Cash Flow Management for the Fitness Professional
In this interview, host Kelly welcomes John Briggs, author of Profit First for Microgyms and founder of Insight Tax, to teach fitness professionals a cash‑flow management framework based on Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First methodology, adapted for gyms and personal trainers. John explains why traditional single‑account accounting leads to overspending (citing Parkinson’s Law) and introduces the “Essential 7” bank accounts – Income, Owner’s Pay, Team, Profit, Tax, Equipment, and Operating Expenses – each with a specific purpose. He describes how to set up these accounts, run a cash‑flow analysis to determine industry‑specific allocation percentages, and establish a regular allocation rhythm (weekly or twice‑monthly) to move funds from Income into the other buckets. The conversation covers the importance of paying yourself first, reserving tax money, building profit distributions, using profit to accelerate debt repayment, and reviewing expenses regularly to cut waste. John shares success stories of gyms that survived COVID thanks to the system, and emphasizes the core message that every fitness professional deserves profitability to continue serving their members. The session ends with resources (the book, a 5‑day cash‑flow challenge, and a debt‑snowball spreadsheet) and an invitation for further Q&A.
Chapters
And now, without further ado, let me bring on John Briggs. He is the author of Profit First for Microgyms and the owner of Insight Tax. And he's coming to us from Utah, correct, John?
That's correct.
All right. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here with us.
Yeah, I'm really grateful for the opportunity. Nothing excites me more than helping fitness professionals figure out additional ways that they can stay in business longer. And I'm sure I'll get into all my many reasons why, but I'm really stoked to be here to share this simple system with everyone.
Thank you so much. So what I'm going to do, because I know you have kind of a mini lesson for us, is I'm going to let you take up the whole screen. I'm going to take myself off the screen. I may pop in with questions, and then at the end we will go through all the questions that the audience is submitting and we'll do a little Q&A session. Does that sound good to you?
Perfect.
All right, beautiful. Without further ado, take it away.
Okay, so let me just start saying then, as I'm sharing this information, please by all means pop your questions into the chat and the comments so that we can see those and get those answered. Um, I'm gonna do my best to share this information, but it, it can be a lot. And I also admit, as an accountant, I don't always speak human. I try my best But sometimes I say things that end up being confusing to people trying to understand and listen to me, and that's on me. So if you put clarifying questions in there, that would be super great because I do want you guys walking away with information that you'll feel empowered to help with your profitability. So the structure that we're going to talk about today is a cash flow management system called Profit First. And, um, I want to start by sharing with you, we are all subject to this thing called Parkinson's Law, and it's one of the reasons why we need Profit First in our life. So I was sitting in my office, I was a controller for a door-to-door sales company, and if you're not familiar, that just means head accountant. And the president of the company comes running in And he's out of breath. He must have sprinted. And because he doesn't go to your gyms, he was out of shape as well. So he's breathing really heavy and he's just like, oh man, you gotta lock your doors, John. You can't let anyone know that you're here today. And normally as an accountant, our jobs are pretty low-key. So I kind of felt like Doug was being a bit dramatic. And, uh, so I'm like, dude, I— what's going on? Um, because from my frame of mind, the weekend before, we just celebrated our year-end celebration, and it was a large company, and we had done $30 million in revenue, and we were handing out bonus checks to all the salespeople. Well, uh, apparently, um, and I knew this part, we were going to be short on cash, and so the owner of the company had been working on getting a loan. a million-dollar loan and it didn't go through. So all those checks that we handed out to salespeople, they were bouncing and they were gonna come into my office that day to ask me to write them another check. And if I did that and then they took it to the bank, those were also going to bounce. Um, so at this point, the question should be, how in the world does a company that does $30 million in revenue not have enough money to pay their sales reps? That seems, uh, ridiculously irresponsible, and it was, but they had fallen prey to this thing called Parkinson's Law. So the law states the demand for something expands to match its supply. Say it again. The demand for something expands to match its supply. And what we're talking about here with business is that we usually have one bank account, and that one bank account has cash sitting in it. And we can think of that as a pile of supply. So the demand to spend that money is going to continue to increase until there's no more money to spend. And we see this all the time. Um, the, the largest or highest preference for bank, uh, business owners when it comes to Um, deciding if they're going to spend money is what we call bank balance accounting. Hey, I need to spend some money. Do I have money in the account? Perfect, I'll, I'll go ahead and do that. But the problem is, when a dollar comes into our business, it's already been committed to some other things. Um, if, if you have a physical space where people come into it, there's rent. If you have team members, you've promised to pay them. Maybe you have a software that you're using for your members. We have commitments. Um, and the reality is, is that not every dollar that hits our account is ours to spend on operating and running the business. So what do we do? We say, okay, there's no way we're gonna fight the psychology of Parkinson's Law. It is what it is. We accept that it exists. But what we can do is put boundaries around our cash so that we can put ourselves in a financially fit position. Because without it, with the one bank account, one giant plate, we have this scenario where we're just going to keep spending the money. So one of the principles also relates to us as fitness professionals. Um, we know that if someone uses a smaller plate, they will consume less calories. The same goes with our business. If we have one giant bank account compared to multiple bank accounts that have smaller balances in them, we will consume less financially— or less financial calories. So I want to go over what are the accounts we recommend setting up And then I'm going to go over how the system works so that you can see the simplicity of the steps that you can take to implement a system like this. And look, I know that initially when I say we're going to set up more than one account, most gym owners don't go into business because they love accounting. And so sometimes there's an immediate pushback on just Like, you're gonna complicate my life by having me do all these things. And so maybe some, if they feel that way, are already gonna check out. Um, I am inviting you to trust me and the hundreds of clients that we've worked with. It works, and it actually doesn't complicate things. It gives you more clarity. So we say we're gonna have these smaller plates. But we're going to have specific purposes for some of them, because in those specific purposes is where the power comes, because, um, of just a lot of things that again I'm going to get into. Okay, so account number 1 that we recommend you have is called the income account. The sole purpose of this bank account is to receive your customer deposits. That's it. That's all it does. And when I tell you about how we're going to take money from the income account into these others, that I'm going to share with you, these other smaller plates, it's going to make a lot more sense. But for now, just write down income account, receive customer deposits. The next account that we want is owner's pay. If you have team, we love our team, they're really great, but the truth is, as the owner, you are the most important employee of the business. Certainly, if you are the only employee, you're for sure the most important employee. What do you do with your most important employee? You make sure they get paid. Too often, especially in the fitness industry, fitness professionals are willing to what I call fall on the sword, sacrifice, um, compensation and their livelihood as the last resort. Hopefully after I pay all these bills, there's some money left over that I can have a lifestyle. I believe that that tendency comes just because of the good natured people that I've met in the fitness industry, because the truth is you guys care about your members, you care about their health. And I know that sometimes, because there's that charitable component of what you do and the fact that your service improves the lifespan of somebody, improves their quality of life, sometimes we have a hard time accepting that even we deserve to be profitable. And you do. And so the first step we want to do is to make sure you have owner's pay and you're paying yourself. Um, if you do have team, we recommend having a separate account for team members. If you don't have team, you don't need to worry about that account. The next bucket we have is profit. So owner's pay is to pay me for working in the business. I should base my personal lifestyle off the compensation that I'm taking out of my owner's pay account. And I will— I'll get into how do you figure out what that dollar amount is. Um, but for now, again, I just want to go through the smaller plates. So owner's pay, working in the business day to day, I want to base my lifestyle costs off of the dollar amount there. The profit account is to reward me for taking the risk of being a business owner, because not everyone in the world takes this risk. And guess what? Risk deserves a reward. So the reward that we're going to do is profit distributions. Big companies do this all the time. They're called dividends. In fact, some people prefer the investment strategy where they only buy stock in companies that issue dividends. Well, in this case, you own stock in your business And now you're purposely going to set up a system where you're going to give yourself regular profit distributions. Uh, the next account is tax. Now, no one feels stronger about this than I do. The government sucks at spending your money, um, and the IRS is just full of a bunch of bullies. And I'll leave it at that for now because I'm— I want to be polite and positive, but the reality is For your tax bucket, while someone like us can help you get that down to the lowest amount possible, as you find success running the things that you're taught through, for example, these programs that Kelly teaches, you're gonna have taxable income. So let's set aside money for that tax burden. And the reason we have a separate bucket for it is because we believe the business generates the tax burden Therefore, the business should cover that expense. I don't want you to have to take money and save money out of your owner's pay amount to then pay your tax amount later down the road. So if I— if my owner's pay amount's $10,000, I don't want you to take out of that $10,000, say, $2,000 of it and set it aside, and now you're only living off of $8,000. I want you to be able to live off the full $10,000. Let's save the other $2,000 in this tax bucket. So that when tax time comes, you have the money available. And I can tell you, as I get into sharing with you how we allocate money, the system works really well because you're doing— you're putting money aside very often, which is a lot different than the scenario of not doing anything. And then you get your tax bill at the end of the year and you're like, uh, how do I owe this much money in taxes? Where's this? This can't be right. Um, it's a lot easier to come to set aside a small amount throughout the year than it is to come up with a giant big chunk of things. Again, that's partly because of Parkinson's Law. So we're just, we're putting boundaries and protections around it for ourselves. Okay, so to recap, income, uh, owner's pay. I mentioned the team member account, profit, tax. Uh, we recommend an equipment account for fitness professionals. Now, if you're doing online type of things and you're demonstrating things, and it's— so it's just your equipment that you're using, uh, and your, your clients are kind of doing like remotely or whatever, you probably don't need an equipment account because it's just wear and tear on your own stuff, and that's fine. But if you have a brick-and-mortar location or you're responsible or provide equipment to um, your clients, then we recommend this bucket. And you're going to set aside a smaller amount. Did you have something, Kelly?
I just wanted to, um, to make a comment or add something and see what you had to say. Now that piece where you're talking about having an equipment account, that's different than the original Profit First methodology. That's kind of specific to fitness professionals.
It's very specific to fitness professionals. Yeah. So if you've read Mike Michalowicz's book Profit First, his was designed for all businesses. So he wrote it in a generic fashion. And when he did his analysis of what fitness— what the healthy companies were doing with these different owner's pay percentages and tax percentages, he looked at a variety of industry. He opened up the opportunity for some of us Profit First professionals. So I'm a mastery level Profit First professional. He opened it up a few years ago and said, hey, look, I see that you guys might be tweaking things for your specific niches that you're experts in. And if you feel like you're tweaking it enough, let's go ahead and see if writing a book makes sense. So that's where the book Profit First for Microgyms came from, because we have tweaked it for the many— right now we're over 400 fitness professional clients. We've tweaked it. And so yeah, I've added the team member bucket for fitness professionals because if you have a brick and mortar location and you have team, they are one of your 2 largest expenses. And then equipment, because look, you have wear and tear on the equipment. Anyways, that was super fun experience writing that and working with Mike to make sure he was great with all the changes that I made. As part of it too, which I'll get into when I talk about the percentages, We decided to do our own analysis just on gyms because his generic percentages didn't quite match the fitness industry. And so we looked at financially fit gyms, and that's where our numbers are going to come from. All right, so equipment account. And then the final account, which you already have, is your operating expense account, or OpEx. The purpose of that account is to pay bills. Which you're already doing out of that account anyways. So the biggest change in that account that you'll have if you implement the system, which I really hope you do, is you're gonna have your deposits go into the income account. Everything else is basically gonna stay the same. You're still gonna write checks out of it. You're gonna have your autopays come out of it, that type of stuff. Um, so that's kind of the easiest account to deal with. So those are what we call the Essential 7 smaller plates. For fitness professionals. And again, if you don't have team or you are doing some sort of remote coaching service, you may not need 2 of them. Um, and I'll maybe say that as a caveat here too. This is a framework. The goal is to find something that is going to work that you're excited about working with. And so A lot of our clients will adapt some of these things. Um, as, as a— another common adaption, owner's pay account. I have half my clients who don't set up a separate business account for owner's pay. They just transfer the money directly into the personal account. There's nothing wrong with that. Uh, go ahead and do that if that sounds more convenient to you. Um, I'll tell you, I personally have an owner's pay account because I have fluctuation in my cash flow cycle as a tax firm. Um, and so there are some months that I would be allocating a pretty large amount to owner's pay, and then I have other months out of the year that I'm not able to allocate anything, uh, just because of the way cash flows. So this way, by having an owner's pay account in the business account, I actually can spread those out so that I'm transferring the same dollar amount into my personal account And then at the end of the year, my favorite part is that whatever balance is left over at 12/31, I transfer that all into my personal account. So it kind of feels like Christmas, uh, even though Christmas just happened. It's like Christmas for New Year's. Anyways, I love it.
Okay. That is goals right there because that has not happened to me yet.
And Kelly, the same thing goes with the tax account. So Um, if you're setting aside money in your tax bucket and you get to the end of the year, or when you pay your tax bill, you compare your tax bill to what you had saved during that year, and anything left over is now your money to play with. So instead of being excited about getting a refund from the IRS and, uh, giving them an interest-free loan, which we don't want to do, you give yourself your own little bonus. And again, you can spend it on whatever you want. It's awesome.
Now that, that did happen to me with the help of Insight Tax this year. So you guys did help me to make sure that I was paying the correct amount and not overpaying in any way. And then I did end up with money that I had set aside for taxes that I did not have to pay for taxes. And so I was super excited about that. And what I did is I took a portion of it and used it and then left the rest as padding. in case, you know, it's needed at whatever time. But that feels so good to have that extra money just kind of, you know, most small businesses don't have any money sitting aside. So it's really great to be able to have that.
Yeah.
And I would not have that without the Profit First structure of accounting and putting money into these different buckets. There's no way.
Yeah. I just love the stress relief of setting aside the small amount, which is what we'll move into next. So as we think about, I just gave you 5 to 7 accounts that I'm recommending you set up. And I'm telling you, you should put money into these accounts. Well, how do you know what to put money into? We, well, you wanna do a cash flow analysis to start with. And it's kind of like the before and after pictures that we used to see before Facebook thought that those are never, not allowed anymore.
No.
So it's like, here's the client before they met us, and now here's the client after they met with us. So the cash flow analysis gives us a snapshot of where are you currently allocating your money, because even though you haven't consciously done this, you have spent money that goes into these different buckets, and that's what the cash flow analysis uncovers for you. So we get a current snapshot, and then it compares your revenue size to what a financially fit gym is able to do with the same revenue. And that gives us a target. So it's kind of like, here's your before picture, here's where we want your after picture to be. Now how do we get there? And so the cash flow analysis is going to reveal for you, like, let's say owner's pay is 15% and taxes 10%. For anyone interested, we do have— I'll send the link to Kelly. We have a free resource. I've taken the cash flow analysis process And broken it up into really small digestible steps over the course of 5 days. And we call it our 5-Day Challenge. And over the course of the 5-Day Challenge, by the end you will have ran a cash flow analysis for yourself so you can see what percentages you may want to consider using into these different buckets. Okay, so I know that I fast-forwarded through a lot of stuff there, but let Let's now assume I got my account set up, I got my percentages. How does the system actually work? The bread and butter of the system is allocation days or rhythm days. And for this example, I like to compare a bear to a horse. Now, bears generally come with them a lot of body fat. Yes, they are massive and they're powerful and they are strong. But if you compare their physique to a horse, the horse is generally pretty shredded, very lean. And the reason is we can look at their diets. Bear, just a gigantic amount of food goes into hibernation, right? Horses graze and they eat regular meals. So look, I'm not saying anything about the new intermittent fasting that I mean, it's not new per se, but it definitely has gotten a lot more attention. I'm not saying anything about that. What I'm saying though is we know that if you do eat smaller meals on a more regular basis, that is proven to help you lean out and become more shredded, as opposed to maybe eating a couple big, big meals. We want to do the same thing with our finances. We can't wait every 12 months to actually consider thinking about what do we owe for taxes and how much money did I actually make. So we recommend you either are going to sit down every Friday or twice a month. And we want— if you're going to do it twice a month, 15 days apart. So 10th, 25th, maybe the 5th and 20th if you want that. Some people, that's their payroll date, so it matches better. But again, once a week or twice a month. You're gonna sit down, and when you sit down, these are the steps that you're gonna take. Step 1, whatever dollar amount you have in your income account, you're gonna transfer that money into your new— into these new smaller plate accounts, the Essential 7. And that's why we love having the separate income account, is because I don't have to look at my finances, which Uh, well, my financial statements, which is good to look at, but it's not necessary to run the simple system. If there's $3,000 in the account, I'm gonna allocate it. And since I have my percentages for my cash flow analysis, I'm just doing it on a percentage basis. 15 goes into owner's pay, 10% into tax, you know, 40% owner OpEx, whatever your percentages may work out to be. So that's step 1, allocate the actual money. Step 2, pay my bills. So anything that has come in since the last time I sat down and bills that I need to pay, I'm going to look at them. If they're not due until after the next time I'm going to sit down— so meaning if, if today is a Friday and I can see a bill that's not due till next Friday, I'm going to put that back on my pile of bills to play pay later because I don't need to do it right now. So I pay all the bills that are gonna— that are due now or that are gonna be due. And guess what? That's the only time I have to think about paying bills. So the other 6 days of the week, I can focus on serving my members. And I don't— I look, I just don't study enough psychology to know the real reasons why. I can just tell you from personal experience and talking with our many clients who've done through this, there is something about not having your subconscious worry about all these bills that need to be paid because you've established a time, a set time that you know they're going to get handled. So your body doesn't worry about it, and it works, and it's magic. Okay, so again, I'm gonna— on my allocation days, I'm gonna take money from my income account, put into the smaller plates, then I'm gonna pay my bills. And now what I want to do is look at my expenses. We do not do this enough, and I can tell you every time I sit down with a client, one of two comments are made as we look at every single expense because it's one of the, one of the lesson or one of the, uh, appointments that we set with our clients who do Profit First with us. One of two comments. One is, I thought I canceled that, or, uh, I have no idea what that is. Those 2 comments are strong indicators that you're spending money you don't need to spend, especially the ones that you're like, I thought I canceled that. Look, not everyone in the fitness industry is as honest as you are, and especially the vendors who we deal with. Sometimes they can be not nice or good people, and you may have canceled it, but you know, they're playing the cards. So it's always good to check. And then of course, if you don't know what the expense does, even if it is doing something for you, chances are it's not doing what you thought it should be doing because you would have been way more aware of the expense in the first place. We are big on the idea of thinking, is this expense productive or not productive for my business? Or in other words, do I get an investment out of spending this money? Is there a return that I can see that I'm getting? And if you can't see the return, you really need to think long and hard about keeping that expense in the first place. And if I'm doing that every single week, that means I'm just looking at the past 7 days of transactions. If I'm doing it twice a month, I'm just looking at the past 15 days. I'm not looking at the last 12 months of statements. I'm just looking at the most recent expenses so that I can give myself that space to really be honest with myself and say, is this expense necessary? For what we have going on? Is it adding to the member's experience? Does it help me with retention? Is it helping me grow membership? Like, you want it to be a good investment. And those are the 3 steps you do on your allocation day. And the first time is gonna take a little bit longer because you're— it's uncomfortable. You haven't done it before. It's the same thing when you have new members come in and you show them a new movement. You know, they're a little hesitant. It's fine, I get it. Just fight through that because I can tell you after the second and third time, you're gonna get it down. And all of a sudden these allocation days, you're gonna be able to bang out in 15 minutes to 30 minutes. And you're gonna feel so empowered because now you're regularly seeing, uh, the health, the financial health of where your gym is at. And you're transferring money to yourself and paying yourself and making sure that you are getting a reward for all the hard work that you're putting in. 'Cause really Profit First, it's a really sexy title, but I make the point in my book, I think it should be called Cash for the Benefit of the Owner First, but it's just not, doesn't sound quite as sexy as Profit First. Because if you think about it, owner's pay benefits you, profit gives you profit distributions and tax. Usually we've been accustomed to take money out of our owner's pay to pay the tax. Now the business is going to cover that. That's a pay raise just right there. So those 3 accounts really benefit you as an owner. Um, yeah, so that's the gist of the system. Um, the last thing I'll say when it comes to profit distributions, we recommend doing that once a quarter. And what you'll do with that is you'll actually distribute half of the balance in the account to yourself. And that is designed for pure celebration. You are not allowed to plow it back into the business to cover expenses. If your business doesn't have enough cash to cover the expenses using this system and model, your business is trying to communicate with you that it has too many expenses and you need to cut something. And when you get that message over and over from your business, you're gonna find creative ways to cut back. It, it just works great. On the profit distributions, again, once a quarter. We like to keep the half of the balance in there because it serves as a rainy day fund. And I can tell you, all of our fitness professional clients who did this system prior to COVID, because they had that balance, they were able to weather the storm during the crisis. And all of them are still in business. I'm not trying to say it wasn't hard for them. But they didn't get caught with their pants down like a lot of other professionals did, and they had to go out of business because they had the cash to help them survive. So it's also a crisis-preventing structure as well. And then the other advanced method I'll share with you, and then I'll open it up back to Kelly and any questions and answers that people have for us. Is that if you have debt, we recommend using the profit distribution to pay down that debt faster. So out of your operating expense account, you're going to make your normal payments, but then once a quarter, buy yourself something nice, something really small if, if you want that celebration. But the bulk of your profit distribution goes towards debt principal. Um, And it's a way to accelerate paying down that debt. Uh, it, it's really awesome. We had a client, they came to us with like $60,000 of credit card debt that they've been trying to get rid of for the last 2 years. And I will say this gym had really great top-line revenue, but they were making a lot of the Parkinson's Law mistakes and they weren't analyzing their expenses. So we helped them analyze their expenses. We freed up some additional cash flow. We Talked through them to take a very short-term cut to their owner's pay. They were still able to live their life, it just wasn't as glamorous as it had been for 4 months. Um, and with that extra cash we freed up, we were able to get their credit cards debt paid down in, uh, like completely paid out in like 8 months. Um, and now since that, because of the payments we were putting towards it, they freed up $8,000 of cash flow, which now they can use to further their mission, to further helping their, uh, the health of their members. I mean, the stuff's really powerful. Uh, the system works. And anyways, let, let's see what kind of questions, uh, people may have for us.
So I just want to say, I love that you brought up that part at the end where you said that it frees up cash flow to help you, um, further your mission. Because as I've been working with fitness professionals, and especially the fitness professionals that I work with, because I really work with instructors and personal trainers who are building direct-to-consumer businesses.
Nice.
So it's a very small, very micro business, and it's very new to them. And I'm just finding that many, especially fitness instructors, they don't have necessarily these visions of creating a 6-figure business or a million-dollar business. They want to create something that, yes, compensates them for what they do, and maybe that they make more than they did when they were working for the gym. But past that, they just want to help as many people as possible.
Yeah.
And when you are cash poor and when you're feeling stressed about money, then you, you can't help people. You can't get out there and help people. You're too busy, like, trying to fill your next class, which is why I teach the strategies that I do around automating the pay and that kind of thing. And I just love that you brought that up as well, because this system of accounting will free you up to not have to be thinking about your accounting all the time.
Totally. And I'm willing to bet with your systems, it's actually probably pretty easy for them with a little bit of work, uh, to have a 6-figure business anyways, even if it wasn't their initial intention.
I agree with that. I agree with that. I'm seeing that happen with people, um, every day that as they, once they start to really dial in their processes, start to understand who they serve, that they are able to start growing that. And it, it can get bigger than they had originally intended, which is great. And it also means that they can work less and make more. So they don't have to necessarily be working 60 or 80 hours a week. And they don't necessarily have to be working outside of the fitness industry in order to support their career in the fitness industry.
Yeah, I love it.
So very cool. I loved that you brought up— and then there was one other thing that you said that I hadn't thought of in the past, or it hadn't come up for me. Um, and maybe that was around using the profit to pay down debt instead of taking the distribution. Yeah, that's huge.
Yeah, so we— if anyone's familiar, look, people currently give credit to Dave Ramsey for the snowball method. Um, he has always said it wasn't his, but he's gotten to the point where he stopped saying it, so everyone thinks it was his idea. Um, the idea is rate your debt based on lowest principal left. You're not paying attention to interest rate, just what's the loan that has the least amount left. Rank them, and you start with the one that has the lowest balance, because then as I'm paying my operating expenses, um, those are normal, they're going to get their monthly payments. But then with my profit distributions, I can accelerate paying that down. Once I pay off The first one, I now take the amount I was paying towards that and I automatically apply it on a monthly basis to the next one. So I'm now already accelerating paying down my debt that way. And then I add in this profit, this quarterly lump sum payment, and it just pays it down real fast. And I can tell you, having lived with debt and then having paid off all my consumer debt, I just make better decisions and I'm more calm and less stressed out not having any consumer debt. And it— I wouldn't have been able to do it without using the Profit First system.
Amen. So as you're talking, I'm looking because I've got this really cool spreadsheet that does the, the snowball for you.
Nice.
And you can just put it all in. So I'm going to try to find the link to that because of course I don't want to send you guys mine. But I'll find the link and I'll put it into the comments for you guys. So it's a really cool debt reduction calculator. You just plug in all of your debt, what the interest rate is, how much you have left to pay off, and it tells you exactly what to pay first, second, third. Oh, the other thing you put in is how much money you're putting toward bills every month.
Yeah, very cool.
Very cool. I don't have a lot of people asking questions. I have a feeling we've got a lot of going on, so I'm gonna suggest that everybody go out and grab the book. Let's put the link to your your book, The Profit First for Microgym, into the comments. Do you have like a short URL for us or—
Uh, no, I don't think I have a short one.
Is it the Amazon?
I just have the Amazon one. I can put it in there.
Yeah, absolutely. So, so John's book is Profit First for Microgym. The original book that that's based off of is Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. Um, Mike Michalowicz also has a podcast. He talks about personal finance for entrepreneurs. That is like his thing. Um, and then Profit First for Microgyms really breaks it down for our industry. And one of the things that I think has really kept me in business is the fact that you guys put the exact percentages out there. So there's a chart, it says if you are making this much, you're gonna put these percentages aside. If you've got this number— oh, Lonnie put it in for us. She's so good. Okay.
Nice.
So, um, if you're making this much, then you're gonna put this much aside into each bucket. The— every single one of the percentages is in there, correct?
Correct.
All right, very cool. So you guys, if you do have questions for John, go ahead and put them into the comments. Otherwise, we're going to start wrapping this thing up. And then, um, he's in the group. John is in the group, so you can tag him with questions within the Grow Your Fitness Business Um, group. He's also the CEO and founder of Insight Tax, which is insighttax.com, right? Yep, you can find him there. He's john@insighttax.com and super approachable, great team. I use them for my stuff and I love working with you guys. I appreciate you.
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Um, if I could just say one more thing Please. I, um, because we've, we've hinted at this, and when I wrote the book, I was taught you want to have a core message to the book. And you would think with it being finances that the core message would be you should have money, um, it's important to stay in business. But the truth is, my core message is that every fitness professional deserves to be profitable, because I don't think enough fitness professionals accept that they actually do deserve it. And there's nothing wrong with making money off of helping people and changing their lives. I truly believe if we think about the way economies work, business— like, our economy is on the back of us as small business owners, the people who, who have 1 to 2 employees, it's yourself. We actually are the backbone of our economy. And in order for us to change kind of maybe the trajectory of where things seem to be going, we have to be around. And you can't be around if you don't have money left over. And I also want you guys to consider, of all the services that exist in the world, yours probably does the most good. Because guess what? Not everyone in the world's passionate about helping people with their fitness, but everybody needs it. So the world needs you. You literally are heroes of humanity. Because of what you do. If you think about how people can spend more time with their kids, and maybe they're a little more active, and they live longer, and they need less medication. Because anyways, like all those things, you help with those things. So the world needs you to stay in business, and the only way to do that is if you have profit. You have to have money left over. in order to have a sustainable business. It's just, it's business 101 that sometimes doesn't get talked about. So please stay in business, find profitability, and keep being those heroes for your members.
Oh my gosh. Amen. Thank you. Preach, my friend. That was so good. I know we have tears right now because I know these, these people and we, as, as a group, as an industry, we just do not value what we do enough. We do. We feel so guilty about charging and it's so such a mindset shift to have to get over, but it is important because, y'all, those people who are undercharging you, those people who are not structuring their finances, they're not going to be in business in 6 months. And then nobody is serving these people that we fought so hard to serve when COVID happened, and we were so worried that nobody was getting their, their fitness in. That's what's going to happen if, if we don't Do if we don't set ourselves up correctly. So thank you for saying that.
I love it. Yeah.
Okay, you guys, John is in the group. John is available at Insight Tax. Get the book, read it, um, ask your questions. We can have him back on if you guys want to do like a little book club kind of time and take some time to read the book, and we can have him back on for a Q&A. But Um, think about these things and get a structure in place. It will take so much off of your mind to know that you've got that rhythm in place and you don't have to worry about accounting every day. So I, I just can't recommend everything that John said enough today.
Thanks for having me. It was a blast.
