The Gym Owner's Shortcut I Wish I Had 20 Years Ago

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Chris Cooper has written 10 books, and he says it's not because he loves writing. It's because he kept watching gym owners hit the same walls over and over, at every stage of ownership.

In this episode of "Run a Profitable Gym," Chris breaks down which book he'd hand you depending on exactly where you are in your journey.

• "Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Chief": for gym owners who feel stuck and need to know their single next step
• "Start a Gym": for those opening their first location or still in year one
• "Gym Owner's Handbook": for owners who've realized running a business is more than just being a great coach
• "Help First": for anyone who wants to grow without feeling slimy or salesy
• "Millionaire Gym Owner": for owners finally making consistent income who don't want to blow it
• "The Golden Hour": for gym owners who know what to do but can't get out of reaction mode long enough to do it

Tune in to find out which book matches your exact stage of gym ownership right now.

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0:00 - The lesson I wish I had 20 years ago

1:33 - The one book every gym owner should start with

3:28 - Before you open your first gym

4:33 - When coaching isn't enough anymore

5:34 - The marketing book that changes everything

7:08 - What to do when your gym finally makes money

8:18 - The habit behind every successful gym owner

9:44 - The shortcut to building a profitable gym

Transcript

Chris 0:02

If I could go back 20 years and open my first gym again, I wouldn't ask the bank for more money. I wouldn't ask for cheaper equipment or a discount on shipping. I would ask for the right lesson at the right time. Most gym owners don't fail because they aren't willing to work hard. Of course they are. They struggle because they're trying to solve the wrong problem for the stage of business that they're in. The lesson that you need as a brand new gym owner is completely different from the lesson that you need when you're building a team or you're trying to open a second location and really step into a CEO role. People think that I've written all of these books and I've got 10 now because I enjoy writing. But the truth is I wrote every single one because I kept watching gym owners struggling with the same problems over and over and over again. Every book solves a different challenge. And today I'm going to show you which one that I would hand you, depending on where you are in your journey. By the way, if you're ever in my hometown, I keep multiple copies of many different books just to hand out to visiting entrepreneurs. I'm Chris Cooper. I'm the founder of Two Brain Business, the world's largest gym mentorship company, working with over 3,000 gym owners worldwide to help them hit six figures in profit. Because yes, it is possible. Whether you're opening up your first gym or you're trying to grow the gym that you have or you're building a team or you're finally becoming the CEO that your business needs, I'm going to share the biggest lesson that I wish I had learned at that stage and the one book from my arsenal of books that I'd recommend to help you get there faster. That's right, it's not a library, it's an arsenal. The first book is Founder, Farmer, Tinker Chief. I just rewrote this for the third time because the evolution of a gym owner has changed. Years ago, when I was looking for help, there were no books about gym ownership. There were no mentors, no business coaches, nobody who could you objectively say, like that person's done it. And I really struggled to find the right answer at the right time. If you're like me back then and you're sifting through endless business advice and you don't know what to actually do next, this book will show you the single next best step for where you're at right now. See, information isn't the problem. Gym owners have more content available to them than ever. Podcasts, YouTube videos like this one, forums, books, of course, blog posts, and it still doesn't tell you what to do on Monday morning. And of course, in the AI age, everybody's generating content, but often that stuff is just a guess. Without a really clear next step, you burn months and months chasing the wrong priority, or worse, getting paralyzed and doing nothing. So this book, Founder Farmer, Tinker Chief, maps the four stages that every gym owner moves through, from startup to CEO retiree like me, and it tells you exactly what to work on at each one. And speaking of, this might be the easiest business decision that you make all week. For a limited time, my brand new book, Founder Farmer Tinker Chief, is available for free on Amazon. If you've found value in this video so far, just use the link below to grab your free copy before this promotion ends. It's only available for a short time, so don't wait. And hey, if you got one of the first two editions of the book, I promise you this book is so much better. It's thinner because it's more concise, it's more to the point. And I think the last section on Chief is going to really be an epiphany for a lot of people. All right, so let's get back to it. The second book, Start a Gym, is for people who are about to open their first gym, or maybe you're still in your first year of gym ownership, or maybe you're just kind of thinking about it. This book will show you how to skip all the mistakes that take months and thousands of dollars to undo later. See, most gym owners are first-time entrepreneurs, and you plan to just be the best coach in town and have a great life and have this entrepreneurial lifestyle. And then day one hits, and you're suddenly signing a lease and trying to price your services, and you're hiring other humans, and you're reading legal contracts that you've never seen before. But signing a bad lease locks you in for five years. One bad hire drags your business down until that bad hire is gone. The wrong price bleeds you to death slowly. This is a step-by-step process to follow at startup, not a business plan that's overly formal and sits in a drawer. This is built to save you tens of thousands of dollars and all the mistakes and heartache and sleepless nights that I did myself. The third book that I would hand you if I was meeting you for the first time in a coffee line and you said, I own a gym already. I think I'm a great coach, but I've realized that ownership is more than coaching, is gym owner's handbook. This is for the owner for whom every day feels like Groundhog Day. And the book will show you how to build a business instead of just owning a job. So you didn't set out to just buy yourself a job with worse hours than your old coaching job at your old gym used to give you. You want to make an impact. You want to make a profit and you want to make it home before dinner, but that only happens when the gym can run without you standing in the middle of it every single day. This is the handbook for systemizing your business, turning it from a hobby or just a one-man band into an actual business, a platform that your staff can grow careers on, that streamlines market and sales and retention and helps you decide what to fix next, backed by proof instead of guesswork. This is really the most popular book that I have right now, and there's a reason for that. The fourth book that I would share with you if you said, Chris, I just need more clients, is Help First. Now, this is not my best-selling book of all time, but this is the one that people carry with them that they ask me to sign, that they kind of live by because it's strategic, it's tactical, but it's also an ethos. If your marketing just feels like guessing, or you do it out of desperation, or you feel like you have to turn into this salesperson that you don't ever want to be, this book will show you over 50 proven ways to grow without ever feeling slimy. Only about 25% of the marketing that small businesses do changes from year to year. That's that paid algorithm chase, the Facebook ads, the Instagram ads. But the other 75% of marketing never changes. That's human connection, that's conversations, that's referrals, that's content. Every tactic in this book has been tested and proven, not just made up or invented out of nowhere. You can grow your gym while you stay true to your values. And this book pairs with any of the others on this list. Look, my gym really didn't start it to grow until I realized that sales and marketing were my first opportunity to actually coach people into changing their lives. Marketing coached them to lift the heaviest weight in my gym, which is the front door. Sales coached them to commit to themselves and invest in themselves. And then, you know, I could get to coaching them to push their knees out in the squat after that. But the thing is, like until you adopt that mindset and you see from examples how to adopt that mindset, you'll always struggle because internally you'll feel like sales feels slimy and marketing feels like you're tricking people. That's not the case. And that's why Help First is usually people's favorite book. The fifth book that I would hand you if I met you in line at a coffee shop is Millionaire Gym Owner. If your gym is finally producing consistent income and you don't know what to do with it, but you're scared of blowing it, you're scared of screwing it up, you're scared of spending the money in the wrong place, or you're hoarding money because you think like there's going to be another lockdown or something. This book will show you how to protect that money, grow the money, and build a legacy instead of losing what you've built so far. Profit without a plan just gets wasted, or worse, it gets reinvested badly and wrecks what's already working. Sometimes when people have a really profitable month, they'll just go buy a bunch of new rowers or toys or gimmicks for their gym instead of investing it in a place where it can grow and be there for a rainy day. This book is built on interviews with gym owners who became wealthy. This book teaches the barbell investment strategy, how to decide whether to open or buy another location, how to build real long-term careers for your staff, and how to make sure that your gym survives without you. If for the first time ever you've had a good month or you're doing things consistently, do me a favor and just read this book before you go out and open a second location and try to double down. Now, the sixth book that I would give you if we're standing in line at a coffee shop is called The Golden Hour. I can't even keep this book in stock. I give it away so often. But this is for people who already know what their business needs, but you just can't get out of reaction mode long enough to do it. Or you just say, I don't have time, or you wake up every day and it's like groundhog day and you go to bed every night and you're like, I didn't do anything to grow my gym. I was reacting to emails, answering texts all day. See, some two-brained gym owners hit millionaire status with this great staff and this amazing lifestyle. Other two-brain gym owners take years longer, or some quit before they get there. And the difference isn't knowledge, it's whether they do the one thing that will grow their business every day before everything else pulls away their attention. They're not less busy than you are. They're not smarter or more hardworking than you are. They're not sacrificing more than you are, they're probably sacrificing less. But what they do have is one focused hour every single day where they do something to grow their business before they do anything else. That's the difference, and that's the golden hour strategy. In our gyms, we talk to our clients about incremental gains all the time, getting 1% better every day. The golden hour is how you do that for your business. One focused hour a day, done first before the day turns into Groundhog Day again, leading to steady growth, better income, and peace at night. Hey, I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. I write books because I can't stop myself from wanting to share these lessons with you so that you don't have to go through the same pain that I've gone through or other gym owners have gone through. I want to give you the shortcut, the fastest path to growth, so that you can get out there and make a bigger impact in your communities, make a profit, buy your kids the cool jeans for school, and make it home for dinner.