Episode 100: The Future

The two brain workshop opened up its first bricks and mortar location as you say, Murray , where we're helping out local entrepreneurs and I think we elevated the game for a lot of affiliates worldwide. As a thank you, I have two gifts for you. The first is a two brain 2017 a book that I put together maybe by accident. Uh , we write every day , uh , stuff that's going to help out gym owners.

And when I asked our editor to compile all of those blog posts from two brain prisoners' dot com into one document, it came out to 380 pages. I took out the pictures, but I left in the links and I had my interview with Greg Glassman transcribed and included that in the book. You can download it for free for nothing@tobringbusiness.com forward slash to brain 2017 two zero one seven. You can also find that in the show notes for this episode.

The second thing that I'm doing for you is I'm giving our 2017 summit video recording series to you for free. If you sign up for the 2018 summit in Chicago, this is about a 17 hour high quality recording, high quality audio, a course that you can get on our site automatically. If you get your tickets to the 2018 summit before January 1st I'm happy to give that to you for free. We'll be selling it for $400 after January 1st as a standalone product.

There's some great stuff in there from Dave Tate , uh , from a lot of the two brain mentors. I've got a few hours of content in there on some higher level stuff that we don't talk about it on our blog. There's also the coaching side included in there too, with some really high level coaches like Jason Brown, Ray Gallet , um, and a host of others. You're going to love it. It's yours free. Merry Christmas. Happy Thanksgiving.

I hope that 2018 is the best year of your life, both on the business side and from your personal side too. Hey everyone, it's Chris. Welcome to our hundredth episode. You know what ? I was about four years old. My mom asked me what I wanted to do for a living and I told her two things. The first was to drive a backhoe and the second thing was to be a sports announcer on the radio because I thought those guys were just the coolest thing. Luckily, I can do both.

I've driven a backhoe and frankly I get to do this every week, so thank to all my listeners. I want to reward you with this episode by doing first a state of the industry, a recap of what 2017 brought where we sit now as gym owners and business owners and entrepreneurs and specifically CrossFit affiliates, and then a couple of predictions on the future.

This is not my usual ideas episode, which I will do again in January where I'm giving you the top ideas that I've seen play out and are about to be played out. Instead, this is more of an overview of what the fitness industry is doing and where it's headed. I hope you enjoy it. I originally did this episode as a webinar for those in the two brain family.

Every week we do this, we get together and uh, I'll bring a guest on interview the guest and people who are in the two brain growth stage can ask questions of the guest . So it's like they're doing the interview too. But there was so much amazing discussion on this webinar that I kept interrupting myself to pose the questions that people from the group were asking me. And so I decided to record it again from scratch.

Today, December 18th just to kind of keep the flow a lot simpler, so let's start with an overview. First, two years ago, nobody was really doing a solid nutrition program at their gym. Today, almost everyone is, if you're in the two brand group, you probably have a nutrition program started. You might be refining it, but you're a lot further than you were a year ago or even two years ago.

Nicola coin has played a huge role there and we're really proud to keep calling her our partner at healthy steps nutrition as she refines and grows her own program today. Her book came out nourish. You can go to the link in the show notes and grab a copy of that. If you're thinking about adding a nutrition business to your program, we highly recommend this. This is the first piece that you can kind of snap onto your base puzzle.

Now, we are not all about just solving one tiny little problem at a time, but looking at the bigger picture and saying, what are we actually selling here? And I think 2017 brought us a much clearer vision of that. That vision was hardened and focused mostly by competition, which is why I love the free market and this entrepreneurial opportunity that CrossFit has given us more than ever before. We've seen the rise of things like bootcamps, like Barry's bootcamp.

We've seen the rise of orange theory. These are people who five years ago would never have taught a thruster, would never have put a dead lift into their workout program, probably didn't even exist, but now what they've done is they've taken our intensity factor in CrossFit and they've commoditized that. They've made it look better. They put better branding around it, they put better marketing around it, and they've institutionalized it.

They've turned it into a franchise model where they can churn out trainers with minimal certifications who are really running choreography in these classes. They're not really coaching. A lot of gyms are threatened by this, but I think it's awesome because what it does is it levels up the playing field for these classes and it gives us an even bigger opportunity to differentiate ourselves as fitness and health professionals. So let's start from a blank slate here. What do we sell?

We sell coaching and lifestyle management. When somebody comes into a two brain gym, they're not asked, do you want to try CrossFit or how did you hear about CrossFit? What they're asked is, what's your perfect day or how can we serve you? The process is called a no sweat intro and the no sweat intro is being revamped for 2018 because now we can do more for people than we ever could before.

That's coming up later when I talk about the future, but currently when people walk into a two brain gym, they go through a no sweat intro process and that starts with who are you and how can we help you? Then we'll create a prescription. That prescription is going to include probably in equal parts nutrition and exercise.

Then we're going to filter how those services are delivered with the next question, are you more comfortable doing this exercise one-on-one with me in a small group with your friends or in a large group of supportive peers that we put together for you? If they choose the third option, we're going to recommend CrossFit and we're going to tell them how to qualify for a CrossFit class by going through like an OnRamp program and I wouldn't use that word qualify.

If they say, I would rather do it one on one, that's great. They're going to do personal training. Now the workouts that they're doing are going to be CrossFit because we believe that CrossFit is the most effective exercise program in the universe, but it's not a business plan. Our business plan is catalyst fitness, and I'm not talking about rebranding. What I'm talking about is having the philosophy and vision that CrossFit is your method, but your business is your business.

The next thing that we're seeing a lot more of in the fitness industry right now is a willingness to accept that you need to profit and that means sometimes putting yourself first instead of last. So up until now, a lot of gyms have been operating like a charity. Honestly, I'm not going to call it like a club or a hangout because everybody always knew that there was money involved, but most gym owners would put themselves last meeting.

They would think about how can my clients afford this first when they're setting their prices and how can I support my coaches on a meaningful longterm career? Second, instead of asking, how can I make this business a meaningful and longterm career for myself so that I can support my family, keep this business going and keep changing lives?

That attitude has shifted quite a bit in 2017 the quality of the questions that I'm asked on our free calls, which I've done over 1500 of now, the quality of those questions has improved quite a bit. It's amazing. People are me more about profit margin now on these calls instead of how can I get more members, which used to be every call. A lot of people will have tried a marketing company in the past, made some money, and then come to to brand to say, how can I run my business better?

Which is great. That's fine. A lot of other people will say, I know that I don't want to get 300 new leads this year because I'm only going to keep 30 of them, so I need to put processes in place and even the mention of processes, standard operating procedures and a step by step plan to build those and get there. Those are all new in 2017 it was amazing. I think everybody is stepping up.

We're all growing up in our businesses now and I'm hoping that it's not too late for some of the great gyms , um , who haven't asked for help yet. The next big bright spot that I saw in 2017 was a more overt willingness by HQ to provide business advice or even a template to its affiliates. I got invited to be on the CrossFit podcast and where HQ has hosted a lot of our seminar materials. In the past I was always introduced as here's another affiliate owner and what he does.

Now I'm being introduced as here's Chris from two brain business who mentors gym owners. I'm very grateful for that. I think it's overdue. Uh , but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I think that HQ their best move to grow and spread the CrossFit movement, fight big sugar, do all the things that they want to do is to support its affiliates maximally and optimally, and that means providing templates and guidance on how to get to success.

They don't need to overtly recommend to brain. That's fine. They can just say, this service is available for those who want it. It's better to start with something than a blank slate every time. There is absolutely no reason for a new affiliate in 2018 to repeat the same mistakes that I made back in 2009 those things are expensive. They're a massive waste of time. They can slow down the affiliates growth.

They can slow down their success and their happiness and knowing what those mistakes were can stop other people from making them. That's why we're so happy to share them. The second piece of that conversation was me sitting at Greg Glassman's kitchen table and asking him the questions that affiliate owners wanted to know specifically, should you be profitable? How do you measure the success of affiliate? Should you be adding nutrition advice and should you be charging for it?

Greg answered all those questions eloquently in the way that I predicted that he probably would, but it was still comforting for me to hear it and I'm sure it was even more comforting for other people to hear those exact same things. Thank you, Greg, for making the time and space in your schedule to host me out in Portland and to hang out with me after the interview too. Always, always an honor. Now what are the big opportunities?

What are the big kind of misses, you know, where can we improve going into 2018 number? I think the scale of reference for success has to improve. It has improved a lot in the last three years before success was basically seen by an affiliate as surviving, you know, and trying to make it to the games. Now, gym owners understand that success means the longterm financial viability of their business, which it is. That's great. However, what are the top boxes actually making?

Where are the millionaire box owners? They're out there. I know a couple of them. We need to hear more from them. They're not ready to talk about it yet, but we need to know where the high water Mark is so that we can keep pushing that ceiling up. The bottom line is that within three years of opening their CrossFit gym, even a brand new first time entrepreneurs should be able to net $100,000 at this. If they're not there yet, then we need to have a better strategy.

We also need more role models saying, here's exactly what I do. Not all these role models are going to be two brain gyms. Of course, and that's fine because the two brain methodology is not for every gym, but the ones who are within our ecosystem. I'm asking to step up even more and talk about how much they actually take home. Now. Does every gym owner in the two brain family net $100,000 a year?

No. Part of the problem is that our , our scope of what success means is not quite there yet and part of the problem is that we still allow for too much individual variation. Frankly, there should be, I think a standard to which every gym is held. We are calling this being two brand compliant in 2018 and you might see some other levels or other standards upon which people are measured. HQ is not going to set this standard. This became really clear to me in my visits HQ this year.

Um , they are not only not interested, but they are completely unwilling to say, here is the minimum viable standard for being a good box or even here's a measuring stick upon which to compare yourself to the best boxes. Nobody else I don't think is in a great position to provide this measuring stick. And so that is what we're working on right now. Uh, we're very fortunate to have such a tight relationship with HQ and also such a, such a position of trust with affiliates.

You know, we've worked really, really hard , uh, to have affiliates trust us. I'm very grateful for your support. Even if you're listening, paying attention to our content and not buying anything from us, that's fine. Um, but I think that also gives us the burden of responsibility for providing these measuring sticks and tools. So stay tuned for that stuff. Finally, the last piece that I see is the pendulum beginning to shift back toward technology.

So in the fitness industry, if you've been watching it for the last hundred years or so, what you'll see is an advance in technology pulling the pendulum of public attention toward it. So for example , uh , everybody's working out in these grungy garage gyms with cast iron barbells, and they're doing clean and press and they're doing deadlift. Then Arthur Jones shows up and says, I've got these Nautilus machines that he copied off the Russians and they're all policing cables.

And you can isolate specific muscle groups. So for years, people keep swinging toward that end of the spectrum. They're doing machines with variations on that common , uh , theme . You know, the machines aren't really changing because your body isn't changing, but they're adding hydraulics and they're adding accommodating resistance. And the pulley angles are different. So you've got the appearance of different, but it's really just variations on a theme.

Then CrossFit pulled the pendulum all the way back to the left saying, we don't need any of that stuff. We want functional movement back. We want deadlift, we want plank, we want gymnastics, we want calisthenics. We want sprinting in, in doses that produce optimal results. And a lot of us jumped on that bandwagon, especially a lot of fitness pros. But now technology will always pull that pendulum back in the other direction again.

And so what you're starting to see are variations on that CrossFit theme. You're starting to see people sell programs that are CrossFit under a different name. Some of these people are wide open about this. In fact, they brag about it. Hey, we can use CrossFit to cure addiction. Okay. Sobriety, while Josh is very, very open about how CrossFit saved his life, we can use the CrossFit model to solve nutrition. Okay, Nicole is super open about this stuff.

The best people I think are open about how they , um, show CrossFit through a different lens to solve a slightly different problem. Other people are taking the CrossFit model, claiming that they're anti CrossFit or that they're not CrossFit, but they're just slightly different and trying to make a living on that. That's always going to happen. We shouldn't be afraid of it. What we should look for are the lessons that they're going to learn by plunging into the surf first.

What's going to be left in their wake? What can we learn from them? Also, what can we learn from new technology that could actually improve what we believe? So for example, can blood testing improve the prescription that we give our clients? Will that change our programming next year? Will we say to some clients, you know what? You don't need this much intensity more than two days a week.

We want you to go to spin class the other day, or we want you to go to swim lessons the other day where we want you to go play hockey during the winter and in the summer, you're going to come five times a week using this technology should allow us to refine our craft. If we stay on top of it, we can use these things as tools or we can fight them as weapons. It's our choice and I hope that you embrace the tool side and now the future.

My first prediction for 2018 leans on one of the recap items that I brought up for 2017 the reach of the prescriptive model broadened in 2017 and I think in 2018 it will deepen as more affiliates become established and familiar with the prescriptive model. As more clients are brought onboard using this model, I think gym owners are going to be a lot more comfortable referring their clients out.

Also referring them to the service that they need instead of just the service that the trainer thinks they can afford or thinks that they want. The problem of projection is now well acknowledged. Gyms don't have Olympic lifting biases usually, unless the owner has an Olympic lifting bias. Instead, we should be biased toward what the client wants.

And so the prescriptive model allows us to say, what do you want now while I'm your coach and here's what I would do to get those same results instead of do you want to buy my weight lifting program? With that in mind, I think the door is wide open for more partnerships. For example, if a client comes in and they want weight loss, my prescription might be a CrossFit class. Say they want a class a two times a week to three times a week to build strength.

I'm going to suggest they come on Monday and Thursday so they have a squad in there somewhere. Then I'm going to suggest that they do two more days of exercise per week. Now if they have a gym membership at 24 hour fitness down the road, they can certainly do their homework there and I'm happy to prescribe them with homework. Here's the price. If they like going to spin class with their other friends, that's wonderful. I'm happy to include that in their prescription.

Here's the price and I can even go so far as to make a deal with the spin studio down the street. That will give me a referral fee every time one of my clients visits and then my job is not to provide the space, the equipment, the expertise or the coaching. It's not to compete with the spin studio. It's basically to audit them and make sure that they're paying me every time my client's visit could that'll be done through a membership at my gym. It certainly could.

Or you need an audit pathway to make sure that the inaccurate headcount is coming back. That's all. The beautiful part of this is that if we take this vision, we no longer have to feel as if we need to provide yoga at our gym for our clients to get yoga. All we have to do is provide the prescription and the followup and the tracking to get our clients yoga.

So, for example, if I have a masters athlete and our goal is to increase range of motion in the shoulder and hip by 20% over the next three months, and it's also to help him lose 12 pounds of body fat and it's also to gain 20 pounds of pressing power. Then my prescription, Michael like this, I want you to come to CrossFit three times per week. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday would be best. I want you to change your diet to a zone plan, and I can write that plan for you if you want.

I also want you to attend yoga once on the weekend and once for a shorter class mid week, you can do the shorter class on your own at home on Wednesdays you want to, and I'll tell you what to do. Here's the price for all of that. Let's meet again in 90 days. Meeting again in 90 days is really key to that coaching relationship because you're going to assess them. So maybe you're going to measure a range of motion in their shoulder and hip using a basic goniometer.

You're going to put them on your InBody or you're going to measure their body fat and you're going to have them do a press for you. You know, maybe they're doing CrossFit total in the past if or if you're still just selling CrossFit classes, you can only make about one of those three assessments and the only time you make those assessments is random. You know, whenever CrossFit total comes up, we measure how much you can press.

Whenever there's a one rep max press, we find out how much you can press. For a lot of us, that was enough, but it's not anymore because most people aren't coming in with the goal to get better across fit. So you have to assess their goals and their progress toward those goals. I think a deeper prescriptive model will allow us to do this. The next thing is a partnered club membership where membership at your gym might include other things that deliver other values.

So for example, we could partner with a swimming pool and we could say that their membership includes CrossFit, you know, 13 times per month and it also includes lane swim. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, but we don't even have to include fitness in this. We could put together a club membership that includes a whole bunch of other stuff. For example, maybe it includes a meal plan. Maybe it includes chess club, maybe it includes some online courses to help them reduce stress.

Maybe it includes seminars once per month from local experts on different subjects. Okay. Maybe it includes some coworking space when your gym isn't in use mid day. Maybe it includes ClassPass. That's a great example. On a small scale, maybe it includes something else. Therapy. The only way that we can make a solid partnership with a provider of these other services is to be in front of our clients and actually telling them what to do.

If all we're doing is giving them a choice, Hey, if you're looking for a haircut, here's the business card of a hairdresser I recommend. Then we're really not doing our partners much of a service and we can't really call that a club membership. Right? It's just a referral and a referral just means a mention. What we actually want to do is say in front of the client, we want you to learn how to swim. We want you to buy a bicycle. Here's our recommended provider.

It's not up to us to upsell anything for the provider. It's up to us to say, I want you to be more active on your off days. You can come to the gym three times a week to get started in the first 90 day period, but when you're not here, I want you to either walk or ride a bike. Do you have a bike? No. Here's who I recommend. I can make you an appointment right now. You're going to go to this bike store. You're going to talk to Yon .

He's going to get you properly fitted, and if you decide not to buy from him, that's okay. At least you'll know what size bike to get. Okay? These club memberships are working out really, really well at catalyst right now. We have the two brain workshop next door in a separate building that I bought in 2017 people come in, they get a coffee from the cafe. They enjoy the coworking space and then we might invite them to come and do a little workout with us.

We're seeing more entrepreneurs do this and that is going to bring me to a point down the road about niche targeting. My third prediction for 2018 is that , uh , the marketing problem is going to be solved. So the , the number one Plagge of small business owners in the past has really been, how do I market, how do I get more clients? And the answer for most small business owners is, I don't know, outsource it, pay the newspaper, pay the yellow pages.

But the truth is this, most of us, when we open a small business by ourselves, a job doing this thing that we're good at, right? So I'm a personal trainer. I'm going to open up a personal training studio. I like CrossFit. I'm a CrossFit coach. I'm going to open a gym, I'm going to buy myself a living, and then we get a little bit busier and it's time to hire somebody. Well, there are three main seats that run your business, right? There's finance, which most of us aren't going to do.

There's operations, which is again, you delivering your service, doing the job. And the third is sales. When we're hiring our first person, really we should hire somebody with a complimentary skillset , not the identical skillset, but what most of us do. We hire another coach, somebody that's exactly the same as us. We use them to replace us in some classes and then we say, okay , um, I guess we should offer more classes.

We fill up our schedule with more work instead of putting somebody like ourselves in that sales chair and , and taking care of sales or hiring a sales person instead of a CrossFit coach. So nobody's in the sales chair, which means we don't sell in our business, doesn't grow. Up until now this has been a huge problem for every small business owner. Online marketing is really solving that problem better than any form of advertising or marketing ever has in the past.

You know, audience targeting, we now know more and we can interact with our audience way better than we ever could in the past. Short of meeting them and then marrying them and then telling them to come to our gym. The cool part about marketing now though is it's algorithmic. Where before in the past marketing meant making relationships and you know I argue that making relationships is still the best marketing.

You can go a long, long way using Facebook ads, using Google ad words, using Yelp reviews and SEO and all that stuff, and it's algorithmic. You don't have to know me to put together a good effective Facebook ad that will make me money. You can follow the algorithm. The key though is the ability to monitor. So you want to monitor an ad campaign. You want to see what's performing well, you want to tweak it a little bit. You want to test again, tweak, test, tweak, test, tweak, test.

It becomes almost binary after the ads are set up. In fact, the magic of Facebook advertising has nothing to do with creativity. It's not, you know who can make the best picture, who can write the best headline, it's who can stay on top of which ads are performing well and gradually increase these things, increase the spend. This is not something entrepreneurs are good at. This is something that technicians are good at.

Marketing is , has gone from creative to technical, and that means it's becoming more of a commodity. Eventually a robot will be able to do this best. Facebook is already testing this stuff. You know the graduated scale up where you just give Facebook permission to gradually increase your spend on ads that are performing well and that means price is going to come, are going to come down.

Commodity means that I can't differentiate between your service and the other guy's service, which means the only basis of comparison is price, which means price pressure is going to be downward. Marketing is going to be solved in 2018 it's going to be less expensive than it ever was before. It's going to be more effective than it ever was before. And if you combine, you know, Facebook and online marketing with affinity marketing, I think you're going to have a solid recipe for success.

Affinity marketing is just a step by step process basically of making relationships, asking the right question to those relationships, showing those new relationships, how your service can appeal to them, and then bringing in new clients through conversation. I think 11 of the 13 members who joined catalyst between October and December came through my personal relationships.

Maybe it's the parents of the kids that I coach or it's other volunteer coaches on that staff or it's people who I met in the arena, but there is obviously a time and place to attract a cold audience with online marketing with funnel marketing.

As much as I hate to say it, and that's going to be solved for us in 2018 my job with marketing is to teach you affinity marketing, which is the most powerful method, but also to introduce you to a partner who can handle the online stuff for you and we're getting closer and closer to making tighter recommendations for you as we go. I also think my fourth prediction for 2018 is deeper niche specialization.

So as more and more affiliates realize that they don't want everybody, that they're not trying to create a cultural melting pot in their gyms, that they should really be working toward best clients who can afford their services and have a lot in common with the owner. More and more gym owners are starting to see like, Hey, I have the most in common with this specific group.

I have the most in common at catalyst with other entrepreneurs and I always have, I just didn't realize , um, other friends of mine have most in common with other cyclists around their town. So why not tailor what you're selling to what your audience wants to buy to the people with whom? Of course you have the tightest affinity and I think this is going to lead to more niche specialization. You can literally have two CrossFit gyms in the same building right now.

One of them catering to a white collar crowd and one catering to a blue collar clap crowd, one catering to students, one catering only to professionals who want to pay $500 a month for a premium attentive service where they are given exercise one-on-one where their , their food is monitored, their lifestyle is monitored and you have much deeper testing. Both of these models work just fine. They can work side by side.

If you're specializing in a niche, I think the ability to recognize your niche comes through , uh, the pumpkin plan interviews, the C client stuff, the stuff that we have new people in the two brain incubator do on day one. We'll give them a sense of what their actual niches and where they should be specializing. And you know, what their audience might look like three years from now.

If I could tell you right now, who is going to be in your gym three years from now, that's going to make your life a lot easier, right? It's the unknown that really terrifies and paralyzes us. So if you want to take a look through the keyhole, make a prediction on who is most likely to be in your gym three years from now. Look straight to your seed clients, find out everything you possibly can about them and start targeting your marketing, including your ads at that group.

Okay. Facebook does make this kind of easy for you, but again, Facebook marketing is maybe like step eight in the process. It's not step one. All right. The 10th prediction that I'm going to make, I'm sorry, the fifth prediction that I'm going to make, this is the 10th slide from my presentation, is that the philosophy that your box is a platform for gigs or partnerships.

And I really came to this realization when I was visiting Joel Saladin K the lunatic farmer down in West Virginia and I was visiting him on behalf of CrossFit journal. You can look that article up in the journal if you want salad and has a 600 acre farm. He can't farm all of that himself. And so he has , um, he has members of his family who run like a , an egg business on his farm. He has members of his family who run a dog breeding business on his farm.

Other people run an egg incubator on his farm, his farm. The land is basically a platform for all of these other small businesses. And as we move further and further toward this gig culture where people don't have a nine to five salaried , you know, glass, prison career anymore, but instead have two or three gigs that pay them more and keep them interested across the gym is actually a great platform for that.

Will we have to work harder to maintain a level of excellence in part-time coaches than in salary coaches? Maybe. I haven't seen definitive data that a fulltime coach provides a more excellent service than a fresh excited, energetic, part-time coach. Empirical evidence tells me it could go either way, but the myth that we need to build these career coaches to have an excellent service is false. And I'll tell you why. I went to university for exercise science when I graduated university.

I had no idea how to train anybody. I could tell you exactly how the left ventricle worked. You know how the essay node fired him and what made it fire. I couldn't tell you how to make people happy in the gym. I couldn't tell you how to make people come back for more. Richard Simmons cannot tell you maybe the name of every bone in your skeleton. He cannot tell you the rotational torque of the hip in a box squat . He cannot tell you why you have butt wink .

He's probably never even heard that term, but he can inspire millions of people, especially women, to tune in three days a week and do a hard workout to sweat in their living room to lose weight. He's a cult legend too . These people, are you a better coach than he is? I don't think I am. What determines a great coach is not their knowledge is their ability to make people take action.

What makes a good business mentor is the ability to make an entrepreneur take action on things that will move their business. It's not to give advice, it's not to educate the client necessarily unless that's impeding their action.

So a full time coach who is overworked, burned out coaching way too much is less effective than a part time coach who comes in fresh and excited every day. On the other hand, a part time coach who does one hour a day is never going to be quite sharp enough. Right. I think there's a balance there and I think it depends on the individual. I also think that there are a dozen other roles beyond coaching that can be done better by somebody other than you.

For example, if I need exercise demo videos done for marketing or promotion or maybe I'm going to include them in my onboarding, somebody else can do the video editing better than I can. They can do it faster and what it costs me will save me a ton of money in the long run because I'll be doing other things like marketing and sales. If I am cleaning, I'm not a good cleaner. I'm not an enthusiastic cleaner. I can hire somebody else to do that for me. If I'm programming, I love programming.

I love it too much. It takes me five hours a week. If I let it, however, I can hire somebody else for $200 a month box, programming.com they'll do my programming for me. I don't have to commit for the rest of my life. I can just say, well, I'm going to hire you to do this stuff while I'm working on these other things, and then maybe go back to programming later or maybe not.

The point is that I am creating an opportunity with my platform for these other people to make careers, to make some income, to make a living, just to make their lives more interesting. Should I be rewarded for that? Absolutely. Because without my box, none of these other services exist. If you don't have a gym, there's nobody to program for. If you don't have a gym, there's nothing to clean.

If you don't have a gym, there's no one to sell these nutrition services to , so the philosophy of your box as a platform is two sided. Number one, it creates a wide open landscape for other people to succeed. Given your client base and your equipment and your insurance and your access and your sales and your marketing and your knowledge on the other side, it means that without your platform, none of those opportunities exist and so you should be compensated accordingly.

That mindset can transform your small business into a real big business platform. And you know, mine has done that with several other businesses that have kind of spawned off catalyst a few other predictions about 2018 I think the loss rate of CrossFit gyms will go down. I think fewer and fewer boxes will go out of business mostly because their business knowledge increases. Not because our ability to teach an air squat is increasing.

Second, I think that we are going to see more of a long tail effect with adding new boxes. Now this isn't based on any data at all, it's just my experience in working with existing boxes or new boxes. Um, the hockey stick effect of number of new affiliates is tapering down. Um , we're still growing absolutely as we deserve to, but we're not growing as rapidly, I don't think as previous years, again, empirical only no data from HQ supporting this.

This is good because what it means is that it gives all of us who are still kind of fledgling business owners, right? I mean the , the onus, the oldest remaining affiliates are still 10 years old or, or maybe 12 at the outside. It gives us a chance to really get a sense of what we're about here and get comfortable when we were all, you know, three years in or whatever, we were all terrified and that's why we reacted negatively.

Our coaches going to open their own boxes or HQ allowing other boxes to affiliate right next door. We were scared and that's why we had those, those negative outbursts and that's why we rebelled and why a lot of people D affiliated, we blamed everybody else. Now we're more mature. We realized that we have opportunities and responsibilities to the CrossFit brand and we're taking advantage of those things.

So I think, you know, different revenue streams, kind of a coming of age , um, the automation of marketing, these are all going to make CrossFit affiliates a lot stronger. The question is, what next? How do we impact the lives, our communities, our members, even more than we are right now. What is the next level of income for box owners? I mean, you know the CrossFit affiliate model is an owner operator model where you are supposed to be buying yourself a job.

It's not really an investor model, but what's next 10 years ago at my park bench moment, one of the things that I ask myself is what does a 40 year old coach look like? I had never seen a personal trainer who is 42 years old today I am 42 years old and I'll tell you what things look like for me. I own a couple of buildings and a CrossFit gym.

I own an amazing program that helps people with cognitive challenges called ignite a worldwide mentoring program with about 360 gyms learning and teaching each other. I'm a happy, healthy family. Did I think that any of those things were going to happen when I was sitting on that park bench after an argument with my wife after a staff meeting in which I told people they were going to take a pay cut? No, I did not. Did I become a better trainer over that time? Probably not.

I'm going to be honest with you. Did I become more passionate over that time? No. Did I grind harder? Probably less hard. What changed? I got business help. I learned that CrossFit is the most effective exercise model on the planet. It is not a business model and when I got help things started to turn around. I learned a lot of other stuff like the power of abundance and that's why I publish free content every single day on to rain business.com is why I write you love letters.

It's why I stay up late at night when you're going through your rate hike and I know you're not sleeping so I'm not either. But what really made the difference was that realization that we needed a model and so my final prediction for 2018 is a more firm model. Instead of saying, here are your three choices for supplements, here are your three choices when it comes to open gym, here are your three choices. When it comes to your intake process.

We are revamping all of our materials to say, here is what the data supports, what makes this possible, the collection of data. And so what I would appreciate from every listener on this show is that when we put out a survey or we ask for feedback that you give it, I'm not selling this stuff. I know you get enough spam from, you know, CrossFit area sellers already. I hate that stuff. What I am asking though is that you helped me elevate this movement into the next century and beyond.

Thank you for listening. Have a happy, happy, healthy, financially wealthy, 2018 serve others, continue to save lives.