June 9, 2025 • 9 mins
Knowledge won’t grow your gym—action will.
In this episode, Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper explains how to close the gap between learning and doing so you can move your business forward.
For gym owners, the cost of inaction is high: wasted payroll, lost revenue, clogged marketing funnels and low retention.
Chris has seen thousands of gym owners get stuck in a cycle of compounding mistakes—not because they lacked information but because they didn't have someone to help them sort through the info and figure out what to do "right now."
The solution? Building a clear plan for your gym with an expert mentor who will tell you exactly what to do and hold you accountable for doing it.
If you’ve been consuming videos, blogs and books without making progress in your business, tune in to find out what separates growing gyms from stagnant gyms.
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Gym Owners United
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0:32 - The implementation gap
1:31 - The cost of inaction
3:54 - How mistakes compound
4:49 - Value of an outside perspective
7:38 - Why Chris still has mentors
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Hey, I'm Chris Cooper.
This is Run a Profitable Gym,and I know you.
You're not lazy.
You're probably learning morethan ever about running a gym.
But learning isn't enough.
I've been providing free help togym owners for 16 years.
Books, podcasts, blog posts,templates, tools.
(00:22):
Some people use it and succeed.
And most people collect it.
They save it for later.
And later never comes.
Today, I'm going to talk to youabout the implementation gap and
how to actually make the changesthat will grow your business.
The implementation gap is thespace between what you learn and
what you do.
(00:43):
If you learn 50 things thisyear, but you implement zero,
what does that do for yourbusiness?
I'll give you a challenge here.
Think of the last five thingsthat you learned from listening
to a podcast or you read in abook.
Did you implement any of them?
And that's why mentorshipmatters.
We close that implementation gapbetween knowledge and action.
(01:03):
Jim wrote famously said, don'tlet your learning lead to
knowledge.
Let your learning lead toaction.
And I have that printed in myoffice because like me, you
don't need more ideas.
You need to act on one greatidea consistently again and
again, and focus on gettingbetter at that instead of
jumping from one thing thatyou're bad at to another one
(01:24):
that you're just trying for thefirst time and failing.
This is how mentorship gets you10 times further, 10 times
faster.
So first, let's talk about thereal cost of not taking action
because sometimes we use theaccumulation of knowledge as an
excuse to not take action.
Well, I want to finish this bookbefore I start working on it.
Actually, I'm going to listen tothree more podcasts on the topic
(01:45):
before I launch that thing.
Here's some examples of how muchpausing and waiting actually
costs you in your gym becausewaiting has a price.
For example, if you hire peoplewithout written roles and tasks
and evaluation forms andcontracts, that can easily cost
you$100,000 in wasted payroll asthat person quickly churns out.
(02:08):
If you don't have a pricingbinder, that's probably costing
you$5,000 a month in lost sales.
And if you have a weak website,then every dollar and every
second of time you spend onmarketing is probably wasted.
These are mistakes that peopledon't realize they're making
until it's too late.
I'll give you another great one.
Pricing based on what yourcompetition is doing or what you
(02:28):
think your process is worthwithout help from a mentor,
without looking at a P&L, that'sprobably costing you$5,000 to
$8,000 in revenue a monthbecause you guessed instead of
actually working things out withmath.
And so when a lot of people comeinto Two Brain, they think like,
I'm doing okay, I'm treadingwater, I'm holding even, I'm
maintaining, but they'reactually going backward.
(02:51):
So they're wasting money onstaff that's not going to stick
around.
They're wasting money on ads.
that have no effect becausetheir website stinks or they
don't have a good sales process.
They're wasting money trying toget all these clients in and not
keeping them.
And they're wasting money on thewrong model.
They're going down the wrongpath as fast as they can.
An example from my own gym isthe first four or five coaches
(03:13):
that I hired between 2005 and2009 were hired without any
written...
tasks to complete.
They had no checklist.
They didn't know how to do a 10out of 10, A plus job.
They came in and worked hard.
They showed up when I did veryearly and they stayed till late
and they trained a lot ofclients and I was still
dissatisfied.
And they would sense thatdissatisfaction and they would
(03:36):
just turn out.
They would think like, I'm doinga bad job.
I'm working as hard as I can.
My dad says I should get a jobin the post office.
Why don't I just do that?
It's so much easier.
And my boss isn't angry all thetime.
And so I wasted easily$100,000on hiring people who didn't stay
because it was my fault.
The next problem that happens isthat these mistakes compound.
(03:57):
So very few of us make just onemistake in business.
We hire the wrong people, wehave a bad website, we're doing
bad marketing, we have bad salesprocesses, our retention sucks,
and all these things multiply onone another.
If your retention sucks, thenyour staff is gonna wanna leave
sooner.
If your sales process is really,really weak, then you're gonna
get frustrated with all thesecold, leads who don't want to
(04:20):
buy.
And then you get burned out too.
And so these mistakes justcompound and compound until
you're so overwhelmed that youwant to get out.
And let's face it, moreknowledge just adds to that
overwhelm.
Gee, maybe the thing that I readin that book I should be doing.
Oh, I know I should be doingthis.
You start to feel guilty becauseyou're not getting results and
you know what to do, but you'renot doing it.
(04:41):
Without mentorship, your errors,your mistakes, your waiting
compounds and it multiplies oneach other So here's the next
problem.
You start trusting your ownopinions too much because you
know the right thing to do, butyou just don't do it.
I'm sure you've got clients likethis in the gym.
They come in and they're like,oh yeah, by the way, I have
(05:02):
Achilles tendonitis or I havethis problem with me.
And you say, okay, did yourdoctor say that?
No, no, no.
I Googled it.
Oh, did your physiotherapist saythat?
No, no, no.
Chat GPT said this is probablywhat's wrong with me.
And of course, doctors aren'tperfect, but they're way more
accurate than the averageperson.
And that's because they have anobjective perspective as well as
(05:22):
their knowledge so that they cantell you exactly what to do and
prescribe the action required tofix the problem.
See, when we're living in ourheads like we do all day every
day now, it's very easy to comeup with the first answer and
convince ourselves that that'sright.
Or to read a book and thinklike, wow, that's the solution.
We have novelty biases.
(05:43):
We have self-perception biases.
We have scarcity biases.
And these often guide us downthe wrong trail 100 miles an
hour because they can convinceus that we're doing the right
thing, even when it's only thevoice in our head.
And business is the same.
We project our feelings and ourbudget and our perspective and
our experience onto everybodyelse.
(06:04):
That's why you need an outsideexpert to help you see the real
problem.
Otherwise, you keep treatingchest colds when you've got lung
cancer.
Now, look, I've had a lot ofconversations, thousands of
them, with gym owners, whetherthey were in our program or not.
And quite often, 75% of thetime, they say, I just need more
leads.
But the problem is the sameproblem I had in 2009.
(06:27):
You can get a lead to come intoyour gym and not sell them.
Maybe the gym is messy.
Maybe you're all sweaty fromyour workout.
Maybe you don't know what tosay.
Maybe you spend an hour tryingto convince them and you never
get to the point.
Maybe you don't even make aclear offer.
Maybe you run a free trial andyou hope that they'll just toss
their credit card not you on theway out the door.
None of this stuff works.
(06:47):
But inside your own head, youthink, man, I'm working really
hard.
I'm trying really hard.
Why don't they see it?
Because you see it.
You have to be able to seethings from other people's
perspective, and that isextremely hard when you live
inside your own head all day.
We project our knowledge offitness onto people coming into
the gym.
We think that they understandwhy a GLP-1 might not be the
(07:08):
answer.
They don't.
They don't have anything nearour level of knowledge.
That's called the technician'scurse.
But the key is that they thinkthey do.
They think they know all aboutfitness, just like we,
first-time entrepreneurs, thinkwe know all there is to know
about business because we listento a leadership book that told
us to just grind harder and eatthe frog or something like that,
right?
(07:28):
The key here is that you needobjective perspective.
Just like your clients need anobjective perspective to help
them on their journey, you needthat in your business.
I use mentors still.
It's been 20 years since Iopened my gym.
I have a Over a decade since Istarted mentoring other gym
owners, I have many mentors thatwill help me.
(07:48):
They're all paid.
I listen to all of them.
They all are very specific.
And that's how I've grown thelargest gym mentorship practice
in the world.
Not because I'm smart, notbecause I had the best idea at
the right time, or I'm morecreative, or I'm a harder
worker.
None of those things.
It's because I have a coach.
And that coach sees things fromoutside my own head.
(08:09):
Look, you might think I justneed more time or more energy or
more information to make adecision, but you've probably
already tried all those things.
And there's a reason that you'renot taking action.
You're not doing it.
And it's not just because youdon't know what to do or how to
act next, right?
That's what mentorship gives youis a guide, a prescription, and
accountability.
(08:30):
I've got a lot of stories,hundreds of stories that I can
share about mentorship guiding agym owner to turn their gym
around.
Look, mentors don't come in andbe your CEO.
They don't change your gym foryou.
They guide you to do it, whichgives you the long-term skills
to be a good gym owner.
And that, to me, is the realvalue of mentorship.
You can learn lessons from abook, but not like what you can
(08:53):
learn from actually running yourown business and fixing your own
mistakes.
And that's what mentorship helpsyou do.
That's why working with a mentorfor a couple of years can make
you a great gym owner fordecades.
I want you to stop drowning incontent.
Stop confusing knowledge withgrowth.
Close the gap.
Get a mentor.
Make changes and grow yourbusiness.
And later this week, I'm goingto explain why it's so important
(09:15):
for every gym owner to growinstead of to fail.
I'm Chris Cooper.
This is Run a Profitable Gym.
And if you want to get some helpfor free, go to
gymownersunited.com.
We share actionable steps,tools, tactics in that group.
We do webinars.
We answer Q&As for free everysingle week.
Hey, I'm Chris Cooper.
This is Run a Profitable Gym,and I know you.
You're not lazy.
You're probably learning morethan ever about running a gym.
But learning isn't enough.
I've been providing free help togym owners for 16 years.
Books, podcasts, blog posts,templates, tools.
(00:22):
Some people use it and succeed.
And most people collect it.
They save it for later.
And later never comes.
Today, I'm going to talk to youabout the implementation gap and
how to actually make the changesthat will grow your business.
The implementation gap is thespace between what you learn and
what you do.
(00:43):
If you learn 50 things thisyear, but you implement zero,
what does that do for yourbusiness?
I'll give you a challenge here.
Think of the last five thingsthat you learned from listening
to a podcast or you read in abook.
Did you implement any of them?
And that's why mentorshipmatters.
We close that implementation gapbetween knowledge and action.
(01:03):
Jim wrote famously said, don'tlet your learning lead to
knowledge.
Let your learning lead toaction.
And I have that printed in myoffice because like me, you
don't need more ideas.
You need to act on one greatidea consistently again and
again, and focus on gettingbetter at that instead of
jumping from one thing thatyou're bad at to another one
(01:24):
that you're just trying for thefirst time and failing.
This is how mentorship gets you10 times further, 10 times
faster.
So first, let's talk about thereal cost of not taking action
because sometimes we use theaccumulation of knowledge as an
excuse to not take action.
Well, I want to finish this bookbefore I start working on it.
Actually, I'm going to listen tothree more podcasts on the topic
(01:45):
before I launch that thing.
Here's some examples of how muchpausing and waiting actually
costs you in your gym becausewaiting has a price.
For example, if you hire peoplewithout written roles and tasks
and evaluation forms andcontracts, that can easily cost
you$100,000 in wasted payroll asthat person quickly churns out.
(02:08):
If you don't have a pricingbinder, that's probably costing
you$5,000 a month in lost sales.
And if you have a weak website,then every dollar and every
second of time you spend onmarketing is probably wasted.
These are mistakes that peopledon't realize they're making
until it's too late.
I'll give you another great one.
Pricing based on what yourcompetition is doing or what you
(02:28):
think your process is worthwithout help from a mentor,
without looking at a P&L, that'sprobably costing you$5,000 to
$8,000 in revenue a monthbecause you guessed instead of
actually working things out withmath.
And so when a lot of people comeinto Two Brain, they think like,
I'm doing okay, I'm treadingwater, I'm holding even, I'm
maintaining, but they'reactually going backward.
(02:51):
So they're wasting money onstaff that's not going to stick
around.
They're wasting money on ads.
that have no effect becausetheir website stinks or they
don't have a good sales process.
They're wasting money trying toget all these clients in and not
keeping them.
And they're wasting money on thewrong model.
They're going down the wrongpath as fast as they can.
An example from my own gym isthe first four or five coaches
(03:13):
that I hired between 2005 and2009 were hired without any
written...
tasks to complete.
They had no checklist.
They didn't know how to do a 10out of 10, A plus job.
They came in and worked hard.
They showed up when I did veryearly and they stayed till late
and they trained a lot ofclients and I was still
dissatisfied.
And they would sense thatdissatisfaction and they would
(03:36):
just turn out.
They would think like, I'm doinga bad job.
I'm working as hard as I can.
My dad says I should get a jobin the post office.
Why don't I just do that?
It's so much easier.
And my boss isn't angry all thetime.
And so I wasted easily$100,000on hiring people who didn't stay
because it was my fault.
The next problem that happens isthat these mistakes compound.
(03:57):
So very few of us make just onemistake in business.
We hire the wrong people, wehave a bad website, we're doing
bad marketing, we have bad salesprocesses, our retention sucks,
and all these things multiply onone another.
If your retention sucks, thenyour staff is gonna wanna leave
sooner.
If your sales process is really,really weak, then you're gonna
get frustrated with all thesecold, leads who don't want to
(04:20):
buy.
And then you get burned out too.
And so these mistakes justcompound and compound until
you're so overwhelmed that youwant to get out.
And let's face it, moreknowledge just adds to that
overwhelm.
Gee, maybe the thing that I readin that book I should be doing.
Oh, I know I should be doingthis.
You start to feel guilty becauseyou're not getting results and
you know what to do, but you'renot doing it.
(04:41):
Without mentorship, your errors,your mistakes, your waiting
compounds and it multiplies oneach other So here's the next
problem.
You start trusting your ownopinions too much because you
know the right thing to do, butyou just don't do it.
I'm sure you've got clients likethis in the gym.
They come in and they're like,oh yeah, by the way, I have
(05:02):
Achilles tendonitis or I havethis problem with me.
And you say, okay, did yourdoctor say that?
No, no, no.
I Googled it.
Oh, did your physiotherapist saythat?
No, no, no.
Chat GPT said this is probablywhat's wrong with me.
And of course, doctors aren'tperfect, but they're way more
accurate than the averageperson.
And that's because they have anobjective perspective as well as
(05:22):
their knowledge so that they cantell you exactly what to do and
prescribe the action required tofix the problem.
See, when we're living in ourheads like we do all day every
day now, it's very easy to comeup with the first answer and
convince ourselves that that'sright.
Or to read a book and thinklike, wow, that's the solution.
We have novelty biases.
(05:43):
We have self-perception biases.
We have scarcity biases.
And these often guide us downthe wrong trail 100 miles an
hour because they can convinceus that we're doing the right
thing, even when it's only thevoice in our head.
And business is the same.
We project our feelings and ourbudget and our perspective and
our experience onto everybodyelse.
(06:04):
That's why you need an outsideexpert to help you see the real
problem.
Otherwise, you keep treatingchest colds when you've got lung
cancer.
Now, look, I've had a lot ofconversations, thousands of
them, with gym owners, whetherthey were in our program or not.
And quite often, 75% of thetime, they say, I just need more
leads.
But the problem is the sameproblem I had in 2009.
(06:27):
You can get a lead to come intoyour gym and not sell them.
Maybe the gym is messy.
Maybe you're all sweaty fromyour workout.
Maybe you don't know what tosay.
Maybe you spend an hour tryingto convince them and you never
get to the point.
Maybe you don't even make aclear offer.
Maybe you run a free trial andyou hope that they'll just toss
their credit card not you on theway out the door.
None of this stuff works.
(06:47):
But inside your own head, youthink, man, I'm working really
hard.
I'm trying really hard.
Why don't they see it?
Because you see it.
You have to be able to seethings from other people's
perspective, and that isextremely hard when you live
inside your own head all day.
We project our knowledge offitness onto people coming into
the gym.
We think that they understandwhy a GLP-1 might not be the
(07:08):
answer.
They don't.
They don't have anything nearour level of knowledge.
That's called the technician'scurse.
But the key is that they thinkthey do.
They think they know all aboutfitness, just like we,
first-time entrepreneurs, thinkwe know all there is to know
about business because we listento a leadership book that told
us to just grind harder and eatthe frog or something like that,
right?
(07:28):
The key here is that you needobjective perspective.
Just like your clients need anobjective perspective to help
them on their journey, you needthat in your business.
I use mentors still.
It's been 20 years since Iopened my gym.
I have a Over a decade since Istarted mentoring other gym
owners, I have many mentors thatwill help me.
(07:48):
They're all paid.
I listen to all of them.
They all are very specific.
And that's how I've grown thelargest gym mentorship practice
in the world.
Not because I'm smart, notbecause I had the best idea at
the right time, or I'm morecreative, or I'm a harder
worker.
None of those things.
It's because I have a coach.
And that coach sees things fromoutside my own head.
(08:09):
Look, you might think I justneed more time or more energy or
more information to make adecision, but you've probably
already tried all those things.
And there's a reason that you'renot taking action.
You're not doing it.
And it's not just because youdon't know what to do or how to
act next, right?
That's what mentorship gives youis a guide, a prescription, and
accountability.
(08:30):
I've got a lot of stories,hundreds of stories that I can
share about mentorship guiding agym owner to turn their gym
around.
Look, mentors don't come in andbe your CEO.
They don't change your gym foryou.
They guide you to do it, whichgives you the long-term skills
to be a good gym owner.
And that, to me, is the realvalue of mentorship.
You can learn lessons from abook, but not like what you can
(08:53):
learn from actually running yourown business and fixing your own
mistakes.
And that's what mentorship helpsyou do.
That's why working with a mentorfor a couple of years can make
you a great gym owner fordecades.
I want you to stop drowning incontent.
Stop confusing knowledge withgrowth.
Close the gap.
Get a mentor.
Make changes and grow yourbusiness.
And later this week, I'm goingto explain why it's so important
(09:15):
for every gym owner to growinstead of to fail.
I'm Chris Cooper.
This is Run a Profitable Gym.
And if you want to get some helpfor free, go to
gymownersunited.com.
We share actionable steps,tools, tactics in that group.
We do webinars.
We answer Q&As for free everysingle week.
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