Barbell Shrugged - Starting and Scaling an Online Fitness Business: DO THIS w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged #456

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

How to take your fitness business online?   What are the upsides to an online fitness business?   What are the downsides?   Main differences in coaching, communication, and getting buy in from athletes?   What level service are you providing to your clients?   How do you get new clients?   Building a sales funnel?   Lead capture   Athlete nurture (FB groups, slack channels)   And more…   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Travis Mash on Instagram   TRAINING PROGRAMS   Host the One Ton Challenge at your gym: http://shruggedstrengthgym.com   One Ton Challenge   One Ton Strong - 8 Weeks to PR your snatch, clean, jerk, squat, deadlift, and bench press   20 REP BACK SQUAT PROGRAM - Giant Legs and a Barrel Core   8 Week Snatch Cycle - 8 Weeks to PR you Snatch   Aerobic Monster - 12 week conditioning, long metcons, and pacing strategy   Please Support Our Sponsors   Paleo Valley  - Save 15% at http://paleovalley.com/shrugged   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   PRx Performance - http://prxperformance.com use code “shrugged” to save 5%   http://kenergize.com/shrugged use Shrugged10 to save 10% Masszymes http://masszymes.com/shrugged use Shrugged to save 20%

Truck family, I am fired up about this episode today because the entire fitness industry has moved online. And there's been a massive movement towards the online space for many years now. But the influx of online coaching, Zoom classes, the brick and mortar facilities being forced to go online, I think is a new wave that is very interesting and I have a lot of experience in this field moving online how to run an online business Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash we all run online businesses Barbell Shrugged is 100% online we don't have a brick and mortar facility. We don't even live in the same state. Mash has been running an online business since the very first time he

was on Barbell Shrugged a couple years ago. So we have a ton of knowledge in how this business is started, how it runs, how it scales. And I think you're going to learn a ton from it, especially if you are a personal trainer, a gym owner, or anyone that is finding themselves in a space right now in which you have to move your business online. There's a ton of opportunities. There's a ton of downsides as well. If you are lost, you are not specific. And I think this episode does a great job highlighting exactly where you need to be and what you need to focus on to get started and to scale your online business. all week, but look, not even all week, all month, but look, we needed a company that was going to

be providing us with high quality meats, knowing that we were going to be in shutdown, we were going to be traveling, and I needed some snack food, and we were looking for a company that could deliver high quality grass-fed beef, and we found Paleo Valley uh paleo valley has been around for a very long time the highest quality meats a best omega ratio food the omega-6 to omega-3s that comes with the grass-fed beef the summer sausage and the teriyaki blend of the beef sticks are phenomenal we've also got some turkey ones and there's just some really good vitamins and minerals and capsules that they have as well. But get over. You need these products while you are being held in captivity. PaleoValley.com forward slash shrugged. You're going to save 15% automatically by just going to the website and ordering your food. Go over, get your beef sticks.

They get delivered right to the house. And then you're going to have healthy, quality snacks delivered right to your door. Also, make sure you get over to barbellshrugged.com forward slash store. We've got e-books. We've got programs. We've got bundles. Get over there.

Tons of stuff. And you can save 10% by using the coupon code shrugged on everything in our store barbell shrugged.com forward slash store use the coupon code shrugged and you're going to save 10% automatically on everything in the store stoked for this episode hope you guys enjoy learn a lot we're going to kick it to one more sponsor at the break, and we will see you guys in a bit. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner.

I'm hanging out in my bedroom. Bug Lars and Coach Travis Smash. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about building an online fitness business. Not only are the gym owners in a weird spot right now, but we've got thousands and thousands of personal trainers around the world right now that have been taken out of their Globo gym or out of their personal training studio. They actually just shut gyms down officially in North Carolina.

The governor came in and said, you're not allowed to have a service industry business at all. So now we've got uh thousands of trainers that are basically either have to go online or are going to be unemployed and all three of us have been in the brick and mortar business uh sold our gyms i can now say that officially travis congratulations again um yeah and we have taken all of our business online. And one of the things that when I had the brick and mortar business that I thought was going online was the key to success. I can infinitely scale.

It's going to be so easy. There's so many more people. And that is just not the case. It's very crowded. It's a very loud space. but over the last three years, I've learned a ton. Doug, how long have you been solely online? I know you just sold the gym, but you've been basically online for what, five, six years now? Yeah, Barbell Strug really got his start. We were talking about it late 2011. Technique WOD started summer 2011 um which is really when i started getting

online barbell shrugged showed up about six or eight months after technique one and we kind of smashed them together uh so yeah since mid 2011 nine years yeah nine years or trav when did you Man, 2009 was when I, well, you know, I owned my first gym in 2003 and then sold that one in 2004, like one year later, and then I got back into the gym business 2009. Nice. And you're purely online now, right? Yeah, you know, but I've been online since i really met you know doug you know i met him and then in a year later i was making the majority of my money online as soon as i figured it out you just you can reach more people but you have to be good at what you do yeah when i had my brick and mortar our online stuff was so high pride like it was the the big high ticket item that we sold because it was

all there was no like just general gen pop health and wellness fitness clients everybody was like on the path it was either coaches looking to get to regionals um so it was like our our high ticket price was to actually be online and have personalized coaching versus the, the online thing. We talked a little bit about it. I think that one of the coolest things that's happening in this whole shutdown, lockdown,

social distancing thing with the gyms getting shut down is nobody's really thinking about the fact that online coaching is really being revolutionized a lot right now. I was blown away when I started to see my gym and all gym owners around the country moving their entire business to Zoom classes because we don't run Zoom classes. That's a massive upsell, not even up upsell but it's an upgrade to what the standard model is for online coaching right now which is just here's your program here's your nutrition go follow this report back to me when you're done and now people are setting entire gyms up with

these big tvs multiple camera angles and you have an actual coach that's leading you through what's going on in the gym what you should be doing at home providing instant feedback and that is something that hasn't happened in our space maybe ever unless i don't know anybody that runs an online business that's providing that level of service right now um yeah have you ever done any of the zoom stuff like that in person draft no no not till now you know like as soon as this happened you know we immediately went to zoom so yeah yeah i just figured it out you know i was like uh i was gonna you know i wasn't quite sure what i was gonna do when this all hit and then um someone told me about zoom i played around with it and then now

i love i love it i'm not quite sure if if I'll ever go back to not doing Zoom. Who do you think is doing better than Zoom? Of all the companies that are getting smashed right now, Zoom is probably doing great. So when this happened, there's been like a gradual party happening in Zoom where they're just getting more and more and more excited that they're going to be the dominant platform for everybody.

Are they traded publicly? Man, somebody should have jumped on that. I'm not sure what level Zoom's at. Yeah, they've got to be smashing right now. It's like all the fully online companies were just like, great, this is going to push our entire society further online. I think they've made it free too. Oh, really?

Like everybody can go on. It doesn't matter what size your company is. It's free right now. But, I mean, their email list has grown millions in the last – Oh, Zoom is free? Right now. Oh, I paid, but I don't mind. I think it is.

I could be wrong, but I think I heard. So companies like Spartan, they've just opened up forums for all the Spartan racers to come and connect with each other and tell stories, talk about where they're at. I feel like Zoom not only is right now, it's not just the fitness platform. It's like the dating platform. You can't go out and meet anybody. There's no way to have a date. This is like what you would do if you were trying to find a girlfriend right now. You would be like, we'll go on Tinder.

And then you send them a Zoom link and talk to them. Oh, my God. I don't know, but you can't go have dinner. So what do you do? I tend to forget for a lot of other people that I have a fully online business and I live with my wife and my kids. I don't really need to go anywhere. It's mildly inconvenient that I have to stay at home, but it's a pretty ideal setup for this situation. I can talk with you guys on Zoom. We can do show still we can we can get all my work done with my laptop my cell phone but there's there's a ton of people that this isn't the case like everything from like i have a friend who owns a hair cutting business like a little barbershop

for kids she's totally smashed like she's so she's so smashed she's like fucking totally screwed um i have my my very first like oh shit moment last night we went to our local thai restaurant to get food and i love going to restaurants like that because it's like it's it's legitimately the family right their restaurant and when everybody's done eating if you're there late enough you will see the family gather around the table in the restaurant and they eat their family dinner which is like leftovers of what they didn't sell for the day and they had like the whole dining area blocked off last night and i went in there and there's like a 16 17 year old

girl taking she's clearly the daughter and she gave me the like she always says thank you she's always very nice uh but last night it was like the, like, thank you for coming in. Like, the very heartfelt one. And I was like, fuck. Like, I want to give you all my money right now. But it was more than just the thank you. It was that thank you of, like, man, I'm 16 years old and I understand a balance sheet. And I know when this place is rocking and I know when this place is struggling.

And mom and dad are tight right now. And I just, it like, oh my God. It like, I just, here's your 30 tip i don't know what else to do but it crushed me to see this girl that clearly understands business at like a way different level than every other 16 17 year old girl does and she was just like no seriously thank you like you don't get it like we're fucking hurting right now um but it was it was really it was like the first probably like super heartfelt like thing that has really happened yeah um but getting back to kind of how it's affecting all the personal trainers businesses um gym owners taking things online um yo what

do you guys like about being online coaches? There's a lot of great stuff, but it's also like over time, I feel like there begins to be pieces that I really miss about brick and mortar. I guess what are the big upsides when you guys started to make this move? Do you like it a lot more than the brick and mortar piece? It's definitely more convenient as far as like um you know time because you know if you if you have a brick and mortar a lot of time is wasted you know as far as like you go you have to drive there then when you're there there's a lot of talk which is cool because you're socializing but for a dad and a husband is trying to like be you know time you know trying to be very time efficient it can

sometimes just drain you because you're trying to leave 10 people talk to you an hour later you get to your car so it's like i get to give you know when i'm coaching my athletes i'm all in and i give them 100 when it's over it's over i click leave now i'm with my family it just it's definitely made me way way more efficient and I think everyone benefited the athletes my family me so that's what I would yeah I'm in a similar boat like that that was the original reason for wanting an online business was just total freedom of schedule like right now a lot of people are going to have that for the first time in a long time where they can just do their work whenever they feel like it. Sure, you got to be on conference calls whenever they're scheduled and whatnot, but it's actually

a great opportunity for all the people that have to be at their job from 9 to 5 to have a little freedom and flexibility with how they structure their day. Granted you can't go out and go to the gym or wherever else. We have tons of restrictions on what we can do right now, but i feel like it's a fantastic opportunity for a lot of people to to just switch it up like try something new see what you like yeah trying trying something new and seeing what you like absolutely i think uh one thing that has happened is i appreciate um actually being at the gym and being around people so much more. One thing that I've learned over the three years is that when I had the gym, the thing that I wanted the most when I got out of it was I wanted the freedom from having to be on all the time.

So you kind of go online and you can go hide in the coffee shop and do your work and you don't have to think too much. And then all of a sudden you like put a wall up and then you put another wall up. The next thing you know, like you only have an hour in the gym. Yeah. And that's your training session. And you don't realize how quickly you start to isolate yourself. So somebody like me, like I'm like i love being in front of people i my favorite part of being in the gym was standing in front of classes and like performing all day like that was like the thing that got me

going so much so if you're one of those people um you should be very prepared to create an outlet for yourself um where you're where you have to be around people and you have to continue to like work on your craft because coaching online i think is a much more like technical thing versus a personality driven thing so like this show doing barbell shrugged and us getting out on the road and doing all this stuff really allows me to still kind of tap into that like entertaining performing side of what we do because online you're doing just so much technical coaching um instead of just instead of that like connecting with people you're doing a lot of like writing back and forth to people versus like the getting up and fully immersing people into an hour of entertainment i started coaching my neighborhood

kids so like i've got like a bunch of kids now they're from the neighborhood coming to my little you know i'm working out outside yeah so that's been cool but and it's cool because it's like 20 minute increments because they're all young they're all like yeah you know 10 years old and down and so so it's not so bad so it doesn't drain me but i still get to you know, 10 years old and down. And so it's not so bad. So it doesn't drain me, but I still get to, you know, practice. It's been a long time since I, like, coached someone real little. Like my sons. That's been interesting because I always told myself I wouldn't. And now they're asking that, you know,

I can't coach the neighbor and not coach my boys. Totally. And so we've been battling, but now we've come to terms with, like, what they have to do if they want to get coached. It's an interesting dynamic for me. I've been used to coaching world team members. It was super cool this weekend when I ran my COVID-19 boot camp party.

First off, I've never in the history of my life marketed myself or what I do as boot camp party first off i've never in the history of my life marketed myself or what i do as boot camp so when i got online and i was like i'm running a boot camp come on out no weights all skill levels i was like i did it i'm running a boot camp in my front yard i can't believe you charge did you charge no man i i legitimately um so my neighbor – and this is really just – I talked to you guys about it because I just had this itch that I had to scratch. Like last week when we recorded, I just – man, it was eating me up. I felt like I needed to do something. And as much as I like could do other things, fitness is my thing it's how I connect with the world with people like I just I don't know what else to do except to get people around me

and get them excited to go pick something up or do some squats and um so I just I went into my garage and shot a four minute long live video uh posted it in my gym group, and we had nine people show up. Just actually Doug's 100 Metcons for Time e-book that we're putting out, 10-minute workouts. I just put three of those together, all the body weight stuff that he just built. And then I kind of just like made it all skill level set up so everybody could do it. And it was rad. Everybody had a good time. Everybody kept their distance. Everybody felt good about it.

It felt very good to to like weigh on people so much is you know 12 weeks of not having people is a very not human thing yeah right yeah for all the people that were already isolated and now like they have no hope to talk to anybody they don't live with anybody they're just sitting at home all by themselves you can call your friends and whatnot but after a while if you're not even like talking to the to the cashier at the grocery store, you're not talking to anybody, you get lonely really fast. Well, I think that this is something that online fitness coaches really have to understand in the longevity of eliminating brick and mortar. It's like that human connection goes away very, very quickly. My life is lived in a – and I'm a very social person and my life is lived inside a one and a half mile radius. My coffee shop is 0.8 miles that way and the gym is 1.4 miles that way.

And I can walk to both of them if I want to. I also don't – I have a gym in my garage. There's days where I don't talk to a human until my daughter and wife come home. And if you do that consistently, all of a sudden this idea of social distancing becomes your life, which is very not what you want

when you get into fitness many times. It becomes, It's tough. I feel like it's a good time for people who are, you know, I have a friend, Gabriel, who's a counselor. I think it's a good time for those guys. Bill Reall? Yeah. Love that guy.

I think these guys need to really make themselves available. We should interview him on here. We're going to do that. He's awesome. He's such a good you know like every time i have one of my athletes who needs i consider needs help you know like i always call him he tells me what to do and now they've opened up the borders to guys like him so now would be a good time for him to really make himself you know noticed i'm gonna pick him yeah someone needs to set up like a a non-nude kind of classy cam girl setup

where's this hot chicks that keep their clothes on just call you and talk to you and they they keep the conversation rolling they ask the questions like just make it easy for people to like have like a real conversation for all the people that are like totally lonely and really don't have anyone, but they still have some cash. I feel like people would actually buy that in this situation. Oh, yeah.

That would be amazing to be like, if you're single and literally live alone, it would be... They need help because I would lose my mind. It may be fun for a little bit to be all by yourself and quiet, but then I'd be like... I would lose my mind after. It may be fun for a little bit to be all by yourself and quiet, but then I'd be like, I would go stir crazy, and I'd be like, I don't care what the governor told me.

Yeah. There's tons of people that are still going and hanging out with their friends. I got a neighbor who is like a 16 or 17-year-old high school kid. He's got a girlfriend. They don't live together. They're still going to see each other. The germs from one family and the germs from the other family are going to be intermingling frequently because talking a high school kid out of seeing you know their boyfriend or girlfriend that's uh that's tough to do for very long they're gonna sneak out

they're gonna they're gonna go do it oh yeah yeah they're about to get there yeah i'm like yeah i'm going to bed yeah yeah yeah you ever sneak out when you were a kid travis yeah are you kidding me did i ever stay at home that's the question yeah look at my stepdad told me when I got older once, he's like, look, I used to watch you push your car. See, they messed up. They put my room downstairs. I had my own driveway and my own exit. I had my own door that went outside. So he said he watched me push my car onto the road and then drive away.

And he's like, man, I was too tired to tell you. I just let you go. He knew what you're doing yeah you're only gonna get so much trouble i left and i would always leave a note i would do that mom you know we didn't have cell phones back then i would say mom i'm here call this place i know i'm in trouble but you know i knew it'd be way worse yeah she'd be calling the police, and then it's my ass. As far as the communicating with your athletes and clients, how often do you do that, Travis? Are you on a daily basis now?

Almost. Last week, I did Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I always take Thursday off. And then Friday, I didn't because we did our thing at 2, wasn't it? I had a meeting at 2. So this week will be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday at 2 o'clock. And then it will be for all my athletes who can make that work from all over the world. So that's kind of cool.

Is this a brand-new thing? It's brand-new that you're doing this a brand new thing it's brand new that you're doing the zoom classes so it's brand new that you're talking to them daily as well yeah so people like jordan cantrell who's a three-time world team member like i rarely get to coach him now i'm getting to coach him all the time and then you know my girls from denmark that you guys you know sandra yeah coach them and now i'm actually what i'm having them do this is kind of cool um is they send me videos directly from the side ahead of time so then when it's time for them to train i can share a screen and show them so i i take i take this app it's like where it

shows bar path yeah i saw you uh post it the other day and then i mix it with coach's eye so i can like do all kinds of like you know analysis and then i show them to the everybody so then everyone gets to learn from everybody it's so it's a an added advantage so really there's part of me that says this is even better because yeah not only do i get to teach my people from around the world i get to teach them with you know the the, I get to teach them with the bar path, the coach's eye, and they're learning from everybody every time. Yeah.

Parts of this is better. Well, you have such a... I don't actually know what your bronze membership looks like. It's just a Facebook group, right? Yeah, they get a program. They can choose. There's a bunch of choices. And they can go back and forth from all the choices.

But then it's a Facebook group. But I'm about to, I guess, I'm about to invite everybody to maybe, I'm going to see how many people it is, to a Zoom call once a week. Yeah. And then, so I can get now, try to give as much free away, because people they need help and they need contact and so yeah as good as it gets so i'm

gonna go above and beyond what i've told them for a while at least through this and then maybe forever we'll see how this changes the world you know well most of the stuff because i mean we have so many people that train at 4.30 a.m. We've got people all over the world in different places doing different, we've got 15 different programs that they could be following. And all of our stuff is done through a Facebook group. When trainers get into there, I think that there's something that is, and maybe this is just because we're at this new stage in kind of online coaching, but really thinking about what level of communication people have. I think that right now we all have more communication with our athletes and clients than we have ever done in the online game before.

I mean, there's people that are selling thousands and thousands of programs because there's such scale to what they're doing, but they never actually talk to a person that's on their programs. It's just by the 30 days, you go do it, tag me on Facebook. You're basically just doing marketing for that coach versus actually getting coaching. When, how do you, most coaches, whether you're in a gym or not, are going to set up three levels or three tiers. How do you think about setting those pricing structures or the tiers up and what athletes are actually getting for communication, programs, nutrition, and kind of that all inclusiveness going from being in a brick and mortar to, you know, transitioning online? Gosh, it'd be so individual, you know, like for me, like, because we, you know, have a bigger following, like I have, we, what we try to do to separate ourselves from, you know, people is like, we do a lot of individualized programs. So that's a lot harder. So obviously I can't do that many people. It's not scalable. so then i have really good coaches like

you know coach crystal who has her masters she has her cscs um we have jackie cscs um sarah she has cscs anyway so we're like so i take those people and then they they use my programming you know and then they can individualize it based on because they've been with me for years yeah they only know how i program and so then they use you know they can use their own ideas too but it has to fit a certain you know element otherwise because people have come to you know it's like my brand it's like you know like uh if you're selling whiskey it's got to taste a certain way so yeah they do that and then the gold is expensive just i mean not because i'm i think i'm that, it's got to taste a certain way. So they do that. And then the gold is expensive. I mean, not because I think I'm that cool.

It's just because I got to set a line to where I can't do 100 people. Otherwise, it's watered down. Once again, get over to barbellshrug.com forward slash story. Use the coupon code shrugged to save 10% on programs, eBooks, bundles, everything. Get over there. Do it now. Barbellshrug.com forward slash store. Use the coupon code shrug to save 10%

and want to thank our friends over at Organifi, the green, the red, and the gold juices. If you are not on the Organifi products right now, trust me, you're not doing it right. You're not doing it right. You're not getting the vitamins and minerals. I had a big salad tonight. You know how many big salads I've had this week?

One tonight while I'm recording this. That's not that good. I'm not getting the vitamins and minerals that I need to properly digest food. So what do I do? I have an awesome supplement to help. Those people are Organifi. I take the greens. I take the red, I take the gold. The juices, they mix perfectly. Some almond milk, that's my go-to. If I don't have the almond milk, I hit the water. It blends perfectly. It mixes perfectly. It tastes delicious. Get yours at Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. You're going to save 20% on the juices. Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. Save 20% and back to the show. So how does somebody actually become Travis Mashes? Do you have to be a world team member? Is it a skill level thing or is it a monetary value thing?

Well, you know, obviously if you're going to be like a – well, to be honest now, Crystal is like I have faith in her. So I have no problem with world team members, you know, going to her, especially the younger ones. And she does a great job. So, but, like, yeah, so skill level, you know, it's like Kendall, you know, I'm going to coach Kendall because I know she's going to be a world team member and we dive.

And then, yeah. Are you talking about Kendall Hudson? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's rad. Yeah, she's rad. I talked to her this weekend yeah so um so she would

she didn't make my boot camp she didn't no it's messed up yeah well she's still snatching clean jerks she couldn't handle all the curtsy lunges

I made everyone do you're doing more than one rep at a time you're missing out on outside glute game right now yeah exactly and that's the way i wanted to stay damn some hundred

you did what you went to anders no i'm gonna come bar anders anytime you can't go so yeah and then they can buy my gold and then anyone gold, and then anyone can be with me if they do gold. It's just more expensive. We're about to raise that way up just because we have new things like you guys that we're rolling out that's going to take my attention. So I'm pretty much capped there probably. Doug, I'm going to ask you this even though I know most of the answer. But when you start to put together programs and pricing, how do you view kind of structuring the programs and the tiers that we put together?

Well, it's a program-specific question. Right now, of course, everyone is training at home. And so they need stuff they can do at home which you know we recommend for all the gyms to transition a lot of their clients to bodyweight only workouts and then really ramp up nutrition coaching and then just rent the equipment to them seems to be kind of what everyone's doing at the moment you know doing zoom coaching and whatnot for actual physical movement is a component of it but that's a tough thing to do with all of your members all being in different places. Even if you're on group calls, it's still kind of tough.

I think the nutrition coaching is easier than watching everyone work out. But right now, I'm stuck at home with my wife, with my three kids. I have a two-year-old, a three-year-old, and a five-year-old. I need to figure out a way where I can get a workout in, but at the same time, I'm not smashing my wife by by just dropping all all the kids on her which is it's tough to watch three kids so we yeah the new program you mentioned earlier the 100 amraps for time program we just put together they're all 10 minute amraps they're all couplets and you're just supposed to do 10 a week for 10 weeks so what me and my wife have been doing, which has been working really, really well,

is that she goes and does 10 minutes while I watch the kids and then we switch. We can break up our working out into, again, it's bodyweight movements, so you don't need that much warm-up, just a little bit of loosening up and then you're doing air squats anyway. So you just kind of start slow and then go faster and faster and faster over the course of the 10 minutes but we can just accumulate 10 minute metcons throughout the day go you got you got 15 minutes go ahead and warm up and do a 10 minutes and come back inside and we'll switch we can just kind of do that at any time if we're just stuck inside i guess they rained all day long

and so so we weren't like outside playing we didn't go anywhere we're just stuck inside i guess they rained all day long and so so we weren't like outside playing we didn't go anywhere we go to the park or anything like that like if you're smashed at home and you got you got kids and responsibilities like that structure um is working really really well for us yeah i actually really like the way the the thing we've been doing recently in bundling all of the programs together and getting the programs some sort of mobility plan. We have so many assets. We put together a spreadsheet of all the programs we have in the Shrugged portfolio. And it's like 33-something-ish programs.

Wow. portfolio and it's like 33 something ish programs and you between three and 18 months plus like every nutrition program for every goal you could ever have plus multiple mobility programs so what we've been doing is taking all the like workout programs finding the nutrition program to go along with them and that doesn't even include this big project that we're working on that we've got three new programs and we're going to be working on six brand new ones as well to be rolling out in in retail which is gnarly um and putting like bundling a, like the workout program with the goal specific nutrition program, putting some sort of mobility program to it and then adding on additional accessory programs

to go along with it. So if you're putting like a shoulder program together, we just had a bundle, the boldest for shoulders bundle that we basically roll out. Yeah, like the shoulder health program, the bench program, the jerk program program nutrition for weightlifters plus an entire like eight hour long series on shoulder health for mobility stability assessment um and all those packaged together and then we can offer

because it's all digital information we can offer a big um discount to people. And that's been an awesome, awesome setup for us. We went for the 100 AMRAPs that Doug's putting together. Rolling that out is a big package as well. It's going to be really cool. What if people bought that? Like, whatever, like, I feel like that'd be a great, if I'm a coach, and I'm, you know, if I bought your stuff, you could easily use that to coach your athletes is that okay or not okay uh i i think that it just happens

yeah it just happens it's kind of one of those things when you have an online business like tell everybody that you've ever talked to that runs an online company or that is a consumer of online products has shared a password in their life. Yeah. In fact, if you got that HBO or that Disney bundle on your Roku, hit me up. Especially HBO. Yeah. I think that's a part of it.

And look, if I have people that... I know that e-books get passed around. Sure. There's thousands and thousands of dollars of people forwarding e-books. Like, what do you do? I mean, they're still knowing your name. It's the way I look at it. I try not to worry about that mess. Yeah.

It's actually a really cool thing when you get a message that says, yo, me and three of my buddies just did your squat program and we want to know what's next. I'm not going to be like, oh, you owe me $150 now because you paid for it, but three of your buddies didn't. We've always told people to buy the thing and then get a training partner and do it together.

That's always been an emphasis because people are going to do it anyway. There's no downside on our end for them doing it really. I've done it myself so many times. It would be so hypocritical for me to tell other people don't do that when I've done it a million times for any digital product from a million different industries. I love it, online education. I love getting access. If someone's like, I got access to this person's membership site, I i'm like fucking hook it up give me access i want to see it so

it's just it's just the way people are uh so getting back into um this is going to be the big one and i think is actually the the trickiest part of going from brick and mortar into the online game is getting new clients because when when you turn your Instagram thing on, holy shit, every single human in the entire world right now is trying to tell you how cool their program is online. And all those PDFs, all those e-books, how do you separate yourself and get, we'll get into the sales funnel side of things next.

But how do you differentiate yourself online? I'm asking you because all I really want to do right now is tell you what I think, but I'm going to let you go first. Retire me right now? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I just try to give more free information than my you know other weightlifting coaches and powerlifting coaches oh i bet that's so easy in that industry too yeah yeah yeah oh yeah well i mean i outwork them you know when i go to you know this is like any other

time you're gonna have to you know if anyone tells you that you can become super successful without outworking your competitors they they are lying to you. And that goes for everything, whether you're an athlete, whether you're an entrepreneur. And so I just outworked the other weightlifting coaches. They're always asking me, they're like, when do you sleep? Because, you know, I'm always putting out an e-book, an article, you know, a video, something, and they're not. And so, I don't know know you just got to you got to work harder you look at people like cory gregory or you know you guys or you you just have to out

work the other people no matter what that's how i became the best power through that's how i'm becoming the best weightlifting coach i just outwork my competitors. Yeah. I... Man, the social media thing is so interesting because you can have some crazy cool idea that just instantly pops overnight and you become super successful. But when I look out at the people that I truly respect or have longevity in this game,

it's always the people that set an alarm for 5.30 in the morning and are up and they do a daily blog or they do a weekly. There's some sort of consistency to their writing. There's consistency to their video. The thing that I actually struggle with the most because I feel like it's the the lowest value is really the social media like that as much as i enjoy maybe popping the phone on and telling a joke like i i'm not i'm like a family guy at at the heart of things right now and like me spending

time with my family i don't want to have my phone in my hand in my face talking about what i'm doing because i'm being a dad being a husband um i appreciate that about you oh thanks yeah i uh it's but that makes social media really tough but three days a week i put out an article about training um i am doing live training sessions in my garage right now. And then we put out two podcasts a week. And that's a heavy schedule to be loading the world up with information. But if you really want to cut through the noise, and the reason I really like podcasting so much is that,

especially over the social media side of the game is like we get to sit here and talk about a single subject for an hour right on social media i feel like i have too much to say to get it out in 300 little words like it just doesn't suit the way that i want to talk about a subject like i'm not i really struggle in the social media world because you have to get on there and be like my program is the greatest program in the world that I want to talk about a subject. I'm not. I really struggle in the social media world because you have to get on there and be like, my program is the greatest program in the world if you want to grow a bigger butt. And I go, well, Brett Contreras is the butt guy.

He's the butt guy. And then I go, well, I'm going to make you bigger and stronger and faster than anybody in the whole world. I go, well, Travis Mash exists and he's kind of like the strong guy. I know him. He's good at that. I don't in the whole world i go well travis mash exists and he's kind of like the strong guy pretty good i know him he's good at that i don't know if i'm better than him like i have a hard time i feel like there's the fraudulent side of the things that you say to get attention on social media

really don't jive with the personality and the number of people that i know in this industry and i just i'm like that that that piece of it i i tend to struggle with with social media so the way that we go about that i combat a lot of that is we've got hour-long podcasts you can watch me train in my garage every day i'll put it like that's that's what my training looks like it's fucking hard i'm grinding in there in dead silence because there's a baby sleeping right next to me and this is just what I do uh like all of that is it's it's tough to stand out and and get people's trust built into buying your programs and wanting to be on the same training plan and using your experience but if moving to online you have to be creating things like that how many books do you have to be creating things like that. How many books do you have now? How many books do I have? Yeah.

25, I think, maybe. What is the average length of all of them? Oh, hundreds. Yeah, average, 100 probably, maybe more. It's like, that's a good question because we've had 400-page books. I just put out a 33-page article over the weekend. Yeah. I just like like i like to write though

so that's you know i think anders you like to write too so i love writing i would add this just because i do that doesn't mean whoever's listening should do that yeah you gotta find what you love so if you love podcasting which i do that i love two things i like i love to podcast and i love to write i don't like video that much. You know, I don't like the editing and the splicing. Yeah. I love to write and I love the podcast. I love to teach.

That's what I truly love to do. So find what you love and do a ton of it. I would definitely give you, this is the one thing. You know, I thought about doing an article about here are the things Gary Vee says all the time. So then you don't have to listen to him because he says the same things over and over. But definitely, I would say this, is that if you're just now getting into the market, then I would recommend doing what Gary Vee says and put out more content than anybody out there. I mean, why not? Look, you got tons of time and so

everyone's doing it so you better outwork them and by that at least he recommends like 180 pieces of content per day it's pretty crazy but you know it's um oh no wait i'm sorry 90 90 pieces of content per day but that before you get overwhelmed that's like three instagram but you know a story one story is a piece of content you know a tweet a tweet is a piece of content but like you're sitting your ass at home you have nothing else to do yeah you might as well you might as well like uh do the work but schedule it i'm not saying be away from your family and like make yourself busy i'm like sit down four hours a day and outwork everybody. In those four hours, don't scroll, actually work.

Yeah. When I first started making content, a lot of us were having conversations around, are we going to run out of stuff to talk about? You're going to do your post about how to gain muscle, and then you're going to do your post about how to get stronger, and then you're going to do your post about how to lose body fat, and then you're going to be like, well, now what do I do? You already covered it all. You do it again, yes and no.

You need to niche down your content into the smallest unit possible. Find a niche of a niche of a niche of a niche, that type of thing. So if you're talking about getting stronger, you could go one layer deeper and say how to get, you know, more upper body strength. And then you go one layer deeper and you say how to get more pressing strength. And you go one layer deeper and you say how to get, you know, better, you know, shoulder specific strength. Like if you can, if you can take it down a couple of levels, well now, instead of just talking about how to get stronger, well now I can talk about an article for each individual movement pattern in each individual muscle group in each individual um type of training you know max effort or explosive training or whatever it is and then

even with that you can niche that down even further so we're just talking about squatting and then now we're we're just talking about overhead squatting we're just talking about wrist position on overhead squatting like Like if you can make it super, super, super niche. Well, now you have content forever and the content that you're putting out is actually easier to write.

And it's more useful because people are finding specifically what they're looking for. Yes. Look at, look at your boy, Brett Contreras or squat university. They've taken one aspect and murdered it. Like glutes, just a muscle group or squat university, a taken one aspect and murdered it like insane glutes just a muscle group

or squat university a movement squat and like he does a little bit more but he really does stick to you know he most mainly talks about the squat but he's insane i love him he does deep or if you're a science guy if you're super nerdy, which is kind of where I'm kind of going, but like a Greg Knuckles has made a big living off of getting into science and making it seem simple. That's my goal is taking physiology and making it seem okay to the masses. So that's a great one. You just got to find what you dig. You can't copy somebody just because they look cool to you you gotta say what what is my passion what am i really good at because if

you're not good honestly i'm gonna be very straight if you're not good at this you're not gonna do well no matter what you do and so like you do have to be realistic and if you're not talented doesn't mean you can't become but that means you got've got work to do. But it won't work right now. But know who you are. Yeah, but to that point, the only way you're going to get good is by fucking doing the work. Doing the work. But you've got to study, too. You can't just, like, you know, you can't randomly do shit and get better at it.

You've got to, like, actually learn and go find someone who is good at it. There's, yeah, just getting in the trenches and writing right like here's what i know putting it all down i mean in the content game it's like i tell myself this about social media all the time because that's it parts of it fit my life but a lot of it doesn't and i'm i i'm like i just have to do it and then i do it for like three four weeks and i'm like ah i'd rather just sit down and write a full article write a full ebook um like those those long form really deep dives suit suit what i like to do a little bit more um they're a lot more fun to me like i when we wrote when we sat down and wrote the one-ton challenge like ebook and we're gonna get into lead magnets and and finding new clients and all that right now um

when i sat down and wrote that i was thinking like i'll just you know lay out the six lifts tell the backstory of what the one-ton challenge is and then we should be 97 pages later i was like i gotta shorten this thing no one's gonna read this damn book. No one's gonna get through 97 pages. It's like, this thing's gonna be a fucking novel by the end of the day. Because there's just, when you get into it, you could look like

Squat University. He's talked about the exact, he's got over like 1.2 million followers or something that just watch him talk about the intricacies and in-depth knowledge of one movement that's insane yeah crazy um but i mentioned the word lead magnets um what are you guys using for lead magnets at mash i know we've got six seven different maybe even more things that we're we're putting out for free resources. How do you guys attack this stuff for you?

Same thing. We have the Mass Method e-book. I almost downloaded it yesterday just to let you know. It is actually good. I got that ad. It's several ways to use post-activation potentiation, even some examples of workouts of how to do it then we've got um we've got videos that um ctp came up and shot those videos that we use as lead magnets uh same thing using you know post

activation that's a big one people uh love that something that if i if i'm going to do a lead magnet it's something that you know people grab them right away it's something that will add value to their life or to their workouts instantly that's what i would use as a lead magnet and then you can get deeper into it once they get a good taste of something awesome so yeah so if you're really just getting started out in the online game when we're using these link this language called lead magnet so what we're really thinking about is some sort of free resource that as mash just said is like a way to provide instant value to somebody that they can instantly use and it's your ticket to building trust as quick as you possibly can so if you download the mash method or you're going by download the one ton challenge guide the goal

is that you're going to be able to pick it up skim through it i'd love it if you read all of it in depth but we're human we know you're going to skim through it and you're going to take a few nuggets and go oh that guy anders knows what he's talking about it's like oh doug really gets it he i like the way he thinks and what we're changing what we're trading in that system is you get nuggets that you get to instantly use in your life and we get your email address and our goal is to continually give you nuggets

that you get to use in your training, you're reading all of our emails, all of it's filled with really good quality training information and from there we get to sell you programs at the end because we've built so much trust. And I think that that is the biggest word that, to me, allows the online business to work because there's so much noise. The initial goal is how do you get attention, but how do you build trust is the next gigantic step in the process.

Getting somebody to download the Mash Method e-book or the One Ton Challenge book or How to Get Stronger Now, we could give you the free resource, but the trust piece is what gets somebody to hand you the $60. Right. And that's why we want you on the email list and that's why we want to talk to you as much as we do with the content is how are you not only getting – you may write your e-book. You put your eight-part video series together for making your clean and jerk or snatch better whatever it is how to get stronger now um you put that together but then how do you take that person's email and turn that into selling ebooks at a later date like there's a long system that goes into building trust with people it's not just lead magnet turns into things so and this is doug really where i think that you nobody may know the depth uh that you work on this stuff but um through automation um and and just building out the back end system what are you thinking about when you're you're structuring the business of barbell shrugged as far as us us staying in the game with people and building that trust.

Well, from a pure business perspective, having evergreen assets that will provide value forever, I think is a great way to build wealth. If you buy a very new home and you own it 100% outright, then you're going to be able to use that asset for decades. If you own a gym and you have members and then the coronavirus hits and then your members go away, that asset is sunk. Gym goes out of business. If you have a bunch of eBooks and a bunch of social media posts and a bunch of email sequences that are just like the squat university information, pushing your knees out and having a neutral spine email sequences that are just like the squat university information you

know pushing your knees out and having a neutral spine and all that like that's all evergreen content you you put it out one time and that content is relevant forever and you have an easy way to kind of copy and redistribute every so often that same content so i like automation for a lot of reasons where you can do the work one time and then just set it up to run over and over in the future with a big enough break where it comes in the funnel and runs for them. It's a very easy way to scale yourself. Just like social media scales you out to a lot of people, having automation which mostly means through your email sequences as far as pushing out content to people and people buy digital products and then they automatically deliver the product no matter what you're up to in that moment.

I think it's a fantastic way to build value, have that value continuously being distributed to your fans or your audience. That way you can spend your time doing other stuff, whatever you want. You can spend time with your wife and your kids and training, what have you, because you don't have to be at that 9-to-5 job. So building digital assets really is the goal. Do they need something like Infusionsoft to be able to do that, or can you do something that's not so complicated?

We have Infusionsoft that kind of automates all that stuff for you, but for the people listening who are just now in this world, what should they use to do that, to do the sales funnels? I mean, there's tons of options there. ClickFunnels is pretty copy-paste. But, of course, you have AWeber and ActiveCampaign, Entreport and Infusionsoft or whatever. There's so many solutions out there. Picking one of the more simple ones like ClickFunnels or ActiveCampaign I think is wise initially compared to

Entreport and Infusionsoft, which are a little more complicated, or HubSpot. Those bigger enterprise-type solutions are going to be more complicated than most people need on the front end, but eventually, if you get good at it, you might want the extra capabilities that they bring. I think that gym owners or new personal trainers if you so in between owning the gym and shrugged i own another online company and we use click funnels and they make that process so simple for people that have no idea what they're doing it's like the i mean we made the joke on last week's episode of um of every personal trainer or every person should just go get a ClickFunnels account and try to build a exists is lead magnet straight into a $7 product

into a one-time upsell of a $150 product, and then they get sent to a bigger screen for whatever your $1,000 product is. Like that funnel is set up in ClickFunnels. And if you were to lay it out, it's a free ebook into some simple guide that somebody can follow. A one-time upsell into $150 to $200, like eight to 12 week long goal specific program, which then backs into online coaching and one-on-one training for $1,000 or $1,500, whatever it is. and you're just building people up the ladder with the goal of, you know, whatever your percentage is for getting people to that big ticket item.

Along the way, and this is where the work comes in, along the way for each step, you want to create a system so that when somebody comes in and gets your lead magnet but doesn't buy, what sequence and how many emails are you putting together to get that person turned into a paying client? Then from paying client to know how do we, and then maybe they don't buy the next level. Once they drop off, how do we re-engage them to get to the next step? Building them all the way to the amount of trust that you need to get them to the highest level so in a four-step sequence to your highest product you're looking at writing 20 to 25 emails to be able to re-engage along the way each time um that's where the work comes in that's the hard

part yeah being engaging the key to the work the key will That's the hard part. Yeah. Being engaging. The key is work. The key will be value the whole time though. Like, you know, don't give them something shoddy early on because you're trying to make them get to this down the road. Like make sure it's awesome every step of the way.

Yeah. You know, cause one shoddy email ends the whole process. It's like dating. Yeah. I think, um, you know,

my business partner, Lauren is really at explaining the whole funnel system. It's like the dating process. You mess up one time along the way, you might mess that whole relationship up forever. You've got to be very wise and thought out. Totally. And then the last piece, kind of the nurture piece, but we talked a little bit about earlier. Once we have the clients through Shrugged and MASH, your ability to stay engaged with them, because the easiest person to sell something new, like, and Doug, I've learned a ton from you with new launches and things along those lines. But when you're thinking about, I guess, kind of the process of setting up a launch cycle for new programs, how do you set that whole system up?

Because it's not just new program, go. But building the momentum. I'd love to see. I think you guys, Mash, actually do month-long launches. I think we're typically more around a seven-day, seven-to-ten-day cycle. No, we're like two weeks. It's like two weeks normally. You're two weeks? Yeah, we're two weeks.

So we're about the same then. So, yeah, we're two weeks exactly. Maybe two weeks and one day because normally we start on a Friday and end. All right, so it would be two weeks and three days. So, like, it should be two weeks and three days. So two weeks and three days. So we end on the Monday, the following Monday, two weeks later. I thought your last e-book you guys did a whole month of, I want to say it was February this month. Maybe it was the beginning of February.

Whatever we got back from Sweden. Oh yeah, we did that squat gains uh no it was it was exactly 14 15 it was 17 days yeah you know like longer than probably longer than you guys and but we only go hard like you know at the very beginning and at the very end is when we go super hard you know know. Yeah, so that's a lot of the stuff that I learned working with Doug is kind of the sequence in watching people's, when you put time closes on initial launch sales, like you're going to get, say, sell 100 programs in that time. 50 of them may trickle in over 13 days.

But 50% of your sales are going to come in in the last 8 hours of having that launch period open. I used to think about this a lot more than I do these days, but if you aren't sure how to launch a

product, I think a good model to look at is how big mainstream movies are that are being launched in the theaters. You see all of the posters that are up everywhere. You see all the trailers on TV.

There's so much prep and hype that's happening leading up to the launch date for that movie. That way they can have that opening weekend big box office smash like that you should think about that concept and how how you can do something similar well maybe you're maybe all of your stuff is just going on instagram so you're you're teasing the fact that this thing's coming up dropping little little pieces of the benefits of the program along the way for the weeks leading up to open cart where people can actually buy if you have the ability to make some type of dope trailer or something like that just like a movie to like really get people to be like wow this looks fucking incredible

um that those types of things if you can copy the movie industry um i think it's really effective we used to do more stuff like that like trying to do like movie posters and um uh like big trailers and whatnot for our for our big programs than we do these days but it's highly effective yeah yeah um rad team i hope this helps everybody we have uh like an entire industry that has shifted from being inside gyms to inside their garage um and i think that on the whole so far i think it has done nothing but elevate what is currently known as online training um I think the gym owners, if you're not taking notes right now on what you're doing online with these classes, you're missing out

because you should not be thinking right now that you're just going to go back to your old way of doing it with your old members. You're recreating an entire way of doing business and combining the brick and mortar side of things with the online side of things. And with just a little bit of production value, you can combine those two and infinitely scale your business, infinitely scale your coaching, and have a really dope base gym membership. And all of this is an opportunity for your business right now you're

maintaining your gym membership and learning an entirely new system um it'd be really really cool it's going to be very cool when we get back to normal life to see how this idea of the zoom class really just sticks around i think that that's's going to be probably one of the biggest areas. I know just from what people talk about in our industry of having the future is this virtual reality. You'll have the trainer in your house. This is like as close as you can get to having a trainer in your house right now and following along group classes that we can do. So I think there's a massive transition right now and following along group classes that, that we can do.

So I think there's like a massive transition right now. And the gym owner themselves is actually far ahead of what most online trainers are doing. And it's a, it's a massive opportunity because most people aren't doing the zoom thing. Like, you know, they're already ahead. I would definitely add one last thing. You know, I think basically we're just going after the everyone now is going to the echelon or the uh peloton model and so we're just taking what peloton does turn it into like you know whether it's weightlifting powerlifting group fitness or whatever it is you do and like and doing the

same thing so it might not be a bad idea to if you can take a look at what peloton is doing i have one so um it's i'm trying to learn like i'm riding my bike i don't tell a lot of people that but uh a lot it's only the strongest man in the world guys on my little bike you know i bet he's got a nice little white towel underneath to catch the sweat so he doesn't mess his floor up. I got the fancy biker pants and all that stuff. Padded butt. The whole thing.

That's the best. I know. My wife's not allowed to take a picture. She won't see so bad. Ruined my reputation. 800-pound back squat straight to the Peloton bike. My pals and friends would probably have me killed just because. Put me out of my misery. We got to get up to the west side and talk to Louie about your Peloton game.

He would for sure kill me on the spot. What happened to you? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Well, I want to do a show on all that too because we have with our new like the 100 AM raps for time coming out. Dude, Meathead Metabolics getting strong and doing conditioning. We're going to do that show coming up here soon. Mash, where can they find you?

Mashelete.com, baby. Instagram, Mash Elite Performance. Doug Larson. Find me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We're Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. You can find us at OneTonChallenge.com forward slash join. And if you want to throw the One Ton Challenge at your gym, get over to ShruggedStrengthton challenge.com forward slash join and if you want to throw the one-ton challenge

at your gym get over to shrugged strength gym.com we've got all of the basically the entire system we just laid out so gym owners can throw badass events in their gyms and you can send me an email anders at barbell shrug.com to learn more once we get out of this craziness we're going to be the baddest event to bring your community back together. So, friends, this is rad. We're doing this thing online, and I appreciate everybody sticking with us. We'll see you guys on next week.

Awesome. That's a wrap, friends. I hope you learned a ton. Get over to barbellshrug.com forward slash store and use the coupon code SHRUG to save 10% on everything in the store. Programs, e-books, bundles, everything. Barbellshrugged.com forward slash shrugged.

Our friends at PaleoValley.com forward slash shrugged. PaleoValley.com forward slash shrugged. PaleoValley.com forward slash shrugged. Save 15% on the most delicious grass fed beef sticks and then Organifi.com forward slash shrugged to save 20% on the green, the red and the gold. Next week, friends, we are on Wednesday.

Joe Ken, super. No, no, no. Andy Galpin's coming to hang out. It's so exciting. I haven't talked to Galpin. We shot like an hour and 45 minute show with him. Turned into a lot of bro time. It's super exciting. Catch you guys on Wednesday.