Chris Cooper guides gym owners through an expense audit using a simple three-column system: list every cost, mark whether it brings calm, and mark whether it generates revenue. Instead of cutting blindly, he shows how to negotiate with landlords and bookkeepers, keep critical services, and ask how to improve each expense's return rather than eliminate it.
I wanna walk people through an exercise.
Okay.
And that exercise is an expense audit. And I'm gonna do this the Chris Cooper way, not the John Briggs, you know, professional financial money math guy way, okay? Here's what I want you to do. I want you to make a list of all of your expenses, okay? And you're gonna list them all in one column. And you're going to say, I'm going to draw 2 columns beside it. In the top of one column, you're going to draw a smiley face. Okay, in the top of the other column, you're going to draw a dollar sign. This sounds like Pumpkin Plan, right? But it's not quite. Then you're going to look at each expense on your line. Okay, so expense 1, rent. Does paying my rent make me happy or make me calm? No, it doesn't. Okay, so I'm going to draw an X under the smiley face. Under the dollar sign, does paying my rent make me money? Well, it sure does because I run my business out of there. So that's a check mark. And then you go to the next expense on your line, okay? Air conditioning. Does air conditioning make me happy? It sure does. Does it make me money? Not right now. Cancel the air conditioning, okay? But when you get to things like mentoring, bookkeeping, accounting, You have to say, like, under the smiley face column, is this thing keeping me calm? You know, like, I mean, when the crisis started happening, John, I made 2 phone calls. One to my CFO, Veronica, am I going to be okay? And the second to my mentor, Todd, what do I do? And they've guided me through this, and 2Brain has grown through this crisis.
Right.
We have better retention than we've ever had. More new people are coming in because they're saying, I need you more than ever. When you're looking at your expense audit and you find something on there and you're like, oh, I'm not sure, maybe I could cut this, the first question you should ask is like, how can I improve the ROI on that? Not can I cut it? You cannot cut your way to success. You can't cut your way to wealth. You can't cut your way to being a millionaire. What you have to do and what millionaires and billionaires do is they say, how can I leverage that better? So, you know, my call to my bookkeeper, hey Christine, you know, what can we do about tax deferment this month? Hey Christine, should I, should I call my landlord if I had a landlord and ask them to spread the rent out over the next 6 months? Okay. Not, hey Christine, I don't need bookkeeping anymore. I'll take my chances with the CRA. That's the Canadian IRS, right? It's like the IRS in French. It's, you know, like, that's stupid. Don't do it. Do an expense audit and try to leverage the expenses that you have because you signed up for these things for a reason, right? Maybe you're not optimizing them. Now you'll have the time to, but don't just start cutting stuff. I hope that helps.
No, that's a really great way. I like the simple approach. For a little bit more John Briggs complicated approach, because we're accountants, we like to complicate things. If you guys go to profitfirstformicrogyms.com/tools, we created some tools for the book, people who bought the book. Certainly we have a chapter in the book that goes over expenses.
Nice.
And we also have courses that have specific lessons just on how to look at and analyze your expenses. Now's a great time to Pivot, because guess what? Expenses that last week were profitable or productive for me are probably not the same expenses that are productive for me right now after I've, after I've closed my gym. So you want to reassess that because you, your gym model has to change if you're going to stay viable.
