"Freedom and responsibility within a framework." In his book " Good to Great ", Jim Collins lists "A culture of discipline" as one of the six necessary elements that make a company great. It's a really profound concept, but I'm going to make it actionable for you. Read the post here: https://businessisgood.com/a-culture-of-discipline/ Connect with Chris Cooper: Website - https://businessisgood.com/...
In his book, "Good to Great", Jim Collins shares 6 big ideas that great companies have in common. The unifying theme of the companies in his book is that they didn't start out great, but became great when they acted on these big ideas. One of the biggest is the "hedgehog concept", which is a strategy of focusing hard on the thing you can do better than anyone else, and repeating it over and over. Connect with Chris Cooper: Website - https://businessisgood.com/...
Comparison is the thief of joy. Theodore Roosevelt Entrepreneurs spend most of their time looking for the next problem to solve. This is often good for business, but bad for the entrepreneur. According to Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy in The Gap and the Gain , "Gap Thinking means looking at the distance between where we are and where we want to be (or comparing ourselves to what other people have achieved)." When you're "in the gap", you can't be happy, because you're always desiring the n...
In my book "Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief", I broke the entrepreneurial journey down into four phases. In the Founder Phase, the entrepreneur is wearing all the hats. They're bootstrapping, staying up late, building and testing products, learning to sell, opening the business early and closing it late. In many cases, they're self-employed: they've really just bought themselves a job. In Farmer Phase, the founder begins to add staff and systems to make the business grow. They turn their attentio...
We content creators live in a miraculous time. We can talk to more people than ever before in history. The power of marketing is astronomically stronger than it's ever been. Our audience knows no geographical limit. The real foundation for all of this power and reach is the content we produce. We can publish for free anytime we want--and people will listen. We can be our own TV station, our own radio network, our own newspaper. And now, thanks to Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT, we do...
Jason Katzenback is the cofounder of Amazing.com, a company that did $45M per year selling on Amazon. As you'll hear in this episode, Jason--an early seller on Amazon--quickly flipped his niche skill into coaching others. He took the time to figure out something that made him a lot of money, and then multiplied that knowledge by helping others do the same. Jason was actually a client in my gym when Amazing was starting to form in his mind. He'd talk about shooting videos in his basement and prod...
Want your clients to get results faster? Make the steps smaller. This is a meta-skill for great coaches in every field: fitness, business and even spiritual leadership. There are many reasons clients can't hit their goals: the goal isn't clear enough they don't have time to work on it they don't know where to start the amount of work required to reach the goal is overwhelming they "don't have enough time". they're not motivated or incentivized they don't believe they can reach the goal All of th...
"Fix the leader, fix the business". - Aaron Stokes, ShopFixAcademy In this series, I've been talking about the natural evolution of a business...and the things that stop it from growing. The things that stop the business from evolving are usually inside the founder's head. In the Systemize phase, the founder must get the operating instructions for the business out of their head and into the heads of their employees. If they don't, they've bought themselves a job instead of a business. They must ...
"I can't take on more business without more staff...but I don't have the money to hire anyone!" I'm sure you've been there. Your business is busy, but you're not making enough money. You have cash flow, but not enough to hire someone else without cutting your own pay. This is the Valley of Death: when you have to hire for capacity ahead of cash flow. Greg Crabtree coined the phrase "Valley of Death" in his book, "Simple Numbers". The Valley of Death is when you have to hire ahead of cash flow, s...
"Nobody can do this as well as I can!" - every entrepreneur, ever "Never mind. I'll just do it myself!!!" - every human who thinks they're saving time Early in my career as a fitness coach, a mentor told me to work more ON my business and less IN my business. Since I had no time in the day, I decided to hire another coach to run the 6am group at my gym. I thought, "She can run the group. I'll show up at the same time, and do my homework while she's coaching." Logically, this made sense. But in p...
Every business grows through four phases: Systemization - optimization - growth - and scale. Systemization means getting every process in your business out of your head. Optimization means repeating the processes that work best, over and over. It also means pursuing virtuosity in those processes - doing them well, without wasted effort or excessive "tweaking". Optimization often means avoiding novelty in favor of repeating what works, even when it gets boring. This is also where delegation occur...
"If you want to succeed in business, you're going to have to make a lot of mistakes." That's true. But... it's not the mistakes themselves that matter. Many business owners make lots of mistakes, and don't survive them. In fact, that's true for the majority of small businesses. They make pricing mistakes; they order too much inventory; they shoot for the moon with their restaurant design or gym equipment. Then they run out of money and it kills their business. The more fragile your business, the...
How do you scale up a one on one coaching program? I'm Chris Cooper, this is BusinessISGood. Today I'm going to tell you what is in between one on one mentorship and a big group coaching program. In the past, there have been a few different models where people have delivered their mentorship or their coaching, and it started off mostly like one on one -- kind of like a personal trainer, you would have this mentor who would get on a call with you and work one on one. And this is actually how Two-...
When your clients run out of future, they’ll quit. If they can’t see the ultimate goal, they’ll question why they’re in your coaching program. If they can’t see how your prescription will get them to that goal, they’ll be distracted by other ideas. If they can’t see the very next step in front of them, they’ll be overwhelmed and fail to make progress. Here’s how to show them the future: long-term, near-term and short-term. Start with their Perfect Day. Ask a client to describe their perfect day....
What makes a great mentor stand out from an average one? For starters, a great mentor will say, "I don't have experience with that, but I know someone who does. Can I connect you?" Business is Good and Chris Cooper is back, addressing the problem of "guru on the mountain top" – that know-it-all mentor who'll answer any question regardless of whether they have the skill or experience to do so! It's okay not to have all the answers as a mentor, and today Chris is showing us why working outside you...
Master the basics yourself. Systemize them for your staff. Optimize outcomes over time, but do them forever. One of the hardest skills for entrepreneurs to practice is virtuosity. This is simply a mastery of the fundamentals instead of trying to do every new idea that comes along. High-level performers in golf, for example, work on their basic swing for years; novices buy new equipment. This is true in most sports. Greg Glassman, founder of CrossFit, used the gymnastics definition of virtuosity:...
Strategies guide long-term growth. Tactics generate immediate results. And skills compound. More and more, our data set shows that clients with solid skills – like focus, virtuosity, and patience – outperform everyone else, even when they’re given the SAME strategies and tactics as everyone else. Skills have compounding value (they become more valuable over time, because): 1 – a little bit of each skill is helpful, but a high skill level pays off even more; 2- no one can copy them – they’re an u...
After working with over 1800 gyms worldwide, we know that our program can get a gym amazing results. Our strategies are commonly used in huge businesses. Our tactics are specific to the fitness industry, and tested relentlessly. Every tool, every template, every social media swipe file has been tested hundreds of times. They work. But still, around 1.8% of the time, a client struggles in our RampUp program. They get the same strategies and tactics as everyone else. They have 1:1 coaching calls (...
As business mentors how do we build curriculum – and how do we create generations of clients whose performances improve upon those that came before them? Business Is Good with Chris Cooper, and today's topic provides insight into how we create content , how we audit that content , and how we then upgrade it . Much like the story of the tortoise and the hare, we need something or someone to compete with and measure ourselves against. Building curriculum that we improve upon with each generation o...
We currently have 868 gyms in Two-Brain Business, my mentorship practice for gym owners. We’re going to cap it at 1000. I’m Chris Cooper, and this is BusinessIsGood. Today, I’m going to tell you why we’re capping membership in my mentorship program, TBB. If you’d like to talk about this or any episode, go to businessisgood dot com and click “join the BIG movement” at the bottom. Here’s why: It’s best for our clients. We know that the clients who get the best results from Two-Brain keep it simple...
No matter what field you’re in, you can build a staff training program following these five steps. If you’re a business coach, you can help your clients do the same. Take this model and apply your own branding. First, a question: why do we have to train staff at all? Doesn’t our education system prepare people to work? In Western culture, our education system is an “industrialized Greek model”. We follow the original Greek teaching model: a student sits at the feet of their teacher, listens to a...
How do you produce more content, better content, and do it consistently well? Business Is Good! - and today, your host Chris Cooper is sharing his ABC Content Plan. The ABC Content Plan is a framework that will allow you to consistently build better content over time. It's also how Chris built a $25 million company from a 200-word daily blog. Separating the content you produce into levels, according to Chris's framework, will allow you to focus your energy more wisely, and spend your time on the...
If you could spend 1 hour doing something – or 10 hours – and get the same results, which one would you pick? Of course, most of us would choose one hour. But in truth, in business, that rarely happens. As business owners, we have often been brought up with a job mindset , believing that the harder we work at our jobs, the more successful we will be. The reality is that our job, as owners , is to focus on outcomes : how do we put those first, and what are the fastest ways to get there? Shifting ...
SUMMARY KEYWORDS clients, increase, expenses, arm, business, gym, photographer, revenue, hourly rate, work, bucks, crm, paying, owner, hire, retention, simple, coaches, raise, coming SUMMARY KEYWORDS clients, increase, expenses, arm, business, gym, photographer, revenue, hourly rate, work, bucks, crm, paying, owner, hire, retention, simple, coaches, raise, coming Today, we're going to talk about raising client value before you do anything else. I'm going to go through this in three big topics. F...
How would you scale from one client to ten without hiring anybody – and still give those clients excellent service ? That’s the question for the one-man band . How to build a single-person business is what Chris Cooper is addressing today on Business Is Good. Chris is sharing his vast experience as a business coach and mentor by narrowing down the decisions that the person running their own business has to make to three key areas . These are: should you do it , how to scale up your time effectiv...
Don't teach what you know, give people what they need. This is BusinessIsGood. I'm Chris Cooper. And today we're going to talk about outcome-based coaching. I'm going to cover this in three big topics. First, we're going to talk about what outcome-based coaching is, then we're going to talk about elegance. And then we're going to talk about speed. Building a successful coaching business means starting from your clients' ideal outcomes and then working backward. So here's how we do it. If this is...
Connect with Chris Cooper: Website - https://businessisgood.com/
How to Consistently Produce Better and Better Content. In this episode, I tell you how to produce content for YouTube, your Podcast, your blog AND your social media...all at once! Then I tell you how to use the media you produce to create a book, longform video or audiobook using a model we call "The Power of Ten." (It's how I wrote my last book, "Start A Gym".) I'll start by telling you what each "level" of content means: A - longform, big projects, like a book or film B - shorter-form daily or...
Whether you're running a personal training business, a coaching business, or teaching painting on the weekend, chances are that you've thought about how you can scale your business. Fear not: if you hit a ceiling whenever you try to scale, then Chris Cooper is here with four tips that will take your coaching business from 'one to one' to 'one to many .' Learning how to leverage technology and add group coaching to your business offering while creating replicable models AND hiring the right staff...
BiG Podcast - Partnerships and Sponsorships Mon, Mar 13, 2023 8:11AM • 17:44 SUMMARY KEYWORDS audience, website, product, gym, building, recommendation, people, clients, business, bike, partnership, recommend, booth, owners, company, test, trek, podcast, local bike shop, sell I will pay you $500 for a 30 minute phone call. Hey, I'm Chris Cooper, this is business is good. And today I'm going to tell you about sponsorships. Why I don't take sponsorships on my podcast and why I said no to the softw...
