The Sevan Podcast - CrossFit Affiliate, STILL WORTH IT? | Chris Cooper | Two-Brain Business - 2023 State of the Industry

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

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She's like, we don't have any space for him. Bam, we're live. Do you use that machine like you personally yeah yeah i do not like a ton because again i only have one so i would use it a lot more if it was if i had more of them would you would you ever use that machine to warm up on or that like that's how i used it really god that that that movement grabbing those two strings and pulling down and bending over does not seem like that would be a good movement for me to warm up on oh i think it'd be great for you

to warm up on actually oh shit yeah i like something really subtle like the bike yeah motion like you could reach and get your lats going and like drive through and you don't have to like i mean there's lots of different ways if you're just using it to warm up you don't have to hinge over as hard too and you can just you can use it chill just like a bike you don't have to like i mean there's lots of different ways if you're just using it to warm up you don't have to hinge over as hard too and you can just you can use it chill just like a bike you don't have to go berserk yeah 100 chris what's up dude going berserk no don't go berserk on the bike unless you're really warm yeah i'm not really warm it's like uh minus three right now oh my goodness it's so funny um i'm on this group thread and i told my friends i said wow my calves are really sore and some guys

like oh just get on the assault bike this morning and and pedal it out i'm like dude i'm 51 this is from a workout three days ago i tried to walk three miles yesterday to walk it out and it just made it worse i am so sore you gotta get one of those uh walkers that has the wheels on the front yes and then put some tennis balls on it yeah put some tennis balls on it and then you got like your doritos right in the little basket you demand coop Yeah. Chris Cooper, always solution-oriented. That's why Two Brain Business is so successful. There is no problem he can't solve. He's a man of great compassion, servitude.

Chris, I was actually thinking this morning, there's this – I always – the gold standard for guests is Josh Bridges. I mean you could put him on, any show and it's gold. But then I was thinking this morning and I can tell by my stress levels, how good or bad I think a guest is. And I was so relaxed this morning. I was like, Oh, maybe Chris is in the pantheon of the best guests ever. I don't think I'm in the same universe as josh bridges but i think you're you're climbing if you're if there's a mount rushmore you're there you got your pickaxe out and you're you're trying to get your you're climbing up dude you are the man thank you i will drink coffee while

i'm here i mean i i got that in common with josh i think please how do you keep a house? Where are you? Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. That's Canada? Yep. And how far up from the border are you? Well, I'm in my office today, so I could walk to the border in 10 minutes. Of the United States? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Where my cottage is, I could canoe across and back within an hour. Wow. Yeah. Border patrol in that water? No, you'd be good. Just smuggle cigarettes or whatever you want. Yeah, when I was a kid, that's what everybody did. Just go across the border and get stuff?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. That is awesome. Wow. Yeah. Most people here, or many people here, would actually buy their gas in America. So they would cross over and buy their gas and come back to Canada. All kidding aside, is that something you could do? I don't, I don't mean for illegal activities, but literally there's people who have motorboats there would go across,

have lunch in the States or vice versa. If you're in the States motorboat across and get lunch and then come back and you wouldn't have to do any passport or anything. You would. Yeah. You'd have to. Oh, there is a port of entry. Well, it's at any Marina you'd have like one telephone and you'd pick it up and say here i am this is my passport number you know but it's not complicated wow wow it's friendlier than i thought man it's so much better than driving across the border yeah it sure is that has been ruined that

experience you are the owner of uh two brain business yep uh you are an affiliate owner and you opened your first affiliate in opened my gym in 05 and we became an affiliate in 08 after trying to prove that crossfit wouldn't work we proved the opposite and decided we better affiliate gotcha yeah good great great story uh if you guys want to know more about Chris, also, he's been on the show at least two, three, maybe four times. And Two Brain Business is a gym consulting business, the largest gym consulting business on planet Earth. Yeah, it's a mentorship practice for gym owners. We started off in the CrossFit space today, about half our gyms. There are 931 gyms in two brain today but uh about half our crossfit gyms still and what's the most it's ever been just out of curiosity percentage wise uh about that i think i think early on maybe um crossfit journal was putting a lot of our stuff uh online and so maybe

like two-thirds of our gyms were crossfit gyms back then. But I mean, you know, we might have had 100, you know, and so now we have 930 in the program. We've got about 1500 alumni. And, you know, we have an audience that participates in the data set of like 15,000 gyms worldwide. It's the biggest data set on earth for gyms. And what you're referencing there is the state of the industry report. Yeah, I know we're going to get there but but really like two brains reaches beyond just what's in the mentorship practice it's it's also like people participating in things that we do and taking stuff uh that we give them for free and reading our books and whatever um uh guys the first time

chris came on the show was when it was the CrossFit podcast. You've authored how many books? I think six. And the books at that time, I don't know what the status is now, but he was sending them free to anyone who asked. And he even offered it through HQ to all of the affiliates worldwide. I don't think CrossFit took you up on that offer, right? No. So we just donated all the royalties to different places, including think CrossFit took you up on that offer, right? No. So we just donated all the, all the royalties to, uh, different places, including the CrossFit foundation instead. So, um, yeah,

probably 50,000 books sold worldwide now. And we just, we donate the royalties, but if somebody out there wants one, we'll just ship it to them for free. Where do you donate them? The royalties? CrossFit foundation or other like local um you know needs whatever i mean last year i bought this year so far we bought close to 100 bikes for kids in foster care last year we did 50 um we build bike trails we sponsor hockey teams you see some of them like behind me and stuff um you know we we do lots of cool just fun stuff um uh chris was on

the show um i don't remember what year it was let's say 17 when it was the crossfit podcast matt souza uh the executive producer of the sebon podcast who's over there next to chris he he saw that show and picked up a book and today um yep what uh sarah cox told me is an anomaly um uh is matt suza's gym because it's successful the other day she's like well so you can't make money doing a crossfit gym i'm like suza's killing it and she's like that's an anomaly all right uh but suza. But Susan does – if you've heard the story, Susan gives a ton of credit. As a matter of fact, all the credit for shifting the direction of the boat to coming across Chris Cooper's work. Thank you.

So from there and from all the people who adore Chris, he's just become a regular on the show. What happens is Chris puts out this magazine you guys see me talk about all the time. I don't even's just become a regular on the show. What happens is, is Chris puts out this magazine. You guys see me talk about all the time. I don't even know if I would call it a magazine. It's so high quality, but it's called the state of the industry report. It is the leading report. Would you call it boutique gyms? Sure. Yeah. CrossFit gyms, micro gyms is what we usually say, but it's, it's brick and mortar owner operated coaching businesses.

is what we usually say, but it's, it's brick and mortar owner operated coaching businesses. And this is last year's. Um, this year's is, uh, coming out, uh, any day now today. Okay. November 13th. And do you have hard copies once again? Yeah, we're going to ship them. So we, we put this together and then we ship out about 7,000 copies of them every year. And, um, people can actually get the digital version like right now, this morning at two brain business.com forward slash data. And I know we're going to be talking about it a lot. And if they want to have it in front of them, they can just flip through it. There it is right there.

That QR QR code will take them right to that. Oh, thanks Matt. You're way ahead of us, man. Always. And listen, guys,

feel free anytime to call on the show with questions. The, the really good thing about Chris, as opposed to me or other people on the show, is Chris doesn't have to play any games. There's no politics. He'll just answer your questions. So all the really hard questions you wanted to just ask people that maybe you feel like I've danced around because I don't want to offend HQ or someone else doesn't want to finish you. You can ask Chris or the hard questions about running a gym. You can ask him. He'll just tell you straight up because at the end, you'll notice

his business is successful if the gyms are successful, like directly, like he needs you guys to be successful. So he's going to give it to you straight um so you're either successful or you don't join his program and uh and you don't ruin his numbers ruin his reputation that's right that's right um i i want to do you do you have you have access to it suza yeah yeah whenever you're ready okay cool uh uh there there's a there's a breakdown of the study of the survey, and it says page 1 affiliate, for example, I was just asking people their opinion. And instead of saying, like going to their website and seeing what they actually charged. So quantitative is the real numbers. And when we were putting this together, I didn't want to guess I didn't want to have

people like, you know, estimate. And so what we did was we went to partners like Wattify, Pushpress, Kilo, TeamUp, and we asked them to help with data. And so what they would do is they would say like, okay, we have this many gyms and their average pricing is this. So it was anonymous. Like I can't tell you Savon's gym charges this, but we wound up with about 15,000 different gyms. And so we can conclusively say like, here's what a gym charges, et cetera. Here's how many members the average gym has without guessing and estimates.

And then qualitative is more like, how do you feel about things? You know, what's your impression? Do you think that CrossFit HQ is doing a good job? And so we like to put that out too, because a lot of the times that's the most interesting part. There it is. Thanks, Matt.

It starts off right in the beginning basically saying the struggle is real. Yeah. Tell me what you mean by that. Is that the struggle is real? Well, I mean we're talking about gym ownership. And while it's really, really easy about gym ownership and while it's really, really easy to open a gym, it's really, really hard to keep a gym going. And so kind of that's our mission is keep your gym going once it's opened. I think last time I was here, I said

that the greatest gift I thought that Greg Glassman gave the world was this really easy path to being an entrepreneur. And the sad part is that out of the tens of thousands of affiliates that have started, you know, there are, I think, just under 12,000 remaining now. And it's not because the owners weren't hardworking or smart. It's just because they didn't really have a model to start from, or they didn't know how to read a profit and loss statement. Like they didn't know how to run a business. And that was me, certainly. You know, I just thought being a great coach would make me a a business. And that was me, certainly. I just thought being a great coach would make me a great business owner. That's not the case. And so what

we've done is we've said, okay, how can we simplify gym ownership as much as we can? And so instead of teaching all the accounting and everything that you need a four-year degree to learn, we just break it down. Like here are six metrics that you need to track. Here's how other people are doing at these metrics. Here's how the best in the world are doing at these metrics. And then, you know, here's how you can make your metrics better. So it's very much like going to the CrossFit games. We want to see your max deadlift. We want to see your fastest grace. We want to know who's the best in the world at this. And then we want to know how to make yours better. That's all. But you know, if, if people aren't making decisions with numbers and they're guessing and they're just going to continue to struggle and I've been there.

It's kind of interesting. It reminds me of marriage. I'd never thought about this before. Maybe I should have thought this out before I said it, but my mom was an attorney and she was a divorce attorney. And I think I remember her telling me at one point that the main reason people get a divorce is because of finances. But that's not the main reason why people get married. And I think of a CrossFit gym is probably the same way, right? You get in and open a micro gym because you're in love with some sort of something you do and something you want to share. something you want to share. But at the end of the day, it probably fails because of some inability to reconcile your relationship, managing a relationship with that love for that gym and those people and money. Right. I'm guessing that that's got to be 50% of the

problems there too. Sadly. Yeah, it's very true. You know, it very nearly killed me. I kind of won the lottery with finding a mentor when I was in trouble and he forced me to take a look at my numbers. And now, you know, we teach Jim Morrison the same. Are you, do you still have your relationship with your original mentor? Yeah. I mean, he moved to Florida. Part of, part of his whole story was that he was leaving town and he had done this kind of Lee Iacocca thing where he got paid a dollar for his first year in exchange for stock and really turned the company around, saved the company. Can you say what company or what kind of company? Yeah. At the time they were called Algoma Steel, which is the largest employer in my city. I mean, honestly,

if that company hadn't been turned around, my whole city would have been in real trouble. But then, you know, when he sold out five years later, he retired and on his exit, he said, I'm just going to work with five local entrepreneurs, kind of as a legacy project, and I was one. How did the other four do? I don't even know who they were. That's a great question. He wouldn't tell us.

I apologize. Cave Dastro, for the regular listeners, here's a very good way of understanding qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative is your body count. Qual qualitative is the quality of your mate the the the the the their interactions and the intimacy the quality so it would be subjective like yeah well done she kissed but if you just kissed her you get the quantitative data okay i like that yeah thank you thank you cave keep helping because chris talks this business talk, and I struggle with that business talk. We know the struggle is real. We know people will stay in it and war, right?

Borrow money from parents, pick up partners. And so basically the first time I met you and you were on the show, the way you described opening a business to me is there just becomes this decisions that keep splitting off. So the first decision is easy. Do I want to do it? Yeah. And then there's another decision. Should I get the building here or here or here? And then, and then should I get the toilet paper or should I get a bathroom or should I get a shower? Which weight should I buy or what kind of floor? And then everything just starts fractioning off and using two brain you can pick the order and the decisions based on i'm oversimplifying it but based on the the all the data you have on what's been successful for people so maybe the idea isn't to buy the big ass fan first it costs uh fifty eight hundred dollars no you don't like that i have a favorite part of those years because

coop will have some stuff that will mention to you that having like a lock on the front door is more important or or i mean even like people are gonna have questions should i buy the skierg the the bike um or the rower first and these are all, how much should you pay your employees? All of that stuff from the, what insurance to use? What kind, should you do Facebook or Instagram? It's all there from the most mundane to the complex. So we're not going to get in. We're going to do, go ahead, Chris, go ahead.

No, no. So what's interesting there too, is like the answer changes depending on where you are in the world and some other factors. So like, you know, if if you're starting in downtown Detroit today, you're going to get a different path than somebody who's starting in Italy today, because the the growth of CrossFit is happening in like kind of a wave. And so the strategies that used to work in Detroit are now working in Eastern Europe, but they don't work in Detroit anymore. And so that's another reason it's really important to track this data in a big, big data set. You know, like what's happening right now?

If I look at if I go to Italy, for example, right, or Spain, you're going to see these CrossFit gyms with three, four hundred members. example, right? Or Spain, you're going to see these CrossFit gyms with three, 400 members, and they're really capitalizing on these early adopters. You know, the same growth that we all saw in Detroit, Atlanta, New York back in say 2014, but that doesn't last forever. And so you need to know like what's coming and what do I need to set up in advance? And that's what this helps you with too. So the answer is different depending on where you live. State of the industry coming out a month before our gym opens is huge for us. Hey, that's really practical where they are in the evolution of CrossFit. And then, of course, I was thinking of just more mundane superficial stuff like, hey, you don't need to invest in a heater in maybe California, but you're better in Canada. The number one reason people don't come to the gym in the winter is because it's too cold.

It might be. Absolutely. So – and you have access to all that stuff through Two Brain. One quick question before we dig in. Why give this away free? Don't you think this makes you a little, um, you put in all this, this looks like it was, it's expensive and tedious to put together. Why, why give this away free? Um, you know, we're just out there to help. And that that's really what we started out to do is

just help gym owners. 95% of the stuff that we produce is free. The other 5% is expensive. And we want to give you the knowledge to be successful. And then when you work with a mentor, you're basically buying speed. So you fix your mistakes faster, you grow your gym faster, et cetera. But we've always done it. And honestly, this is the thing

that I'm most proud of every year because around 2018, when I was at HQ, Sebi, what was the name of the little breakfast place that everybody went to? Silver Spur. Yeah, yeah. So everybody's there and we're sitting outside under an umbrella.

And I don't know, maybe Bruce says, what's the number one thing that CrossFit HQ can do to help affiliates? And I said, just collect data and give it to us. Like, don't tell us what to do. We want our freedom. We want optionality, but like, just tell us what's the average person charging. And, um, he said, that's a great idea. We're never going to do it. And so I said, okay, well,

and then he laughed. I could hear Bruce. Bruce is so good at asking the right questions and being honest. And he probably laughed because he knew Greg. He's probably like, no, we're not going to do that. Bruce was a great guy um so so i just said okay well i mean we have we have a lot of reach we have some money let's do it and so we just started putting it together after that and it's just gotten bigger every year and you know thanks to great partnerships uh we get a massive amount of data that would be impossible to get if it was just me i I'm really going to leave the track now. This is not the way this podcast is supposed to go. Recently, a survey went out, and I speak to a lot of affiliate owners.

I speak to affiliate owners every single day. Awesome. And, yeah, I know that's weird to tell you that because I know you speak to two affiliate owners every single day, but I speak to one affiliate owner every day. you that because i know you speak to two affiliate owners every single day but i speak to one affiliate owner every day and um recently a survey went out from uh what we're trying what we assume is crossfit hq they know it went out people are sending their country uh managers like direct texts and emails saying hey what is this did you guys send it out and the answers they're getting

are bizarre they're not like yes we sent it out or yes we hired someone to do it they can't get there i feel like we can't get a straight answer yet but this a survey went out you would think in the name of transparency that if they sent out it in a questionnaire they would tell you why they're sending it out right because what's happening is all these all the affiliate owners I know are very suspicious because they're getting questions. So if I sent you, if I called you and I said, Hey, Chris, what time will you be home? Uh, what are your hours? You're keeping it home this week. And you know, you owe me $5,000. You know, that's a loaded question. $5,000 before you don't, you't you don't but you know that's a loaded question you know i'm asking you because me and uh and susan and a couple other guys are

coming over with bats want to have a talk with you so you're like so so i don't tell you that but i ask you that question right yeah what are your hours keeping so when you do you do you know about this survey by the way that yeah a few people have brought it up inside the two brand group. I'm not sure where it came from and I haven't actually seen it unless it's the same one that was sent to Canadian affiliates, but I do know that the premise, and I do understand why people are worried about it. So let me ask you is why do you guys send out, what do you do? You send out a survey. Do you tell people why you're...

They obviously know. Well, they know you're going to aggregate it, curate it, and release it to them. So maybe that's why they feel safe participating. But what do you do with this information? What kind of nefarious things are you doing with this information?

This is truly evil but yeah like since you uh since you asked me to wrap you on the spot yeah yeah i mean we publish free content every day to help so for example like if i know um the average gym is charging 120 bucks a month for a membership then we can put out more content on like here's what you should be charging and here's how to raise your rates or here's like how to boost your average revenue per member this way or whatever like it guides the rest of the content that we publish for the year and then to be honest with you it kind of gives me a milestone too so like if the average gym is keeping clients for eight months then i want every two brand gym to keep all their

clients for 16 months. You know, like just like every affiliate that reads this, like you want to smoke the average, right? You don't want to be average. You want to kill it. You want to, you want to be better. I'm not going to let you off the hook that easy. I want to know, I want to know more why you guys click the data, but now that you mentioned that, I want to turn to page. Thank goodness. We're going to talk about franchising. No, not yet. Not yet. Okay.

I want to turn to page… I think it's 47. Okay. And I really like the fact that you said that. That's a really honest answer. You want to know what the average is so you can set goals for your own company and your own mentors that you want to make sure you're beating that. And I think page 47 shows the average revenue for a gym – no, that's not right. Sorry.

Give me a second. Yeah, you got it. 47. Longevity. 47 longevity is that there was one that showed that it was if you use two brain your um you were basically your your monthly revenue was about 20 000 a month whereas if you didn't use two brain it was between 11 and 13 000 let me see if i can uh monthly expenses monthly rent earning oh maybe uh it's not 47 no so that's what the gym owner takes home um but what's interesting so you're right it's like if they the average gym that doesn't work with two brain

maybe 21 or 22 page 21 or 22 sorry chris go ahead yeah well that's cool and then say it again so the average gym that doesn't isn't working with two brain that's in this survey of like 15 000 gyms does between 12 and 16 000000 gross a month. Right. And there are some gyms that do very, very little that are pulling that number down. It should be higher, but that's the median, the average gym with two brain. And, you know, like we're talking a thousand gyms, um, does about five grand to eight grand a month, more than that. But what's really interesting is that of that revenue, a lot is going to coaches and a lot is going to the owner instead of going to landlords and government.

So that's one of my favorite stats in here is like how much the owners are actually making. Because when I started out, I was making 19,000 a year as a personal trainer. And I figured the only way to make more money is to open a gym. And then in the first year of gym ownership, I made $19,000, but I worked twice as hard. So, you know, like I really want gym owners to be making money so that this can become a viable career that supports their family and they can stay around for 30 years instead of like bailing the next time there's a lease increase, you know, a rent increase. Susan, scroll down to the page right before this. I want to show you. So the number is $21,040 for the average revenue for someone who uses the Two Brain Mentorship and for the average

in the United States for someone who doesn't use it is $12,490. So when you see that number and you see that you're almost doubling it for Two Brain, that's like a quick look. Hey, this shit works. We're doing the right thing. We're going down the right path. And then the next biggest thing would be like to make sure that that eight thousand dollar difference. That it's that it actually leads to profit, just not more hard work. Yeah, I mean, the owner. Yeah, exactly. Like there's no sense making an extra eight grand if you just hand that over to the landlord every month or the government, right? Like, I want you to make the money. And so a good portion of that does go to the owner. And then two brand gyms pay their staff more too. So a lot of a lot of it goes to their staff. Wow. By the way, that was crazy. That basically answered the question that I'm dancing around. 33% increase. That translates, that 50% or 100%, the doubling in revenue leads to 33% larger profits. And I didn't even think about that. So if you work at a gym and your owner is doing two-brained, that's a good sign for you probably. Yeah, we actually hear that a lot. So like, um, a lot of people will bring their coaches to our events and stuff because not only will it get the coaches fired up to kind of grow their own career,

but they'll also see that the owner is investing in their eventual success too. And in creating a platform on which they can, they can last. I mean, the reason I really started a gym was I was doing a personal training at a studio and I was getting, I forget what it was, $23 a session or something. And when I did the math, it was like, there's no possible way I can coach enough to make a living here. And I don't want people leaving for that reason. I want people leaving to start their own affiliates, but with the help and partnership and mentorship of the person that they're working with instead of as like their escape hatch um jordan vance uh how to how to marry biz metrics product sales with glassman's focus on best coaching possible. I ran a gym with Two Brain for three years.

The difference between paying rent and date night was shirt and way pre-sale. The difference between paying rent and date night. Okay, so he's saying he – I think what he's – Jordan is saying is he worked with you and that when he started selling shirts and way protein, he was able to actually start going out and getting some qualitative data on his dates. But what he's suggesting here is that Greg says don't sell – so here's the thing with Greg. He says that – and I think you'll relate to this, to this coop and i'm sure you've heard this a lot he says hey don't you don't want to go into your doctor's office and he said and he's sponsored by

pfizer yeah you don't want that you you want him to like not be pushing that and there's another piece he brings up we've all seen the brands that pick something up that ruin the brand for you so like if you've ever seen the mercedes-ben electric bike, you're like, man, that's not good for your brand. Or the Mercedes-Benz electric Lamborghini bike, these are – like stay in your lane. You're diluting your brand. So that's the other piece. He says if you are going to sell something, it has to be equivalent to your – to the level of your brand or else you're spending your brand equity to prop them up. Correct. That being said, I also have this mentality.

I used to get so frustrated when I first started working at CrossFit that we didn't sell visors or shirts or that kind of stuff because I wanted to rep the brand. Or if I go to my gym, I want my gym to sell jump ropes. I want my gyms to have water or fit aids. I personally want that. Yeah, so his first – Sorry, one more thing. Sorry, one more thing, Chris. Greg's very derogatory about it.

He poo-poos it hard. He pushes back on kind of this model that you're saying to supplement the income, and we'll get to that page. But with supplements, nutrition – well, I don't know what he thinks about nutrition seminars, but definitely supplements and shoes and shit like that. Yeah. So, I mean, Jordan's first question was like, how do you balance that with just being a better coach? And the reason we're called two brain business is one side of the brain is your business and one side is your service. And the thing is though, that if you're a CrossFit affiliate, you have some of the best coaches on the planet because CrossFit has the best certification methodology there is.

So most people that we meet have coaches who are already an eight out of 10, but their business is like a one out of 10, you know. And so they need to work hard to bring that business up. Eventually, of course, if your coaches aren't any good, like you can't charge enough for your service to be viable. And you reach this kind of balance point where you have to improve your coaches before you can improve your prices. And, you know, but honestly, most gyms are nowhere near that point. So, you know, as far as like selling whey and stuff, we do it. Honestly, you know, we sell some retail, we sell some protein. We do it because my clients are going and buying that stuff anyway.

And if I don't have it for them, if I don't act as like the filter to see what products actually live up to my brand, the Catalyst brand, they're going to walk down the street to a place that's literally called the gear garage and they're going to say what protein is on sale this month that's a great name oh yeah it's literally a garage it looks like um they're going to say what protein's on sale this month and they're going to take 20 off the soy protein isolate double roasted that's canada by the way that's why he said soy. They do it different up there. Go on. Yeah. I mean, sorry, protein's garbage no matter where you're from, but like, um, that's what they're going to buy, right? They're going to have some teenager tell them what they should be buying. I'd rather just keep it in stock and I make like a 10% commission on it,

but it's really great stuff. I've done the legwork to figure out like what's really good for my clients. And, um, I just, you know, I see it as part of the service. I've done the legwork to figure out like what's really good for my clients. And I just, you know, I see it as part of the service. I want to be really clear when he says he takes 10%, he two brain doesn't take 10%. He's talking about his actual gym. Do you ever do that? Let me ask you this, the boy, this is getting really dirty. Do you, do you ever take money from people? Two brain does to let's say some protein company said, Hey, two brain does to um let's say um some protein company said hey two brain will you will you push this onto all your gyms your your 930 gyms so um this is a big topic um the the answer is that right now there are three companies that pay me a commission if two rent gyms use them one is uh an advocate for it's

called merchant advocate one is a va company and one is a um what's what's a what what's a merchant advocate just like some like a like a software no so what they'll do is they'll call up the people who process your payments okay so if you collect 100 bucks in your gym the payment processing company is going to take three of those dollars. OK, what this company would do is they would call up that processor and negotiate that down. So they are advocates on behalf of the gym. And so what I mean from that company, I make about 70 dollars every three months, you know. OK, and then we just donate that.

But we're ending that. And actually, even as of this morning, this was a lesson that basically came from the original CrossFit APN. When we got approached for the APN, the premise seemed off to me. Sorry, will you explain what the APN is? Yeah, it was the official or the original affiliate partner network. So I don't know, a couple of years ago, we got approached to be in the APN and there was no filter for quality. It was like, will you pay CrossFit a percentage of your sales that you make through the APN and we'll put you in the APN? And we just said, no. And then we said, we started our own marketplace just for people who wanted to get deals on things that would help gyms. And we put like 50 different vendors in there. Some of these vendors are so big that they have like a standard contract, right? Like Merchant Advocate gives us 10% of 4% of 10% of whatever they save or whatever.

And so they just like default send you money. And there's no negotiations, just like what they do. But we're even ending that. And so we've been, yeah, we want to make sure that like our marketplace is absolutely without bias, without reward. And I think like a lot of companies will tell you already when they apply to be in our marketplace, they offer us money and we just say no. So let me dig in a little deeper here so you're saying that crossfit crossfit has this portal basically this page that once you're an affiliate you can go there and you can be like oh i can get a discount on this i can get a discount on this thing those companies

actually pay crossfit to be there behind that that portal to be a part of that so that way affiliates get directed there okay i don't know if i i don't think i have a part of that. So that way affiliates get directed there. Okay. I don't know if I have, I don't think I have a problem with that, but they probably don't vet them, which does concern me a little bit. But what you're saying is they offered it to you to be back there and you said, no, thank you. Right. Yeah. And because you, and why is that?

Because you didn't want to give a percentage of your sales up or you just didn't think it would help you or did you think it was bad for your brand? Because now that's want to give a percentage of your sales up or you just didn't think it would help you? Did you think it was bad for your brand? Because now that's the big picture of what I'm saying. Did you think that CrossFit would pull down your brand value? Well, so we were told in the beginning, you're the only one we want to talk to. You're the only one. Me too. I don't blame you. You want to be in line with Two Brain. Thank you. But of course, we talked to other business coaches in the space and they were like no they took crossfit told us the exact same thing

like for beta yeah exactly oh no so they had some they had you checked on their um quantitative data and there were others yeah and so exactly so um the other thing was like, I wasn't willing to raise my rates by a certain number just to give that to HQ. And I just didn't think that that brought a lot of value to the gyms that we were serving. And so we just, you know, kind of declined. We do other things, you know, with CrossFit, like we pay to be part of the affiliate summits and we're proud to do that that's fine um but yeah the the apn just wasn't a good match for us do you do you um do you pay to be a part of the affiliate summits yeah to i i there's there's two i feel like there's two kinds of people on social media. There's these people who have these massive accounts, and that's overgeneralization.

They have these massive accounts, and if you pay money to be affiliated with them, people will know your brand. But they might not convert, right? So I may have 5 million followers, and I hold up a can of a drink. No one's going to buy it, but now 5 million people have now heard of that drink. You know what I mean? going to buy it but now five million people have now heard of that drink you know what i mean whereas there's other there's other people like you see them drinking it you see miko salo put wrist straps on and you run to the store and buy them i sure did yeah i did right right me too so um where does it fall in and being affiliated with crossfit does that convert to you um into

sales or is it more like hey it's good for people in the community to know you're there? Because I would think I think it's the first, but you would know better than I would. It really has never converted into sales for us. I mean, so every month we send a two brain speaker to speak at the affiliate summits because we want to help affiliates. And so it costs us about twenty five hundred bucks to send somebody there, put them up, pay CrossFit, et cetera. And you could call that brand marketing if you want to, or you could just call it the help first ethos, whatever. Sure. But it also lets people know that you're there. Sure. Yeah. What I would guess it would do. Yeah. And a couple of our mentors on staff are crazy passionate about doing it. And so

that's, they want to do it. And so we just, you know, empower them and, and pay them to do it. So, so we go, the challenge when you're having any kind of marketplace like this though, and you're a big brand, like two brain is that you're placed on the same stage with smaller brands and the audience can't tell the difference. So back to what you were saying is like, unless there's some filtering happening there, it's a big risk if you're a big brand, because you might speak right before somebody that's just starting out or has no data or they're 10 percent of your size or whatever. And the audience can't tell the difference. So in that in that position, like when I'm in that position, I think my job is to be the one to filter and tell the difference. So in that, in that position, like when I'm in that position, I think my job is to be the one to filter and tell the difference. And so like, you know, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the APN or anything wrong with the way that CrossFit

does it. I understand how the company has to make money now, but the way that we do it is like, I don't want to promote somebody just for the money because I don't need the money. So I would rather do the filtering and say, we the Settlement Podcast because that's what I believe in. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I like that. And hey, so these other companies out there that offer services to mentor gyms, they must also be ecstatic that this is coming out. Yeah, yeah, most of them are. I mean, this is like a crazy service. Are you friends with all those guys? All the, all the, uh, uh, ladies and gentlemen that are out there who do that? We're friendly with most of them. Um, yeah. I mean, I mean, I even, I think I even see them

at your summit. If I'm not wrong, you even invite them to your summit. Yeah, sure. Yeah, absolutely. They've even presented at your summit. Some yeah absolutely yeah that's wild what's really funny is after this comes out every year is you'll see a bunch of uh business coaches like read from the guide but but put a piece of paper over the the logo so they'll they'll have it here's our 2024 state of the fitness industry. Can't wait to share all these numbers with you. You know, like there was an email last week from a really big company, probably the only company as big as two brand in our space. And it was like, here's all the data you need to know.

And it was verbatim a chart cut and pasted from our state of the industry. And honestly, man, like that used to make me pissed and jealous. But now it just makes me proud that we're producing something that's such high quality. Man, oh, man. Yeah. I will say this. For being the biggest guy in the room,

you guys still have the mom and pop feel, and congratulations to that. You guys are just authentic as the day. Let me use a different word you guys are homies homies thank you homies authentic's just been destroyed no that was the thing that i said i loved so much about the the rogue invitational it felt like crossfit 2015 oh when you were there milling around oh yeah and you know meeting all the people with the savant podcast t-shirts and stuff and, you know, hanging out with the real OGs. I would never call myself that, but, um, thank you. It's, it's, uh, it's nice to be like mixed in with some names like

that. You know, dude, you've been around forever. You're dying. You're there's before OGs, there were dinosaurs. Zach, thank you so much for having Chrisris on early this year that pod uh got me to reach out to him and start the startup program awesome i'm glad i'm glad it helped yeah thank you yeah the feedback is always uh crazy positive i told chris this the first time we had him on the crossfit podcast it was our worst rated show ever but with the most feedback we'd ever gotten from any show, like by tenfold. Meaning that, once again, it's the difference. What he gives people converts. He's the guy with 1,000 YouTube subscribers, but all 1,000 of them are fully engaged,

as opposed to the person who has a million YouTube subscribers, and they can't convert shit. You don't want to be that million person. You want to be that 1,. You want to be that 1000 person with the, uh, the active, the, um, active army. Okay. Um, how, how is, um, how is the gym business? Big picture. How is I'm, um, I want to open a gym. How is the gym business? It's, it's definitely better than it's ever been and oh you know we said we said yesterday that um there's never been a better time to open a gym you know really if you want to create financial freedom or even wealth for your family and you're wondering like okay how do i start a business honestly the the path through CrossFit is probably the simplest, least expensive,

and also has the highest potential. If I wanted to start an F45 today, well, I wouldn't start an F45 today. If I wanted to start an artist theory today, I'm looking at at least a $400,000 bond before I even rent a space, massive build out, I'm easily out of pocket three quarters of a million before I get the doors open. I can start a CrossFit affiliate today for whatever the affiliation fee is. You guys might know three grand or something and a plyo box that I made myself and like, and a thousand for the L1. You got to take the L1. Right. Yeah, yeah, sure. And, uh, you know, I can go back to the original CrossFit journal articles and figure out how to make my own med balls like we all did back then with the expanding foam and pea gravel. And I can just start, you know, like I started my gym with $16,000 and I didn't need that. I could have done it on five. I wasted most of it, you know, buy a rusty barbell or something and you're good to go. bell or something and you're good to go. And out of that tiny little investment of time and money,

I mean, you can create a massive opportunity that's life-changing and give your family opportunities that others won't have. What's the subtle, you wouldn't open an F45. What's the deal with that 45? They're tanking. I mean, they're in real trouble. They like delisted their shares. HQ has started buying up their shares, which you see in franchises when they're in real trouble. They like delisted their shares. HQ has started buying up their shares, which you see in franchises when they're starting to get in trouble. But they might survive. I mean, McDonald's went through that 30 years ago. That's the sound of F45 right now.

Yeah. I mean, the thing about F45 is like they took group training and they commoditized it even further than it was. And so, I mean, you come in, you see like, here's the screen, right? Like, and I'm going to do what the screen tells me. And there might be like one circulating coach or whatever. It's a very industrial model and it's fun for people at first, but then they get tired of it. And so their churn rate, I imagine must be very,

very high, very, very quick. What are these numbers here? Your average cost to open a gym? Yeah. So yeah, they are high, right? So let's just take like CrossFit and Access. So now this is the median. So when people now are opening CrossFit gyms, they're not doing what I did. And Matt, what year did you open? Was it 08, 10? No, in 2013. did. And Matt, what year did you open? Was it 08, 10? No, in 2013. Okay. So even then, right? Like five years after I did the cost to open a CrossFit gym, I doubt you spent $20,000. Did you? No. Well, we bought an existing one. So our situation was a little bit different. Okay. Yeah. If you're starting from scratch though, like I said, you can do this for $5,000. You go get your L1, you sign up, you put your affiliation on a payment plan every month to protect your cash flow.

You build a couple of plow boxes, you buy a used barbell and like you rent the church basement and away you go. But the median now to open the gym is $60,000. Like that's how much people are spending. And of course, like that number is going to be influenced by people who are trying to open up these beautiful gyms and they're going to compete with F45 and Orange Theory and they're doing it in Manhattan. Like these things skew the numbers. But even so, it's like a fifth the price of opening up a goals. You know, the access gym that you see at the bottom right there, that's not a franchise. So that's if you opened up like a 24 hour access gym where people come in, they use the equipment. It's a completely different business model. You're looking at

over $300,000 to start those up, even if you're not part of the Golds or World Gym franchise. So, I mean, how much does it cost to open one of those? I'm guessing the equipment and loan in one of those costs a million dollars. Oh yeah so 300 yeah exactly i think the franchise fee for um for a uh golds was a million before the pandemic who knows now they've been through chapter 11 but who opens those who opens those chris do do any is that like do rich guys open like do you have to just be retired and sitting on 200 million cash like who opens the gold or is it companies that open them who opens the gold well it's it's usually um what you call investors so okay these are not like fitness aficionados right okay they don't want to talk about coaching at all it's they're going to buy a franchise because they see an opportunity to put a franchise

in this town and then they're going to buy three or four more and own the whole territory and then fold all those into one company and sell that to an even bigger fish, right? That's how private equity works. And by the way, private equity is what owns CrossFit now. So I'm not saying that's the way that this is going to go, that they're going to force franchising.

Yes, you are. No, I'm not. But I am going to say it. You might not be saying it, but you just said it. It's a different company now. That's all I'm saying. And the goals are different. That's all.

So if you want to open up in Sault Ste. Marie, an access gym where people come in and use the PEC deck whenever they want to, it's going to cost you $320,000. Crazy. Those gyms are nice i do i do enjoy those i do enjoy going i mean i haven't been in 10 years but i used to you know i used to always be on the road and i used to love going to those gyms like going to a nice gold or a 24-hour fitness or somewhere that had the uh you know the sauna they didn't do they didn't have cold tubs back then, but now they do. And even my nephew belongs to, uh, the global gym in town. And the whole reason he belongs there is for the sauna and the cold tub. It's, it's a great place for people who know what they're doing and are self-motivated.

Yeah. And it's also a breeding ground for future CrossFitters, by the way, like let people get in there in a low pressure environment, get started. All of us. I bet you all of us. I bet you 90% of us started there. Absolutely. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with it from that perspective. You know, I know Greg early on didn't like it because they were charging memberships to people who just weren't signing, showing up and getting results and stuff. I totally understand that too, but you don't need all that to get results. Um, once I was down in Memphis at, uh, St. Jude children's hospital with Greg Amundson and he's like, let's go do a workout. And you know, the workout room was about five by five. It was in this old bank vault. And I'm like, Oh, Greg, there's no equipment. Like, what are we

going to do? And he goes, uh, does it have a wall? And I was like, yeah, there's like four walls. He's like, okay, here's the workout. And it was like, exactly. You had to do a hundred handstand pushups. And every time you came off the wall, you had to do 10 burpees. Oh, good God. Oh yeah. So he left and came back and got you in the morning. Literally. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just going to go get a sandwich chris i'll see you you know what what's the most um uh important metric um is there any metric in this uh current um report that just came out today the uh two brain business state of the industry report that stands out to you the most or or even we settle for the most important metric to you is there any any page on here like this is the one yeah i mean ultimately right now the most important is what we call net owner benefit like what is the gym owner making because that will determine can the gym

stay open long enough to fix all the other stuff you were on i think that's 52 i think you were on that page okay yeah i mean the bottom line is is you can become a level three or level four or whatever it is now, and you can become a master dietician. You can become a PhD if you want to, but if your gym isn't making money, you're not serving anybody anymore. And so net owner benefit is really critical right now. Yeah, 39.67. It's better, but it's still not good enough, and we need gym owners to make more. The second most important metric that I think most people would care about is what we call leg length of engagement, and that's how long somebody stays at your gym.

So we know – Before we switch to that, that's very important. I want to read these numbers to you. Average two-brain client monthly net owner benefit from March 22 to July 2023 is $4,763. Yeah. It's not good enough, but it's $800 more than the average gym is making and that's like take home right so that's your family makes an extra 800 bucks a month right yeah that's that's crazy and let me ask you this that me that 800 though that's after you paid to brain oh yeah whatever services you need from them yeah the mentorship. Oh, yeah. And I do want to go to this, what I call this retention number.

Don't let me forget. Does working with Two Brain add time to my day? Yeah, 100%. We measure that too. How much? Does that suck? That scares me. Like, do I have to spend an hour with you guys every day instead of like?

No. I mean, everything that you do is an investment, right? Including time. And so we say 40 minutes every day to do, you know, improve your business before you do anything else. And so people start off by adding 40 minutes to their day. But what they quickly find is that they end up working a lot less because they're focused and they know exactly how to spend their time. And so I think the average two brand gym it's in here, you know, they're, they're working like 32 to 35 hours a week where the average is 56 to 60. Right. Okay. And I didn't see that page too. Okay. So you may

have to, the first six months or a year, have to put in an extra 40 minutes every day. That'll be time you can't be scrolling. Scrolling or, you know, to be honest, some people are, some gym owners are working out two hours a day and then wondering like, why am I not growing my gym? So it doesn't matter where it comes from, but you need about 40 minutes of focus time behind a door that closes where you could just do the work. Okay. Fair enough. Okay. And then the second most important number after the extra $800 you get, go ahead. Go ahead, Susan. Well, I just have one question, Chris. Did you find it interesting from 2022 to 2023, the only number that did not move was CrossFit as far as net owner benefit as you look at the um median there yeah that's a great question man and uh i mean i can't before you answer let me explain

that for you answer for those of you listening uh through the podcast in 2022 the average crossfit gym owner took home 3500 a month and in 2023 it in 2023, it was still 3,500 a month, but you can compare it to other gyms like martial arts. They doubled their take home. Personal training increased it a tiny bit. Strength and conditioning increased it by 500 bucks. Um, access gyms increased it by 300, but CrossFit just stayed the same. Almost like the average gym owner did not, not almost the average gym owner did not make more money. Average CrossFit gym owner did not not almost the average gym owner did not make more money average crossfit gym owner did not make more money take home between 2022 and 2023 yeah great observation matt like i can't explain that i mean our our crossfit gym owners make 1200 bucks more than that

um a month um and i think like part of it is just a little bit of stasis or maybe even confusion on let's wait and see what's going to happen here. Like, like, you know, we all signed up to be independent, run our own gym, maintain optionality, do it however we wanted. But right now I get the impression qualitatively that a lot of people are just waiting to see what HQ is going to do. And like, you don't have time for that. You still own your gym. You're still independent. Like it's up to you to change it. And so that might account for some of the numbers. Okay. By the way, it's kind of, it was a mistake to say you only make $800 more if you use TwoBrain. You actually, the average is $1,263 more if you're a CrossFit gym owner.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Okay. And then the second most important number, which is such if you're a CrossFit gym owner. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Okay. And then the second most important number, which is such a fun number to look at, is retention. Yeah. Once you get a client, how long do they stay in your gym? Well, that's huge. That's critical for us. That's huge.

Yeah. It's important from a business, but it's also more important from a changing their life perspective. important from a business, but it's also like more important from a changing their life perspective. You know, it's really, it's more important to keep a client around long-term than anything else. Like if, if the workouts aren't working for three months, but you keep them for 10 years, that's fine. You know, if they don't like the programming for six months, but they're still around 12 years later, they're getting like you've changed their life and so we tried we tried to figure out like how do we know when we've actually changed a life in my own gym and this was one of the three metrics that that left out to us was like they have to be here for at least two years if they quit after two years they're not quitting fitness

like they might be quitting catalyst but they're still riding their bike and they're um they're doing street parking like for some reason a big percentage of my ex clients love street parking. They're meeting up with their friends. They're throwing down in gyms, like they're maintaining their fitness. But if they quit after seven months, they're probably not, you know, they're just done. They're, they're going to wait another year and go on a fad diet or do something different. And so when we look at these metrics, and we look at retention, that kind of bears out through the numbers, because

if you can keep a client for two years, the likelihood of keeping them for three years is very high. And if you can keep them for three, the likelihood of keeping them for seven is very high. And like, that's what why leg matters. And so while I want every two brain gym to have a length of engagement of 24 months or better, we're at 20. And so while I want every two brain gym to have a length of engagement of 24 months or better, we're at 20 and we're getting there. Unfortunately, like the average is eight months, which is not long enough to change anybody's life. Hey, just out of curiosity, what's the average length of CrossFit gym stays open? Do you know that number? I don't know that number, but I'm going to guess it's like an even number because qualitatively speaking, when people quit is not on the 15th of the month. It's,

man, I've got a new lease coming up January 1st. I don't know if I can make that nut on out or some other fee is changing or you're three years in, you're not making any money. Your wife and kids are like, who the hell are you? And you're like, okay, I'm just not doing this anymore. So you run out your first lease. So you'd probably see affiliates quitting after like three years, five years, 10 years even because costs are going up and their revenues aren't going up to match. And that was a big takeaway in the data year too,

is that while revenues are kind of the same, expenses are going way up. And next year, they're going to go up even higher with energy costs, rent. A lot of the landlords have to make back the rent that they lost during COVID when they tried to help you out. And so they're going to put that in, whatever. COVID when they tried to help you out. And so they're going to, they're going to put that in whatever.

Real quick, Jared, this surveys from 13,444 gyms on at least four or five continents. And he, as he said, in the beginning of the show, he has 931 clients. So you can just subtract a 13, 931 from 13,441 and you can start getting the numbers you can see he definitely stuffed the ballot with his 940 come on guys come on be thankful someone's putting this together i hear you they're fair questions but come on but come on yeah that's cool we're so like we're here's the here's the scary thing it kind of reminds me of a disease that we had sweep the planet a couple of years ago when the average age of death was higher than the average age of death of a human being. That's why it's important how long to know a CrossFit gym is open for because if you're getting clients, if your retention for clients at gyms is longer than the average length the gym is open i wonder what that is what do you

what would you guess that is you think a crossfit gym that averages five years four years i guess somewhere between four and five stays open yeah i have no idea though i'm happy for you to say no sebi you're stupid it's 12 well i don't know you know and like i don't like to guess and that's exactly why we pull these metrics yeah okay i'd guess five years if i if you put it into my head just because like based off what chris was saying that's probably your typical commercial lease for the first time business and first time with them and after those five years you've either made it and you feel comfortable about re-signing or you're or you're jumping ship jared it's all in there buddy of the 13444, does the report show how many are CrossFit strength?

It does all that. And if it doesn't show the exact number, it shows the percentages so that you could do the math yourself if you prefer numbers over percentages. Dude, I'm telling you, this thing is exhaustive. And you know what? He's not – this isn't a menu to make a nuclear bomb to where if you're off a little bit, you fucking blow up like your steak. There's nothing – that's why I tried to ask him in the beginning, what's this for? Who are you trying to manipulate? What are you trying to steal?

And it's not like that. It's like just use it how you want to use it. It's free. There's the barcode. You just click that with your phone and open it up. It's crazy. It's crazy transparent. I'm sure.

And even just now we just asked Chris, Hey, how come CrossFit gyms aren't making $3,500? They made $3,500 in profit per month last year and 3,500 this year. He doesn't, he doesn't, sorry. I don't know why.

Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it's not a mistake. Maybe it's the economy. Maybe like, maybe who knows the price of gold change. We don't know. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it's not a mistake. Maybe it's the economy. Maybe like, maybe, um, who knows the price of gold changed? We don't know. One of the best things you can do is read this guide and say, I'm going to, I'm going to kill everybody. I'm going to win this next year. I'm going to get double the results and then come back to me next year and say, screw you. I'm twice as good. Good. Do that. And I'm going to ask you what you did. And then we're

going to teach that to everybody. And then everybody's going to keep moving up. And while I definitely am not going to take credit for Jim's growth, it's, it's that sharing of information that's largely responsible for it. Because honestly, like while there are still some people de-affiliating and still some CrossFit gy gyms sadly going out of business, it's not nearly the rate it used to be. It's just we didn't see them all going out of business because they weren't connected, and we weren't learning from the ones who failed. There were so many new ones coming in that it looked like we were just growing all the time. I also want to say this. I misrepresented Chris. When I asked him earlier in the show, why are you doing this? He said, basically I'm paraphrasing, but I want to see the average

numbers so that I make sure that two brain business is beating all those averages numbers, or else I know we don't have a product. I'm kind of, yeah. So, and so it's, it's kind of basically he's, this is kind of an audit on his own business, and then he's sharing it with you. Yeah, we do that. And so the other thing that we share is like, who are the best, right? So imagine there was data collected on all CrossFitters, and we said the average deadlift of a CrossFitter is males 315, women 285. Awesome information to have. 315 is my first goal. But then you also

want to know who has the best deadlift in CrossFit. Okay. And because that's going to be your next target. And so we publish those every single month, like in all sex metrics too. And then we interview those people. What are you doing? Can I have your deadlift program? You know, and we share that with everybody else. Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks man. Um, I want to talk about cost of leads. Okay. Um, I asked you this, it's on page 17. Um, this is now, now we're going to fall deep into the weeds if you're an affiliate owner. Um, you'll, you'll probably, you might like this. Uh, I,

talk to me like I'm a fucking idiot. Susie explained it to me last night like I was an idiot and I still don't get it. Explain to me what a lead is. Why do you need them? Why are they so expensive? A lead is just a person raising their hand to say, I'm interested. And you can count on opening your doors and people just walking in your gym, but you'll probably starve. And this was my big mistake.

Instead, you have to be like – Like this guy Joe Neals that we've been following. He's doing a 30-day project where he spends an hour every day walking around his community talking to people about coming to his gym. He's getting leads, right? Yeah. Like he goes to Walmart and just talks to people on the cookie aisle. Yeah, perfect. I think I actually just met him. You have to be intentional no matter what you do. And that's legit. Walk around and talk to people. Ask people, I think we can help your husband.

Why don't you bring him in? Whatever, however you do that, you have to track like how you're spending your time because the one thing that affiliates are most interested in is marketing. And if you don't measure what's working for marketing, then you'll just throw money away. So for example, affiliate will ask us, hey, what do you think about putting like hangers on doorknobs in apartment buildings?

Well, what do those cost you? And how many leads will they get you? Like how many people after seeing those hangers will raise their hand and be like, yeah, tell me more. The reality is that cost for those leads suck, right? Like it's not effective. And so what we want to track is like, what does it cost you, the gym owner? What do you have to invest to get somebody to raise their hand and say, I'm interested. And so what we see here is like, since last year, the cost of doing that has almost doubled. Now, there's a variety of reasons for that. You know, gym owners are using more paid ads and the cost of paid ads are going up. They

have to run more paid ads and they have to invest more for the paid ads to work. But they're also using different media and they're experimenting in a lot of platforms. And that's why the costs are going up because they don't really have the system down yet. But next year, those costs are going to double again. So if you're in Eastern Europe right now, Facebook is now testing an option where you pay $9.99 a month and you don't see ads. So if you're advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and you're in Berlin today, you better start thinking about a new ad strategy. And that's where, you know, us collecting the data, figuring it out, trying it in 50 different places, and then telling you what works. Like that's where that investment really pays off. Wow. Yeah. And you have that, you have,

so this is the big picture. You have more, for the people you mentor, you have more granular data. And that's specific. Yeah. So we have, we teach everybody like you need to track what it costs you to get a lead because most people will say, I tried this marketing and it didn't work, but that's not true. Like they didn't measure it. It's like, how fit are you? I'm super fit. But if you don't measure your fitness, you don't know. And so we teach people, here's how to track this. Again, really simply, here's how to track how many people are raising their hand, how many of those people are coming in, and how many of those people

are signing up. You need to know that because if you're spending money on Facebook and people are interested and they come into your gym and it's like a pigsty and they hate it, well, you're spending money on Facebook and people are interested and they come into your gym and it's like a pigsty and they hate it, well, you're just giving Zuckerberg money for nothing. But it's not his fault. He's doing his job. And when I started my gym, I thought that my first mentor was going to teach me, here's how to do marketing. And he looked at the pictures of my gym. He's like, I wouldn wouldn't join that do not spend a dollar of marketing until you fix your gym oh yeah yeah i mean it was typical crossfit gym i i it was like 2 000 square feet the walls were black there was chalk on the floor metallica on loop i like

a new album an an old album. Black album on repeat. And like I had seen in the CrossFit Journal, Mike Workington's gym had a pirate flag in the corner. I'm like, okay, my biggest investment this month is this pirate flag. That's awesome. And yeah, so I was hanging over the bathrooms and the bathrooms were filthy, right? So people were coming in the door. Like, what is this? This one woman comes in and in hindsight,

she's probably the perfect, the person who needed me the most. And it was Tiffany. The last name started with a C and she comes in, she looks and there's a power cage on, on her left and there's chains hanging from it. And she goes, what the fuck is this?

And she turns around and leaves. And I mean, cage on on her left and there's chains hanging from it and she goes what the fuck is this and she turns around and leaves and i mean the chains weren't enticing i guess yeah i mean surprise you know naturopathic doctors were coming in and they're like what is this on your barbell is that blood and i'm like no it's. You know, thinking that would convince her to stay. But of course, you know, if your gym sucks, like don't spend money on ads until you fix that first. That's all I'm trying to say. Oh, of course my phone's not working.

That's amazing. Let me see if I can get this caller connected here really quick. Hold on. Let me see. Good old. I got a new phone. So let's see if this is fine. If this is finally going to work.

Oh, shit. Yeah. Let's see. Here we go. Moving up. Yeah. Let's see. Sorry, caller.

If you're still there. Oh, maybe I hung up on him. You're just going to get the. Maybe I hung up on you. If I hung up on him. You're just going to get the bum, bum, bum. I hung up on him. Maybe I hung up on you. If I hung up on you, I'm sorry. Call back. Chris, so you're saying that if someone – I'm looking at 2022.

I want to see if I – so I spent $1,000 on Facebook and 40 people responded, which means it ends up being $25 a lead. Yep, exactly. But that doesn't mean that those have converted to clients yet. Those are just they called me. So now it's my job once it's a lead to convert them. Yeah, I mean they've clicked something on Facebook or Instagram or wherever

and they've gone to your website. So if your website sucks like mine or you lost them and that's not zuckerberg's fault um what about um let me get say something i know absolutely nothing about what about getting leads while also adding value to your current client's value to your current clients experience so that might be hey we're doing a christmas party it's free you have to bring someone who's not a member of this gym you know what i mean so now we'll say that again is that dumb suza no no i said two girls like

it's a frat party oh right right you have to bring so so – so that way you add – like I'm trying to like steal a page. Like you're adding value for your clients with that money and – That's the best thing you can do, right? It's like – And increase your business. Yeah. So you start jujitsu. The boys are all doing jujitsu. The next client that's going to sign up at my gym is Haley because she's going to come pick up the boys are all doing jujitsu the next client that's going to sign up at my gym is hayley because she's going to come pick up the boys i'm going to be like hayley i'll tell you what instead of dropping them off picking them up sitting in the chair and watching them

why don't we set you up with a session over here and you can just try this out see if you like it and then it becomes this family thing, right? Now, obviously that's a bad example because she's trying to avoid you. But like, you know, most of the time, like the best marketing that I can do is, can I, how can I serve your spouse? How can I serve your kids? And at my gym, the fastest growing market is how can I serve your parents? growing market is how can I serve your parents? I want to talk about this position at HQ, the affiliate director position.

I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and I was thinking about when Kathy Glassman ran it, and I don't mean this as an insult at all. She ran as she was the the affiliate team was basically it was two things it was the concierge desk and it was the cashier and you need a cashier and you need a good cashier and you need a cashier that smiles and says thank you and here's your change and is there anything else i can help you with and and then the concierge is like, hey, if someone called and they needed help, or hey, they could say, hey, we have these resources, or you can consider Two Brain or whatever. But it basically should be someone who's intimate with the community, I'm guessing, who visits the affiliates.

But there's sort of a... You kind of don't want them selling you shit or being involved in growth you want you want them kind of to be the real person at hq that you're going to interact with and then the other the part that you would think that the affiliate director would do actually would come from the vision from the ceo's office and the media team. Have you given it much thought with that affiliate director? I mean, a lot of people did say that when they hired this new guy. A lot of people did say,

why don't they hire Chris Cooper? First of all, I know they can't afford you, but second of all, maybe that's not what the affiliate director should even be doing is what Two Brain is doing. Yeah, it's tricky because – so I'm not sure who the affiliate director is because the titles change. So when you say affiliate director – By the way, if you work at HQ and you're on the executive team and you haven't met Chris Cooper, you have not done your job.

Sorry, I don't mean to embarrass you, Chris Cooper, you have not done your job. Sorry. I don't mean to embarrass you, Chris, but like you're, you're, you've not met your, done your job. You should be talking to Chris at least four times a year, getting on the phone. Thank you. I think they have. Okay. Okay. Good. Okay. If you are, if you're a private equity company and I'm going to, I'm going to use the two brand example because we do get approached by private equity, you know, to buy you. Yeah. How close you've been to selling? Never. Never. Are you interested in? No. Hey, listen to anyone who wants to buy rogue and two brain package deal.

I will help you facilitate that. I have Bill and Katie's number and Chris's number. We'll start. All I want is 3%. that I have Bill and Katie's number and Chris's number will start. All I want is 3%. Starting at $1 million. 00.01 I could package up to brain and rogue and sell it to Bezos. Come on, Jeffrey. Sorry, go ahead. 00.04 No, it's cool. So 00.04 It's my show. I can pitch whoever I want.

Don't don't don't 00.05 Yeah, yeah, Bill, just don't kill me for him saying that. I love and respect Bill so much. Oh, he's the man. But if I'm private equity, I'm going to look at a company like Two Brain or CrossFit, right? And what I'm going to try and do is think about, if I buy this, how can I sell it in three to four years and make money? Because that's what they do. They don't buy a business because they want to operate it. So what they're going to do is they're going to say, okay, there's 931 gyms in Two Brain or 15,000 in CrossFit. There's two ways I can make more money or grow this company.

The first is to capture more value from the audience they have. So I can charge the gyms more or I could sell them more stuff. The other option is to grow the number of clients that they have, like grow the affiliates, grow the gyms in Two Brain, grow the audience, right? So if I'm the affiliate director, to me, it seems like I'm in charge of growing and capturing more value from within the ecosystem. So that means selling more stuff to the gyms that we have, or charging them more money or increasing the value to make it worth it. And I know like the rate increase topic has come up and like, there's reasons that gyms might even want it. And there's reasons that gyms might

be terrified of it. And we can get into those if you want. But like the first job I'm going to do as affiliate director is like, how can I make affiliation worth $10,000? Like a no brainer. It's worth $10,000 to me to pay this every year. And I think maybe like that's where they start. That's where I would start as the affiliate director. You have to increase the value of your service before you can charge more for it. Right. Makes sense. And could i think that that's kind of like where they're trying to find their footing right now is how do you can't imagine the affiliate director i'm and i'm not arguing with you i'm i can't imagine the affiliate director position

having any authority to do that in any meaningful way to the affiliates maybe i'm wrong to be completely fair to to greg which's bizarre than some aspects that he hasn't been touted as the greatest business person in our lifetime with the growth of what happened across the fastest growing chain in world history but the only nut we'd never cracked was retention yeah it's a tough one that was the only we cracked every nut and ran with it we were dunking the retention one and and that's the i think that's where two brain comes in because we weren't giving any advice we weren't giving any best practices even even i know that that's for some people that's a taboo saying but even at least at two brain bare minimum if you read the

book you're going to get 10 things like hey you better not do that until you've done this or you're gonna go broke 98.2 percent of the time right yeah we did we didn't even offer that at HQ so our retention was just a disaster you know the previous c-level team at HQ um they they got on some pretty tense phone calls with me and said like what are you telling these guys you know you're you're, you're conflicting with what, what we want to do. And, and our, our mission is just like keep the gyms open. And so over time, and I think like HQ staff has come around to this is that HQ is actually helping them a lot by stopping these gyms from going out of business. You know, and, and that's the key is like,

Two Brain doesn't see gyms go to business because we teach these guys how to run a business and stay open whether they stay with two brand whether they stay with crossfit that's their choice you know that's fine but like we want to make them sustainable and like the the greatest you know i said the greatest gift greg gave us was the opportunity to be an entrepreneur the greatest tragedy is how many people took that leap and then failed at it. And they didn't fail because of their love or passion or hard work or brains.

Or even that they were shitty coaches. Exactly, yeah. I mean, there's lots of shitty coaches making great living out there. And that's another reason. Yeah, I mean, it's another reason that affiliates need to be successful because if they're not, somebody else is going to take their place at the table, get in front of their clients and sell like multi-level marketing milkshakes.

You know, we need to be successful because we need to shine a light in all these dark corners of the world instead of letting the hucksters and the shysters sell their snake oil out of the gear garage to them. Natalie Bates, by the way, Natalie is, this is interesting too, because this is a dear friend of Greg's. If you go to a party at Greg's house, you could easily run into Natalie there. We will turn 10. Our CrossFit gym will turn 10 in January. But the last four years have been the hardest. Chris, thanks to Two Brain, we signed up this year and we're excited for the change awesome that's

good to hear thank you what does the 99 mean i mean i just made money um oh good for you um natalie hey uh stay in touch i want to have you on the show i'd love to talk about that uh let's talk like in the next six months. I want to hear the process the last four years. I love, we're always looking for people for the affiliate series, dude, Chris, we're going to have some dude on.

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Brave guy. Yeah. I'm so glad to hear you say that. I'm like, hey, when you come on the show he goes what for i'm like i want to see if you're fucking bat shit crazy or not you open a gym in san francisco are you nuts good for what what about cities that are collapsing open um uh opening gyms and like location must be location must be more important than ever now i mean there's some i don't know what's going on. Well, Vancouver.

Vancouver's nuts, yeah. Vancouver, like we're watching a civilization collapse there. Portland, we're watching like some weird shit happen in some places. Zombie land. Yeah. Are gyms hurting in Vancouver because of just the – Yeah. I mean, I guess there's no other way to say it, but the inability to get the drug addiction under control. Yeah, yeah.

And you know what? To be honest, it's happening everywhere. We have it in little Sault Ste. Marie on the border too. But the key, like when you're opening that city, is you've got an uphill road because you've got very high rent still. You have challenges with drug abuse, especially if you're in like a highly trafficked area.

And you've got competition coming East from Asia that makes, if you've got like a model that only sells group, boy, you've really got to fight ahead of you because Nike is selling cross-fitting workouts for 99 bucks a month. Oh, they really are doing that? Yeah. You've got, you've got companies like uh you know f45 moved out of australia east um there are some coming out of asia now that are doing it for like 70

bucks a month and they're identical to orange theory they're they're just a knockoff you know try it free for a month kind of thing but you you really have to understand that you, you have to stand alone as you know, a gym that the models coaching that gives people prescriptions that helps them with their nutrition and their, and their fitness and their guidance and their life. Like you have to differentiate yourself and, um, it's getting harder and harder if all you're doing is selling group classes. Um, uh, Spiegel,. Spiegel, you triggered me. I'm going to come back up to your comment in a second and smack you around a little bit unless Chris saves you.

Hold on one second. 321 Wellness. Mishigami? Mishigami, yeah. Awesome. So cool. Racist. Mishigami. Two Brain has taken us from possibly closing down this year to member retention, streamlined onboarding, and better member experience outside of CrossFit.

Man, I didn't realize how important that client retention is until I think it was Craig Howard or some – it was a gym that had tons of members. And I was like, wow, congratulations. He goes, yeah, kind of. And I go, why? He goes, because if you have 600 members, that means you're losing three every month. And when you lose three every month, that means you have to put on three every month. And, or you, or if you lose 13 every month, you have to put on 13 every month. And he goes, that takes a lot of time onboarding those people. And I was like, wow, it is. It's like bringing, bringing someone up to speed in the gym is a crazy time consuming.

I'm guessing. Yeah. And, And the pressure on you to be good at marketing, you know, I really don't feel pressure to be good at marketing at my gym because we just don't lose people very fast. So if I'm getting four new members a month, I'm growing because we just, we only lose three, you know, early on there were gyms who were even giving business advice and they were losing 30 people a month which means you got to get a new person to sign up every single day just to break even and those gyms were giving business advice yeah but i mean you see that a lot that that's fine if you're out there to help people then i got you back i don't we just i don't we

want to go to chris's house. Thank you. That's why we want to give this data, right? We want people to have real numbers to work from because even when I was trying to avoid bankruptcy in 2008, you go on the CrossFit message boards and it sounds like everybody's killing it except for you, but almost all those gyms are gone now. And it's just because nobody had defined fitness, so they didn't know how fit they were. That's all. Here's why I don't like just – this is going to get political.

I apologize. This is why I don't like everyone giving advice. If someone's – if 30 thugs come to my house to rob me and I can run out the back door with my family, I don't want your advice if your advice is stand your ground and fight, don't be a pussy, and then getting me killed. And there's a lot of that going on in the world these days. People giving people advice who need to fucking not get killed

so they can fight another day, but you from the comfort of your little fucking college campus are giving people advice that's getting them killed. We saw the same thing happen in the United States, people giving advice to people on the way cops should behave, and it ended up in a lot – thousands of unnecessary deaths. Remember, when the shit's hitting the fan, don't be giving fucking people advice to stand up and fight. Sometimes you got to go regroup somewhere. I don't think that's true yeah me neither it's just a it's emotional it's a irrational emotional reaction it's like telling someone like oh

business is suffering borrow a million dollars from the bank and rent out another 10 000 square feet oh no oh no don't worry you'll get your relationship is suffering have a kid yeah oh my god yeah exactly Make a love child. Yeah. Okay. Well, so because that's never going to go away and our kids especially are exposed to that all the time. Like the most important thing that we can do is teach them to be skeptical, like teach them healthy skepticism, teach them the scientific method, you know, teach them how to use tools like a profit and loss statement so they can actually evaluate what's working and teach them how to ask better questions you know so in our free groups because we do free groups at gymownersunited.com people will ask questions and other people will

jump in with advice and they're well-meaning and they're caring and they want to help but you always have to ask like is that your opinion or is that your experience? And if it's your experience, like what else have you tried? You have to approach this with science. And that's what attracted me to CrossFit in the first place was that Greg approached this with science. Out of 5,000 possible barbell exercises alone, he said, here's the 12 we're going to use. like out of you know 50,000 diets he said let's just do this and and that I think was his real genius was the ability to simplify complex optionality into like just do this you know Amundsen once told me this story of he was he was trying to like lose some body fat. Maybe you know this story, Sebi.

So Greg tells him to count his calories. It doesn't work. Greg gives him the zone book. I read the book, but nothing happened. So Greg's like, bring me your Tupperware. So he brings in his Tupperware the next day, and Greg takes out his marker, and he's like, draws a line on Tupperware.

Fill this up to this line with protein right you see greg doing that and and that's genius like it is so so so hard to take something that's really complex and and simplify it down to do this right now um and crossfit.com that's what that was it was a simplification that made fitness accessible to every single person. And Greg's genius was not being more creative or having more ideas than everybody else. It was cutting crap out and getting down to the essence of things. I mean, nobody else can define fitness and he did it in a hundred words, you know, and that's, that was really inspiring to me. And so when I see stuff like that in business, it's really resounding because I'm like, that doesn't make sense.

Or how can that claim possibly be true? Or can you justify that? What else have you done? I'll get off my science soapbox now. No, no. That's why you're here, to tell those stories. There was a – oh, sorry. Before I go on, what did you say that you have a free groups? What? West. What do we do? And so we just started like putting gym owners together into these,

into this one group and saying, here's a resource, here's what's happening. Here's our daily update on, on what to expect. And it worked amazingly well. People were sharing their stories. We were sharing resources. If a gym got locked down in Italy, we would call them like in the middle of the night and be like, what did you do? You know, how did you stay open? How did you deliver this online? And then we would go into Gym Owners United and say, hey, we just learned this, you know, and like, OK, so Sweden like isn't locking down. Here is how people are talking to their clients and their clients are still showing up. Right. So when you have a really big reach and network like this, you can learn really, really fast. And so by the time COVID lockdown started happening on the East Coast of the States, we already had a pretty good battle plan.

And so this is where we shared it, Gym Owners United. There's about 8,500 gym owners in there now. On the right here, gymownersunited.com. I'm just going to drop it in there. And you guys, Two Brain brain business runs that page. Yeah. So we read it. Free to everyone.

It's free to everyone. Yeah. Unless you're an asshole. We kick assholes out pretty quick. If you're trying to sell something like you're gone. So we've booted maybe 1700 people, but again, like I like that.

Yeah. That's fair. You got to do it. No, I mean, quality doesn't come from adding things on top, right? It comes from subtracting things until you get down to the core. And it's also, it's the police channel on the radio scanner. Like it has to be clean in order to deliver a high fidelity message. Like not that you have a problem with people selling stuff or assholes are

cool, but not on this channel. This is like, this is the high fidelity, like move forward channel. Literally separating signal from noise. Yeah. That's what Greg did with fitness. Thank you for working with my metaphor. Appreciate it. Thanks for the softball. And that's what we try to do, especially with the state of the industry. Like everybody's saying they're crushing it. Everybody's saying they're going to put 50 leads into your gym next month what are people actually

doing and that's why we collect this and publish it with our partners um there uh there was a something in here spiegel said i don't even really know what it means but uh it it triggers the out of me here we go here go. You can't increase retention unless you do quality control local affiliate. So what I'm I don't like that. Like I'm hearing something I don't like. Well, so that's, that's the scariest thing here, right? Like, I'm not scared of the affiliate fee going up. If you've been around for five years, you've got a great head

start. It shouldn't bother you if your affiliate fee goes from three to $4,000. If it does bother you, okay, let's grow your business so that that doesn't affect you. But what does bother me is loss of optionality. You know, one reason that we affiliated with CrossFit is so that we don't get like the golden handcuffs that you would get with an F45. You know, you sign up for a franchise and you're told, here's the playbook. Here's what you do. Here's your branding. Here's your equipment.

Like there's pros and cons there. But one of the big cons is that, you know, if the franchise is going down, like your gym is in trouble and you're not going to get any help. And, you know, we talked to this franchise late last year. It's a kickboxing franchise.

Over 50% of their franchisees are losing money, and they're going to go bankrupt. And they're screwed. CrossFit gym affiliates are not like that. Like, you can do whatever you want. If you're in a nosedive, you can fix it. There's resources out there. But the key is that nobody is imposing systemization on you. And so early on, you know, when they introduced like the affiliate playbook, I didn't like the name, but I liked the sentiment of tools, not rules. You know, if, if I tell you like, here's five different ways to. I think the guy who wrote that book went to F45. Could be. Or to Orange Theory. Didn't, didn't didn't didn't who's the guy who owned brick

um jared um i don't think he wrote the affiliate playbook i but some very smart people were involved anyway you know okay okay okay yeah i mean so there you know there's a great example um you have to question everything right right? Like you have to have tools that allow you to say, is that, does that actually matter? You know, did that actually work? Like, will getting the L3 really make me more profitable? Will training my coaches really solve my retention problems? Maybe the answer is yes, but like you need to look at numbers. really solve my retention problems? Maybe the answer is yes, but like you need to look at numbers. And so instead of giving people a sample affiliate playbook with like, here's what you could do, or like the global mentoring thing that they're doing, where it's like, you should have a

plan. What they should actually do is teach everybody how to read a profit and loss statement and how to do their own experiments, you know, and then three years in the gym owner will have figured out what works for them. They know how to tell if it's working or not and where they need to double down and et cetera. And they're good. You know, um, we work with gyms for an average of two years, one month, nine days, but they're going to keep their gym for 30 years. And the stuff that we're going to do with them is what makes that possible for most of them um uh look at look at um spiegel let me just push back on you a little bit you're saying you can increase you can't increase retention unless you do quality control look at f45 they have quality control across all their gyms and and they're sinking but let me also stand by you

spiegel and say this maybe to chris what ch Chris is saying is that we may have a little worse retention, but it's worth it in order to keep autonomy. Yeah. That's Jim. That's right. And why do we want autonomy? Because that's the spirit of who we are as a group, CrossFit. And it'll kill it if we don't. The culture. That's right. Okay. of who we are as a group, the CrossFit and you know, the culture, the culture. Okay. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you're in a franchise,

by the way, an affiliate called me last night and said that he goes, Hey, if they, I don't give a fuck what the affiliate fees are. If they tell me to do one thing, I'm fucking out. This is a massive affiliate, massive. One of the biggest ones out there. And I'm like, Oh wow. That's interesting. We all want to be successful and we want to do it our own way. But there are certain models that you can copy and follow. And that's really key, right? Use my model as a template, get it working, get successful, and then change the model if you want to. But don't try and just figure it out from

scratch. I mean, Greg's premise, as he explained it to me, was that you create a system big enough where not only does the cream rise, but the cream of the cream is actually under the tent. You know, so, for example, since CrossFit launched, there have been probably 100 equipment companies start right as a guest. And there's only one Bill Hanegar, but Bill Hanegar is in that group and you have to cast a wide enough net to get Bill in that group. I mean, I think the Bill story was there was a CrossFit event. He volunteered to unload the truck that was coming from Perform Better or something like that. And he was just like, I could do this better. And boom, Rogue. And literally unloading the truck with him is the guy that found it again faster. And they were big for a little while too. It's this free enterprise system that creates companies like Beyond the Whiteboard, that creates Watt know, that creates like Wattify that creates two brain. It's, it's just like the people

who are good gym owners or they're, they actually are gifted at something else. They show up if you cast a broad enough net. The flip side of that is that when you lose somebody, you have to figure out why, or else your churn rate is going to be too fast and you're not going to learn any lessons and you're never going to progress. And that's like what's missing is that connection. And we can't learn anything from the 10,000 affiliates who have shut down because we don't actually know what they did wrong. So that's kind of the mission with the data set here. That's interesting.

That was something that Bruce always wanted to pursue also. Like what is the reason that people uh shut down their gyms chris in the um in the state of industry report that comes out today you can click the qr code and get it uh 7 000 of you will be lucky enough to get one of these in the mail um i i i scoured it thoroughly and i think you missed the page there is a way for everyone to have a successful gym that chris doesn't uh include in here and i apologize to call you out on this, Chris. If you can win the CrossFit Games five times consecutively in a row, you can open a gym and it will automatically be successful. Guaranteed.

This page is not in here. That is why you listen to the Sevan podcast. My ways are bulletproof. Chris's is like, you know, it's not bulletproof. Five wins in a row open a gym you're gold hard training you can charge $2.50 a member unless you open

the gym in Vancouver then you're on your own you're still in trouble you need six wins to get that there's a interesting stat let's go back down into the weeds page 27 minimum classes this these are the kind of cool things in here yeah that you might not even think well i wouldn't think i guess if you're a gym owner you think of this um can you

talk to us about um this page and the fun little uh dad on here yeah so what's interesting is like um a lot of gyms for example offer way too many classes and so the gym owner winds up working way too much getting burned out and honestly like some of these classes have one or two people in them and what they've done is they've just opened up the class time and then fingers crossed enough people show up to make the class viable. That's not what Greg did, right? Greg was doing like small group training. He was not trying to get 18 people or 30 people into a group. So what, what's really encouraging this year is that the gyms are actually doing fewer

classes, which I love to see because client numbers are going up and that means that the classes are busier. The gym owners are working a little bit less and they're probably bringing more energy and better quality to the classes that they're doing. And so most popular weekend class times in the United States, 9am, 8am,

10am popular weekend classes. And so you don't make, maybe you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Yeah. And I mean, some of these numbers, if you're an affiliate owner and you're like, oh, the most popular class on the weekend is 9am. Duh. Sure. You know, if you've been around for a while, you probably already know that. But I tell you, like, this is one of the questions we get

most often. What class time should I start with? And and this is this is the difference between having information and having a mentor so we would say well the most important class times seem to be 5 a.m 5 p.m 4 p.m and 6 a.m so you need you need two classes five and six a.m four and five p.m let's start there let's announce this as your september schedule or your your fall 2023 schedule this as your September schedule or your fall 2023 schedule. And then we're going to audit, like where are people showing up? Oh man, 5 p.m. is bananas. Okay. So we're going to have a 4.30 and a 5.30 p.m. in our spring 2024 schedule. And you alter that schedule as you go. Nobody's going to guess right, right out of the gate. And having these data like makes it a lot easier to make good guesses. But you also have to

have a system that allows for correction over time you know like science and and once again these locations will matter right like if you're if you're in a high foot traffic area probably the the class the 5 a.m class in manhattan is probably packed yeah right because those people that need are going to be going to work and they live just right above the CrossFit gym and the skyscraper. Yeah, it's very true. And, you know, one thing that we tell people when they're just starting a gym is like, if you've got a location in mind, fold up a lawn chair, go to that location and sit there, you know, from 5am to eight one day and from 5pm to 9pm the next day, just notice when

people are walking by, there's no sense opening up, you know, in a high traffic retail area with crazy rent, and only being open from 8am till 4pm. When everybody's at work, it doesn't make sense. You know, it's like, if you're going to do that, you might as well work for the, uh, the DMV equivalent in Canada, which is only open from 10 AM till 4 PM Monday through Thursday when no 16 year old can ever go there. Right. Like, yeah. Ask me how I know. But the, uh, the key is like, you want to be open when your clients are available. Maybe you don't need to be there at 5 AM, but maybe you need to be there at 5am and no other time. You don't know until you test, but at least you got a good starting point here. And that's what also makes it a little bit cheaper to get started as a CrossFit gym, because you have the autonomy to say, okay, we're only going to be open for four hours to bookmark

the day. And then we'll adjust according to what the data is showing us with the clientele. 100%. Yeah. It's a great way to bridge that gap too. Like if you're working a full time job somewhere else and you're saying, I need to quit this job so that I can be at my CrossFit gym 15 hours a day. That's not true. Like you can start off with four or five classes. You can bootstrap. It's one of the very few businesses left in the world where you can do that. Yeah.

And I've made multiple adjustments. When I first started, I was gun ho and I was like, we're not closing. It's just going to be open gym through the whole time. And it just completely screwed myself because then I was there from 5am to 8pm with no break. Same. Yeah, man. Same. Yeah. You want to walk two blocks to get coffee? What did you do, Matt? Yeah. Well, I didn't. And when I did, at that point, I just started saying, well, shit, nobody ever shows up between one and three anyways. I could probably sneak away, which isn't bad because that's the one time somebody shows up for that hour when I decided to go to Starbucks to have a break. And then they're like, I thought you said you were open, which then creates an issue, right?

Oh, yeah. I don't know if you guys remember the Steve's Club snacks, but I mean, I would like live off those because I couldn't leave the gym. Yeah. That's too bad that went out of business. They, they pivoted. Uh, they're doing something different now. Uh, I can't remember what it's called, but they were, um, our featured, uh, charity at the two brain summit two years ago. You know that he had, he probably could have used your help. I want to say he had a couple monster years of success and then the,

and then something happened, but man, those were awesome. His kids, I was the best beef jerky in the business. It was great. Yeah. Yeah. Steve is an amazing guy. His kids grew up. He started traveling to hockey tournaments with them and yeah, he eventually passed the torch. Jim, Jim worldwide. I ran a CrossFit in New York city and another right across the river in New Jersey. 5am was the busiest class in New Jersey.

And it was dead in New York city since no one commuted. Oh, okay. What do I know? Well, it's, it's different everywhere, right? Like for example, I can't run a 5am class. Nobody would show up because it's too cold and their cars won't start in the winter time. In the summertime, they all want at 5 a.m so that they can get out of work at four and go straight to the cottage oh right you have to adjust and you had long days up there also yeah very much so yeah you know the polar bears all wake up at 3 p.m so you got to to be done by that didn't get eaten uh i um i want to talk about some uh not quantitative

qualitative data when i one of the things i think about uh when i go to bed at night is when i i'm gonna come on the show in the morning I tell myself when I go to sleep someone get a good night's sleep and Prepare yourself. This is gonna sound kind of weird But I want to I don't know if the word is channel I Want to be present I want to be present if there is a God I want I want God to be present for the show I want to be present I want to be a portal of presence for the show at all times. And if I don't feel like I can do that, I don't want to come on the air.

I want to be present. I want to bring my A game for my guests. I don't want it to be any like – and it's easy. You don't even have to do research. I just have to be fucking present, like crazy present. And then I can – and I'll just start channeling just fun shit. Like crazy present. And then I'll just start channeling just fun shit.

Are there people that just... Does a CrossFit gym owner need to do that too? Like do they need to... Like is there some... Like if you're just not a happy person, should you just fuck off and not open a gym? Like is there someone who just should not open... Like I see people who work so hard on their podcast, but they're just holding back. They're, they're like,

there's someone in this that I know has a podcast who's so nice, but they dim their own light with their kindness. They should just be present and explode. You know what I mean? Is there, um, which is interesting, right?

They dim their own light to be nice. You can tell they're, they're making themselves small to be nice and it's like dude stop making is there someone who like hey dude like the problem with your gym what made me think about this is someone said in here like hey the reason why gyms fail is just they're just shitty with business acumen someone oh here we go the um the real issue is incompetence of the affiliate owner some of them think it's a franchise others know that it isn't and want to be left alone the one struggling or simply a business incompetent but are there other ones

that just like hey dude no one wants to fucking hang out with you yeah 100 and and i think there's a you know there's a yin and yang there like if you're not good at business you're broke you're starving you're mad this is certainly me i'm only speaking from my experience here. Nobody wants to be around. In 2009, nobody wanted to be around me at 6 a.m. because I was exhausted. I was mad that the bathrooms were dirty and I had to clean them before I coached the first class. Hadn't eaten yet. Maybe needed another cup of coffee. I was broke. I was stressed about finances at home and what was going on there. I was missing my kids. And the group comes in and they're late. That's a lot of shit you just said, by the way.

That's a fucking hard life. It's typical. It's very common. And the only way that I finally realized it was I had this business mentor, Dennis. And he's like, you need to take that first hour of the day and work on growing your business, hire somebody else to run that class. And so I hired this girl named Charity, very over the top, bubbly. She was a college student at that time, very passionate about CrossFit. She went and got her L1 on her own. She didn't have near the

knowledge or experience that I did, but people loved to see her at 6 a.m that class dramatically grew and i learned my lesson like did you resent her for how happy and nice she was for about five minutes and then i was like fuck you i hate you you're you're attractive smart and happy. Fuck off. Get out of here. Yeah. But luckily I was also old enough to realize like, she's doing me a big favor here. Like, you know, stick it. So, um, then it was like, okay, I, nobody wants to be around me when I'm like that. Like my bad attitude stunk and people can smell it. And, um, if you look at like, who are the big successes in fitness in the year? Like Greg is a unicorn. Here's this scientific smart dude.

The really huge successes in fitness over the years are, you know, Suzanne Somers, right? Kathy Ireland. It's the people who can get up there and smile and be happy all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. The Tybo guy, Billy, Billy, uh, not, was it Tybo? The Billy Banks guy. He was super positive. Massive energy. The P90X guy, the beach body dude, like Richard Simmons, you know, wanted to be around. I mean, if I stood in a room with Richard Simmons and there were 300 people in that room,

I'd be standing by myself alone because everybody would want to talk to Richard Simmons, right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah, it's also what Peloton's built off of, right? A lot of people say that. Wow. Because you're just-

100%. So the differentiator there is the person who's leading that class. And really that's what Nike is doing too, is they are just going around like, you know, San Francisco and saying, who are the best fitness instructors at the spin studios, at the yoga place, the personal trainers, Hey, come and work for us. And, you know, unfortunately like the bar for a salary in fitness is really low. If you pay somebody $60,000, they're crushing it. And you attract that person and you build your brand off personality, not on methodology. Hey, that's another reason, by the way, I think that

the affiliate, if they, I don't know the new guy, but that's another reason why Gary Gaines, did you ever meet Gary Gaines? I did. Yeah. He was, I mean, he, I thought, I mean, he'd been doing CrossFit forever and he was big and beautiful. And very charismatic dude. Yeah. Yeah. Cool as shit. Smiling, confident. Like that's why I thought, well, I mean, that's a good face. If I, if I'm, if I'm an affiliate and I'm paying money, I'd like it to be to that guy, someone like him. Because you want to give your money to something that you like and feels right, right? I'll tell you though, when I started getting on calls with Gary and Austin Maliolo and Daniel Chaffee, it was very obvious. Beast.

it was very obvious beast yeah right like i like austin i like daniel and i was just meeting gary yeah but it was very obvious to me who the genuine people in the room were oh and so when he left and the conversation shifted to austin i think that was a big upgrade right i and i yeah and i hear what you're saying the that's the other thing that these people who are coming from the outside are going to struggle with. They come from really disingenuous fucking places. And so that's why I don't like using the word authentic anymore because that's the word these ding-dongs use. Authentic. And it's like, dude, stop. We already know that you haven't been authentic yet. The tech world's a mess, man.

I don't think it's a good place to draw people from. I don't think it's a healthy environment. I think it's – yeah, it's not a healthy environment to draw. Those people need a sabbatical. Those people need like – I also wonder how successful they actually are because if you were an affiliate owner and you could read this in the State of the Union – or excuse me, State of the Industry. That happens all the time, Sousa. That happens every day.

I have to catch myself. Whoever named this thing State of the Industry is out of their mind. They should put a picture of someone, a president on there. But the point that Smith was making is that you could just hang CrossFit on your door and your gym would be wildly successful. And because it was new, you had a lot of these early adopters, like people were just piling in because they heard of CrossFit. And so I wonder if some of these execs that are coming from other tech companies just kind of rode that wave also of success in the tech industry, especially as social media was exploding. And you see on the resume youtube linkedin instagram face dude if you come from youtube or facebook or instagram or linkedin like google like you're that you were already the fucking

there's nothing on the line when you go to work every day you are you are the you are the brontosaurus and you're right so in my way. So I wonder what happens when you switch that and you come into, for lack of better words, a receding market in a company that does not have the ridiculous access to capital that those companies did. And the success is really, it's going to be put up on a pedestal now because it's not going to be masked by all these other factors that are coming into play during your time with the company. And so I'm just curious as to like, you know, how, as they fall back on these resumes, which it seems as to why, how they're choosing to hire these people, how much of that resume

will uphold now in this current climate and with this company? Well, CrossFit is a unique beast. I mean, you guys have said it all the time, right? It's like, okay, we're Facebook, we're good at being Facebook, and now we're going to buy the Catholic church. And we're still going to come in on Sunday, we're still going to say the prayers, the priests are going to have the rose, we're going to light the candles, but we're not going to talk about God anymore. anymore. And that, you know, that's a real challenge. And the difference is that like the software world and the gym world are very different. It's a product versus a service. And you really also, even, even in the gym world, like you have to be careful about people giving you advice or telling you how to run a business, but they didn't make money in their, in their gym. Like they made it in software or whatever, supplements. Selling M&Ms is totally different than getting people to lift heavy shit.

Yeah, and I think probably the execs know this. And so if they're coming from a software background, I think that they understand it's not the same as a service business. I think it's different to intellectualize it besides actually know it. It is a very bizarre world. Making the shift and understanding Greg took me 10 years. Maybe I'm slow. But there are some things that are really counterintuitive.

You think your whole life that you're supposed to make money and sell people shit and like you'll be in big trouble if you if you try pumping that shit around here you know because because people because at the end of the day the person that's gonna have to do all the work is the guy that you're also collecting money from right very true he doesn't get to sit down and eat a box of twizzlers and watch a movie. You're not giving him that. Hey, go ahead. Were you going to say something? No, the gym business is like one of the hardest in the world because nobody wants to start and it's very easy to quit. And so like you have to be good at things like retention.

I mean, Facebook doesn't have to be good at retention because you're addicted in the first 30 minutes, right? Instagram does not have to worry about length of engagement. It's just like, oh yeah, okay. We tapped into the brand chemicals and now we're a drug. in the first 30 minutes, right? Instagram does not have to worry about length of engagement. It's just like, oh yeah, okay, we tapped into their brain chemicals and now we're a drug. And so, you know, understanding the gym world is hopefully what these new executives will want to do. And that's more than just working out. And it's definitely more than getting your L1. Like you really have to look at data and say, where can we help most? If you want to add value into the, the customers, the affiliates that you

have. Um, why hasn't, um, two brain started, uh, an affiliate program? Why don't you guys just step into the space? Um, uh, call it, um, uh, two brain fitness and just step into the space. I don't want anybody buying my brand right like you you started a gym to have like savon crossfit or or whatever it's who's the strength and conditioning that's your brand that's your business you're the entrepreneur i want to give you all the benefits of a franchise the data the systems whatever without the handcuffs or without the risk you know know, I mean, I want your gym to outlive two brain. I want your gym to last 30 years.

They could, they could. Let me see if I'm understand what you're saying. So, so the reason people used to always say to Greg, Hey, why didn't you get RX bar sold for 600 million? Why didn't, why, why didn't you get into the fitness space? And he's like, Hey, cause I don't think I can be the master at those things. Bill's the greatest ever at making equipment.

That is the greatest at making bars. I'm going to stay in my lane. But why not – yeah, Seve's Cuck Fit. Yeah, thank you. Why not just have – because you don't think that's the service that you provide. I'm trying to understand what you said. I'm trying to understand what you said. I didn't really understand what you said. You don't,

you don't provide the service to give value to affiliation. You provide the service to be successful, a successful business. Yeah. So more than anything else, we train the entrepreneur. I want you to be a successful entrepreneur. I hope that you're successful in fitness because that will change people's

lives. But if I say you're going to call yourself a two-brand gym and here's the systems that you're going to run um you take on brand risk i add all kinds of costs i have to charge way more to do that and it doesn't add value it doesn't get anybody any fitter so what's the point like call it your own brand as long as you're not like uh you know poisoning yourself with your own with a bad brand um your brand is going to be way more powerful than mine because you own it and you're passionate about it and you're going to go out there every day and change lives under your own flag instead of the black and gold two-brain flag um uh this is i i've heard this floating around a lot lately private equity buys 200 million crossfit for 200 million then settled the nsca suit for 100 million

now they basically got the company for 100 million yeah i've heard that i don't know if that's true but maybe but it could be true but what a challenge is is like you know if you think of crossfit as a baseball card which is an analogy I got from a very smart guy, you know, their job is not hold the baseball card and put it in a vault forever. It's like increase the baseball cards value and then sell it. So what's happened is that since CrossFit was purchased, interest rates have gone through the roof. So at this point, CrossFit HQ dramatically has to improve the value of CrossFit if they're going to sell it along like the typical three to five year window. So that's why I think maybe some affiliates are starting to see these signals and get a little

bit jumpy. Like, are they going to franchise us? Are they going to standardize our operations? Are they going to force us all to use one piece of software? Or like, do we all have to buy our t-shirts from the CrossFit website? Do we all have to use CrossFit of software? Like, do we all have to buy our t-shirts from the CrossFit website? Do we all have to use CrossFit global mentoring? Or, you know, is CrossFit going to sell pull-up bars? That's what's got people spooked. And for good reason. Like when you start seeing signs of, we want you all using our marketing.

We want you all using our software. That's when you know, like, these are the first stages of building something that captures more value inside and will eventually turn into a bigger sale. That's so basically I was on the phone the other night with Sousa. Sousa, sorry if I'm mischaracterizing this or revealing a private conversation. But Sousa said when Greg sold CrossFit, they pointed at something and they said, that's CrossFit. Do you want to buy it for 200 million? And they said, yeah. Now Sousa tells me what they're doing is is they want to make this thing look less um what's the word ephemeral what's what's ephemeral they and they want it

to look more real like hey that's not just an idea of a car over there look I can point at the wheels so he says they're trying to solidify this thing under like get like we actually control if we can show we control these gyms more we can point at the tires of the car we can get them to do things we can have everyone stand up and sit down they did not we used to not have that control over them look at this control we have we can make them hang this sign in their window and then that way they can sell it for more because they can actually point to the bag of m&ms now when suza was explaining that to me i was like oh shit then i wonder if the next thing because we see these insane valuations for these companies like soul cycle or that have 30 locations right yeah and so if you could point to some control over 10 000 locations on six

continents um the valuation for this thing could go skyrocket into the billions overnight. Absolutely. But boy, man, you could really fuck this thing up too if people start jumping ship. Or if someone – I think this thing is in jeopardy if someone's starting another affiliate program, to be honest with you. I think that if they're not careful, you hand out surveys like they're handing out and don't tell people what they're for, people are going to get – what's that? Mad giddy. Not even mad. They're going to get nervous.

They're going to make irrational decisions. Yeah. They're going to start – like the buildings on fire, they're going to start jumping from the windows. Yeah, I know personally when CrossFit Canada sent out a survey a few months ago, the survey was co-sponsored by DAXCO, and DAXCO owns Zen Planner. And so the first page of the survey is a release of information to DAXCO. Well, why do I want Zen Planner to have my numbers?

And I don't think anybody at HQ maybe like did this on purpose. Maybe it was just kind of like, oh, if we do this partnership with Daxco, maybe we can help or whatever. But the reality is like, it stopped me from doing the survey. And so now you get, you get people suspicious about what's going on behind the scenes. You know, if a software company approached HQ and said, yeah, we'll sponsor you 10 million a year, but every affiliate has to use our software, like what's gonna happen there? People will de affiliate. There is a there's a page in there where you talk about the dates that the data was taken.

And since then, I feel like there have – with the hiring of DeCunes and the hiring of Josh Graw, G-R-A-U. DeCunes was the head of the affiliate department. Josh Graw is the head of the marketing department, which I still call the media department, but I should get over that. It's not. And the making of these videos, I don't know if you've seen them. Andrew Hiller's made some videos. Basically, there's these videos going out now and there's a lot of social media pressure and a lot of pressure on YouTube basically like saying, hey, like this guy who runs the affiliate department, I don't know if you know this, they sent out a letter saying he doesn't have his level one well to open an affiliate you have to have your level one so the whole thing's kind of bizarre right why did you send out an

email saying he's going to get his level one like it's bizarre um so um so basically he's been exposed and i feel like that there's a lot and now i I know I live in an echo chamber, but I feel like there's a lot of rumblings going on. And there is even a stat in this state of the industry report. There's a 9% number. Do you know what I'm referring to? Let's pull this up. This is in the state of the industry that's released today. If you want to copy and get it with the code there, with the barcode there, point your phone at it and hit that QR code.

With the code there, with the barcode there, point your phone at it and hit that QR code. It says 9% of the 13,444 respondents were unsure, apathetic, or hopeful for the return of Greg Glassman. And this is a big question I'm asking, but do you think that things have changed since you took this, since the new 2023 have changed significantly since in the attitude of gyms? And are you surprised to see this, this people like this 9% number? Well, I'm surprised by the 9% number, but if you scroll down a little bit, like the approval rating for HQ has actually gone up. I know. And that's the part I'm struggling to believe, but maybe it's because I'm biased and I don't want to believe it. So I'm open to that. I mean, every data set is limited, right? Okay, right. Well, I'm just thinking times have changed.

This is now eight months old, right? The data, yeah. Yeah, we ended the collection period in July or something. So it's like four months old. Okay, so not eight months old. But what's interesting about that 9% is that nowhere did we write Greg Glassman in this book. So people wrote that in. And I think that's really, yeah, yeah.

It's not like they were like, better, worse, Greg Glassman. You know, check one. So 800 people had to write that in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Holy shit. Hey, the other thing I would like to point out too is that just concluding in July, as an affiliate owner going to the games this last year with dave back and stuff i would say that that was the height of my like comfort level and

feeling like hq is back on track in terms of like what it could offer that old school feel when i was at the games and all this stuff and then i would say since the since the games that stock with me has plummeted in their new choices of hire and different things like that. So there was this big peak like, yeah, we're at the games. This has got the old school feel. Dave's back. We got Don here.

He's shaking hands and kissing babies and what have you. And I was like, yes, this is it. And then since then, that has just – But we're also probably not good. You're asking people the – Susan and I are standing on the top of Everest, and people are're asking people the weather susan and i are standing on the top of everest and people are asking us what the weather is yeah and there's only room for you know what i mean and it's like like we don't have any fucking we don't know what the fuck the weather is we're chill we're stuck on the top of the mountain yeah yeah well i mean i was skeptical

you know i was optimistic with eric rosa optimistic with Gary Gaines, and I slowly became skeptical. And I think Don has actually done a good job. And so to me, I like what Don has done enough to wait and see what happens with Jay. And full disclosure, I'm having a conversation with him tomorrow. It's a meeting for the first time. having a conversation with him tomorrow. It's a meeting for the first time. I mean, yeah, you have to, I would imagine like, what if, what if the videos were released differently? So CrossFit media is like, okay, we're bringing in this guy. He's going to be the head of affiliates. Five years ago, he actually said some derogatory stuff about CrossFit, but since then he did

CrossFit and he loved it. Like, what if we released that video first? You know, here's the biggest CrossFit skeptic on a public stage. Oh, actually he's admitting he was wrong. And now he loves it. Like if that's the video that comes out before Andrew put his out, I mean, that would have gone a long way. And so a lot of this is, it's not like Show him working out in a gym, all sweaty. And he's on his back and you interview him and be like can you believe that you used to not like this and he's like god i was dumb and then you flash and show that old video and then you show him getting up and by then he should have also already done i've been to four level ones not i don't i agree it could have gone a huge way working out at the level one when you have that yeah the fact that

they're ignoring chris sorry the fact that they're ignoring – Chris, sorry to interrupt. The fact that there's two people, me and Hill, are putting out content every single fucking day now, and they're at a huge disadvantage if they don't – they're not controlling the megaphone. Right. We've taken it from them. It's not spin. It's just context, right? Yes, yes. So you understand. Self-awareness.

If I see you outside take a can of Raid and kill a beehive, I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind? Like, what are you doing? But then if you tell me, hey, these are killer bees from Africa. We took three yesterday and – Something. Yeah, yeah, something. Yeah, yeah, something. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's too late. They can't go back. No, no. And I think that's a – With that mistake. Right.

Yeah. There's – And Andrew also released a video of my interview with Greg. And that for me was so valuable. You know, going to Portland, sitting at his kitchen table for two hours and just hitting record and asking him, you know, point blank the stuff that I knew I would never get

the chance to ask him again. I think a lot of affiliates might find good information in that video, but also like hope and optimism. Because if I saw anything at the Rogue Invitational, it's that the community is alive and well, and the community will survive and thrive and grow and support one another and outlast whatever happens at HQ, good or bad.

I just typed in Chris Cooper, Greg Glassman. Is it episode 93? Yeah, if you just go to 2brandbusiness.com forward slash Greg, you can hear the whole thing. How many times have you interviewed him? Once? Several times informally, but that was the only time we sat down somewhere with a microphone and prepared questions. Is it October 30th, 2017? Does that sound right? That's right? Yeah. And I'll throw that in the, um,

you're supposed to be there savvy and something came up, but, uh, but he was there and a cool Carol was there. Yeah. A bunch of, uh, a bunch of his folks were around. Um, you can copy and you're going to put that in the show notes. Yeah. Awesome. Right now. So there's something very interesting about you and greg and and and i and i don't i don't want to get biased because i know a lot of people think this guy's a charlatan and a salesman uh there's this guy running for office in the united states named vivek ramaswamy and the thing that i like about

the three of you guys is people can ask you anything so people don't like this like you greg doesn't feel like he needs to be prepared he's not afraid to be ambushed chris cooper is not afraid to not be prepared and uh and and and be ambushed and that's really refreshing thanks that's that's really um i don't have to worry about offending you i can ask ask you anything. I can be, you know what I mean? You're like, um, in the beginning, Jared Graybiel was like, Hey, where are they getting this data from? You're very transparent in, in this, in the state of the industry report. Hey, yeah, we know we get, you know, a 900 of the respondents were from our, uh, our clients already. Yeah. You

tell us what the data set is, all of it. You tell us the dates, um, when you don't know something, Hey, why do you think it turned out like that? You just say, I don't know. And what's crazy is if anyone would know or have ideas on it, it would be you. Oh, thanks. Yeah. I mean, well, it's just the way it is. I mean, there's no one who has the view that you have. No one. So even if someone doesn't want to pay you for their services, if they want to see something that no one else can see, they should go over and visit Two Brain. There's no one so so even if someone doesn't want to pay you for their services if they want to see something that no one else can see they should go over and visit two brain there's no one who has your view thank you that's that's a that's a fact that's not a that's that's quantitative data that's not qualitative thank you the advantage that i had i think was publishing

all my mistakes up front like if anybody wants to read about here's how I screwed up like that's my entire first book and um what I learned from that was like if you tell everything every everybody like all the bad things about yourself and all your mistakes you don't have to hide anything and so you don't have to be worried about ambushes because there's like nothing left. Right. So my gym struggled over the last four or five months. We published an entire podcast episode, several blog posts about like here's what happened, here's why I was struggling, and here's how I fixed it because I would never want to hide that. Wow. Wow.

Hey, so that's not – you weren't like tripping a little bit? Like that would be embarrassing i don't want to share that yeah it's scary but i mean i know like okay a lot some people are going to take that and be like haha you know this this guy owns the biggest gym mentorship practice on the planet and like his own gym was struggling see i told, but the people that I care about, like the smart kids, the caring kids, um, they read that or watched it or listened to it. And they were like, thank you so much for sharing that. I feel better. In one case, a woman posted or shared with me that like, she was going to keep going instead of shutting her gym down because she was right where I was. she was right where I was. Yeah. And you know, what's interesting about that too, is that's different than if you would have been like, um, you know, God forbid, sorry to put this example out there, but if you would have been like, Hey guys, I'm going through a divorce right now. Things are hard. Like people think that that's being authentic. That's none of anyone's business. That's your shit. Yeah. But it is authentic to just be like, hey, this is relative to what I'm trying to say to you already, to the platform I stand on, which is running a successful gym. In a nutshell, can you tell us what did happen?

Yeah. How old is the gym? Can you tell us what did happen? Yeah. So how old is the gym? Oh, 2005. So 18 years, over 18 years now. We were locked down in Ontario for almost two consecutive years. And there were periods when we were technically open, but we were open with massive restrictions.

So you had to show proof of vaccination. You had to wear masks even during your workout, which sucked. Through all that, we did pretty well. We had 78% revenue retention. And then coming out, in most places, gyms saw a surge of about 8% in the first two months that they reopened. We didn't see that, but we weren't worried about it because Catalyst had been so profitable for so long that we were just sitting on cash and no big deal if we have a couple of bad months. And then after about a year of that, I started looking at our numbers and it was like, we were down like 70%. And I started going,

what's happening here? And then I finally realized that I had to jump in myself, that it was really up to me. And so I chronicled like that entire journey, feeling absolutely down, coming close to actually just selling the gym and then deciding not to. And then like the exact steps that I took to rebuild it. We did all that on a blog. We shared it on a podcast, everything.

And even the staff at my own gym were like, we had no idea, but they loved it. So was that an emotional journey oh yeah i can't tell you the times i would call work because you don't need that gym for you don't need that gym now financially you can feed your family without your gym yeah exactly but it's my gym right you know and like i don't want to lose my gym i love my gym there were things about it that i didn't love at the time that i had to fix that i probably wouldn't have fixed unless i

was forced but uh but you still weren't forced even which is interesting let's be truthful because obviously you cared and it's interesting so you kept your gym separate from like the rest of your empire yeah so like um it would be very tempting to just like take money from two brain and throw it in the gym and prop it up. Prop it up. Yeah. I don't know. I,

I have a values problem. That's what Sousa does to this podcast. Okay. Takes money from his gym. More resources and propping it, pumping it into me. He loves it. Exactly.

Yeah. But I mean, I don't know. Don't give Sousa business advice. It'll be my downfall. I should have that checking account with you. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I don't know. Don't give Suze a business advice. It'll be my downfall. I should have that checking account with you. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It was a merger.

Yeah. Co-signer. So yeah, I mean, I just keep them separate. I keep all my businesses separate. Like I don't want to keep one business going if it's losing money or, or prop it up. It doesn't make a financial sense to do that in Canada anymore, but it also like, doesn't, it doesn't align with my values, you know, and I got to tell you, as soon as you solve the money problems in your life, you can start working on like the values

problems. And that is when you become really wealthy, What does that mean? Values problems? Well, so for example, like there are a lot of people out there who will say like, I would never, I don't know. I would never sell out for money, right? And then it's like,

okay, Metallica, but you lost $30 million when people started downloading your stuff for free. Like, is this a values problem or is it a money problem? And the thing is like, everybody's values are a little bit flexible when they're starving. Like when you need money, all you think about is making money. And I get it. But when you solve the money problems for yourself, it's a lot easier to stick to your values. And so for example, um, Oh, here's a great one. A guy comes into the gym and the gym was at its lowest point, right? So it was like actually

losing money for the first time since like 2008. And he comes in and he's like, look, I know you don't sell a one time a week membership, but I'm willing to pay for that. You know, I will give you $60 a month or whatever, and I'll just come in once a week and that's it. And if you're struggling, it is very hard to say no to that 60 bucks. 60 bucks makes a measurable difference because I didn't need the gym to survive. It was very, very easy for me to just be like, nope, see ya. In both cases, the owner knows it's the right thing to do, like not break their own rules for every client. But it's a lot easier when you have money to like stand on your values.

Right. And so you're saying that once you have the money, once you have the money, should you work on your values too? No, you should work on your values all the time. Absolutely. I'm saying it's just easier to stick to them. And there are a lot of people who stick to their values no matter what, even if it starves them good for them. You know, I try to do that. It's just easier when you do have money. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. Uh, I, um, uh, I, I spent a lot, I have, I'm, I get on my high horse about how to raise kids on the show all the time. And a few months ago, in my kids' private lessons, it's expensive.

Not just the private lessons, just lessons. They're not in school. So they're either skateboarding, jiu-jitsu, or tennis, just always, right? And those things add up in cost. And I don't know, like five or six months ago, I thought I was going to need to sell a motorcycle that I haven't ridden in three years. So I pulled it out of the shed. I rolled it around.

My nephew put a new battery in it. And then I got an influx of money. And now it's been sitting on the porch for four months. But my values were going to change, get off my ass and sell a motorcycle I don't use. And then money came in. And now my wife's like, you know that motorcycle is just sitting on the porch now, right? I'm like, yeah. Got moved around. But it's one step closer i know that's a little different than values but it's pretty funny like what you'll yeah what you'll do um fit fitcom media

uh asking for a friend is chris hiring um we we do hire all the time and we have 70 staff worldwide. Um, yeah. So what we do is we, um, take gym owners to our program and they're successful. And as they grow, we identify the ones who, uh, are not just good at running their own business, but are actually good at helping other people. And then we train them on how to coach other business owners and then we hire them. And so like, that's so that's the process. It usually takes four or five years to work for Two Brain. When I worked at HQ, there was – I felt like everyone there could do something. And I feel like I don't understand the new world order.

Meaning like there's gardeners who come to my house, right? Twice a month gardeners come to my house, and they all – no one sits in the truck. Three dudes jump out, and mowers are going and blowers and checking sprinklers, and they're going. Like they're on a team. They move in one direction. They get it done. They leave. I assume they know, like, hey, if we get through all the five houses fast,

we get to just go play soccer for the rest of the day. Racist. Football. Football. And so I don't think that that's what's going on also. That's the problem at HQ. I think that's the big difference. I think that there's not – not everyone out there can dig a hole and plant a tree.

I think that they're – and I think that the way business – it's like we used to deal with Apple or Facebook occasionally when I worked at CrossFit, the media departments. And they just had layers and layers of middle management. And you could just be like, wow, these people actually don't do anything like they're they're just paper pushers they're just uh as andrew hiller likes to say they just move the dirt around on the floor no one gets a dustpan picks it up and throws it out and and i think that that's a um i think that's a problem and specifically around media do you have any thoughts on on why more that hq should get back into the media uh business that they should start a thousand percent i mean you know so when i got hired for media i don't mean hiring people to do it yeah that's really expensive i mean actually making it in-house and in shoveling

it onto youtube yeah i mean so there's parts to that you have to have the right people on the bus which is what greg told me when i got hired and those people also have to have a culture of accountability where you know there's there's three gardeners in the truck if somebody's not pulling their weight it is obvious and the other two are going to make them pay for it you know and i think like in a lot of ways when you used to show up to hq and you'd see the media department everybody was working all the time, you know, and everybody was busy. That's what's happening at street parking too now, by the way. They have 50 people on staff who are working. It doesn't surprise me. Yeah. And it shows like, you know, I think I met Miranda at a CrossFit media meetup in like 2012, right? Like she learned it the same place that I did. She

probably just learned it earlier. And it really comes down to like having the right people and putting them in the right seats. And it quickly became apparent that like, I might not have been the right person to work in CrossFit media. And so, you know, I was booted in like 2018, but that had to happen, right? Like they, they needed people who are just going to be fully focused on that and nothing else. So yeah, I think like that's the key right now is showing the mission here is like

changing all these lives. The way that we do that is top down media and then affiliate. You can't just open up more and more affiliates and assume that like you will naturally just attract more people. You have to start with the media because that's what gets people into doing CrossFit and going into the affiliates. And I think you need media like that. They basically have no media.

Their media strategy is different, right? Like the media... No, no, Chris. Okay. It's a different strategy. No, no, Chris. I know you're a guest in my house and my mom would want me to be polite to you.

If you're drinking water, but it's not enough to stay alive, I'm going to say that you're not drinking water. So I realize I speak in hyperbole. I'll meet you halfway and say it's a little bit of media. But you have this fucking ding-dong named Andrew Hiller from fucking his garage owning the space. Single-handedly. No one's even paying him. He's controlling fucking the narrative on all six continents. I mean, it's like, what the fuck is going on?

Yeah. And, you know, at the same media summit I mentioned in like 2012 or whatever it was, might have been 2013, you know, Greg was there and he said, CrossFit's a media company. And that boom, light bulbs just went off for me because literally every company is now a media company. And, um, you know, if you're going to run the Sevan podcast for three hours, every single day, you're going to have a massive, massive advantage over somebody that's going to publish one video a month, even if it's a really great video. over somebody that's going to publish one video a month, even if it's a really great video.

When one of your generals there who works for you, Mike Workington, he ran the CrossFit Journal. I can't say enough nice stuff about Mike Workington. He could even speak in Greg's voice. He could write stuff for Greg and show it to Greg and be like, okay, yeah, great. And by stuff, I don't mean like – i mean just like stuff like addressing the community and then you know and like the stuff that was in the um in the games uh what uh what's what's that thing that someone gives to you when you go to a play they hand you a program yeah the games program he would

write something maybe that was in greg's voice anyway and no one knew the crossfit journal better than mike workington and leaf edmondson but there was what but mike and leaf when they were in the media department there were three pieces they would publish three pieces of media every day basically yeah there would be dot com and then there would be one video one article minimum every day not even and they didn't even have to work together you know what i mean one could be on eating one could be on fighting and one could be on um uh politics i mean it didn't matter but like we were wow that's like real office phone yeah that did you just do that on purpose just to make it like you're a real businessman no who has a landline jesus criminy. So, yeah.

And to this day, the journal hasn't even been fired back up. Yeah, that's a shame. I'm just tripping. Honestly, so CrossFit can help with marketing by running the games. The games are not my favorite, but they do grow the audience. They can also help by giving affiliates tools that they can use. And even as an affiliate, you know, doing one of the CrossFit podcasts, Tyson Oldroyd was in the room and he's like, we don't understand why affiliates don't just take our stuff and share it to their social media to promote their gym. And if they don't

want to do that, just like copy what we're doing, you know? Right, right. Exactly. And I was like, oh man, CrossFit Media is the template here for marketing a CrossFit gym. And once I understood that, you know, things really ramped up for me. And our marketing at Catalyst was always referrals. And before that, it was blog. And once I started working for CrossFit Media, I started to understand it. Like, you have to have video and you have to be using social media to reach the people with your message. And it doesn't have to be fancy.

No. In fact, that's probably a detriment. The fancier you make it, the less it will probably do well. Right. Yeah. You know, an example that I give to gyms all the time is if you look at like like the two brain channel we publish every single day, like 13 times a week. And we have I don't know how many followers and subscribers. But if you actually go to my gyms YouTube channel, I have videos there that like, are bigger and more

popular than anything from two brain. And it's just and they suck, right? Like it's just me with like some some slides. Like if you, um, look at the catalyst fitness, Facebook, uh, YouTube channel, and you look at the video for like zone two training thousands of views, right? Like dozens of comments. That's not typical for what you get on two brain. And it's, it just proves Susan's point. Like it doesn't have to be fancy. It just has to meet your audience. Boy, that's a popular name for Jim's catalyst.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I affiliated Greg Everett was, he was catalyst CrossFit and I had to call him up and ask him permission to be CrossFit catalyst. What's the, what would I type into YouTube to find your CrossFit catalyst? Yeah, I think it's Catalyst Fitness and Nutrition. It's a green arrow. Oh. Anyway, it's just to prove the point. Like if you're a CrossFit affiliate,

you have more than enough knowledge to produce a YouTube video twice a week for 10 years. Yes. And you should just be doing that. Don't worry about making it perfect. Like sit down with a client. Hey, Matt, tell us about your journey here so far. Congrats on losing 10 pounds.

That's it. Or sit down and tell a story. Sit down and write a blog post. That's all it takes. And you really can do stuff. The most important thing, I would say, is to just make it really, really short. Hey, guys, I'm at the market. Apples are in season.

They got organic ones at Whole Foods. I wanted to share this with you. A great way – something to eat for a pick-me-up an hour before you work out. Love you guys. See you today at 5 o'clock. Right? Done. Perfect example.

Done, right? Great example. Hey, guys. I'm kind of tripping on peanut butter lately. I've fallen into a rabbit hole. I don't want to freak anyone out. But I found peanut butter here at this place with no sugar, no palm oil in it. If you're tripping

like me here you go love you guys see you at 8 a.m class today that's it right easy is that yeah that's it savon gpt right hey guys uh um send uh here's my gofundme uh qr code send me 100 bucks love you guys see you at five o'clock and um it's funny because it doesn't even need to be fancy at all i made this five years ago and to chris's point this like they were my audience the gym was and so this first episode like the camera didn't even work so it's not even actually a video it's just a still shot of me right there like that and then it's a 12 minute long podcast and then we interviewed members we interviewed coaches so like it doesn't need to be uh fancy at all 32 000 views on elbow rotation warm-ups

and you make little things like that um and it does wonders for for the business for the clientele for bringing everybody together and things look at i don I'll have to big dick you, Susan. Look at this one. This is someplace called the Catalyst Method. That's us, yeah. So the name is- 46,000 views. Yeah, that's 40, that's 23 times bigger than your YouTube channel. Yeah, exactly.

Because like, you know, most of our videos don't matter to everyone, but they matter a lot to the people who own gyms and own CrossFit affiliates. And so on to brain like you're not going to see, you know, the owner of the local carwash tuning in, right, because it's just for gym owners. And so the audience is smaller, but they're very engaged, very trusting, very loyal. Thank you.

This is a great way. Kalita Connell, know your audience, talk to them often, ask them to buy. I don't even think you have to ask them to buy. You just, if you just know your audience and talk to them. Yeah, it's we have to coach them to the right decision, right? Like if somebody comes in your door and they're like, show me your gym and your 2000 square feet. And you're like, well, there it is. They're like, oh, okay. And you charge six times as much as the gold gym down

the street that has $3 million in equipment. Uh, see you later. You know, you have to sit down and say like, okay, let's see where we're starting from. Let's write you a plan to get better. Here is my prescription. I'm going to hold you to it. Um, that's what the actual value is, but that takes some, some coaching. And I think I know that's what Cletus is saying. Um, there is this phenomenon too. If you give nutrition advice, let's say 30 seconds, you don't even know you're doing it every single day on your Instagram. Right. And then all of a sudden you decide, uh, you, and you do that for a year. And then one day you said, Oh, I'm going

to do a nutrition challenge in my gym. And then all of a sudden people will be, you can announce that and people will be like, Oh, he knows about nutrition. But at the time that wasn't your, that wasn't your intention. So like i started this podcast three years ago and now one of my friend's sons has become a quarterback for the chicago bears and he listens to this podcast and now he's going to come on this podcast regularly he's going to make me rich as fuck i'm going to quit this job yeah so uh you're building things without even knowing them if you're just adding value to people's life, like she said, know your audience, share some good shit, try to add value, be short, be sweet. Yeah, definitely.

My first building, the first four years of the blog, I was writing notes to myself. Dear Chris, you know, quit screwing this up. Don't make this mistake again. And now it's a we're a massive worldwide company. Oh, that's crazy. I forgot about that. Yeah. So that you turned your notes to yourself. Wow. Yeah. That, that became the first book, which, you know, yada, yada, uh, now we're massive and it's, I still do the same thing every day. Like, you know, most of my blog posts, almost every day, somebody writes me back and they're day. Like, you know, most of my blog posts, almost every day,

somebody writes me back and they're like, Hey man, were you looking in my gym windows last night? Cause this is exactly me. And I'm like, well, no, I was looking in my gym windows last night. And that's why I wrote this, you know? And that's, that's really the key is like, you have to keep giving yourself notes, right? Like there's a, there's a coach at a CrossFit gym and he chronicled like a year of trying to lose weight. And so his clients would be tuning in every couple of days. And he's like, oh man, I'm really struggling with this. You know, there's Christmas cookies and stuff. Like, here's what I'm doing. I'll let you know if it works. If you're trying to lose weight, that is the only person in your town that's really talking about weight loss. And that's the person you're going to trust. Damn. Damn. Well, Hey, um, I'm truly flattered

that you came on here to launch the state of the industry report. Uh, I can't wait to, I hope, I hope I'm on the mailing list to get a hard copy I think so and I thanks we got your we got your address from your secret like social insurance not what time what time will you be home this week Chris what what are your hours you're keeping at home this week they say every good movie should start and end the same uh okay thank you um I'll dig through it i'll look for typos and we'll have you back on and point out uh typos thank you i appreciate you brother thanks for all you do uh chris cooper two brain business um have a great day man stay warm thank you there's so many ways to look at him a wealth of knowledge that's for sure like you yeah you can

be like oh my god he's done so much for the community and two brains done so much for the community or you can be like man what a genius for the for the um for the opportunity he's made out of the necessity for the services he has offered but that being said he still did it like forrest gump what do you know what i mean he just had his head down and was running in one direction and part of that was writing down the blog so he developed this other skill he probably enhanced his writing skills. He ended up having a memoir and a playbook for how not to fail. He wrote down who would have ever thought to write down all your failures and then turn it into a business of a successful business. I mean, it's just I don't think he planned it all out. He's just a head down work kind of guy. Yeah. And then obviously, as you get older and you mature you start you know your brain starts

thinking and connecting more dots and yeah well the best part about it too is because then the advice that he's offering you could see the path of how he got there it's not yes yes hey that's my crypto because uh i did and i made you know 5.6 million dollars i'm here in my garage with my lambo and you're like well how the fuck did that happen right there was some big leap from like you were broke to like now you're in your garage with a Lambo, but with Chris, the Lambo, well, you remember that dude, Ty Lopez that did that shit? Dude, I'm here in my garage with my Lambo. Like how the fuck, but, uh, the, that's the cool part about what Chris has done and what he's continuing to do is he shows you the path of how he got there

backed by the data, not just his opinion and as things change and evolve the data changes and evolves their best practices change and evolve but you could see why it changed and evolved and and how they continue to move forward in the directions they are and so that that's that's super important and i love the fact that when he brought up this stuff about his own gym um like was struggling and then he jumped back in and then documented that of like hey my gym was struggling and then this is how that takes time i mean well to be honest that that is how and i know you don't like this word so i'll change authentic but that's how you build trust because nobody wants the holier than thou person that's

never made a mistake if i sat on top of this hill and was like oh i've never made any mistakes with my gym ever it's just always been super successful. Um, you, that, that trash tries to break, starts to break down and you get people that want to watch you fall because you got this holier than thou kind of image going and people that would just want to see that fall and be like, well, that's not true. There's no way you've had to make mistakes. i hope you guys never see me fall humbly authentic do you hear that no but i heard that but do you hear it because it's coming in yep yep now i hear it but is it super low oh okay okay so something's not working and you have the i'm assuming you played with like the knobs right like you turned the cell phone up and then you turned it up in my corner

hold on hold on i think hold on one second i think my old phone is in here in the room so it's connected to my old okay interesting i think too one of the things we could have we could have chris on and kind of like break down So it's connected to my old one. Okay. Interesting. I think, too, one of the things we could have Chris on and kind of break down the whole entire state of CrossFit HQ, which we did a little bit in here. One of the things that I always find interesting is we talk a lot about – My calves are so sore. Oh, from Chad? Did you do the foam roller thing I told you to do? I did all that shit okay

good how was that it was painful it was painful i mean i rode the assault bike i got off i feel fine yeah but now i've just been sitting now again when i woke up this morning i was like oh i don't even know if i could walk and of course i took a hot shower and it went away but now i've been sitting for two hours and 37 minutes and my calves are just like yeah they're victim calves yeah totally i think i think it's a cool picture hey i wouldn't have it um uh it's a cool shot i i love doms do you like doms i guess i like it in a little bit i hate being when I'm like ridiculously sore to where I can't move. It happens mostly like with my lats or like my hamstrings. And like to me, that's just like too much. I love to feel it a little bit like, oh, I got a hard workout in and I could. Yeah, I love it. But I do not like having to like hold both the walls to sit myself down or like not being able to reach up above my head or like well i i like all that the the one weird one is is when you do get like wobbly uh quads or glutes and you're like like going up and downstairs and

you're like oh this is a trip okay let's see disconnect yeah i don't maybe search uh it's interesting i can't get this one. New phone. Maybe I'll connect forget device and start over. Yeah, maybe that's a good idea. Take it off. I feel smarter for talking to Chris. Always. Especially the state of the industry

thing. It gives you such a great scope on how the industry is doing right now. If my mom knew I was friends with him or thought I was friends with him, she'd be proud of me. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

That she'd be proud of you to hang out with? Why don't you hang out with that other boy? Go hang out with Chris. I like him and his parents. Okay, let's see see oh you hear it yep i hear something it's faint oh yeah that means it's not working oh that sucks so we so we don't have a phone damn isn't it the weirdest thing that i bet you if you turn called forwarding onto my phone right now and we ran it through my roadcaster it'd probably work fine let me see uh which is i go to general no no i go to cellular how do i do that you go to oh yes uh phone oh yeah i don't remember how to do that and then i switch call forwarding

switch call forwarding oh shit let me see probably don't want to say your number loud on the air preferably not no let me see it's one Z yeah

two Z's that would be wild nine two five okay Tuesdays. That would be wild. 9 to 5. Okay. But if you are in the area on Saturday and you want to make the drive, you can come work out with us at the gym. Oh, yeah, yeah. I am going to be there. I am going to be there.

So if anybody's in the area and wants to drop in, please come by. You're welcome. We'll have some pancakes afterwards to work out with us come see the gym now I'm gonna call the number oh okay oh fuck but now I don't have it hooked up to the roadcaster hold on but yours is ringing

yeah let me see zuza hold on hold on bluetooth that sucks Yeah, let me see. Zuza. Hold on, hold on. Bluetooth. That sucks. Why would I not hear? Maybe it's time I hardwired the phone in and just see what happens. Yeah.

So it should be. I can hear you. Are you? Oh, I got it now. Oh. Yeah. Yep. So that word did just then ring on my end because I didn't have it hooked up in time.

All right. I guess I just have to figure out. I think there's a USB-C option right like you go USB-C just lightning or depending on what phone you have USB-C to USB-C I wonder if it charges the phone too

probably does because it's plugged in it's like how to hook a phone up to RODECaster probably should get How to hook a phone up to Rodecaster. Probably should get off the air before I did. Press Bluetooth button above the Bluetooth channel fader. Oh, that's not how I do it.

Fucking David. Is he complaining about yeah he said 1500 shows in the old box don't even know what he's doing facts that's just the facts dude okay I'm gonna disconnect this

hey I'm on the cutting edge of technology do you understand that it's 1214 shows okay I'm no device connected Of technology you understand David. It's it's twelve hundred and fourteen shows Okay, I am no device connected Okay, pro press the Bluetooth button above the blue channel fader to make Rodecaster Pro discoverable to nearby devices, okay Bluetooth hookup, right? Yeah. You're trying to plug it in?

Oh, okay. And it says pair. Oh. Okay. Okay. We're good to go. Let me see. I give it a call.

Here we go. Good to go. Fuck. Wait. You turned it up? You can hear it? I can hear it. No, but just barely.

Just barely, but there's no volume option? No, because otherwise the phone's too fucking loud if you turn it up and then someone talks in it. It would Oh, output routing? Maybe that...

Okay. I can keep on the comment. How do I connect my phone to my Rodecaster? It'll use the volume on the phone. That's actually a good suggestion. Is the volume on the phone? If it was really hooked up, you would you know how you used to be able to hear it like through the

channel coming in? And it's just not. It's just not. Son of a bitch. So he's meeting with the Coons tomorrow. Yeah, that's interesting. If I offered an affiliate ship, he would be one of the first people that I'd probably call. Oh, for sure. Right. Oh, for sure.

Right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think when Dave became CEO for that short period, when Greg fired the other CEO, I think one of the very first things, I think on day one, he called Cooper. I mean, I'm assuming Don did the same thing. You would have to be fucking stupid not to yeah uh and may oh sorry chris i told you the wrong place my wife just corrected me the place we went to breakfast with chris was aunt mames not silver spur and i should have known that when he said we ate outside not not that it matters but in case you want to eat where me and chris, Aunt Maine's.

Now you got all the facts. Yeah, now you got all the facts. Cooper's landline would be helpful now, yeah. Let me see if... You're not wrong, Zach. Master's class in connecting it. Fuck you. Are we just live on air

just hooking this thing up? I'm OCDing. I'm really... Oh, here we we go there is a phone jack back in the 3.5 millimeter okay oh we went to bluetooth but started hardwired hey when you went to blue the reason why i went bluetooth is i read somewhere scott that you couldn't um receive and make calls through hardwired can you you do that? And why did you switch to Bluetooth? Do you have the roadcaster too? That's the problem.

I got the, the, the kind of the newer model, I guess the newest model. And ever since then, shit's kind of gone sideways. What a stupid son of a bitch. Oh,

that's cool. Thank you. What's going on there? I got this one, too. David. Middle of the device on the back. Thanks. That's like if I asked you

which hole do I get when I'm a girl. Or which hole do I get to get a girl? The one underneath her. Thanks. Hardwired was glitchy. Oh. Oh, yeah, you have the two, huh? Oh, shit.

I had an iPhone 13 hooked up to it. Now I have an iPhone 13 hooked up to it now i have an iphone 15 hooked up to it dude my calves are destroyed did you see the did you see the stool that jeffrey birchfield was stepping up to he's out of his mind dude first of all man of your age should not be using a stool uh that rinky dinky stool dude that that stool will lower your testosterone did you see it no instagram it's fucking nuts dude he's fucking crazy let me see if i can find it he found a way to make it uh instagram birchfeld everyone knows jeff it's a who's who when people comment on his Instagram

I didn't realize how popular he was it made me like you more like popular people oh man look at this shit this shit is crazy where's Kayla when you need him look at this

oh boy dude eliminating excuses that's for sure holy shit dude I think that step still helped him stay present for all 1000 steps oh my god dude there were times that I did fall off like the side

like just being lazy and just like this is how it ended he got the josh bridges rogue invitational name thing he knows people that knows people damn oh my god yeah wow dude how'd you get that hey oh my god oh my god dude he was on his feet for an hour and 45 minutes stepping up that stool yeah that's hardcore dude it's really cool dude i had some lows i had some lows you didn't do it huh one's a lot have you done it i don't know i've never done that workout there were some lows i don't think you need to do it my wife asked me if she should do it i said no i said hey if you wanted to do it. My wife asked me if she should do it. I said, no.

I said, hey, if you want to be like, just like crazy, just like do 250, run a mile, do 250, run a mile or something. Like don't. A thousand step ups. Hey, people like everyone I know who did, it's got like something. Thank God this year. I don't, but it has like something going on. You know what I mean? Now, like are larger than them or their hips got a click in it. It means a lot of volume.

Hey, K, there's some dude in the – I saw a post. Someone mentioned, I don't know who, but someone did an hour and 58, and they did burpees. Burpees, step-ups. Oh, wasn't that – 45-pound ruck. Oh, why am i drawing a blank um i did chad 1000 last year same feeling two days later when i did the new york city marathon oh you're fucking nuts i can't i can't remember um why am i drawing a blank on the name same dude

that did murph every single day for you broski guy what's his name jim jim thank you jim fuck how can i forget jim's name i never forget your name just how do i find his ig i jim i think he's like broski something oh no jim just broski bro then he did like brown hero wads for a for a Bobby Brown maybe maybe somehow I don't follow him could that be no you follow him J J what's his does anyone know his uh Jim Jimsky Jimsky Jim bro oh shit you know what maybe I don't follow him I need to oh yeah I do yes do you see You know what? Maybe I don't follow him. I need to... Oh, yeah, I do. Yeah. Do you see it? Did he... Oh, no, I don't follow him. What now I do? Let me see. Go to his most recent post.

It's like a picture of him and his wife, so I don't think this is it. That's what he did after a thousand step-ups. Yeah. Good-looking family. Damn. But, yeah yeah I think he did that it wasn't Jim that did that who was it Will it wasn't Jim

was it Spencer Hendel what do you know Will don't come and tell us oh your legs still work well then quit bitching well played Jedediah Snelson. Oh, your legs still work? Well, then quit bitching. Well played. Fat dose of reality from Jedediah Snelson.

It was Jim. Spencer Hendel. Get out of here. There's no way Spencer Hendel did a fucking thousand burpees. Lil's been huffing too much paint decorating his house. There's no way Spencer. Renovating his house, not decorating. He's too big to do a thousand Did it last year? Yeah, see

That what the most vulnerable point of that podcast with coop was When he talked about a Malleola chafee and gary gaines that is that is the thing gary was very polished and so i think that's what coop was like referring to when he basically said yeah he he liked malleolo but i think malleolo has gotten pretty i think the new regime has kind of gotten to malleolo a little bit too maybe he got a little polished i mean you're gonna adapt i used to love getting polished as a young man what i'm sorry i said you're gonna have to adapt to the group that you're around and i mean that's the hq for the last three years internally has just been in fricking survival mode. Like if you work there,

I mean, titles are changing. Executives are changing. Bosses are changing. You know what I mean? Did Dave get a little polished? You want me to answer that? Hey,

how about, Oh, is his weekend review up? It is up. Yeah. Oh shit. Should we just do that right now i have something at 10 30 hold on let me see one long show let me just see uh uh okay let fuck okay let's go for let's let's aim for um the 1 o'clock time still.

Yeah, can we do that? I could do that, yeah. I'm going to finish coaching the noon class, and then I'll swing into the office real quick and do it from my laptop. Okay, let me call. Because I kind of want to go to the skate park with the boys. Yeah. Is it raining?

Not here. It's actually nice out here. God, I hope Taylor doesn't answer the phone with something inappropriate. 50-50 shot. Yeah. Spencer Hendrel Lutha came and talked It wasn't Spencer Will

We know this We know this JR JR Is that you? Hello Hey this is JR Hello JR suggested today is that you hello hello JR suggested today that I get on the assault bike before I came on the show

it's like well fucker I live on that thing don't tell me what to do JR when did he send that let me see if I wonder if Pedro can come on can I call Pedro in Ireland yeah I wonder if I have his number what's his real name Peter Pedro can come on. Can I call Pedro in Ireland? Yeah. I wonder if I have his number.

What's his real name? Peter? Peter. Peter Coffee Pods and Wads. Okay, here we go. Peter White. We think he'll even answer. I don't like that ringtone.

Hello? Hey. Oh, there he is. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. Hey, there you are. Good. How are you? I'm good.

Hey, this is Sevan. I figured. I have your number saved. Oh, that's cool. Are you in Ireland? I am. Okay. Hey, you're live on the air.

Thank you for not using any racial slurs. We know how you Irish people are. Yes. Okay. Yes, okay. Yes, so far. Are you standing in a bucket of gold right now? What's that I hear? No, my kids are watching Toy Story.

Hey, can you come on the show at 1 p.m. Pacific Standard Time? That would be in three hours. Is that three hours? Yeah, three hours. Yes, sir. Okay. All right, cool. Thank you. Thank you. No problem. Okay, sir. Okay. All right, cool. Thank you.

Thank you. No problem. Okay, bye. Love you. Bye-bye. Love you, too. Whoa, that was nice. That was sweet.

Bye. Bye. Bye. What's this? Lil's got fat. He hung up first. That means I like him more. What are you asking? If I checkers up the text, you'll find my sponsor.

Is that? I said the Spencer Hendel thing was I couldn't even find Spencer Hendel's Instagram account misinformation okay so that's me you and Pedro do we have any and we couldn't get Taylor and Grundler said no I'm trying to see I'm looking in this thread

to see if there's anyone else. He'll still eat. Just me and Pedro do it? Yeah, fuck yeah. We'll rock it out. Okay, fine. Oh, we haven't had Tyler Watkins on in a while. We could ask him.

Oh, it's a good addition. Yeah. Right? He's funny. He's easy. Let's see if we can do Tyler. Yeah, he offers a good perspective oh chase chase might be throwing his hand in the ring here you see that he said what do you need

oh oh one o'clock oh that would be that would to replace bill and someone else from get with the programming can you come on at one o'clock to do the weekend review. Ass pound your buddy at the HQ. Dave Castro, the TDC. Oh, Hiller. Yeah, we could do Hiller. Chase, do you want it? Or if not, I'm going to call Tyler and then I'll call Hiller. 1 p.m., Chase, you want it?

1 p.m. start with me and Pedro and Suzo. Only four available. Taylor didn't answer. I know Taylor's always great. No, only four available. Taylor didn't answer. I know Taylor's always great. No, we tried Taylor. I'm doing Tyler. Get Tyler. Okay.

I do want to do Hiller, but it's like I don't want to overexpose Hiller. Come on the show. You can't come on? Oh, you want me on? Yeah. Okay, so you can come on at one that's in three hours you can come on at one o'clock for the dave castro review and review of a review of a review show yeah okay love you it'll be me you pedro and suza awesome you demand thank you yep bye okay well there you go then deal all right. See you guys in three hours. Bernie, always good to see you, buddy. Love you.

And thanks. Off to the skate park. Enjoy your next three hours without us. Bye-bye. Need that Sebon discount code. For what? Just type in Sebon. Works everywhere.

All your favorite products. Yeah.