Barbell Shrugged - Real Chalk  — Acquisition & Retention w/ Jim Crowell  — 33

Episode Date: July 24, 2018

Jim Crowell is the CEO of OPEX Fitness.  Above all, he loves building businesses and mentoring coaches and business owners to enjoy inspiring, fulfilling, and successful careers. Prior to becoming the CEO of OPEX Fitness, Jim started, grew, and sold multiple successful gyms in Pittsburgh, PA.   Prior to his fitness career, Jim successfully traded commodities for a hedge fund in Austin, TX. He also holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina, two Bachelor’s Degrees from Penn State University, and the Core Course Designation from Harvard University.   In this episode, we learn about Jim’s journey, including how he entered the hedge fund world where he learned the importance of continuous learning, and how he came into OPEX as a coach, but wanted to tweak out the business side. We also talk about how he educates new OPEX gym owners (over 65 gyms), how to handle gym’s two biggest problems – acquisition and retention, how to get people in the door and keep them there, and more.   Enjoy!   – Ryan and Yaya   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/rc_crowell ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/ barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, this is Doug from Barbell Shrugged. I just want to let you know that we now offer 11 of our top training programs as a part of a single membership site that we're calling the Program Vault. We used to launch training programs every few months and people were always bummed that they couldn't sign up at any time. You had to be around for the launch. The launch was only 4 or 5 days. If you missed it, then you had to wait 6 months or a year depending on what training program we were offering next.

And it was kind of a hassle, even when people signed up for training programs to switch to a different program when they got to the end of their current program or they just happen to be in a new phase of training they hit their their past goal and now they have new goals and new goals require different training programs so inevitably it was a pain in the ass for people to switch programs so we took all that feedback and we decided to just put all of our programs together on this thing we now call the program vault that way all shrugged athletes could have access to all the workouts that we have and move from program to program as they saw fit for themselves makes sense so there's 11 programs three of them are long-term very comprehensive programs where there's you know a warm-up and there's mobility and there's nutrition added in there all the workouts are there there's a cool down there's there's stuff

to do on your off days they're super super comprehensive and those programs last for over 18 months if you want to stick around for that long and there's also eight short-term programs these programs are three months long and these are basically add-on programs so if you are already doing classes at a gym and you don't want to stop doing your classes but you want to work on one particular thing maybe you want to like work on your shoulder health or you want to work on your conditioning like your your aerobic capacity or maybe you just want to work on your squatting strength or your pull-up strength or something like that then we have these short-term add-on programs that are super low volume but

they're just like an extra you know two or three exercises at the end of your workout to help work on whatever those very specific goals are that you have so the three long-term programs are flight weightlifting that's a very weightlifting specific training program it builds it builds you from someone who's more like beginner intermediate at weightlifting and build you up to be a more technical professional style weightlifter you know over the course of 12 or 18 months now we also have muscle gain challenge if you just want to put on muscle mass and you want a higher volume training program this in my opinion is more of an intermediate program if you don't have good technique on the olympic lifts yet you're going to kind of be throwing right to the wolves so to speak that It doesn't ramp you up like flight does. Flight has very specific progressions for weightlifting

to let you learn all the technique over time. Muscle gain challenge kind of just throws you right into it. So ideally, you already have some experience with Olympic weightlifting before you start the muscle gain challenge. And there's a very high emphasis, of course, with the muscle gain challenge on gaining muscle. So that means you've got to eat a lot of food. So there's a lot of emphasis on of course, with the Muscle Gain Challenge on gaining muscle, so that means you've got to eat a lot of food, so there's a lot of emphasis on how much to eat, what to eat,

and your recovery as a part of that program, so that way you can get bigger and stronger. Also, we have Strug Strength Challenge, which is more of a traditional kind of CrossFit-ish program. If you do CrossFit classes at a CrossFit gym, you probably do some strength movements at the very beginning of class. Maybe you do front squats for five sets of five, and then you do a Metcon that's, you know, 20 or 25 minutes or whatever it happens to be. That's more typical of the shrugged strength

challenge where strength is the goal, but certainly conditioning is a key part of that as well. It has more of a strength bias than kind of a regular generalized CrossFit-y type program. So the eight short-term training programs, again, these are about three months long, and they're kind of an add-on program. So the first one is boulders for shoulders. That's a shoulder health and stability program, health, mobility, and stability program. That doesn't mean you're going to be doing a whole lot of jerks and overhead presses necessarily. This is, again, an add-on program. So you're going to be doing a whole lot of jerks and overhead presses necessarily. This is again an add-on program so you're going to be doing a lot of assistance work for your shoulders, your thoracic spine, etc. That way you can have the healthiest shoulders possible. There's the aerobic monster program which is adding in a bunch of extra mostly aerobic

conditioning. You're going to be on the airdyne a lot, you're going to be on the rower a lot, you're going to be doing a lot of monostructural stuff. So you you already have your regular workout, you do strength, you do your Metcon, and then as a very overly simplistic example, you do 20 minutes of rowing or you do 30 on, 30 off for 10 rounds or you're doing a hard 30 and an easy 30 or whatever it is, just a little bit of extra aerobic work. There's the Squat the House program where we add in two leg exercises three days a week. So you might squat and then do some lunges or something like that. Depending on what your regular classes are like, you might already be doing a lot of squatting.

But if you're not currently able to do a lot of squatting and you want to do some more squatting and you just want to add that onto your current training, then Squat the House is a great program. Anaerobic Assault, that is a high intensity interval style program where you're doing very fast Metcons. So you might be doing airdyne sprints, you know, 30 seconds on, 100% full speed, and then take a three minute break and do it again. Or even, you know, five touch and go deadlifts followed by, you know, 10 burpees, rest two minutes and then do it again. But you're doing it all 100 full speed really teaching how to kick it into high gear and move very very quickly when you're doing your metcons there's

my first pull-up which is not going to give you a whole lot of actually doing pull-ups these are this is a program for people that can't do a pull-up yet so there's a lot of assistance work for pull-ups and there's a lot of extra assistance work for just all the muscle groups involved in doing pull-ups everything from just doing extra extra lat work extra scapular attraction rhomboid lower trap work extra bicep work etc to help get you to the point where you can do your first pull-up there's a strongman accessory program where you can be doing yoke walks picking up stones pulling heavy sleds and things like that and then there's two more programs that are kind of a little bit higher volume.

You could do them on your own if you wanted to. And you also can combine these. You could do Aerobic Monster and Aerobic Assault and My First Pull-Up altogether if you wanted to, if you just wanted to add extra volume. But the last two, Open Prep is exactly what it sounds like. It just gets you ready for the CrossFit Open or other similar competitions. You'll be doing a lot of Metcons. And the last one is Barbell Beginner to Meet.

It's prepping you for your first Olympic weightlifting competition. Each program is scheduled between three and five days per week. There's videos explaining all the programming. There's demos. There's technique explanations for everything. And then also you have access to the private shrugged collective facebook group that way you can get advice from ourselves we'll be in there hanging out our guests from our shows we also have a bunch of athletes coaches and strength experts that are friends of ours that are in there too to help you out

if you're interested since i've been talking long enough you can go to shruggedcollective.com backslash vault for all the information. Again, that is shruggedcollective.com backslash B-A-U-L-T. That spells vault. Go there, check it out. If you have any questions, email help at barbellshrugged.com and enjoy the show. Welcome to Real Chalk, a Shrugged Collective production. Mike Bledsoe here. Stoked to be launching this network so that we can introduce you

to amazing content providers like Ryan Fisher. We'll be posting new shows every weekday, so be on the lookout. As a thank you for listening, Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get 60 bucks of free organic groceries plus free shipping and a 30-day trial. Go to thrivemarket.com slash real chalk.

This is how it works. Users will get $20 off their first three orders of $49 or more plus free shipping. No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week, so just hit up Thrive Market today. Go to thrivemarket.com

slash Real Chalk to get set up. Enjoy the show. And here we go again. It's Yaya coming right back at you guys. You guys are listening to the Shrug Collective. This is the Real Chalk Podcast coming at you. This is the last week of the OPEX month here on the Real Chalk Podcast. You guys already had the pleasure of listening to Marcus Philly, who most of you guys know for his functional bodybuilding, Mike Lee, director of coaching over at OPEX, and then last week, James Fitzgerald, who definitely needs no introduction. If you guys missed any of those episodes, make sure you guys head back and listen to all of those to get the full OPEX experience. And we're going to end this one with a bang as well.

We got Jim Correll, who's the CEO over at OPEX. So this time around, this week, we're going to jump a little bit more into just the business side of things. Jim actually came from the hedge fund world. This is where he learned the importance of continuous learning. That's one of the things that OPEX is always coaching. I believe they have five different levels of coaches coaching right now, so making coaches better at their craft. So this is really deeply rooted into the OPEX way.

He came into OPEX actually as a coach. He opened a couple of facilities as a coach and a gym owner, but he quickly realized that there were some things about the OPEX way and the business side of things that he thought he could tweak out and make a lot better. That's when he became the CEO. He now educates new OPEX gym owners. By the way, there are 65 OPEX gyms now worldwide. So we even have locations opening up overseas now. So we talk about how to keep something like that running, how to keep the culture intact, how to make sure that that's exactly what you want and that

everybody represents the OPEX name in the way that you would want it to represent. We also talk about the two biggest problems for any gym owner out there. If you guys are a gym owner, you for sure notice acquisition and retention. So how do I get people into the door and how do I keep them there ultimately and build my gym membership up, build that whole culture, how to just be able to retain all those people that walk into your door. We also speak a little bit about just OPEX and how they've been able to scale personalized fitness and where gym sees this fitness trend going and the personalized fitness trend going. All of that and way more in this episode. If you guys regularly listen to our show or even any other show on the Shrug Collective,

there's a really good chance that you guys have heard the word mushroom being swung around. You guys probably know what we're referring to. This one is a little different. These mushrooms you can actually drink. I'm talking about the mushrooms you guys get over at foursigmatic.com. Pretty cool company we teamed up with recently. The Barba Shrug guys actually made a trip over there and recorded some really cool episodes. So go ahead and head back on their channel to listen to those Four Sigmatic episodes. But like I said, you can drink these special mushrooms and they're nothing short of magic. You guys can get anything from mushroom coffee to matcha

all the way to hot cocoa and other varieties of their drinks. This stuff truly enhances your daily routine starting from get going in the morning all the way to winding down later at night. I've actually personally been using these from a long, long time ago, even before we started the podcast and immediately got hooked, especially the mushroom coffee was the one product that stood out to me

and that I first started trying a long time ago. I like it simply because it tastes exactly like coffee, but it doesn't give you the jitters and it doesn't give you the crash at the end of the day. Some of this stuff will seriously put you guys on fire, like the mushroom coffee or the lion's mane that they offer, while other products like the rice that they have in a delicious hot chocolate will help you guys to finally chill the fuck out at the end of the day. So go ahead and head over to foursigmatic.com slash chalk or just go to foursigmatic.com and use the code chalk. That is F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot C-O-M slash C-H-A-L-K.

Foursigmatic.com, check out their products and you guys are welcome. If there's one thing in the world that you guys noted ryan and i love more than working out and podcasting then that's eating if you guys watched a vlog recently uh in our phoenix trip we literally just ate the entire trip and just bounced around from restaurant to restaurant but even with us eating so much food all day, every day, one of the hard parts is to get enough greens. Sometimes it's just not a lot of fun. The burger most of the time sounds a lot better than the salad.

And especially on the road, the stuff can get tricky. However, if you guys listen to us on a regular basis, you guys know how important it is to get not only a balanced diet, but to get those grains in your diet, stay healthy, keep the immune system going so you guys can keep crushing in and also outside of the gym. When you're on the road, especially as we travel a lot for the podcast, and I assume that most of you guys are mainly on the road as well, your best option is like a green juice from somewhere, but those are always pumped full of sugar or even worse, a ton of preservatives. And most of the time, they're also super expensive. The green juice by Organifi, that's Organifi with an I.

No worries. I'll spell it out later for you guys. The green juice is the exact solution to that exact problem and it tastes just as good if not even better than those sugary green drinks you guys can get at the store even better they make it super convenient just bring along your green drink you guys know that one you're going to be set for your greens two you're going to get high quality food while on the road and at home and And even better, you're also going to be saving money with the green juice powder that you guys just simply going to mix into your water or beverage of choice.

You guys are spending around two bucks a drink. Good luck finding something like that at the store. You guys can now head over to OrganifiShop.com use code REALCHOCK for 20% off. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I, shop.com, use code REALCHOCK, 20% off, and check out their green drink to finally get all those greens in your diet. Stay bank loan. Right to it.

Perfect fucking sound check, dude. That's our new sound check. I love it. It's a solid start. No, we're still here. Still on air. Still in Phoenix. Are we?

Still at OPEX. Yeah, we're just right in it, dude. Right into it. Sitting down with Fish and Jim Kroll. I crushed that. I crushed that. Nailed it. CEO here at OPEX.

Runs the whole business side of everything. So we've had Mike. We've had James. And now we're getting more into the business-y side of everything. So I'll give you a little bit of a stage here. Introduce yourself. And then we'll take it from there. Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on.

It's really fun to get to do this with you guys. And I love hearing the growth that you guys are having on. It's really fun to get to do this with you guys. And I love hearing the growth that you guys are having too. It's cool to see. Yeah, what I'm really responsible for is the growth and the structuring of the business. So I'm lucky that I have guys like Mike and James and all of our other coaches in-house because they are such great content producers, such great coaches, such great consistent pieces of the pie that we can build off of. So my job is to build off of the great minds that are in here already. So I got here about four years ago as a coach. So

I came in as a coach for OPEX and then I immediately recognized that I wanted to build out the business side. I had owned two CrossFit gyms before this. I was a hedge fund trader before that. So I kind of just have business in the blood. And I got here and recognized that there was just huge opportunity to put some structure around this place. And so I've been doing that for the last couple of years. And my big place on day to day outside of the business lines is I really educate our OPEX gyms. So that's what i'm paying the most attention to for a strict focus right now um and we've been doing that for about 18 months and at this point we're up over 65 gyms and you know having a lot of fun doing it you have 65 gyms yeah wow yeah 65 opexes there are wow i did not know that i had no idea either Yeah. So that's my fault for you guys not

knowing that, you know, or not the world not knowing that, but we've really been trying to, I'd love to say the word perfect, but it's never going to be perfected. We've really been trying to figure out how to structure these gyms to really handle the two biggest problems that gyms have, which is retention and acquisition. So, you know, so we're building out as much as we can on an education side for these guys, as well as we're really trying to make sure that our systems and platforms are in place. So, you know, you can come into an OPEX gym now and we've got a website builder that builds websites. We've got a CRM that you can just plug into our CRM. You know, we're building out social media funnels, AdWords funnels, the whole bit, just so that we have a unique message that we can help them bring clients in. The system is great in terms of retention because it's personalized fitness, right?

Like you have a coach and a client one-to-one, but you get to experience fitness on the floor with a floor coach. And so it's a really cool concept where basically our idea is that we've scaled personalized fitness. So that's kind of how we're trying to do this. And the growth of it's just been great. You know, so we think that as long as we keep building the system and supporting the coaches and the owners that, you know, this thing could scale pretty nicely for us. And it's cool because it kind of sits outside of what's out there. You know, so if you look at group fitness here and then personal training, we really try to sit right in the middle where nobody has really scaled a one-to-one methodology before. So it's cool. And

we like doing it. So exactly. Like, let's say I walk in the door and I want to become a member here. Like, how does that work? Like, talk to me about the options sell me yeah no the cool part and this is some of the things that we talk about often is we've gone talking i'm just going to help you out okay cord is right here oh got it there you go so we've got um we've gone through iterations of the best way to sell the product and we've we've tested out a number of different offers and what we're really finding out is that the easiest way and the most effective way and actually the most profitable way to do it is somebody comes in and you sell them the service. So it's cool because we can talk directly with a

client and say, well, where have you been? What have you done before? What's worked? What hasn't worked? Why are you here? And we can build out a strategy with them in the consultation to then sell the service behind it. So what we're doing is we're selling the solution to the problem they have and we can deliver that because we can dig into the exact things that they need in their training. So you know we'd like to call it the last fitness gym they ever need because we believe that we can over time you just continue to progress them over and over and over and over and over and because they still have a camaraderie of a group around them but they're getting

their own program that's where we think that the real magic can happen is that they still get the community feeling, but they get one-to-one coaching while having the floor coach eyes on them at all times. So it's selling a solution to the exact problem that that client has. We sell them into the service. And then they get,

and you would have talked to James and Mike extensively about this, but they get a and you would have talked to James and Mike extensively about this, but they get a full assessment. They get full consultation. They get nourishment and nutrition education. And then, you know, what all coaches come to us initially for is program design. Program design is the last piece of that puzzle, right? Like you can't write a program unless you assess them. So we can walk them through a really nice progression in the first couple of weeks where it is one-to-one in an assessment. But what we're really getting them to is the point where they can train on their own. Like they don't need to be told every day what they should do.

And the program should reflect what they need to be doing day by day. They shouldn't worry about a movement, you know, because they shouldn't be given a movement that they can't do or that they don't understand right away. So we really try to progress them into that. That's kind of what we think our secret sauce is, is that we have a really well laid out system that a coach and an owner can align and deliver to every client that walks through the door. The hardest part for us, right, is just building awareness and visibility in the market because we're small. So I think that as we can do that and the more gyms that open up, it's a really cool idea. And I know, like, I know it's a fact that this thing works now because I've seen, you know, 65 gyms implementing it. So it can work. And the better that it gets out and aware in the market, it's a cool idea. So are these, let's say i want to open an opex is like is that

how it really goes like someone wants to open it you give them they go through like a schooling process so like everyone there is on the same page and then you guys get like a royalty from it or is are you are you personally opening these oh facilities uh no they are licensed facilities so it's not a franchise we don't force a specific look in the gyms per se. Yeah, we certainly have best practices. Yeah, exactly. And when a coach comes into the licensing program, there's a consistency because they have come through our coaching education. So we have a CCP coaching education. Every coach that coaches in an OPEX gym must go through that. And that is a robust education system for people who don't know what CCP is. That teaches them how to coach in an OPEX gym. Once they've

gone through that education and now they're into the licensing program, the first iteration of that or the first step of that is a six-month business accelerator program. So we walk them through weekly phone calls, video calls with me on those calls with a specific curriculum. I look at their homework every week for six months, and all of the homework is leading them to being able to implement this from a system side of marketing and advertising and sales, and then looking at a consultative part from our end to make sure that they recognize what they're deficient in. Some of the things that we learned while we were doing that is that we wanted to have an even tighter touch.

So at this point, now every single gym that starts as an OPEX gym has a one-to-one mentor, as well as going through this accelerator program. So you're going to have an existing OPEX gym mentor you through and make sure you do all the little shit that nobody wants to do right so oh you don't have a facebook pixel you know let me slap you across the face until you do you know little things like that make such a world of difference in these small gyms that you know we just recognize that wasn't tight enough so i don't know six twelve months ago we started now probably six months ago we put mentors with the gyms and it instantaneously changed it you know we in the beginning we didn't have websites.

Now we've got a platform to build websites and a CRM on top of that. We're going to throw social on top of it. We're going to throw AdWords on top of it. We're going to build a billing and balancing system inside of the website. So it's like the problem that we know gym owners have is that they're out of time. They're not scaling effectively enough to get past the pain point in most gyms, right? Like not all gyms, but we're trying to solve those tangible problems that they have with education and with systems and technology. And so far it's been working pretty well. But then once they

finish that six months, they still keep their mentor into perpetuity. So they're always going to have a direct, you know, personalized fitness, right? Like they're always going to have a direct, you know, personalized fitness, right? Like they're always going to have a personalized touch point to OPEX. And then James and I are on monthly calls with them for both business and, you know, consultation life coaching pieces moving forward. And then we do, you know, one or two masterminds in person a year with them so that we're, you know, you keep the togetherness of what that looks like. Our goal is not to have 15,000 of these things, you know, the goal is to have, you know, a few hundred really solid OPEX gyms that are, you know, the best in professional, the best in professional fitness.

That's really cool. And then, so let's take the regular functional fitness gym, and I'm sure you guys, if you have 60 plus gyms now now there's a wide spectrum of stuff that's working stuff that's not working within within those gyms if you go like super wide spectrum and we're just looking at the world in general or the United States whatever you want to do and you look at a functional fitness gym what is it that makes a good gym what does that makes a bad gym that's a difficult question because I think we have to define what's good or bad. So I certainly know a lot of gyms who are epic marketers that can get people into the gym and they have churn out the door. So they lose a lot of clients every month, but they put a lot of clients in every month. So if that's the model that you want, that's super successful.

So I can't fault anybody for wanting to do it that way. What we consider successful is high retention rate on a month-by-month basis and consistency of membership growth with an increasing lifetime value per client over time. So that's what we like. But in terms of gyms globally, I think that a lot of gyms are struggling with saturation. I think a lot of gyms are struggling with finding their own identity within a world that looks pretty similar gym to gym. And I think a lot of gyms have either never marketed, so you guys are way on top of it, but a lot of gyms have either never marketed or don't know what to do or don't know how to tell their story. So that has without a doubt been the thing that we have had to up-level our gyms on instantaneously. Your story is huge, actually.

Yeah, huge. You know, so a lot of the, you know, some of our gyms were former group gyms. They were former CrossFit gyms and they weren't succeeding in that. And so one of the things you got to break in that mindset is they're used to people walking through the door. And CrossFit did that beautifully, right? Like they created a brand where people would walk through the door. But once it starts getting saturated in markets, there are fewer people that just naturally walk through your door. And then if there's any sort of a downturn in that industry at all, now these gyms are not bringing in enough clients to manage the churn that they generally are having. So we're trying to make sure that they have a structurally sound system that

retains clients and puts a marketing system on top of it so that they can build consistency. Most of the gyms that come into our program have never really looked at financials. They've never really looked at any of that stuff. So we have to teach them how to build that out and look at it so that they can see what's working. Because a lot of the gyms that, let's just call it micro gyms in general, a lot of them don't know how to look at that stuff because they've never been taught.

They either came out of strength and conditioning or out of a gold gym or whatever, and they wanted to open a gym because they wanted to coach people in the way that they wanted to coach people, which is noble, but nobody ever taught them how to win on the business side. So, you know, my job is to teach them how to win and to make sure that they are consistent in the way that they do that. And then thank goodness, you know, we've got the mentors because that's been such an additionally helpful point. That is really cool. I've never heard of the mentor thing,

like being able to give that to someone as they open their own facility. That's really, really cool. It's been huge. It really has been. And they've done a nice job. How is it finding those people? Well, they're OPEX gyms.

No, the mentor people. That's what I mean. The mentors are existing OPEX gyms. Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. Yeah. So I'm basically the mentor to the OPEX gym mentors and we talk weekly and we discuss all of the issues that they're seeing inside of the

gyms. So you're basically having like a mastermind, like an online mastermind conversation or something like that. Exactly. It's so funny you say that because yesterday I posted on social the, about doing the monthly mastermind with our gyms. And on a weekly basis, I'm talking to our mentors about as much as we can that's going on inside of the system so that we can say, well, this worked brilliantly or this was dog shit, right? We got to get that stuff out and keep the stuff that's really working.

But that's just kind of more of our style. You know, it's like we believe that a one-to-one connection at some point is important. And so if you get to kind of the apex of OPEX, I didn't even mean to do that. You know, if you get to that point, right, what are you going to get from OPEX? You're going to get one-to-one because that's ultimately what you need to experience to understand how the system really functions. And that's what most of our coaches have done. They're getting into the gyms, they're getting a mentor. They might have done our remote coaching at some point.

So they felt what that feels like to get coached one-to-one. So now they can deliver it a lot more effectively than maybe somebody who hasn't experienced it. How much is that for someone? Let's say you walk in the door and it's a one-to-one because like most member cross-reps are usually between 150 to 200 hours a month. Yep. Right. So it depends where the OPEX gym is. So if you're in Vancouver, you're probably $350 plus, you know, to get a monthly service. But CrossFit in Vancouver, I'm guessing might be $225 or something like that. If you go to a normal U.S. city, OPEX might be $275 to $3.25, and CrossFit might be $150 to $175. So the idea behind it is you're going to get the entire service.

So if you look at a lot of CrossFit gyms, and I owned two of them, so I watched this happen, they're spending a lot of extra money on a lot of extra stuff, whether it's weightlifting classes or nutrition challenges or anything like that. What we've done is we've simplified the service. So when you come in, you buy OPEX. You buy one-to-one coaching with a floor coach, and you get nutrition. You get consultation. You get ongoing assessments.

And then you obviously get access to the gym. So if there's 10 people in the gym, the floor coach is looking at each person? Is that correct? Or is there multiple floor coaches going on? If it's one to 10 people in the gym, then yeah, it would be one floor coach. And then generally what we find is that around the 14 or 15 client mark, that's where we'd start to like to see a second floor coach hit the floor. But you got to remember that everybody's doing their own program. So theoretically, and you know, this has been working, but theoretically they should be doing movements that they know, that they understand, that they can execute, that they're confident in. So the floor coach shouldn't have to teach the movement. They might optimize the movement, but they shouldn't have to

teach it. That's super cool. Really cool. I liked it a lot. It's actually doesn't really sound all that expensive either. Like at first I was like, this has to be really expensive. No, it's not. And then you started talking about it, and I was like, oh, well, that actually makes sense. If you're all out there and you know what you're doing and you're just at a floor coach type of thing. Yeah. The camaraderie could be a little bit off depending on – For sure.

The floor coach – If you're doing a Metcon and then like someone else, they have 20 minutes of lifting left, and you can't jam the music as loud as you want. I don't know. depending on how that goes. So far, we haven't seen it hurt any community in the gyms. Keep in mind, we're not going after high-end athletes in these gyms as a normal client persona. And I don't think if you want to make money, anyone should.

You can't. You just can't. I mean, it's fun to coach them, right? Exactly. So maybe somebody has an athlete, And I don't think if you want to make money, anyone should. You can't. You just can't. I mean, it's fun to coach them, right? Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, maybe somebody has an athlete or maybe, you know, like an OPEX North Scottsdale has an athlete, right? Because you've got to remember, that's a license. That's an OPEX gym. So OPEX HQ does not own that gym.

One of our licenses does. And I'm pointing to the gym if people can't tell. So they might have a couple of athletes, but it makes sense because you've got Mike Lee and James who are working with those athletes on the floor. So our coaches, if educated properly with the right experience, they should be able to coach an athlete. They should be able to coach a runner, a triathlete. But the ideal audience is certainly a fitness enthusiast. It's somebody who wants to come in and grow in their fitness and grow in and out of the gym.

So the cool part that our coaches are able to do, which is why they come to us in the first place, is they want to coach more fully. You know, they want to coach a client in a bigger way. So they come to us, they learn how to do that, and they realize that a lot of that can exist in a gym because they have the opportunity to consult them on and off the floor, the client has a huge benefit because they get to understand what they really prioritize. So I don't care if somebody wants to come in and train 30 minutes a day, three times a week, if that allows them to live an inspired life. I don't care at all, right? But if somebody wants to come in and train two hours a day for a very specific thing six days a week, let's do it. Let's figure out how to do the program that addresses where you are and where you want to go. But let's also make sure that this program is going to make your life out of the gym even better.

And that's kind of where the consultative parts and the nourishment parts really come into play, which, you know, obviously we're biased as all hell. But, you know, we think that that's a massive important part. And what is so important that exists for OPEX gyms is that all the coaches come through the education to train them to work inside of that gym. So for example, when somebody starts our CCP coaching education, I'm actually the first one that they see because we need to get them aligned with what the hell they're doing first before we even ever get to something like assessment or program design. So I'm guessing, right, but 85% of the coaches that come in through OPEX are coming for program design. You know, that's the, that's the sexy topic, right? Everybody wants, how do I program better? But we've, I mean, it's been challenging to get to this point because we've

had to tell the market that it's not only about program design. Everything that surrounds it is what leads to program design, but they come in and they see the business course first, because if they don't have an understanding of what they're doing individually around this thing, that is a fitness business, they'll just flounder out. And we, you know, we definitely have a huge desire to honor the coach. We want coaches to be able to have a career. So we need to teach them in the way that's going to get them prepared to do that. And a huge component of that is understanding the business landscape, regardless of whether they're in a group gym or an individual design gym, it just doesn't matter. They have to have an understanding of that.

So let's say I am a business owner, a gym owner, and like you said, most of the time those guys are very short on time. Maybe some of them or I think a majority of the people come because they open up their gym, especially a CrossFit gym, because it kind of fits their lifestyle and maybe they want to work out a little bit more and all those things. Not necessarily because they have the business mindset to do so, correct? Yes.

So saying, taking all those things into consideration, especially the time factor, with marketing being so important nowadays, and let's say, I know the keeping your clients is very important as well, but let's start at the beginning with just getting clients into the door. What are some steps I can take as a business owner to improve my marketing? To clarify, are we talking about group or individual? Because I would view them slightly differently. Let's go both.

Okay, so let's talk group first. In my mind, you have to know what model you're in. So let's just take two different examples. One's a CrossFit example. One's an Orange Theory example. The Orange Theory model would say that you're going to digitally hammer your market. You're going to spend a bunch of money on Facebook.

You're going to spend AdWords money. You're going to have an optimized website. It's a franchise, right? So everybody comes out of the gates really hot in an Orange Theory to try to sell out membership in the first go. That's one way of doing it, and they've done that quite well, and they've spent a bunch of money at the Orange Theory HQ level to really make sure that they have the exact targeting strategies laid out. If I'm by myself in a CrossFit facility in an area,

I'm certainly going to get benefit from the name CrossFit being on the door because it's an understood entity, and you cannot forget how important that is. But what I need to do is I need to build out probably, first of all, one funnel. So I need to understand one place where I can build a name for myself. And for most people in a localized community, they're going to have a combination of Facebook and in-person. So I'm going to do organic Facebook. I'm going to spend and lose money in paid Facebook up front.

Everybody loses money up front on that. But I'm going to build an understanding of who I am. So it goes back to the storytelling part. What I'm going to do in person is I'm going to build an awareness of what I am and what my coaches are to that community. So if I am the best coach to give people intense group fitness, I'm going to project that into the marketplace because I need people to understand what I do inside of my facility. Who should I work with and what do I do in my facility? So if I were to look at an OPEX gym slightly differently, I'm not coming out saying that I'm the best at group fitness. I'm coming out and saying what I am the best at group fitness. I'm coming out and saying what I am

the best at is understanding what you as an individual need. So if I go to, you know, a business meeting, a lunch and learn, you know, I go sit at a Lululemon or something like that, I'm trying to connect one-to-one with clients because that's the story. If I'm in a group setting, I'm trying to connect to groups to help groups understand what fitness can help them do. So I think that, you know, I know that that's kind of gray and a global answer, but you have to be able to tell the story that leads them to recognize the problem that they have and how you can solve that problem. And I think that too many people in the gym industry just expect clients to walk through the door. And I don't think that that's going to happen forever unless you're franchised up, spending a bunch of money, and you have a name brand behind you that is also doing marketing for you. Right. So if you don't have that, then people have to connect to what you, and I'm saying the individual coach owner is, and what you believe in.

And once they understand that story, that's where you start to build out the marketing funnels around it. If you don't do that, you're always going to guess if people are going to walk through the door. So you got to build consistency of what's working. You know, so I talked to our gyms about strategy, execution, measurement, refinement. So it's, it's a consistent, it's a perpetual loop, right? You figure a strategy out, you execute on the strategy, you measure if it's actually working, and then you refine it and do it again. You know, you just keep going over and over and over. I don't think enough gym owners have the discipline to do that.

I think that people could have so much more success if they just looked at a framework like that and asked themselves, why are clients coming in through the front door? I can't tell you how many gym owners don't even look at that yeah they don't know they have no idea you know so people talk to me about this all the time also because i have a really successful crossfit gym probably one of the most successful ones in the world and people are always just like how do you get so many people in the door and i'm like for me, literally the only thing I use is Instagram. I've actually never even used Facebook, to be honest. We have a Facebook account, but I just don't believe in Facebook anymore because I feel like it's a dying entity at the moment. I agree with you on that.

I mean, it still is really good for probably 40 plus maybe age group, but that's not necessarily my target demographic. I think a big thing that people need to look into is their demographic i think they for sure they're like i'm gonna open a gym here it's like all right well why don't you go online and figure out what the median age is what the median income is why don't you figure out like you know like what people are actually doing there and how many kids they have and like you know like all these different things like there's laguna beach which is right next to me in in County, the median age there is like 45. But there's a crazy amount of kids. You could totally have a kids program.

There's different things you could look at. And crazy money income too. Crazy money, right? So you can go from $200 a month to maybe $250 a month and no one's going to blink an eye. And maybe you have a small gym and you have 200 members and you're killing it, but you're only $150 a month and you're not making any money. Exactly. Because you failed to look at that one part and you're not,

now you can't be like, you know what, guys, we got to go $200 a month. They're gonna be like, what? Yeah. And freak out. Two things that come to my mind on that and you're spot on on all of it is I would take an even farther step back for most gym owners and say, who do you want to work with and why do you want to work with them? And then set the gym up to reflect that. Because a lot of gym owners open this thing

expecting the world. They want to work with athletes and they want to work with people who they resonate with. And then they open a gym in an area that has two of those people. And they wonder why they don't connect with their clients quite effectively enough. And I think it's because they didn't set themselves up in the beginning to actually go after that demographic that they're perfect for. And if you don't create a feel or a style of your gym, I mean, let's just call it a brand. If you don't really create a brand around your facility, well, what are people, what are they getting behind? What are they buying into? And then on the Instagram part, the way that we always talk to our coaches about it is you have to educate and entertain.

So based on where your potential clients are, what are they doing in that platform? So people are going into Instagram to be entertained, really, at the end of the day. And it's such a beautiful platform to entertain people. But that's where it gets so interesting, where you have to know your brand so that you can constantly push that brand style into the marketplace. You know, so if you don't have a game plan on what you're trying to put out there, now it's just random and you won't keep the audience that you're trying to cultivate into clients. And I just think, unfortunately, too many gym owners are just deer in the headlights in that they don't have a strategy. They don't

know who they're trying to talk to. They don't know why they're trying to talk to those people. They're just throwing things out there. What is it called? The spaghetti method. They're just throwing things out there and seeing what sticks. It's okay a little bit, but at some point you have to develop a strategy. I think the strategy also like for me I opened my gym and the most the absolute 100% most saturated market in the entire world like Southern California Orange County specifically and it's just like and especially during the time that you opened yeah and the time that I opened was the absolute height and like even I was terrified but like I believed in the

fact that my gym was gonna be so much different than everybody else's and I personally had nothing like it was it was all in for me like my my investor was like you know what I want to see what you have in your bank account and I want you to write me a check for that number oh wow and then I want you to borrow money from your parents and then you have to pay that back and you have to pay me back and you have to like I want you to see i want to see you go all in on this and i was like i can totally do that like i know i'm gonna succeed and at that time every gym that i had been to in that area literally and i was telling james fitzgerald the same thing like none of the owners i was like excited to see and me and like you know like people come in my gym and i just pop out of my office and they're

all excited yeah exactly there was no athletes that like there was no forget the athletes like the workout like the vibe like when i walked in i wasn't like oh yeah like i missed this place you know like anything like that and i was like i i can create this i've seen it at other gyms and i know i can do it and i think a lot of gym owners out there they're like all right i'm just gonna open a gym because i want to be a gym owner. Like, that's what I want to do. And it's like, okay, you can do that. That's definitely like admirable thing. But how much different are you going to be from all those other dots on the affiliate map when you go to CrossFit Chalk or when you go to CrossFit.com?

Yeah. You should totally go to CrossFitChalk.com. But when you're on CrossFit.com and you're looking at all those affiliates, it's like, all right, well, how am I going to differentiate myself from all these? Or am I going to become an OPEX gym? Or should I be something totally different than what everybody else is doing? Exactly.

From the first day I opened my gym, it never said CrossFit on the sign ever. I was going to use CrossFit methodologies, but I was going to be chalk first and foremost for the rest of my life. That was like my first philosophy. And there was less than a handful of the 10,000 CrossFit gyms in the world

that were even doing that um to have a name that didn't have CrossFit next to it or and to have that on your building was like they're like you're not gonna put CrossFit on that's like the boat that's the most marketable thing that you have and I'm like no and you're actually paying money to have it in your name yeah you know and I actually still am paying the money yeah oh sure yeah but and it's still you still get benefit from it though. Like it doesn't have to be on your front door to get benefit from it. But any day I could take it off and I'm fine. Yeah, you'd be fine.

Nothing would happen. Exactly. You know? Because you've built a marketing platform. Yeah. But a lot of gyms, I've had conversations with enough gyms at this point where they did pull CrossFit off their door and all of a sudden clients stopped coming in. Well, because they're not marketing and they never built any marketing around it,

you've created that mantra, that style, that brand that people buy into. James has a great story about going all in too. I don't know if you talked to him about it, but he was all in back in Calgary at one point. So it's a it's cool. Parallel between you guys. But when, you know, when I'm thinking about what's going to be the most successful for so many of these gyms, you mentioned that they would, they might be a gym because they want to be a gym owner. I would say that some of them are gym owners because they didn't like other things. So it's not even a beneficial enough reason to be a gym owner. You know, so I'm, I'm on the business side at this point. I've been on

the coaching side. I've owned multiple gyms. And so I kind of am lucky that I've seen those different avenues. And coaches aren't business owners. Now, I know that people are gonna be like, fuck that guy for saying that. But, you know, I think many coaches are not good business owners. It doesn't mean they can't own a business. It doesn't mean that they can't get a GM or whoever to help them do this thing. But if they don't recognize that they need to have an affinity for business, they need to pay attention to these things, they will get slaughtered at some point. Yeah. You know, and some great coaches have turned into great business owners. We've seen it over the last decade. I personally didn't know anything

about business and I've learned so much and I'm so happy and I'm very fortunate that things worked out the way that it did. It could have definitely went wrong. But at the same time, you've also never been comfortable in what you have. You've never like, okay, I have 100 members now. I'm okay, I don't need to do any more marketing.

You've always been at the forefront of what's possible and Instagram and marketing and doing this and doing that. We're like, even now where we have 350, 400 members, every single day there's a handful of people still walking into the door. And our retention rate is insane. Like 2% leave a month or something like that. That's great.

Insane. But yeah, very, very fortunate for sure. There's a lot of CrossFit. There's still CrossFit gyms opening up and I'm just like, why? I was just going to say that though. It is definitely getting less and less and less. I mean, there was like the mecca of opening up your CrossFit gym and everybody was doing it.

It was like the next big thing. And I was definitely slowing down. That's not just me. That's actually happening, correct? Oh, yeah, for sure. What I'm hearing is that the U.S. is slowing down in openings, but places like Brazil and Asia are blowing up because they're just behind that curve.

Yeah, just behind in the time. What are some reasons for that that you see why there's less and less CrossFit gyms opening up? Do you know how much it is down by? No, and I don't want to put myself out there saying something that's not accurate. I think it's definitely accurate. I just don't know how much it's down. I mean, if I were to guess, I wouldn't even consider it down.

I would consider that there are gyms closing because they're either not successful enough or they want to do something else. And it's now played out as the hot thing, right? So if, you know, back in 09, when I really started to learn about it, I was like, this is uncharted waters. Like nobody's doing this. I'm going to open a gym. I'm going to have no competition. I'm going to run it hot and then we'll see what happens. And so I went a four year 2010 to 2014 and sold in 2014 because I was noticing the tension between the gyms. And so I think it's really interesting that we can want to all be friends. Like we want to be friends, but if you take a client from me, you know, that does not make me feel very good. And at some point you get saturated enough and that

has to be what happens. So remember, Starbucks is a corporate model. So I can put a Starbucks here and here and nobody gives a shit because it goes to the same house. You put a gym here and a gym here who have different owners who wins well it's you because you create marketing you create a brand and that guy's gonna go out so I think that I'm actually really sad that that's even a possibility like I feel like cross should minimize the distance you know what I mean like it's kind of fucked up well I mean for for our cuz I could totally open the gym straight across the street from you yeah like for sure yeah you sure. You want to spend $3,000 a month and call CrossFit?

Yep. Go ahead. It should be, like, minimum. Well, the interesting there, I would agree. We have territory protection around our gym. So we took that route just because we didn't want that to be a problem. But you can't say that CrossFit did it wrong, right? No.

Because they grew, like, a weed for almost, what, I guess really from 09 to, what, 15 or something like that? A couple years ago, yeah. And Glassman's actually answered this question before. He's like, fuck that gym. Yeah, strong will survive. I don't want them to survive. I actually would rather people see that that one sucks

so that they go to that one. Yeah, I think it's interesting that the typical owner of CrossFit has continued to shift as well, right? Where when I first opened in 2010, you weren't seeing investors open CrossFit gyms. It was the garage gym inching up. Yeah, exactly. So I think that you now have – and this is to CrossFit's credit. They've built this massive brand.

They've built the CrossFit Games. They've done such a nice job building that brand. But now there's different audiences and there's different owners and there's different coaches and now they're doing a little bit different things. So it's getting a little bit hazy on what it is or what it isn't. And I think that's challenging for somebody looking at this moment to go in and say, well, there's five others of them in this five mile radius. I do look at my demographic because I would suspect that overall the business savvy of people who would come in right now should theoretically be higher at this point because there's now data to say that this is a working model and everything.

So they're going to start asking these questions and they're going to look at it and they're going to say, do I want to open a gym with five other of the same gyms in the area? To your point on uniqueness, that's just a willingness to pay, right? So like if you have no uniqueness, it will ultimately be a race to the bottom. And I'm not saying that's CrossFit or not CrossFit. I'm just saying in a business, if you don't have uniqueness, they won't pay for your service. You know, it's not even good or bad. Like everything can be, everything can be viewed as good at this point, right? Because if I Instagram myself well enough, I can look really damn good, but I need to be unique for the audience that I want to work with if I want that audience to have some sort of emotional connection to me to ultimately become my client. And I just don't think that enough gym owners are doing that.

So sorry to go all the way around the question, but I think that potentially the difficulty here is that what's the next thing? So if I'm looking at opening a business, I want to know what the next thing is. As the garage gym owner was excited about the CrossFit Games and the intensity of the fitness and like this changed my life, I think that that's less of a factor at this point because it's been around for 15 years. So what's the next thing that's going to come out? I mean, perhaps the CrossFit Games get bigger. Perhaps the play that they're making in the heart health and diabetes, maybe that's kind of the next iteration. But you are going to have different owner audiences that are going to pop up to latch on to that next thing. So I just think it's a really interesting conversation of what's coming next.

And when I look at it, I just say, I'm not sure. Yeah, I know. People ask me that all the time, too. And I'm just like, I just say, I'm not sure. Yeah, I know. People ask me that all the time too. And I'm just like, I have some really cool ideas that I think could work out. But it's all going to be about who makes the first move and starts creating this really cool thing. Well, I think you look at Kalipa, right? Opens up NC Fit. And so he has his vision of what he wants to do.

And he's obviously one of the guys that executes amazingly well. It's still CrossFit, though. He's just doing CrossFit with NC Fit on the sign. But he's not an affiliate, though, is he? No. Okay, so. But he's just like as if I was going to be chalk.

Yeah, exactly. And I still do CrossFit workouts in the gym. I mean, I do my own style, which I think is definitely not traditional. I do a lot of IWT stuff and stuff like that. But, yeah, he's still just doing CrossFit. He just took his name, took the CrossFit name. No doubt about it, but he's built a brand that is moving farther and farther away from it. Yeah.

So it's just – he's done it well. I think that you're going to see more people do what looks to be crossfit with their own brand because they're trying to be unique and he's building it out not directly as a franchise but a little bit more where he always has the front desk and he has this it's the same feel and the logo and the flyer and like if and i'm sure opex is the same thing to an extent where if i walk into an opex here and opex, I'm going to see some similarities. Oh, for sure. All over the place. And we're seeing that continue to merge into an idea, right? Like, so we're seeing what works the best. And then, you know, 65 gyms are like, that works the best.

Sounds good. Like, we're going to put that in. So we want them to have autonomy. We don't want them to feel like they're constricted. But we needed to have a brand around it. So when we first opened, you know, you didn't have to call yourself an OPEX gym. And we were trying to allow creativity and autonomy. And then as we grew, we realized to go, oh, man, like this, this can't grow a consistent brand, if we don't have OPEX on the door. So we actually went to the the idea that there has to be OPEX on the door,

because that signifies the level of education that people are going to get on the way in. And we have an education program that we're really proud of to get the right coaches in. And there's a full business and coaching program behind it. All of our coaches in the OPEX gyms program have a weekly call with James and Henry Toronto on coaching. So every single week you have client avatars and examples and how you're working with this person, how you're coaching this person on the floor, how to improve the experience. And that's just been massively beneficial for these coaches because that gives us a consistent language even as we scale up. So our goal is as we get bigger to actually be more consistent as opposed to the opposite.

You know, tall order perhaps, but that's the goal. So that's where the technology, the education, the mentoring, all that's just been put around this so that consistency actually gets better so that we end up having, you know, a front desk area that looks similar because it works better. And we have a sales system that works the best. So more and more gyms are putting that in. This website style works the best. So throw it in gyms are putting that in this website style works the best. So throw it in, you know, so we're trying to work together and that can work because you can't be close enough to the gym next to you to be fighting for their clients. I think a lot of people mess up with the front desk person. Like personally right now, I still wish I had a desk

person like full time. I just like can't find the right people that I want like all the times. But I, so what I have a desk person who's just there during the craziest hours. Then the rest of the hours, it's easy enough to take care of whatever. I think a lot of people don't understand is when someone calls your gym and you don't answer it, what happens is they don't call back. They call another gym because they're like, I'm going to call this one. They didn't pick up. I'm just going to call this one real quick. You might have missed out. Yeah. So like, sometimes people are like scared to give someone, you know, 10, 12 bucks an hour. And in reality,

if you just get one person that month, it pays for it. Absolutely. I mean, we actually don't have designated front desk people in the beginning. Um, when a gym gets large enough, we'd tell them to put it in, but it's an expense. Yeah. But in the beginning, our gym owners, I mean, they work hard. And so we want them to be a coach and an owner day one. And then generally around, and this is if somebody starts out and doesn't transition to gym or whatever, but if somebody starts out fresh, generally about the 30 or 35 client number, that's when coach number two and the rest of the scaling system comes into play because they have the economics to deal to do it gotcha yeah which you know that's you know those numbers and those scaling patterns are just

things that we've learned by watching all these gyms go through the process you know so thankfully for our gyms way up front when we didn't have it as built out as well as we do now you know they they kind of were blazing the trail of what works and what doesn't. So it's cool to see that they're, you know, they're successful. Sounds good. Yeah. I got one more question. You've basically answered this like in pieces every here and then, so you don't have to

go super into detail. Definitely don't have to repeat yourself, but I just want to get this like very clear. If I am successful enough as a gym owner where I can now branch out and I know Fish is playing with the idea as well to open up a second location, third whatever and I know you've answered this that's why like you can keep this short if you want um the main things that I want to focus on in in for me I think the scariest part of doing something like this would to be um to keep the culture in place right chalk runs on culture yeah it's fish and yeah it's the marketing and yeah it's the programming but it's the vibe as soon as you walk into the door that like just hits you and pulls you and it

won't ever let you go. So if we were to open another location, how do we do that in Oregon? How do we do that in Arizona? How do we do that everywhere else? Oh, I got him. No, I'm trying to I know exactly kind of how I want to answer this. I would say this is pretty much why you have your coaching course, correct? Yeah. So I think that you have to know that gym number two is going to be a little bit different than gym number one. The vibe is going to feel a little bit different because it's the human beings that make up that gym that really create the exact vibe that's in it. Now, you can create etiquette and coaching methodologies and everything that's surrounded, but you know that every coach has a little bit of a different feel, a little bit

of a different flair that they would coach with, and every client has a little bit of a different feeling. So I might actually tell you that if you're trying to have the exact same vibe, that may not work. Now, what I would definitely tell you is that you have to have sure that the coaches are executing on a daily basis to provide those steps, those tools, and that environment for the culture to come out. So I think what happens is a lot of gyms in gym one, they're really relying on the gym owner because he or she is so good that they can create the culture and they can keep it rolling. What they don't do is they don't create economies of scale in the systems, so they're doing double the work for a second facility,

and they don't have a blueprinted game plan of how they want every single piece of the experience to go. So, for example, the way that we try to handle this with our gyms, and a couple people are now having multiple OPEX gyms, so it's starting to happen at this point. We create a service blueprint with our gyms that says, what is the exact experience you want somebody to have the moment they drive into the parking lot until they've left after the workout? And we're talking about every interaction is described. Every piece of technology is laid out the exact way you want somebody to walk into the gym, go to the locker room, you know, come out. And for us, they're writing their workouts on their own, you know,

personalized whiteboard, like all that stuff. And when does the coach interact? When do they not? And how to make that experience the best. So what I would recommend that any gym do when they're thinking about scaling is to ask themselves to do that blueprint. Because if your coaches are kind of winging it in facility number one and it just works, facility number two will be a little bit less good than facility number one. And that might be the difference between success and failure. So I think that that blueprint is massively important. And I can't tell you how enlightening it is to look at that blueprint and be like, fuck, I have no idea what we want to do at that point.

And I think that blueprint would actually be great even if you're not thinking about opening a second location. Without a doubt. Without a doubt. Just to get your culture in place. Yes, exactly. So think about it. I can have a blueprint for the on-the-floor experience.

I can have a blueprint for my sales strategy. I can have a blueprint for how I do Instagram marketing. And what does that do? That allows you to work with your coaches and your staff to ensure that you have something specific to manage to. And because facility number two is all about the management of the people in that building. And I know this intimately well because when we went into a second facility,

I realized really quickly I couldn't be the guy. Like I could not be the guy in two facilities. I had to have a staff that could execute really well, and thankfully they did. But there was a lot of things that I would have even liked to improve on, you know, four-plus years ago when we were doing this, and I would have killed to have an exact walkthrough of all those processes because that would allow me to make sure that I'm managing them effectively. But if I don't know exactly what I want it to look like, how am I supposed to manage somebody to do it? You know, so that to me is what creates culture

is when you are consistent with, well, I mean, we have what's called a trust triangle in our coaching education. It's the three C's, so competency, consistency, and care. So that creates trust. If I can use those three things in as many different places as possible, that will create trust. And ultimately, I believe that that creates culture. So if I can show all of my clients that the experience is consistent, that we are competent, and that we really care about them,

I'm going to win. But when any of those three pieces start to break, your clients start to lose trust. If they lose trust, you lose referrals, you lose clients, you can't market as effectively because people don't trust you lose referrals you lose clients you can't market as effectively because people don't trust you even digitally and I've seen that just destroy gyms and to get to facility number two you can't lose those three

C's and that's where the systems would come in like it yeah I always felt like for me personally if I was ever open another location it would have to be like I'd want to go there for like two or three months, get it like really, really popping, you know. And then I also like get it popping. I also wouldn't I wouldn't want any like financial responsibility. Like I'd want to that person would have to put all the money in and then, you know, give me some sort of royalty. But I think to actually open one with my own money and open another one, that would be so scary to me. Well, it's interesting where...

The fact that I already survived and it worked, I'm just like, oh, thank God. Well, and you have to make sure if you remove yourself in any percentage from facility number one, are you going to potentially hurt facility number one? And that's the cash cow for you at this point. So much of this, I would tell you, is that it has to run without you. It must, you know, so until you have the systems and the

marketing in place for that facility, I'm not an investor in it because you're the guy in facility number one. Now I don't know enough about your system. So, um, but, but if you put all of those systems into play and you trained that second group of coaches and staff to do that, now I'm an investor because I know you know the system that works. But I can't have you in two facilities. That doesn't work. Now, if you check into facility number two here and there, I love it. But you need to have somebody day to day that can handle it and manage it. And you need to have systems that you can have that person or GM manage to. Do you do that? Call me. But I think that that's where a lot of people fall short is they don't do the work to understand what they want

it to look like. And then they don't put the systems in place to make sure that it runs that way. And I think that can go right back to, you know, where is growth in this thing? Well, I don't think there's enough consistency right now to make somebody go, I'm putting 150K into that thing. You know, so what makes it different? Well, somebody's going to probably put something else on the door, you know, and that's the problem that we have. Yeah. I like it. I dig it. I'm all good. How about you? I think so. Like that was, we got a lot of good information out there. I think a lot of you guys out there who think about opening gyms, you got a lot of good insight. If you currently own a gym, you got a lot of good insight. I think that we literally answered everything.

Yeah, I think that was all. Is there anything that you think that someone else out there who's either struggling or wants to better their facility should know that we didn't cover? No, I think just globally somebody who wants to win has to know what is succeeding and not. So I think a lot of gym owners are going day by day reacting to what's happening in front of them. You know, it's like the email syndrome, right? It's just like you spend the whole day like answering emails like, holy shit, what did I just do with this day? I think a lot of gym owners are reacting to things that are happening and not proactively going out and figuring out what they need to spend their time doing. And until they do that, they're not going to get better. They're just going to either stay at the same place or start to fumble. And I've seen a lot of gym owners telling me that

approximately the 70 to 80 client mark and then the 180 client mark are the two massive brick walls that most gyms struggle to get past. And if we look at 180, I get it because over 150, now it's less of a tribal mentality just from a sheer cultural feeling. But the 70 to 80 seems to be where a lot of coaches can't scale themselves at all. You know, so once you get to that point, are you delivering a consistent service to clients from other coaches? Did the culture shift when you went to 81? Did something change that brought in some sort of a whirlwind that screwed with people?

I just think that there needs to be an investigatory process in these gyms. And I don't think enough gym owners are investigating what's working and what's not. And it's hurting them. I'm really paranoid personally about music. I bitch about music all the time. I'm like, it has to be, it's got to be like this. If it's making me tired or something, like some super slow rap. One of my coaches the other day, I was like, I can't listen to this anymore.

This has to go. They were mad, and I was like, I don't give a shit. Yeah, and imagine your facility number two, if that wasn't in the cards, I'm less interested to invest because your system is what I would invest in. So if your system means that this music is going to be in the building, then that music better be in the damn building. You know, if your coaches have to abide by that, cool. If you need to create a 10,000 song playlist that they just hit play every morning so that they don't screw it up build the playlist you know but i don't think enough coaches are

willing to take those steps to create consistency of what works 100 all right guys well what can uh i mean i guess i was gonna say where can people find more of you but i guess you're just opex yeah i'm just uh i'm yeah um i always this, but if they want to email me, it's just jim at opexfit.com. Oh, man, that was not a good idea. I know. But I'll tell you what, I always do that because when I do that, of the 15 people who actually email me, they're generally worth something. Okay. So I like having those conversations if somebody is willing to put some skin in the game and email out now, maybe I back it, you know, maybe I back off of it after

this one, but, um, and then, yeah, just OPEX fit.com is our website and I'm just, um, Jim Kroll on Facebook and Instagram. Awesome. And LinkedIn. Yeah. Oh yeah. LinkedIn. I got to be the business guy, right? I really appreciate it guys. This was fun. Us too, Jim. Thanks so much, man. Thank you so much. All righty, kids. And that will do it. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Real Chalk Podcast. We always love having you guys here, and we also love hearing from you guys.

If it's just, A, you guys are awesome, or, A, you guys suck, whatever you guys want to tell us, my Instagram is going to be at yaisview. We got fish at ryan fish that is s c h fish head over there go slide into our dms let us know what you guys like what you guys don't like maybe some topics you want to hear about some guests you would love to see on the show or just if you want to say hi we always love hearing from you guys. So make sure you get in there. We will be back next week with another awesome episode. Until then, guys, stay jacked.