3 scenarios to make 100K: Interview with Chris Cooper

All right. All right. Hey, welcome everyone. Facebook and Zoom changed some stuff on us. So this one's being broadcast on insighttax.com, but we'll figure out how to get it to our Profit First for Microchips group as well. Today I am chatting with Chris Cooper. Those of you who don't know, Chris Cooper is the founder of the largest Mentoring organization to fitness professionals. Um, he is— I've known Chris when he kind of was having— doing 2 Brain stuff, um, with another partner, and then he broke off. And man, obviously what he is doing and his organization is doing is working because they continue to grow, which means they continue to provide value. Um, because as we know, if you don't create value, your business dies.

Thanks, man.

Today, uh, Chris, one of the benefits Coop has is that they have a lot of gym owners and they get a lot of data based on the services they offer. They just, they get that data. It's awesome. So they've compiled, um, this report called $100,000— Make $100,000 with 150 Members or something fancy. Coop will correct me here in a second. Um, But so I thought, man, we all need to hear this message because making 6 figures as a gym owner is definitely a needed goal. I use that word on purpose. You need to make a living off of owning your gym, and you cannot do that by falling on the sword. So Coop has some data he's going to share with us. Um, and he'll, he's going to give us information on how you guys can access this report as well. So Coop, thanks for being here.

Thanks, John. I always have to mute myself during your intros because I always crack up.

Uh, so tell us about this thing. What do we got going on here?

Yeah, man. So we've been collecting data, uh, for years and years now. We have a massive dataset. Uh, we tracked, uh, about 6,500 different microgyms. And the number one goal of people who get on a free call with us or get into our program is always, I just wanna make $100,000 a year and I can be happy. And so what we did was we took that goal and then we extrapolated, we pulled some averages out of the numbers and we said, okay, well, based on the averages, what's it gonna take for most gyms to make that goal? And we've actually kind of created a few different ways that you can do that. The key though is that most gym owners out there are chasing client headcount, and that's the wrong target. They should be chasing the value that their clients get from their service and the value that their clients give them in return. So I'm gonna get into that, man. But before I do, I just wanna know, like, have you ever, You know, when you started your gym or bought the gym, I guess, you know, like what were the metrics that you were looking at right off the hop?

Well, um, deposits was one of the first ones we were looking at. Uh, you do need income coming in to support it. Um, memberships, you're like, well, and I mean, when we first started, it was basic, right? Like I bought into a failing gym. It was the gym I was going to and I had a good fitness habit. And so selfishly, I didn't wanna lose my routine. But yeah, focusing on net income, focusing on the number of members were the ones that we normally focused on. But of course, since working with you, we now focus on a lot of other ones, which I'm sure you'll touch on in here. So I don't wanna steal your thunder.

That's okay. Any thunder that I have is yours to share, John. So the thing is like how many Clients you have is kind of like the what's your bench question of fitness, right? If somebody says they like working out, we don't really know what to ask them. So we say, what's your bench press? At least that's how it was when I was getting into fitness. The problem is that like that's the wrong metric of fitness, and how many clients you have is actually the wrong metric of the fitness of your business. It's a correlate for sure. Like you can't have zero members, but having 300 members or 500 is not necessarily. a guaranteed path to profit, and it's not even a guaranteed path to survival, as we saw from a lot of the bigger, like, CrossFit gyms during COVID So what we wanted to do here is break down some math, and I think probably that's what attracted you to the book, was, um, there's math in it.

Well, so, and let me say this too, because you just referenced bigger CrossFit gyms, um, but let's not forget the other fitness model out there of Renting equipment. Gold's Gym permanently closed 52 locations within a month of COVID happening, and then 8 weeks after COVID happened, they declared bankruptcy. And then 24 Hour Fitness closed like 130-some-odd locations as well. So just to prove your point, it's not just number of members. There's, there's obviously more that you're going to share with us. It can't just be focusing on getting more members.

Yeah, that's right, man. And like even the, the micro gyms that are selling group coaching, high intensity interval classes like Orangetheory, Barry's Bootcamp, a lot of these guys shut down completely for months. And while some of these big chains were filing for Chapter 11, these franchisees of these smaller chains were really, really struggling. And the people that had the biggest advantage were actually the micro gym owners with about 150 clients. Who could talk to each client every day. So we're gonna, we're gonna share 3 models here. The first is you've got 150 clients and they're all in group training. They're all just doing classes plus like an on-ramp program. The second model is you've got 150 clients and some of them are doing a little personal training. So about 10% of your revenue comes from either, uh, personal training or nutrition coaching. And then the third model is a little bit more robust. You've got, uh, about 70% of your revenue coming from group training, 20% coming from nutrition or, or PT, and then 10% from this kind of third revenue stream. And, and that might be, um, supplement sales. It might be retail. Some gyms are selling like 24/7 access as an add-on, whatever that is. You've got a different model. Now, can you make $100,000 with 50 clients? For sure. And there are gyms doing that. Can you do it with 300 clients? Absolutely. And there are gyms doing that. But if we, if we look at like the modal average of the most successful gyms in the world, they're following one of these 3 and they're doing it with 150 clients. So here's the first scenario. You've got 150 clients, 95% of your revenue is coming from group training. The other 5% is basically like your on-ramp program. Okay. The owner is basically paying themselves as a coach and a little bit of a salary too of $3,500 a month. There are some pros, like this is a true owner-operator, bought myself a job, don't have to answer to anybody else model. You know, this is how I started. The cons are that it's really not sustainable because Yes, you have to do coaching, you know, 50 classes a week, but you also have to do the things that grow your business too. And so you've really got yourself like 2 full-time jobs. It's very hard to sustain, especially if you've got a family. Okay.

So let me ask something here, because one of your books that I've loved the most was Founder Farmer Tinker Thief. So this scenario one, is this the founder stage where you're doing the work, but It gives you a great platform to then grow the gym into a place that is sustainable. Is that, is that accurate?

Yeah. Yeah. Perfect, John.

Yeah.

Thank you. You're, you're really self-employed. You don't really have a, a business, you know? And one of the cons is heaven forbid you ever get hurt. You know, I, I tore a muscle in my lower back at a powerlifting meet. Okay. I got a PR. But I could barely bend over to tie my shoes and I still had to go to work. And for 2 days I was popping Advil. I had a weight belt on cranked to the max under my shirt just to give my spine a little bit of support. And I had to go to work anyway. And, um, obviously that's not sustainable. I mean, can you imagine if you were the only person at your gym and you got COVID? I mean, That could be fatal, you know, uh, maybe not COVID, but fatal to your business.

Yeah.

So, uh, if, if you want to download this booklet and work through it yourself, you can actually go to the Gym Owners United Facebook group and you'll see it for free in files. Just joining the group, the big announcement post is like, click here to download the book. You can work through it yourself. Uh, 2Brain clients, we actually give them a P&L like this now And they can change any of the squares to match the clients that they have and see how far they have to go and stuff like that. So in this model, the gym is paying the coach about $30 per class. Even if the coach is the owner, they're paying themselves as a coach. They're coaching about 50 class— or there are 50 classes a week. The owner is coaching about half of those. They don't have any help on Admin, social media. They do have a part-time coach or two who are picking up some classes and maybe handling a couple of on-ramps, but that's it. They're charging $300 for their on-ramp program and another $250 a month for like some kind of specialty event, but they're also spending that $250 a month on equipment. So in this case, the owner is paying themselves for coaching classes about $4,000 a month. And they're taking a salary of $3,500 on top of that. You know, if they did get hurt or sick, hopefully one of these part-time coaches could step up and the owner would still make that $3,500 a month in salary. They wouldn't lose everything. But the reality is that's, that's tough for a lot of gyms.

Okay.

So this, when we first talked to a gym, this is usually where they are. They're just offering a group class. Maybe they've got 150 clients, maybe not. But it's rare that they're making $100K already. And part of that is the expenses, but part of it is this other stuff we're going to talk about too.

Yeah, we've, we've definitely seen this as well. And what I love about the way you lay it out is that, uh, just laying it out can give a gym owner action items because they can say to themselves, well, if it's just me, I don't want to coach 50 classes a week. I can't coach 50 classes a week. So if that's the case, you lower your classes. that means you got to figure out how to charge more in order for the numbers to work because you'd see how those numbers can change by tweaking them. Or hey, your retention rate's 9, you know, you're suggesting 95. Well, right now I'm at 70%. Great. Well then—

Oh yeah.

We need to figure out how to improve that too, you know. So I love numbers because they give us action items. It's not because I'm— I mean, I am weird and I love numbers, but I think we underestimate the power of what numbers can lead us to do from an action standpoint.

Yeah, it's clarity, right? So, um, you made a point that I forgot to make, John, and that is in all 3 examples, the average membership price for group classes is the same. It's $150 a month. However, the ARM, which is the, the big number that we wanna be looking at, Is 162 here. Okay, so I said earlier that the way that you make more money is that you provide more value. There's a hundred, you know, fitness is a hundred billion dollar a year industry. Not one of those dollars is for you. Any dollar that you make, you have to create in value, and your clients will have to exchange that value with you. So the key metric we want to be targeting here is. What is the measure of that value? Well, that's ARM, that's average revenue per member per month. And in this model at $162,000, the owner's working a lot, you know, and this is probably a pretty happy life for that owner for maybe 2 years. If they're 21 years old and don't need to sleep and they don't go out drinking and they don't have any friends, you know.

Or family responsibilities.

For sure, yeah, exactly. If that's you, great, go for it. Um, scenario 2 is, is more like what we're starting to see from gyms coming into the program, and it's definitely what, what we strive for in our ramp-up program. So in the first 12 weeks, we kind of sprint, uh, and we diversify rev streams and boost revenue that way, and then get the owner paid more. Um, so in this model, you've got 150 clients. But now you're also doing about 10% of your revenue from personal training or nutrition coaching, one of those two. During COVID sometimes the third option was online. Some gyms are still doing that, and that's fantastic. Um, the one thing here though, the more interesting thing is that because you've got more personal training and nutrition, your ARM is up. So we went from $162,000 to $180,000, same number of clients, same average group price, but you're making more money per client. And that is key. So if you look at net owner benefit at the bottom, the owner is coaching less. They're down from 25 classes a week to 17. Big difference if you've been there. And they're making a base salary of $5,500 instead of $3,500. So less of your income depends on you being there. And that's critical because the next step requires you to invest your time. And the person in our first example didn't have any time to invest. So still $30 a class for coaching, 50 classes a week. All that stuff's exactly the same. The difference is adding personal training or nutrition. And this is actually a really simple step. The 3rd example is a little bit more of your revenue is coming from personal training and/or nutrition. So maybe you added one of them and now you're gonna add the second. Or, you know, over time you just ramp those things up. Still working with 150 clients, still working with $150 average monthly membership. But what happens is your average revenue per member goes up to $205. Super important. Now you're earning more from each person who comes in your door. And the, the biggest kickback we get when we talk about this in public is my members will never pay $205 a month. You're right, they won't. Your current members won't. That doesn't mean you have to replace everybody. What it does mean is you have to understand like which 20% of your current clients will pay more than that if you offer them a service that they really wanna buy. And so if you can get your ARM up to $205 a month, what happens is now you've created more than enough money for you, and you've created a pool of money to hire some help. So if you, if you look at staff pay, what you'll see is you, you've still got like a full-time coach making $64,000 a year, and that's just what they get for coaching. They might be doing some of these other roles too. You got at least one more part-time coach making $41,000 a year, but then you've got these lower value, very leverageable roles like client success, admin, social media, cleaner, and you've got $2,000 a month to pay them. So what you're actually buying there is not necessarily somebody who can do this better than you. What you're buying is time to work on higher value roles. Okay, that, that $2,000 is an investment in your time.

So when I look at these 3 scenarios, what you've laid out is the scenario 1 of You're the owner, you're doing all the work. You're— I mean, that, that's hard, especially to maintain.

Right.

And then each scenario, you've basically, by adding on additional revenue, it allows you to leverage that revenue to let other people take some of this workload off. So now, not only do you get a good feeling of providing for the families of others, but you have more freedom as the owner. Like, right, because he's still going to make $100 grand, but in this case he's working less.

Yeah, and when he is working or she is working, they're probably not coaching. Well, they can if they want to, but they're probably not cleaning. You know, here's an example, John. Um, when I figured this out with the help of a mentor, it was 2010. I could hire a cleaner for minimum wage, which was $11 an hour in Ontario back then, And so what I did was I hired this guy named Sean, and Sean would show up at the gym at 8:55, and he would start mopping at 9 o'clock after my last class ended. And while he was mopping, I would sit at my computer and write the email to my email list, or I would, you know, make up the page on my website to promote my new thing, or I would email clients back, you know, or I would sometimes leave a voicemail even at 9 o'clock at night. So I was working on higher value roles and You know, even then I knew if I send out my monthly email, I'm gonna make $300 back. Well, it takes me an hour. I can pay Sean $1,100 and get a $300 return on that time investment. Like, I'm crazy not to do this. And then over time I figured out like, okay, I can also hire people to do my whatever, you know, my social media when that became a thing. And then I just kept graduating my time up. And as that happened, I was making more money and the business was growing.

Yeah. And that, you guys, that's a really great way to go about it. I know we get a lot of clients and when we do an analysis with Profit First and cash flow analysis, honestly, we have to come back to the owner and say, look, at the end of the day, you can't afford to take all these classes off right now.

Yeah.

Like, if in order to avoid burnout, you really do need to coach some more. And then by paying yourself to coach those classes, for the record, because some people don't do that either— I'll coach all these classes because I can't afford to pay someone else— uh, well, then you never know if you can afford to replace yourself. Let's start doing that, then do the other Profit First work, cut back expenses And then do some of the 2 Brain work of improving standard operating procedures, all the other stuff that you guys show on the different levers that can be pulled. Then now you're getting to that point where, okay, I can now replace myself and I know I can afford to do it.

We teach this like a timeline now, and there's a brand new workbook for people in 2 Brain, but I'll just, I'll give you the gist of it. The first thing that you want to do is figure out like, what is your time worth as an entrepreneur? You know, if you were going to hire yourself or somebody else was going to hire you as CEO of their gym, like what, what should your salary be? And so what you do is you start by taking out like, you know, net owner benefit.

Okay.

How much did your gym pay you last month? And then you divide that by hours worked. Okay. And then what you do is you write down the hats that you wear at your gym. And you determine the local replacement cost. So I said at the low end of the spectrum here, back in the day, I could pay Sean $11 an hour to clean. Okay. So that's like the cleaner, but I could also pay, and our minimum wage just went up to $15 an hour last night. So I could, I could pay somebody $15 an hour to be like at the front desk or processing payments. Okay, I could pay somebody maybe about $20 an hour to handle my social media. I could pay somebody $30 an hour to be a group class coach, right? So we got cleaner, we got admin, we got social media, and we got coach. So then what you want to do is you want to say like, okay, I paid myself $1,000 last week and I worked 40 hours, so my time is worth $25 per hour. Okay, so you know here here's me. I almost chose brown for this, but I didn't. Here's where I fit on this this value line in my business. I should not be doing any of these jobs because I'm more valuable than the replacement cost. So what I should be doing is saying, okay, well, I'm cleaning you know five hours a week here. If I replace myself in this cleaner role. For five hours, I've actually bought myself five hours where I can do a higher value role. Like maybe that's coach, and now I'm earning another 150 bucks a month. You know, or you know up here you start to getting get into like sales and marketing and lead gen and stuff, and that time is actually worth more. So maybe that's about 70, and your goal as a gym owner is to be more valuable, earning more money for the same time as you would as a coach. So if you could make 70 bucks an hour being a personal trainer at Gold's, you. want to be able to earn more than that as a gym owner. So your goal is just like, you know, gradually move up what we call the value ladder here. Yeah.

And what's really important, because we've seen this, the gym owners will start leveraging their money to take some tasks off their plate, but they don't utilize that time in the high-value activities. They just And I get it, maybe you need to take a week off. We all need time off. So please, I'm not saying that. I am not of the mindset of the hustle and grind forever and kill yourself. I just— it's not sustainable. I don't believe in that model. It's not a, it's not a lifestyle that I choose. Um, and so I would never encourage anyone to do that. But there is a point when your gym isn't as profitable as you know it will be in the future. you have to utilize the freed up time to work on the business, on the higher value activities. There will come a point, I promise there will come a point where you can just legit leverage your money to free up more time for yourself. And yeah, it means your take-home pay might be a little bit less, but you've already reached that point in like Maslow's hierarchy of needs that you don't necessarily need the extra money. So that can be a point, but you have to be smart about And honest with yourself about what stage your gym is at so that when you are freeing up this time, you're first starting with, okay, I freed up 5 hours. I have to use those 5 hours and treat them as like, uh, you know, just firm. I can't negotiate these 5 hours because I'm going to do activity XYZ to make it worth my while.

Yeah, that's great, man. That, that's what grinding really is. It's not putting your head down, coaching every class, mopping the floor, working out, doing your social media, and trying to make it home at 9 o'clock. You know, grinding is actually lifting your head up and saying, what is the value of the work that I'm doing here?

Yeah, so good.

Okay, so why you're not making $100,000 a year. There's 6 reasons that people aren't making $100,000 a year. The first is that they're not paying themselves enough. You know, we had a, a person come into ramp up a couple weeks ago and their gym was doing like $300,000 a year gross. Fantastic. He was making $0.

Wow.

And his wife was making $0 and he was thinking about getting another job. So their mentor said, okay, hang on, before we do anything else, write yourself a check for Friday for $1,000. And he, of course, you've heard this 1,000 times, John, Wow. Where's that money coming from? Right? It's not just gonna appear. I'm telling you, I don't have it. Okay. Write the check. And of course there it was. And he paid himself first and, you know, suddenly he had given himself a $36,000 a year raise just because of that shift in perspective that comes from Profit First.

Absolutely. And, and I'll just tell you this, I won't go into the full explanation, but what you just described is Parkinson's Law. If you're not paying yourself first, you are using up your expenses in other ways, honestly, just because you're not giving enough focus to the fact that you need to pay yourself first. But paying yourself first, you still see the money left over. And yes, it's less than what it was, but you underestimate your creativity as a gym owner that you will figure out how to make it work. And you do. You do. Every time it works.

My first week as a gym owner, I had to make $900 to pay our bills. And, um, like, there wasn't an option. We were poor. We were, we were broke. And I had a mortgage. And so I wrote myself a check on Monday, took it to the bank. It was postdated for Friday. Had never heard of Profit First at this point, right? So this is the This is the dumb way to do it, but I wrote myself this check. But then for the rest of the week, I knew that like I had to make $900, and so I asked clients to pay in advance. I would have done that otherwise. I asked clients if they wanted to buy packages of 20 sessions instead of just paying one at a time and I'll bill you at the end of the month. I called people with outstanding accounts and said, do you mind giving me your credit card so I can process this? Like all the stuff that made me super uncomfortable, I did it because a bounced check would've made me way more uncomfortable. So there's a forcing function to it too. The second reason is you don't have enough clients. And this, you know, this is a valid reason.

Yeah.

It's the reason that everybody thinks they're not making the money, but 5 times outta 6, it's not the actual reason. However, there are things you can do. The third reason, and this is the real reason for most people, is you're not making enough money from the clients that you have. Sometimes you need to raise your rates. More often than not, you have to have a better onboarding process and you have to coach people in what they need coaching in. So that means one-on-one training or nutrition. Not all your clients will want that. Most of them won't. Most of them don't need it. But for the people who do, this can make a massive difference in your business. The 4th reason is they're not keeping clients long enough. So what happens is every 8 months they have to replace every client that comes through their door. That's the average leg of 6,500 gyms, 8 months. Like, you can't ever, you can't ever fill the bucket when a client, every client has to be replaced every 8 months. And Worse of all, worse than anything else, is that in your local market, when somebody comes in and tries your service, especially if it's CrossFit, if they quit, they're not coming back because I've done CrossFit and now it's onto the next thing. So if you're going through clients that quickly, you're gonna spend your entire time marketing and you're gonna be talking to colder and colder leads and the wrong people who are just price shopping. The next is your expenses are too high. This doesn't mean, you know, like you need to cut, cut, cut everything. What it means is that you're not getting a good return on your investments, your investment in space, your investment in equipment, your investment in staff. You can't cut your way to wealth, but what you can do is magnify your return on the investments that you made. Like when you opened your gym and it was 10,000 square feet, You didn't get a big space because you're dumb. You got a big space because you kind of had a plan. Now maybe you have a different plan. So how can you leverage that space better? You know? And then the sixth is you try to do everything. I mean, the reason that most gym owners quit is they just give up. And it's— they're not making progress. They're working really hard. They're burned out. They're poor. And they say, I don't know how this is going to change. It's not going to change. I'm done. Instead, what they should be doing is saying, I had to invest in myself to become a coach. I should be investing in myself to become a business owner. And part of that is investing my time as an owner to be a valuable CEO to this business, which we just talked about.

Yeah. And I'm— that exercise you described of them labeling out the different tasks they're doing and putting a mark A market replaceable cost on it is super key to starting the process because at least gives you the plan of what you're looking forward to. Because when you set it out, you're not going to be able to do everything at once, but maybe you can afford to free up the couple hours a week you are cleaning the gym, and then that allows you to reach out to your members, and that alone may increase your retention from the 8 months to at least 10 months or something longer than that. So yeah, it is a process, guys, but sometimes with the right guidance, you can make that process really happen really quickly.

It's scary at every step, Jon. I was scared to hire Shaun, like $11, I could have that $11, you know? And then it was scary to replace myself as a coach at the 6:00 AM class. But guess what happened? Like, you know, we put a coach named Charity in, she was young, she had a ton of energy at 6:00 AM, People loved her and they stuck around longer. And that also bought me an hour to be working on calling old clients and saying, have you met our new coach Charity? And that's when things really started to snowball.

Mm-hmm.

So, um, everybody had— nobody is like running a perfect gym out there. Okay. The, the key to running a better gym and making $100,000 a year is to determine like what your priorities are. And it's really hard to sort that out. So we made this little diagnostic tool. The first thing you're going to do, and you can get this again in our free guide in the Gym Owners United Facebook group, or I'll send it to John, he can send it to you, whatever. The first thing you want to do is just circle where you are in these 6 areas. So, you know, what's your net owner benefit? How much does the business pay you per month in salaries or distributions? You know, circle that. What are you? So if I'm making $2,500 a month, I circle number 4. The next question is, how many clients do you have on recurring memberships? You know, maybe I've got 130, so I'm going to circle number 8. What's your average revenue per member? This is an interesting one because you have to include the people who are getting your service for free, right? Your trades, or like this coach gets a free membership. You have to include this in ARM because every new person that you add means you can spend a little bit less time with the clients that you already had. So if a client, if a coach is getting free membership and they are receiving quality coaching from you, then that's less quality coaching you're giving to somebody else, right? So you have to count them in. For most gyms, if you don't know this number, most gyms are number 2 on this, okay? Like they're $98 a month average ARM. Gyms who have been through the ramp-up program average $155 a month ARM. Gyms who've been with 2Brain for 2 years or more are at about $176 right now. But the interesting thing that's happening is since we gave them this, this row, these numbers, boom, that ARM is going way up. And you're starting to see people using hashtags like #150at205 in our group. And like they're working backward from that goal of high ARM.

Well, and you said that, you know, every stage is scary, and I get it. In order to improve your revenue per member, you literally have to either raise prices or offer more services.

Yep.

Then means the member is paying you more money than you're worth. I mean, that's just a logical outcome of raising your revenue per member. That can be scary. And I know it's a lot easier to do it when you've spoken to someone who has experience doing it, because you kind of need that moral support. Because guess what? Some percentage of your current members are gonna be pissed. But you're also gonna have a percentage of your members who actually were probably waiting for you to ask them.

Yeah.

Like, here are my goals, this is what I want to accomplish. Oh my gosh, I didn't actually know you could help me with that. Yeah, I'd be more than happy to pay more for that.

Yeah. Yesterday I had Rob Olson in our office hours and this guy's average retention is 30 months and his, yeah. And his ARM is like $240 or something. So like his, the lifetime value of every client at his gym is just over $9,000. And he said like when he bought this gym, they were charging $90 a month. People were stacking discounts. So like you would get 50% off for your spouse and then another 25% off of the remainder because you were a first responder. And, um, you know, every step of the way he was terrified, but every step of the way it was like, no problem, you know? And, um, they lost a couple clients, but most of that ARM increase actually comes from new people coming in the door. Like they don't know what your old rates are anyway.

So yeah.

Average length of engagement. So we said, if you don't know the answer, circle number 2, it's probably about 8 months. What's your time worth? That's the exercise that we just walked through that I drew really poorly on the whiteboard. And then what percentage of your money goes toward paying recurring expenses, not including payroll? So that's, you know, if you take in $10,000 a month, And you pay out $4,500 of that to your lease, your rent payments, the recurring expenses that you can't change, you know, you circle a number 5 on here. And then what you basically wind up with is a graph. You know, you could draw a line from one number to the other, turn it sideways and say, that's my weakest link, or it should just be obvious to you. The thing is like, these are all extremely leverageable scales. If, for example, your lowest number is leg, you know, you make a decent ARM, you've got a decent number of clients, you're paying yourself first, but your retention is poor. Well, if you increase that retention by one notch, going from 8 to 10 months, you'll make about another $40,000 a year because everything else will rise with it. If your ARM is $95 a month and you take that to $115, And you've got 150 clients, like that's, you know, $20 times 150, that's $3,000 more per month without any additional expenses. That's going straight to you. So net owner benefit comes up. So you can use this diagnostic. And the next step actually is we'll tell you like how to fix the lowest scoring things on here. But if you want somebody to walk you through it, give you some tips, you can book a free call with our team too. And there's a link at the end of the book.

Yeah, man, Chris, this has been awesome. Um, and obviously if you guys notice, there's more pages to the guide, so I recommend—

So many.

To, uh, go download the guide. Um, it's really— it's not easy, right? But it's at least simple. Um, yeah, it's— we don't have to be rocket scientists to make our gym more profitable. And by knowing which area is your weakest link and fixing it, you have just leveraged your time because you focus on the thing that's going to give you the biggest bang for your buck the quickest. Uh, so Chris, I'm really, really grateful you guys, uh, are doing what you're doing and you have the data to share with everybody. Um, I, I say this all the time and, uh, Well, I think the world is just such a better place when people are healthier. And if we think about what gyms do for our economies in whatever countries we are, the auxiliary benefits of someone having more health is just astronomical in their quality of life. And so we need gym owners to stay out there, and we've seen the ugly side of gym ownership. And so I'm really glad that you share your message that you do and you give resources like you do so willingly. If you guys aren't part of that, the Gym Owners United Facebook group, ton of free resources. Take advantage of it, um, stay in business. And remember, guys, profit is a choice. Have the courage and wisdom to choose it. Thanks again, everyone.

Thanks, John.