The Sevan Podcast - Castro, Don & Pedro | The CEO interview

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

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There's so much good content out there. What's up, you guys? I am low man on the totem pole. Who is that? Who's that singing? Is that you, Don? What's up, baby? What's up, you guys? Hope you're doing well. Well, man on the totem pole gets pushed out. 11 a.m. Savon's going to be on with Chase and Ingram.

Chase and Ingram. Bill and Chase. So we're going to rock it out a little bit earlier today. I got some cool stuff. Little music. We're just going to try this and see how it works out. A little intro song. Hopefully my voice goes over the top of it. Mic. Is my mic not working? Does that work? Can you guys hear it? Wait, hold on. Maybe we could start the whole thing. There we go.

There we go. Can you hear it now? Oh yeah, there it is. There it go. Can you hear it now? Oh, yeah. There it is. There it is. Shit. And you know what? I tried to get new internet. They sent me a new modem and apparently it's all choppy. I don't know what the frick. What the frick? Don't cuss in the first

minute of this show. Okay. So now that we got the mic going, we got a little music going. Little intro song. Oh, man. I love the chorus of this song. It just reminded me of a little private equity talk we're going to have today.

I'm still going to beat this drum hard. This is pretty much the only lane I'm in here. We're going to review Pedro's show. He killed it. Did you guys see it? You should definitely go see it i also have this one this was like uh no that's a bomb was it this one and um so we're gonna review pedro show we're gonna check it out he he absolutely crushed it he dove right in i was like i started getting nervous did you guys

watch that one live like Like he just went hard. Saxophone. We talked about that last time. So yeah, so we're going to review the show. We're going to go through some of it. I didn't have a ton of time to piece the whole thing out. Like I said, I can either push the show way later

to the afternoon, but I decided to push it forward. So I got some good clips from it. But if you guys haven't watched the whole thing, please go check it out yourself. Go watch the whole interview. We're going to dive right into it. Okay. Here we go. Sousa, do you know the timeline on

Kill Taylor shirts? I do not. No. No. Rambler, go hard with the questions the questions dude he jumped right into it he jumped right into it the first thing that i want to point out is i'm just going to bring this up here um get my screens together thank you for joining me everybody too i really hope the internet is okay it's showing one bar on my end which sucks because i definitely got that um new modem which would i hope i hoped would increase my upload speed but uh so far it's looking like trash um okay this is strange to me just the whole thing with uh dave is strange like is he the only person doing media for the

crossfit games it weirded me out when he wanted to do like the dave we can review makes sense because he wants to have his own voice he gets to kind of like clarify some things that are happening out there he gets to create his own narrative and most importantly he gets to have a relationship with the community i'm going to try this let's see if i turn the wi-fi off and go straight connected in. I don't think that changed anything. But it's good that he is trying to build a relationship with the community because there is no relationship with headquarters in the current CrossFit community.

There's just not the same back and forth. And what I mean by relationship is we hear from Dave every single week. He addresses all the questions that come through, majority of the questions that come through. Essentially, as a member of the community, I get to have access to him. I feel like if I type something into these comments

or whatever that we'll hear from Dave, we'll hear his opinion, and he'll address some of the comments. One thing that got a little weird to me was when he decided that he was going to do all these short little athlete interviews because that seems very out of his lane. They're great. If you guys have watched the first two with brooke and justin they're awesome but it just seems like there's some sort of internal thing happening with that because the

fact that he's in the testing mode that he's in and creating everything from the games and we're in that time frame and he's going to go from that to um also doing athlete interviews that's juggling a lot and typically that would be outside of the scope of what he would do at least a public forward facing which would be to interview the athletes so i just i'm like and you know me i read into a lot so take it for what it is but i'm kind of reading into this and i'm looking at it like there's some sort of like he is he making a statement here is that's what happening to the rest of the team? Like, look, stop talking about it. Let's be about it. Here's how you execute and just starts making content. Or is it simply just no more than what he said on there, which is like, you know what? I feel like I don't have

the same connection I did with athletes in the past. And so I'm just going to run these little five, 10 minute interviews to get to know them a little bit more. So it is interesting, right? So it is interesting, right? Great is a stretch. I'm giving him a little love, right? Meerseed also, why is it not being posted on the game's social media accounts? It's exactly right.

It seems like it's like one entity, but there's different things that are happening within that entity. Like almost like there's just some sort of internal uh hierarchy struggle or internal battle i don't i don't know speculation of course um but yeah it's just interesting in that they're not repurposing this for the crossfit games instagram is also something interesting to know um but this it just seems strange like if it were anybody else like even if boz started doing it i i wouldn't feel that much like anything was up but since it's dave with athletes it just seems a little out of his uh lane so um brady seems like hq said they wanted athlete interviews but didn't want to pay for them.

Yeah. It reminds me of Trish. It reminds me of the five minutes your doctor gives you to catch up and explain. That's probably an accurate statement right there. Chris Pedro is a baller. Absolute stud in a stud of an interview too. I'm just, I'm super nervous now that it's going to be choppy when I show this to you guys.

Kind of bummed because I definitely got together all my little timestamps here and wrote some stuff out to hopefully make this meaningful. And then also, so we don't have to watch all of Pedro's show, right? We don't want to have to watch it. You can go watch the whole on your own there. Okay, so I've got to get my links right y'all the second i click it though it starts okay um damn i messed it up again sorry guys thanks for bearing with me so this first clip you're gonna see here pedro like we're only

one minute i think into this interview and he already dives in hard with like hey how's that affiliate fees raised going for you um and that's what this clip is going to be here is going to be hold on maybe it'll be here be over here now i know why savannah has three monitors so then that way i could have had a third one up for this tab cancel that move this around. Boom. Put that in. Okay. Never mind. This is going to have to be up over here. And we'll play it. Get it together.

Get it together. People still have doctors? Barely. Third-party interviews. Yep. That's what I am right now. This is a free third-party interview. The one with Brooke helping. The one with Brooke is on the CrossFit Games IG with clips from the game, so it seems likely it

is likely is a way to get athletes to talking to turning into reels. Okay, so he's still producing content for the team now. That's the part that I'm talking about that's weird. Not like how they repurpose what they're doing, but the fact that Dave's now running interviews just seems a little odd.

Okay, so here's the first question that Pedro dives into here, and this one is about the... Sorry, guys. I'm still messing with Windows. I want to be able to see my notes and then also see the screen at the same time. Is it too much to ask?

Okay. And here we go. That it had been, gosh, over a decade since affiliate fees have changed. And yeah, to your point, we know it's a community that, there's a lot of passion for CrossFit. And we know when we make changes,

big or small, that we hear about it. We obviously knew that that change was a pretty substantive one and we were going to hear from folks. We anticipated, our thought going in was, hey, we are probably going to have... Because we have socialized some of it and talking to owners ahead of time, trying to feel for things and the best way to approach it. I think by and large, what we've seen and heard is pre-consistent with what we expected. So I'd say there's a big set of owners who look at it through the lens of like, hey, we run businesses, You're running a business. Looking at pricing is one of the more important business decisions.

That was the camp that I was in when I first heard it come out. I was like, I get it. Things get more expensive. You have to raise prices. It happens. We have to do it at my gym. And that was the first camp that I set into. Now that we're six months into it. I'm wondering if that, um, you know, they talked about some of the value add that they would have with the price increase. And I know, you know, $1,500 isn't like, I don't expect the world after that, but you would expect to see something more come out within six months. Um, that would be at least more, uh, forward

facing as to what, where they were allocating the money. Spent 10 years. There's been meaningful investments. Makes sense. And obviously, no one is going to shout at the root talks and say, we love the price change. But I think there's probably the biggest group of owners who looked at it and said, get it, understand it. Makes sense. We have a pocket of owners who I'd say, and I'd say in that former category of owners,

I'd say a lot of folks who have a pretty good understanding and appreciation and dialed into the investments we have been making in supporting affiliates and what comes with affiliations. So I think that was helpful for a lot of owners to say, hey, we've seen over the last year and a half, two years, the investments that CrossFit's been making in the team and summits and tools and resources. And so with that, we understand that on and off, you know, that this price change is about supporting that and more of that to come. I think there's another group of owners who were not as connected, you know, group of owners who

maybe, you know, maybe they started their affiliate 10, 12 years ago with, hey, I don't expect anything from HQ. I don't want anything from HQ. Aren't necessarily owners who have been as kind of plugged into some of the things that we've been HQ. Aren't necessarily owners who have been as kind of plugged into some of the things that we've been doing. A lot of folks who actually were not necessarily aware of a lot of the things that came with affiliation.

We're aware the cap was free now. We're aware that we have marketing resources. We're aware that we were doing summits and roundtables. And I'd say we've had our work cut out for us with that group to just listen, educate, talk about the investments

that we've made and what to expect moving forward. And that's an interesting point to me because he goes on further in this portion. And he says that the biggest thing that he found interesting or that he learned from the affiliate fee raise was how many affiliates didn't know that there were other tools out there for them. Meaning like the affiliate toolkit. To be specific on this, guys, when they talk about the affiliate toolkit, there's a lot of fancy language behind it.

But essentially, what you're getting is like programming with the affiliate programming stuff. So you have some resources that are there. You also get this playbook, which is essentially business 101 for running a CrossFit affiliate. There's also the community stuff as far as your affiliate rep and reaching out and doing some roundtable discussions. And then roundtable has a town hall thing where you get to meet with them. My problem with that is I would much rather... The in-person events, the affiliate gatherings in and of themselves are awesome. I love that. The round table stuff and all the Zoom meetings and different things like that, I would rather see those efforts going towards not putting them behind a thing for affiliates, because I know that that's the value prop because because then you have to be affiliate to participate. But I think in general,

it would be so much better if these town halls were open and available to everybody. And then I know now that now all of a sudden, you don't have a value proposition as what you get with it as an affiliate. But I just think that in terms of for me, an affiliate, the biggest thing is like HQ having a relationship with this community. Just because it's so vocal and there's so much going on that if HQ isn't projecting its own voice and its own vision, its own direction, telling its own story, just the world at large, that to me is the biggest value proposition as an affiliate owner. Not these fancy tools. A ton of this stuff, you're going to find all on your own. Chris over at Two Brain Business runs a fantastic mentorship business where you can get a lot of these resources that CrossFit is saying that is now included in affiliation completely for free at Two Brain Business.

And you've always been able to. And I actually have a note in here, which is interesting, because some of the data that Don actually pulls is from Two Brain Business' industry standard book that they put out in November every year. Which is... Okay. So just something to note there. We'll go on with this a little bit. And then I'd say the last group of owners is... I think there are some folks who just look at the change as, hey, my fee changed from X to Y. I'm not interested in... I want

to continue to do my thing. I'm not interested in the resources." That's probably been some of the tougher conversations. So today, we are... It varies a little bit by market. In the US, for example, we look really closely at what our renewal rates look like. How many of our existing affiliates are going to continue to renew? In the US, we're at 90%. So we're doing well. We've got some other markets where we are tracking behind that. We've got some more work to do on that front. Which is also interesting because we're only six months into the price hike. So you're about halfway through the time that you'll actually know. You can't really make a call on affiliation and how many people dropped off due to price increase until January of next year. Because

if you guys remember, this became effective in January. So any metrics that you're accounting right now aren't necessarily ones that would be included in terms of like, did the price thing go over well or not? You had to wait the full year for that. For instance, like my gym, I don't have to pay until December. So together, if I'm an affiliate again next year or I'm not going to, they won't know until December,

which really by the time their data catches up, they won't know until January. So the fact that you could claim that there's a 90% or 80% without saying, hey, we're only at the 50 yard line. It's a little too early to tell how this is going to shake out. That's a little... You're jumping the gun there a little bit. I'm large about what we expected. We still got some more work to do. I'd say my biggest

learning was how many owners out there were not aware of what was available with affiliation and how much more work we got to do on that front. Yeah. And they're not aware, again, because there's not this back and forth with the community at large. Like as an affiliate owner, if you're going to provide something for me, I need to have that easy to access on the platforms that I'm already at. And I need it to also be really relevant. If I am going to join one of these roundtables or do one of these discussions, that's a value trade. Because now I have to say, okay, I'm going to carve out my time to be here at this time to listen to you guys or this group for an hour, right? So for me, it's just a little interesting that you wouldn't put a ton of that stuff

just publicly. Why would you put it behind some sort of wall and put it on a Zoom thing and not just kind of openly have those resources for everybody, even if you did it in retrospect? So like, hey, if you didn't have a chance to join the town hall, no problem. It's available now on YouTube for everybody. But you can make it exclusive at the time it's recorded for affiliate owners if you wanted to have some exclusivity there. But I just feel that the more that you're communicating a vision and a direction of where this company is going and what we're doing and what we aim to do, the better off you'll be for all of these talking points

all the way across the board, especially in terms of affiliate owners, like you had said, which is where I kind of fall in, which is like, I don't really need the fancy tools. Like I maybe look at CAP in terms of just like, as much as I look at all these other programs that are going on, whether I'm drawing ideas or inspirations

or just seeing the way things are being put together, I don't actually use it as a verbatim. We just follow this. The affiliate playbook and all those tools, I haven't used any of them. I'm sure they would be great for somebody who maybe is just starting out as an affiliate owner or something like that.

But for me, I'm going to resource all my stuff from Tuba and Business and Chris. That's where I got it all when I first started. And then once you digest a lot of that material, I mean, there's thousands of books on small business out there that are written by much more... I don't want to say qualified, but people that have had a lot more experience in running a small business.

The interesting thing is this playbook and stuff like that. I don't really know how the information was sourced. It's pretty general basic information. But one of the things that was interesting that was said in there is like, oh, our 10 or 20-year affiliate owners, they probably had an issue with this. For me, that's your resource. I would much rather watch stuff on CrossFit.com or on YouTube put out by CrossFit.com channel on these gyms that have been around for 10, 12, 15 years that are really successful. Go stick a camera in that affiliate owner's face and have them talk about what they do or what makes their gym unique or

something like that. Because not only am I going to watch that and pull ideas or inspiration from that, but potentially a ton of other people that are on the fence of maybe opening their own gym or aspiring to opening their own gym one day are going to see that and be like, fuck, I want to make my gym like theirs. And this is open and it's free. So the type of advertisement that you're going to get from that is a lot more. And then talk about your third party making everything free so it doesn't cost you anything. Dude, all these affiliate owners would probably film and put their own stuff up there for free for you, let alone even having to send somebody to film it and edit it. So you're not even utilizing some of those resources that it sounds a little bit like are becoming more of a thorn in your side. And the reason why I think

the 10, 12-year affiliate owners are becoming more of a thorn in the side is because we remember when. And I'm going to get into what remember when is. And I'm not talking specifically just about Greg coming back as a savior, but I'm talking about the collective as a group and CrossFit being a media company that was unapologetically sticking the flag in the sand as far as this is the truth in exercise science, this is the way we do stuff, and we're not going to compromise for anybody. We don't see any of that anymore. And in the past, we've seen it slow down significantly. So for me, it's more or less like, why are you hiding all that shit behind the paywall? Get it out there, get it open and use your 10-year affiliate, 12-year affiliators.

Don't create them as the enemy. That is not what you want to play there. And so if they're not using most of your resources, your older gyms, and some of your gyms are, but then you realize the hardest part was communicating these new resources, at some point, you have to ask yourself that are these resources that we're claiming as a value proposition, are they really even that valuable? Or are they just materials that we're claiming as a value proposition, are they really even that valuable? Or are they just materials that we're creating so we could point at? Because right now, it feels like they're materials that you're creating so that way you could point at. You're like, well, look what we did. But ideally, if this was going really well,

you wouldn't have to point at anything. The work would speak for itself. The work would speak for itself. Okay. So he's going to get a little bit into the value proposition portion of affiliation um is there do you like off the top of your head do you know the total number of affiliates now like right now yeah we're just i think we're just under i don't have the exact number of we're just under 13 okay so just under 13 000 i've been hearing a lot of stuff that has been more or less closer to under 11,000. So I don't really know. It's hard to get a number. It's crazy to me that they don't have a number.

They might have the information and they being CrossFit HQ internally, they might have the information and they just don't want to fully disclose that. That's fine. It doesn't really make sense to me either way. But it's just weird how the number changes. 13, 11,000, 10,000, we've heard in some stuff. And then we get this really, oh, it's a roundabout number. Now, here's the interesting thing about that I want you guys to pay attention to.

We have a lot of claims that are going to start coming up with metrics here. Some of them seem really specific. And then some of them seem like that where they don't even seem to have a handle on it. It's like, oh, it's about, oh, we think, oh, we estimate. Oh, but wait a minute. But then when other things come into play, you're really specific. Retention's 90%. Well, we're at the 50-yard line. How do you know it's 90%?

Okay, we are about 13,000 affiliates. But we know that we're going to drive 8 to 15 leads annually, which the CrossFit name on your gym. Wait a minute. Which metrics do you know really well and which metrics do you do not know really well? Because we use them in our advantage and then other times we're kind of vague about it.

It's both paying affiliates as well as we've got a bunch of non-profit, not-for-paid affiliates as well. Okay. When you raised the fees initially, you like the royal you not like you, Don, when CrossFit raised the affiliate fees, when that was done there was a lot of talk about growth and investment and technology and there's kind of a

return on investment as well as the fact that it's just inflation and it's probably coming up in years and whatever. That was kind of the duality of the message. If you were to, like if I was an affiliate owner now, what return on investment do you think I'd have seen six months in? What difference would it have made to me, the fact that I paid more? Okay, now this is... And by the way, if this whole

podcast could just be me sucking off Pedro at how good he did, I would just do that for an hour or two. Because the questions he hit and Pedro's ability to push back when it needed to be pushed back, but do it in a way that seemed very open and

just out of curiosity's sake was top notch, brother. Yeah. So going back to that change, yeah, some of it was we looked at it around inflation. Some of it we actually just looked at what is the existing value of affiliation independent, given all the things that we had done leading up to the change last November, what is the actual present value of affiliation? And then the expectation that we did set was, hey, the value of affiliation should be changing every month. Okay. So that's the materials that he's

pointing at. Remember earlier when I said, hey, a lot of these materials that people don't even really know if they're using or if they're not using or most people... Not most people, but some of the affiliates don't even know that it's accessible to them. Now, he just said, hey, when we went back and looked at what we offer for affiliateship, we easily justified this price. So that was the playbook exactly. Put together a bunch of these materials, add this stuff in there, show it as a value proposition, then point back at that once affiliate dues went up. But the curious thing about that is, in the previous statements, he was saying like, Hey, not a lot of people used it, blah, blah, blah. So it's like,

who values it? You guys or is it actually valuable to an affiliate owner? Or every six months. So if we go back to it in really simple terms, obviously we're having this conversation hundreds of times with affiliates. The place we start with actually was just, if you just look at the brand alone, having CrossFit on the wall,

we actually talked to a ton of owners last year and actually asked the question, how much value do you think there is in just having that CrossFit on your wall as part of your name associated with the brand? And how much business do you think you get from that alone? What we heard from owners is they estimate somewhere between, I think it's eight and 15 new leads, new members a year come from affiliation from just with the brand? And how much business do you think you get from that alone? What we heard from owners is they estimate somewhere between, I think it's

eight and 15 new leads, new members a year come from affiliation for just having the brand on the wall. So that doesn't include anything else. None of the tools, none of the resources, just having the brand itself. You do the math on that, that's north of $10,000. If we look at it on a USD perspective, north of $10,000 alone in terms of return on investment. Okay. North of $10,000 alone of return on investment. What do you guys want to say is the average cost of affiliate fees? What do you think the average cost of affiliate fees are? Let's say it's $180. So times 15 equals $2,700 for those new members. So now the interesting thing is, is if it's at $180 on average for CrossFit gyms and they get 15 annual new leads coming in

just from having the CrossFit name on their gym. Now, the question asks is where did that other $8,000 or $7,300 in value that you just said came from? Is that going to come from the lifetime value of that customer? How many months they stay time over time? And again, without having that data or that information or giving the complete picture, you're kind of just putting out like, yeah, you spent $4,500 and you got $10,000 of return on your investment. Now, is that net return or gross? Because then that's a discrepancy of another $5,500 in there. If it's gross, if it's net, then how do you come up with those numbers? Are you also paying attention to lifetime

value of a customer, meaning how long does each member in the gym stay? Because if you just did across like whatever, 15 members annually coming into your gym, well, that's $2,700 worth of revenue. Did you keep them for more than one month or not? And if you did, how are they getting this information to make these assessments? Let's find out. person with through summits, events, the things we posted at semifinals and other events. We've met in person, I think, with about another 4,400 affiliate owners. We've launched a marketing toolkit now that gets updated on a monthly basis with resources that owners can use in their local community to drive lead gen and more membership. We have an education series that we've launched since. Most recent one was Daniel Chaffee, Daniel led a series on prospecting and sales.

So how do you think about growing your membership base? Something that his team, he and his team across the Louvre are probably one of the best in the business at. We've made investments in SEO and SEM, so we've invested money. Okay. So he pointed to all those different value propositions that we talked about earlier, which is something that they're deeming as valuable. But can we actually see some tangible return on that value? And if it's that valuable, why do a certain percentage of affiliate owners, A, not even know it's existed? And then another percentage of the affiliate owners say that those tools are beyond my time? Meaning, sure, they might have been awesome at the beginning of my journey 10 years ago, but to this current day, it's not really making much of a difference for me.

Dean. Dion. Sorry. Dion. There are about 10,300 affiliates on the map. Interesting. That's the number that I've been landing on and been hearing more regularly than the 13,000 that we've been hearing coming from a lot of the executive team. So we have that first portion. Now he's going to get into the talk about SEO, which I have a clip with that. So we're going to move this forward a little bit here as I bring the SEO one back up here.

makes a claim here about SEO, traffic to the site, everything else. So I want to... I'm going to play this portion of it and then we'll get into a little bit of discussion around that. And I think this is the correct window at the 950 mark. Yes. But the case of metrics is just something that I just want to put a stake in in here because if we think about um the value proposition in terms of just the name on the wall right maybe just the the brand name just having crossfit on your gym does that bring in anything and he's claiming about uh 8 to 15 members annually um as you go further on about that, he talks about that coming from the Tuba in Business industry standard booklet that they put out each year and then doesn't have a claim to actually back up with any further deeper metrics on to how he came up with that ROI number.

Historically, our website was not. And so it was candidly kind of a mess historically, which meant that when someone searched for something that was relevant to CrossFit where we should show up, we were not representing well. So we've been working on, so restructured our site map, looking at how we structure content on CrossFit.com to improve how much traffic comes from organic search to CrossFit.com. And then we've been working as well on website changes to optimize and improve our handoff to affiliates.

Ultimately, if you're a new member who comes to CrossFit wanting to learn about CrossFit, we want to get you into an affiliate. And so we've done a bunch of work to experiment with our homepage. We have a dialogue now that shows you the closest affiliate. That meaningfully increased conversion rate. So more people ended up getting handed off to affiliates. We've also been experimenting with some ads and some paperwork we've done on social where you actually enter your email address directly on social media and it gets sent directly to an affiliate. And that has performed extraordinarily well for us. So there's a bunch of stuff in there around SEO and SEM. The other thing that we're

doing is looking at... Okay. So basically, they're trying to turn the homepage now into a top of the funnel lead generation sale. So Dawn's here is claiming that in the last 10 years, historically, CrossFit.com did not do a good job in terms of search engine optimization, meaning when they put in something relevant to CrossFit, CrossFit HQ's website did not come up. And he's saying that in the last 10 years, they're doing better now than they were then. Well, here's the good news. We could fact check it.

Round of applause, lady and gentlemen, for Google Trends. Yeah. Okay, so we're going to... That was the wrong button. It blasted some music. That was the thing. So I got this here for you. So we don't need to necessarily speculate on it.

Okay, so what I'm going to bring out and switch out the screen here is a thing called Google Trends. You could tell how much a certain word, in this case, CrossFit was searched. This is from 2004 when Google Trends started to the present day. Okay, through the present day. Now, Don was claiming this section here, which goes up to all the way to June of 2024. So partly through the end of this month. So we'll call it March.

2024 so partly through the end of this month so we'll call it march so this section here during his um time through 2022 is claiming that they did better than about 10 years ago which uh clearly is not the case at all so if you look at the search trend trends here um in or around crossfit uh this is what happened over time. And so 10 years ago, it seems like it was actually doing a lot better now than it was then. The top searches were CrossFit as number one, gym, exercise, Reebok, which is funny. That tells you that dates that, right? And Reebok CrossFit shoes in particular. So I think what was happening through this period of time, specifically around 2013, the games of 2013, if you look at that, that July time, it dips a little bit because a lot of

people are searching for games content, but it holds pretty high from that initial climb in 2012 all the way until, let's say it starts to really dive around 2017, 2018, when we saw the dismantle of the games media and the media team at large at CrossFit.

Also during this time, CrossFit was pulled off of socials, Facebook, Instagram, those types of things. But if you look back to this, that optimization seemed to be working really, really well in terms of SEO in driving people to CrossFit.com. And I'm attesting all of that to the mass amounts of media that was just pouring out. I mean, there is a period of time where they owned almost every instructional video. It's like they where they owned almost every instructional video.

It's like they started coming out with those instructional videos. So if you typed in push up or sit up or squat, the chances of that YouTube video from CrossFit popping up as number one was huge. It happened all the time. And so the SEO, in terms of search engine optimization,

might be necessarily that they were tagging more keywords on the website that'll populate that more now. But in terms of just people searching for CrossFit and then landing on CrossFit.com for the homepage with those searches, it was much higher 10 years ago than it was now. Significantly. Significantly. What type of searches and content performs the best? And how do we make sure that in those areas, so if there's a lot of consumer interest in best, and how do we make sure that in those areas, so if there's a lot of consumer interest in strength training, how do we make sure that the content that we have created

or are creating is predisposed to connect with that audience, again, so that we can get people to our website and then ultimately hand them off to an affiliate. And that's not something we have really deliberately been doing for a long time or even ever to my knowledge. Okay, so the questions that I just get raised up here is like the handoff to affiliates. Now, that might sound good at the

beginning, right? Like where it says like, you know, I'm going to hand off to an affiliate. Well, imagine if I was like, Hey, you're going to run this business and I'll deal with all the customers at first. Don't worry. They're all going to come to me and then I'm going to, I'll send them to you guys. I'll send them to you guys. So originally you're like, okay, well, why are you bottlenecking in between that? Why are you now positioning yourself as a top of the funnel lead generation sales here, as opposed to just the media hub that is spreading the message of the brand and protecting the brand in and of itself? Because if you ask yourself, how many of these people do you think are typing in CrossFit, going to HQ, going to the map, then typing in their location, or if it's auto-populating it, then clicking a gym from

that, then putting in their information into the contact form. That's a lot of steps in terms of lead generation. For us, it's like you go straight to Google, because let's be honest, everybody's going to search Google first. And what are you going to type in? Gym near me or CrossFit near me? Or just CrossFit, right? If you know that you're specifically interested in that. So if you type in gym near me or CrossFit or CrossFit near me, all those places are going to populate through Google. And that's going to matter much more on a local SEO level than it is pushing them to CrossFit HQ. But if CrossFit HQ is optimizing their search engine to essentially come in between that... So now if I go to Google and I type in whatever, CrossFit Gym Near Me, and the first thing that populates is CrossFitHQ.com,

and then they click on that, how many steps is it going to take them to actually for me to get that contact form? As opposed to if CrossFit just spread the message of the brand just absurdly and then typed into Google, CrossFit gym near me, and then I populated up there, and then they clicked on the mine, it's going to bring my contact form up. Now, the reason why that's important is because owning the information of the lead and owning that data is a really big step for any business. Because if you have the right systems, which all of you guys should have in place, if not, you could talk to Chris Cooper over at Two Bainter Business or Cledia over at Kelio and they'll set you up with the website. You should be capturing all the information of

those leads in a contact form so you could retarget those leads in a lead nurture campaign. Now, the question that I have is if CrossFit is coming as the in-between, so they're capturing all that lead information and then handing it off. If there's not a successful handoff and that individual never comes into my gym, is CrossFit owning all that information in terms of the users that are putting in their information for the lead

and then keeping that to retarget them later themselves? Because then they're kind of feeding themselves but also doing it in the guise of, well, we hope you got the member. You got their information too, right? You reached out to them. We sent you their email. But I now have to contact that person on my own independently outside of my own systems. So right now, if you do a contact form, we have a certain amount of text and lead automation and it populates into my inbox and shows me and sends them stuff right away.

And that doesn't happen when my lead comes from CrossFit HQ. By the way, I've gotten two of them since they started this. Neither of them have signed up for members, but one of them came in and then signed our kid up for our straight think edition. And the other one just disappeared, never answered my phone calls. So if you're talking about the SEO and how that necessarily helps the affiliates, I don't know if that's necessarily a huge value proposition. If you go back to when we talked about the beginning, a lot of the 10-year, 12-year affiliates, some of the people that didn't even know that they had these resources and tools in place were just basically saying, I just want to have CrossFit across my door and do my thing. And you guys just keep the brand at the forefront of people's minds and keep it really strong. So essentially, needing more internal media to project out to everybody in the total is going to be the most important thing that you could do to drive more traffic to CrossFit.

Not focusing on driving the traffic in and of yourselves. Let the affiliates handle that with their tools and systems that they have. Just be the hub of all that media that's coming out. And a lot of it could have been done third party, which we'll hear about that doc in a minute here. So now we're going to go into... Pedro asked them here about meaningful cuts, budget cuts. And Don says something that is kind of interesting here. And we'll get into that piece next. 2030, 2030.

Points in sale. And so things that we would do that we could do in the short term, for example, if you wanted to massively eliminate costs, there are things that you would potentially do that would hurt the business that would make it less healthy, that would make it less attractive. And so I think, you know, what's really important here is to understand that, like, our job, my job is to make sure that over the next X years, that the community and the business remains healthy, and that a really smart, savvy, potential owner of the business look across and say, holy cow, I can see a continued path to impact growth here. And I want to be along for that next phase. And so now, you know, what we're focused on is, you know, we want to basically tell a story of growth. That is the most compelling story, too, and specifically earnings growth. And so if we look at top-line revenue, the amount of dollars that we bring in, in simple terms, minus how much we spend, the delta there in oversimplified terms is earnings.

And our job is to make sure that we have healthy, ideally growing earnings. And there's, in simple terms, two ways to do it. We can grow top-line revenue. We can find more revenue in a way that supports growth of the business. Or we can run more efficiently. We can find opportunities to do things more efficiently. So basically what he's saying there is either we could find more customers or we could fire more people. There's only two ways to do that in a business, right? I could go and be like, shit, I need to make 10 more grand a month. Okay. I'm just going to fire

my whole entire staff. All right. Made it. That might not work for the business, but you could do it that way. So it's either cut expenses or sell more things to either existing customers or sell more things to new customers. And the sell more things to existing customers could just be not selling them anything but a price hike. Get more revenue in that way. Speaking specific, and we're doing both of those things. So, you know, we are, honestly, I would like to do the ones that are fun are the ones that are all about top line growth. But there are areas, candidly, where if I looked at where we were two years ago, you know, CrossFit had grown from 100 to 200 employees in like 18 months. We had grown

super fast. The amount of money we were spending had ballooned really, really fast between, you know, 2019 and 2022. There were things that we were doing that I don't think were helping the community, that were not having an impact on the business and so what we've been trying to do over the course of the last year and a half is you know first and foremost let's see if we can find areas to grow so you know you heard me my first message when i started was like the rising tide that lifts all boats is getting more people into affiliates let's grow the ecosystem let's provide you everybody benefits from it um that's hard work but we're making progress crossfit grew the number of members we've improved by about four percent last year

rising tide that lifts all boats is getting more people into affiliates let's grow the ecosystem That's hard work, but we're making progress. CrossFit grew. The number of members we think grew by about 4% last year. So it's growing. The rising tide that lifts all boats is getting more people into affiliates. Let's grow the ecosystem. Let's grow value. Everybody benefits from it. That's hard work, but we're making progress. CrossFit grew. The number of members we think grew by about 4% last year.

So it's growing. Not as fast as we would like, but there's growth. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Did anybody catch that? Did you guys catch that little nugget of a metric drop there? Okay, so there's two important things that happened. He said that the personnel, meaning amount of employees they have,

ballooned from 2019 to 2022. So that tells me that that was Rosa's doing, right? Remember him? Remember, guys? Remember Rosa? He owned CrossFit. You remember that? He was going to own it for the next 50 years he had all these ideas it was going to be great and then we found

out we were sold the whole entire crock of shit and he just fucking outright lied to us literally just outright lied and was like i own crossfit this is my baby and this is what i'm going to do turned out you were a fucking limited partner you bridged the gap that you needed in terms of money to fund the thing. Brought in another company, which I don't even know what's going on with that company now. And then you fucking brought in Berkshire to bring in the rest of the money. They looked at you and was like, well, he had a billion dollar exit with DataLogic. He must know what he's doing and invested into it. It turned out you didn't own CrossFit. You were a limited partner in it. You only put up a small amount of money. And then your position got accelerated to chairman of the board and nobody fucking hears you at all. Again, you're just gone. Boom, poof, gone. But yet you owned it. So the question that I have now is like, you've already broken the trust, right?

It's like such like, Hiller says this on a show too, like the affiliates are like this microcosm for everything that happens. And I think that CrossFit in and of itself, and I agree with that statement, is like a microcosm of what's happening here in the US. This is an ideology war,

is the way that I see it. Oh, that's extreme. Get out your tinfoil hat. That's right. Get it out. God, that song's still playing. Okay. Now I could use the rest of it.

Yeah. Get it out. Get your tinfoil hat out. Bring it out. Because I don't even see... I just feel that we're just being lied to at this point. We've already had the... There's no story with what happened with Rosa.

You'll see in this interview too, I don't know if I already passed this section or whatever, when Pedro very bluntly says, yeah, private equity usually sells within three to five years. And Don's like, five to seven. Like, okay, what are we even arguing over at this point? And the reason why he gets all into this whole entire tight tie corporate speak is because he can't actually fucking tell us what's going on. Like, let's just be honest about it. You can't tell us what's happening. Two reasons why either you don't want to release it right now because you're going to have some sort of issue with that. There's going to be a bunch of pushback and you guys aren't prepared for it. Or it's not really fully thought through yet. You don't actually

have the solid plan together. So one of those two things is happening. And Don's very great at it. He's very good at the slippery... He's like a slippery fish. You can't really pin him down too much. He's good at it. Speaks really well. But then drops little nuggets like, we've had 4% growth in members. Okay. So that just opens up a whole ton of questions for me. Because now I just say, well, what's a member? What's a member of the CrossFit community? How are you defining that? Number one, are you talking about affiliates? Are you talking about affiliate members? Are you talking about people that just engage with CrossFit? How do you define a member? And then number one, how do you know something specific as a 4% growth in members, but we don't know the exact number of affiliates that exist? exists. That's confusing to me. Because either you know it or you don't. And let me tell you,

in business, whenever I start to lose track or get lazy with my data, meaning like, what's the churn rate month over month at the gym? How long are we holding people? And then different metrics for other businesses. Each business will have its own set of key metrics that you're going to focus on and you have to, to a certain degree, because that's the dashboard, if you will, of your business. So if you got your dashboard up with all your metrics, you could tell what's important. And when the light starts flashing, check engine, check engine, and you look at the data point and you go, shit, why has churn been 12% month over month over month? We need to fix this. Without having the clear data in that dashboard being displayed, it's hard to know the knobs that you're turning and what you're doing are having a positive or negative effect on the business.

So it's interesting to me that in some degree, we know very specific percentages of growth. But in other ways, we don't even have a handle on the total amount of affiliates that are there. Barry, they send surveys and get their numbers from that. So it's not clear. But who do they send the surveys to? Just the affiliate owners. And then as an affiliate owner, I'm putting down how much my membership grew. And then they're taking the aggregate of all that data. Then they're going to display that out and be like, hey, the aggregate of all these surveys that came in based off the aggregate of all the surveys that came in last time, because then you're going to have discrepancies like, well, we had 100 people fill it out last time and we only had 75 people fill it out this time. Okay. So there's a discrepancy in the amount of people that filled it out. How is that going to

relate to the total data that we're trying to receive from the survey anyways? And I know Barry's not defending the survey there, but he brings up a really good point because that's probably exactly where they're getting a ton of the data from. And so if you're running your business off of that, that's a little sketchy. It's good to have survey data in terms of what Chris Cooper does because then you just have a ballpark look at the landscape of what's happening. Not necessarily, I'm not running my business by those numbers. I'm aware of those numbers.

I'm utilizing those numbers, but I'm not running my whole entire business just based off of that. And if you do, it's a little sketchy. Jack me off, you freaking guys. He then said, we think we grew by about 4%, so he's full of shit and doesn't know. I wasn't going to use the S word with the Don,

but it definitely seems to be off a little bit. So that's why the metrics matter. I'm just curious as to know how they're defining a member of CrossFit. That's interesting. And then, okay, so we'll talk about here, which is going to move us forward a little bit more. Let's square away.

Matt, why didn't you have all these windows pulled up prior? Well, I had to go early, that's why. Just blame it on somebody else. It's not my fault. I can prepare for this more. It's somebody else's fault, that's for sure. There's 30 million CrossFit

CrossFitters, whatever, across every table table basically. Have you doubled down on that, revisited it? Have you, what would you call it, defined it a bit more as in sharpen the focus of what it means or how you measure it? Yeah, what I would say, so from the beginning, as I shared, this has not changed yet. We don't have a great way of measuring exactly how many people are doing CrossFit. And so we're somewhat reliant now on third-party sources of data to understand what's happening. So last year, that 4% number that I talked about, that was based on some two-brain data that they've done, I think, in partnership with Wattify.

We're still in that place. We are working towards getting... What? What? Not only do I comb through Chris's two brain business, uh, thing very, very, um, carefully. Cause I, I like those numbers. He's a data nerd like I am. And so that that's like a real trusted source for me, but nowhere in there does that data say, Hey, all the cross fitters across the world grew by 4%. What does that even mean? There's your problem.

Wattify. Yeah. See, Barry's catching what I'm putting down too. He understands it. So then the numbers are just kind of skewed to that tracking software. Oh, my Atlanta. David. What's up, David? What would be good if we had a price I think Berkshire wanted, are wanting RID. Let me decipher that. If we knew how much CrossFit costs that I could go in the lotto and buy it. I'm still trying. I haven't bought a ticket yet,

but it's all up in the mind, guys. It's all up in the mind. To be fair, I also do my research at 2Brain. Me too. But here's the thing. I just talked about that. We're using that as ballpark numbers. He just said that crossfit members grew by four percent and i guess he's talking about members of wadify i i don't know that's where it gets a little messy huh

we got a better way to measure it i think it's a relationship goal and what's happening so last year that four percent number that I talked about, that was based on some two brain data that they've done, I think in partnership with Wattify. We're still in that place. We are working towards it, figuring out a better way to measure it. I think it relates to the overall goal.

I think one thing that is increasingly, what I would say that is shifted a bit for me, I still think growth is really important. I think reaching more people is really important. I think it's continuously a thing that benefits everyone in the community. What I would say more strongly now is in the short term, our focus oriented on growth needs to be in service of and is in service of supporting affiliates. So in the long run,

I've been asked about this historically, all 30 million are all 30 million training affiliates. I think in the long run, that's not the case. There will be some folks, we have some folks who do CrossFit in their garage gym today. I think that will be true in the future as well. For now, we view growth as a means of delivering value to our affiliates. And so what we really... For now, for now, for now, we just view growth through the affiliate for now. Double down on internally as a team is how do we make sure that things we're doing in and around growth are directly leading to new leads for our affiliates that we can measure and assess. And so we have some of that data, we're in a slightly better place, but there's a little more work we need to do on that front.

I'd say if you assess where are we on that journey to get to 30 million, if we're gonna get to 30 million, we've got to accelerate our growth. Again, we were going at 4%, 4% is not good enough. And so we need to see that growth rate pick up if we're gonna get there. What about education, like seminars? The next question Pedro had was awesome, but I just would have loved, and this is super easy for me to say, watching this interview back like three times as I watched it and everything else,

just would have loved to have been like, what are the most important metrics for growth for you guys internally? What number do you want to see creep up? And then Pedro got into the whole thing about CrossFit being sold. And he basically was like, Hey, yeah, we're going to plan to sell.

That's what private equity does. But we're going to look for the right buyer. And we want to make sure that the right buyer that comes in sees a potential in growth from this and could say, Hey, we could take this and we could grow it as well too. And so the main question that would come there, and I don't know if he'd got Don to answer this or not, is I would have said, what buyers do you hope to attract? That's important. What type of private equity company are you hoping to attract to buy CrossFit?

And with those buyers that are currently in the market, what metrics are most important for them that are going to lead to a path to more growth once they purchase the company? Because essentially, you have to set it up and package it in a way that looks appealing to certain private equity companies that might have the tools, resource, funding, whatever the case may do, to look at that and say, Oh, shit. Okay. They haven't done XYZ with this yet. We can implement XYZ really good. This is what we do. We're going to implement that. We could see that we're going to have a 20% growth year over year, and we could package that up and sell it. So the question that I would then come right after that is, what's your most important metric that you're looking to spike up in terms of growth for affiliates overall or CrossFitters overall, which is very much how he's playing the conversation. He keeps saying, we want to grow the whole pie and then goes back to affiliates,

but then kind of leaves this room open to this potential direct-to-consumer targeting, even though he says, oh, we don't have any current plans for that right now, later in the interview. And then the second question is just like, what type of buyer do you want to be attracted to CrossFit? Like, if you're going to package up this company

and continue to build enterprise value, meaning have more stronger lines of revenue, more continued revenue, more customers that you can reach so that way they could see growth, what type of buyer would fit that protocol for you? Halpin. So it cuts the cost.

It cuts a cost the affiliate is paying Wattify and CrossFit gets the data. Oh, you're talking about the app. Yeah, the app. Sean, Susan, you're giving me PTSD of working in a tech company with your phraseology. You're wasted in CrossFit. Heard Salesforce are hiring. Yes, we're going to circle back around. I tried to find the exact timestamp and I ran out of time.

But the one part of this interview that I literally just put my head down and was just pulled one of these... Was right when Don said, Oh yeah, that's a good question. I'm going to follow up with you with that. Nobody in the history of anything ever that has said good question. I'm going to follow up with you with that. Nobody in the history of anything ever that has said, oh, I'm going to follow up with you with that has actually followed up with that after the interview. It's just a perfect question. It's just a perfect way to deviate around a question.

Like, oh, yeah, that's a great question. You know what? I'm going to get with the team. I'm going to tell you, we're going to follow up. I'm going to follow up. Imagine you got pulled over by the cops and they're like, smells like there's weed in your car. Can I check it?

Like, no. You know what? I'm going to check it later back at home, officer. I'm going to follow up with that. I'm going to follow up. I'm going to call you. If I got a little something in the car, I'll let you guys know. But right now, I don't know.

We'll have to check it at home. It's like, what the fuck? When does that actually work? Barry, no one circles back. Never. Never. James Watson, for now. Yeah, that's a real key.

Helping. I wouldn't put M in A past Berkshire to acquire an app that does something like Wattified emerge in it. That's 100% what I think is going to happen. I think that this app, I still think that it's going to be something to do with the HustleUp app because they're already in bed with Northern Spirit and Northern Spirit is underneath the same exact umbrella as B-Sport. So B-Sport owns Northern Spirit.

B-Sport owns Hustle Up. And I would imagine that if CrossFit had some sort of app, maybe they undercut the Beyond the Whiteboards, they undercut PushPress, they undercut Wattify, they undercut Mind and Body. So they undercut all these major players for software inside the CrossFit space, meaning their product is just cheaper. They can white glove service it and just integrate it into making it easier to transfer over your current members, all their data. Now CrossFit could potentially even have another source of revenue. So if they take a piece of the pie for transactions that are coming through because you're doing it with their gym software, that's another way for them to add revenue. If they don't, they just hand that back to

HustleUp or B-Sport. What CrossFit will still gain from that is the data. So both those things are really important to both the businesses. The potential transaction fee that they have when you charge all your members for their monthly membership and the fact that CrossFit can retain the data. And arguably, that data... Let's say there are 10,000 affiliates and 5,000 of them choose to go with this new software. And let's say CrossFit takes up 0.5% of every transaction that happens through that. So that's another big increase in revenue.

But more importantly, let's say that CrossFit now could peek behind the wall and look into all of your data. They could see all your members. They could see the member churn. They could see how much your average customer is paying at each gym. They have access to all that data. And that's really important for them because if you go back to what we talked about earlier with that dashboard of metrics that I could tell if like, is my vehicle running good? Is it optimizing? Is my business

running well? Is it optimizing? You're going to need more of that data. So don't underestimate how valuable that data is to CrossFit as a total. Plus, I think on top of that is once you have the data, you can now quantify the amount of people that are doing CrossFit, as Don calls us, members, right? Outside of just your affiliates, but all the people inside your affiliate. Now, if you also make your website the direct-to-consumer, I mean, lead generation,

to where everybody's coming into there and then you hand them out, you distribute them to the affili direct-to-consumer, I mean, lead generation to where everybody's coming into there and then you hand them out, you distribute them to the affiliates that are closest to them, you're capturing more data, more customer information, which then you have the ability to, like I said, either retarget them in a lead nurture campaign, or again, you have the amount of data and you say, this is how many people are doing CrossFit. This is how many people are inside affiliates and everything else. So that data is important. Jesus, so what do we want CrossFit to do? We want CrossFit to sell CrossFit to me because I'm just super arrogant. And I think that the group of people that I run with are crazy fucking passionate about CrossFit at its core, unapologetically being the methodology and program that fights against the system. That's what we want CrossFit to do.

And when that doesn't work, geez louise, I just yell loud noises into the microphone and hope to get people fired up. You don't have to be mad at anybody, dude. What am I mad at today? You don't have to fired up. You don't have to be mad at anybody, dude. What am I mad at today? You don't have to be mad. You don't have to be mad. I'm just openly discussing the future of CrossFit here. CrossFit can also sell that data. Oh, he's even playing one step ahead.

Could sell that data to other consumers if we sign a deal permission we don't realize we are signing. And then those companies can target each individual more accurately in their own ads. So now I hand that information over to GoRuck. GoRuck could use that information to target all our same people or they could put all that data into optimizing their ad placement. Damn, CrossFit's killing it. Jeez Louise, one of my pet peeves is that we have all these problems and no one brings or acts on a solution. I would like to say that everything we're doing here at the Sebon Podcast and everybody in the tech side at the locker room are all pushing towards media and bringing you guys a bunch of stuff that CrossFit isn't doing.

In fact, you guys now know that we have, in partnership with Two Brain Business, this affiliate commercial where you go in and you get some testimony from a couple members that we're going to be running a contest on. And this is the type of stuff that I would be pushing at HQ. So I feel that, although I overall agree, kind of, geez louise, with your statement there,

that I would like to think that we're providing some sort of solution now another solution here as you reminded me that I hope that I'm providing that could help out coaches and gym owners obviously is going to let me find this. ...is here inside the school platform. So I know I talk very critically about some of the CrossFit business, the direction the business is going, the framework of the business or how we do it. But inside of this bad boy here, I hope that I provided some sort of solutions where a bunch of gym owners can come in. We could all chat with each other. We could share ideas. One thing that was really dope that you guys could check this out... By the way, this is all completely for free

is this, this community collections. So inside this community collections, people that are contributing, I'm sitting down and talking with this one specifically was with, uh, Jessica, who works over at CrossFit life. You guys know Carlos, uh, comments regularly in here. And I just, um, sat down with her a couple of days ago and she put together this whole entire slide deck on how to run events at your affiliate. She breaks down everything from how she plans the yearly calendar to the spacing to the cadence in which she tells her members,

how they alert their members, the announcements that they do on the board. She does all this over at CrossFit Life. So I sat down with her and we started chatting about all of it and broke the whole entire thing down. So if you guys want to, if you're a coach or an affiliate owner, and you want to run an event or set up a yearly calendar for your gym, you could go in there, go to the classroom section, check out the community collections portion inside the classroom,

and you could get it for free. So geez louise, I hope that answers your questions as in I am hoping to provide some sort of solutions as well as talking about my opinions in what I would do if I were at the helm of CrossFit. Okay, back to Dawn. We'll hang out here for another eight minutes. It's kind of run this shorter than I wanted to, but that's okay. You guys have already been hanging on with me for an hour, so I really appreciate that. Hopefully, as I kind of pick through this,

you guys are learning something and, I don't know, taking something away from it, I hope. I always hope to add something. I'll take on that stuff where you expected to be. Has it been a drop? Has it been a boost? How is that shaping up? We are, I think we're above where we were last year. Last year, I think we were

we had a good, not great year in terms of top line growth. We are on the education front. Started the year really strong, January, February. We saw a little bit of a slowing. We've seen that recently pick up a bit. So, feeling good about our big goal on the education front this year is increasing the number of,

we came to the year one, it's really increased the number of level twos. So our belief was one of the best things that we can do, you know, for the community is elevate the quality across the ecosystem. And so how do we motivate, you know, more level ones to get to level two? And so we set an explicit goal internally

around meaningfully increasing the number of level twos. We're ahead of that goal. So we make good progress there. I'm not, you know, I think I'd say collectively, I would like to see, you know, our overall volume and education. I know that the amount of media and sponsored media, meaning they paid for it.

And a ton of the stories coming out of the L ones and L twos is just, it's so crazy. The amount of media that comes out of that from CrossFit HQ, that it just makes me want to run and go sign up for mine. What? Come on, dude. You want more L2s. You found a way to do that. You just basically make it to where that if you're an L1 and you have one year to get your L2, if you own an affiliate, that'll increase the amount of L2s. Dude, the L2 is crazy awesome for you guys that are actually coaching. If you thought the L1 is great because that sets the basic, here's all the information I need to know.

But the L2 takes your coaching to just this next level. It is such a great course. I've taken it three times despite what CrossFit HQ's records has on there. I took it back in 2014 when it was called Coach's Prep. It wasn't even L2 yet. I took it in 2017, 2018. And then I took it again in December of 2023 because I had to get renewal. The L2 is freaking great.

I mean, the crazy part about this is I don't know of any other certification courses that provide more value than the L1 and the L2. And I don't know any other certifications that have zero marketing done towards them. fact that you would um so again if i was at the uh what did uh kenneth just say if i if i was at the helm of these nuts if i was at the helm of these nuts i would be pushing the l1 just straight up as like a health certification not like a thing to get a thing to do a thing meaning i don't need to get my l1 to become a coach so the only reason I get my L1 to be a coach, I'd be advertising that sucker as if it were just its own health cert. Like, hey, if you want to combat against all the shit that's happening out there,

meaning chronic diseases, type two diabetes, different cancers that we're being exposed to, all of that type of shit. If you want something, a tool that you could use, that you could own, that you could apply anywhere you are in life, go to the L1. And if you just beat that sucker like a drum, you would have way more people flooding in to take the L1 that maybe that might even be their first time exposed to CrossFit.

By the way, there was a lot of that early on in 2013, 2014, when those certs peaked. Inside my first L1, which was in March of 2013, there was a handful of people. There's probably 60 people in that cert. And they said, hey, how many of you guys have never done a CrossFit workout before, but you're just here because you're a personal trainer. You want to learn the next thing. You want to take the cert because you heard about it. And I would say probably about 15% of the hands in that room went up, which is a pretty big number when you compare that to now. I bet you now if you went to an L1, you said, how many guys have never done CrossFit before are just doing this to advance your education within the health and fitness space? I bet you zero hands would go up. health and wellness certification that is available to anybody, even if you don't want to become a coach at a gym. That's where I would go to. And then the L2 should just be nothing but marketed towards your people who are already L1s that are CrossFitters.

And then what I would do is I turn to every single affiliate and I would say, Hey, here's 20% off of two-year coaches L1s. Hey, here's a free L1 that you get with your affiliation. One free L1 that has to be for somebody else, not you. Or one free L2 for somebody who's been a coach for X amount of time. Those are value propositions that would help my business grow

because when I find that community member that's been a part of my gym for three, four, five years, and they're just awesome. You know the types that just embrace it. People think that they're a coach there and they're like, no, I've just gone here for a long time. I can approach that person and be like, hey, your passion is awesome. Have you ever considered coaching or learning more a little bit about CrossFit? I'm going to give you my free L1. So that's a value proposition right there that you could claim, hey, this is worth $1,200.

We give one of these away for you for free for you to apply to somebody else. And that's the rule. I'd make it that you have to give it to somebody who's never gone through the course before. There's lots of different ways that we could have these hands feed each other. And I think the certification and keeping that alive is huge. Okay, we're going to finish up with this portion here. Accelerate in terms of growth. But overall, it's been positive year on year. One of the cost-cutting measures that I heard was that seminar staff had their Saturday evening budget cut from like $200 to go out for dinner to like $50.

I don't know if you've been out for dinner recently, but like $50 is fine, you fuck all. If you go out anywhere for dinner, that's like, hey, let's spit like half a burger between us. Is like those guys, like the red shirts has there been a good retention there with like who's doing it and like people are there is there more people being inducted as red shirts or whatever is that team like growing because obviously if you want to do more seminars need more people because you can't just like work the same people in the ground basically yeah so i keep talking about seminar staff um we i think my favorite part about that was when pedro called out a very specific hey i heard they used to get 200 bucks to go have dinner on

saturday night in between you know saturday search starts, the seminar staff goes out for dinner Saturday night. Of course, Sunday, they come back in. He was like, hey, I heard you cut the meal expense down from 200 bucks to 50 bucks. I won't even really buy you shit. If you guys pay attention, I would replay it, but I think my internet's choppy here. So Don's probably moving like a freaking whatever robot anyways. but if you go back and you watch that you watch his body language there like i was like oh shit pedro i think pissed them off there um because that's a very specific like hey you just cut your people's meal down i came up by a burger for 50 bucks have you been out to eat and he got a little he got a little

uh squirmy there um and he was saying the... The biggest request we get from our seminar staff, for a lot of them, obviously everyone has different views. Actually, I think a lot of our staff wants to work more seminars. And so we're trying to look at, one of the things we have to try to balance is with the existing size of the team and the amount of demand that we have. How do we get folks on our team as much work as we possibly can? And I will say that

honestly, the volume that we are seeing now versus... I think peak was like... I'm probably going to get the exact date wrong. Peak for seminars is probably 2012, 2013. We are not at that peak volume. And so one of the things that we are seeing now versus I think peak was like, I'm probably gonna get the exact date wrong peak for seminars is probably 2012 2013. We are not at that peak volume. And so one of the things we try to manage really carefully is given the demand that we have right now, and obviously working to grow it, how do we give members of that team as much as as much work as we possibly can, we have added some new members to the team. I don't know the exact numbers, I can follow up on that. I can ask the team. He's gonna follow up on that. Hold your breath, guys. He's following up. Hold your breath.

It's not a massive increase. I actually think we're in a position where our biggest thing to focus on is driving more demand rather than growing the team. And then look, on that example, I think our job is across the board to do the best job we can figuring out how do we put the dollars that we spend to best use. Okay, I got an idea for you, Don. Your staff members want to work more. Their biggest complaint to you is we don't have enough work. They're contracted, so they don't get paid unless they're inside certifications. On a show a while back, I said, what if you actually moved a lot of them to where they were being paid or on staff or maybe even full-time or just gave them more contracting hours by having them drop into their local CrossFit affiliates. That's it. Just drop in. Go take a class. Pay the drop-in fee at the affiliate. Have the L1 or seminar staff member take a class at the affiliates. I guarantee you that if the affiliate's new, and I would love for this to remind that the seminar staff members

are going to be dropping in semi-regularly. You might see them once a month, once every two months, something like that. And they're just going to come by and take the class. The whole entire group gets a little bit tighter. Like, oh, we don't want to be that gym that a seminar staff member comes into and ours kind of sucks. You want to have that top-notch quality. So if you're able to deploy those people into the gyms to build the relationship with those other affiliate owners that are close by them, you're putting a really tight-knit community between your trainers, your L1 staff seminar, and the affiliate owners and the coaches that are there essentially giving the message to and handing out to the community. So by being able to give them a little bit more work to have some

more follow-up and just go take a class to develop those relationships with all of their local affiliate owners, I think it's just going to be, to use your term, a tide that rises all ships. As opposed to moving the majority of them to online, which essentially means that you're cutting all their costs and you're moving more stuff online, which is going to completely water down and diminish what I think would be the whole point of the L1. Jeez Louise, if that was done, would they grade us, give us pointers? Or would that mean that they are... Give us pointers. So that would be completely up to you and the gym owner. I would leave that up to the individuals. They're just going to come in and do the class.

Just a little bit of accountability pressure out there. If you want to do a thing where you're like, Hey, I would love some feedback on that or something like that, that would be an option. It's not necessarily a secret shopper, but it's just like you tighten up a little bit when you know the boss is in the room. You tighten up a little bit when you know people are coming to visit.

So fear tactics. Yeah. If you want to call it that. Sure. Yep. Fuck it. Yeah. I mean, I think that that phrase doesn't...

It fits it, but I wouldn't want to use it. But you're not wrong. So I can't really push it back against that. And then I would make it to where you are pushing more of your seminar stats, more of the certs, more of the education, more, more, more of it. I think that that would be a really big step. I made a statement a while back, um, to somebody, uh, high up in CrossFit. And I was like, Hey, I got a couple things that I would love to run by you. And just kind of like, just some ideas. You guys are probably already know about them, but, um, I'm going to give you one line. And if the line isn't, doesn't really like entice you in, then, uh, then we won't,

we won't continue with the conversation. And they're like, okay, what is it? And I said, the health of the L1 in the certs equals the health of CrossFit, the company as a total, and then therefore the health of the ecosystem of CrossFit. And so without a lot of certs being sold all the time and without that rocking and rolling, that we see the health of the community in crossfit

overall suffer um okay so sebon's over on uh get with the programming with bill and chase that show started at 11 there's a little bit more that we could probably dig into but all the main points that i wanted to hit i um covered from this uh from this interview here or at least the ones i wanted to discuss with you guys at. Thank you very much, Pedro, over at Coffee Pods and Wads. I shot him a text earlier and I was like, I was like, hey, dude, I'm going to just basically steal your whole entire thing for all the content of my show.

So I appreciate that. And he was like, yeah, go for it. So thank you very much, guys. Appreciate you hanging out. I will be back with you on next Tuesday, hopefully at the normal time of 11. You guys can head over now to get with the programming. And if you're interested at all, come join over at school.

The link will be in the description of this show. And you could also just do it by going to school.com, typing in Media Launch or CrossFit, and we'll pop up in the search there. It's completely free. Thanks for hanging out, guys. I appreciate each and every one of you. And we'll catch you on the next one. Bye-bye.