Barbell Shrugged - 70- How To Make A Living Owning Your Own CrossFit Affiliate or Gym Business

Episode Date: July 10, 2013

Do you want to own your own CrossFit affiliate or open up your own gym? Do you have the passion and drive to make it happen, but you're just not sure where to start? Watch this episode of Barbell Shrugged to set you down the path of business success.  Mike, Doug, and Chris are joined by co-owner of Faction Strength and Conditioning Rob Conner. You'll learn why Mike, Rob, and Doug started their own CrossFit affiliate and some of the mistakes they made along the way that you should avoid.

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we talk about business. If you own a CrossFit gym, or if you ever thought about opening one, you should listen to this podcast. Yo, this is CTP, and you're listening to the Barbell Shrugged Podcast, the number one strength and conditioning podcast for CrossFitters. If you want to check out the Barbell Shrug Podcast, the number one strength and conditioning podcast for CrossFitter. If you want to check out the video version, which you should, go to fitter.tv and watch that because it's way cooler than just listening.

And how do you spell fitter.tv there, Mr. Bledsoe? F-I-T-R.TV. He's a good speller. All right, while you're there, definitely go and sign up for the newsletter. As part of signing up for the newsletter, you'll get a video that Mike made where he shows you the top seven snatch mistakes that you're probably making that are keeping you from hitting that next PR and lifting some big weight. Yeah, look at the seminars, tune into the show, and get ready to become a more awesomer version of you.

We give you the tools you need to succeed. You become a tool. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson, Chris Moore, and Rob Conner. You guys may have never heard the name Rob Conner. He's an integral piece in the equation. He is. You may have heard us reference our financial guy or CFO at certain times.

This is the guy that I make angry on a daily basis. This is the guy. Absolutely. If you ever got an email from a guy named Rob that said, hey, we need new credit card information, and he didn't explain who he was. That's him. I have a tagline. You just deleted that email. That was a legit email. It came from Rob.

We'll try to do better next time. Legit in that it came from us. We'll try to do better next time. Legit in that it came from us. That's right. Didn't come from Africa. Yeah, so Rob is here because, well, he's our friend, for one. And the other reason is we're going to be talking about how to open a CrossFit gym. And I don't think everyone knows this, but Rob and I opened up CrossFit Memphis together back in 2007. Seems like such a long time ago.

Yeah, it was 2007. In a former life. In a former life, yes. Definitely. Started in Rob's garage, right? Absolutely. In your carport. I didn't even have a garage.

Carport. It was cold and hot. It was when the first decision was made. Like, we should open a gym together. Yeah, dude. High five. Something like that. We'll get into the reasons we opened up the facility as the show progresses.

But first, I would like to talk about some things that are coming up. If you didn't already know, the Muscle Gain Challenge for this quarter is sold out. If you're interested in the Muscle Gain Program, make sure to go to barbellstrug.com. Click on the Muscle Gain Challenge thing. We made that easy. It's muscle.barbellstrug.com. Click on the muscle gain challenge thing. We made that easy. It's muscle.barbellstrug.com. Okay, go there and put your name, your email,

your name and email on there, and then we'll let you know when the next one's coming up so you can be prepared. Which is when? Which will be, that next one launches in October, but you'll be able to sign up in September.

I think September 3rd was the day that I put for registration to open, and then it starts October 7th or 8th, whatever that Monday is. Yeah. The latest thing we've got in the Barbell Shrug store is the Zach Critch weightlifting seminar. If you don't know, Zach Critch is a national champion in the sport of Olympic weightlifting, and he came to Memphis to hang out with us. He and his wife, Sarah, did a pretty great seminar.

And I think you'll get a lot out of it. We already had a lot of people buy it. And we've got really good testimonials that people are happy. So it's a good thing

to make people happy. Hey, I brought a product and it changed my life forever. The world is brighter. The sun shines brighter because I bought this Whitetail seminar. Good for you.

Thank you, Chris. You're welcome. I got to keep my job on the show. I don't know the fancy money stuff. I ain't no CEO or chief operating officer, but my role here is to make Bledsoe and everybody just feel good. Just to say a dick joke and make everybody feel good. Chris makes me smile every day.

What more important job could I have? Not much more important than that. My only point. Last thing I'm going to promote real quick is the Faction Fundamentals Blueprint. So that's one reason we're doing this podcast is just kind of let you guys know about that as well. What we've done is we took what we do at Faction, Faction String Conditioning, home of CrossFit Memphis. We took, like, basically how we get people in the door, how we market to people out there, how we get them in the door. Once they get in and start doing our fundamentals course, how we develop our membership with them, how we sell them.

Basically the whole process. And Doug is primarily responsible for that. You want to talk about that real quick? Just real quick plug on that? Real quick. Two breaths. Yeah, do it in like a sentence or two. No, I'm just kidding.

Basically, we took that whole system and we packaged it up and we're giving it away as something that you can implement immediately without really having to do a whole lot of work yourself. So for the fundamentals course, we run a four-week fundamentals course. It's three days a week for four weeks.

So there's 12 sessions. Basically, what we did was I taught the entire 12-session course, and we recorded the whole thing. And then we also edited videos together of me coaching it live and then me standing there explaining why we do it the way that we do. And we have coaches' handouts. We have athlete handouts for the workouts and for the nutrition talk for every single day.

So I show you the template. I show you the order to go in. I provide checklists. It's a completely done-for-you program where you can pick it up, read through it, and just follow the instructions step by step. And then if you're a coach or a gym owner, rather, it's very nice because you can then delegate that to your other coaches, and then it's easy to scale your gym because you don't have to be the one

doing every single thing, and it just runs on repeat every single month. So that's all put together. In addition to that – Which I think is the best part coming up. Go. Oh, my God, which part? Don't put pressure on me.

The thing you're about to talk about next is the best part, in my opinion. How do you know what he's going to talk about? Yeah, how do you know? There's one thing he hasn't talked about yet. Oh, well, let's see. I'm not know what he's going to talk about? There's one thing he hasn't talked about yet. Oh, well let's see. I'm not sure what he's getting at. Maybe the email stuff? Yeah.

As part of that, we put together an email marketing campaign and so we provide all the template emails that we use to follow up with our clients. That way you don't have to sit there and type out the same exact email for every question that you get every week. We provide all the template emails and then we also provide, you know, you guys probably

get a lot of emails from us. A lot of those are automated and most people are well aware of that. Some people don't know they're automated and they think that I email them every day, but I totally don't. But I love you anyway and uh we provide uh those email systems where uh if you sign up for to hear you know about the gym and whatnot on the website you get a series of automated emails to tell you about the gym and then when you come in and you've actually been in the gym um then you get on on a new list and it kind of tells you more relevant information when you're a member

again we put you on a new list and again autoresponder gives you more relevant information. When you're a member, again, we put you on a new list, and again, autoresponder gives you more relevant information to being a member. And then if you end up canceling your membership down the line, you're on a new list, and it sends you follow-up information as a past member. And no one ever leaves the list. No one ever leaves the list. You will die before leaving that list. You can opt out at any time. Yeah, you can unsubscribe at any time.

If you don't have an unsubscribe option in your emails, then you have messed up. You're probably going to be blacklisted on the internet and no one's going to get your emails because it's going to end up in their spam folders. So it's not the only way to follow up with people. The benefit there really is that I can give you a little 10-letter piece of code

and it'll enter all those lists into your email thing for you. So I can put like 100 emails in place, and you don't have to do anything. Yeah, you don't even have to copy and paste a lot of this stuff. I mean, it is done. You just got to take your gym name, insert, and it's done. That's why I think that's the most beautiful part of that whole thing. It's the closest thing to a magic bullet I've ever created.

Yeah, it's... If you screw that up, you're an idiot. It is done. There's no way to screw it up. You're dumb-dumb, and you shouldn't be running a business. It is done for you. The thing is, there's a lot of people who do uh gym business consultations and stuff and they will tell you to do that thing which we can tell you how to do it right here right now and we probably will uh but um the the magic is in like it's done for you i don't know

anyone who's doing it for you so this is is pretty awesome. That's where the magic is. It is, too. When everybody does your work for you, that's magic. Yeah, buy it done. How many years did this take? Why would you spend three years tooling around during trial and error? The cost of that product will repeat 20 times over, and that cost in terms of the failed opportunities you faced.

Doug, how long did it take you to write those emails? This isn't just like, oh, I sat down one month and I decided to write these emails. No, I mean, they were developed over years. Yeah. So this is stuff that's worked for our business. Yeah. I tried things that didn't work. I tweaked and refined and perfected and changed and switched things out.

And then over time, we got to where we want it to be. And now it's just all packaged up and we're making it available. Yeah. Thanks for that quick summary of that product. It was so quick. It was like eight minutes long. Sorry about that, folks. That's like half the stuff that's in that product.

This is what happens when we let Doug talk. He just goes on and on and on. Can I say, I was really respectful during that. You did a good job, Chris. I didn't say hardly anything. He didn't interrupt us at all. Mike, did you say that when we let Doug talk, he just goes on and on? Yeah.

As opposed to Mike? That's why it's a joke. Mike, did you say that when we let Doug talk, he just goes on and on? Yeah. As opposed to Mike? That's why it's a joke. Yeah, I'm joking. You have a nickname that means like yappy bitch in Portuguese. That's right, Matraca. It means chatterbox.

It means chatterbox in Portuguese. That's what they told you in case you were wondering. Hello to Adriano Nassau if he's listening. He's not. Nassau.

Yeah, he's not listening. He still has a phone that has buttons on it. Why would I listen to your podcast? I can practice my jujitsu. All right, so yeah, we're going to talk today. The primary role of this podcast today is to teach you how to...

Loosen up, man. Primary role of this podcast. Primary role. Just because we're talking business doesn't mean you've got to be all uptight, baby. We're going to strung a bunch of words together. It doesn't make any sense. You sound like Russell Brand. Russell Brand. Russell Brand.

We just congratulated him about not interrupting, and then boom, he was in there. We're going to be talking about how to open a CrossFit gym. We're going to talk about the mistakes we made. And Rob will hopefully have some input here. I think he will. Rob's going to take a look. He's nervous. I can tell.

First time. He's his first time talking into a sock microphone. I promise you we plan to upgrade our microphone stands with new mic stands plus pop filters. Now, yeah. And we won't have socks to talk into. Now you understand just why we were requested to spend. We brought Rob on this podcast specifically to talk into the socks. So he understands why I need to buy new pop filters. He's like, this is kind of ridiculous.

Yeah, it's working. Rob okays all of our expenses. Yeah. What are we talking about? You just told us what we were talking about. Oh, yeah. So why is it important now? I think we got away with a lot of things when Rob and I first started, because we were the only

CrossFit in town. Not that there was a lot of interest, but like. Yeah, certainly easier when you have a monopoly over the whole city. Anybody who has any inkling of interest in it has to come try it at your place. That's a good advantage at the start. Those times are done. Like even in Memphis now, how many CrossFits are there? Eight or seven or eight?

Six, seven, eight. Something like that. We're not saturated like some cities, but there's more competition now than when we started since there was zero. And it's only going up. There'll be more. Yeah, so we got away with a lot of things

that we wouldn't get away with now. I mean, on the other hand, CrossFit's a much more known brand, so it's got more marketing power, whereas before,

like, oh, you know, we do CrossFit, and people were like, what the hell is that? And kind of had to explain it to them. That's only a small... High-intensity stuff.

Hot chicks looking out. That's a good selling point. Yeah, but we made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. I think it was probably one of the things we talked about way back in the day was it's best to be first than best. But now you're not going to be first, so now you have to be best. You miss that train if you're just now opening a gym yeah you're probably aware of that so now i feel like the common story i hear when i get emails all the time say hey i want to open a gym you know what should i do and the

story is always the same i learned about crossfit about it's very similar to people that start crossfit like i learned about crossfit a year and a half ago and it changed my life and now i really like fitness. And I have no business experience at all. I have no marketing experience at all and I have a year and a half of fitness experience only in the CrossFit world and absolutely nowhere else.

So I'm going to quit my job and do this. Exactly. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But it's still you're probably more limited than you think you are. Yeah, passion is good. But if you only have passion and no experience, then it's a rough battle when there's a lot of other competition in town.

You'll be a passionate loser. Yeah, you'll be passionate and broke to start off with. And then if you survive, it's still going to be quite a fight. Rob, so what was your motivation for opening the gym? Me, worked out at the Globo gym, made too much noise, and then Mike came home from the Navy,

and we needed a place to work out. So we just, we did it. I had a job, I had some money. Man, that was super specific. That's an honest reflection of why most people start gyms. You think it would be cool. For me, it wasn't even a gym in the beginning.

It was a place for me to work out and Mike to work out. And it was cool. That was the business that you were operating, so it was cool. And it worked. It fit with my business background. And then as it transitioned to a business, it fit into my background. You actually have a business background. so what is what is your business background real quick with uh i've got my undergrad in finance and then an mba yeah so you're more

of a business guy yeah right it's not that big of a stress for you to start a business right yeah he got he took a marketing class and then we had you know i had a little bit of money i had my you know kind of my first job coming out of school. I held the piece of plastic up and said, let's do it. Gave it to Mike. Credit card. Credit card. I don't think Mike could even qualify for a credit card at this point.

Probably not. At the time, I didn't have a job. I was in school, and I was making $1,200 a month for my GI Bill. Which is pretty good. I was living off $1,200 a month at the time. At the time, when you were living off that, I had like an $800 GA job. I mean, it's a good time to be broke and crazy. Yeah.

But I could see your wild-eyed ass going into a bank going, you should give me money because I'm opening a gym. Breathing heavily Through your mouth At the banker Trying to get money From somebody It's a good thing he was here I think it brings up

A good point Like we just wanted A place to work out We treated the business Like a hobby in the beginning I think a lot of people do that They I recognized that we were

Starting a business You know When We went from We did buy all the stuff In the carport And we're like Oh did buy all the stuff in the carport, and we're like, oh, we'll train some people in the carport. And that was actually hard to do.

No one wants to go to someone's house to train, I don't think. And we were just training our girlfriends at the time. That's how you put it. 6 a.m. That's when you know you've got a good girl. She'll meet you at your buddy's house at 6 a.m. to work out. That's just my opinion. But we treat it as a hobby at first.

When we decided, hey, we need to get out of this carport, we started in the spring of 2007 in the carport, and it was like as soon as we started doing that, I was thinking, well, when it gets to be winter, this is going to suck. We need to get indoors. Good thing you have that natural business instinct. It's cold out here. It's going to suck, bro.

We need a building. Yeah. So I was like, let's take this to the next level. Let's take this to the next level. Let's get into a big garage space. We can start looking. So what I did first was I went to barnes and noble or something like that uh and i found this book i i went through and went to the business section and i found the book that looked the best to me

on how to write a business plan i was like oh i'll just put this business plan together and then uh i don't you know it's one of those things you things where I don't even know why I'm putting a business plan together, but I know that's what you're supposed to do, right? If you're going to start an LLC and you want an LLC to protect you in case someone tries to sue you, so you can set up accounts and share things, and there's all sorts of reasons you'll do that. But I just found how to start a business book, and I followed the directions. Like, step one, do that. But like, you know, I just found this, how to start a business book. And I followed the directions, like step one, do this. And so I wrote this business plan.

I know that Rob and I went to a lawyer and sat down with him. And when we sat down with him, I was like, we got a business plan. He was like, oh shit, most people don't even do that. I was like, oh, well, I mean, even though we were, at the time I felt like I was treating it like a business, but looking back on at the time, I felt like I was treating it like a business. But looking back on it, I was like, I was not treating it like a business.

I just knew I had to do these steps to have this hobby. And it had to be considered a business. Like, I think I already had the mentality at the time, like turn your hobbies into a business. So they're tax deductible. But genius. I think some people call what you do playing business rather than doing business. You're just going through the process

of what business people do rather than actually finding out a way to make money. Yeah, that's very, very true. I was doing what I knew I was supposed to do instead of having

that ingenuity and trying to take something that I love and passion and turn it into a way to make money. Yeah, it was just a way to get what I wanted, really,

which was a place to work out with my buddies. Well, no, I think you did really all you could expect to do at the time, which is you identified something you thought you should do. It seemed most obvious at the time that this is the right thing to do. I'll start by reading a book. You took action. You kept making steps, even though some of them might not be optimal. Some of them might not be by the book and so smart in hindsight, you still arrived at where you're at today because you

said, I'm going to do something and I'm going to keep taking those steps, even though some of them might be bad. You did it. Taking action today is a huge thing to be proud of looking back. You could be the guy who's like, I wish I could live my passion, man. I wish I could have some place to train. Oh, I could never do that. I don't have to read a book to do that.

At least you fucking did some steps. You took action, man. If most people just did that, they'll find a never do that. I don't have to read a book to do that. At least you fucking did some steps. You took action, man. If most people just did that, they'll find a path eventually that leads them to where they need to go, and they can share their experience back to other people who would like to repeat that. There's two different types of business plans. There's one that you write for the potential investor, and that might be for the bank or for somebody who's going to buy into your business so you can get some cash.

And then there's a second type of business plan, which is for you to look at and develop how you want to move forward. And they're going to be two totally different things. And the business plan you're writing for the investor is not going to be nearly as sexy. But a quick note on that is how sexy is the other one? You basically have to have some – you've got to catch the potential investor on the first page of one of

those for sure um i would just draw neon dollar signs open that up and see neon dollar signs like glitter all over that's what i'm offering you that might work so what was the point where you decided oh shit this is i need to make this a business i can't this cannot be a hobby or i won't survive because you had a building and you were getting GI money so you had rent and you had some type of income but not very much

from the government basically. We had enough income to cover rent and utilities most of the time but anytime an unexpected expense popped up.

Which is every month. There was a, yeah, there was phone calls between me and Rob. I was like, I remember several meetings. We got to fucking

do something. I remember taking money, like I was making only $1,200 a month with GI Bill and I was taking that money and putting it in business and then paying myself back

like afterwards. Having to get money from Rob and we were both like, you know, taking personal money and pumping it in. Yeah, I remember several meetings

where we met in a parking lot in between the gym and where I was working so I could write a check and Mike would take it and take care of it. I'll spend this for you. We're $300 short this month. Rob was the bank for a while. Yeah. It's like I'm $300 short this month on bills.

Well, I would say I did not write myself a check from the gym. And I'm really bad about this. This is my personality type. Is even if a business is making money, I want to spend it on the business. I don't want to write myself a check. So I'm really bad about paying myself a salary. So I probably could have paid myself earlier than I actually did. But I like living on bare minimum.

You're rustic. I don't know why. Something's wrong with me. If you've never had a lot of money, you don't know anything's wrong. Yeah, it's easy. That's true. That's why you need to take these risks while you're a college kid who doesn't know any better. Suffering is what comes naturally.

You still were in college. Used to being poor, yeah. Well, I mean, it was interesting because when I was in the Navy, I had a decent income. I got out, and I spent two, three years in college being poor as hell. So there's a recalibration there. But, yeah, I was very used to being poor. But it was about the year and a half mark, you know, when I went to kind of switch from like, you know, this is a hobby to a business. And the biggest change was my GI Bill money was gone.

The biggest change was necessity. I went from – I was in school. I was like, well, I'll just stay in school as long as I can. That way I can still get that GI Bill money. But I was in grad school, and it was very, very obvious that I could not run the gym well and do well in school at the same time. I was like, well, I can always go back to school, but I can't let this business fail. So I quit that, and then I quit school and then just focused on the gym.

And that was like the first change. That's where I started treating things more of a business. And then when you came home so doug doug and i trained together in college and he was there when the gym opened up and all that kind of stuff but he wasn't a business partner from the get-go but when he went to australia for like five months in return and i knew that and i wanted doug to be a part of the business and this was kind of around the same time i was like things were clicking for me like i need to like make money and i can't do it on my own because i have a lot of holes in my game i'm not very good at a lot of different things but doug is really good these other things so i remember when

you came home you were in the army yeah you were you're overseas you were in on deployment and uh and i basically protecting america that's right doug was like well i want to own my own business deployment. Protecting America. Doug was like, I want to own my own business. He was going to hang around and help out a little bit, but he wasn't planning on sticking around. I got Doug to stick around by giving him a piece of the business.

I thought it was a hand job. That too. It was a figurative. We were going to leave that part out. That was basically the handshake, you know. So, experts in the business, I'll be buying you your first Lamborghini. That's all good, but what else

you going to give me? Yeah, and Doug was actually really good. Doug filled a lot of holes in that he's very detail oriented he likes spreadsheets he likes tracking uh you know he likes collecting data and then putting it in spreadsheets and making really cool looking spread uh graphs and bar graphs with pretty colors i by the way i despise pie charts don't give me a pie chart bar graphs only and uh no and me and rob do all the

reporting yeah so yeah rob rob did a really good job. It's one of those things where we kind of fell in our roles by accident. I wasn't like sitting in bed one night going, Oh, my God, Doug will fill these roles. Rob will get these, and I'll do these, and it'll be a good triad. We just lucked out. We really lucked out. Synergy.

Yeah, I mean mean really it is like you kind of automatically fell into the the role of the ceo and that's just how you are that's just your whole personality my personality as a as a systems-based person that likes you know that likes numbers i fell into the coo role and then you got your business and finance background it's just obvious that you should be the CFO. And so having all three of those roles fulfilled makes the team very strong. Chris Moore was there. Chris was there to make us laugh the whole time. CGO. CGO, right?

CGO. Chief Comedy Officer. I was just thinking about we all hang out naturally because if everybody was like you, the four other people would get aggravated with you sometime. We just beat the shit out of each other. I don't think it would naturally occur to you to open up a business with anybody who was not complimentary because you feel naturally that these people around you compliment you and make you better and fill in gaps and make you see things differently.

That's why you're close friends. That's why it's natural and organic for you to start a venture with them because you have that relationship already in place. It was subconscious, but I wouldn't get together with somebody just like me to do much of anything because we couldn't tolerate each other's presence. It would be too much of that thing. What's interesting is I run into a lot of that, though. I talk to people who do team up with people who are just like them. So this is your first pearl nugget of the show is find partners who are complimentary, not people who

are just like you. Yeah. No, we disagree all the time. We have drastically different styles. We don't fight. We definitely disagree.

You have to rub up against somebody and that friction lets the real good ideas actually survive. That's how you start a fire. A business fire. A money fire.

We always joke that if it was just him, he'd do all kinds of cool shit, but he'd be broke, and we'd go out of business immediately. And if it was just me, everything would be perfect and organized, but it'd be boring as shit all the time, because I only want to do the same thing that works, but isn't very exciting. So having a creative person and an organized person together is kind of that perfect synergy. It's the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. It's the Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger.

All these big famous billionaire pairs are always one creative and one organized person together, and that works very well. People forget Steve Jobs really didn't know. He obviously understood computers, but he wasn't the guy who could make a computer work. He didn't know how to program it. He didn't know any of that stuff. He needed Woz to help him. Woz was a fucking maniac genius who never would have done

anything on his own. No, it's the two people together that fill the gaps like you were saying earlier. It takes two to tango. Yes. That's another pearl, whatever that means.

And then someone to count the money. That's what Rob does. Rob just swims in money all day. You're like the Donald Duck, not Donald Duck, what's the duck character that swims in the money? Money. You're like the Donald Duck. Not Donald Duck. What's the duck character that swims in the money? Money bag duck. From DuckTales.

He's got one of those in his backyard every morning. We've said that. Unfortunately, that's what people, you mentioned this yesterday, I think, Doug. When I think you own a business, oh, you charge this month for your CrossFit classes a month, like this much. You must be rolling. You must be money bag, swimming in money guy. Yeah. And you go, that's what you don't understand about business.

People are like, oh, how many members do you have? How much do you charge? And they start doing the math. But they fail to realize that it costs $35,000 to run your gym. Yeah. Every month towards expenses. And we make less money than 99% of our members easily. Probably.

Well, that's where the money hits the money surface. That's what you got to expect. Oh, no. What is he talking about? No, I was going to say, like, all people see when they first start CrossFit is how much it costs a month. But you don't realize, okay, there's this facility, there's a limited amount of people, like one tent, the people who are in your local global gym.

Everybody's dedicated, but the money to make it real has to come from somewhere. Yeah, you're not, the members who are active aren't being subsidized by the people who aren't showing up. Exactly. Most people are showing up for sure. That's why it's expensive.

Like your coaches aren't rich driving around Lamborghinis calling you a sucker for buying into the cult. No, it's just what it takes to make it real. It's what it takes to make it real. It's what it takes to make it real and to have people who are educated teach you because they need money to survive. We don't make a ton of money,

but it is a very good lifestyle. You do get what you pay for, that's for sure. Was that your whole point? We're done. We're done. The podcast is over. Don't you want to go out and start your own business now? Yeah.

So I want to talk about what makes a good business, some of the changes that were made. I would say, Rob, what would you say the best thing we ever did was? No pressure. Like the biggest change. People ask me this all the time. Like what's the one thing you did in like the last six years of being in business that you felt was kind of changed the game? What made things the biggest difference? Yeah, for us.

Hiring CTP. Go ahead and say it. Hiring CTP. That too. And David. That was a good moment. And David. I'll throw one out to David.

Definitely doing the contracts. And you brought on ASF, right? Yeah. What is that? And that's our billing company. They really helped out. But doing the contracts, I mean, in the beginning, we didn't charge membership for a few months,

and then it was absurdly low. And then we kind of hit that tipping point where, oh, this is a business now, and we're going to have to run it like a business. And not every member can be our friend, and we'll just have to keep track of everybody and try to take as take it out of our hands as much as possible so we don't you know don't look like bad guys and run it like a

business yeah yeah bringing on a third party billing company that can automatically draft your your payments each month is huge you do not want to be the person that has to like go up to 100 people every month like hey uh you got, you got that check for this month? And then your friend's like, oh, yeah, I meant to bring it. You're already in a tough situation. I'll bring it back to you. I'll be here Tuesday, I think. I'll bring it then.

I'll bring it then. And then they forget. It's just a total hassle. So if you're not automating your billing, then you're probably stressed out all the time. This is on the far end of the spectrum, but I've heard of people who had their members drop off a check every month. I was just like, how do you even do that? We never did that. We actually went with a third-party biller pretty early on

because I didn't want to deal with that. But I would say the next best thing was contracts. Because when we went from month to month, we went into it with the mentality, well, if people really value what they're getting and we're doing a really good job, then that's all it's going to take to keep our members paying every month. Pretty much we were going month to month, which meant that even though we had a third party biller doing that they could cancel anytime they wanted so they could train for a month you know and you know

what kind of results people get in a month you know it's not gonna be great and I mean unless you're a faction but uh no but uh people could quit whenever they wanted. So like even if we made, you know, $20,000 this month, that doesn't mean we're going to make $20,000 next month. You know, it's just so, you know, while we were doing it, I didn't feel like it was a big deal. I was like, oh, we're not.

It was ignorance is bliss situation. Yeah, I was like, oh, we make money every month. It works out, you know. You're lucky. Kind of. You know, we were having to dip into our personal funds every once in a while. But then you actually, Doug, convinced me, like, hey, we need to do contracts. And I was actually opposed to it in the beginning. I was like, well, you know, I was fearful that we weren't going to sell as many memberships

because people were like, oh, I don't want to make that commitment. I felt like the sell came after they were a member for a little bit, which is true. But we actually have a way to make that work in our favor and still have contracts. Some of that stuff's okay when it's just you by yourself. If it's just you by yourself, you've got people going month to month, if they don't pay, then who cares? You won't make any money and if you've got to

sleep on the streets for a little while while you get back on your feet, no big deal. It's your suffering. Yeah, it's just you. If you're a single guy,

you don't have a family to worry about, you don't have any employees to take care of, then having zero stability in your business, if that's what you want, then that's no big deal.

But if you have people that rely on you and we have six or seven employees of Faction, they all count on that money being there that next month. And if everyone can cancel their membership next month, and they don't have any signed agreement that's going to make them stay and pay their membership... Your whole business falls apart. It could just fall apart, and you have to just cut all your people.

Their livelihood is my responsibility. And then the next month, if everyone signs back up, then you've got to be like, oh, oh, well, now people are paying again. You want to come back? They're going to be like, no, fuck you. And they're not going to come back. Like, it offers no stability in your business. So if you don't have employees, you've got to have contracts. Yeah, when you're talking about your business, you're talking about your employees.

I think that's a really good point. You have a responsibility to do it. You have a responsibility to do it. Before relying on you. Yeah. You're a creator. And a faction. not a taker. And at Faction, our employees aren't making billions of dollars or anything like that,

but they also have good health insurance and stuff like that. And I know not every CrossFit gym out there can say that they offer their employees health insurance. We made that decision in the beginning to do salary, to take care of our employees, give them everything we could. I really like that model. I guess you didn't do it until you were in a position to treat people the right way. Right, exactly right. You did more work initially, so you didn't have to give people bad deals. We put in the time coaching and taking care of them

until we could take care of them. That would have been impossible without a contract. And then another big one I liked that i believe was doug's was and i don't think a lot of crossfit gyms do this even to this day was we offered three membership options and we had our little jars of jelly discussion the other day but i really like that i think that makes it doug will do it better because it was his story. But having the fewer options, it helps all of us. It helps you to sell the membership. It gives them fewer options.

And it takes some of that. Like this guy's got two days a month membership, three days a month. We had some of that in the beginning. And we were like, we've got to streamline this process. Yeah, we had two days a week. We had three days a week at one point. And then we had unlimited memberships. And that's if you're doing two days a We had three days a week at one point, and then we had unlimited memberships.

If you're doing two days a week, three days a week, and unlimited, and you're doing three months, 12 months, 18 months, two years, or whatever, once you look at the spreadsheet, you've got 25 options, and now it's very hard to pick which one you want to do specifically. It complicates them. The example I was using the other day that you were just referring to with the jelly or whatever was from

Barry Schwartz's book, The Paradox of Choice. Basically they were in a grocery store. They had two different groups. They had one stand that had six jars of jelly on it and they were selling jelly. And then they had another stand that had 30 jars of jelly on it. And the people that came to the 30 jars of jelly, took some free samples, bought significantly less

jars than the people that went to the stand that had six jars of jelly. So it was less decision making and easier for them to choose which option to take, and so they bought more stuff. So at our place, we only offer three options. It makes it very easy for people to figure out which one they want. Rather than offering 25 options, people get confused, and then by default, they just don't make a decision.

They just go, well, I'll get back to you, and then you lose them. And you feel that every time you watch cable news, for example. I heard Barry give the talk. He gave an example about buying jeans. It was like you go into most clothing stores. You go, okay, I need to buy a pair of jeans. On his TED Talk? Yeah.

I need to buy a pair of jeans. You go, holy Christ, examples of like over the top there's five main structures. And within that there's all these conditions. Like some are antique. Some are straight legs. Some are dark. Some are light. Thick cut.

Boot cut. You can't just decide. Yeah. And then the other great example is when Steve Jobs came back to Apple Computer and said, you offer 25 different versions of each computer. The product list is so long. They were thinking at the time that they were failing because they needed more products. And he said, what we're going to do is you just got up and draw that matrix.

There's pro and consumer. There's a laptop and a desktop. We make nothing else. And he just destroyed everything else. Yeah. That decision saved the business. Make them as high quality as it can. Yeah, and to bring that back around, talking about without contracts,

people weren't going to see success or get the results they wanted. Coming two days a week, you're not really helping them out at the end of the day. So that was another important piece of doing that. Go ahead, man. Yeah, you want to go into a little bit of the stability numbers on how we define stability in our business? With base Cables versus expenses? Yeah.

Yeah, one of the things that Thomas Plummer talks about is having a ratio of, what is it? Sorry, I can't remember what it is off the top of my head. Five to one, I think. I know, but five to one of? Yeah, base receivables is the amount of money that people owe you in the future. So if you added up your contract, so if you sign an 18-month contract, $100 a month, that's $1,800.

So you owe me $1,800 in the future. If you added up all those for your whole gym, you have a number called your base receivables. So say for E's sake, that's $200,000, and your monthly expenses is roughly $40,000. So that's $200 divided by $ 40 comes out to be 5, right? If you have that ratio of 5 or greater, then you have a fairly stable business.

And there's a lot more that plays into it, but that's one of the factors that we look at every single month to see if we have some amount of stability in the business. Do people owe us enough money in the future where we can make decisions now that are going to cost us more money? But are we going to be able to afford those decisions in the month?

You got to keep that comfortable buffer and you have confidence that your current decision will yield some success. If that buffer is wide enough. Yeah. And every month we were looking at a spreadsheet and looking at a graph and we could say, Hey, we're not breaking that 20%,

you know, that, that five to one ratio. We're not, we haven't reached stability yet because when we first implemented contracts, if you don't have contracts, you don't have base receivables, which means that your stability is zero.

You might as well just call yourself an asshole. Possibly. If you want to hire another employee, you're going to say, I'm going to hire another employee. It's going to cost me $2,500 next month. Then then you can compare that new expense that's going to be recurring every month against the base receivables that you currently have. And you can see, I don't know, is this going to be too much money? Should we do it yet? Should we do a part-time person?

And it just helps you make that decision. And I remember breaking past that. Doug put together the spreadsheet and there was like a red line. And that was, once we got past that red line, that was our. It's color coded for Chris. For me. I use that in my data analyses. I put a line, and when it exceeds that, it's either a good or a bad thing. And even advanced analysts like to see just a simple, like, if you get to here, then this happens. I remember breaking

that threshold and it was like this huge sigh of relief you know it's like oh my god we did it you know now we we do better than that now um that's like we haven't been below like seven in a long time yeah yeah but you know and that's actually you know one marker of success for us isn't just how much money did we make and how much money did we spend this month because it's more than just that these kind of tools are cool man because like if you it's a it's a tool that allows you to take some of your fate out of the hands of like just the whims of markets like you right everything stirring around your business cannot be controlled but you have the ability to limit these risks just by doing some simple things that make sense like if you know that ratio is a certain level bigger the better then if you make

a decision you see how that many puts the risk and you can keep yourself in a favorable position you're not just like leaving it to the to the to chance whether you're gonna your life your dream is gonna make it or not yeah i remember i remember doug the way he convinced me to do the contracts and if you have a business partner you're you want to do contracts and they don't, this is, this is a good argument. And what he told me was we can try the contracts and, you know,

let's try it for 90 days. And then if our sales are down or if things aren't going well, then we'll just ditch them. You know, like, we'll just try it. We should try everything. And I was like,

well, I think you're right. We should just try everything. So he convinced me by saying, Hey, we'll just try it on a try out it's a trial it's not something that we're having to do no matter what for the rest of our lives and but what was interesting is the very first time we signed a contract and we had base receivables it felt really good i was like i didn't know that i was stressed out about worrying about the next month until that was done. I go, oh, I was stressed out. I didn't even know it about having to worry about who's going to pay next month type of thing.

Now I know how to convince you of anything, though, by the way. You haven't tried it. How do you know you won't like it? You're right, Chris. Try it. You might like it. Well, that's how I live my life now. All right, guys.

We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about some of the business tools specifically that we use and that you can use also in your business. Tools. Hey, guys, this is Rich Froning

and you're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to fitter.tv. Are you going to say anything about the podcast? Welcome back. I am.

Welcome back to Barbell Shrugged. Business edition. Dun, dun, dun. Are we recording? We are recording. Are you sure? Yeah. Welcome back. I am. Welcome back to Barbell Shrug. Business edition. Are we recording? We are recording. Are you sure? Yeah. I'm 100%. Don't worry about it, Chris.

I see the numbers moving. Okay. Yeah. All right. Anyways. I trust you, CEO. I believe in your vision. I know enough about everything to screw it up.

That's about it. Now, so real quick, I'm actually going to be doing a live webinar on the topic of opening up a gym, or if you already own a gym and you want to learn how to maybe pull out some pearls and nuggets on how you can improve your operations, I'm going to be doing a webinar in the near future. We don't have it scheduled yet. We just know that we want to do it, and I have most of the presentation completed. But if you want to be notified of that, make sure to go to barbellshrug.com and sign up for the newsletter. So that when we do schedule it, we'll email you back and you'll be able to register for that.

It's going to be free. And it's only going to be limited to the first 100 people. We did a webinar a few weeks back on nutrition for weightlifters and it was maxed out the whole time so you're going to have to get in there early. We had 330 people register for it. Yeah, 330 people register for a 100 person webinar.

Oh, it's so sad. It is sad. Do you need more money for more people? Because you're not getting it. No. He's like, yeah, we don't have any. I actually like the 100 person because it keeps it more intimate. If we end up letting too many people in, we get bombarded with a lot of questions and we don't get to

give everybody the attention they deserve. I know on this last webinar, when I did it, I completed it and I was actually able to answer every single question afterwards. I think if there had been any more people, it would have been question fest. The questions would have gone on way too long. This way, it would have been like question fest. It would have been, you know,

the questions would have gone on way too long. This way, I was able to interact with everybody. It was really good. You added value to the situation. That's the goal. Yeah. The other thing I want to promote real quick is,

we have just decided, just now? During the break. During the break, we decided to launch a new podcast oh shit speed of implementation yeah you'll you'll learn about that in the webinar no but uh there'll be barbell what are we doing what are we calling it barbellbusiness.com i just bought the domain so we'll be uh barbell you want to call it barbell biz something is that cheesy barbellbusiness.com simple it's it tells you exactly what it is

there's no questions about what it's about it's about gym businesses obviously right obviously yeah there you go try to be as obvious as possible marketing lesson number one be as obvious as possible let the customer know let the customer know what you're talking about yeah so doug was wanting to touch on something we came back i forget what it was exactly you never listen to me i listen i just forget easy uh during the break we were talking a little bit about about systems and kind of what your role should be as the business owner as the business grows so i remember now initially initially you most people, they start across the gym and they coach all the classes.

They do all the marketing. They do all the social media stuff. They do all the accounting and finance. They take care of the money. They try to do everything by themselves and it's super overwhelming, especially because most of your clients are going to show up for your 5 a.m. and your 6 a.m. classes and then again for your 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock, and 7 o'clock p.m. classes. You're pretty much working all day long and eventually get burnt out and exhausted. So what we're going to touch on was what your role should be going in once you have

an employer to hire some coaches, eventually step away at least a little bit where you can be the coach's coach and you can help replicate yourself. and then you don't have to coach every single class, and you can actually have time to grow the business instead of just simply working in the business the entire time. Was it hard for you to start delegating? No. You didn't feel that was hard for you? No, I never want to do anything.

I like to give it away. Some people want to do everything themselves, and I'm totally not like that at all. Every time I do something, I think, why the hell am I doing this? I want to give it away to somebody else so um yeah that's that's my first uh thought now i remember was it yesterday we were doing the faction four which is a team competition we hosted at a faction strength conditioning actually did a fantastic job of running that yeah um but your wife guess what it was at a gym that we own but i really didn't have a role at the competition

and someone goes someone who was helping judge was like oh what are you doing i was like oh i'm just making sure nothing goes wrong like i'm i'm backup you know if i had if i'm responsible for something then i messed up as you know a business owner yeah owner. I own this thing. If I'm responsible for any single thing that's going on at this event, I messed up. Because what would happen if I'm responsible for something and then there's this emergency and I have to go take care of it, guess what, now I have to get someone else to take care of what I was taking care of, which I was the expert of.

But what I need to be doing is making sure there's somebody who is responsible for each thing, and they're the expert of that thing. And if for some reason they fall out, then I can come in and help out or whatever. So you want to make sure that everyone has a role but yourself, and you're there to jump in if need be. Let people do what they're really good at and what they excel at. You're not that guy.

You can't do that as good. You're overseeing and managing everything, more or less. Well, really, you're just standing around with a smirk on your face the whole time. That's the way it appears. I can see how you could think that. I drink beer and I talk to people in the crowd. It appears that I'm drinking coffee and whiskey most of the time. What I'm doing is market research.

And just hanging out with people. But I'm taking care of important business stuff. Exactly. No, I don't doubt you at all. I never doubt you. But yeah, I actually had a hard time delegating in the beginning just because – not because I wanted to do it, but just because I was afraid that someone else wasn't going to do it as well as I wanted it done. Right. And I still struggle with that.

Yeah, that's something that's hard to get over. If you're really passionate about something and you feel like you could do it really well, delegating to somebody, guaranteed they're not going to do it just as well as you do. Or the way you wanted it. They may be doing it – they may do a good job or better than you, but it's just not the way you want it done. It's like, oh, my God, you know? Yeah, as long as they can do it 80% or 90% as good as you would do it or the way that you wanted them to do it, that's pretty much good enough. All that little stuff, most people aren't going to see

from their perspective. You can see it because you know how you want it done, but most of the clients and the rest of the staff and anyone who's not you is not going to see or care about. So forget about that little stuff

and just kind of move on and go take care of something more important. This is interesting because this is speaking right to me as a guy who is launching a thing that's 100% done from start to finish by me alone. This particular challenge. Chris just launched barbellbuddha.com

in the last couple weeks, and he's had some epiphanies about maybe some business stuff, and I've been helping advise him a little bit. It makes my chode tingle just thinking about it. Actually, that's become one of my passions is helping out new business owners. So I really, really enjoy handing out advice and seeing people grow and do new things. That's very rewarding for me.

So what Faction is and what – Barbellbusiness.com. Always plug everything all the time. That's my business cue to you. But in my situation, what makes me this different than Fitter is that Fitter is an organization. There's people involved. We've gone over that and factually been the same. But in this case, this thing lives

in my fevered, fizzy mind that I conceptualize something, I put it down on paper, it got created, and then I also had to be the guy who designed the cover to this book that I dreamed up. And then I was like, oh shit, how do I edit it? Okay, I'll do a good job of that. Try my best. Then how do I get something onto Amazon?

How do I get something spread? Like, it's an interesting experiment to start just on your own on an island with only your thoughts in your head. It's a curious way to move through it. When I hear an experience like that, what could I – I've got to look for opportunities to have help in this if I'm going to make it. Like, at least a little bit of help to take off some of the things like, you know, when it comes to figuring out how to do an audio book,

I said, well, Chris, just sit down and record a thing yourself and learn how to act out an audio book. Okay, Chris. At some point, there's a breaking point where you can't be the guy that does all the lifting. You can't be the guy who designs the cover, puts it on Amazon. All this stuff is to figure out how to do each step is a lost opportunity to do something else. I've got to sit down for an afternoon and figure out how to make the shop work.

He's a quick learner. Yeah. I mean, it's what you've got to come to terms with. Coming back, what will be yours and what will you selfishly hold? For me, it's more intense because I'm the guy who wants to create all that stuff. But what can I let somebody else take from me? Yeah, and then there's – It's way harder than you think.

You could swing too far the other way. I don't know what you could call it, but... Over-delegation? Over-delegation or having black boxes in your business. I've heard it referred to as having black boxes in your business. You give over so much that you no longer understand what's going on. There's too much distance. Well, yeah, you don't understand how it works. So, I mean, i struggle with that a little

bit myself there's some things that like if someone were to disappear it'd be like an oh shit moment you know but there's there's enough overlap and it may not be it may not be me that knows how to do it but there's another person in the business that knows how to do it so but it's tough i mean the bigger organization gets the more opportunity there is to have that black box uh thing that thing you don't understand how it works and if you lose an employee then it's gone The bigger your organization gets, the more opportunity there is to have that black box thing, that thing you don't understand how it works. And if you lose an employee, then it's gone. But there's a way to mitigate that risk.

Yeah, you can't have too many degrees of separation between you and the moving components. Some distance is great because it allows people to blossom and do what they do and have some ownership over a component and feel good about what they're contributing to the machine. But if you're too far back from it where you don't understand it, then it's injecting a little bit too much risk. Right. You're losing control over the known variables. Another way to mitigate that is staff training.

Shit, I didn't know you were going to call me out. Staff training. Systems. Systems. I was thinking of the S word. And actually, I like where you're going. Systems and staff training for sure. So right now, just to give you a touch on how we kind of handle staff training we have a meeting every day every day we at least get the entire team together the morning crew and the evening

crew f action and we all talk about what we're going to do that day we usually just touch real quick on what our biggest priority is for the day just to kind of bring everyone together monday and wednesday we meet in person tuesday thursday friday we meet just over the phone on on a conference call and that usually takes like 10 or 15 minutes everyone just reconnects we call that like a team huddle and just puts everyone on the same page lets them know where the business is at such chance it like it brings some transparency everybody knows what everybody has to do and everybody knows what the other person's doing so you want to deliver what you said you do just it's a good time yeah you know you said yesterday i'm gonna finish this a good time. Yeah. You said yesterday, I'm going to finish this thing.

And then the next day, someone says, hey, where's that thing? And you go, oh, I didn't do it. And then society, so to speak, you got some peer pressure on you to actually perform and do what you say you were going to do. But on Monday and Wednesday, we have staff training. So we have our quick meeting. And then usually me or Mike will do some type of staff training. If we're making a product for Barbell Shrug,

usually we'll do kind of like our rough draft presentation of what we're going to cover in the product, and then our staff can learn from that and give us some feedback so we can update and tweak and refine before we launch it to the rest of the world. Or if we're reading a book, like right now I'm reading Supple Leopard, or before we had bought, bought to mention k-star again we had bought his online creative live basically it's his movement and mobility course that he made a digital information product out of with with creative live.com and we use things like that you know say hey watch this video on monday we're going to talk about it

and we're going to go over the things in that video. So we always provide some type of video for people to watch. Yeah, and then we go over it as a group. And it's expected. I mean, we have a culture in our business where it's expected that you continue your education. If somebody isn't looking to improve something, people will just think you're weird. You know what that reminds me of? You reminded me of Chris Rock when you said this. Let me do what Chris does best and make wide jumps in association.

That brings insight. So Chris Rock in one of his funnier gigs was like talking about in culture, like if you graduate high school and people are like, congratulations. Like, no, no, like graduating high school, taking care of your kids, this is shit you are supposed to do. So it's interesting, like in a business, people want special attention for wanting to learn and get better.

No. That's the threshold you must break to be a part of this group is that every day you desperately want to get smarter at what you're doing and better at what you're doing. We don't reward you and say, good job for wanting to learn. No, motherfucker, that's what you're supposed to be doing. You're supposed to fight every day to get better at the things you do. That's what we expect.

If you're not killing it on that, then we just think you're an asshole. We're supposed to fight every day to get better at the things you do. That's what we expect. If you're not killing it on that, then we just think you're an asshole. We're not giving you rewards for that. All the athletes at our gym that have gotten very good very quickly, they do a lot of studying outside of the gym. They don't just come work out, go home, and forget about it, and then come back the next day and then pick up where they left off. They go

home and they're watching YouTube videos and they're reading books that we recommend and they're watching our products and they're watching the show and they're reading books that we recommend and they're watching our products and they're watching the show and they're watching other podcasts that are relevant. They're doing something all the time. They have their headphones on and when they're driving around, they're listening to nutrition audio books. They're constantly putting that information

into their head and same with the entrepreneurs that we know. They're constantly reading business books and going to seminars and meeting other entrepreneurs and having lunch and talking business. They're constantly trying to learn, improve, and grow. They realize there's so much information out there that they'll never get to, but they're always trying to. That's the attitude I think is so critical for people to understand.

That's how you get good at training. That's how you get good at training people. That's how business must run. That's how you get really smart. That's how you become good at anything. It's not like it's hard to do because you're drilling in. The energy comes from you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. It's like I wrote a blog post a couple weeks ago about going to where the energy is.

If you're doing something that's what you should be doing, the energy will come to you, and you'll feel compelled to put this amount back into it. If you're trying to force every step of the way, it could be a very obvious sign that if the energy's not coming back to you, you're on the wrong path. But if you feel there's, man, I've got to rock this business. I've got to keep doing this. And you'll do what it takes.

But every five minutes, looking for some cool thing. You go in every situation looking for the nugget within that situation that could allow you to do the next great thing. That's the attitude it takes as, like, an entry-level thing to get good at it. Yeah, and we have a pretty liberal budget also on the continuing education side of things. Like, you know, there's a lot of things that stay pretty tight. But, like, we know that we're going to spend $300 a month on books.

Like, that's just going to happen. And trust is going to pay off. So when someone orders a book, it's not like, what the hell? It's like, oh, good job. Can I get a copy or, you know, can I borrow that when you're done? You know, it's not like, you know, the continuing education is not the first thing we're looking at you know if we need to save some money you know it's it's not like you're going out to eat every day for lunch that's something that's not bringing like if you make the investment to get everybody this certain book

then the amount of benefit i could bring back to you is you can't really get your a number around what that's worth yeah rob could probably tell us what that number is, but we're probably in the tens of thousands. Each year and continuing education between seminars, conferences, books. And then another thing, Doug, if you're so

liberal with that, then you should take me to your next high falutin marketing guru business conference in Chicago. You have a business, right? Yeah. You're rich, man. Let me launch this store. I've got to get that store up.

I mean, you're an author and a business owner. You must be just rolling in the dough. I'm so rich in terms of emotional money. Internet money. I've got all the internet money in the world. See? Give me some of that money. We were talking about resources

and telling people to go get educated and always be working on their continuing education, but what about some specific examples? I mentioned Supple Leopard. I mentioned K-Star's Creative Live thing, which were both very good. If you haven't read those

or seen those, go find those. But what have you read or listened to lately that you thought was very good that you shared? Everything that's in the Barbell Shrug Shop has pretty much taught me everything I need to know. Upselling.

Oh, shit. There you go. Yeah, actually, right now, I'm actually doing some continuing education and training on my own with Gymnastic Bodies product. I bought their Foundation One. I'm kind of rebuilding my gymnastic bodies, uh, product. Oh, I, uh, bought their foundation one. I'm kind of like rebuilding my gymnastic skills. I decided to go like from the, from like, go back to the basics,

which, um, if you're in CrossFit, you probably never did gymnastics basics. If you think a gym, if you think a pull up is the basics, then you're wrong. You know,

there's, there's a, a much deeper progression and, up good movement, you know. Did anyone else just notice CTP is not in the room anymore? Yeah, he left. He's batting right now. We have no – he's batting right now. Now we can let our bellies come out and just relax.

So you're suggesting that – This past year – well, I did that and then I was – You had a high-level understanding of gymnastics. Now you're going deep. Yeah, you know, taking it to the next level to the next level on something that's within CrossFit. Another thing I've done this year, I went to the OPT live coaching. That was really good for me. I think it would be good for anybody.

He offers a lot of good courses. I know Doug and I are talking about going and doing some more stuff with OPT and stuff like that, too. I think it'll be good. Can't go wrong, dude. We're over budget. We're over budget. We're over budget.

Okay. I just said we're liberal on that. Yeah, everything James does is really good. So you can't go wrong going to any OPT's certifications or courses. He's back. Another thing I'm wanting to do this year is one of my training goals is to get my USAW level two coach certification. For weightlifting.

For weightlifting, yeah. Yeah, stuff like that. What are you doing for continuing education, Rob? I just listened to a book, Spin Selling. Spin Selling by Neil Rackham. Is that who it is? I was going to ask Chris because he told me about it. Yeah, Spin Selling is really good.

I crushed it. Drive it back from Florida. Crushed it. Just like, oh my ask Chris because he told me about it. Yeah, Spinsung's really good. I crushed it. Drive it back from Florida. Crushed it? Just like, oh, my God, this is the greatest book ever. Yeah. You really liked it? Yeah. I want to listen to it again.

I read that book and I was like, I didn't like it at all. You already know everything, though. Did you read that book or did you let it play in the car while you listened to it? Because that shit is not called reading a book. The latter. I listened to it. Mike doesn't like systems and step-by-step processes. That's true.

Spin selling is a sales system where you walk somebody through what their situation is and what kind of problems they're having right now. And then you basically just tie the things that you have to offer with what they actually need. It's a professional way to do sales where you're actually helping somebody by finding out first exactly what they actually need rather than just pushing whatever you already have on them without even considering what they really need. So if you want to be a professional salesperson and give somebody real value that they actually need, it's a win-win. If you're a business owner, you are a salesperson, right? Yeah, that's the whole paradigm shift for a lot of people too.

If you're not, you'll go out of business. It's probably one of the most referenced sales books of all time, and's very very good some people don't like it but but a lot of people really really do so thank you chris uh it's a good sales book if you want to learn something about sales yeah yeah the point i was making is not everything's going to work for everybody so if you take one of our suggestions and you're like that was stupid well you probably listen to rob but i'm just kidding. I told you so. I told you so. Any other nuggets over there, Rob?

I don't know. QuickBooks, Intuit. They do a lot of, y'all probably don't know this, but they do little webinars too. Oh, yeah. I watch how to learn their programming and software because they're continually updating. I'm continually updating them. A lot of companies like that also have really great, short, educational like the Shopify site

has all these great YouTube videos and YouTube pages. How do you do each component of this? I'm going to tell you simply, unpretentiously how you do this. Here's where you go. Here's an understanding. They have a free e-commerce entrepreneur learning center where you can go in there and just soak everything up. There's so much resource now.

You don't even need to pay for a book sometimes. Sometimes these resources are just throwing value at you with these extra things that compel you. Just learn all you can about it. We're sharing our expertise with you. It's fantastic. Actually, that's a good point for a lot of the gym owners out there that don't do monthly financial statements.

Having Intuit online where we can all access our financial statements like having into it online where we can all access our financial statements at any given time is fantastic you update it and then we all have access to it immediately so we can look at our profit loss and our balance sheets and our statement of cash flows and then you give us a quick screencast video go to jing.com j-i-n-g.com you get super simple screencast software we can just just record a five-minute video of your screen. That way you can walk us through something and then just send us the video over email and we can look and see exactly where the company's at financially

every single month. Or sometimes once a week. Look at all these shiny numbers and these pretty colors on this report. This makes me feel good. That's your CEO role. Actually, yeah, I think one of the books that helped me understand some of the sheets and pages.

What do you like, bar graphs? I'm really good with pictures, but I actually read some of the Rich Dad Poor Dad stuff. And he has some really, really simple break it down for the common man, like how to look at profit loss and balance sheets and stuff like that. I thought that was pretty helpful for me in the beginning because I remember taking an accounting class in college. They don't explain anything. They're like, all right, debits, credits. This belongs over here.

They never tell you why. They're just like, debit? That's not when you owe money, right? It's like you go, well, from my experience with accounting classes, I went in and it was like, if this, then that, if this, then that, if this, then that. And I was like, why are we doing any of this? But you know, the good part of this is that, like, one of the guys I go to for business advice, and I probably do a lot more of this searching in this realm now that I'm actually officially a business person. But I've always thought Richard Branson's books were so beautifully communicated. Everything he's done, you can tell he's a very genuine, warm-hearted guy.

And every time you see him, he's so captivating. But he openly admits that he's a little bit dyslexic. And when somebody tries to explain to him, like his financial guys, what's going on with the business and just definitions like revenue and income, expense, he can't hold on to that kind of thing because that's not how his brain works he's a visionary but the the mechanics of the business is not what he really grasped he knows what people want he's a brilliant man obviously but it's it's nice to know that yeah if it doesn't come to you naturally get the resources and the people who will help you understand in a way that makes sense to you because he has like he says his

his chief financial guy would just doodle a certain thing on the back of a napkin like okay here's how they kind of like this works here's a picture of what I'm trying to explain it goes oh yeah brilliant but whatever it is it doesn't matter that super simplistic and childlike because you don't need anything complex and heavily analytical in order to help you see what you need to understand and run your business better I think a guy like that knows how to make money but like managing the money is pretty tough for him. I mean,

I'm kind of in the same boat. Hey, guy, that genius. I have ideas on how to make money, but I... It's okay. You start giving me

too much information, and I'm just... It's okay that you have these glaring weaknesses. Big picture stuff. That's a big point I like people to listen to because people feel like...

I recognize my weaknesses, and I feel it kind of... It's not always pleasant to address them but it's okay to say i'm not good at that and i don't understand that you're not you're not wrong for addressing like a guy like richard branson who owns his own posh 500 billion dollar house on an island he owns like a guy that important the guy who's that pivotal and can change the whole world forever and what he's done has glaring weaknesses and it's okay it's not a problem i was reading a book called business brilliant they were talking about branson and that's one of the reasons that he is so successful because he does have a lot of problems like like almost like a learning disability where he has trouble doing a lot of things and so his whole life he had to find a way to get other people

to do things for him because he can't do it himself and he got so good at that that now that's a great business skill to have in school they teach you you do this you don't ask anyone what the answer is you have to do it by yourself and if you ask other people that's wrong and you get a bad grade and you get kicked out but in the business world you just need to find someone that does it really really well give them money and they'll do it for you. Make them feel great about doing it. The total opposite. And that's the fastest way to get something done. And it doesn't matter if you do it yourself.

If your car breaks down, you take the mechanic, you say, I don't know. I don't care. Here's money. Fix it. Give it back to me when it's better. Let me share with you a cool thing, Doug. You just connected with me emotionally. Sometimes we don't do that.

Sometimes we can't. But I was reading a great – I've got a great – it's going into the new talk and a new book product, but one of the guys I'm looking to for inspiration is Akiyu Sanju, like an ancient, he's been dead for like 600 years, but he was a Zen master in Japan

who loved Zen, Buddhism, women, and sake. He would study Zen, Buddhism, and master it and write these poems. I like two of those things. Yeah. He loved, he was a womanizer in terms of being, but he loved the presence of women,

and he wanted to explore all that, and he drank with the best of them, and he hung out with the fishermen, and he saw the beauty in all the details. One story he said is like, there are many paths up the mountain. Like, there's many different ways you can get to the top, but once we're all there, we all look at the same moon.

It's like there's, you're taught in school, like there's one way to get to a certain place, and you feel desperate because you feel like another path is right for you but you're scared that that won't be a successful path when that reality is whatever is the most important thing to you at the moment and as long as your attitude and how you take that path is appropriate you will get to where you need to go don't be afraid of taking a different path even though a teacher told you you couldn't succeed in that path and there's multiple ways to get to the top you got to do what you think is best and you got to have the attitude like we're all talking about where you're you're never going to stop learning you're going

to stay open to ideas and you will get to the top and you'll stare at the same moon that the other guys looking at that took a different path don't get so hung up on the path there's not one way to do something they got to stick to your strengths like for you to be like the crossfit memphis or faction strength conditioning running coach you could could probably get it done and teach people how to run. You call me fat? We could find someone who has a lot of experience running, and you could teach powerlifting. That's your strength. And they could teach running and let everyone do what they're already best at instead of taking a couple years to be only moderately good at something that just isn't your skill.

You checked out again. You checked out on a couple of podcasts lately. I was thinking deep in thought. Well, I know you weren't just being silent. That's one of your skills. That's what I was just talking about. You're a good thinker. You were touching your beard with one inquisitive finger like, hmm.

Yes, yes. He was staring at Rob while he was doing it, though. So you want to have sex with Rob or you had a good idea? I thought that was a good idea. Well, I told you you didn't know if you'd like it until you try it. So sex with rob or you had a good idea i wonder i thought that was a good idea well i told you i told you you didn't know if you'd like it till you try it so maybe that's what you're thinking about how do i know i'm not gay i mean how do i really know i haven't really tried yeah if you haven't tried you won't know so so alan cosgrove who runs results fitness out in california he says that you should always balance your your fitness and your business

learning so for every business book you got to business learning. So for every business book you've got to read, or excuse me, for every business book you've got, you can read a fitness book. But you can't just focus on fitness. You have to have one-to-one because now that you're not just a fitness coach or a passionate CrossFit person and you're a business owner, you've got to have more business skills. So constantly reading a book a week is the standard that he proposes.

Yeah, I've run into, like, especially some weightlifting coaches that are just brilliant weightlifting coaches. And they're in some little tiny hole. And they're not young. They didn't just get started. They've been doing this for a long time. And they're coaching five athletes, you know. And those five athletes are really good.

They're good weightlifting coaches. But they could coach so many more people if they just understood business better and they they want to when you talk to them they're going you know man i don't know what's wrong i don't know why i can't get more athletes in here i'm like well you got four platforms and you know and 800 square feet and you're and you you know right and there's a lot of things going on here well that's why that's I easily recognize the problem that's going on but they could reach more people so you know being having more business sense isn't about just improving your life as a business owner but like I know that the more success that we have the more people who are going to be able to reach and touch and improve their lives those two points stick out to me because one like identify what you just said

because like okay if i can write something and honor my overwhelming yellow energy which is to create that and that reaches 10 people then that makes what's yellow yellow one is a creative energy like a creative educational like i want to create things to spill out and people say i really liked what you created, and it lights my world on fire. It's a very good thing. But if I don't devote time, if I don't devote time

to figure out ways to make that more accessible to more people who could like it, then I'm failing. Like I don't compromise my creative spirit in order to think of ways

to share it with more people. So that's an honest way to approach marketing education. And what Doug just said really speaks to me because I recognize that my strength is in going out and finding all these cool books and niche stories and odd ideas that when I look and see them, like when I hear something over here and over here on a podcast, over here in a book, I can see a web form between them. And all of a sudden I see a story I can tell that makes people really understand a certain thing. But I now recognize how important it is that it's balanced with learning how to get the skills that allows me to share that knowledge with more people. And if I let that balance stay all towards the creative web building ideas, I don't learn how to – like I don't give up anything by achieving that balance.

I can allow this stuff to bloom more with that knowledge. I'm not sacrificing what I could develop here to get business knowledge. This becomes more because I keep the balance. That stuck out to me a lot. I do think they're complementary. Yeah. You've got to have a balance between the two. If you only have one, then it's either, like I said earlier,

with the creative and the organizer, it's either going to be really, really cool and no one's going to hear about it, or everyone's going to hear about it, but it's not going to be that cool. It's like with you. If you took more time to learn about something that would set blood so off, you're not always necessarily letting your skills suffer because of that. You'll be better at what you do because you have that insight. It's not a zero-sum thing where because you traded one thing,

you can't have the other. No, in this case, this new knowledge can enhance what you already had. You're not giving up on something because you chased something new. Another thing, too, is having a teammate that fulfills, you know, that compliments you, allows you to go even further into what you're good at. So that's very, very nice. That's very freeing. I don't have to do a bunch of stuff I don't like doing,

so I can spend more time on things I enjoy, and that's more fulfilling. I do want to wrap this up. First, there was one book that I wanted to mention. If you're even considering starting a new business. Oh, no. Sorry. If you're even considering opening a new business, I think this is the most important book to start off with.

It's called Business Model Generation. Basically, it allows you to be creative and, and understanding how you're going to make money, what exactly your services that you're going to be offering people and stuff like that. Like, that's something that I discovered way after I had already started a business or two. And I wish that if I had, if I discovered that book on the front end, I think a lot of things would run smoother right off the bat. And I would have understood what I was doing, which is kind of crazy to think about. But it helps you develop a big picture. I really like that. Doug, what do you got to plug? Since you gave a resource, I'll give a resource as well. I kind of briefly mentioned him earlier,

but his name is Thomas Plummer. And he writes a lot of books for the fitness business industry, kind of more in the big box arena. And he's slowly kind of books for the fitness business industry, kind of more in the big box arena. And he's slowly kind of moving into the more small gym, group class, CrossFit arena. But he's given us a lot of advice, one-to-one, where we've gone to some of his seminars and workshops. And then also we've read all of his books, and those are very good too. So if you want a place to get started for learning business stuff

specifically for the fitness industry, Thomas Plummer is a great person to research and to start on some easy to read books. Also, we mentioned the Faction Fundamentals Blueprint will be coming out here in a couple weeks. I won't go into a big

plug on that since we talked about it earlier, but keep your eye out for that. It should be coming out here hopefully in a couple weeks. Rob, what do you got? Into it. If you're going to do any of the finance side or keeping your business afloat, they're the best. You can't go wrong. Chris could do it. Anybody could do it.

I'm the idiot example? The village idiot right to my left. I don't know how we ever made it without it. I can't say anything bad. I won't be able to plug made it without it. I can't say anything bad. I won't be able to plug anything. I'm too hurt. All right, Chris.

Well, go to Amazon or iTunes. Check out Progress. I think you'll really like that book. I'm writing another one now, but I'm keeping that close to the chest until it emerges as more of a thing that's plug-way later on. Until that moment, stay tuned to...

He doesn't know what it's about yet. I'm 4,000 words into that bad boy. But, yeah, go to barbabudo.com. I hope to launch the cool store, which I'll offer some new versions of Progress. The new book will appear on there. I'm also going to offer some new products that will be very cool and very beneficial to all. It will change your life forever. You'll go, how did I even exist before this store existed?

How could I even consider the life I was formerly living? That's the kind of response you'll get from this service. Beautiful. Make sure to go to barbellstrug.com and sign up for the newsletter so that we can notify you when I'm going to hold that webinar on running a gym. And then also look out for Barbell Business. Check out barbellbusiness.com. I have no idea what's going to hold that webinar on running a gym. And then also look out for Barbell Business. Check out barbellbusiness.com. I have no idea what's going to be there, but something will be.

So you've got like two weeks to set up some sort of site. Exactly. Or whatever. I'm going to speed up the implementation. That's what I'm good at. Wait until the last minute? If you wait until the last minute, it'll only take a minute. Whoa, you blew my mind with that.

That is not good business advice. Bottle of Business is going to be a blog spot shitty web page with a weird hand-drawn logo. You took a picture of it with your iPhone and uploaded it. Business, money signs, crayon fucking colors. I have explosions and boobs there. Prestige worldwide. All right, guys.

Thanks for tuning in. See you next week.