April 28, 2025 • 10 mins
Want to earn $100,000 a year from your gym? Passion alone won’t cut it. You need a clear plan.
Today, Chris Cooper introduces a proven, step-by-step guide: “The Gym Owner’s Checklist for Hitting $100K+ Annual Income.”
Based on data from thousands of gyms worldwide, this checklist outlines exactly what you need to do to build a profitable, sustainable business.
It’s broken down into six essential areas:
- Get More Clients
- Average Revenue Per Member (ARM)
- Length of Engagement (LEG)
- Effective Hourly Rate (EHR)
- Staff
- Finance
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the business side of gym ownership, this checklist will give you a clear path forward.
Join Chris for a live walkthrough and Q&A on April 29 at 12 p.m. EDT in Gym Owners United—linked below.
Links
Gym Owners United
Book a Call
0:01 - Intro
2:29 - Overview of the checklists
3:48 - Client headcount, value & retention
8:13 - Owner pay, staff & finance
9:50 - Your next step
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, it's Chris Cooper here and we're taking
the mystery out of growing yourgym. This is something that
I've been working on for thelast six months, but really
it's been a journey of over adecade to simplify gym
ownership into a checklist thissimple. And today I'm gonna
share with you what exactly youhave to do to grow your gym.
I'm gonna give you thischecklist tool so that you can
just check things off, find outwhere you're doing well already
(00:25):
and what you need to build. Andthen from there, I'm even gonna
make an offer to take youthrough this in a live training
on April 29th. Now, businessownership usually seems really,
really complicated. I have todo all these things and, and
gym owners tend to getoverwhelmed by all the things
they want to do, and sometimeswe get discouraged because it's
just not what we signed up for.
(00:46):
But breaking things down into amanageable checklist means that
we can pick the problem apart,we can make it achievable, and
you can walk through thisthing. So even though this
checklist might seem long, thereality here is I'm giving you
the exact steps to grow yourbusiness. I'm gonna walk you
through it briefly now, but ifyou wanna do this with me, ask
(01:07):
questions, go through a livetraining. We're gonna do that
April 29th at 12 noon easterntime@gymownersunited.com.
That's our free public Facebookgroup for gym owners where we
are just there to serve andhelp you grow for free. So I'm
gonna walk you through thischecklist right now briefly,
but on April 29th at nooneastern, we're gonna go step by
(01:27):
step through everything. I'llanswer your questions. Coop ,
what do you mean? Before I getinto this, I want you to know
exactly where we get thesenumbers. Every year for the
last five years, two brainbusiness has conducted a
massive data collection and wework with different partners
like software companies to gettheir data from thousands and
thousands of gyms around theworld. It's the biggest data
(01:48):
set in the world. And fromthat, we're able to say, how
many leads do you need to get?
What does the average gym ownermake? How much revenue does the
average gym owner make? How arethese types of gyms doing
compared to these types ofgyms? You can't find this
literally anywhere else in theworld. One value of that data
set and doing all that work isthat it allows us to build a
checklist just like this. Whatdo you need to do? And one of
(02:10):
the biggest values of achecklist like this is it also
tells you what you can stopdoing, what you can stop
wasting time on. So let'sbriefly go through it. You can
get this checklist, by the way,for me, for free from gym
owners united.com , um,starting April 29th. So just
log in there. All right , let'ssee what's in the guide here.
Remember that when you open agym, you are no longer just a
(02:33):
coach. Being a coach is anamazing job. But when you open
a gym, you become the CEO ofthat gym and your primary
responsibility is to grow thatgym. Now, you don't grow that
gym by teaching better classes.
You don't grow that gym bygetting more certifications in
CrossFit or Juujitsu orwhatever. You grow that gym by
becoming a better CEO. And sothat's what this checklist is
(02:54):
gonna do. This is gonna giveyou the master checklist of
what you've gotta do to growthis gym . We've broken it into
six sections, how to get moreclients, how to increase the
value of each client, a RM, howto keep your clients long
enough to change their lives.
That's LEG. Um, how to makesure that you're focusing your
time on CEO activities insteadof, you know, emptying the
garbage and washing the dishes.
(03:16):
Um, what you should be doingfor your staff and what you
should be tracking for finance.
Because let's face it, a lot ofus when we open a gym are first
time entrepreneurs and we don'tknow anything about finance. We
don't know what a p and l is.
We don't know how to read abalance sheet or an income
statement, none of that. And sowe just get scared and, and we
keep putting it off and we tellourselves, if I'm just a better
coach and I coach betterclasses, that's gonna save my
(03:37):
gym. That's not true. And thesooner you realize that, the
sooner you can actually startgrowing your gym because nobody
else is coming to do it foryou. Alright , let's get into
this here. So the firstchecklist I've got here is
getting more clients. I wannamake sure that you're doing the
things that you need to do toget more clients. And if you
answer no to any of thesethings, well that's what you
(03:58):
need to start doing. So forexample, I've got the, the
evaluate evaluation up here.
First, you know, do you measureyour set rate? If you don't,
you need to learn how tomeasure your set rate and start
doing that. I measure my showrate, okay? And once you can
say, yes, I measure thosethings, then you can look at
this chart and say, okay, wellmy set rate is 62% or better.
(04:19):
Now if you're not measuringyour set rate, that's where you
need to start. Don't getoverwhelmed and say, I don't
even know what that is. Yourfirst job as CEO and
responsibility is to find outwhat that is. Now of course, we
teach this in our mentorshipprogram. We publish free
content on this stuff everysingle day and we have for over
a decade. You'll get access toresources like this in gym
owners united.com . And you canask me this question
(04:42):
specifically if you want to onApril 29th at noon eastern in
our free training. The bestpath, of course, is mentorship
to learn this stuff. Think ofmentorship as an investment
that most people would've madebefore they open a business.
But you and I were just toopassionate about fitness and we
jumped right in. So here's thechecklist to get more clients.
Now we're gonna go through thisbriefly, but we'll go through
(05:04):
it more in depth at our freetraining April 29th. So using a
spreadsheet, how many clientsdo you wanna get? If the answer
is just more, then that's nevergonna be an achievable target.
We will figure out this targetby calculating the revenue that
you need to pay your expensesand make an income and pay your
coaches. And then we set atarget for your clients. If you
haven't done that yet, that'sreally the first step. Then you
(05:25):
wanna measure how you're doing.
So you figure out like, where'smy funnel leaking? So you say,
I measure how many leads I get,I have a referral funnel, I
have a content funnel, etcetera. And you just go through
this list, it'll take youprobably five minutes. I bet
that you can answer thesequestions just right off the
top of your head. Nomeasurement required. And then
, um, all the ones that's yousay no to are things that you
(05:46):
need to build if you wanna havelike a really good functioning
gym. Now, it might seem likewe're making the business of
owning a gym complicated, butwe're actually making it a lot
simpler. You know, people outthere will tell you it's not
complicated. Just get moreclients. The more clients you
get in the door, the better thegym you have. But if you've
been in business for more than10 minutes, you know that's a
lie and they're trying to sellyou an easy answer, right? Just
(06:08):
like people are trying to sellour clients an easy answer like
Ozempic business coaches andmarketing agencies that tell
you that growing a business issimple is trying to sell you a
magic pill. So here's thechecklist again, you know, this
is just to give yourself anhonest assessment of where
you're starting from. Think ofit as a functional movement
screen for business. And youknow, you're just, you wanna
(06:29):
see the s's and the no'sbecause then you got rid of all
the maybes and you've gotclarity. And you know, even if
you've got a lot of work to do,you know what that work is and
you can just do it. 'cause Iknow you're a hard worker then.
Okay, so here's the get moreclients checklist. You go
through it. If you've got agreen a yes in every category,
congratulate yourself. That's awin. If you've got some nos,
hey, you know, get to workbuilding those things. And if
(06:52):
you want some free resources,gym owners united.com has lots.
If you want coaching, wellthat's what two brain business
is really here for. Okay? Thenext checklist we're gonna walk
through is a RM. You know, doyou actually track it? And is
your a RM red, yellow, orgreen? Then from there you can
say, Hey, I can pay my billswith 50 clients. And we go
through this a RM checklist.
(07:13):
Okay? Now the get more clientsone is the longest one because
that's where we get the mostquestions. But the reality here
is that you need to go througheach of these checklists. Then
we're gonna walk throughretention. Retention is
important because if you're notkeeping people for two years,
you're probably not changingtheir lives. And so we wanna
make sure that you're doingthat. Most gyms will
over-report retention. They saythey're doing better than they
(07:34):
actually are. So this is yourchance to say, how am I
actually doing? Okay? Uh , sowe're gonna also track lifetime
value of a client. Then we'regonna go through a checklist
for retention. Retention is oneof these fuzzy topics that
everybody knows they shouldcare about, but nobody actually
breaks down into what works.
And they give recommendationsabout, oh , you need a badging
system. You don't, you justneed to do these things. And if
(07:57):
you can check yes off the , onthese, I know you're gonna have
amazing retention. That's morethan two years. Alright ? By
the way, if you think that yourretention is already more than
two years and you're running agroup coaching gym , I really,
I'm asking you dive in andcheck it for sure. This is one
that you really can't afford toget wrong. Effective hourly
rate. The reason we're trackingthis is we wanna see are you
(08:17):
doing CO work or are you mostlyjust being a coach or are you
an underpaid coach, or are youbeing paid as a janitor to do a
CEO's job? Okay? We're gonnawalk through this checklist
too. Staffing , uh, we wannaknow, like have you set
yourself up with success? Hey,if, if you hire people in , in
two years, three years, they'regone, it's because you haven't
(08:38):
checked the things off on thestaffing checklist. It's not
enough to have staff. You haveto keep your staff, you have to
motivate your staff. You haveto get your staff to do things
that you want done in the waythat you want them done. That's
what leadership is . And that'swhy this checklist is here .
We're gonna check these thingsoff . It could be that out of
the 12 things on the staffchecklist, you can say yes to
(08:58):
11 of them . Wonderful. Yourpriority is now obvious and you
can get to work on improvingyour business. But one thing
sometimes can be enough to killthe whole deal. Finance. Hey,
look, this is the scary one formost people, but let's face it,
nothing gets fixed by avoidingit. Just like your clients
don't lose weight by pushingoff their gym membership for
two more months. You are notgonna fix your profitability by
(09:22):
avoiding looking at yourfinancial statements. So you
just wanna know, honestly, doyou know what a p and l is? Do
you know how to read a p and l?
Do you know how to makedecisions with it? If you
don't, that's your priority.
And you can go get coaching oryou can ask your bookkeeper,
how do I read this? Andeventually you'll take control
of your business. Okay? There'sthe finance checklist. Uh , we
(09:44):
break this down by revenue andexpenses too, because you're
probably likely to be good atsome of this stuff and not
others. Reality is that you'reprobably really, really good at
coaching, but most of us arefirst time business owners when
we open a gym. And that meanswe're not good at owning a gym.
We're at eight outta 10 as acoach, and we're a zero as a
business owner. That's okay.
(10:04):
What's not okay is lying toyourself saying, I'll give it
three years, or I'll figure itout as I go, or I'll build my
wings on the way down. That isjust a path to destruction. And
the faster you figure this out,the sooner your gym will grow,
your life will improve, andyou'll be a real entrepreneur.
The longer you wait to figurethis out, the more expensive it
gets to fix mistakes, and themore likely you are to burn
(10:26):
out, flash , run outta moneyand close your gym. Let's start
by going through the checklist.
Let's see what you need. So onApril 29th , uh, at noon
eastern gym owners united.com ,I'll be there live to walk you
through this and answerquestions. Let's get your gym
rolling .
Hey, it's Chris Cooper here and we're taking
the mystery out of growing yourgym. This is something that
I've been working on for thelast six months, but really
it's been a journey of over adecade to simplify gym
ownership into a checklist thissimple. And today I'm gonna
share with you what exactly youhave to do to grow your gym.
I'm gonna give you thischecklist tool so that you can
just check things off, find outwhere you're doing well already
(00:25):
and what you need to build. Andthen from there, I'm even gonna
make an offer to take youthrough this in a live training
on April 29th. Now, businessownership usually seems really,
really complicated. I have todo all these things and, and
gym owners tend to getoverwhelmed by all the things
they want to do, and sometimeswe get discouraged because it's
just not what we signed up for.
(00:46):
But breaking things down into amanageable checklist means that
we can pick the problem apart,we can make it achievable, and
you can walk through thisthing. So even though this
checklist might seem long, thereality here is I'm giving you
the exact steps to grow yourbusiness. I'm gonna walk you
through it briefly now, but ifyou wanna do this with me, ask
(01:07):
questions, go through a livetraining. We're gonna do that
April 29th at 12 noon easterntime@gymownersunited.com.
That's our free public Facebookgroup for gym owners where we
are just there to serve andhelp you grow for free. So I'm
gonna walk you through thischecklist right now briefly,
but on April 29th at nooneastern, we're gonna go step by
(01:27):
step through everything. I'llanswer your questions. Coop ,
what do you mean? Before I getinto this, I want you to know
exactly where we get thesenumbers. Every year for the
last five years, two brainbusiness has conducted a
massive data collection and wework with different partners
like software companies to gettheir data from thousands and
thousands of gyms around theworld. It's the biggest data
(01:48):
set in the world. And fromthat, we're able to say, how
many leads do you need to get?
What does the average gym ownermake? How much revenue does the
average gym owner make? How arethese types of gyms doing
compared to these types ofgyms? You can't find this
literally anywhere else in theworld. One value of that data
set and doing all that work isthat it allows us to build a
checklist just like this. Whatdo you need to do? And one of
(02:10):
the biggest values of achecklist like this is it also
tells you what you can stopdoing, what you can stop
wasting time on. So let'sbriefly go through it. You can
get this checklist, by the way,for me, for free from gym
owners united.com , um,starting April 29th. So just
log in there. All right , let'ssee what's in the guide here.
Remember that when you open agym, you are no longer just a
(02:33):
coach. Being a coach is anamazing job. But when you open
a gym, you become the CEO ofthat gym and your primary
responsibility is to grow thatgym. Now, you don't grow that
gym by teaching better classes.
You don't grow that gym bygetting more certifications in
CrossFit or Juujitsu orwhatever. You grow that gym by
becoming a better CEO. And sothat's what this checklist is
(02:54):
gonna do. This is gonna giveyou the master checklist of
what you've gotta do to growthis gym . We've broken it into
six sections, how to get moreclients, how to increase the
value of each client, a RM, howto keep your clients long
enough to change their lives.
That's LEG. Um, how to makesure that you're focusing your
time on CEO activities insteadof, you know, emptying the
garbage and washing the dishes.
(03:16):
Um, what you should be doingfor your staff and what you
should be tracking for finance.
Because let's face it, a lot ofus when we open a gym are first
time entrepreneurs and we don'tknow anything about finance. We
don't know what a p and l is.
We don't know how to read abalance sheet or an income
statement, none of that. And sowe just get scared and, and we
keep putting it off and we tellourselves, if I'm just a better
coach and I coach betterclasses, that's gonna save my
(03:37):
gym. That's not true. And thesooner you realize that, the
sooner you can actually startgrowing your gym because nobody
else is coming to do it foryou. Alright , let's get into
this here. So the firstchecklist I've got here is
getting more clients. I wannamake sure that you're doing the
things that you need to do toget more clients. And if you
answer no to any of thesethings, well that's what you
(03:58):
need to start doing. So forexample, I've got the, the
evaluate evaluation up here.
First, you know, do you measureyour set rate? If you don't,
you need to learn how tomeasure your set rate and start
doing that. I measure my showrate, okay? And once you can
say, yes, I measure thosethings, then you can look at
this chart and say, okay, wellmy set rate is 62% or better.
(04:19):
Now if you're not measuringyour set rate, that's where you
need to start. Don't getoverwhelmed and say, I don't
even know what that is. Yourfirst job as CEO and
responsibility is to find outwhat that is. Now of course, we
teach this in our mentorshipprogram. We publish free
content on this stuff everysingle day and we have for over
a decade. You'll get access toresources like this in gym
owners united.com . And you canask me this question
(04:42):
specifically if you want to onApril 29th at noon eastern in
our free training. The bestpath, of course, is mentorship
to learn this stuff. Think ofmentorship as an investment
that most people would've madebefore they open a business.
But you and I were just toopassionate about fitness and we
jumped right in. So here's thechecklist to get more clients.
Now we're gonna go through thisbriefly, but we'll go through
(05:04):
it more in depth at our freetraining April 29th. So using a
spreadsheet, how many clientsdo you wanna get? If the answer
is just more, then that's nevergonna be an achievable target.
We will figure out this targetby calculating the revenue that
you need to pay your expensesand make an income and pay your
coaches. And then we set atarget for your clients. If you
haven't done that yet, that'sreally the first step. Then you
(05:25):
wanna measure how you're doing.
So you figure out like, where'smy funnel leaking? So you say,
I measure how many leads I get,I have a referral funnel, I
have a content funnel, etcetera. And you just go through
this list, it'll take youprobably five minutes. I bet
that you can answer thesequestions just right off the
top of your head. Nomeasurement required. And then
, um, all the ones that's yousay no to are things that you
(05:46):
need to build if you wanna havelike a really good functioning
gym. Now, it might seem likewe're making the business of
owning a gym complicated, butwe're actually making it a lot
simpler. You know, people outthere will tell you it's not
complicated. Just get moreclients. The more clients you
get in the door, the better thegym you have. But if you've
been in business for more than10 minutes, you know that's a
lie and they're trying to sellyou an easy answer, right? Just
(06:08):
like people are trying to sellour clients an easy answer like
Ozempic business coaches andmarketing agencies that tell
you that growing a business issimple is trying to sell you a
magic pill. So here's thechecklist again, you know, this
is just to give yourself anhonest assessment of where
you're starting from. Think ofit as a functional movement
screen for business. And youknow, you're just, you wanna
(06:29):
see the s's and the no'sbecause then you got rid of all
the maybes and you've gotclarity. And you know, even if
you've got a lot of work to do,you know what that work is and
you can just do it. 'cause Iknow you're a hard worker then.
Okay, so here's the get moreclients checklist. You go
through it. If you've got agreen a yes in every category,
congratulate yourself. That's awin. If you've got some nos,
hey, you know, get to workbuilding those things. And if
(06:52):
you want some free resources,gym owners united.com has lots.
If you want coaching, wellthat's what two brain business
is really here for. Okay? Thenext checklist we're gonna walk
through is a RM. You know, doyou actually track it? And is
your a RM red, yellow, orgreen? Then from there you can
say, Hey, I can pay my billswith 50 clients. And we go
through this a RM checklist.
(07:13):
Okay? Now the get more clientsone is the longest one because
that's where we get the mostquestions. But the reality here
is that you need to go througheach of these checklists. Then
we're gonna walk throughretention. Retention is
important because if you're notkeeping people for two years,
you're probably not changingtheir lives. And so we wanna
make sure that you're doingthat. Most gyms will
over-report retention. They saythey're doing better than they
(07:34):
actually are. So this is yourchance to say, how am I
actually doing? Okay? Uh , sowe're gonna also track lifetime
value of a client. Then we'regonna go through a checklist
for retention. Retention is oneof these fuzzy topics that
everybody knows they shouldcare about, but nobody actually
breaks down into what works.
And they give recommendationsabout, oh , you need a badging
system. You don't, you justneed to do these things. And if
(07:57):
you can check yes off the , onthese, I know you're gonna have
amazing retention. That's morethan two years. Alright ? By
the way, if you think that yourretention is already more than
two years and you're running agroup coaching gym , I really,
I'm asking you dive in andcheck it for sure. This is one
that you really can't afford toget wrong. Effective hourly
rate. The reason we're trackingthis is we wanna see are you
(08:17):
doing CO work or are you mostlyjust being a coach or are you
an underpaid coach, or are youbeing paid as a janitor to do a
CEO's job? Okay? We're gonnawalk through this checklist
too. Staffing , uh, we wannaknow, like have you set
yourself up with success? Hey,if, if you hire people in , in
two years, three years, they'regone, it's because you haven't
(08:38):
checked the things off on thestaffing checklist. It's not
enough to have staff. You haveto keep your staff, you have to
motivate your staff. You haveto get your staff to do things
that you want done in the waythat you want them done. That's
what leadership is . And that'swhy this checklist is here .
We're gonna check these thingsoff . It could be that out of
the 12 things on the staffchecklist, you can say yes to
(08:58):
11 of them . Wonderful. Yourpriority is now obvious and you
can get to work on improvingyour business. But one thing
sometimes can be enough to killthe whole deal. Finance. Hey,
look, this is the scary one formost people, but let's face it,
nothing gets fixed by avoidingit. Just like your clients
don't lose weight by pushingoff their gym membership for
two more months. You are notgonna fix your profitability by
(09:22):
avoiding looking at yourfinancial statements. So you
just wanna know, honestly, doyou know what a p and l is? Do
you know how to read a p and l?
Do you know how to makedecisions with it? If you
don't, that's your priority.
And you can go get coaching oryou can ask your bookkeeper,
how do I read this? Andeventually you'll take control
of your business. Okay? There'sthe finance checklist. Uh , we
(09:44):
break this down by revenue andexpenses too, because you're
probably likely to be good atsome of this stuff and not
others. Reality is that you'reprobably really, really good at
coaching, but most of us arefirst time business owners when
we open a gym. And that meanswe're not good at owning a gym.
We're at eight outta 10 as acoach, and we're a zero as a
business owner. That's okay.
(10:04):
What's not okay is lying toyourself saying, I'll give it
three years, or I'll figure itout as I go, or I'll build my
wings on the way down. That isjust a path to destruction. And
the faster you figure this out,the sooner your gym will grow,
your life will improve, andyou'll be a real entrepreneur.
The longer you wait to figurethis out, the more expensive it
gets to fix mistakes, and themore likely you are to burn
(10:26):
out, flash , run outta moneyand close your gym. Let's start
by going through the checklist.
Let's see what you need. So onApril 29th , uh, at noon
eastern gym owners united.com ,I'll be there live to walk you
through this and answerquestions. Let's get your gym
rolling .
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