Episode 5: Greg Everett on the Art of Coaching

I talk a lot about content marketing. A lot of people would call that branding or they might just call it marketing and sometimes in my book, "Help First," I talk about sharing things just to help people with no promise of return. Greg Everett is really a pioneer in this field and he was doing content marketing before it was even called content marketing. But when you think of him, you don't think of Greg as a marketer. You don't think of him as a salesperson at all.

You think of him as a coach first. Why do you think of him as a coach? Because he shows himself coaching. He shares his coaching knowledge, and you can be sure that even though he has shared almost more coaching knowledge on Olympic weightlifting than anyone else online, there's plenty more where that came from, and today you're going to get a glimpse into that. Greg's going to talk a little bit about science and a lot about the art of coaching.

We're going to delve into business a little bit just because he is a great content marketer. He has gained a name for himself that way. He's worked really hard to do it and he's been very successful. He can serve as a model and we're going to talk about models in coaching and mentoring and where we're missing that and where technology is taking us. This is a fantastic show with one of the biggest names in US weightlifting today. I hope you enjoy it. B Greg Everett, welcome to Two-Brain Radio.

Thanks a lot for being here.

And I think one of the big mistakes that you see made with coaches of any discipline, with people, period, is, you know, being too tightly wed to a very narrow interpretation of things or a single philosophy, a single methodology, whatever the case is, to the point that they'll dismiss other ideas or other protocols out of hand without actually investigating and experimenting and things like that.

And it doesn't mean that I'm willing to try anything that I've ever heard of or ever seen because some things you can dismiss out of hand. Some things, as they say, don't pass the laugh test. There has to be at least some degree of viability, which you can usually kind of see right off the bat if you have any experience. But there are always ideas that, you know, surprisingly enough and you personally may have not come up with yet.

And it certainly doesn't hurt to at least give them some consideration before ignoring them.

It's basically the product of my just being very energetic and interested in doing what I'm doing and continuing to work very hard to put out material and create new content and kind of get people excited about this stuff. And if you sat me down with someone who was an expert in business, they would shake their heads and laugh at me and just say, you know, "What are you doing?" And it's happened before.

I've spoken to people who have wanted to consult with me and do all these things and they kind of look at my quote unquote "plan" and just kind of shake their heads and say, you know, "You could be making so much more money, you could be doing this, this, this," and I just tell them, "I don't want to do that."

I don't want to sit around all day thinking of business plans and finding ways to monetize content and figuring out what's the newest conversion technology on Twitter or you know, whatever is going on. I couldn't be less interested in it. Unfortunately the fact is that I do have to make money off this stuff because it is my sole source of income and it supports not only me but my wife and my daughter. And so I do have to take that stuff somewhat seriously.

But, you know, from the start it's always been the mindset that, you know, as naive as it probably is, that if I work hard and I continue to put out quality material and do a good job that enough people recognize that and appreciate it to pay my bills. And so far that's turned out to be true.

And I thought it was kind of lame. Didn't really want to do it. You know, I was training in my garage. But very quickly I was kind of converted mainly due to how much I liked Robb Wolf, great guy to this day, still one of my best friends, he and Nicki both. And he asked me to partner with them in the gym. And so that happened all in very short order and he saved me from the mistake of going to grad school, and I'm forever grateful for him for that.

So we ran that gym in a few different locations for a couple years. And then I decided I really—you know, that had been kind of an opportunity for me to get back into Olympic-style weightlifting, which I had never fully had the opportunity to do, just due to a lack of facility and coaching, you know, this is between 1996 and 2003 or so, where this just stuff just wasn't accessible. The Internet barely existed.

You know, catalystathletics.com certainly wasn't around for me to look up helpful videos and stuff. And so I moved down to Southern California to train with Mike Burgener. And so we basically traded my share of the gym for their share of The Performance Menu Journal, which was a monthly journal we started publishing in 2005. So now we're over 10 years on that journal. But anyway, that was kind of the deal.

And I was sad to go, but it was something I felt like I really wanted to do and needed to do. And I wasn't getting any younger. This was a great opportunity. So, you know, Burgener was my weightlifting coach, and really mentored me as a future weightlifting coach in a lot of ways. And of course my wife was one of his lifters and she was 18, so we met through him. We found out years later that he was trying to set us up the whole time.

And that was really the first kind of a step into publishing in that industry that I was doing.

And it was originally basically a nutritional supplement to the CrossFit Journal. And you know, of course at that time we had Greg Glassman's blessing. We were all pretty close with the Glassmans, and it very shortly, the nutrition thing, we just decided that it wasn't enough. It got kind of boring. So we kind of expanded out to the training realm. And of course when I took it over, I steered it directly towards weightlifting.

And so we still have that Performance Menu name as kind of an artifact, which is unfortunate in a sense because it really doesn't convey what the content is, but you know, once you've had it for so many years, you kind of just stick with it.

So we moved up to my home town to open the gym in, I think it was December 2008, and we're still in basically the same location. We moved across the parking lot about two years ago, but otherwise the same place. And The Performance Menu was, well I guess I should go back. I actually started the company Catalyst Athletics in 2006 while I was still down there with Burgener. And then, so The Performance Menu was part of that and I eventually actually legally merged them at some point.

But, so The Performance Menu was very helpful when we opened the gym because people knew who I was through that and through the other content we had been publishing and kind of my involvement with the early CrossFit community and all that kind of stuff.

So we were fortunate in that sense because we weren't starting from absolute zero when we opened a facility, you know, we expected or at least hoped that my reputation would kind of get people through the door right off the bat, which it turned out did work that way to some extent. It's not like we were flooded with people. And again, this is 2008, beginning of 2009, even though that's only, you know, six, seven years ago, it was still very different with regard to the market for CrossFit.

These days largely you open a CrossFit affiliate and you have instant membership, you know, back then it wasn't quite so guaranteed. So we definitely had to hustle for a couple years to get it going. And so we were very fortunate to have that other side of the business with the publishing and all that content to kind of cover the gaps in the facility and kind of give us that little buffer to get it going.

Cause I never want to basically find myself in that position where I'm struggling to stay relevant and, you know, posting videos of myself on Instagram or just making stuff up outright, doing all these silly things to try to create a persona and maintain or build an audience. So yeah, it is a hard question to answer and it's like the classic airplane conversation, people ask you what you do. And I kind of just stumble over it because I don't know really how to describe it.

Usually I just say, I run a gym because everyone can kind of understand what that means. But the reality is that I hardly do anything to run the gym anymore. You know, I have Amy and a couple of employees who largely take care of that day-to-day stuff. So, primarily I guess I would say, I write articles, I create content, video, all this kind of stuff. I do all the editing and that sort of thing. So really most of what I do is more on the content-publishing side of things.

But, and then we do the rest via email, text, video, all that kind of stuff. But yeah, technically I only coach people who are actually present in the gym training for the competitive team.

Whether they're tired, whether they're frustrated, whether they're distracted, you know, all of these important things as a coach you need to know, both with regard to how you're going to adjust programming or how you're going to interact with that person that day or that week, whatever it is. And you lose all of that when you go to remote programming.

You know, you don't have the full picture and so you're largely guessing and estimating. And so it absolutely cannot be as effective as having a live one-on-one interaction.

The good thing about the opportunities that this technology provides is that there are a lot of people who don't have access to a qualified weightlifting coach and a good gym with a good weightlifting team, and so they at least have this option, which is a lot better than coaching yourself in most cases, depending on who you're working with, of course. But again, you know, it'll never replace that actual personal interaction with a coach and with a team.

So, just to back up to what you said about watching an athlete tie their shoes, what does the first 10 minutes of your interaction with an athlete look like? I guess this starts as soon as they come in the door, right?

And I put, obviously, different amounts of time and energy and focus into different lifters based on what level they are and how committed they are. And so don't hide that from my lifters. I'm very clear that the more serious they are about their own we ightlifting, t he more serious I'm going to be coaching them. And I think that's only fair.

You know, there's only so much time and energy that I have, and I'm going to distribute it j udiciously based on merit and based on, you know, them giving back to me as much as I give to them. So, you know, we have a pretty casual, laid-back atmosphere here, and unfortunately we're in a position where we can't have a super rigid schedule. Because you know, all of my lifters actually have jobs and responsibilities outside of lifting.

We 're n ot fortunate enough to have a stipended team who's here, you know, their entire existence is w eightlifting only.

Because I would very much prefer to have a rigid schedule wh ere w e train at 11, we train at 4, you're all warming up together, you're all training together, you're all doing your accessory work an d c ooling down together because as a coach that makes it a hundred times easier to track everybody, it makes it easier for them to stay focused and stay motivated when they're all training together. Like for example, Sat urdays, th e whole team trains at 11.

That's the one day of the week where every single person on the team is here training together at the same time. And the energy in th e gym is the highest, everyone has the best time, even if it's a tough workout, which it typically is, versus during the week where people are kind of split up a little more, some of the lifters train in the morning, some tra in in the afternoon or some have to start a little earlier so the y're ki nd of finishing as ot her ones are starting.

And so you lose some of that energy and so me of that atmosphere. And again, that's something you can't get with the remote coaching. So my interaction with them is based on a lot of different things and again, it's relatively casual. And I would say that I'm largely a pretty laid back, friendly coach. I will definitely get pissed off at them and chew them out when I feel like it's well deserved and it's going to be actually productive.

And there's other times where will I will flat out ignore someone and not say a single word to him the whole training session because they are demonstrating the fact that they're not committed to that workout. They're not focused, they're not doing what they need to do. And there's only so many times I can tell someone the same thing and they're either going to do it or they're not.

And so I largely come from the perspective that, you know, to be successful as a weightlifter or really any athlete, you have to ultimately be intrinsically motivated. You have to want to do it. You have to want to work hard. You have to have that compulsion to be the best you can be. And you know, no amount of coaching or prodding or coercing is going to really bring that out in a person, that has to already be present.

And so I pretty much set my expectations high and people either meet them or fall short of them and my kind of energy commitment is dished out accordingly.

And you know, it's not usually not a super difficult workout, but you know, in their present state it can be pretty miserable. And so again, you know, how you coach athletes has to vary based on that athlete. You have to find what works best for each athlete and that changes even with a given athlete at different times. So sometimes you have to be kind of the soft-spoken, encouraging, kind, person, sometimes you have to kick em in the ass and be an asshole.

And that's part of the art of it, is learning what each athlete responds to best when, and I don't always get it right. Sometimes I'll bite someone's head off when I probably should have been hugging them. So you screw up sometimes, hopefully you pay enough attention to learn when you've done it wrong and the next time you know better.

But generally, you know, if I feel like they are having a tough day because the training is really, really difficult, I've asked a lot of them that week, I'm more inclined to kind of back them off a little bit. Maybe we'll drop a set or two, maybe we'll reduce the weight. Maybe we'll even change an exercise kind of depending on what's going on.

If I think, though, that it's less an issue of them being too physically tired, too beat up or the training's too hard and they're just kind of being crybabies about it, then I'm going to push them and make them do the work. I can remember really clearly, there was a day back in Burgener's gym years ago, when Amy was having just a terrible day with snatches, just missing over and over and over and over again.

And Burgener basically told her to go out— you know, we trained in a garage and there was a little area outside the back where we kind of do abs and box jumps and stuff. And he basically sent her out there, get your head out of your ass, take a minute, come back in. And then she came back and started smoking snatches. And so, you know, that's the kind of thing you learn when you work with a good coach that you don't really get from books or videos or articles and all these different things.

Kind of learning that feel of when you need to push an athlete and force them to keep doing what you want them to do. And when you need to just pump the brakes and say, hey, you know, we're asking a little too much of you right now. Let's back it off. And that can be for a million different reasons. It can be because the training is genuinely too hard. Like you went a little overboard.

It can be that, you know, their girlfriend or boyfriend just broke up with them last night and they didn't tell you, there's a million different reasons why someone can be having a bad day. And it's really important that the coach, as much as possible, finds out what is going on so they can kind of respond appropriately.

It's people kind of getting these piecemeal chunks of information and trying to reassemble them into the whole, and they're missing all the nuance and the human component of it. And so part of it is it's just having interpersonal skills, period. And that has really nothing to do with coaching or weightlifting or any support. It's just knowing how to socially interact with other human beings. And again, a lot of people are missing that because of all this online life.

You know, we don't talk to people face to face anymore. We text people. We—I mean, I don't even know what Snapchat is but we Snapchat people, you know, all these goofy things that have removed that really personal communication interaction and that makes it very difficult for people to then do it when they need to do it.

And so you do have to remember that, you know, you can sit down in front of a computer and write a program on a piece of paper on your Excel document or you know, whatever you're using. And it's all numbers and figures and science, although there is quite a bit of art to it.

But eventually that program has to be used by a living, breathing human being who is very much an individual who has a lot of things going on in their life that will affect how they train, how they think of training, how they think of you as a coach, how they think of themselves as an athlete. And all those things contribute to their performance and their commitment to the program and you know, their competition performance and all these different things.

And so without that day-to-day interaction and you know, being able to actually establish these personal relationships and that rapport, ultimately you can't do as good of a job as a coach.

But if we're just following these guys on the Internet, we miss, as you say, those little pieces in between the cues. Where can we go to get those models now, Greg?

I picked up and moved my entire life so I could work with one. And granted, that's not reasonable or possible for every single person in the world. But if you look at people who are truly successful, you will see that they display a level of commitment that is far and away greater than the people who are not successful. And you know, a lot of that it comes down to making sacrifices and making decisions and taking risks. And that's one of them.

Now, if you're 45 years old, you have three kids, a wife, a dog, house, you're probably not going to pick up and relocate to train under some world-class weightlifting coach. I get that. But also on the other hand, if you're 45 and that established, you're probably not gonna be changing careers that drastically anyway. So, you know, the best advice I can give you is, you know, when you are in your younger years and you're relatively unattached, you have that sort of freedom.

You have to jump on those opportunities. And now of course, you know, there are only so many coaches in this country especially who are of a caliber who I would recommend people, you know, mentorwith. And so obviously the demand is much greater than the supply. And I realize that it makes that recommendation very difficult to execute. But at the same time, I also recognize that 99% of the people you tell to do that are not going to bother trying to do it anyway.

So that remaining 1% I hope can at least take that advice and you know, they can continue this process of kind of that lineage and that progression from one generation of coaches to the next where all that nuanced information and the atmosphere and the mindset and all these things that you can't encapsulate in a book or in these other means of conveying basic information. So that stuff gets passed on and kind of that culture of weightlifting gets passed on and is preserved.

And of course, you know, people can train and you can coach and all that kind of good stuff. You know, all those reasons people attend seminars. At the same time, seminars are so incomplete because, you know, I do a full two-day seminar. It's a long two days and you know, by Sunday afternoon people are so smoked, they hate my guts, they just want to go home and rest. And I still feel like it's not enough time. But it's definitely better than nothing.

And so the online experience is definitely the next step down from that. And we do a lot of video, a lot of texts and all these different ways to present the information. And then our online modules have, you know, like a Q & A thing so people can ask whatever questions they want. I get notified directly. So I'm personally responding to all of those questions.

And so as much as possible, I try to kind of recreate that live experience as well as can be done online with the recognition that it's never going to be quite as good. But at the same time, recognizing that it was kind of a necessary thing, that there are too many people who, you know, for practical reasons can't attend a seminar. And, you know, I can't travel to every single city in the world, giving seminars every weekend, which, I mean, the requests we get are crazy sometimes.

You know, it's like, well, why don't you just stay for four weeks in this country and travel around and do seminars. We're like, what do you mean, why don't I? Because I have other work to do. I have a family, I have a weightlifting team. That's why. You know, when I traveled to do seminars, I fly in Friday night, seminar all day Saturday, all day Sunday. Try to fly home Sunday night or sometimes Monday morning cause I don't have a choice.

It's not like I'm free and kind of hanging out and like, oh let's go to Australia for three weeks and just, you know, visit everywhere and give seminars. It's like, I got to get in and out, get this stuff done, get back to work cause I'm already behind now because I've missed three days. So it was basically, I had to jump on that and say this is a way we can get more people this information. You know, help more people who don't have access to it currently. At least kind of get that start.

And it ties in with our coach certification program, is we wanted to basically create a certification that was a little bit more reliable in terms of what it actually meant. And by that I mean knowing the general philosophy and methodology of a coach who is certified through Catalyst Athletics is going to be consistent across the board versus a say like a USA Weightlifting coach. You could have any number of totally different approaches, often very contradictory.

And that's not to disparage the USA Weightlifting cert, but it doesn't really specify that methodology and that philosophy, you can pretty much do whatever you want. And so we wanted to allow more people to kind of get on board with that.

And so we would add two formats and then, you know, now you can get it on DVD. You can download it from VHX, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play. And so then we get hammered with, well, why isn't it on Netflix? Well, we can't just make Netflix take it, you know, that's their decision. And so it's like, it's never good enough. You know, there's always something more that someone wants.

And so the farther this technology spreads, the more options there are, which means the more formats we have to create, the more money we have to put into—people don't understand that it costs money to put these things out in all these different formats, it costs money to build an app, it costs money to build a website, it costs money to get things on iTunes.

And you can't just like keep pouring money indiscriminately into all these different things, because it's super convenient for, you know, two people. So that's what I'm saying is that I kind of hoped that the technology just like chills out for a little while. Because if you have to constantly be focusing on the delivery format or the delivery vehicle, then you can't focus on the content.

And I think that's part of the big problem now, is everybody is so focused on the packaging and making stuff look cool and being available on these goofy new stuff. Like, well, now there's Periscope and all these different things and well, what about the content? The content is missing and that's what should matter. You know, in my opinion, a book is still the best thing out there.

And yeah, it's not perfect, especially for a sport like weightlifting where you can't convey certain things, like video is so great for that, but that is still the densest, you know, easiest way to organize and present information that's been invented so far, and people keep trying to reinvent the wheel and they're so focused on that wheel that they forget the rest of the vehicle.

And so it drives me nuts and I don't want to sound like some kind of Neo-Luddite or something who wants to go back to stone tablets, but it gets a little absurd after a while. And so it's always fascinating to me when you see people like, oh, here's my new weightlifting starter kit on this app and it's $400 for 12 workouts or whatever. And you go, why would anybody buy that? You know, you can get all this stuff for free or for $5 and actually get better content.

But it's that packaging that people are attracted to you. Like, oh, wow, yeah, that looks cool. It comes to my phone. Or, you know, people hammer us always like, why don't you guys have an app? I was like, well, why would we have an app? We have a mobile-friendly, responsive website that will work on any, you know, imaginable device that's connected to the internet versus an app that's specific to an Android or iPhone or whatever. It just doesn't make any sense.

You know, because those barriers to entry were editors and publishers who, you know, had to be focused more on the bottom line than the content itself. But, you know, the pendulum has really swung far the other way.

So I still think that having a book or, I mean, I hate to say it out loud, but even an ebook at this point, but something that is a dense, thorough, extensive package of information that's actually helpful and practical and that people can implement that demonstrates your expertise is still the best way to establish that expertise.

There are plenty of books that you know, appear to be written by second grader using clip art from Microsoft Word, you know, Word 95 or whatever. But generally speaking, that is the impression people get of books. Like, oh my God, so this guy's written a book. Oh yeah, he's super smart. And so there's kind of that instant credibility.

And I think largely, if you talk to a lot of people who, you know, make money speaking and giving seminars and things like that, they'll tell you that their books are not really money makers directly. They're kind of that badge of credibility that then allows them to go out and make money with seminars or speaking engagements and things like that.

And that's a good start is you know, having a website that has practical information that demonstrates that not only you know what you're talking about but that you care about your clients' and potential clients' progress, safety, health, enjoyment, you know, all these things. Rather than just kind of having a revolving door gym to kind of get bodies in there and make some money off of them. And is it going to work for every single person?

No. Some people are going to go to a gym because the picture on the website look really cool. That looks like the most hardcore one. You know, there's a bleeding palm on the front page. That's where I want to train.

But I think those generally are going to be people who kind of come in and out quickly and you're going to get a high turnover rate with that kind of a client versus ones who are a little more discerning, you know, who want to know like, hey, these guys have experience, they know what they're doing. They actually care if I make long-term progress, those are the clients you want because those are the ones who are going to stay with you long term.

As long as you take care of them and do a good job. You can do a great job with a certain type of client and they're still gonna leave after a month because they just, it's in their nature, they're gym hoppers, they want to go meet new people and do different things.

And so, you know, part of the reason I made that "American Weightlifting" movie is that I kind of foresaw this change that at the time I started, which was like 2010, 2009 or 10 or so, I k ind o f saw it coming a nd it's become worse than I thought it was g oing t o be, b ut kind of this like impending loss of the American weightlifting culture, due to this massive sudden influx of people to the sport who have not been fortunate enough to train with, you know, e stablished w eightlifting coaches

in a weightlifting gym, y ou k now, in that environment. So they never are exposed to that culture. They don't learn that culture and kind of adopt it. It's no fault of their own. It's not like they're intentionally coming in and trying to mess everything up for everybody. They just haven't been exposed to it. They don't know.

And so, you know, part of the reason I made that movie is I wanted to make sure that mindset and that culture was preserved some way and that these coaches were set down on record and kind of preserved as they are, rather than kind of being seen through a lens of more the more modern environment that we have now. And so, yeah, we really like putting out that kind of content, t oo, in addition to the practical stuff. Everyone wants the practical stuff.

I want to know how do I fix this error in my snatch. And that's great. I l ike providing that stuff. It's easier for me to w rite. But we do want to provide all o f those other things too. And, you know, how do we become better coaches? How do we become better athletes on the more human side of things? Matt Foreman i s really good about writing articles like that. And he's very good at that because he's been in the sport for, you know, 25 years or whatever it is.

And he's more willing to kind of put himself out there. I think I shy away from articles like that because I feel like an idiot when I write them. You know, I'll read Matt's stuff and I'm like, d ammit. Yeah, I think the same thing, I should have just written that article, but I don't because I don't want to sound like a dork. And so he's really great to have around. He saves my butt because I'm usually too busy to write articles every week. But so yeah, we t ry to cover all those bases.

So again, as much as possible, I want to get as much out there to kind of give people what they're missing by not being fortunate enough to mentor under a coach and come up as a competitive lifter in a n e stablished weightlifting gym a nd team. So as much as I'd bemoan kind of the dearth of that sort of stuff, I want to try to, you know, give it to people as much a s a s possible.

You know, you can try to put a bunch of pictures of, you know, clients hanging out together and smiling and you know, whatever, but you know, you can't genuinely convey that outside of people actually experiencing it. And so, you know, something that we've, well, formerly what we would do is, an on-ramp program for our fitness clients, which was, you know, the program developed by Nicki Violetti that we started doing at CrossFit NorCal. It was basically a month-long introductory class.

So you had this group of new people all training together, and that was kind of like their indoctrination, right. Where you let them experience the culture, you let them experience the coaching and how everything worked. And at the end of that four weeks, if they hated you and didn't want to see you again, they were gone. But most of the time, by that time, you know, you had really convinced them that this was the place they wanted to be. You could do a great job.

They love the people and they end up staying long term. With our weightlifting classes and fitness classes, we kind of do something similar now where we basically have like an intro package. And so depending on the person's experience and skill level, that's either going to be, one to four private sessions followed by four weeks of classes. And so we kind of get that introductory thing done where we're making sure they know what they're doing and they can operate safely in a class.

And that kind of gives them a chance to develop that rapport with a trainer. You know, build that personal relationship so they're not just some new person in a class that's all sad and quiet in the corner cause they don't know anybody and they're embarrassed and they think they're terrible.

And then you move them into that class and then they can really experience that culture in the gym and see that, you know, our clients are supportive and friendly and they don't care if you're only snatching 20 kilos, you know, they want you to do well and they want to help you and support you and encourage you. And so I think, you know, doing things like that is a way that these gyms can, you know, start to get people through the door, but more importantly, keep them there.

And to me, that should be the goal, is it's, you know, you have to get people through the door. You have to get those leads as the business people woudl call them. And you know, that FEOs, the front-end offers and all that kind of stuff. But really what you want to do is build these long-term relationships so you can keep your clients because there's nothing worse than a gym that has a whole new clientele every two months.

You're just over, you know, every two months or every three months or whatever. I mean, it would drive me crazy. And I think one of the reasons we've been so successful is that we've been very good at keeping c lients long term. We have a couple of clients who have literally been with us since the month we opened the gym in 2009.

And so to me, that just speaks to how hard we work to kind of make sure that our clients know that we actually care about them a nd we want them here and we want them to succeed rather than how can we squeeze some money out of you.

But you can't lose sight of the fact that you are first and foremost a gym and people are there to exercise or train. And when people, you know, kind of misprioritize things, that's when I think there are problems. And so even if people love you and they want to hang out with you, if they're not making progress in their training, they're not going to stick around.

And so, you know, the way we're able to keep people so long is that we continue to provide quality coaching, you know, rational, safe, effective programming that keeps them progressing over the long term. And then we support that with the environment in the community and the culture rather than the other way around. Where it's like, yeah, let's hang out.

We're going to have a barbecue and we're going to get drunk in the gym and do all these things and oh, if we have time, maybe we'll write a couple of workouts. And to me, taking that approach is very backward and that's how you're going to end up with that revolving door situation.

And I don't mean that in a negative way. I just mean that it's just growing exponentially because each gym is just like spitting out coaches who then open their own gyms because again, there's no barrier to entry, really, you just need a credit card. And that's one of the fantastic opportunities that CrossFit has created. Of course, it's a double-edged sword in many respects, but the opportunities that the CrossFit market has created are incredible. I mean, that largely supports my business.

So I'm very grateful for Glassman's—you know, whatever problems we've had in the past, like, I will never not be grateful for that. And they know that, I think. But so each gym, the gym owner has to be very cognizant of the culture they create and that they model with respect to the other coaches. And there has to be a sense of ownership. There has to be a sense of investment by those coaches.

They have to feel like they're part of the gym and not just expendable employees because that's how you lose people. You know, you have a coach who's unhappy at a gym because they feel like they're not really a part of it.

They're just the guy who has to come in and restock the fridge and then run the class and close up versus someone who's genuinely contributing, you know, maybe writing programming or suggesting new classes, you know, these different things where they actually are invested personally in it. And I think that's how you not only get but maintain good coaches. And then you have to support it financially too. These guys have to make enough money that it's worth their while.

And you know, one of our biggest things is that we pay our coaches very well, and from a business point of view, we pay them too well, we screw ourselves. We, I mean, we truly do. We really screw ourselves in that respect, but to me it's worth it because I have really great coaches, really good employees, and they love being here, and I'm not constantly worried about them bailing out and opening a weightlifting gym down the street.

You know, I can rely on them to do a good job and I can have high expectations of them because they know that I'm paying them well and I value what they're doing.

So in other words, that's kind of their incentive because they can make more money with private training, but we need people to coach classes. So that's their incentive to coach classes is that those hours can bump them up to the next higher tier for private training percentage.

To answer Sarah's question though, I don't want to get into philosophy. What I want to do is describe the difference between a model, a mentor, and like a seminar, like a teacher. Because I do all three in different forms with different businesses, the easiest one's a seminar, so this is like a short-term engagement where I'm going to show up and dump as much knowledge as possible. I'm going to do a few tricks to help you retain your knowledge as well as possible.

And anybody that's been to a 3-2-1 Go! project seminar knows that we're playing brain tricks all the time. We're moving around a lot. We're doing everything we can to improve your knowledge and we're giving you materials and after the seminar is done, we're sending you videos to remind you like, here's all the stuff that you learned. A model is something that you can follow almost verbatim or you can at least mirror.

So for a lot of people when they're a beginner in a new sport, say boxing, a model is very helpful because you can just watch and do what they do. A newcomer in business, will find a model really helpful because they don't have to guess what's best for me, how do I make this applicable to my situation? It's just here's what to do. Checklist, do it. And there are a lot of people out there selling models. A lot of people benefit from models. They want a checkbox.

A mentor, though, is the person who sees between models and can tailor a model or replace a model based on what the mentee or the student or the client is looking for. Not every model is going to work for everybody and no model is going to work for very long. A model, a lot of the time, is a short-term fix. For a lot of people, it's a necessary short-term fix. They need to gain some momentum, they need some traction, and a model will give them that. For a while.

The beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur is that you can jump from model to model to model for a long time. Eventually though, what you're going to have to do is develop the entrepreneurial mindset of trying things and growing yourself and making mistakes and learning from those mistakes, and that is what a mentor's role is. A lot of the time I find myself giving people permission to try things and measure the outcome and then walking through that outcome with them.

Measuring pros and cons, you know, and applying an objective scale or sometimes an objective viewpoint. A lot of what I do is prioritizing for people, so where somebody will get on the phone with me and actually have a lot of great ideas, the problem might be that they don't know which one to pursue first or that they're currently pursuing all of them or that they're paralyzed because there are so many opportunities. And this happens more often than you think.

For other people though, when we get on the phone, they're just stuck. They've dabbled a little bit, they've tried this and this, but they haven't really maybe understood the concept completely or they can't understand why it's working for somebody else or they're just getting plain too much advice and they need a filter. And so for those folks, we're going to talk step by step. And in either case I need to talk to somebody live to do that. T echnology i s great.

Now I don't have to fly to somebody's gym to be a successful mentor. But I know mentors who feel that they have to do that. I would rather be available to help more people, and through a life of service, I am most satisfied when I can help people most successfully. So that means maintaining this balance point between a lot of people, and a few people but getting into great depth with them.

This is w hy 321GoProject developed the 321Go Academy, so that people who need systems, who need some traction, they need some momentum under their belt, they need to be told do this and then this is step B and here's step C and step D, there's a proven method there for them to follow. Eventually, though, these people, everybody, is going to need a mentor.

A lot of people who have been successful at other things in the past need a mentor to help them transition into a new thing or maybe to transition to the next thing. And so more and more since writing Two-Brain Business 2.0, I get calls from people who are looking to transition into another business ownership. And this is great. So they've done really well as a gym owner, but now they want to become a real entrepreneur and it is my intense pleasure to help them do that.

In the last 30, 40 days, I believe I've seven nondisclosure agreements with people who have offered me shares of companies, who have tried to exchange mentorship maybe for ownership and in two cases I actually did accept a percentage of their company to help guide them. And this is the kind of thing I really enjoy now. Sarah, I really hope that answers your question. I know I rambled quite a bit there.

The best thing that anybody can do after they decide they need a mentor is to get on the phone with several people. You know, look at them in the eye over Skype if you can. Ask them about their model, ask them if you need a model or if you need something else, and ask them where you're starting from. You know, tell them the pieces of the puzzle that you already have. Let them try to show you the box cover. Or at least what steps you would take. Hope that helps. Have a great week, everyone.