What do you do when the gym down the street undercuts you on prices? Or opens a location a hop and skip from your front door? Or steals your best ideas? Celebrate, says Chris Cooper.  Competition is just an opportunity.An opportunity to be the A-plus service and get the clients who graduate up to your gym after stagnating with the B-minus service. An opportunity to get the best clients while the lesser competition gets the ones who're out for a discount. An opportunity to differentiate yourself and be better. Links:Driven NutritionArboxGym Owners UnitedTimeline:1:05 – The kind of competition you want.4:53 – The goldfish scenario.7:41 – Why you shouldn’t worry about copycats.9:26 – An opportunity to be different.10:24 – An opportunity to be the best.14:16 – Why you need competition.

Eleven years ago, Billy Hofacker answered a knock at his door, only to find his brand-new, cherished Honda Accord being towed away by the repo man. When he faced the mountain of unpaid bills and did the math, the total came to a staggering $130,000 of consumer debt.Today, Hofacker — a personal trainer of 20 years — is the owner and CEO of Total Body Boot Camp and Performance Center, with two successful locations in the hyper-competitive market of Long Island, New York. And he uses the tools and expertise he gained digging out of his own debt and building a platform of wealth to help other fitness pros do the same.Here, he and Chris Cooper talk about how gym owners can win with money.Links:Your Fitness Money Coach"Fitness Profits"Your Fitness Coach Money PodcastDrink O2Beyond the WhiteboardGym Owners UnitedTimeline:1:47 – Becoming a fitpro. 4:09 – Hitting financial rock bottom.6:33 – Becoming the Fit Money Coach.8:29 – The most common money problems fitpros face. 10:01 – How to stop feeling guilty about charging what you’re worth.13:34 – How Billy paid off $130,000 of personal debt in five years.18:13 – How paying off that debt made Billy a better business owner. 20:34 – What Billy does for fitpros.21:37 – Staying motivated after you’ve made the money.25:13 – What to do with the money you’ve made. 

John Heringer owns Method3 Fitness in San Jose, California — a gym that does $86k in monthly revenue. What's the secret? The secret is that there's no singular secret. Retention tactics, sales strategies, systems to execute those things and a true service mindset — Heringer and his team weave it all together. The result? High-value clients who get results, stay longer and generate more revenue.John and Two-Brain Radio host Mike Warkentin dive into the details here.Links:Method3 FitnessLevel MethodTwo-Brain ProgrammingGym Owners UnitedTimeline:1:28 – Getting to know Method3 Fitness.10:08 – Going from $100k per year to $86k per month.13:55 – Personal training vs. group fitness: Method3’s breakdown.16:12 – Tactics for stellar length of engagement and retention.25:38 – Saving — and even upgrading — would-be cancelers. 29:37 – The other arm of revenue: Sales.33:53 – A prescriptive approach to the free trial.37:56 – The results roadmap meeting.40:27 – It’s a lot of work. How does Method3 manage? 44:46 – Systemize it, staff it, streamline it.45:40 – One powerful thing you can do today to improve retention.

So you've got a successful gym business. You're paying the bills and making a nice profit, too. Time to start another business and double your money! — Hold on a sec.Chris Cooper is no stranger to starting businesses, and in his original book, "Two-Brain Business," he describes your first business as the cornerstone to a larger platform that you can build.But what he didn't mean was to go open a coffee shop, pizza joint or even a yoga studio. Here, Coop offers guidance on when to start a second business — and what that second business should be.Links:Gym Lead MachineForever FierceGym Owners United"Two-Brain Business""Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief""Gym Owners Handbook"Two-Brain CoachingTwo-Brain ProgrammingTimeline:0:36 – Why Coop is rewriting “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief.”2:11 – Why most gym owners should not start a brand-new business.4:54 – The key middle ground.6:03 – Why Chris started Two-Brain Coaching. 8:37 – Why Chris started Two-Brain Programming.13:29 – The question you need to ask yourself before you start another business.15:48 – What Chris is working on now.

A good coach starts and ends the class on time and teaches the air squat well. A great coach does those things and much more: They close sales through no-sweat intros. They follow your coaching principles but bring their own expertise and personalities to the floor. They create content and build authority as experts in their field. At least, the ones who complete the Two-Brain Coaching course do. Here, course creator and mentor Mike Watson joins Two-Brain mentor and Two-Brain Coaching co-founder Josh Martin to talk about how the course benefits coaches and gym owners alike.Links:Two-Brain CoachingIncite TaxGym Owners UnitedContact: mike@twobraincoaching.comTimeline:3:05 – Rockstars of the Two-Brain Coaching course.7:55 – What is a Module 1 coach?10:45 – Preparing coaches to handle No-Sweat Intros.18:57 – Helping coaches find and hone their niches.22:44 – Coaches’ homework: content creation. 25:07 – How to get coaches to create content.30:11 – Getting third-party insight. 32:14 – Bringing the benefits back to the gym — and making other coaches better, too.36:28 – Developing a cohesive approach among your staff.41:00 – Building confidence.

The unlimited membership is often pegged as the key to building revenue and retention.But if you're rolling all your services into one package — your core offerings plus extras like nutrition coaching or speciality classes — you're actually undercutting the value of those offerings and priming clients to get bored and look elsewhere. Chris Cooper explains it all here. Links:Chalk It ProDriven NutritionGym Owners UnitedTimeline:0:59 – If clients should only pay for what they want, why does Two-Brain offer more resources than any one gym owner could use?2:11 – Value vs. perceived value. 4:23 – Recency bias.6:41 – Two-Brain Business vs. recency bias and the biz-coaching biz.10:17 – Balancing core offerings with novelty.

How come F45, Orangetheory and the fancy club downtown can charge sky-high prices for "total transformations" and you can't? Especially when you're just as good — if not better — at coaching? It's all about value — and the client gets to decide what yours is. Here, Chris Cooper shares five key ways to establish a higher value for your service — and charge more for it. Links:AGuardArboxTwo-Brain CoachingGym Owners United"The Go-Giver"Timeline:1:59 – You don’t determine your value. Your clients do. 3:44 – The five laws of value.4:22 – Excellence.5:11 – You have to get people results. 7:15 – You also need to be a communicator. 9:02 – Consistency.11:22 – Attention.14:09 – Empathy.16:02 – Appreciation.

CrossFit trainers: How familiar is this scenario? Tomorrow's workout has just been posted. It's a max deadlift followed by Diane, 21-15-9 reps of deadlifts and handstand push-ups. You know what to do; you've done that workout dozens of times. No need to prepare a lesson plan, right? Wrong — according to Railroad CrossFit owner Shawn McQueen. Here, Shawn joins Two-Brain Business mentor Josh Martin for a candid discussion about what separates the average coaches from the greats. Links:Railroad CrossFitDrink O2Beyond the WhiteboardGym Owners UnitedTimeline:2:49 – The struggles of group-fitness coaching. 5:19 – Preparation is key. 8:25 – What happens when you don’t prepare. 13:30 – Why lesson planning is worth the time. 16:42 – Why every coach should make their own lesson plan. 18:55 – Failing to plan is planning to fail. 26:11 – Remember your why. 29:04 – Body language and feedback.33:32 – Building rapport. 

Do you know what your Effective Hourly Rate (EHR) is? That is, your pay, divided by the number of hours it took to earn it?Joleen Bingham's is $290.But it wasn't always that high. Here's how she multiplied a $10 starting EHR by 29 — and how you can, too.Links:Two-Brain ProgrammingLevel MethodGym Owners UnitedLevel Up Your Staff (and Fire Them Up Instead of Firing Them)Timeline:2:26 – Joleen’s starting EHR: $104:22 – What happened when Joleen started listening to her mentor. 6:58 – Climbing the value ladder.9:24 – Offloading tasks and becoming a tinker.11:13 – Taking the first step toward higher EHR.14:34 – Lessons learned post-COVID.17:32 – Narrowing the client avatar.23:37 – The top three things to focus on right now to increase EHR.28:29 – The three things to focus on to go from a $50 to $100 EHR. 

So you're ready to scale up and out. Maybe you want to open a second location; maybe you want to start a new business altogether. First, you're going to have to cross the Valley of Death. The Valley of Death is the gap that lies between your first successful business and your second. It's the money gap. The knowledge gap. The tools gap. Chris Cooper has crossed the Valley of Death more than once. Here, he'll tell you how to get safely to the other side. Links:Two-Brain CoachingIncite TaxGym Owners United"Simple Numbers""Traction""Get a Grip"Timeline:1:30 – The Valley of Death.3:19 – Gaps that kill.6:13 – The gaps that almost got Coop.8:27 – Operational skills vs. management skills.11:36 – Change is inevitable.12:36 – Upgrading to expert-level knowledge.15:39 – To cross the Valley, start with a big buffer.20:01 – Trade where you can.21:57 – Join a mastermind. 22:31 – Partner with caution. 26:37 – Set up commercial agreements in advance. 28:41 – Simplicity scales faster.29:17 – Maintain financial guidelines.30:27 – Mentor your team. 30:57 – Layer your marketing. 32:48 – Think about your impact.33:17 – Be patient.