June 3, 2025 • 12 mins
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper presents the leaderboard for gyms with the most paying members.
Coop reveals what the leaders have in common: They all focus on improving business fundamentals—such as retention, staffing and repeatable systems—instead of chasing shiny objects such as ad campaigns.
Another commonality: boosting average revenue per member (ARM) rather than just adding a ton of cheap, new members. To accomplish this, many have added high-value options such as small group training, personal training and Hyrox programming.
Chris also shares real quotes from these leaders, including one from an owner whose gym halved its ad spend while increasing front-end revenue.
Tune in to hear tips from top gym owners for growing your client headcount without spending your hard-earned profit on advertising.
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Gym Owners United
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0:01 - Intro
1:42 - Gyms with the most clients
3:05 - What they have in common
4:53 - Quotes from the leaders
9:43 - CrossFit gyms in Europe
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
How do you get more clients?
The best way to figure that outis to ask the gyms that have the
most clients in the world howthey did it.
I'm Chris Cooper.
This is Run a Profitable Gym,and today I'm going to share our
leaderboard, our top 10 gyms inTwo Brain for the number of
clients they have.
Keep in mind that these are allcoaching gyms.
(00:21):
These are not big club gymswhere people pay$40 a month and
they come and use the equipment.
Two Brain is a mentorshippractice for coaching gyms, and
we want to know who's doing thebest.
And so every month we trackacross several metrics, how many
clients they have, who's got thehighest value per client, who's
keeping clients the longest,who's getting the most leads,
(00:43):
who's getting the mostconversions.
And then we break down thelessons from one of these groups
for you on this podcast forfree.
Today we're talking about whohas the most members.
Not because that's the onlyimportant metric that you can
count on, but it's one of thosemetrics that multiplies on the
others.
Now, Before I get into it,because these numbers are going
to blow your mind, let me tellyou how we picked these gyms.
(01:07):
These are all single locations.
One owner has two separate gymson the board in Chile.
Each gym is representedseparately.
It's earned its own spot.
Amazing.
Also, these gyms are alsocoaching gyms.
To keep things level, we don'tinclude access gyms unless their
ARM is over$130 a month becausethat shows that they're not just
(01:28):
selling like a door pass accesswhere you can come in and go out
and build your business around1,000 clients.
What we're actually looking athere are paying members in a
group coaching gym or a program.
So let's start here with number10 and work our way up.
In 10th place, we have a gymfrom the U.S.
with$300 members.
In a coaching gym, that'samazing.
(01:50):
And keep in mind that theaverage revenue per member at a
two-brand gym is over$200 now.
That means that these peoplehave 379 clients, all paying
above$200 on average ARM.
Ninth place, also from the US,386 members.
Eighth place, from Portugal, 419members.
(02:11):
Seventh place, from the UK, 436members.
Sixth place from the US again,444.
Fifth place from theNetherlands, 446 members.
Fourth place from Denmark, 472.
Third place from Chile, 474members.
Amazing.
But the other gym from the sameowner also in Chile has 649
(02:35):
members.
That's incredible.
And the number one gym inTubrain last month for the most
members had 655 and they're inDenmark.
Now that's close.
The second place has 649.
The top one has 655.
They're competing for that topspot.
Good for them.
But what they have to teach youis probably what's more
important.
You know, these guys areinspirations to us, but we're
(02:57):
all climbing the same mountain.
So I want to use what they knowto help you grow your gym.
You ready?
Let's go.
Before I get into their specifictips, I want to give you some
common overlying themes.
So first, none of the leadersmentioned crazy marketing plans
that other people in Two Brainaren't using.
In fact, one of them is reducingads to focus on lead nurture and
(03:18):
sales better.
This plan was clearly supportedAnd I'll share their quote in a
moment.
(03:50):
operations the next level isyour marketing the third level
is your brand and the fourth arethose unmeasurable things like
culture and community all thesethings are important but you
have to focus on the basicsfirst and that's why you'll hear
in these quotes so many of thesegyms are saying we need to get
better retention even when theyalready have like 500 members
(04:10):
they're still focused on gettingbetter and better and better at
retention instead of doingdifferent and different and
different marketing next thingthese gym owners are focusing on
high value clients.
They're not just adding lots andlots of cheap members by running
these cheap challenges or freetrials.
Hyrox and small group streamsare part of that, increasing the
value of their memberships aswell as personal training and
(04:32):
semi-private.
There is one access-based gym onthe board, but they sell with
the prescriptive model.
They use a consultation, theyuse an assessment, they do a
prescription, and that rangesfrom 24-hour access all the way
up to personal training.
Their ARM is 60% higher thanother access-only gyms that we
work with.
(04:53):
So let's talk quotes from theseleaders because that's what's
gonna help you.
All right, here's the first one.
They said, over the past month,we've cut our ad spend by more
than 50% and shifted our focustowards sales training and lead
nurturing instead.
We maintain the same intake ratefrom half the number of leads
and even saw a slight increasein front-end revenue all while
(05:15):
spending half as much on ads.
That's been amazing.
Boy, if you take nothing elsefrom this episode, write that
down.
If you improve lead nurture andsales, you can cut your ad costs
in half.
The second person talked aboutretention.
They said, we doubled down onreaching out to our at-risk
clients.
Normally, we track members whohaven't visited the days in two
weeks, but now we've loweredthat threshold to eight days.
(05:38):
Naturally, that increased thenumber of people on the list a
lot, but we committed to callingit four days every single week.
And out of 472 members, onlyeight hadn't shown up in the
last eight days.
So the effort is definitelypaying off now.
Another person focusing onretention said, the first thing
we worked on when we bought thegym in 2023 was the systems.
(05:59):
The churn rate was high.
So we started by focusing onretention and systems.
We saw a ton of change inprogress.
Now, another common theme herewas these gyms adding a hybrid
model of group coaching or smallgroup or high high rocks, et
cetera, okay?
This person said, our mainservice is group classes.
We have 400 students with lotsof scheduled classes, all
(06:22):
CrossFit, high rocks, or othersimple metabolic classes.
Plus, we added small grouptraining with 28 members so far.
And after six months of runningthis business, we realized we
wanted higher revenues, and sothat's why we added small group
training.
And we're using our metrics tomake decisions.
Another person said, we addedHyrox in December 2024.
(06:44):
Conditioning classes are similarto Hyrox, so this was really
easy to add.
The Hyrox brand is getting a lotof exposure.
It's been a great experience.
We added the classes when wedidn't have anything else
scheduled, and we have 26 peoplein the classes sometimes.
That's amazing.
And Hyrox is not like the gold,the silver bullet, but it's an
example of how adding additionalthings or new things can boost
(07:06):
average revenue per member.
Adding something like Hyrox isnot going to save your gym.
Remember, you've got to haveyour systems and your retention
down first.
Then you've got to have yourmarketing.
But adding a brand like HighRocks, CNU Stretch, Parisi Speed
School, on top of those two baselayers of ops and marketing,
that can really catapult yourbusiness.
The next person said, we focuson calculated, sustainable
(07:29):
growth.
Last month, we turned on our adsand we needed to turn those down
right away because we don't haveenough staff now.
So adding the team is our newfocus.
Another person talked aboutmetrics based decisions.
They said, we're trying toreduce the total members because
we're trying to increase ARM.
We started at 500 kroner sevenand a half years ago when we
(07:49):
opened up, and now we're at 649.
The increase has come across thelast three years.
So this is an increase of about76 to$100 US, but in Denmark,
this is a massive deal.
Fitness in Denmark is veryunderpriced, very undervalued,
and our gyms are trying tochange that.
Another gym said, it was allabout staffing.
(08:10):
They said, I hired a CSM for athree month internship.
We measured the no sweat introsand we measured the goal reviews
that we did.
Her goal is to double the goalreviews and no sweat intros that
we do.
She's also doing three months ofinternship with the marketing
agency that we use.
She's tasked with uncoveringwhat our top 10% of content is
and seeing how we're doing sothat we can produce less media
(08:32):
overall and focus only on thehigh performing stuff.
This is a very high levelstrategy.
Yours doesn't have to be thiscomplicated.
Just produce more media, buildyour content funnel.
A different person said, twoyears ago, I hired a box
manager.
If I see improvements that weneed, then the GM comes up with
a solution as the operator.
This, by the way, is very rare.
Hiring a GM to save yourbusiness usually doesn't work.
(08:55):
Hiring a GM to operate yourbusiness by executing on your
systems and your operations anddoing your marketing that you've
already set out, that can workand that frees you up to build
the new stuff.
Finally, somebody said, westarted mentorship after
consuming a bunch of Two Brainfree resources.
They said, we've been growingsince starting with Two Brain in
(09:15):
February 2025.
This is a box with 13 years ofhistory and we've owned it since
2023.
We were mainly growing from theTwo Brain methods laid out in
the free content.
And we went from 289 clientswith the old owners to 400 plus.
And so we finally decided toinvest in the business and
ourselves with Two Brain.
We focused on adding an on-rampand we usually have 10 to 15 new
(09:39):
clients per month.
cancellations are also down.
This is a box in Europe.
And listen, if you're a CrossFitgym in Europe right now, you are
probably seeing a lot of peoplecoming in just to try it, right?
It's still novel.
It's still new.
You're still getting the earlyadopters, but that churn rate's
going to be high.
And eventually you're going torun out of these early adopters.
(09:59):
You're going to run out of theinflow of new people.
You have to make the change nowto add an on-ramp and focus on
retention and operating systems.
You want to be the first box inyour town to do that, you
certainly don't want to be thelast because the first box to
figure this out is going to bethe box that keeps people while
the other boxes are justbringing lots in and flowing
(10:21):
them right out again and maybeascending those clients to you.
So adding an on-ramp now, beingthe first in your city to do
that, means that you can be theone to keep clients and keep
maintaining your pace while theother boxes start struggling
when the new clients stopshowing up.
I make this point because thishas been a trend that we've been
watching for the last decade.
(10:41):
First, it happened inCalifornia.
Then it happened on the eastcoast of the US.
Then it happened in Australia.
Then it happened in WesternEurope, you know, Scandinavia.
Then it happened in the UK, thenFrance, then Italy.
And it's moving eastward.
And the exact same trend ishappening time after time.
You open up a CrossFit gym.
Whoa, stuff's really, reallyeasy.
(11:02):
People want to try this newthing.
They're excited.
I'm the first CrossFit gym intown.
A year later, well, they're notcoming in quite as often now,
and a year after that, it'slike, uh-oh, what do I do?
Maybe I'm not as good atbusiness as I thought.
I need to start marketing.
Oh, panic, right?
Look, I know this because it wasme, right?
(11:22):
I thought I was good at businessuntil, unfortunately, I realized
that I wasn't, that leveragingthis certain brand was what was
bringing people in.
The early adopters were gone.
I hadn't kept very many of them,and now I was in trouble because
I couldn't get new people in.
The way out of this is to workwith a mentor to build your
operating systems.
(11:43):
A lot of the longest standinggyms in the world, you know,
this one that I just quoted,they've been around for 13
years.
They've been through two ownersand it's because the gym is not
actually successful.
Just surviving doesn't mean thatyou're healthy.
And it's the same with business.
If you want to have a successfulgym, you want to have enough
clients paying a high enoughvalue to make it successful.
(12:03):
That's the key.
Work with a mentor to figurethat out and guide you through
the changes if you're not surewhat to do.
Use the free resources untilyou're ready for help making a
change.
I'm Chris Cooper.
This is Run a Profitable Gym,and I want you to do even
better.
How do you get more clients?
The best way to figure that outis to ask the gyms that have the
most clients in the world howthey did it.
I'm Chris Cooper.
This is Run a Profitable Gym,and today I'm going to share our
leaderboard, our top 10 gyms inTwo Brain for the number of
clients they have.
Keep in mind that these are allcoaching gyms.
(00:21):
These are not big club gymswhere people pay$40 a month and
they come and use the equipment.
Two Brain is a mentorshippractice for coaching gyms, and
we want to know who's doing thebest.
And so every month we trackacross several metrics, how many
clients they have, who's got thehighest value per client, who's
keeping clients the longest,who's getting the most leads,
(00:43):
who's getting the mostconversions.
And then we break down thelessons from one of these groups
for you on this podcast forfree.
Today we're talking about whohas the most members.
Not because that's the onlyimportant metric that you can
count on, but it's one of thosemetrics that multiplies on the
others.
Now, Before I get into it,because these numbers are going
to blow your mind, let me tellyou how we picked these gyms.
(01:07):
These are all single locations.
One owner has two separate gymson the board in Chile.
Each gym is representedseparately.
It's earned its own spot.
Amazing.
Also, these gyms are alsocoaching gyms.
To keep things level, we don'tinclude access gyms unless their
ARM is over$130 a month becausethat shows that they're not just
(01:28):
selling like a door pass accesswhere you can come in and go out
and build your business around1,000 clients.
What we're actually looking athere are paying members in a
group coaching gym or a program.
So let's start here with number10 and work our way up.
In 10th place, we have a gymfrom the U.S.
with$300 members.
In a coaching gym, that'samazing.
(01:50):
And keep in mind that theaverage revenue per member at a
two-brand gym is over$200 now.
That means that these peoplehave 379 clients, all paying
above$200 on average ARM.
Ninth place, also from the US,386 members.
Eighth place, from Portugal, 419members.
(02:11):
Seventh place, from the UK, 436members.
Sixth place from the US again,444.
Fifth place from theNetherlands, 446 members.
Fourth place from Denmark, 472.
Third place from Chile, 474members.
Amazing.
But the other gym from the sameowner also in Chile has 649
(02:35):
members.
That's incredible.
And the number one gym inTubrain last month for the most
members had 655 and they're inDenmark.
Now that's close.
The second place has 649.
The top one has 655.
They're competing for that topspot.
Good for them.
But what they have to teach youis probably what's more
important.
You know, these guys areinspirations to us, but we're
(02:57):
all climbing the same mountain.
So I want to use what they knowto help you grow your gym.
You ready?
Let's go.
Before I get into their specifictips, I want to give you some
common overlying themes.
So first, none of the leadersmentioned crazy marketing plans
that other people in Two Brainaren't using.
In fact, one of them is reducingads to focus on lead nurture and
(03:18):
sales better.
This plan was clearly supportedAnd I'll share their quote in a
moment.
(03:50):
operations the next level isyour marketing the third level
is your brand and the fourth arethose unmeasurable things like
culture and community all thesethings are important but you
have to focus on the basicsfirst and that's why you'll hear
in these quotes so many of thesegyms are saying we need to get
better retention even when theyalready have like 500 members
(04:10):
they're still focused on gettingbetter and better and better at
retention instead of doingdifferent and different and
different marketing next thingthese gym owners are focusing on
high value clients.
They're not just adding lots andlots of cheap members by running
these cheap challenges or freetrials.
Hyrox and small group streamsare part of that, increasing the
value of their memberships aswell as personal training and
(04:32):
semi-private.
There is one access-based gym onthe board, but they sell with
the prescriptive model.
They use a consultation, theyuse an assessment, they do a
prescription, and that rangesfrom 24-hour access all the way
up to personal training.
Their ARM is 60% higher thanother access-only gyms that we
work with.
(04:53):
So let's talk quotes from theseleaders because that's what's
gonna help you.
All right, here's the first one.
They said, over the past month,we've cut our ad spend by more
than 50% and shifted our focustowards sales training and lead
nurturing instead.
We maintain the same intake ratefrom half the number of leads
and even saw a slight increasein front-end revenue all while
(05:15):
spending half as much on ads.
That's been amazing.
Boy, if you take nothing elsefrom this episode, write that
down.
If you improve lead nurture andsales, you can cut your ad costs
in half.
The second person talked aboutretention.
They said, we doubled down onreaching out to our at-risk
clients.
Normally, we track members whohaven't visited the days in two
weeks, but now we've loweredthat threshold to eight days.
(05:38):
Naturally, that increased thenumber of people on the list a
lot, but we committed to callingit four days every single week.
And out of 472 members, onlyeight hadn't shown up in the
last eight days.
So the effort is definitelypaying off now.
Another person focusing onretention said, the first thing
we worked on when we bought thegym in 2023 was the systems.
(05:59):
The churn rate was high.
So we started by focusing onretention and systems.
We saw a ton of change inprogress.
Now, another common theme herewas these gyms adding a hybrid
model of group coaching or smallgroup or high high rocks, et
cetera, okay?
This person said, our mainservice is group classes.
We have 400 students with lotsof scheduled classes, all
(06:22):
CrossFit, high rocks, or othersimple metabolic classes.
Plus, we added small grouptraining with 28 members so far.
And after six months of runningthis business, we realized we
wanted higher revenues, and sothat's why we added small group
training.
And we're using our metrics tomake decisions.
Another person said, we addedHyrox in December 2024.
(06:44):
Conditioning classes are similarto Hyrox, so this was really
easy to add.
The Hyrox brand is getting a lotof exposure.
It's been a great experience.
We added the classes when wedidn't have anything else
scheduled, and we have 26 peoplein the classes sometimes.
That's amazing.
And Hyrox is not like the gold,the silver bullet, but it's an
example of how adding additionalthings or new things can boost
(07:06):
average revenue per member.
Adding something like Hyrox isnot going to save your gym.
Remember, you've got to haveyour systems and your retention
down first.
Then you've got to have yourmarketing.
But adding a brand like HighRocks, CNU Stretch, Parisi Speed
School, on top of those two baselayers of ops and marketing,
that can really catapult yourbusiness.
The next person said, we focuson calculated, sustainable
(07:29):
growth.
Last month, we turned on our adsand we needed to turn those down
right away because we don't haveenough staff now.
So adding the team is our newfocus.
Another person talked aboutmetrics based decisions.
They said, we're trying toreduce the total members because
we're trying to increase ARM.
We started at 500 kroner sevenand a half years ago when we
(07:49):
opened up, and now we're at 649.
The increase has come across thelast three years.
So this is an increase of about76 to$100 US, but in Denmark,
this is a massive deal.
Fitness in Denmark is veryunderpriced, very undervalued,
and our gyms are trying tochange that.
Another gym said, it was allabout staffing.
(08:10):
They said, I hired a CSM for athree month internship.
We measured the no sweat introsand we measured the goal reviews
that we did.
Her goal is to double the goalreviews and no sweat intros that
we do.
She's also doing three months ofinternship with the marketing
agency that we use.
She's tasked with uncoveringwhat our top 10% of content is
and seeing how we're doing sothat we can produce less media
(08:32):
overall and focus only on thehigh performing stuff.
This is a very high levelstrategy.
Yours doesn't have to be thiscomplicated.
Just produce more media, buildyour content funnel.
A different person said, twoyears ago, I hired a box
manager.
If I see improvements that weneed, then the GM comes up with
a solution as the operator.
This, by the way, is very rare.
Hiring a GM to save yourbusiness usually doesn't work.
(08:55):
Hiring a GM to operate yourbusiness by executing on your
systems and your operations anddoing your marketing that you've
already set out, that can workand that frees you up to build
the new stuff.
Finally, somebody said, westarted mentorship after
consuming a bunch of Two Brainfree resources.
They said, we've been growingsince starting with Two Brain in
(09:15):
February 2025.
This is a box with 13 years ofhistory and we've owned it since
2023.
We were mainly growing from theTwo Brain methods laid out in
the free content.
And we went from 289 clientswith the old owners to 400 plus.
And so we finally decided toinvest in the business and
ourselves with Two Brain.
We focused on adding an on-rampand we usually have 10 to 15 new
(09:39):
clients per month.
cancellations are also down.
This is a box in Europe.
And listen, if you're a CrossFitgym in Europe right now, you are
probably seeing a lot of peoplecoming in just to try it, right?
It's still novel.
It's still new.
You're still getting the earlyadopters, but that churn rate's
going to be high.
And eventually you're going torun out of these early adopters.
(09:59):
You're going to run out of theinflow of new people.
You have to make the change nowto add an on-ramp and focus on
retention and operating systems.
You want to be the first box inyour town to do that, you
certainly don't want to be thelast because the first box to
figure this out is going to bethe box that keeps people while
the other boxes are justbringing lots in and flowing
(10:21):
them right out again and maybeascending those clients to you.
So adding an on-ramp now, beingthe first in your city to do
that, means that you can be theone to keep clients and keep
maintaining your pace while theother boxes start struggling
when the new clients stopshowing up.
I make this point because thishas been a trend that we've been
watching for the last decade.
(10:41):
First, it happened inCalifornia.
Then it happened on the eastcoast of the US.
Then it happened in Australia.
Then it happened in WesternEurope, you know, Scandinavia.
Then it happened in the UK, thenFrance, then Italy.
And it's moving eastward.
And the exact same trend ishappening time after time.
You open up a CrossFit gym.
Whoa, stuff's really, reallyeasy.
(11:02):
People want to try this newthing.
They're excited.
I'm the first CrossFit gym intown.
A year later, well, they're notcoming in quite as often now,
and a year after that, it'slike, uh-oh, what do I do?
Maybe I'm not as good atbusiness as I thought.
I need to start marketing.
Oh, panic, right?
Look, I know this because it wasme, right?
(11:22):
I thought I was good at businessuntil, unfortunately, I realized
that I wasn't, that leveragingthis certain brand was what was
bringing people in.
The early adopters were gone.
I hadn't kept very many of them,and now I was in trouble because
I couldn't get new people in.
The way out of this is to workwith a mentor to build your
operating systems.
(11:43):
A lot of the longest standinggyms in the world, you know,
this one that I just quoted,they've been around for 13
years.
They've been through two ownersand it's because the gym is not
actually successful.
Just surviving doesn't mean thatyou're healthy.
And it's the same with business.
If you want to have a successfulgym, you want to have enough
clients paying a high enoughvalue to make it successful.
(12:03):
That's the key.
Work with a mentor to figurethat out and guide you through
the changes if you're not surewhat to do.
Use the free resources untilyou're ready for help making a
change.
I'm Chris Cooper.
This is Run a Profitable Gym,and I want you to do even
better.
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