What's up, guys? Here for another podcast. I just dropped Joey of basketball, so I'm just walking around the field waiting for him. Figured I'd catch up with everybody here. But I wanted to let you know that I am I think 17,000 words into my new book. I have been on a tear lately. I'll be honest with you, like I have had a pretty crazy year. A lot of distractions, as you I think I mentioned last week. I ended up selling the agency that I owned. Earlier in the year, I acquired it fully and then I sold it. Issues with my mom's got dementia, just like a lot of crazy shit going on in my life. It's been like actually a really crazy tough year. But a good year, lots of good lessons learned. But I have never lost the momentum with my emails. I don't think they've been as good lately, but I've never missed one. But I have been not been writing books. I try to write a book a year, and I've just been off of it. I honestly have. I haven't been able to sit down and focus with all the preparing for the events, with all the other stuff I had going on. Book writing took a back seat, and it's it sucks because it's something I really love to do. And but I will tell you this in this in possibly some of it was uh closing the sale of the business, because that's been something I've been working on for the last several months, and there's just a lot of back and forth and a lot of decisions to make there. But in the last seven days, I've written like 17,000 words, and I've just had this book like building up inside of me, and it just poured out in the last week, which is an awesome feeling. I'm super excited about it, and I want to tell you about it because I think it's really relative. So probably about this one of my earlier books, but probably about seven, eight years ago, I wrote a book called The Four Stages of Fitness Business Success. And I got the concept from Ari Weinswig, and I read in his book, his book is called Managing Ourselves. And it's an unbelievable read. You should definitely read that book. But the concept was built around that all businesses go through these four stages. And he wasn't speaking from he owns a restaurant business, and he wasn't speaking from like a restaurant business or an industry. He was just basically, in general, they go through these four stages. And he did a brilliant job of outlining the process of these four stages. And he basically outlined in stage one, what are the problems you'll face, what are the things that you need to do to break through to the next level? What's the type of leadership that you need at each level? So it was a really well-done thing. And I was like, this is really helpful for me. And I want to create a version of this for gyms. And so I did. And it's been something I've talked about, but I wouldn't say I talked about a ton. A lot of people have read the book. It's a really short book, it's like tiny. And uh but in my probably decade of consulting, I was starting starting to think about how many gyms are in stages two, three, and four, and how many gyms are in stage one. And it is a shit ton more of gyms that I've come across that are in stage one, trying to get to stage two. And so this new book that I wrote, and it's actually it's funny because it's twice as long. Well, no, not more than twice as long, it's 10 times longer than the actual four stages book. That's how short that one is. And the entire book is about going from stage one to stage two. And for those of you listening, it is the clearest way I can define stage one is a business that's a gym that's doing zero to 25k. That's the ballpark range. Now, if like you're doing 22 or 27, it's not this exact science, but it's pretty dang close. And so that's what the book is about. The book is about how do we get stage? How do we go from stage one to stage two? Because I will tell you this. And I had some fun today in the book, and I was re- I like to start each chapter with a quote. And for some reason, I was just in a funky mood today, and I was writing the quotes for the chapter, and I decided I have this one quote where I quote myself, and then I sign my name as I said it, and then in parentheses next to my name, it says, only assholes quote themselves, right? So I just kept repeating that, but I saw I just came up, I just started inventing these quotes out of thin air of just my ideas and things that I thought, stuff that I've heard before, but putting my own spin on it. And my first quote of the stage one chapter is stage one is a fucking grind. And that's the bottom line of stage one. It is not easy, and I have been through stage one as a gym owner, I've been through stage one growing a consulting business, I've been through stage one growing a marketing agency, and it's not easy, it's tiring, it's hard. And so if you're listening to this and you are a stage one gym, meaning your revenue is between zero and twenty-five K, and things are hard and you're tired, and you're looking to take the business to the next level, this is gonna be the perfect book for you. Now, I'm gonna give you some insights here, and if you're any background noise, sorry, I'm walking around and there's birds chirping and stuff like that. But so I want to give you some insight here that if you're in stage one, what you need to do to get to stage two, which is 25 to 50k, which is a nice place to be. A nice place to be. And the funny thing is, as I started, and the other thing is I got the idea to write the book from all the people that I've worked with that were in this stage one. But I started looking through my success stories, as I always do, and I need to build my confidence. And some of our best success stories were people that went from 5K, 7K, 8K, and scaled past 40K, 50K, 60K, some people 200K. And I started to look at those stories. I was like, man, this is these guys are doing really right now. And sometimes I take it for granted and I forget. Like, we have this guy named Giancarlo, and I've talked, I talk about him a lot, but I talk about him because he's like probably my biggest homegrown success story. There's some guys that I've coached that I do coach now that they were doing pretty well already. And I helped them get better. But John Carlo is a story where this kid was like doing$7,000 a month and he didn't know anything about business, and he didn't know what direction to take his company. And he found originally found my surge program, and then he found the mastermind, and then he found CEO, and the kid is like on a tear. He's he grew way faster than I ever did. And he always has this line where he says, I stand, I stood on the shoulders of giants talking about a lot of the other members in SPF that were a little bit ahead of him. But that's a guy. Like I look at what he's doing now, and it's holy smokes, he's kiss killing it. But I look at not that long ago, he was doing$7,000 a month. And I'm not gonna promise that if you're at$7,000 a month that you're gonna all of a sudden be at$200K a month like G-Man, but I want to shine the light on that it is possible. There's another guy that doing a podcast with tomorrow, Bobby Casita. And he is he's been with me not as long as G-Man, but he came to me around doing$8K a month, and they scaled it to, I think,$55K a month, their first gym, and they just opened their second gym, and they've already gotten 50 members in their second gym. Another guy, John Doherty, Dr. John Doherty, who's absolutely killing it right now. I think he's got five or six gyms. He's got this monster business out in Texas. He came to me also doing 7K a month. So it's like these a lot of these success stories they hear you hear me talk about, that you see me highlight in like the SPF Gym One of the Year Award and stuff like that. Understand that not all of these guys started like that. Hardly any of them started like that. They all started probably under 10K or between 10 and 20K or whatever it is. And I tell you these stories to give you some inspiration and some hope that if you're floundering a little bit and you're between zero and 25k, and you're not making the amount of money that you want to make, and you're getting tired, you're getting burned. And I want to share with you that there you can get to the next level. But you gotta get moving. And I say that because one of the other lines in the book is that the longer you stay in stage one, the more likelihood that you're gonna get burned out. Because when you're in stage one, the business lives and dies with you. It's pretty much the fact that if you the way I the example that I give is let's say you are a bat your bet your gym is a basketball team and you're LeBron and you're playing the game with five middle school kids. All right, if when LeBron's on the court, things are going well and everything's good. If you pull LeBron out of that game, they are not even close to the same team. And that's like what you are in stage one. You are the business, and if you remove yourself from the business, or you get too tired, or you get sick, or you have to go away, everything stops. And so that is a lot of stress, that's a lot of pressure. And it's funny when I was going through it, and this is when I tell you, this is one of my favorite lines: ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is bliss. When I was going through it, no one told me about this. I was just going, right? And then all of a sudden I looked up and I like felt myself like demonstrating an exercise on the floor and literally like doing a bridge and laying down on the floor and not wanting to get up. That's how tired and that's how exhausted I was. So I didn't need anyone to tell me that. I just all of a sudden realized, man, I am fucking tired. I am not, my brain is not thinking clearly. I started drinking coffee at that time and then crazy monsters and all of that, just like massive amounts of caffeine. And all of a sudden, you end up like hitting a wall. And we want to get through this stage as fast as we possibly can. That that's what we need to do. We're everyone's gonna go through it, but if you stay in it, it's gonna be a rough, long road. And I have a guy, my that probably the happy one of the happiest guys in my group is a guy named Jason. And Jason had a gym in in San Diego. He ended up selling it, and then he moved all the way across the country to New the New England area and opened up another gym. And he hired us before he even opened. And he followed all the steps, and he legitimately almost he went through stage one faster than anyone I've ever seen. We launched the thing fast, he got marketing going right away. Like it was just like light speed through almost, it was like a couple months the kid was in stage one because he grew so fast, and that's ideally. And he I had a consulting day with him not that long ago. I'm gonna be recording a podcast actually with him for the book. I'm gonna take the his the podcast I do with him and almost treat it like a case study because he went through, but that's what we want. We want to go, we're gonna go through it. You gotta go through it. But the longer you're there, the harder it's gonna be, and the more stress to your body, the more stress to your brain, the more stress to your family. And so you gotta figure out what to do. And at the end of the day, the thing that keeps us in stage one the most is us having to do everything. And the bigger reason usually of why we have to do everything a lot of times is money. Sometimes it's you're being a control freak and you don't want to give anything up, but a majority of the time it's around money. You possibly have chosen a price structure that is not bringing you enough money. You possibly don't have enough customers, right? You don't you haven't figured out the marketing or the sales side of things, and you're not, you don't you just don't have enough customers. Maybe you have this is usually rare, but possibly you've done a a number on yourself and taken on a really big rent. So your margins are small. That's a tougher one to outpace. But a lot of times, what keeps us in stage one is we got money problems. And the way out of stage one into stage two is not having everything rely on you, and that takes money because the way to do that is to hire people, right? And maybe you need to hire consultants to tell you what to do, maybe you need to hire staff to help you on the training floor, maybe you need to help someone hire you to help you market and sell for that, whatever it is. What keeps you in stage one is you doing everything, and what keeps you doing everything is not making enough money. And so we gotta figure that part out. And the book is about profit levers, that's what the whole book is about. The book is actually titled Eight Profit Levers, and it's essentially geared towards getting gyms that are doing between 5 and 25k to gyms to doing 35 to 50k, essentially stage one to stage two. All right. But we gotta handle the money situation, and why I decided on these specific levers is because over the last several years, I started giving people advice to do things to help them make more money to get out of stage one, stage two. And I sat down when I had the idea to write this book, and I'm like, all right, I know what the problem is. I know that these guys are stuck on stage one, they're tired, but what are the things that they can do to get them out of stage one to stage two? And I started taking inventory, I started thinking about guys like G-Man, guys like Devin Gage, guys like that I mentioned before. And I'm like, what did they do? What's the first thing that they actually did? And I started writing all those things down. And I came up with the list. And I didn't want to have the book be so long, I really wanted to keep it simple, but I came out with eight things. I came out with eight things that I was like, all right, if somebody in stage one implements these things, there's a really good chance they're gonna ring the register that you're gonna start making more money. And if they start making more money, they can feel comfortable making a hire, they can feel comfortable investing in in things that are gonna help them get on track and have the business not be so dependent on them. So that's what the book is about. The book is about these eight-profit levers. Now, what is a lever? A lever, the best way I can describe a lever is like something that gets you more from less, right? And so I'll give you like what so the first lever that I'll talk about is price, right? And so if I have a move that I'm making, let's say that I'm charging$300 a month, and I make a change, right? I use a leverage point of price and I make a change to the price, and I bring the average value from 300 to 350, okay? And I have a hundred members. That's an extra$50 times$100. That's an extra$5,000 a month. So literally, in that one move, in one letter to 100 customers, I increased the recurring revenue by$5,000. That is a lever. I did something that was not super. I can't say it's not hard. It is hard to do. It's hard to do emotionally. And this is, you know, what some of the stuff we help with in like mastermind and stuff like that is the because yeah, it's easy, just go raise your prices, but there's the whole emotional baggage that comes from that. That's a I talk about that a lot in the book. But at the end of the day, it's a lever because it's hey, write this letter, send this to your customers, make five grand a month, right? So the book is about these things that you can do to implement in your business that aren't going to take a huge amount of effort and time because I know that's not what you have. You don't have a lot of time. You don't have a lot of energy, you don't have a lot of resources like staff to implement things. And so that's kind of what I really leaned on is what are these levers that I can give you to be able to get something going. Now, one of the other levers is digital ads, right? I do think that, and again, I know a lot of people possibly doing this do not have a ton of extra money to spend. And maybe you don't have the money to hire an agency, and I don't think it's truly necessary. But sometimes one of the biggest things is like you do not have time at all to go out and do anything, to go out and strum up a new business, to go out and join BI groups, not everybody, but some of you. And a really good leverage point is to get an ad up and have a constant flow of leads that you can follow up with. That is a lever because it does take some money to do that, and you have to get around that. You'll have to get and into what's called this investment mindset. Right. And that's kind of what I someone on the Wednesday call today asked a really good question about how to think about paid ads. And the question was around budget. He's what should I be spending? How much should I be spending? And I was like, Well, don't think about it like that. Think about it like this. It's all right, let's say your cost per lead is ten bucks, you can get it and put an ad up and you get a cost per lead of ten bucks, right? So a hundred leads is gonna cost you a thousand dollars. So essentially you pay a thousand bucks and you get a hundred leads. If you convert ten percent of those customers, right? If you have a think bundle of hundred leads, cost you a thousand bucks. Okay, you can find a thousand bucks. Bundle of a hundred leads costs you a thousand bucks. And let's just say that your average lifetime value is shoot, I don't know, three grand, four grand. It's not that's not exaggerating, something crazy. And you get ten customers. So ten customers times three thousand dollar average value, and you don't obviously get all that at once, but at the end of the day, you invested$1,000 and you made, you got 10 customers at three grand at lifetime value, you made$30. And so that's how you have to look at it. And that I know it's scary sometimes, right? But understand it is a leverage point. We can do more with less. That's why they're called profit levers, is because we want to do more with less. So putting some kind of an ad up, even at a small budget of a thousand bucks a month, and maybe you don't go out to eat, or maybe you cancel the subscriptions, or maybe like you figure out a way to spend the money. You beg, borrow, and steal. Because when you understand that, hey, if I spend a thousand and I can make 30,000, shit, I gotta do that more. And that's a leverage point. And the book actually has some different bunch of different offers and ed copy and stuff like that. That but those are the things that I'm talking about. Those are the things that I share in the book. And I'm don't worry, there's no link to download the book because it's not ready yet. But I'm uh I'm like, I wake up every morning super excited to dive in and I'm done with the main meat of the book, but I am super excited to dive in. But this is a specific resource for gyms in stage one, doing between zero and 25k to scale to$25,000 to$50,000 a month, which is stage two. And uh man, I'm excited about it. I'm really excited about it. And uh, I'll keep you posted on the release of the book and everything like that. But yeah, it's gonna be out soon. And so hopefully, if you're in stage one, just some of this insight was helpful. Maybe it kind of gave you a little bit of a breath of fresh air to realize that hey, a lot of people have been where I am. It does suck. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. It can be hard, but it is possible to get out, and it is possible to get out and to and to go to great places. A lot of the guys that I've worked with have. Yeah, so you can do this, man. You can do this, you can get out of stage one. And here's the thing: you want to get out of stage one. You do. I I have yet to have someone say, I love stage one, I love like doing the five to nine, right? Because that's what it is. It's five to nine. You're waking up in the morning at 5 a.m., you're doing the morning sessions, you're doing whatever in the middle of the day, and then all of a sudden you're back at it at night, and it's rinse and repeat. And that is hard, and that is exhausting. And I don't think that is a life of freedom. I think we could all argue that one of the fruits of being in business is freedom. And that ain't freedom. You have to be chained to your gym and you have to be there, and if you're not there, you don't make money, you have a business, but you ultimately have a glorified job. And the goal is you get better at business, and I think these profit levers are really going to help you. If this resonated with you, and you're like, I need help, I need those levers, and you don't want to wait for the book. There's a link in the show notes. And if you click that link, you can book a call with my squad. And I actually have a program that helps lead you through this. So, full disclosure, we have a new program that I'm super excited about called Gym Business Accelerator. It's a coaching program, it goes for 60 days, and the entire point of the program is to help you scale past 25K, right? So it's four gyms that are doing less than 25K to get past 25K and grow the revenue. And we want to do it inside 60 days. And so if you're listening to this and you got fired up and you got excited and you got you want and you're like, I am waiting, I can't wait for the book. I want to get going. Click that link in the show notes, book a call with the squad, they'll get you rocking and rolling. We got a bunch of people already running through a pilot of the program. It's going super well. Really excited about it. But that is the purpose of this. And I'm not like hiding anything. The purpose of this book is to write this book, and then the coaching program, which is already going on, is to help you implement what's in the book. So it's my team helping you implement what's inside the book that I'm excited about. So go ahead. There's that link in the show notes. Click that link in the show notes, book a call with the squad, and I will see you on the next one. Peace.