Reflect, Plan and Win: Chris Cooper's Year-End Message to Gym Owners

It's not enough for me to tell you that 2024 was great. I wanna actually show you and I wanna show you how great it was for your own gym. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to go into your booking and billing software or your Google Calendar and just open up your calendar first, okay ? Or if, if you're journaling amazing, pull up that journal. Then I want you to pull up your metrics.

So pull up your profit and loss statements from the last year, or open up your two brain dashboard or open up your QuickBooks file. And I want you to have that on the screen too. Now look, before I really get into this, if you're not tracking your metrics and you're still stuck back in 2014, that's gonna be the number one thing you can do this year.

Start tracking your metrics so that you're not behind the curve and you can see growth and decline. Then when we do this exercise again at the end of 2025, you'll know how well you're doing and it won't just be your gut. Okay?

Now the third thing I want you to have open, other than your calendar and your profit and loss or your metrics, is I want you to grab a blank sheet of paper and I want you to write at the top of the left side, I want you to draw wins up here, and I want you to draw lessons over here. And then I want you to draw a line down the middle, okay? Now we're gonna go through 20, 24, month by month.

So I want you to ask what happened in January? Were your metrics up or down? What happened that was positive? Okay, put that in the wins column, then what happened that you can learn from the, the bad things, the challenges that happen in your business. You're gonna put that in your lessons column. So if your revenue was up last January, that's a win, write it down.

But I also want you to write down what caused that spike in revenue on the lessons side, if your client headcount was up, that's a win. You know, write it down, but also write down why your client head count was up. What did you do last January? Okay? This is how owners become better owners. They reflect on the wins and the losses and they, they record them as lessons.

Now what I want you to do is look at your calendar. So what happened in January? If you keep a journal, look at that, write down your wins. If you're tracking bright spots Fridays like we do in two brain , go back in the two brain Facebook group, look at your bright spots Fridays. Those are all your wins. Search for your own posts in the group and write them down. Okay?

You can also ask your mentor to help you find your bright spots from last year and track your metrics from last year. Now look for lessons. Okay? So what happened in January that could have gone better, or what happened that went amazingly well, and you wanna keep repeating that. So, you know, I had , uh, a revenue headcount boost last January. Why was that?

Well, you know, we made a series of videos in December about joining the gym before the January rush that might've contributed to it. Um, also we had to bring a friend event very early in the month. Usually we wait till later in the month when we do them. That could have contributed to it. So you're gonna write that down on lessons, okay?

Now, if you're looking ahead, you're super duper smart, you're probably realizing that the lessons are going to form a plan for 2025. And if you wanna get a template to build this plan, just go to gym owners united.com, send me a DM through that group and just say, Hey, coup , can I get a copy of the annual project plan? And you'll get a template.

You can change it to be whatever you want, but you know, learn and grow from the mistakes and the wins that you have in your own business too. Okay ? So after you're done January and you've gone through your metrics and you've gone through your journal or your calendar, go to February and go month by month. This is gonna take you 15 minutes probably. Okay? I'll share some examples from my life.

So last January, my revenue was not a win. I made some really hard moves on the staffing side, but I learned a couple of really great lessons. And the first is that clarity is kindness. And I've been talking about this quite a bit in, in our two brain Facebook groups. But here's the reality. When a staff member doesn't feel like they can communicate with you, or they're scared to be transparent, they hide in action .

What happens is kind of this like festering doubt on both sides. And then you get suspicion and you start looking over their shoulder and you start wondering like, Hey, where are they? It's 8:00 AM why isn't their car in the lot? And you start micromanaging them. Do this exactly today. And then you just get more and more frustrated. Meanwhile, they're equally frustrated on the other side.

And the real crux of the issue is this barrier. Nobody's being honest with one another. Sometimes we're scared, to be honest. We don't wanna be fully transparent because we think ahead of like, what's the consequence of that? Am I gonna have to apologize? How am I gonna make it up to them? And so we bottle this stuff up until it really becomes like a volcano and then we just explode and we can't take it back.

Clarity is kindness. I'll give you an example from years ago in my gym. A coach wasn't doing well, but you know, I was doing his quarterly evaluations and I was giving him kind of like a B or a B minus in my mind, you know, as a kid who was raised by teacher is a B minus is a poor grade in his mind. A kid who maybe got Cs all the way through school, a B minus is pretty good.

And so he's gonna keep using that as encouragement to keep going. And I'm saying like, dude, you're closer to being fired than you are to be promoted. And then when it comes up time for an annual review, or he asks for more money, I'm shocked. And it shows on my face like, are you serious? You're lucky to have a job. And he's like, are you serious? You're lucky to have me. So clarity can sometimes be uncomfortable.

It , it can sometimes feel like, oh man, I've gotta plan this out. The stakes are high. I've got a lot to lose if I blow this conversation. But the reality is, it's always better than the alternative. And that's the big lesson that I learned in January of 2024. So now you, you know , you'd go like on to February. Okay, so let's move on from there.

So after I looked at like the obvious metrics and wins, then I looked at my BSFs, I looked at my journal, like what went right? Well, I started an online race series on Zw, and that actually went pretty great. I had a picture here, I'll show it to you, of the two brain team gathering in Stockholm. Man, I was so proud. I hired a new GM full time .

He, he came in from Brazil and he wanted to become a Canadian citizen. Amazing bright spots for January. And just reading those things reminds me that, hey, I'm pretty good at this. Like I'm a successful entrepreneur. The business is successful and it's delivering in the way that I want to deliver. It's providing the opportunities for people that I wanna provide. Like I'm proud of it.

But you often need that reminder because your brain fixates on what went wrong. So it's really important as you're doing this to go through all of the wins that you had per month too , and not just look at the negatives and the lessons. Now we can skip ahead a little bit so I can go down to February.

You know, I ran the intramural open aha, I had really good engagement, best engagement I've had in the last three years. Awesome. Then you know, my bright spot's Friday, I'll show you this one. It says, I have amazing h Luck . Well that's a , that's a great reminder to me that whenever there's a vacancy anywhere in my life, it's usually filled pretty quickly by somebody. Amazing.

And when somebody leaves my team or you know, my personal relationships that I think I'm gonna really miss that person. Quite often they're just making a spot for somebody even better, who's gonna add more to the team or more into my life. And I'm gonna love even more an amazing reminder that I probably need to read three or four times a year. But if you don't take time to revisit it now, you'll forget all about it.

If I go down to June here, ah , the summit was the best ever. We sold it out. There was a thousand gym owners . The energy was amazing. I did very little except shake hands and hug people and take my picture. I loved it. And the best part was all the feedback from people. That two brain has changed my life. I'm a different person. I'm running a different business. I have a better marriage relationship now.

All that stuff, absolutely incredible. But again, if I'm not taking the time to think about it by doing this exercise, your brain just kind of, you know, files that way. In the back July, my new GM got his Canadian citizenship, he was proud. I was proud because you can't do that unless you've got a solid, meaningful career in Canada. And he has that now.

Now he's working on getting his wife her citizenship, and I'm just like so, so, so proud of both of them. Um, I also look, you know, July, I did a duathlon with my daughter. I had an amazing ride. I had the fastest time on the bike. Like I'm proud of that, but if I'm not wearing the shirt from that event, I might forget about it. So it's amazing to bring these things forward in your mind.

And then, you know, you go down to September, what happened? Well, September, usually we have a spike in revenue as our second best month of the year. That didn't happen. Why not? Well , uh, gee, looking at things like the usual influx of people at the start of the school year didn't happen. What did we do differently this year? We didn't have kids programs.

We didn't send out a lot of , you know , helpful information about planning your schedule in September, carving out time for yourself. Like we usually have that content and we didn't. So that goes on the lessons. And later when I turn these lessons into a plan, I know that I'm not gonna forget that anymore. By the way, here's how I learned how to do this. August, 2008, I had two gyms.

One was a personal training studio. It was doing pretty well. One was a CrossFit gym, it was not, and it was bankrupting me. And as August hit, I didn't have enough money to pay the rent. I couldn't pay myself, and I had already missed one paycheck to myself. I had payroll coming up for my staff.

It was kind of this perfect storm and I eventually fought my way through it, but I can remember saying, I am never gonna live through August, 2008 again. And from then on I started working to plan things out in advance. So after that, we always ran kids camps in the summertime to have revenue for August. We always ran an adult competition in September to keep clients in the gym through August.

Identifying where the dips are helps you plan for them and never have those dips again. That's what we're doing here. So when my September revenue was down this year, I knew to look at August and say what happened? We didn't produce the content, we didn't have an event, we didn't have the kids camps rolling into September. That means, hey, we didn't have a plan.

And so we just kind of like rode the down trough of the wave. But in October we had a new record for revenue. Amazing. How did that happen? Well, you know, I dug in, let's look at the lessons from that win. We had two sports teams sign up the same week. We need to put that on the calendar for next September to approach these two sports teams and maybe five more.

Okay. November, my big win was the golden hour challenge. Hey, look, a lot of you have said Coop Golden Hour is far and away your best book. Thank you for that. We ran the golden hour challenge in the two brain Facebook group and gyms that were getting good results got incredible results from spending an hour working on their gym every single day with intense focus.

We ran the challenge publicly for free in gym owners united.com and I got so many messages from people where maybe they were scared to share their results every day because it's a big group of 10,000 stranger gyms. But they sent me a lot of messages saying this really, really works. Thank you. So thank you for that. I, I learned a lot from that.

And you know, the top lesson that I picked up in November was the business owners have the same struggles that our clients do, which is really not about interest or engagement or motivation, but more about habit formation and focus. If we carve out one hour every day to grow our business before we do anything else, that business will grow every single time.

If our clients carve out one hour per day to work on their health and fitness before they do anything else, their health and fitness will improve. And the key is coaching to build those habits and continue them. In December, my big win was that we published the state of the industry guide.

You know, every year, this is the fifth year now, we've taken the biggest data set in the industry, put it together in a guide and shared it with you. Now, I'm gonna come back to this in a moment, why this is important, but hey, you know, the downside that I wrote down the lesson was there was some debate online about the numbers.

Different people posted that they didn't like the numbers or that they disagreed with the numbers, but this is actually a win. And the amazing thing is like, this is why we put this guy together so that we're debating about what the numbers mean and we're starting the discussion on the real numbers. Instead of debating what people are saying, are they telling the truth? Are they even tracking their metrics?

Why is that person giving me advice when their business just went bankrupt? You know, there's so little transparency online that when you start the discussion from a position of truth, here is what the numbers say, then you can have a meaningful discussion about what the numbers mean. And this is how science works and this is why we publish the guide in the first place.

If you don't agree with my interpretation of the numbers or our independent analysts, that's fine, let's have a discussion. But let's start with the numbers. I also had a big lesson in December, a coach on my team that I really like went to work for somebody who I really don't. And you know, again, that that lesson of clarity is kindness and transparency and candor is really, really valuable. That came up.

And what that taught me was like, I need to reinforce that on my team there . There must have been a reason why this coach didn't think they could approach me earlier on months ago, a year ago that they were having problems, they were struggling to see their future, et cetera . That didn't happen.

And that's something that I can fix by encouraging candor on my team, by reminding them that we wanna be transparent by being warm and welcoming and honest with them. And so I immediately went to every other coach on my team and said, Hey, I really appreciate like the honest transparency that we bring to our conversations. If you ever feel like you can't be totally honest with me, I want you to just call me, okay?

Or send me a message or you know, back up , talk to this person on staff. And it reminded me that while most of my team is open, candid, transparent, I love working with powerful people and I'm not scared of it. There are always going to be people who are maybe a little shy, maybe they're nervous, they, they can't force themselves to be honest. And so they need another way to do it.

And, and I can encourage that in the people who are doing it. And I can give people who aren't doing it another way to approach it. That's a great lesson. The thing about doing this exercise is that it really reveals a skill that we all need. And that is first, when you start looking for bright spots, you start finding them, they become easy.

I, I started this worksheet, I went through January and before I knew it, I could have just like, you know, filled up the entire sheet without even trying, you know, and it was just the back of another sheet of paper as you just saw. So practicing looking for bright spots throughout 2025 is how you can create momentum. You don't really need more inspiration. Your job is inspirational. You don't need motivation.

You , you're a motivated person, but you need momentum. So the next step is to see how you're doing compared to everybody else, right? What steps can I take to build momentum and grow even faster? So we wanna know like, are you a great entrepreneur? Are you a mediocre entrepreneur or are you trailing behind the average? So open up your state of the industry guide.

Now, I mailed this to about 6,000 of you, but if you didn't get a copy yet, go to two brain business.com/data and you can download a copy for free. Okay? Now in this guide, we break down gym growth into six different metrics. And under each metric we break it at the book into categories. You'll see a red, yellow, and green ranking.

Now that will tell you exactly where you need to act, where you're doing okay, and where you're leading the charge over everybody else. So look at each category. For example, a RM, average revenue per member. Okay? Look at your A RM and compare it to this chart. If you are in the red, then you need to take action. If you're in the yellow for a RM, you need to make a plan to do better next year.

And if you're in the greens for a RM, you're good. You can put that on maintenance mode for now while you prioritize your other things. Now finally, compare yourself to the market at large. If your business grew by 28% or more last year, and I'm talking about profit, I'm not talking about client headcount or even revenue, but profit.

If you grew by more than 28% last year, then you are a better entrepreneur than the CEOs of huge companies. Look for opportunities in the state of the industry. Guide anywhere that you're a yellow or a red is a massive opportunity because improving any one little thing will have a huge result on everything else.

If your business grew 20 to 28% in profit last year, then you're average, you're doing about as well as the economy, you're probably riding the wave of the economy. So you need to focus on head count and a RM, improve your product and track your metrics closely. Look for opportunities because again, you're doing pretty well and any little change will give you a big result.

If your business grew less than 20% in profit last year, then you're doing okay, but you need to treat your gym more like a business. You're not keeping up with the average in the economy. You probably need like one or two or maybe three big moves to get your business growing at its real potential. And if your business shrunk last year, then it's time to change what you're doing.

You can't just work harder or keep doing the same things and expecting something different. It's obviously not working. Look, COVID ended three years ago. There's nobody to blame anymore and there's nobody coming to save you. And when you accept that fact as I did in August, 2008, that's when things can start to change.

Now, I don't wanna discourage you, you're in charge, you might feel alone, but when you're alone, you can change really fast. So here's how I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna give you some recommendations. Number one, get a mentor no matter where you are, one little change, looking at things objectively can make a massive difference. It can change your trajectory from slow growth to rapid growth.

It can change your trajectory from slow decline to growth, or it can change your trajectory from terminal to flying again. The next thing is make a plan. Address all the yellows and reds things first. You know, put all your lessons together into a plan. Track your winds . Do the things that that created the wins .

Do those again, and the things that you learn from, put those in the plan so that you've got a plan for them and you don't repeat mistakes. Okay ? If you wanna get a sample annual plan, just go to gym owners united.com. You'll hit the search bar, you'll find like annual plan, or send me a DM on Facebook and I'll make sure that you get a copy.

The third way I'm gonna help you is by running another golden hour challenge in January or February in the gym owners united.com Facebook group. You join that and I, you'll see posts announcing the next golden hour challenge that will help you focus and actually do the work that I'm giving you right now. And finally, start tracking your metrics, but also your wins and lessons every month. Now look, I'm doing this too.

I have coaches, okay? So the first thing that I'm doing is working with my mentors. I have two. One is to help me delegate and mentor my team better. And the other one is to improve the entrepreneur in my head. No matter what size your business you are, probably the thing that's limiting it, and I'm gonna come back to this because I get like individual coaching on this all the time.

The second thing that I'm doing is I'm breaking my problems down into manageable parts. And then I'm saying, okay, now let's build a plan to address each of those parts. I'm doing that with a mentor, just as you would with a mentor and two brain. I am changing one thing at a time. I'm not just throwing the whole business in the dumpster and starting from scratch. I'm changing one little thing.

And of course, just like you should, I'm measuring the effect of that change before I decide whether to make it permanent or or to go all in. So how's your 2025 gonna be? Well, it's really up to you. You can decide to grow, you can decide to do nothing. But doing nothing is a decision. It's a choice that you're making. Just like fitness change is hardest on the first day.

And if you really care enough about changing lives, you have to start by changing your own. Every business falls to the level of its systems. You are what you consistently do, but every business rises to the level of its leadership. That means you are the ceiling, you're the thing that's stopping your business from growing.

This sounds scary, but when you accept that you are the thing holding your business back, it's actually very freeing because now it's a puzzle you can solve. It takes more than reading a lot of books or listening to more podcasts. You really do need a mirror, an objective perspective to help you change. Change the owner, change the business. That's your mantra for 2025. I wish you all the best.

Thank you for your service.