From Trainer To Pro Athlete Stories

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What's up, guys? Welcome to another episode of the I don't even know what this show is called anymore. Business Secrets for Gym Owners. I'm your host, Uncle Vinny. And I uh many of you know me as a business guy, but I was a personal trainer for a real long time. I started my career in San Diego and was a trainer there, banged 60 one-on-one sessions a week for five years. So I know what the grind is like. And one of the cool parts of the grind, especially being in San Diego, was I got to train pro athletes, and I trained some pretty good ones. I was the assistant personal trainer for Lydanian Tomlinson. So Durkin was my boss and he would always train LT. But when Durkin would go away and he started to get kind of well known and famous, so he would travel a lot. And so I got to train LT a bunch. It was super cool. But anyway, I got to work with a lot of the San Diego Chargers. But one of the guys that I never worked with and had never even heard that was on the Chargers was a guy named Wes Welker. And if you don't know, Wes Welker went on to be, I don't know, think he's a Hall of Famer, but a very, very, very good player for the New England Patriots. Did not know his name, did not know he existed. And I knew like almost every player on the team. Like I was, I used to get invited to players, like parties at players' houses. Like I was in with the Chargers. Didn't know Wes Welker even existed. And this guy, two years later, he's on the Patriots and he's like scoring all these touchdowns and Pro Bowl and all that. And what was the shift? The shift was Wes Welker went into a different system. And he fit very, very perfectly into that system. Wasn't a fit for the Chargers system at the time, and he was a perfect fit for the Patriots. And Belichick put him in there, and he was just like the best thing they could ever ask for. Right? And so it begs the question of a really, really good system and a process for success. I was on a call recently with one of our members and CEO, Mastermind. He was, I'll tell you his name. His name's TJ. And he was our SPF Gym Owner of the Year Award winner last year. And I recorded a podcast with him. I don't think it'll be released like in a few months, so it's not we're well ahead of schedule with podcasts right now. But anyway, I did I was talking to TJ and getting his insights on stuff, and he started to talk about the CEO mastermind, which is essentially a mastermind that's a boardroom-style mastermind where it's 12 gym owners meet, and they they basically take a two to three hours to fill out a 15-page document and then show up for two days, and then the rest of the gym owners and myself and Johashi unpack their business, right? And TJ's been doing this for six years, four times a year, has never missed a meeting. And actually, as I record this, it's the evening before one of our events. Actually, this is what January 2026. This is the sixth year. So we started January 2020, it was our first meeting. So this is January 2026. And so 24 meetings, four times a year, never missed a meeting, and the guy's gone from I think he was doing well under a half a million bucks when he started in that group. And so he was doing okay. You know, I don't want to take all the credit for his success, but fast forward today, he's doing, I think, like 1.8 or 1.9 million bucks today. And he legitimately, and I think he gives more credit to the group than he deserves. He's a talented guy and talented business owner, but he gives a ton of credit to the group. But he really was talking about the structure. He's like, if I didn't have this structure, he said these words. He said, I don't trust myself to do it on my own. He's like, if I don't have this structure, I ain't getting done. I ain't looking at my financials like I look at them. I'm not looking at my organizational chart like I look at it. And if I didn't have this group and if I didn't have this thing that I had to get ready for and to prepare this document, and the document's robust. Like it's it's a pretty robust document. It's got stuff about staff, it's got stuff about finances, it's got stuff about marketing, it's got stuff about the sales process, it's got every data point you can ever imagine, right? It's like a, you know, and it's interesting, actually, and I think TJ told me this. He was he was talking to one of his athletes' dads, who's like a big wig investor, right? Big wig guy. And he was showing him the documents that they fill out that we fill out for CEO mastermind. And the the the investor was like, holy shit. He was like, This is the most robust. He's like, this was impressing big business people, right? Um now it's not complex, it's pretty simple, but it's robust and it's a lot to fill out. And it takes some time, it takes some effort, but it's the structure of sitting down and doing the work to identify what are the challenges of the business, what are the opportunities of the business, what are the threats, right? What are the things that are going to possibly get in the way of the company? And then unpacking that every quarter, right? Not letting six months go by or a year go by and not come up for air and think about what needs to happen. And so I think it's like a it's it's a really, really important point. And you know, I'm a I'm very open about my that I run my companies on EOS. And EOS is a structure, right? There's a structure for a meeting pulse, there's a structure for, you know, how you organize your staff, right? There's a structure for how you do visioning. It's a structure. And it's really, really powerful and really helpful. And one of the things that we do in, so we have that, that's our CEO mastermind, and that's only we only have two groups of 12 in that one. So there's like it's a small population of people that are in that group. And it's a it's a big chunk of money to be a part of it. And I realize it's not for everybody. But I try to, I try to do the same thing in my SPF mastermind, right? Where we provide a structure to hold people accountable. And that's what TJ was really talking about. He was talking about accountability. And most gym owners aren't going to, on their own, pull out their P ⁇ L, look at it. Most gym owners on their own aren't going to, if they don't have someone locking over them, look at their leading indicators and the, you know, how many leads they got and how many trials. Like there needs to be some kind of of a structure. And that's kind of what we do in the in in SPF, and we build that structure into that. And one of the big pillars of the structure is we do a weekly meeting. And we meet every Wednesday as a group. I know there's a lot of masterminds out there and they like do quarterly meetings or they meet three times a year and they rent mansions and stuff like that, but they don't do shit in between the meetings. And so I found, and I used to be part of masterminds like that, where there was like nothing else in between. And I found that this weekly call that they get on, I taught one of these calls today as I speak. And it's like it's like part of their business life is to show up, is to learn something new, is to hear from other gym owners, is to ask, get their questions answered. And it's part of the structure of them being a business owner. And so this is like a I and I said this to my guys this today like running a business isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. And it's hard to do on your own. One of my mentors, Paul Goff, says one of the reasons why people fail in business is they don't have any second voices in their conversations. That the conversations are always in their own head and it's dancing around and bouncing around. And when you have some kind of an accountability structure, like TJ does in CEO, like most of my guys do in SPF, there's a built-in structure to get that second voice. And whether that second voice is me, whether that second voice is Joe, whether that second voice is other gym owners in the mastermind, you're getting those second voices. And it's really, really, really important. So one of the things that we do from a structure standpoint that I think is is really powerful is we do quarterly, well, we do it three times a year. We do three time a year goal setting at every meeting. So we meet in person three times a year in the in SPF, in the that's the big meeting. And we I have a usually a two-hour block of time where I will lead everybody through a goal setting session for the quarter. And the goals aren't usually built around how much money they want to make or how many leads they're gonna generate or stuff like that. That's stuff that they should have already set up. What the goals that I'm talking about are the things that they need to accomplish, the projects they need to start and finish that help them hit the financial goals. You can't just say, I want to make a million dollars this year and just like no plan of how to do it. Well, the rocks and the and and the goal setting session is the how, like how are we gonna get this done? And so we set goals around people, right? Do we need to make a strategic hire? We set goals around roles of the owner. What is the role that the owner needs to take on? We set goals around onboarding people into specific roles. One of the things I was working on with a business owner yesterday is they had a general manager, and they're they're about to onboard the general manager into that role. Well, that's the job of the owner to onboard the general manager. And we want to give it 90 days, sometimes in something like that, bigger, to make sure that that actually gets accomplished. Because a lot of times there's there's what's called abdication going on. And that's when you be like, hey, you know, that thing over there, yeah, yeah, yeah, go do that. Business owners do this all the time. They don't actually take the time to onboard people properly pro properly to delegate things like they need to delegate, and they end up struggling because of it. There's goals around expansion, right? Do we need to open up another facility? Do we need to open up a new product line? Do we need to, you know, document a marketing plan? Do we need to document systems? All of these things go into the goal setting process. And that is really how you stay focused as a business owner. You stay focused as a business owner around two areas. One is the areas around the critical drivers of your business, which are your leads, your trials that you sell or consults that you have, your new clients you sign up, your attrition. Right? Those are critical drivers of the business. If those are off track, you don't need to look at your PL. That's gonna be off track too. And so it's important to be looking at that on a very, very regular basis and to be making decisions and doing things based on what those numbers are telling you to do. So for example, if you had a goal of 10 leads in a week and you got two, well, you gotta do something about that. And that's come becomes what you focus on. Right? You focus to keep those critical drivers on track. And then the second piece of being focused is your what I call rocks or you call quarterly goals or whatever you want to call them, right? Are those projects? The projects that we need to have in our in our in our business life, like the ones I just mentioned, and getting to the end of a quarter and being like, I said I was gonna do this and I did it. It's done. And that's how confidence is built. Confidence is built, and I didn't know this till not that long ago. Confidence is built when you say you're gonna do something and you do it. And so if you set out and your company sets out to accomplish hiring a new trainer, documenting a marketing plan, and I don't know, launching a supplement line. You hang, you hook up with my buddy Jason DeRoes from Gym Subs, right? And you do all those things, your confidence as a business owner is gonna grow. So that's like that's like a big piece of focus, is those two things. Well, it's the critical drivers, and what are the projects that I'm deeming most important. That's what you're focused on. Because a lot of people, they go through their life and their business journey, like, I don't know if I'm I don't know what to do. I don't know if I'm focused on the right things. And trust me, I say that knowing that I've said that many times. And there's been many times where I've been in my career and I'm burying my head in my hands, like, I don't know what the fuck to do. And it's frustrating, it's really, really frustrating. But when you're focused, you get something that's really important. You get certainty. And when you have certainty, you have a sense of control. And when you have control, you feel better. When you don't have certainty and you don't have control, you feel very unstable. You feel very stressed. Now, I am not saying that there's a lot of things you can't control. But what you focus on is one of them. This is a really, really important point. You can control what you focus on. Tony Robbins has a line. What you focus on is what you feel. And so when we focus on the right things and we're focused, we have certainty. When we have certainty, we uh feel like we have control. And at the end of the day, you never really have full control. You're never gonna have total control over everything. Sometimes you just gotta let God have it, right? But at the end of the day, at least you're not wading through your day, not knowing what the hell's going on. That gives you some little insight on focus, that's give a little some insight on structure. But what we try to do is we try to build that in. And and you know, I've been talking about my event that's coming up, super excited about it. It's February 27th, 28th, and March 1st. And it's gonna be in Orlando, Florida. It's called the Gym Pranos, it's a play on the Sopranos theme. I do one event a year that's themed. And last year we did a WWE version. This year we're doing the Gym Pranos. I have lots of shenanigans planned, so you definitely want to be there. But it's gonna be a combo. We're obviously gonna have fun, we're gonna do cool things, but you're gonna learn a ton. You're gonna learn a ton. Sorry, you're gonna learn a ton, and we're gonna be focused around helping you become the boss your business needs. Helping you become the boss your business needs. So you're gonna learn leadership, you're gonna learn that role of a CEO. Uh, even if you're not a CEO yet, right? If you're just like a one-man show, you still need to learn some of these skills. We're obviously gonna learn how to make more money. We're gonna teach you all the latest, what's going on in marketing and sales, but you're also gonna, man, you're gonna meet gym owners that are kicking ass. You're gonna meet people that are doing really well and doing great things, and it's going to be a super powerful event. So I cannot wait. I love these things. I lose sleep over the fun things we're gonna do, the the breakthrough things that were are gonna happen. And one of the things that we'll do on day three of the event is I will lead you through a two-hour workshop to set your goals. So I'm not just gonna dump a bunch of shit on your plate and say, oh, here's a bunch of things you learned. Um no, we're gonna take the last day and we're gonna really sit tight and we're gonna be like, all right, what do you need to focus on? And I'll be walking around and I'll be watching what you write, and I'll be having my staff walk around and watching what you write, and we're gonna look at it and we want you to leave with a clear plan of action. Once you leave Orlando with a clear plan of action of what you're gonna do. And so it's not just an event where you're gonna learn stuff, it's an event that you're gonna have a plan. And the cool the other thing is too about these types of events, these events are important because when you get outside your four walls of the gym and you get away, it's like, man, the ideas and the thoughts just come flying. And it's a really, really, really powerful thing. It's a really powerful thing that you will have ideas when you're walking through the airport, you will have ideas when you're walking through a hotel, you will have ideas when you're talking to someone at the bar that just says something, you're like, holy shit, I never thought of that. That is what the power of these types of things, the power of these types of events are getting outside and getting in a different environment, getting around successful, inspired, motivated people. You want to you want to be there. And if you're not there, you'd go to something, other things like this. Ours are just more fun than all the other boring ones out there. We have a lot of fun in ours. And so, again, this event is for my private mastermind group, but we do talk about it because we have guests. We have a bunch of guests already signed up, ready to come. They're super excited. And if you're listening to this and you want to inquire about coming to the event, you want to get a ticket, there's a link in the show notes. There's a page, you read all the info about the event. It's it's gonna be it's gonna be a breakthrough. It's gonna be a breakthrough event. And and we got the legend Thomas Plummer that will be speaking. You know, if you've ever never seen Thomas Plummer speak, you want to see him speak. If you've seen him speak before, you'll have a lot of nostalgia of seeing him speak again. It's it's powerful stuff. My my best friend of the world, Mike Waldron, will be speaking. He's uh he's an expert in finance, so anything you need to know about finance. GR Hoff will be speaking from Gym Member Machine, talking about how to get your Facebook ads and website to work better. I could go on. But the best thing you do is click the link in the show notes, read all the info on the page, and join us, man. Join us. I think it's gonna be a really, really cool event. It's a lot of really good people. You're gonna learn a ton, you're gonna walk away with a plan of action of what you need to do. And the amount of money we're charging for tickets is like so ridiculously cheap. It's like sad. But we won't we won't help people. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to help people. When I realize if we made the event so expensive like other people do, it's cost prohibitive for you to get there. So we made the event very affordable, at least until February 1st. Right? So you have until February 1st to make your decision and hopefully you join us. So it's a little kick in the pants for you. But go to the link now, check it out. Hopefully, we'll see you there, and you can join us for a really, really breakthrough event that's going to help your business take it to the next level. All right, guys. Thanks so much.