why you want the hard times

Dave tate: business is a battle of attrition

what determines who lasts and who doesn't? the hard stuff

nobody wanted covid lockdowns, but when they reopened there was far less competition

Tadej Pogacar - I want the steepest, hardest climbs becuase they're the separator

when you ahve stafff quit - so do they

when your rent goes up - so does theirs

maybe not the same day, but over the 3-year span, everything that happens to you will happen to your competition

They might not survive it

You also don't have to create hardship by attacking them or running them down. They have enough. eVen if they don't show it, they're facing the same stuff you are. and many won't survive

also, you need the reps

you want to practice the hard stuff when the stakes are low

there are reasons things tget hard. one is they're new. one is they're personal. one is the stakes are high.

Break them apart. If the hardship you're going through is because you've never faced that problem before, get a mentor. Don't take advice from someone else who's never done it before.

If it's hard because it's personal, get an objective perspective. don't ask your mom or your bff or your husband. ask a mentor.

if it's hard because the stakes are high, you might need a different kind of mentor to help with perspective, but you still need a mentor

After the trouble is over, you have two jobs:

one - never repeat it

two - learn what you can from it. You've heard the term 'if I win, I win, if I lose, I learn' - or some variation. But most people don't actually learn becaues they don't pick apart the elsson. They keep repeating the same mistakes. so here's how you do an AAR

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

What makes a great mentor stand out from an average one? For starters, a great mentor will say, "I don't have experience with that, but I know someone who does. Can I connect you?" 

Business is Good and Chris Cooper is back, addressing the problem of "guru on the mountain top" – that know-it-all mentor who'll answer any question regardless of whether they have the skill or experience to do so!

It's okay not to have all the answers as a mentor, and today Chris is showing us why working outside your zone of expertise doesn't scale. 

In fact, it's far better to build a strong network of people with expertise in specific areas. The higher the level of client you're working with, the more value you can bring through your network.

As usual with Chris Cooper, there are plenty more shrewd business insights where that came from! Building your client's trust and affinity for your brand is just one click away. Please join us. 

"It's okay to be wrong as a business mentor. But it's not okay to pretend to be an expert." ~ Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

-Beware the "guru on the mountaintop" mentor!

-Why it's okay to say 'I don't know'

-Building scalability by having a network of experts

-The value of having a partner you can trust

-Learning not to undervalue your own expertise

And more!

Resources:

Blog - https://businessisgood.com/blog/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Every business grows through four phases:

Systemization - optimization - growth - and scale.

Systemization means getting every process in your business out of your head.

Optimization means repeating the processes that work best, over and over. It also means pursuing virtuosity in those processes - doing them well, without wasted effort or excessive "tweaking". Optimization often means avoiding novelty in favor of repeating what works, even when it gets boring. This is also where delegation occurs and metrics are tracked to make sure staff can deliver at the owner's level.

Growth means focusing on activities that grow the business instead of delivering the service yourself. This usually means focusing more on sales and marketing instead of coaching the clients or baking the muffins.

Scale means replicating your business over and over. This usually means a second location, but it could also mean placing your model over another business or simply adding a management layer to your current business to scale it up. Growth phase is incremental (one new client or one unit at a time); scale phase is exponential (50 new clients at a time or a new distribution channel).

My friend Sharran Srivatsaa introduced this simple pathway in his podcast. You can listen here:

https://sharran.com/episode105/

This week, I've been writing about The Novice's Curse. Many entrepreneurs are tripped up because they don't follow this process of systemize-optimize-grow-scale.

Like me, they try to attract new clients before their business is ready to serve them well. So they run Instagram ads before they have systems in place for delivery (growth before systemization). Or they try to open a second location before their staff can run a sales consultation effectively (scale before optimization).

My first business simply didn't grow until I mastered the fundamentals of systemization. As hard as I worked, as long as I worked, and as much as I tried to grow, I was always taking one step forward and two steps backward.

For example, I'd work hard to get a new client in the door. But they'd show up when I wasn't available. No other coach knew how to sell them on the gym, so the client would leave. My 'growth' initiative would fail because my system (sales) wasn't optimized (my staff didn't know how to do it.)

In my mentorship practice, I created a logjam when, during an early period of fast growth, I failed to systemize our onboarding process. I once found myself packing 'welcome boxes', driving them to a shipping outlet, loading them into two shopping carts, wrestling with doors, and standing in line for an hour to get them out--because I hadn't recorded the process for my administrator. Meanwhile, new clients were waiting for their first call (and others were waiting to sign up and pay.)

Our business doesn't rise to the level of our marketing; it falls to the level of our preparedness. Businesses without clear, written systems will always be on a marketing treadmill of gain a client/lose a client. Their owners will always be burned out and angry at their staff.

Entrepreneurs that don't track metrics will never be able to delegate work to their staff; never know what marketing is actually working; and always be in a rut of "trying stuff" instead of identifying what works and repeating it over and over.

Entrepreneurs who can't afford to invest in marketing can't grow their business, and if they aren't clear on their ideal clients and value proposition, their marketing won't work.

Finally, entrepreneurs who can't replace themselves in management roles can't scale their business because they'll spend all of their time watching...

When your clients run out of future, they’ll quit.

If they can’t see the ultimate goal, they’ll question why they’re in your coaching program.

If they can’t see how your prescription will get them to that goal, they’ll be distracted by other ideas.

If they can’t see the very next step in front of them, they’ll be overwhelmed and fail to make progress.

Here’s how to show them the future: long-term, near-term and short-term.

Start with their Perfect Day.

Ask a client to describe their perfect day. Go into great detail: what time would they wake up in the morning? What would they do first? What would they have for breakfast? Would they go into work, or do something else? Who would they see first? How would they greet that person?

Where would they go next? Who would they invite to lunch? What would they do in the afternoon? Would they eat an early dinner, or a late one?

Break down the steps to get there.

Ask, “What do you think that lifestyle would cost you per year?”

“Who would you need to have on your team to give you that kind of free time?”

“What does the team need to know for you to take that time away?”

If you can correlate their Perfect Day to metrics, that’s even better.

Finally, identify one single step they can take to start their journey.

Be very specific. “Earn $100 more per week” isn’t helpful. “Launch a preorder program” is slightly better. “Follow this checklist between 8am and 9am tomorrow, and text me when done” is best.

Big jobs require motivation.

Big jobs require grit and determination.

Big jobs require hustle and focus.

Small jobs get done.

Make the big jobs small.

When clients can see their future waiting, they’ll find it hard NOT to get there. The key is to make each step so small, simple and easy that it’s hard for them NOT to do it.

The key? Keep showing them exactly what to do. When they run out of future–when they can’t see the long-term, near-term or short-term goal–they’ll give up on themselves and your program.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

You’re busy. You probably work a longer day than anyone else you know.

You probably start early and finish late. And every minute is packed: you hit the ground running and don’t stop until bedtime.

So why don’t you feel like you’re getting anywhere?

For most of us, it’s because we’re avoiding the work that will actually grow our business. We’re really good at distracting ourselves, lying to ourselves about what matters most, or falling into the trap of urgency. We’ve become skilled at procrastination. We confuse the pursuit of knowledge with the pursuit of progress. Today, I’m going to tell you how to get over it and actually grow your business.

First, know your enemy: This is what Avoidance looks like.

1. Collecting more info before you act. “I need to find one more podcast on firing a bad staff person before I actually do it.”
2. Gathering more opinions instead of acting. “I was struggling with paying my staff, so I kept asking opinions on the 4/9 model until I found a guy who said ‘it won’t work in the UK’–that let me off the hook!” We seek confirmation that things won’t work so we don’t have to do them.
3. “Checking” stuff – we start our day playing defense. We think we have to respond to emails and social media before we do anything else. Once we get on that ‘urgency’ bus though, we say goodbye to the important stuff. Social Media is literally built to derail your brain and stop you from doing the stuff you had planned to do.
4. Doing low-value work – we know we need more clients, but instead we do the “easy-hard” stuff: switching payment processors, building our own CRM, changing our logo, designing tshirts, customizing supplements. We know there are pros out there who do this for almost nothing. But doing it ourselves lets us say “I’m busy!”
5. Gathering ideas you don’t need. How many podcasts do you listen to in day? What’s the last one on which you took action? The entrepreneurs who read 50 books in a year don’t impress me anymore.
6. Procrastination: “I need to be in a better headspace to do this…” or “I need to wait for the banks to open” or “This isn’t the best time to take my neighbor a coffee.” Yes it is. At least it’s better now than never.
7. Looking for the ‘next thing’ instead of repeating the thing that worked before. We all need to be reminded sometimes, but if something’s working, don’t stop doing it.
8. Having a “morning routine”. Somehow, we’ve been led down this road to believe you need a 6-step routine around meditation, cold plunges, deep breathing, reading…but really successful people don’t have a complicated morning routine. Here’s mine:
9. – get up
10. – walk down the hall and press the ‘on’ button on the Keurig
11. – walk downstairs and pee
12. – wash my hands
13. – walk up the stairs and get the coffee
14. – walk back downstairs and open my laptop
15. – open a clean blog page and start typing.
16. I do this at 5:30 because my dog wants to go out at 6:30.

What’s interesting from this list is that none of these things are BAD. We just employ them at the wrong time, or give them priority over doing the stuff that actually grows our business.

Here’s how I fell into the trap: I started listening to podcasts in the morning. I can’t write a blog post while I’m listening to podcasts, so I’d fire up my kid’s Xbox and play NHL for 40 minutes while I listened to Naval or Alex or Sharran or whoever. I’d tell myself I was learning and I’d do a blog post later.

This lasted almost a year. At the end of the day, I was exhausted from meetings and doing stuff on demand. I was creating content because that’s a big part of my job, but I was stressed, anxious and kinda angry all the time. My businesses were growing because they had good momentum, but the growth was slowing and I didn’t know what would drive them forward.

Worst of all, this was a very addictive rut. It was very...

What do you do when your system crashes, or gets really slow, or spins around when doing normal tasks?

You reboot it. You clear the memory and start from scratch.

When you reboot a computer, you shut down all the programs that are running in the background. You clear its memory. When the computer reboots, it starts with the basics: just the systems that are required to run, and nothing else.

If your business is slowly going backward and you can't figure out why; if you feel like you're just spinning your wheels, working harder and not growing, then you might need more than a new tactic or MORE stuff to do: you might need a complete reboot.

A reboot kills the stuff that is slowing you down, starts over from the basics. And builds up from there. It's not a blank slate. More like digging down to bedrock and repairing the damage from the ground up.

Here's how to do it - and how I did it in one business I own (my gym).

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

We currently have 868 gyms in Two-Brain Business, my mentorship practice for gym owners.

We’re going to cap it at 1000.

I’m Chris Cooper, and this is BusinessIsGood.

Today, I’m going to tell you why we’re capping membership in my mentorship program, TBB. 

If you’d like to talk about this or any episode, go to businessisgood dot com and click “join the BIG movement” at the bottom.

Here’s why:

It’s best for our clients.

We know that the clients who get the best results from Two-Brain keep it simple: they trust the process, they follow their mentor’s direction, and they don’t get sidetracked by second-guessing or other options.

These traits are harder to instil in new clients. But if a new client joins a group that’s totally bought in, positive and making progress, they’re more likely to do the same. They learn the skills by watching others.

The best thing we can do for our new clients is to put them in a high-trust, high-affinity environment of other people who are excited and focused.

Adding a cap will mean they are more likely to encounter those people.

Right now, we have the best ‘churn’ rate in any business coaching program I’ve ever found. But still–even ONE nonbeliever, doubter, or cynic in our program affects ten others.

Clients can pull one another up, or pull one another sideways.

It’s clear: the faster a client can build momentum, the larger their result will be over time. Removing overwhelm, distractions and imperfect fits will help them build momentum faster.

We don’t want to ‘compete’ for every client anymore.

While we have more experience, data, proof, clients, and success in every metric than other business coaches in the gym industry, it’s still tempting to watch what the others are doing, or try to talk gym owners out of joining their program.

This promotes a scarcity mindset, and worse: it means we “play down” to everyone else’s level. We find ourselves building stuff that gym owners don’t need just because the “other guys” have it.

The truth is that not every gym owner is ready for mentorship with Two-Brain yet.

With a cap, we’ll stop chasing ‘bad fits’ or feeling like we’re losing when a gym owner signs up with someone else.

We’ll always ascend the best clients to Two-Brain, even if they start elsewhere.

Over the last decade, I’ve worked with many clients who have had another business coach or mentor. Some were happy with the other program, but had simply outgrown it. Others were skeptical of all business coaching because they’d had a bad experience.

But either way, the best fits always find their way to Two-Brain, even if they start somewhere else. “Best finds best” isn’t a slogan – it’s our business plan.

We want to focus on getting the big results FASTER.

Two-Brain could continue onboarding 35-40 gyms per month indefinitely.

Instead, I want to focus on getting Two-Brain gym owners to earning 100k NOB–and then to 1M net worth–FASTER.

We’ve proven we can do it. Every month, a couple of dozen of our clients reach 100k NOB for the first time. And, on average, two of them become millionaires.

For the last five years, we’ve been focused on building everything they needed to get there. We’ve been tracking and publishing how the best gyms do it across the Simple Six metrics.

Now that we’ve done it with hundreds of gyms, we can ask “How do the FASTEST gyms do it?”

We know what’s possible. Now we’ll do it for time.

We want to actually change the industry.

We’ve seen, from our data, that a thousand well-run gyms can actually have greater impact than 2000 pretty good ones.

The best gyms create full-time jobs for trainers, keep clients engaged far longer, pay the owners dramatically better, and have the systems to last 30 years.

If you believe in the libertarian ideal of...

Master the basics yourself. Systemize them for your staff. Optimize outcomes over time, but do them forever.

One of the hardest skills for entrepreneurs to practice is virtuosity. This is simply a mastery of the fundamentals instead of trying to do every new idea that comes along.

High-level performers in golf, for example, work on their basic swing for years; novices buy new equipment. This is true in most sports. Greg Glassman, founder of CrossFit, used the gymnastics definition of virtuosity: performing the common uncommonly well.

For example, a gym owner should work to master their skill in selling their program before attempting to "flood their gym" with marketing. But the siren song of "leads! leads! leads!" is strong enough to distract most of them.

Likewise, a gym owner should develop their staff to make them all an 8/10 as coaches, instead of employing a few "3s" and one "9". This includes evaluations and feedback--uncomfortable processes that many gym owners forget or ignore.

Entrepreneurs in any service business should develop the skill of asking for referrals, nurturing leads, and creating content before considering a TikTok account...but most lack the discipline to master the basics, because the lure of novelty is so strong.

One of the challenges of mastering the basics is that it gets boring. Who wants to do another sales roleplay when they could shoot an Instagram reel or record a podcast? It's tempting to be the first to try (and talk about) a new idea, be an early adopter, or tell your friends how to do the new thing. This is the curse of the novice.

In a letter to coaches around the world, Glassman wrote, “There is a compelling tendency among novices developing any skill or art, whether learning to play the violin, write poetry, or compete in gymnastics, to quickly move past the fundamentals and on to more elaborate, more sophisticated movements, skills, or techniques. This compulsion is the novice’s curse—the rush to originality and risk.”

He went on to describe the "novice's curse"-- manifested as "excessive adornment, silly creativity, weak fundamentals and, ultimately, a marked lack of virtuosity and delayed mastery.”

This is equally true in business. Focusing on building a Facebook ads campaign before a consistent sales process means a lot of wasted time on cold leads, poor conversion and burnout. Worse, it's hard to learn to be a better sales person if the pitch is different every time, because the entrepreneur can't see what's working with clarity.

What are the basics every entrepreneur should master?

Reading a P&L

Getting client referrals

Consistent delivery of their service by their staff

Selling their product

Client communications

Staff evaluations

Content creation

...and more.

It's important to note that "mastery" of any of these is nearly impossible. But most entrepreneurs can grow their business faster by improving the fundamentals than by adding new strategies or tactics.

For example, every entrepreneur should know how to read a Profit and Loss statement (P&L). Even basic familiarity will help an entrepreneur understand how their business is doing. But the pursuit of mastery--asking questions of the bookkeeper, thinking about classifications, identifying opportunities, and putting in lots of reps--will grow their business faster than searching for new trends on social media. The P&L should create focus for a business owner, which is the first step to growth.

As another example, a business owner who can improve their close rate by 10% will grow their business faster than an owner who increases their ad spend. Ads take time to...

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

What are the 11 things you must have to grow your business exponentially? Business and marketing are evolving so fast these days; there are tools needed to track your growth and help figure out where you and your business are going. 

Chris Cooper is back with an episode that is bursting at the seams with tools that you can apply to your business as you try to grow exponentially. And fear not – you don’t need to remember 11 complicated growth strategies or philosophies. Chris has distilled the 11 tools needed down to two simple acronyms. 

We start with unpacking your Massive Transformational Purpose, and we end with assessing your engagements with your staff, your clients, and your wider business community. There’s a smart Call To Action, too, so you can apply Chris’s business acumen to your mentoring practice and business. Join us for IDEAS on how to SCALE – you won’t regret it.  

“The Left brain of your business is in charge of systems and processes and data. The right brain of your business is in charge of creativity, managing growth and having empathy for people.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- What is your vivid vision? What are your goals numerically? 

- Do you have straightforward ways for people to interact with you? 

- Define your interfaces: separate staff and clients

- Which metrics are important to your business? Track those

- Don’t get disrupted; disrupt yourself

- Understanding evidence-based decision making

- Go to your audience

- Create things that can be delivered 24/7 without you being present

- You need a larger community of people who are paying you attention if not paying you money

- Always be hiring 

- Marketing is now a science, not an art form

And more!

Resources:

• Vivid Vision (the book) - https://www.amazon.com/Vivid-Vision-Remarkable-Aligning-Business/dp/161961877X
• Exponential Organizations - https://www.amazon.com/Exponential-Organizations-organizations-better-cheaper/dp/1626814236

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

In this episode of Business is Good, Chris shares a valuable mental exercise for CEO’s who want to grow their companies. Flip the script and think about what you would do if you definitely didn’t want to grow your company. This is a great way to identify the things that are holding you back. 

Chris breaks down the three things that most people do to sabotage the growth of their companies. The first of these is starting new ventures. As alluring as it can be to start a new business, it is a trap. The number one reason that entrepreneurs start new businesses is because they don’t know how to grow their current business. 

The second mistake that Chris sees a lot is that people who have reached a plateau point in their business start to make massive lifestyle changes. They move to a different state, get a divorce, fire key staff or start drinking. This only creates problems that they then need to solve.

The third thing that CEO’s do is abdicate the responsibility for growth to someone else. This can only hurt your growth. As the CEO, you are the primary engine of growth - you can’t outsource that. 

If you want to break through the growth plateau phase in your company and avoid these mistakes, this episode is for you! 

 “If you want to stop growth, the best way to do it is to start a different company, to make a big lifestyle change or to abdicate responsibility to somebody else.” – Chris Cooper

In this Episode: 

- Three things that most people are doing to stop their growth

- Why starting a new venture is NOT the best way to grow your business

- A real-life example of how starting something new can hurt your growth

- Why the novelty of starting something new is so attractive

- Making big changes in your life can seriously hold you back from growth

- As CEO, it’s your responsibility to grow the company

- The CEO’s job is growth - you can’t outsource that

- Put new ideas on the shelf for 3 months, then see if you’re still excited

- Questions to ask yourself as the CEO of your own company

Resources mentioned in the show: 

- Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

How much does being the best matter? In this episode of the Business is Good podcast, Chris Cooper illustrates why being the best business in your industry is 10 times more important than being second. 

Chris lays it out for us with 3 key reasons that involve appreciating exponential value (and understanding how it’s different from incremental value), ascension value, and why 'being the best' is actually a subjective metric. 

There's also actionable advice on how to compile a list of your best clients (the ones that make you happiest) and cross-reference that with a list of clients that earn you the most money. These lists will help you focus on your best-earning clients and those that bring you the most joy, and zero in on how you can meet their additional needs. 

This episode is a great reminder that you also don't need to be the best to everyone, but that ‘best finds best’ – which is incentive enough if you're looking for reasons to dial up your ambition in your business.

“If you're the best, the best will find you. Because best finds best.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- The 3 big reasons why being the best is so important

- Understanding exponential value and why it's better than incremental value

- What does ascension value mean? 

- Why you don't have to be the best for everyone

- Identifying your best clients using the Pumpkin Plan

- Figuring out what else you can offer your best clients

And more!

Resources: 

- The Pumpkin Plan

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

Strategies guide long-term growth. Tactics generate immediate results. And skills compound.

More and more, our data set shows that clients with solid skills – like focus, virtuosity, and patience – outperform everyone else, even when they’re given the SAME strategies and tactics as everyone else.

Skills have compounding value (they become more valuable over time, because):

1 – a little bit of each skill is helpful, but a high skill level pays off even more;

2- no one can copy them – they’re an unassailable advantage;

3 – the government can’t tax you on them;

4 – you don’t lose them. If one business fails, these skills will build the next faster

5 – they can be improved regardless of outcome (if you win, you learn; if you lose, you learn);

6 – they multiply your other investments.

7 – the time and effort invested to learn them has lifelong returns.

For example, patience is a skill that will usually pay off with your investments. Given a long enough timeline, real estate almost always pays off, and stock markets trend upward. Warren Buffett has said, “If you aren’t willing to own a stock for 10 years, don’t even think about owning it for 10 minutes.”

Focus is a skill that will multiply your return on mentorship. As I wrote in “Strategies, Tactics and Skills“, the gym owners who get the best ROI in our mentorship program often say “I just did what my mentor told me.” And the owners who get the lowest ROI often say, “I’m just too busy to do the work!” Of course, both groups have nearly the same amount of work, but the top-earners have the skill of focus.

Another skill is a mindset of abundance: many business owners pass over opportunities to collaborate because they see only competition. For example, instead of taking BJJ gyms or cheerleading gyms in Two-Brain now, we refer these clients to excellent coaching programs. Instead of worrying about “share of wallet” with other providers, we commonly link to vendors we really like.

Another example is the skill of public speaking. I have a coach for this particular skill. If every business that I own tanked overnight, I would use this skill to rebuild from scratch. Ditto blogging and podcasting. These skills don’t go away when the market changes or you get your pricing structure wrong.

Of course, this principles works in the fitness business itself: learning how to squat, press and deadlift properly will make all future forms of exercise more effective.

The challenge with coaching skills is they have a long-term payoff, and they’re hard to quantify. Some clients might not realize they’re picking up skills in focus, planning or patience while working with you. Adding skills into your coaching program can be tough. Usually, entry-level clients need quick tactics to see a fast ROI on your program. And high-level clients, who recognize the value of skills and have the time to work on them, already possess at least a moderate skillset.

One key is to call out the skill as you’re teaching it. “I know it’s hard to understand why I’m asking for a picture of your calendar right now, but we’re slowly building the skill of focus. First, we’ll do this with me; then you’ll do it on your own, and I’ll check; then you’ll own the skill forever.”

How do you teach skills in your program?

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Greg Glassman is the Founder and former CEO of CrossFit, a gym franchise that is popular all over the world for how it revolutionized the fitness industry. Our host, Chris Cooper, was fortunate enough to spend many years working for CrossFit, which gave him an eagle-eyed perspective on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. 

In this episode, Chris candidly offers us the six lessons he learned from someone he describes as the ultimate disruptor. Some lessons were harder to learn than others, and sometimes he needed to learn them twice before they really sunk in. Chris Cooper shoots from the hip while speaking from the heart, which makes his insights into the entrepreneurial journey so invaluable. 

There are lessons on being prepared to fail, why a $10,000 charitable donation is better than $1 million, understanding that we are all media companies (no matter the nature of our business), and the societal value of creating entrepreneurs. 

If you’re a business owner looking for insight into the world of CrossFit and the lessons you can apply to your entrepreneurial approach, Chris Cooper is here with tools to save you from learning these lessons the hard way.

“Every company is now a media company, no matter what it is that you are good at.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- “The next time I start a billion-dollar business from my garage…”

- The pitfalls of losing focus for scope

- Your business is a media company

- How to avoid losing money when doing charitable work

- Build your own platform, create your own audience

- Entrepreneurship grows economies

- Meet your heroes, even if you're likely to be disappointed 

And more!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

BiG Podcast - Partnerships and Sponsorships

Mon, Mar 13, 2023 8:11AM • 17:44

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

audience, website, product, gym, building, recommendation, people, clients, business, bike, partnership, recommend, booth, owners, company, test, trek, podcast, local bike shop, sell

I will pay you $500 for a 30 minute phone call. Hey, I'm Chris Cooper, this is business is good. And today I'm going to tell you about sponsorships. Why I don't take sponsorships on my podcast and why I said no to the software company that wanted to pay me 500 bucks for a 30 minute phone call.

Today, I've got three big key topics for you. First, we're going to talk about the value of your audience. Second, we're going to talk about the value of your recommendation. And third, we're going to talk about the partnership funnel. But first, a story.

In 2006, I was sponsored by Trek bikes. Trek was the biggest most popular cycling company in the world. At that time. Lance Armstrong was winning the Tour de France seemingly every year on a Trek bike, everybody wanted to ride Trek bikes. But I wasn't a cyclist, I was powerlifting. Best case, I might have been the fastest powerlifter with a bicycle within a square mile or something. But the local bike shop wasn't interested in my legs, they were interested in my audience. I was a personal trainer at a local gym, I had a full book, and every Tuesday night, I would lead a cycling group for any of my clients who wanted to come. Now my clients were high earning individuals who could afford to work with a personal trainer a couple of times a week, they had high affinity they really liked and trusted me, most of them were beginners, some of them were thinking about doing their first triathlon.

And so when they thought about what kind of bike should they buy, they would naturally turn to me. And so it made sense for the local bike shop to put me on a Trek. Now, this didn't make sense to me at the time, because I didn't understand the value of the audience, I thought that they really thought I was an amazing athlete. And that's why I was gonna get sponsored by Trek. Of course, at the end of the summer, the store asked for its bike back. And I don't blame, you know, at least they didn't ask me to pull up under the cover of darkness and leave the bike, because they were embarrassed by my actual cycling prowess. But they did sell bikes from this program. And I learned something, which is if you know how to build an audience, you'll never go hungry.

Your audience is more valuable than what you know. even more today than 20 years ago, attention is really hard to get and it's extremely hard to keep. Now that my mentorship practice Two-Brain Business has 40,000 people on its daily email list, 10,000 YouTube subscribers and almost 3 million podcast downloads, people want to get in front of my audience. So here's why I don't take sponsors on any of my podcasts and I recently turned down offers for 500 bucks for a 30 minute phone call. And I will politely decline your offer for your amazing revenue share program if I push your product to my audience of gym owners.

Let's start with point number one the audience is harder to build than the product is. If you're like me, and you're listening to this, and you're a founder or a business coach, you're probably really in love with your product. You love building out your courses or your widget or your cookies or whatever it is that you make. And you want to believe that simply making the best widget, the best courses, the best cookie will guarantee your success. This is called the technicians curse. And I first read about it in the E Myth mastery book. But the reality is that more and more, it's less about what you make and more about your ability to build an audience.

building an audience is easier than...

In a lecture to Entrepreneurship students at a local university this month, I shared a simple business plan that you can use in a week to launch a business, and continue to use for years.

In this podcast, I walk through the model step by step, with examples you can use for different businesses. It's never too soon to start a business...and it's never too late!

To see the full model, click here:

https://businessisgood.com/the-simplest-business-plan-for-2024/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

As business mentors how do we build curriculum – and how do we create generations of clients whose performances improve upon those that came before them? Business Is Good with Chris Cooper, and today's topic provides insight into how we create content, how we audit that content, and how we then upgrade it.

Much like the story of the tortoise and the hare, we need something or someone to compete with and measure ourselves against. Building curriculum that we improve upon with each generation of clients, and then auditing that content and improving upon it, allows us to set ever higher benchmarks for our clients. 

With each generation of clients, we are introducing new hares into the race. And the goal is for them to exceed your standards, and surpass your estimations. That's good business mentorship.

Let's learn how we can identify what content we should be teaching, how we test that content to know if it's any good, how we build courses around that content, and also how we audit ourselves so that we can all improve. Let's dive into the show.

 "If you're coaching anything, you need to outgrow this mindset that the best experiences and ideas and stories and concepts and courses have to come from you. Eventually, your clients will improve on your best tactics and tools." 

~ Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

-What can we learn from the tortoise and the hare?

-How do we identify high-value topics that will get us clients faster?

-How do we test our content solutions so we know that they will work?

-How do we buy material from other people (and our clients) to help our other clients solve their problems faster?

-How do we build courses to teach these concepts and provide our clients with the right tools?

-Understanding the Audit Cycle – how are we constantly seeking improvement for our clients? 

And more!

Resources:

Blog - https://businessisgood.com/blog/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

When most entrepreneurs get their business running smoothly, they turn their eyes to the next thing: the next level, the next opportunity, the next location, or the next big idea.

This means they no longer spend all of their time caring for, feeding and protecting the Golden Goose. They might entrust its care to someone else...but that person doesn't have all of the context, experience or knowledge of the business owner.

We call this "moving from Farmer phase to Tinker Phase". When you leave your farm in the hands of someone else and start tinkering, you have to mentor the new farmer.

In this episode, I talk about the step that most successful founders skip: mentoring their team.

I tell you why it's important, and how to do it step by step.

If you want to join the conversation with other entrepreneurs, click here.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Theodore Roosevelt

Entrepreneurs spend most of their time looking for the next problem to solve.

This is often good for business, but bad for the entrepreneur.

According to Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy in The Gap and the Gain, "Gap Thinking means looking at the distance between where we are and where we want to be (or comparing ourselves to what other people have achieved)."

When you're "in the gap", you can't be happy, because you're always desiring the next thing - the next revenue milestone, the next acquisition, the next hire. Unfortunately, this means you can never be happy, no matter how successful you are.

Sullivan's advice is to focus on "The Gain": look back at your progress you've already made. He calls this "measuring backward, not forward" - which means comparing your current position against your former position, instead of your ideal position.

You have an ideal in your mind, and you're measuring yourself against your ideal, rather than against the actual progress you've made. This is why you're unhappy with what you've done, and it's probably why you're unhappy with everything in your life. Don't let your past be forgotten. Always measure backward.

Dan Sullivan

This makes conceptual sense. Buddhists have been preaching the pitfalls of comparison and desire for millennia. But in a world of constant comparison, where we're watching everyone else's highlight reel on Instagram every single day, how do we avoid comparison--or even jealousy?

Here's how to build the habit of living in "The Gain".

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Jason Katzenback is the cofounder of Amazing.com, a company that did $45M per year selling on Amazon.

As you'll hear in this episode, Jason--an early seller on Amazon--quickly flipped his niche skill into coaching others. He took the time to figure out something that made him a lot of money, and then multiplied that knowledge by helping others do the same.

Jason was actually a client in my gym when Amazing was starting to form in his mind. He'd talk about shooting videos in his basement and producing content, but I didn't get it (and I was too chicken to go and see, or too time-pressed to really dig in.)

A decade later, I was riding in an Uber in San Diego with some huge SaaS founders. We were going to dinner, and one of them casually mentioned "Katzenback". That's not a name you forget, so I locked in on the conversation. They were talking about Amazing.com, and their massive Summit events with very high-level guests. I was shocked to hear it was the same guy.

We reconnected when Jason sold Amazing.com, left Austin to return home to Sault Ste. Marie and agreed to do this show. It's an amazing story, but it also includes some great little nuggets to help any entrepreneur.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

In his book, "Good to Great", Jim Collins shares 6 big ideas that great companies have in common.

The unifying theme of the companies in his book is that they didn't start out great, but became great when they acted on these big ideas.

One of the biggest is the "hedgehog concept", which is a strategy of focusing hard on the thing you can do better than anyone else, and repeating it over and over.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Characteristics of Missionaries and Mercenaries

Missionaries:

• Purpose-Driven: Focused on the company’s vision and values, often motivated by making a meaningful impact.
• Long-Term Commitment: Likely to stay with the company through ups and downs, seeing their work as a calling or part of a larger mission.
• Team-Oriented: They prioritize collaboration and the overall success of the team over personal gain.

Mercenaries:

• Outcome-Focused: Driven primarily by personal benefits such as compensation, bonuses, and other perks.
• Short-Term Commitment: Their loyalty is as long as the benefits last; they may quickly move on if a better offer appears.
• Individualistic: Tends to prioritize personal achievements and recognition over team success.

2. Identifying Missionaries and Mercenaries in the Workplace

Missionaries:

• Look for employees who advocate for the company’s values and are enthusiastic about company-wide goals and missions.
• They often go beyond their job descriptions to help colleagues and advance the organization’s objectives.

Mercenaries:

• Identify those who frequently negotiate for higher pay or better titles without corresponding increases in their contribution to team goals.
• They may exhibit high performance but are less interested in collaborative projects unless these directly impact their personal targets.

3. The Strategic Use of Mercenaries in Business

When You’d Want a Mercenary:

• Special Projects: For short-term, high-impact projects where specific skills are crucial, and the commitment is finite.
• Scaling Operations: When rapid scaling is needed, mercenaries can accelerate growth given their focus on outcomes and deliverables.

4. Encouraging Missionaries to Thrive

Stoking Up Missionaries:

• Align Roles with Passions: Ensure that their roles are closely aligned with what they are passionate about within the context of the company’s mission.
• Recognition and Empowerment: Recognize their contributions in meaningful ways and empower them with the autonomy to lead initiatives.
• Foster a Purpose-Driven Culture: Strengthen the company’s mission-oriented culture, making the collective mission a central part of daily business operations.

If you want to join the conversation with other entrepreneurs, click here.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Why do we need business coaches? What is the difference between a coach and a mentor? And how do coaches earn the permission and trust to help someone grow their business? 

These are the questions Chris Cooper is answering for us today on Business is Good. He provides us with personal stories from his early days in business that illustrate the value of having a coach who can support you in growing your business faster than you ever could on your own. 

Chris’s advice is invaluable as he shows us how ‘simple scales faster’ and explains why successful entrepreneurs don’t have time to volunteer — which is why we need to seek out business mentors. 

There’s insight on what value a coach can add to solving a specific business problem, as compared to what you might gain from working with a mentor for a few years. 

The groundwork is all laid for you by Chris in terms of the logic of having a business mentor help you grow your business quickly and efficiently. Listen in and learn how Chris’s ideas can positively impact your business.

“I want to help the next generation of entrepreneurs grow faster than I ever did and reach new heights. Because that is what will change our local economy, our larger government economy, and our world, by helping people grow.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- Chris’s first experience with a gym mentor

- Why mentorship is not just about finding a successful entrepreneur

- The difference between a coach and a mentor

- ‘Simple scales faster’

- Learn to paint by numbers before you start coloring outside the lines

And more!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- http://www.businessisgood.com/

Motivation is not about fear or money. True motivation comes from those 3.

Autonomy, mastery and purpose - dan pink

Autonomy:

the 4 Ts: their task, their time, their technique and their team

Freedom and responsibility within a framework

Mastery

You don’t get motivated and then start winning. You start winning and then get motivated.

Counting tiny wins - gap and the gain

Habit stacking becomes win-stacking. At first, the work is the win.

Purpose

A Noble Purpose: The Foundation for Happiness

Many people will say they “had a bad day at work” but also “love their job.”

If your vocation serves a noble purpose, some short-term setbacks or stress won’t derail your happiness for long.

For example, when I’m working with gym owners who are going through a hard time, I tend to carry a lot of their burdens personally. I lose sleep when they’re going through a rate increase. I comb their social media nonstop when they fire a coach. I wouldn’t describe these days as “happy” ones, because I care a lot about my clients.

But I also benefit from having a strong sense of purpose: I know, from vast experience, that they’re doing the right thing in the long term. And if I can get them through hard action, they’ll eventually become far happier. Their families will benefit. Their staffs will benefit. And their clients will benefit most of all. That’s why being a mentor makes me happy.

How do you know if your job or vocation fulfills a noble purpose? When you’d do it for free. I would do this job for free—hell, I have. You probably would do your job for free, too.

When owning a gym was my only job, I daydreamed many times: “If someone would just come along and pay me a salary, they could have the gym and I’d be happy.” I just wanted enough to survive and keep going. The job made me happy. Unfortunately, the necessities of ownership soon began to outweigh the happiness I received from coaching. Until I fixed the business, coaching made me unhappy.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

How would you scale from one client to ten without hiring anybody – and still give those clients excellent service? That’s the question for the one-man band. How to build a single-person business is what Chris Cooper is addressing today on Business Is Good. 

Chris is sharing his vast experience as a business coach and mentor by narrowing down the decisions that the person running their own business has to make to three key areas. These are: should you do it, how to scale up your time effectively, and the tech you need to build a single-person business. 

You want to grow your business, you don't want to lose existing clients, and you know a little bit about different coaching modalities, CRM software, and social media platforms (like Facebook) that you can use to communicate with your clients. 

But how do you tie it all together, take advantage of increasing AI software opportunities, and succeed as a one-man band? Chris is here to guide us as he expertly weighs up the pros and cons of marching to the beat of your own drum while scaling your single-person business. 

"If you're thinking about scaling up by going one-to-many, what I would suggest (and what seems to be working for a couple of programs right now) is to go one-to-few."

- Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

-Creating courses as a way to increase revenue and maximize your time

-Building a client-centric business

-How to scale your time from one-to-one to one-to-many

-Various models on how to scale effectively

-Dealing with a high turnover of clients 

-Talking to 12 people at a time as the ideal number for maximum retention

-Using an existing social media platform (like Facebook) for client support

-Following up with clients to help keep them accountable for generating results

-Using the right CRM that fits your niche 

-Using AI to take people's dashboards and look at their metrics

-Using AI to create media for you if you are a single-person operation

-Hiring people who are good at what you aren't 

-Having high churn as a single-person business

And more!

Resources:

Blog - https://businessisgood.com/blog/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Business is Good has never been better with ‘The Simple Six’ and Chris Cooper as your business mentor. The Simple Six is a process where you can grow any service-based business using the principle of incremental growth and compounding gains over time.

Join Chris as he outlines The Simple Six, explains the difference between strategies and tactics, and how to use The Simple Six every day to snowball your business growth. 

Chris has been mentoring entrepreneurs worldwide on how to get better results faster, and he’s developed these six actions you can take to fast-track your business success. Stick with Chris and you’ll appreciate that applying ‘The Simple Six’ each time is like turning a giant wheel for your business once — and that each time you do it, things will get a little bit easier.

“The first step to getting results is to be able to focus on one tactic at a time.” 

 – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- Increasing the number of clients you serve

- Increasing the value of each client that your business works with

- Increasing the length of engagement or the amount of time your clients spend in your business

- Valuing your time

- Measuring the return on investment on everything that you buy

- Calculating the amount that your business pays you

- How to go from strategy to tactic

- Doing a ‘Six Storm’

- What is your average revenue per month?

- Setting goals based on your strategies

- Choosing the easiest, fastest tactics

- Work on your business before you work in it

And more!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

How can you get your clients better results — and use those results to get more clients? The A+ Client Results Framework is what you need to get better results for your clients over time, resulting in more clients for you. And in this episode of Business Is Good, host Chris Cooper shares the four phases that create this framework.

It starts with assessment and how you measure and track what your client is doing. You then have to hold your client accountable to do the work, which will then lead to a natural affinity between you as their mentor and them, their staff, and their brand. Next, you publish your values often and then build your authority by sharing the success stories of what you’ve done for other people. And then you start over!

Learn how to lead with positivity and base decisions on evidence by applying Chris’s A+ Client Results Framework to your business and mentorship program. As always, the advice dispensed on Business Is Good is worth its weight in gold. Please join us!

“Tracking the data and knowing the averages is the key that allows people to exceed that average and become better, and push the envelope up over time.”

- Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- Assessment - measure and track how your client is doing

- Adherence - hold the client accountable to do the work to get results

- Affinity -  how tightly tied are your clients and your staff to your brand?

- What are your values, and how are you communicating them?

- Are your decisions evidence-based? 

- Authority - share success stories of what you’ve done for other people

- Why you should repeat the process of auditing your clients and measuring results

- Creating an evolutionary cycle that is tied to results over time

And more!

Resources:

Blog - https://businessisgood.com/blog/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

I'm a product guy.

I want to believe that if I keep making my product better, I'll make it more profitable.

Unfortunately, that almost never works - we get caught in the Technician's Curse and never stop iterating on our product, tweaking it, improving it...and never having time to market it.

But there are SOME ways that improving your product CAN make it more profitable:

Being the best in class creates a huge advantage, because the best clients will ascend to your service (if they know about it.)

Tactically, you can also try:

• Outcome-based pricing 
• Pursuing greatness as a marketing strategy. 
• Improving client retention by improving client outcomes.

I walk through all of this on today's episode!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Ask yourself: what level of leadership are you at now and what influence do you need to build to get to the next level? Respect to Chris Cooper and the information he’s distilling for us in this luminary and logical episode of Business Is Good. 

We all know the term “influencer” from social media these days, but what does real influence have to do with leadership? And, more importantly, how can you grow your business, your family, and your community by becoming a better leader by wielding more influence?

There are 5 levels of leadership that are worth understanding to gauge where you are. What those levels are — and how to level up — is what Chris is here to teach us. In between, he’s weaving personal stories that add gravitas to the theory while providing us with relatable contact points on how we can grow our level of influence. Please join us. 

“You can change how people view you as a leader and you can become a more impactful leader by improving your influence.” – Chris Cooper



In This Episode:

- What are the 5 levels of influence? 

- Understanding positional influence 

- What is permission influence?

- If you have a proven track record, do you wield production influence?

- Appreciating respect and how people follow you because of who you are

- Chris’s success with CrossFit and building a foundation of trust

- Using data to show how you can help people

- The importance of intent when creating media — showing people HOW and WHY

And more!

Resources:

- The 5 Levels of Leadership - John Maxwell: https://www.johnmaxwell.com/blog/the-5-levels-of-leadership1/

- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition by Robert B. Cialdini: https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

In this episode of *Business Is Good*, I explore the concept of self-leadership and why it’s the foundation of all other types of leadership. I share that while a business's efficiency helps it survive tough times, it’s the strength of its leadership that determines its success in the good times. Often, the biggest limitation to growth is the founder or CEO—their personal knowledge gaps, emotional control, or mindset can be what holds the business back.

I walk through different forms of leadership, including team, brand, and niche leadership, but emphasize that self-leadership is the one we must master first. Drawing from my own experiences, I talk about the importance of financial literacy, staying emotionally disciplined, and confronting uncomfortable realities in business. For example, I share how I navigate challenging employee situations and manage my own emotional responses when faced with overwhelm.

Many gym owners, like those I work with, struggle with distractions and the excitement of novelty, which can pull them away from proven growth strategies. To counter this, I talk about the power of building focus-driven habits, such as setting aside a dedicated hour each day for high-priority work, to create lasting momentum.

To help you practice self-leadership, I’m introducing a 30-day challenge with daily prompts for self-reflection and actionable growth. I’ll provide questions and exercises to encourage honest self-assessment. Whether you’re writing in a journal or just taking a few moments to reflect, this is your opportunity to improve your self-leadership skills and build the discipline and focus that lead to lasting success.

Last week I shared the story of the Smokejumpers, and the horrible tragedy that happened in Mann Gulch, Montana in 1949.

But as in all tragedies and all business setbacks, there's a lesson that we can learn and take from this. In this lesson, the foreman of the Smokejumpers--Wagg Dodge-- did something that seemed counterintuitive and didn't make sense to his team: he lit an escape fire. And this brave act ultimately saved his life, and it shares profound lessons for businesses facing their own kind of wildfires.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Why founders don’t make money

They are product oriented -inventors not investors 

They quit too soon - in the product crew successful, they have done its job

They failed to scale - They are irreplaceable in their business.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

No matter what field you’re in, you can build a staff training program following these five steps.

If you’re a business coach, you can help your clients do the same. Take this model and apply your own branding.

First, a question: why do we have to train staff at all? Doesn’t our education system prepare people to work?

In Western culture, our education system is an “industrialized Greek model”.

We follow the original Greek teaching model: a student sits at the feet of their teacher, listens to a speech on a topic, and asks questions to better understand. This was used by Socrates to teach Plato, and by Plato to teach Aristotle. The needs of industrialization sped up the process by incorporating large classrooms, specific subjects and more emphasis on following specific instructions.

But another model–the Hebrew model–is better for training staff on the job.

The Hebrew model follows four phases:

I do, and you watch.

We do it together.

You do, and I watch.

You do.

The Greek model is designed to teach what the teacher knows. The Hebrew model is designed to teach who the teacher IS. It’s powerful for on-the-job training because it’s simple. But it’s incomplete. It requires an evaluation process. For staff to become masters at their craft, they must do more than know how–they must adopt a process of constant improvement. That process should be driven by feedback.

In early Hebrew times, tradespeople received fast and direct feedback: “this food is no good”, or “your sheep are small.” Apprentices learned first from a master, and then from their customers or patrons. There were no managers or NPS processes–you improved, or you starved. This is the root of a free market economy.

In a more complex world, feedback is slower and less direct. Having hundreds of clients makes it hard to find the most important feedback. Multiple levels of leadership means every piece of feedback passes through filters. And removal of severe incentives–eat, or don’t eat–means that feedback isn’t always applied with urgency.

That means we must add a feedback process to create continuous improvement.

So the model for staff development is this:

I do, you watch

We do together

You do, I watch

You do

I correct, you do better.

This is a cycle of mentorship that can be applied in any service business.

For example, in a gym, a good staff training program looks like this:

I coach and tell you why I’m coaching this way

We coach together. I give you specific assignments to help me.

You coach, and I give you feedback to improve until you’re ready.

Then you coach alone for awhile, and reflect on what you know.

After three months, you do a self-evaluation and I do a managerial evaluation.

Then you coach alone, and we repeat between practice and evaluation forever.

In an accounting practice:

I walk you through a series of P&Ls and tax returns and talk while I do.

Then I assign specific parts to you, and check your work.

Then you do a series of P&Ls and tax returns and I audit them.

Then you go off on your own for three months, and take notes.

Then we do an audit of your work and make notes for improvement.

Mentorship is different from “teaching”, at least in the Western sense. As mentors and coaches, we must be less invested in what our clients are LEARNING and more invested in who they’re BECOMING.

Use this model to train your own staff, or teach it to your clients. Add templates and tips to build out your ‘staff training’ program!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

In my book "Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief", I broke the entrepreneurial journey down into four phases.

In the Founder Phase, the entrepreneur is wearing all the hats. They're bootstrapping, staying up late, building and testing products, learning to sell, opening the business early and closing it late. In many cases, they're self-employed: they've really just bought themselves a job.

In Farmer Phase, the founder begins to add staff and systems to make the business grow. They turn their attention to the crops (products or services) that grow well; hire people to plant, tend and harvest the crops; and focus on growth of the business.

In Tinker Phase, the farmer begins to reinvest their profits and scale. They might buy up more farms, or invest in faster equipment, or automate their production. They might invest in other businesses or visit other farmers to learn about new crops and processes.

These stages are easy to understand, and I use examples from many different industries in the book.

But what the heck is "Thief Phase?"

The book was originally written as "Founder, Farmer, Tinker, King" to describe the rise of an entrepreneur from scrappy startup to a leader in their niche. But the term "King" didn't sit well with me for a few reasons:

1 - I knew many readers would naturally associate the title with my own journey, and I'd never call myself "King" of anything;

2 - Kings consolidate money. They build shrines and vaults and temples and palaces. Their money doesn't move--it stays with them. That's not what I want to teach.

3 - There's only one King. A King has to spend most of his time defending his throne. Kings must stay in a mindset of scarcity because they hold a scarce position in the world. They're either THE KING, or they're not.

So I asked myself, who has similar freedoms to a King, but still lives a life of service to others? Who reaches a high place of success that can be reached by others--indeed, it's possible for anyone and everyone to reach at the same time without killing each other?

And I thought of Robin Hood.

Robin Hood wasn't 'rich' in the conventional sense. He didn't ride around in a gold-plated carriage. But:

1 - He has freedom of time

2 - He has more than enough for himself and his band - if they had more, they couldn't store it anywhere, so they don't accumulate wealth

3 - He 'steals from the rich and gives to the poor' - in other words, he redistributes wealth. Ironically, that's his protection, because the poor villagers will do anything to help him

4 - He keeps his money moving - any money he collects is reinvested in the people around him. He doesn't have to build a vault and defend it all the time

5 - He's an outlaw. By the original definition, he's 'outside the law' - meaning he doesn't have to funnel his money through the tax collectors and bureaucrats and layers of government. He just hands it out.

Obviously, Robin Hood didn't live a life of ease. He had to find new food for himself and his band almost daily; he had to fight; when it rained, he got wet. And he broke laws. I'm not encouraging any of that. However, Robin Hood had a level of wealth that most "Kings" would envy.

How does the story of Robin Hood apply to entrepreneurs?

At a certain level of success, entrepreneurs can lose their sense of purpose.

Through Farmer Phase, the entrepreneur is fighting to keep their business going. It's easy to get motivated when you're working for an income.

In Tinker Phase, the entrepreneur is often excited to have a little bit more than what they need. The pursuit of new knowledge and ideas - and a little vacation - is enough....

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Why Get Rich_

Chris Cooper discusses the motivations and challenges of gym owners, who often sacrifice higher-paying careers to pursue their passion despite low earnings. He argues that wealth creation is essential for personal and societal progress, emphasizing that wealth enables freedom, problem-solving, and opportunities for others. Cooper highlights the importance of entrepreneurship in driving economic growth and democracy, noting that wealth creation is necessary for job creation and tax generation. He advocates for building wealth to solve personal financial issues, compound wealth, create opportunities for others, and ultimately, to give back through philanthropy.

Transcript

https://otter.ai/u/gI_vGIJuGHfXY77z5D1AzbS4MD0?view=transcript

Action Items

• [ ] Develop the skill of making money.
• [ ] Aim to have a personal net worth of $20 million to be able to give away $1 million per year.

Outline

Why Gym Owners Aren't Interested in Becoming Millionaires

• Chris Cooper discusses the low earnings in the fitness industry, with average wages for trainers at $28,000 and gym owners at $42,000, unchanged in recent years.
• Despite the low pay, gym owners often leave lucrative careers in banking, teaching, or firefighting to pursue their mission-driven work.
• Gym owners are willing to sacrifice personal financial stability to help others improve their lives, even going hungry to keep their gyms running.
• Chris Cooper emphasizes that gym owners are less interested in becoming millionaires due to their mission-driven mindset and the challenges of their profession.

The Importance of Wealth and Entrepreneurship

• Chris Cooper argues that wealth creation is essential for prosperity and peace, driving our way of life and democracy.
• He explains that entrepreneurship, not government or unions, creates jobs and wealth, which in turn support the economy and democratic processes.
• Cooper highlights the historical context of wealth creation, noting that even 100 years ago, many Americans were still struggling with poverty and poor working conditions.
• He stresses that wealth creation is a fundamental driver of human progress, allowing for improvements in healthcare, education, and other essential services.

Wealth as Freedom and Time

• Chris Cooper defines wealth as the freedom of resources and time, not just money, and explains that true wealth involves balancing both.
• He shares that solving money problems is crucial for entrepreneurs, as financial struggles can follow them home and impact their personal lives.
• Cooper provides a personal example of how solving money problems allowed him and his wife to afford Christmas presents and other necessities.
• He emphasizes that wealth solves many problems in Western society, such as access to clean water and child brides, though some issues like boredom and addiction are more complex.

Compounding Wealth and Eliminating Debt

• Chris Cooper explains how wealth compounds over time, using his own experience of paying off a mortgage in seven years instead of 25.
• He describes the snowball effect of eliminating debt, where extra money saved from debt repayment is applied to other debts, creating more financial freedom.
• Cooper shares a story of buying a car with cash, highlighting the long-term benefits of wealth compounding.
• He discusses the importance of setting up opportunities for others, such as creating jobs and investing in the future.

Creating Opportunities for Others

• Chris Cooper argues that wealth creates opportunities for others, contrasting bureaucratic jobs with entrepreneurial jobs that add

Whether you're running a personal training business, a coaching business, or teaching painting on the weekend, chances are that you've thought about how you can scale your business. 

Fear not: if you hit a ceiling whenever you try to scale, then Chris Cooper is here with four tips that will take your coaching business from 'one to one' to 'one to many.'

Learning how to leverage technology and add group coaching to your business offering while creating replicable models AND hiring the right staff is no easy task. 

Chris breaks it all down for us, though, taking us on his journey to where he is today while also outlining the practicalities of how you could get even two of your clients to start working together.

It's all about advancing your business further forward, faster – and still delivering those outcomes to your clients. Chris's mentorship insights mean you can apply the lessons he's learned in his business journey in a smart and seamless fashion. Please join us. 

“You don't have to hire the same person that you are."

- Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- Hiring an administrator to buy back more time 

- Seeing your first hires as investments

- Can you scale using an online course?

- Getting your clients to train/learn together

- Putting your clients into groups of 8 to 12 people (a 'board')

- Building an ascension model – what that means

- Understanding what your client needs

- How to replicate what you do by creating models

- Developing models so you don't have to develop skills from scratch

- Evaluating which of your clients would work well together

And more!

Resources:

Blog - https://businessisgood.com/blog/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Welcome to the Business is Good podcast with Chris Cooper. Chris Cooper is here to show you how he grew from a 200-word blog to a $20 million company. He speaks from a lifetime of lessons owning gyms and creating valuable business content, teaching us that it's about sharing experience and not just sharing opinion.

Whether it's learning to adopt the 'help first' mindset when growing an audience or constantly auditing yourself to keep assessing what your audience wants, Chris has tips galore on how to consistently improve in your business.

In this debut episode, Chris distills his wisdom into '3 keys to growing,' from building an audience to building a company with a massive audience. His personal journey as a businessman is built into the narrative, and what's so refreshing about Chris's take is that he is a teacher who learns by teaching himself.

There's candour and humility as Chris shares his business advice that is at once authentic and inspirational. If you're a business owner looking to scale and open to mentoring advice, Chris Cooper will lead the way in teaching you how to set aside your ego, grow personally, and grow your business too. Please join us. 

“I had to pivot to do the harder thing. Which was not just criticizing or condemning bad ideas, but actually sharing what worked.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- Chris’s 3 keys to growing

- 2008, when Chris had two gyms (and one was eating the other)

- The value of connecting with a business mentor

- Long road ahead: 3 years to get 100 readers a day

- Pivot to the harder thing – sharing what works

- Chris's 'evolution of helping'

- Tip: your value is hidden in the top 10% of your content

- Chris's clients soon exceeded his growth – getting over your ego

- Publish consistently to achieve success

And more!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

After working with over 1800 gyms worldwide, we know that our program can get a gym amazing results.

Our strategies are commonly used in huge businesses. Our tactics are specific to the fitness industry, and tested relentlessly. Every tool, every template, every social media swipe file has been tested hundreds of times. They work.

But still, around 1.8% of the time, a client struggles in our RampUp program.

They get the same strategies and tactics as everyone else. They have 1:1 coaching calls (and, honestly, we sometimes do a couple of extra calls to get them on track.) So why aren’t these outliers getting the same results as the others? What’s missing?

I didn’t want to guess, so I looked at our most successful gym owners: the ones who ascended rapidly from their starting point to 100k NOB and then to 1M net worth. I called their mentors; I looked at their call notes and walked through their metrics month by month. Then I scrolled through their Facebook posts and questions, and FINALLY a theme began to emerge.

The most successful gym owners have SKILLS that the least successful don’t.

For example, the most successful gym owners are able to focus on the work they’re assigned in RampUp; make time to do it; and complete it between calls.

In fact, the most common thing these fast-ascenders say in interviews is “I just did what my mentor told me to do.”

Conversely, if you read the conversations and exit interviews of the unsuccessful, the opposite theme is repeated over and over: “I just don’t have time to do it,” or “I’m so overwhelmed, can I pause and come back later?”

Focus is a skill.

Some clients have the skill of focus already. Usually, these are people who have a family, own a business and also train hard. The most focused sometimes have multiple “fields of play”, each of which is important enough to warrant their full attention. So they’re not just running a business, but also raising kids or pets and doing Triathlons.

Some clients don’t have strong focus skills, but they can force a deep focus when required. These are people (like me) who do their best work right before a deadline. When given a short leash, these clients can be really successful with our RampUp program, but they’ll never be successful just by reading books or listening to podcasts. They won’t benefit from a group coaching program unless they’re in it for a very long time. They’re a bit slower than the first group, but they’ll get there. A 12-week sprint with frequent touch points will keep them on track.

Others don’t have any focus skills, and they’re overwhelmed and stressed all the time. In most cases, 1:1 mentorship is their only hope…and even then, they might struggle to keep up with the mentor’s pace. In these cases, the mentor has to do really frequent touch points – almost daily. Or they can make appointments with themselves to do the work and show their mentor when they have “focus blocks” planned. These clients might benefit from scheduled “open office hours” where they just show up and work. But they won’t benefit from getting a new task or idea every month.

Finally, the 1.8% who are so overwhelmed that they can’t get anything done. These clients might not be successful in your program or any other. If they have compounding stressors, like money or problems at home, your coaching sessions will just become therapeutic venting. You’ll have to keep these clients on a very short leash – “text me what you plan to accomplish every morning, and tell me what you got done every night”. They should also be coached on building a schedule to do the work–and their expectation to have the work done–on the very first call. In fact, you might want to add a qualifying question to your sales script: “When do you plan to do the work required to get a great return on this investment?”

There are other skills that some entrepreneurs lack, like:

An abundance mindset (vs a...

Years ago, when Chris Cooper was powerlifting, he would go to a federal prison in the United States twice a year. There, he actually got to meet and compete with prisoners who, in most cases, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Chris and his team would get locked in from 6 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, with a small break at lunch. 

Aside from all the amazing feats of strength that he witnessed from people with little training, access to quality nutrition, or equipment, he got a lot of insight that helped him to live better and grow his business. In this episode, Chris will share with you the 3 best tips he learned while spending time in prison.   

The reality is that, in the internet age, you cannot protect your intellectual property. You have no secrets anymore. Therefore, it’s best to share everything with everyone. This doesn’t mean that you won’t get paid. Your value comes from serving your audience by giving them exactly what they need at the right time in order to prevent overwhelm. In business, just like in prison, you can’t protect knowledge, but you can protect your tribe. 

Does this sound useful? Great, because Chris offers two more juicy tips in this episode. The tips he learned in prison can be implemented right away to change your life and your business for good. 

“Our actions over time define who we are. We can affect those actions by the way that we feel, and we can affect the way we feel by taking pride in the way we take care of ourselves.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- How Chris ended up in a federal prison in the United States

- Not having secrets is great for your business

- Importance of looking good and taking care of yourself

- Having a routine is more powerful than being disciplined

- Tips for implementing a successful daily routine

And more!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

Want your clients to get results faster? Make the steps smaller.

This is a meta-skill for great coaches in every field: fitness, business and even spiritual leadership.

There are many reasons clients can't hit their goals:

• the goal isn't clear enough
• they don't have time to work on it
• they don't know where to start
• the amount of work required to reach the goal is overwhelming
• they "don't have enough time".
• they're not motivated or incentivized
• they don't believe they can reach the goal

All of these problems can be overcome by making a goal or task smaller. Here's how to do it:

1. Get really clear on the goal. ("Point B".)
2. Measure their starting point. ("Point A".)

3. Measure the distance between the two points.

4. Identify the halfway point.

5. Identify the "halfway to halfway" point.

6. Break the "halfway to halfway" point in half again.

7. Continue to break down the problem until you find the Minimum Effective Task (MET). This is the smallest irreducible step that a client can make--usually right now. This step should take less than 30 minutes to complete, so they can do it within their daily allotted work window.

This is hard to understand in the abstract, so here's an example:

A client wants to earn $100k NOB from their business. That's Point B--their goal.

They're currently making $50k NOB from their business--that's Point A.

How do we get there? Doubling their net owner benefit is a huge, daunting task. If you assigned "Make 50k more per year!" as their goal, they wouldn't know where to start.

Breaking the problem down, we see that $75k NOB is the halfway point. That's still a huge goal, but it seems more likely.

If we break the goal down further, we create the "halfway to halfway" goal of $62,500 NOB. That's only an increase if $12,500 per year - a modest goal, but still too large to be actionable.

Breaking the goal in half again gets us to $56,250. Doing it one more time brings us to $53,125.

Could you give a client clear action steps to increase their NOB by $3,125 this month? If not, break the goal down further.

If a client is really stuck, you might break the goal down to something as small as $500. Then you can tell them "Here's how you'll make an additional $500 this month."

Then you might give them some small steps to make an extra $500:

1 - hold meetings with your ten best clients;

2 - ask each for a referral;

3 - aim to get two referrals for $250 each.

Great mentors would break that process down even further.

1 - "On Monday, send THIS email to your twenty best clients."

2 - "On Tuesday, get ten of them scheduled for a 15-minute chat."

3- "On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, meet with 3-4 clients for 15 minutes each. Follow this script to ask for a referral."

4 - "On Friday, call the referrals and book THEM for a chat next week."

5 - "Sign up at least two new clients for your $250 package by the end of next week."

If you can't break that goal down into actionable steps, make the goal smaller.

The most important thing isn't the size of the goal, but progress toward that goal. Hitting tiny goals creates measurable outcomes over time, but it really creates momentum. It beats overwhelm (anyone can copy and paste an email to their 20 best clients) and lets them feel like they're getting small wins.

Here are some additional tips:

1 - have the client tell YOU what they're going to do as soon as they get off the call.

2 - there's no such thing as "too small" - the more a client is stuck, the smaller the steps need to...

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

clients, increase, expenses, arm, business, gym, photographer, revenue, hourly rate, work, bucks, crm, paying, owner, hire, retention, simple, coaches, raise, coming

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

clients, increase, expenses, arm, business, gym, photographer, revenue, hourly rate, work, bucks, crm, paying, owner, hire, retention, simple, coaches, raise, coming

Today, we're going to talk about raising client value before you do anything else. I'm going to go through this in three big topics.

First, the six levers that will grow any business.

Then, why ARM (client value) comes firs

Then I'm going to talk about how ARM improves everything else.

Then I'm going to tell you how to improve your ARM. O

If you're trying to boost your net owner benefit--how much you take home--the easiest way to do that is to increase how much each client pays.

If you're trying to increase length of engagement, how long a client sticks around, the best way to do that is to start with high value clients who stick around longer.

If you're trying to boost your effective hourly rate, the best way to do that is to increase the price that your clients are paying.

If you're trying to get a better return on your expenses, the best way to do that isn't by cutting your expenses. It's by increasing your revenue.

And if you're trying to get more clients, I challenge you to ask, "do I actually need 50 more clients if every client that I'm paying is playing slightly more?"

Then I'm going to give you three case studies.

Thanks for listening to business is good. If you'd like to chat about this episode or the blog posts or podcasts that I put on the business is good site. Just go to business is good.com and click Join the movement. We'll see you there.

Thanks for listening to business is good. If you'd like to chat about this episode or the blog posts or podcasts that I put on the business is good site. Just go to business is good.com and click Join the movement. We'll see you there.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

No matter what kind of service business you own, you must carefully consider their first 3 visits into your service. These first 3 interactions set you up for long-term client retention...or early washout.

Here's how to do it.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

How to Consistently Produce Better and Better Content.

In this episode, I tell you how to produce content for YouTube, your Podcast, your blog AND your social media...all at once!

Then I tell you how to use the media you produce to create a book, longform video or audiobook using a model we call "The Power of Ten." (It's how I wrote my last book, "Start A Gym".)

I'll start by telling you what each "level" of content means:

A - longform, big projects, like a book or film

B - shorter-form daily or weekly content, like a podcast, YouTube video or blog post

C - amplifiers, like reels, tweets, pictures or snippets.

Then I'll tell you how to systemize the process to create MOUNDS of content from one recording.

Finally, I'll tell you how to make your content better and better over time, so it doesn't matter where you start!

Every company is a media company.

You MUST publish content.

Your first content doesn't have to be great - you'll bury the bad stuff with new stuff, as long as you keep getting better.

Want to chat about it? Visit www.businessisgood.com and join our community of entrepreneurs!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

If you could spend 1 hour doing something – or 10 hours – and get the same results, which one would you pick? Of course, most of us would choose one hour. But in truth, in business, that rarely happens. 

As business owners, we have often been brought up with a job mindset, believing that the harder we work at our jobs, the more successful we will be. 

The reality is that our job, as owners, is to focus on outcomes: how do we put those first, and what are the fastest ways to get there? 

Shifting our mindset involves learning not to feed the amygdala (that part of our brain that feeds off our 'fight or flight' problems) as a CEO or entrepreneur, i.e. looking for problems to solve and stressors to resolve.

Rather, we need to be more strategic in our approach to how we reinvest our time and set future outcomes that will help us grow our business – and accurately reflect a worthwhile return on our time investment. 

Chris is hammering home an appreciation that your greatest asset is your time, and that from there you need to figure out the fastest way to get to your business outcomes in order to see real growth. Let Chris show you how to work smarter, not harder in this enlightening episode of Business Is Good. 

"As an owner, you invest your time (which is your most valuable asset) to get an outcome back."

- Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

-Why your job as an owner is to produce outcomes (not to produce work)

-Why we think we need to keep working really hard in business to achieve success

-How to focus on outcomes to put them first –  and find the fastest ways to get there

-Thinking like an investor as a CEO – learning to reinvest your time in future business endeavors

-Ask yourself: what is your Return on Time (ROT)?

-How to work out your Effective Hourly Rate

And more!

Resources:

Blog - https://businessisgood.com/blog/

Traction (book) - Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business: Wickman, Gino: 0783324916904: Amazon.com: Books - https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

“My staff never cleans up before they go home.”

“Our front office is a pigsty!”

“No one returns phone calls or emails quickly.”

“No one cares except for me!”

If you struggle to get consistent action from your staff, there are two possible causes.

The first probable cause is your process. The second probable cause is your people.

Read the full article: https://businessisgood.com/the-two-types-of-problems/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Today on the podcast, Business Mentor Ashley Haun shares the importance of rest for entrepreneurs, highlighting three types of rest: physical, emotional, and mental.

She shares personal experiences of feeling exhausted after a 72-hour race and the need for emotional rest to avoid burnout. Haun encouraged entrepreneurs to prioritize rest to make better decisions, see things from a different perspective, and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

The importance of rest for entrepreneurs, including physical, emotional, and mental rest.

• Tips for entrepreneurs to prioritize physical, emotional, and mental rest to avoid brain fog and improve decision-making.
• Personal experience with the benefits of emotional rest in decision-making.
• Tips on how entrepreneurs can mentally rest and reset, emphasizing the importance of alone time and relaxation.
• Haun encourages entrepreneurs to prioritize rest and self-care to avoid burnout and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Want more from Ashley? Read her blog and listen to her podcast here.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

There are two types of marketing. Brand Marketing is your long term play. Direct Marketing is your short term play. In this two part podcast series, I'll walk you through what each means as succinctly as possible. I'll tell you the opportunities and challenges with both. And I'll tell you what you can do today to grow your business using both brand and direct marketing.

Key points covered in the episode include:

• The distinction between brand marketing (focusing on reputation and awareness) and direct marketing (aiming for immediate sales).
• The challenges of measuring the success of brand marketing and the importance of affinity in building a strong brand.
• Real-world examples, including a gym owner's experience, to illustrate the consequences of neglecting affinity in marketing efforts.
• Strategies for effective brand marketing, such as content publication and maintaining a positive reputation to foster customer loyalty.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

For the last 15 years, I've almost always had a 1:1 mentor. I've participated in masterminds, had specific coaches, but always paid someone to help me set goals, build a plan and stay on course. I pay between $100,000 and $250,000 per year, but the ROI is unmeasurable (though it's in the millions.)

Working with a mentor is a two-way street. These are professionals whose time is almost always worth more than my time; who have done the hard (and sometimes boring) work to get where they are. They are not my personal assistant - they are not going to do the work for me. They are not Google--they're not going to go seeking answers that I can easily find myself. They see things that I don't; they remove obstacles in advance; and they stop me from taking wrong turns that would waste time and money. But to get that benefit, I have to be a good client. Over the last 15 years, I've learned that, to get a great return on mentorship, I have to be a good mentee. I have to be coachable. Here are my top tips:

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

"I can't take on more business without more staff...but I don't have the money to hire anyone!"

I'm sure you've been there. Your business is busy, but you're not making enough money. You have cash flow, but not enough to hire someone else without cutting your own pay.

This is the Valley of Death: when you have to hire for capacity ahead of cash flow.

Greg Crabtree coined the phrase "Valley of Death" in his book, "Simple Numbers".

The Valley of Death is when you have to hire ahead of cash flow, so your profitability drops. Then you race to generate new cash flow. You get out of the Valley when your profitability grows higher than it would have before the hire.

For example, when Two-Brain reached $1M in revenue, it plateaued. I couldn't fit more sales calls into my schedule; didn't have capacity to take more clients; and didn't have time to train more mentors for the team. I was absolutely stuck.

The only way forward was to hire an Admin. This cost money, and cut into my profitability. But hiring Joyce bought me back a lot of time: she processed payments, helped clients find resources, shipped our 'welcome boxes' and filtered my emails. While her role didn't generate revenue directly, she created the bandwidth I needed to find, hire and train two mentors for the team. Within two months, we were more profitable than we could have been without her.

A few years later, we hit another - larger - Valley. I couldn't move forward without people who were more skilled than me: a dedicated marketing expert and a real, experienced COO. I also had to hire someone to lead our growing tech team, and someone to lead our Media production. Finally, we needed to upgrade our bookkeeping and accounting. Together, these roles cost more than our annual profit...but I knew we couldn't reach the next level without them.

Of course, the new CMO paid for their role--and more--very quickly. The head of Media upgraded our content, boosting sales and retention. The COO took every headache off my plate, took over HR (the hardest part of any business) and started running operations. The new Chief Information Officer oversaw app development (another huge investment) and doubled as part-time financial analyst. We hired a fractional CFO to guide us on big decisions. Our profitability dropped to nearly zero...but we'd built the team we needed to take us to the next level.

Here are the keys to beating the Valley of Death:

1. 
   
2. You can't avoid it; the best thing you can do is get out of it fast.
3. 
   
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8. View every new hire as an investment. Either they generate more revenue than they cost, OR they buy you the time to generate more revenue than they cost.
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14. Hire the revenue-generating people first. This is a balancing act, because you don't want to sell a service you can't deliver well. But the marketers pay for the operators. Hire them very close together, but if you need cash, hire the marketer a month or two ahead.
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20. Hire people who are already better than you. I've often tried to train a beloved staff person to do a new role. But they're always limited by my own skill; it rarely works out; and it's actually more expensive to train them than it is to hire an expert.
21. 
    

The hires that will lift your business are, by definition, better than you are at their job. That's what makes the Valley of Death so scary: you're hiring experts, and experts are expensive. But if you want to make it to the next level of business, you need people who are ready for that level...

In the annals of firefighting history, few events are as heartbreaking and instructive as the tragedy of the Smoke Jumpers in Mann Gulch. This group of elite wildland firefighters met their fate in a devastating fire in 1949, which claimed the lives of 13 brave souls. Their story is not only a poignant reminder of the hazards faced by firefighters but also serves as a metaphor for businesses navigating the treacherous landscapes of change and competition.

Smoke Jumpers are specially trained firefighters who parachute into remote areas to combat wildfires. They are the first line of defense against some of the most dangerous fires in rural and wilderness areas. On that fateful day in August 1949, a team of 15 Smoke Jumpers descended into Mann Gulch in Montana to fight a fire that had erupted in the area. What seemed like a routine operation soon turned into a nightmare as the wind shifted unexpectedly, causing the fire to engulf the gulch at a breakneck speed.

The tragedy was compounded by the terrain—a steep 70-degree slope that the firefighters had to climb to escape the rapidly advancing flames. Investigators later found that none of the fallen Smoke Jumpers had dropped their heavy gear; they perished with their packs intact, loaded with heavy saws, shovels, and poleaxes. It was speculated that had they discarded this burdensome equipment, some might have outrun the disaster.

This tragic event underscores a crucial lesson: the importance of agility and the ability to let go of unnecessary weight when facing an existential threat. For businesses, especially those that have been around for decades, this can be a metaphor for shedding institutional baggage to stay relevant and competitive.

Long-established companies often carry their own kind of heavy equipment in the form of outdated practices, legacy systems, and old ways of thinking that no longer serve their purpose. These can drag a company down, making it less nimble and unable to pivot quickly in response to market changes or technological advances. Like the Smoke Jumpers, companies might find themselves racing uphill against challenges that are exacerbated by the weight they carry.

The first step in avoiding this fate is recognizing what constitutes unnecessary weight. This could be an inefficient process that consumes valuable resources, a product line that no longer meets customer needs, or policies that stifle innovation rather than foster it. Once identified, the difficult but necessary task of letting go must commence. This might mean restructurings, like streamlining operations, investing in new technologies, or overhauling management practices to enhance decision-making speed and efficacy.

The lesson from Mann Gulch is clear: survival might depend on the ability to drop what’s heavy and run unencumbered towards safety. For businesses, this doesn’t just mean surviving but thriving—turning potential disasters into opportunities for growth and renewal.

By learning from the past and being willing to adapt, businesses can navigate the uncertainties of the future more effectively. Just as the landscape of wildland firefighting has evolved since the Mann Gulch fire, so too must businesses evolve by shedding the institutional baggage that can hold them back. It’s a vital strategy for staying ahead of the curve and ensuring long-term success in an ever-changing world.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

How To Calm Down

Every entrepreneur gets triggered sometimes.

The reasons might be obvious: a late employee, a missed detail, a poor customer experience.

Or they might not be: we could show up to work escalated; we could be carrying dread or guilt around; we could have a fight with our spouse before we left for work.

Many days, our emotional meter is already cranked up to 9 before we start our day, and one little thing pushes us up to MAX 10. Then we have an over-the-top response to some little thing; our staff thinks we fly off the handle; and we feel guilty about it later; and then we overcompensate. That makes us feel even worse, and we keep escalating.

We need to calm down.

I’m not going to tell you to start meditating or get into shape – those won’t help you TODAY, and you already know that you *should* be doing both.

Here’s how to do it in the short-term, long-term and medium term.

Short-term (the quick deescalation):

1. Box breathing. Breathe in through your mouth, as deeply as you can, for 4 seconds. Hold your breath. Breathe out through your nose, trying to empty your lungs, for 4 seconds. Hold your breath. That’s 1 round. Repeat for 10 rounds. Watch this:

2. Imagine the worst-case scenario. can you live with that? Put yourself in the scenario for a few seconds. Then come out of it. This is a Stoic process of acceptance. It doesn’t calm your unconscious right away, but it will calm your conscious mind quickly.

3. Tell yourself that you’re excited instead of nervous or angry. Your body can’t tell the difference.

4. Break the rumination cycle. Go have a conversation about something else, or distract yourself with a story. Rumination just escalates you. Here’s a quick meditation that will break the rumination cycle for a few seconds.

5. Think of the next step instead of what might happen later. Break the problem down into “what will I do in the next minute?” instead of “what might happen if/then?” See the ‘domino’ analogy later.

6. Go outside, eat a banana and have a walk. This is my wife’s advice whenever I’m stressed.

Medium-Term

1. Adopt a meditative practice. I start the day by writing 750 words. That’s a ‘brain dump’. You can do this forever, but you’ll start to see the benefits within a week.
2. Slow down your thoughts. One reason we stress is because our thoughts line up like dominoes, and we quickly amplify the worst-case scenario.
3. “If I say this, she’ll say that. And I’ll respond with this other thing. She’ll get mad, but I can’t back down. So she’ll walk away and not speak to me for a day. I’ll have to address that. It’s not acceptable in a workplace. I’ll deal with it Monday.” Then you spend all weekend ruminating, imagining Monday’s confrontation.
4. Imagine each of these thoughts as a separate domino. Space the dominoes out, so that each doesn’t automatically push the next one over.
5. “I will say this.” – full stop. You can’t predict how people will react, and trying to do so just escalates your stress.
6. My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened. ~ Michel de Montaigne

Long-Term

1. Watch your thoughts. In “Drive”, Daniel Pink says that most people never have a single positive thought all day. It’s a constant cycle of judgment, guilt and resentment. “That guy shouldn’t have made a turn without signalling!” – and then the domino effect happens: “He must be a jerk! Since he’s a jerk, he probably treats everyone disrespectfully! I bet he did that on purpose! He clearly doesn’t care about other people!”
2. When this happens, don’t judge yourself: just shift your thoughts to something you like.
3. Stop keeping score. We tend to remember the bad things...

 I get between 30 and 300 messages on FB every single day. Usually, I ask, "what are your goals for the business?" and the entrepreneur answers, "I need more clients." But in many ases, they have lots of clients, and that's not ht eproblem. They're chasing the wrong metric. In fact, they're chasing the hardest metric. They should be chasing profit. How do you get more profit and impove that metric? Getting more revenue and cutting unnecessary expenses. You improve those 2 metrics. How do you improve the revenue metric? More clients, maybe...or maybe more rev per client, or maybe less churn. You improve those 3 metrics (headcount, ARM and LEG) But what if you just improved one of those metrics right now? Like ARM? well, every client goes up $10/mo. If you have 100 clients, that's 1000 more/mo. So you improve revenue. Since that revenue doesn't come with additional expenses, the new revenue is all profit. Bingo - you've improved hte metric you actually want to improve. Now let's look at the alternative. You want to improve revenue so you increase client headcount. Well, more clients comes with some expenses: staff, equipment, etc. A good benchmark is that 44% of your revenue, per client, goes to staff. So you bring on 10 clients paying $100/mo...and you have to add coaches and equipment. So maybe about $550 goes to the bottom line. You've improved revenue by $1000, but profit by only $550. Obviously there are a lot of factors here. BUT the key is identifying the right metric to improve. Professionals can actually grow a lot faster by increasing the frequency and value of their services than by increasing their client count. This is where a mentor helps: You start with the end in mind. If your mentor is asking "why do you want that?" it's because they're trying to guide you to the endgame - the picture of success that you have in your head. You might not even have taken the time to craft this picture, which is why you're chasing the wrong metric. Or maybe you know where you want to go, but haven't 'considered all sides of the coin. THat's where a mentor can help too: they can show you the easiest ways to get to your goal once you have it. It's up to you to track these metrics. and when you become a very good business owner, you can identify these opportunities for yourself. Until then, though, if you think that 'more clients' = success, I'd seek an outside perspective.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

This week, we're going to build entrepreneurial resilience: the ability to just keep going when things go wrong.

Listen to this episode, and then visit the Daily Directives section at BusinessIsGood.com to complete daily exercises for resilience all week.

I'm Chris Cooper, and today I'm discussing strategies for overcoming adversity in business. Setbacks are inevitable, but they can be managed by spreading them out over time and making them less impactful. I've found that taking a long-term view, recognizing small wins, and maintaining a practice mindset can prepare us for future challenges. It's also crucial to evolve and improve with clients, staff, or products, and to view departures as opportunities for growth. Every challenge is a stepping stone to greater opportunities, so it's essential to stay resilient and see setbacks as part of the journey.

Understanding Adversity in Entrepreneurship

I kick off the podcast by emphasizing the importance of learning from mistakes and sharing those lessons with other entrepreneurs. I introduce the concept of "$13 days," those times when progress feels like a step backward. This is a normal part of the entrepreneurial journey. The goal is to spread out these backward steps over time, making them smaller and less catastrophic. I share a personal anecdote about my mentor asking me about the last significant setback, which highlights the importance of perspective.

The Long View and Bright Spots

I advise taking a long-term view. Look back at past rough weeks, and you'll see that they happen less frequently and with less impact over time. I introduce "Bright Spots Fridays," where we reflect on our achievements to train our minds to focus on positive outcomes. Recognizing and celebrating small wins helps us stay resilient and better handle adversity. The purpose of Bright Spots Fridays isn't to brag; it's to acknowledge and learn from our successes.

Practice and Preparation for Future Challenges

Every challenge is practice for a bigger but similar challenge in the future. Each setback is a learning opportunity. I use the example of a staff member quitting as a rehearsal for handling more significant departures down the line. By preparing processes to prevent similar issues, we become better equipped to handle adversity with less impact. This cycle of audit and improvement is crucial for continuous growth and resilience.

Client Relationships and Successful Exits

I talk about the natural end date for client relationships and how important it is to view client departures as a success rather than a failure. I share my criteria for a successful client exit, like the client continuing their fitness habit or achieving significant life changes. By focusing on the positive outcomes of client departures, we can feel more confident and prepared for future changes. This concept extends to our staff, products, and services, underscoring the importance of continuous improvement and evolution.

Creating Opportunities Through Adversity

I suggest seeing every challenge as an opportunity to create a seat at the table for something better. I share Emerson's quote, "Heartily no, when demigods go, the gods arrive," to illustrate how removing one challenge opens up space for a greater opportunity. Examples include replacing a damaged company car with a better one or using a staff departure to attract a more suitable candidate. I emphasize the importance of a linear approach to growth, where overcoming one challenge paves the way for the next opportunity.

Top Tips for Working Through Adversity

To sum up, here are my top tips for working through adversity: take the long-term view, maintain a practice mindset, recognize that nothing lasts forever, and see challenges as opportunities. Count your wins, prepare for future...

Many entrepreneurs will tell others they "have ADD" or have a "slight case of attention-deficit disorder".

But most don't: they're just scattered. They're trying to multitask instead of focusing. They're unclear on what to do next in their business. They love starting things, but not finishing; they're usually juggling a dozen things in their head at once; their workday is incredibly long, but they rarely finish everything.

I first took the ADD short-form test in 2011 and wrote about it on my IgniteGym blog at the time. I should note that ADD is an outdated term for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: they're the same thing.

However, ADHD isn't always a downside for entrepreneurs.

“ADD people are high-energy and incredibly good brainstormers. They will often happily work 12 to 15 hours by choice. The business community should not fear ADD. Instead, they should see that they have a potential gold mine here.” 

– Dr. Kathleen Nadeau, a psychologist who is ADD herself (from an ABC News Report)

People with ADD are excellent at seeing a situation from all sides, says Dr. John Ratey. Emergency-room doctors, nurses, entrepreneurs….the ability to approach an obstacle from ten different ways is of enormous value.  Likewise, the ability to imagine oneself in the shoes of others – to empathize – has helped me be more empathetic than others.

And as Leighton Bingham shares on today's podcast, people with ADHD are actually capable of VERY deep focused work.

Is my truck untidy? Heck, yeah. Can I tell you the phone number of a client from five years ago? Yes. Do I send emails, and then think of another detail, and send a second one…a few seconds apart? All the time.

Do I actually have ADHD? I doubt it. I just lose focus if I'm not disciplined with my attention.

However, even this low-level of distraction sometimes pays off: I’m able to generate ideas rapidly. I can ‘see’ shapes while I’m listening to music, and that helps me appreciate it more. I can switch rapidly between creative and academic tasks, like math. I can incorporate successful ideas from other industries into ours.  And I can write for 5 blogs in the same hour.

Instead of ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ I’d love to see the education system appreciate the gifts bestowed by ADHD. Frankly, in a business environment that’s fracturing our attention more and more, entrepreneurs need to be able to balance focus with mental dexterity.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Summary

• Why businesses should fire underperforming staff quickly. 0:03
• Chris argues that it's best to fire people quickly, rather than psychoanalyzing their personal problems or taking on their troubles, and explains why this approach is best for everyone involved.
• The impact of bad team members on business success. 2:15
• Chris Cooper emphasizes the importance of removing bad staff members to boost morale and productivity, citing examples of how a single negative team member can demotivate the rest of the team.
• Staff members look to the leader for guidance and action, hoping to elevate their performance by removing the weakest link.
• The importance of hiring and retaining top talent in business. 4:46
• Chris Cooper reflects on instances where an "almost perfect" person left a job, creating an opportunity for a "perfect fit" candidate to step in.
• Chris Cooper highlights the negative impact of keeping a lower quality staff member on a business, including harming current staff, restricting future better staff, and losing client trust.
• Clients often hold back negative feedback due to fear of conflict, leading to unaddressed problems only surfacing after the staff member has left or been removed.
• Removing bad staff members for business success. 7:54
• Chris Cooper emphasizes the importance of removing bad staff members quickly to avoid torturing both the staff and oneself.
• Firing employees for the benefit of the business. 9:32
• Chris Cooper emphasizes the importance of not keeping employees who can't be seen working for the company in a year.
• Chris Cooper advises on how to handle a difficult staff member: be direct, be clear, and give them a push off your dock to start their next journey.
• Chris emphasizes the importance of asking oneself if they are willing to make the best people in their life sad, angry, or frustrated, rather than holding onto a bad staff member.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Don't teach what you know, give people what they need.

This is BusinessIsGood. I'm Chris Cooper. And today we're going to talk about outcome-based coaching. I'm going to cover this in three big topics.

First, we're going to talk about what outcome-based coaching is, then we're going to talk about elegance. And then we're going to talk about speed.

Building a successful coaching business means starting from your clients' ideal outcomes and then working backward. So here's how we do it.

If this is helpful to you, please just go to businessisgood.com. And join our community where you can talk about stuff like this building your coaching practice, and anything else about entrepreneurship that you want to talk about.

 So first, today, we're going to talk about outcome-based mentorship. What is this? Well, it's basically starting with what your clients want to achieve, and then working backwards from there. Instead of starting with "here's what I know; how can I sell this to other people?" we want to think about what our ideal client's goals are. And so if you've got a specific niche (my niche is the fitness industry) you want to look at the people in that industry and ask "what do they really want?"

One great exercise I'm going to share with you right now is called the Perfect Day exercise. This will help you get a broad sense of what your clients' goals are, and then you can build your mentorship program or your coaching practice for your fitness business or whatever it is backward from those goals to make sure that your clients are achieving those outcomes.

Here's the Perfect Day exercise.

What we want you to do--and you can do this yourself right now-- is imagine you're living your perfect day. You don't have to worry about money or anything else like that.

What time, in a perfect world, would you wake up in the morning? What's the first thing that you would do? What would you do after that? What would you eat? Who would you do those things with?

Would you go to work or not? Would you go to the beach? paint a clear picture of all that? Would you have a nap in the afternoon? What would you do for lunch? Where would you go for dinner? Would you be alone? Would you be with friends? Would you be reading a good book?

Describe that perfect day, including what time you go to bed at night, in great detail. Now just the act of visualizing this perfect day and thinking through it will help your clients understand what it is that they eventually want from life. And then it'll help you understand in a more objective way how you can help them get there.

Then after they've done the exercise, you can work backward and you can define the outcome a little bit more clearly. So you can say, "Okay, what kind of income would it require for you to live in this perfect day all the time? Who is in this perfect day with you? Where are you living? From there, you can say okay, so these are more specific outcome. If somebody says, well, to live this kind of lifestyle, I need to make about $150,000 a year, that's perfect: you've got an ideal outcome that you can coach them to. If they say "to live in this perfect world outcome, I would need to be about 20 pounds lighter, so I'm not embarrassed to go to the beach," wonderful. 20 pounds is a great outcome, we can work backwards from that goal, to create a plan to get you to be 20 pounds lighter. Okay? This is one way that you can help define your client's ideal outcomes.

And after you've done this with enough clients, you can see the commonalities and say, "Ah, all the people in my niche seem to have this similar goal!"

For me, working in the niche of gym owners, that goal was making $100,000 a year. Now that's not their ultimate...

We content creators live in a miraculous time. We can talk to more people than ever before in history. The power of marketing is astronomically stronger than it's ever been. Our audience knows no geographical limit.

The real foundation for all of this power and reach is the content we produce. We can publish for free anytime we want--and people will listen. We can be our own TV station, our own radio network, our own newspaper.

And now, thanks to Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT, we don't even have to write the material ourselves. There's an army of robots ready and eager to write blog posts, send emails, or even deepfake podcasts and videos. We can publish as often as we want to, for free, with almost no effort.

Here's the really amazing part: more content is still more important than good content. Quantity still beats quality in the online marketing game. Show up more often, and you'll win.

This perfect storm of free attention won't last forever. It probably won't last more than another year or so. Eventually, Google or another search engine will figure out how to filter content that's been written by robots, and find the real stuff. The real tech race is actually between the robots that produce content and the robots that find and filter content. But for now, everyone can--and IS--producing a ton of content that would earn you a B+ grade in most high schools.

It's amazing news for everyone who should be publishing more, but isn't.

It can seem like scary news for content producers who are worried their hard work will be buried by blogging droids.

Here's how to make your content stand out from ChatGPT content and other content-bots.

1. 
   
2. Niche down. The narrower your expertise, the less a robot will understand it. For example, a blog about the fitness industry can be written by AI, because that's a general topic with statistics everywhere. A blog about personal training studios can probably be done pretty well by AI. A blog about getting and keeping personal training clients in their mid-40s in Ipswich, PA is best done by someone with experience.
3. A robot might be able to write a blog about how a rocket works, but it can't explain how it feels to be strapped into the seat at liftoff. The more specific your experience, and the narrower your audience, the more irreplaceable you become and the more valuable your content.
4. 
   
5. 
   
6. 
   
7. 
   
8. 
   
9. Be very specific. Your content should be closer to a checklist than an editorial. For example, Jasper (another AI writing tool) could write a broad article about "How to keep your clients longer." The article would give general advice that's directionally correct, but imprecise. For example, when I asked an AI engine how to keep clients at my gym longer, it said "Give your clients a world-class experience". True, but...what does that actually mean? Not much.
10. Real professionals would go much deeper. For example, at Two-Brain, an article on keeping clients longer would include "The 5 Steps To Running A Goal Review". We know that goal reviews keep clients longer, and have the data to prove it, and--because we've done them thousands of times--we can be very specific about how to do it. Like this:
11. Sit down with your client every three months.
12. Measure their progress on your InBody scale.
13. Ask them, "Are you completely satisfied with your progress?"
14. If they say "YES!" then move to the testimonial script.
15. If they say "Not TOTALLY satisfied..." then move to the new prescription script.
16. And then, of course, we have those two scripts ready too.
17. Robots just can't get that deep, because they don't have actual experience.
18. 
    
19. 
    
20. 
    
21. 
    
22. Use stories. Stories stick....

Episode Summary:

In this episode, we’re talking about how business owners—especially gym owners—often make the mistake of overcomplicating their businesses. It’s easy to add unnecessary options, details, and management layers, but that can slow down growth, create confusion, and reduce profit. Many of us became entrepreneurs to flex our creative muscles, but there’s a point where experimentation becomes a barrier to success. We’ll dive into why simplifying back to a minimum viable product (MVP) is essential for increasing profitability and reducing stress.

Key Takeaways:

• How business owners complicate their businesses by adding unnecessary features.
• The importance of going back to a minimum viable product (MVP).
• Why every product you sell should be easy to explain and fulfill with minimal resources.
• How complexity takes you further away from product-market fit.
• Practical steps to simplify your business.

Episode Outline:

1. Introduction

• Today’s topic: How overcomplicating your business is costing you time, money, and stress.
• Entrepreneurs often treat their business as a creative outlet, adding options or details that hurt growth.
• We’ll talk about how to get back to your core product and maximize profit by simplifying.

1. Story 1: Back to Basics – Creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

• A gym owner struggled with offering too many services, confusing clients.
• Solution: They stripped the business down to focus on 1:1 personal training, which was the highest-margin service.
• Result: Simplifying increased their revenue per client and reduced operational headaches.

1. Problem: Complexity Hurts Product-Market Fit

• Adding more services, features, or options may feel creative, but it confuses buyers and slows purchasing decisions.
• Imagine you’re starting from scratch—what is the one product that solves a clear problem?
• Your core offer should be easy to sell, easy to explain, and require minimal resources to deliver.

1. Story 2: Unnecessary Features

• Example of a business owner who kept adding services and packages, hoping to appeal to more clients.
• The result: More complexity, slower sales, and clients were unsure of what to choose.
• Lesson: Simplifying the offering brought more clarity and increased client retention.

1. Avoiding Unnecessary Management Layers

• Many owners add managerial staff too early because they think it’s a sign of growth.
• This adds extra work for the owner (training, managing) and cuts into profit.
• Story 3: A gym owner added a layer of middle management that created bottlenecks and made decisions slower, instead of solving problems.
• The result: They ended up with more tasks on their plate and less profitability. Once they scaled back, their business ran smoother and profits increased.

1. Practical Exercise: Designing Your MVP

• Take a step back and imagine you’re building your business from scratch.
• Ask yourself: What would the minimum viable product look like?
• It should solve one clear problem, be easy to explain, and maximize profitability without adding complexity.
• Tips on how to focus on the core offering, eliminate unnecessary layers, and create a more streamlined operation.

1. Closing Thoughts

• Complexity kills growth. Simplify your business down to what really matters: solving your clients’ problems.
• Reminder: The goal is to focus on what drives the most profit with...

In a perfect world, a business goes through four phases:

Ideation - you craft your original idea, test and tweak it until you have good product-market fit.

Income - you build your business to give you a good predictable income.

Investment - you build your team to give you time freedom. And you build your wealth to give you financial freedom.

Impact - you build your community.

Good businesses are focused on eventually making an impact, but don't try to skip steps to get there. In today's episode, I'll tell you how to focus on one step at a time, get through each phase quickly and maximize each one!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Are you stuck trying to grow your business and don’t know where to start? Do you invest more in staff or spend more time on marketing? In this episode, Chris Cooper shows us how he grew his business from zero to $5 million in annual revenue in four short years – and in so doing, answers our questions about systemizing growth.

The trick is in learning to appreciate that going from zero to $1 million is different than going from $1 million to $3 million and then from $3 million to $5 million. You need to be mindful of what stage your business is at in order for it to grow. 

Chris succinctly breaks it down into 3 key stages for us, based on his hard-earned experience of gym owner mentorship. Learning how to systemize your operations, shore up your personal weaknesses, and hire expensive staff to survive the ‘valley of death’ are just some of the invaluable lessons Chris imparts. 

The Business is Good podcast is a must-listen for any business owner looking to systemize their operations. And the way Chris Cooper explains ‘process’ so simply makes it a joy to engage with. 

“Nail your operations. Measure the results your clients are getting. And then constantly seek to improve those results.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- Zero to $1 million: systemize and optimize your product and your niche

- $1 million–$3 million: expand your audience, systemize and optimize your marketing and your sales

- $3 million–$5 million: hire your way up, systemize your incentives and your hiring, and automate wherever you can.

- Why your business will fall back to the level where it is weakest

- The value of a cohesive Facebook advertising campaign

- Knowing which metrics are important when it comes to measuring your growth

And more!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

Stay In Your Lane

Summary

• Limiting growth by trying to do too many things. 0:01
• Chris Cooper highlights the common mistake of trying to do too many things at once, leading to watered-down core services and distraction from the main business.
• Limiting growth by building multiple, mediocre businesses instead of focusing on one great business, resulting in more stress and less money.
• Chris Cooper shares his struggles with juggling multiple projects and the importance of focusing on one thing at a time.
• He reveals that he has a tendency to jump on opportunities quickly due to fear of missing out, rather than trusting himself to remember good ideas.
• Prioritizing business growth and avoiding distractions. 4:28
• Chris Cooper shares tips on avoiding distractions and focusing on one thing at a time.
• He emphasizes the importance of finding a partner to help with various ventures.
• Chris Cooper emphasizes the importance of having a supportive team that keeps the CEO focused on building one excellent product instead of multiple mediocre ones.
• Chris warns against trying to build multiple $10 million companies at once, as it can lead to lack of momentum and compounding benefits.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

"If you want to succeed in business, you're going to have to make a lot of mistakes."

That's true. But...

it's not the mistakes themselves that matter.

Many business owners make lots of mistakes, and don't survive them. In fact, that's true for the majority of small businesses.

They make pricing mistakes; they order too much inventory; they shoot for the moon with their restaurant design or gym equipment. Then they run out of money and it kills their business.

The more fragile your business, the more impact a single mistake can make. In a book that I wrote for gym owners ("Start A Gym",) I wrote that every mistake made at startup requires at least six months to correct...and, sadly, many gyms can't survive long enough to fix their mistakes.

The key to success isn't making mistakes--it's learning from mistakes, and never repeating the same mistakes twice.

The US military calls this the "OODA loop". In previous articles, I've referred to it as the Audit Cycle. Business schools call it the "Evaluation Process". My seventh-grade teacher called it "The Scientific Method" and my high school teacher called it "Evidence-based decision making."

It goes like this:

1. Try something
2. Measure the result
3. Compare the result against other results
4. If the result is better, keep doing it. If the result is worse, stop.

Of course, this system only works if you measure your results.

If you try something -- like running Instagram ads -- and you get ten new leads, then you don't really know if the advertising was successful until you compare it to something else.

Did you get ten new leads without the ads last month?

Could you have earned twenty new leads if you'd done the same ads on Facebook instead?

Would you have earned twenty leads with a different Instagram ad?

Would you have earned twenty leads if you'd doubled your ad spend with the same ads?

You don't know--yet. But measuring the efficacy of the first ad means you have a baseline to compare against.

The next month, you can change one of these variables, and measure against your baseline: ten leads.

This is how science works. This is the process of empiricism on which empires are built.

Now let's apply this to making mistakes.

Let's say you have people coming into your shop, but they're not signing up.

Are your prices too high?

Does your service not solve their problem?

Did you not explain your service in a way that evokes value?

Does your advertising attract the wrong people?

Your hypothesis is that your prices are too high. But you don't know until you measure, because your first attempt at pricing your service was a straight-up guess.

First, you measure your close rate.

Then, you look at the variables you can control: your price, your advertising, your sales process, your sales skill.

Then you choose one--and only one--variable to change. Since changing your prices carries the largest risk (if you're wrong, you're underpriced; if you're right, you have a different problem), you change your sales process.

You try a new sales process for the next ten leads, and measure the change.

If you sell more of your service, great - you keep the new sales process going.

The next test might be upgrading your sales skills. You work on those, and track the results over the next two months. Did your sales improve?

Real business "experience" has little to do with how much time an entrepreneur has spent owning a business, and everything to do with how many mistakes they've corrected.

The biggest challenge in entrepreneurship isn't that our first decisions are guesses. Of course they are--and most of our guesses will be wrong. We're going to make mistakes. What kills businesses is when entrepreneurs compound their guesses--and compound their mistakes.

For

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

How do you scale up a one on one coaching program? I'm Chris Cooper, this is BusinessISGood.

Today I'm going to tell you what is in between one on one mentorship and a big group coaching program.

In the past, there have been a few different models where people have delivered their mentorship or their coaching, and it started off mostly like one on one -- kind of like a personal trainer, you would have this mentor who would get on a call with you and work one on one. And this is actually how Two-Brain Business was built.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have these big group coaching programs. These are usually lifestyle businesses for the mentor or the coach, they build themselves up to be an icon on Instagram or Tiktok, or whatever, they bring you into the program and you get on a massive group call.

Now there are pros and cons to both. Obviously, it's tougher to scale a one on one mentorship practice because every mentor has to be thoroughly trained, there has to be ongoing training, if one mentor isn't doing a great job that affects several clients, etc.

On the other hand, the one to many approach has very high churn, clients don't feel like anybody is taking a long term view of what they're doing, and they have trouble finding access to materials or figuring out "how does this even apply to me?"

What sits in the middle is a mentor-coach-concierge model that a few clients in our META program are now using with their business coaching practices.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Starting your own company often means wearing many hats and mastering a wide array of skills. When I founded my first business, a gym, I had to be adept at various tasks from entering daily sales to ensuring a clean and welcoming environment for my clients. While I considered myself an A-level trainer, my skills in other areas, like bookkeeping and cleaning, were decidedly less polished. I quickly learned that entrepreneurship demands generalist abilities—you can’t just be an expert at your service, whether it's personal training, hair styling, or driving a cab; you need to have a competent understanding of all aspects of the business.

However, as the business expands and staff are brought on board, a shift occurs. You're no longer looking for jack-of-all-trades. Instead, you seek out specialists—individuals who excel in a singular field. This is evident in any large company, where specialists are often employed by generalists. The key is understanding when to bring in these specialists to fill roles you are less adept at handling.

Consider the wisdom of John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, who knew how to position his players to their strengths. Unlike most coaches, Wooden didn’t force his players to become proficient in every aspect of the game. He observed where each player excelled and then designed plays to optimize their strengths, significantly increasing their success rate. His strategy illustrates an essential leadership principle: put people where they can succeed the most, rather than trying to make them good at everything.

As a gym owner, I juggled multiple responsibilities—crossfit coach, client success manager, cleaner, nutrition coach, among others. But as Michael Gerber explains in his book, "The E-Myth," good leaders excel at assigning the right people to the right roles. For instance, hiring an account manager requires someone with a keen eye for detail, a strong handle on bookkeeping and math, and a diplomatic touch—not necessarily someone who's an excellent crossfit coach.

Growing a business means recognizing you shouldn't be the best at everything. My own experience led me to hire an account manager and a client success manager who were better suited to those roles than I was, freeing me up to focus on other areas. This concept holds true in any small business—aim to fill specific, narrowly defined roles with people who excel in those areas, rather than looking for a "unicorn" who can do it all.

We live in a gig economy where it's feasible to find and hire specialists for particular tasks. As a business owner, your role evolves from doing to connecting—finding the right people and creating systems that enable them to collaborate effectively. Placing staff in roles where they can't succeed is detrimental to morale, retention, job completion, and overall culture. A misguided approach, like expecting everyone to share cleaning duties or to participate in round-robin sales, can backfire by reducing productivity and damaging morale.

To conclude, it's imperative to understand your role as a generalist and entrepreneur, while also recognizing when and how to employ specialists to further your company's growth. This approach not only fosters a successful business but also creates a culture where every individual has the opportunity to excel in their niche. If you're keen to explore this topic further, join our free Facebook community at businessesgood.com, where you can connect with fellow generalists and discuss hiring specialists. For more insights on this subject and others related to the entrepreneurial journey, head over to the Business is Good website and click "Join the Movement." Let's continue the conversation there.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

"Fix the leader, fix the business". - Aaron Stokes, ShopFixAcademy

In this series, I've been talking about the natural evolution of a business...and the things that stop it from growing. The things that stop the business from evolving are usually inside the founder's head.

In the Systemize phase, the founder must get the operating instructions for the business out of their head and into the heads of their employees. If they don't, they've bought themselves a job instead of a business. They must overcome the Swamp of Perfection and the thought that they can "just do it better/faster myself."

In the Optimize phase, the founder must hire people who are more skilled at their particular skill than the founder can be. Founders are generalists--they're pretty okay at every part of the business--but they must hire specialists to take them to the next level. Specialists are expensive. And it's scary for the founder to say "I'm not the best person for this job." This is the Valley of Death.

If the founder can get out of their own way, they can reach some pretty respectable heights: multi-million-dollar businesses, run by excellent staff and polished systems. Their business is valuable and attractive to buyers for the first time, and could probably carry on for a decade if the founder doesn't make any big mistakes. It has momentum, and the founder's job is simply to keep pushing the team forward.

But to really scale--to reach the next level, where the business becomes self-replicating; the clients are self-referring; and the business becomes the default choice--the business must begin to generate its own momentum. That means the founder--who pushed the car up the hill alone, then pushed it faster with a team, and eventually got in to steer while his team pushed--must sometimes hand over the wheel.

Decisions should be led by data. The company must produce metrics and dashboards to understand its progress at a glance. For example, our dashboard includes leads, sales calls booked, sales calls showed, sales calls closed, conversions, ascensions, retention, client headcount, gross profit and net profit.

Historical performance should then be modelled into financial projections. Should the company increase pricing, or increase the marketing budget? The first step is to look at retention and conversion metrics, and then build financial projections to help the leaders decide.

Next, an executive team with high levels of trust should lead and manage their own specialties. At this level, these leaders should really run the company. If the founder disappeared, the staff might notice, but the key metrics would not change.

Many companies follow a "Traction" model for reporting and executive leadership.

The executive team might have managers to lead different departments or teams. For example, we have a head of Media and head of Sales (reporting to the CMO); a lead Mentor, app developer and lead curriculum developer (reporting to the COO). Their job is to manage quality of their team and work to improve it. If improvement is driven by the founder, the company doesn't have its own momentum yet. This is important, because if the founder is creating the product updates, they'll always be "tinkering" with the product instead of making decisions based on data.

When a business escapes the Quicksand of Control, it can become a movement.

However, if the owner still has the responsibility to inspire the movement and create energy and passion for the customers and team.

And if the owner relinquishes control too early, the business could lose momentum and slide backward. There are certainly days when every founder is...

Summary

• Identifying ideal clients and product market fit. 0:01
• Chris Cooper identifies the challenge of identifying ideal clients and explains the importance of product market fit for business growth.
• He observes that businesses have a small group of loyal long-term clients and a larger group of newer clients with a higher churn rate, highlighting the need to serve the former for optimal growth.
• Identifying and retaining ideal clients in a business. 2:30
• Chris Cooper emphasizes the importance of identifying and retaining the right clients for a sustainable business, rather than constantly bringing in new ones who may not have a long-term fit.
• Product market fit is achieved when clients get the results they want and can afford the service, while bad fit occurs when clients are working towards a goal that they don't care about.
• Identify best clients by ranking top 10 clients by payment amount and happiness level.
• Seed clients are those who appear on both lists, they are the best clients who get the most value from your service and make you happy to work with.
• Understanding ideal clients through interviews. 6:22
• Chris Cooper advises business owners to ask potential clients about their needs and preferences to better serve them.
• Identifying ideal clients and tailoring a business to meet their needs. 7:53
• Chris Cooper realized he wasn't his own ideal client when a personal training client quit due to not fitting in with other clients in his gym.
• To find good product market fit, Chris recommends identifying best clients through exercise and surveying only those clients, then identifying common traits among them to create avatars for marketing.
• Chris tailors gym service to high-paying client after epiphany.
• Finding product market fit and growing a business. 11:34
• Find product market fit by iterating and upgrading services based on client feedback, rather than appealing to a broad and vague market.
• Focus on best clients, product market fit, and speed to reach goals.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

I own the largest mentorship practice in the world for gym owners. There are over 900 gyms currently in the program, each with their own 1:1 mentor.

The mentors are trained, drilled, tested and taught nonstop. They're quizzed on our material--but, more importantly, they're taught how to mentor and coach someone. When I started mentoring others, I didn't have any of these skills, and didn't know how to get them. As I got better, I became obsessed with developing myself as a mentor, and sharing these lessons with my team. Even if you're not a business coach, these will help you lead your clients, your team and anyone who seeks your guidance.

https://businessisgood.com/4-skills-every-mentor-needs/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

In the old days, when you thought about a franchise, you probably thought about McDonald’s - the prototypical franchise model. Someone who wanted to be an entrepreneur, create wealth for themselves and have some freedom, but who really didn’t want to take the risk of starting from scratch with their own ideas (that might not work) would invest in a famous franchise like this one. 

When people invested in a franchise, they would get a reputable brand, massive advertising, precise information about the equipment they should buy, training on how to make the product, how to sell it, and how to store everything. They would receive instructions about the whole process. A franchise wasn’t necessarily drawing the highest profit margin, but you could get revenue consistently. It was a predictable money machine. 

But the modern franchise is different. And it is failing. 

Right now, modern franchises don’t have the attributes that they need to be successful in the long run. But luckily, there are three things that franchises can implement in order to survive and serve their franchisees better. In this episode, Chris Cooper shares these actionable items with you so you can improve your business (even if you don’t have a franchise.)   

“The modern franchise doesn’t have the attributes that it needs to survive in a modern information-based economy.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- Franchises in the past

- Franchises in the present

- Importance of tracking metrics

- Learning from metrics taken 

- Incentives propel evolution 

- What to do for your business

And more!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

Podcast Script: Why Business Leaders Should Be Coaches, Not Captains

Intro Music Fades In

Host: Welcome to BusinessIsGood, the podcast where we explore the ideas and practices that help entrepreneurs grow their businesses and create lasting success. I’m your host, Chris Cooper. Today, we’re tackling a big question: should you lead your business as a “captain” or as a “coach”?

To illustrate this, I want to start with a story from hockey. Bobby Hull, nicknamed “The Golden Jet,” was one of the greatest players to ever lace up skates. Known for his blazing speed and powerful slap shot, he dominated as a player in both the NHL and WHA.

But Hull also took on a rare challenge: he tried to be both a player and a coach at the same time while leading the Winnipeg Jets in the WHA during the early 1970s. He had incredible success as a player and later achieved even greater success as a coach, but his tenure as both didn’t work out the way he—or the Jets—had hoped.

Segment 1: The Player-Coach Dilemma

Bobby Hull’s time as a player-coach highlights an important leadership lesson: you can’t do both jobs effectively at the same time. As a player, your focus is on performance—executing plays, scoring goals, and being in the action. But as a coach, your role is to oversee the big picture, strategize, and make tough decisions to guide the team to success.

Even some of the most celebrated names in hockey, like Larry Robinson, achieved greatness as both players and coaches—but never at the same time. Why? Because these are two fundamentally different roles that require completely different mindsets and skill sets.

Segment 2: The Captain vs. Coach Paradigm in Business

This same distinction applies in business. Many entrepreneurs try to lead as captains when they really need to be coaches.

Let’s break this down:

1. Limited Perspective on the Ice:
2. When you’re in the trenches with your team, you can only see what’s directly in front of you. You don’t have the big-picture context that a coach has from the bench. In business, this means getting too caught up in day-to-day operations and losing sight of long-term strategy.
3. Emotional Proximity:
4. As a captain, you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with your team. This camaraderie can make it hard to make tough decisions—like moving someone to a different role or cutting an underperformer. A coach, however, has the necessary distance to prioritize what’s best for the organization as a whole.
5. Distraction by Small Tasks:
6. Captains are busy tying their skates, taping their sticks, and focusing on their personal performance. Coaches are busy drawing up game plans, scouting opponents, and thinking about how to improve the team. In business, staying stuck in “captain mode” means you spend too much time on the wrong things—handling tasks that someone else could do instead of focusing on growth and vision.

Segment 3: Why Being a Coach Wins in Business

Here’s the truth: real leadership isn’t about scoring the most goals. It’s about enabling your team to win.

As a coach, your job is to:

• Make hard decisions that benefit the whole organization.
• Delegate tasks and trust others to execute them.
• Hold your team accountable and provide constructive feedback.
• Focus on strategy, vision, and the next big opportunity.

Many entrepreneurs default to being captains because it’s what they know—it’s comfortable. They’re great at doing the work, but they shy away from the harder, more abstract job of coaching. But this mindset limits growth. Your business can’t scale if you’re always on the ice.

Think about it: players are replaceable. You can hire someone else to score goals. What you...

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Years ago, I thought about making my gym a co-op. I told myself I wanted to give 'ownership' to the clients and let them guide the future...but really, I was trying to avoid responsibility.

In this episode of Business Is Good, I discuss the common - but sometimes unconscious - desire for the owner to say "It's not my fault!"

It's up to you to make the decisions and bear the consequences: you get the upside, if you make good decisions. And you also bear the downside, if you make bad ones.

It's this risk that separates the owner from everybody else.

But if you share decision making, and you build committees in your company, what you wind up with is a bureaucracy.

Summary

• 
  
• Sharing responsibility in a business co-op.0:02
• Chris Cooper learns to embrace business responsibility as owner.

• The drawbacks of bureaucracy in business.1:44

• Bureaucracies prioritize employing people over solving problems or serving needs, unlike businesses that exist to solve problems or meet needs.

• Decision-making and leadership.2:55

• Chris Cooper emphasizes the importance of making decisions and taking responsibility, even if not everyone agrees.

• He shares an example of a trust-building moment with his daughter's birth, where the doctor took quick action without worrying about his feelings.

• Effective decision-making and communication in crisis situations.5:07

• In a crisis, prioritize decision-making and communication over bedside manner.

• Decision-making and leadership in business.6:38

• Chris Cooper emphasizes the importance of making tough decisions and standing by them, even if it means going against staff members' opinions.

• Chris Cooper emphasizes the importance of decision-making in business, arguing that owners must take responsibility and make decisions to succeed.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

BiG Podcast - Golden Hour

Chris Cooper emphasizes the importance of dedicating an hour each day to growing one's business, citing the benefits of uninterrupted time for focus and consistency in practicing the 'golden hour.' He advises listeners to prioritize their mentor's tasks during this hour and highlights the ease of entering a state of focus with consistent practice.

Action Items

• [ ] Block out a daily one hour "golden hour" time on your calendar to work on your business
• [ ] Visit Chris Cooper's website (businessesgood.com) and utilize the daily directives and resources provided
• [ ] Track your daily progress such as words written
• [ ] Spend 5 minutes each evening reflecting on your day's successes

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

"Freedom and responsibility within a framework."

In his book "Good to Great", Jim Collins lists "A culture of discipline" as one of the six necessary elements that make a company great. It's a really profound concept, but I'm going to make it actionable for you.

Read the post here:

https://businessisgood.com/a-culture-of-discipline/

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. 

Abraham Lincoln

You're buried in work. Who has time to work out?

Being a good entrepreneur doesn't just mean making money. It doesn't mean out-grinding the competition, or even loving your work every day. But it does mean:

Selling your service

Negotiating

Leading others

Focusing

Thinking with a clear head

Overcoming procrastination

...and more.

These are all entrepreneurial skills. No one is good at all of these when they start their business; they must develop their skills with practice. But there's a reason almost every successful entrepreneur has a workout routine: exercise can make you instantly better at all of these skills.

Immediately after a workout, it's easier to focus.

Medium-term, a workout can calm you down and help you make objective decisions.

Long-term, working out builds your confidence.

But what workout should you do?

Your workout prescription will change over time. But here's a solid starting point.

1. 
   
2. Get yourself a heart rate monitor. Chest strap is best, watches are better than nothing. This is the watch I use. Yours doesn't have to be that fancy.
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8. Calculate your max heart rate. Here's a video from my gym on how to do it.
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14. Three days per week, exercise in heart rate Zone 2: about 65-76% of your max heart rate. Here's a video from my gym explaining why Zone 2 is so important.
15. For entrepreneurs, Zone 2 is great for helping you calm down; work through problems in your mind; and regulate your blood sugar. If your blood sugar is under control, you'll have fewer mood swings, and make decisions with a clearer head. You won't get "Hangry"--which is just a side effect of riding a carbohydrate roller-coaster. If you can metabolize fat for fuel more easily, you won't get "hangry" anymore.
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21. Once or twice per week, go as hard as possible. This is heart rate Zone 5. Here's a video from my gym explaining what Zone 5 is, and why it's important.
22. For entrepreneurs, Zone 5 is a mental break. It's so hard that you literally can't think about anything else. It's important for longevity, but I have to be honest here - I use Zone 5 workouts to "clear the decks". When I'm stressed out or feeling overwhelmed, a really hard workout gives you a mental break. It also triggers all of those calming endorphins you read about. And, long-term, I swear it gives you perspective on what 'hard' actually means.
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28. As often as possible, go for a walk. This is heart rate Zone 1, and it's really the entrepreneur's secret weapon. This is really easy exercise - just enough to distract your body and let your mind float. Many experts would call this "flow state", but you might call it "being in the zone".
29. You know how your best ideas come while driving, or cutting the grass, or in the shower? That's zone 1 exercise....

"Nobody can do this as well as I can!" - every entrepreneur, ever

"Never mind. I'll just do it myself!!!" - every human who thinks they're saving time

Early in my career as a fitness coach, a mentor told me to work more ON my business and less IN my business.

Since I had no time in the day, I decided to hire another coach to run the 6am group at my gym. I thought, "She can run the group. I'll show up at the same time, and do my homework while she's coaching."

Logically, this made sense. But in practice, here's what actually happened:

The group started a few minutes late. I paced around, trying to make eye contact with the coach, getting aggravated. But I was determined to let her run the group.

Then some members of the group were talking while the coach was talking. I wanted to step in and yell at them to give her the same attention they gave me.

Then she demonstrated an exercise in an imperfect way. She gave the clients a cue that didn't really make sense to me.

Within twenty minutes, I was in the mix, "helping" her coach better. I wasn't doing anything to grow my business, because I was so focused on controlling what happened IN my business.

After the group, I went down the list of problems. I tried to soften the blow of my feedback, but there were so many details to fix that she went away feeling totally beaten.

Here's what I should have done, and how you can avoid my mistakes.

Small businesses progress in stages: systemization, optimization, growth, and scale.

The first real pitfall of most entrepreneurs is the "swamp of perfection" - the need to have every staff person do it exactly as the owner would. This is a dangerous trap that can actually stop a small business from growing.

The 'swamp of perfection' looks like:

• 
  
• micromanagement -
• 
  
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• constant oversight (I once watched our cleaner working through our security cameras--don't do that.)
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• recurring enforcement of "rules" for clients and staff
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• high staff churn
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• growing frustration and a desire to be a "one-man shop"
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Here's how to get through the Swamp of Perfection.

1. 
   
2. Get your business out of your head. Record how you do everything - from opening the door in the morning to closing it at night.
3. This is a constant process, so don't try to remember everything all at once. Keep an open notebook and add to it whenever you do something "new".
4. 
   
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9. Shoot for a C+ level to start. Your staff should follow your recorded systems perfectly, but still deliver only "pretty well" to start. Your first attempt at systemization won't be perfect. This is an iterative process, and you'll get better over time.
10. 
    
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15. Set up an evaluation process. Improve each system at each evaluation. This is the start of the move into "optimization".
16. 
    

Your first systems won't be perfect. But consistency is the first step. Your clients and staff must be able to deliver in a predictable way, even if that method isn't perfect.

In the above example, I should have:

1. 
   
2. Recorded a step-by-step process to running a group class, including...

What can we learn about our business when teaching tomorrow’s leaders? Business Is Good has never been better in this beautifully philosophical episode with our host Chris Cooper as he reflects on what he teaches teenagers about entrepreneurship. 

Considering that most of what teenagers will learn today will become outdated and obsolete by the time they finish high school, Chris reminds us that it’s the values and principles that underpin entrepreneurship that will make the biggest impact on the world. 

What are the gifts that teenagers need to pursue a career of lifelong learning? Why is building an audience so important in today’s entrepreneurial landscape? And why is mentorship so crucial in helping you fast-track your business growth? Chris Cooper’s inspirational approach to entrepreneurial education has never been more evident than when he’s considering the mind of a teenager — full of potential to shape our world for the better. 

“Every business now is a media business. You start by building an audience before inventing a new product or coming up with a new idea.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- Building an audience by sharing what you are learning 

- If you know how to build an audience, you will never go hungry

- Why fame is the most efficient business model

- How mentorship can help you grow your business faster

- What do you give kids when you want to inspire them to go into entrepreneurship?

- Why the way your parents plan to retire is not the way you should plan to retire

- What long-term impact do you plan to have on your family and community as an entrepreneur? 

- Write your own entrepreneurial textbook

And more!



Connect with Chris Cooper:

- Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Are you looking for ways in your business to measure your value and, if possible, drive up your price? Chris Cooper is here to show you how – with 5 simple but effective tools that will help you as a business owner. 

Each tool involves appreciating an aspect of your business that demands your focus. That’s the hard part. The easy part is tuning in, right here, as Chris breaks it all down for us. What is your ‘Niche’? Because the narrower your niche, the higher your price because the greater your specialization. That’s the first tool. 

Are you willing to constantly upgrade your methods to offer your clients more? That’s ‘Audit’ – the second tool of Chris’s that we’re sharing here. You always have to be improving in your business and so need to be constantly asking yourself: is this working?

There are three more tools that are explained and expounded upon with anecdotes, quotes, and stories from Chris’s own entrepreneurial endeavors. Jump in and give it a listen and soon you’ll be counting the 5 things you need to improve your value and drive up price on one hand – while counting your business growth on the other! This is business mentorship at its pragmatic best.

“You have to be committed to solving your audience's problems more than stoking your own ego.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- The smaller your niche, the greater your value

- People are actively seeking trust in troubled times

- Delivery – you have to get results

- Auditing yourself – how can I get my clients there faster?

- How do you scale 1-on-1 mentorship?

- What Ernest Hemingway means when he says that you have to murder your darlings

- Why your price is a reflection of your value

And more!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

"I believe entrepreneurship and business development are key for Indigenous individuals, like myself, and communities, to escape situations of poverty and become sustainable, independent and positive contributors to the overall greater good while reclaiming our economic independence within the local, regional, national and international markets.

Growing up a poor brown kid in the city of Sault Ste Marie, I witnessed enough poverty early on in life and I remember telling myself that I never wanted to be poor as an adult.

I looked around and I saw people in business who were not poor and that is what I decided to become, not really aware of anything particular when it came to business, just a general sense that I wanted to be a businessman.

Now, as an Indigenous adult entrepreneur, I can honestly say it was well worth the effort to stay in school, invest in myself and follow my childhood dreams of escaping poverty through business."

Contact Steven McCoy: www.thestevenmccoy.com

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Taryn is an experienced business mentor, and she's worked with a lot of small businesses.

Based in Yorkton, SK, Taryn started a gym to pursue her CrossFit passion. Like many of us, she quickly realized that her job skills didn't translate into ownership skills. She sought a mentor and turned her gym around.

But during that process, she began sharing her lessons with other entrepreneurs (as I did.) That unlocked a new passion for coaching small businesses to help them avoid the mistakes she made...and scale up faster.

Taryn's in a unique position: she's a popular mentor in my mentorship practice for gyms, AND she's successfully opened her own practice to help other types of businesses. Many have tried to do it, but Taryn is successful. In this episode, you'll see why.

Links:

perfectdaybusinessmentorship.com

Taryn's Facebook group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/theceoclubhouse or https://www.theceoclubhouse.com 

IG: @perfectdaybizmentorship

TikTok: @perfectdaybizmentorship

YT: youtube.com/perfectdaybizmentorship

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Have you ever been called a “slave trader” on social media? Chris has. And the business coach who did it probably got what he wanted from him - and that’s attention. This experience has led Chris to think about the efficiency of negative marketing and he goes in-depth about the controversial subject in this episode. 

Chris shares the definition of negative marketing and explains how it works—until it doesn’t. The truth is that negative marketing can get you a little bit of a jumpstart. It’s a valid business tactic to attack the leader in your category. But in the long run, you can’t build your business by tearing your competition down. 

Being your own self is the best marketing strategy. You need to be bold enough to say: “I have my own ideas and I’m going to share them.” Of course, this is easier said than done. It is scary to give advice because, no matter what you say, you are going to be judged by that advice. 

Until you share your own thoughts, experiences, and opinions, your growth will always be limited by the other people in your category. When you start expressing your own opinion, you will be attacked. However, you have to do it anyway. If your ideas can help another human being, you don’t just have the opportunity to share them; you have the responsibility to do it. 

“You can’t build your own brand by tearing another brand down.” – Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

- What negative marketing is

- The problem with negative marketing

- Chris’ personal experience with negative marketing

- Fear around being your own self and sharing your ideas

- How to help others by expressing your opinions

And more!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

- www.businessisgood.com

This November, join me for a 30-day GOLDEN HOUR Challenge to grow your business!

To participate:

Commit to participating in our Facebook group (join here)

Post "done!" under each daily GOLDEN HOUR CHALLENGE post when you've completed the work for the day!

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

How do you produce more content, better content, and do it consistently well? Business Is Good! - and today, your host Chris Cooper is sharing his ABC Content Plan.

The ABC Content Plan is a framework that will allow you to consistently build better content over time. It's also how Chris built a $25 million company from a 200-word daily blog. 

Separating the content you produce into levels, according to Chris's framework, will allow you to focus your energy more wisely, and spend your time on the content that matters, according to your strategy. Along the way, you will see that your content in one medium suddenly has new reach in others.

From online books to YouTube videos, and from podcasts to blog posts, categorizing your content according to its long or short-term value will help you to grow your brand. What content are you saving for your social media channels (C-level content, and how can that possibly turn into A-level content in time?

Chris is showing us how your hard effort can be triplicated, by turning a YouTube video into audio for your podcast, with the transcription of that audio being turned into a blog article. All of this makes you and your brand easier to find online, and for your potential customer to consume your content in the manner of your choosing. 

Creating a quality, consumable content with Chris Cooper is as simple as ABC... please join us.

"Content is the foundation of my mentorship practice, it's the foundation of everything that I do. But I make better and better content by identifying what my clients like hearing about, and making sure that I'm telling it in a different way all the time." 

~ Chris Cooper

In This Episode:

-Understand the A, B, and C of the ABC Content Plan

-How to systemize the B and C levels (the daily and weekly publishing deliverables)

-Chris's top secret 'Power of 10' strategy for building A-level content

And more!

Resources:

Blog - https://businessisgood.com/blog/

Traction (book) - Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business: Wickman, Gino: 0783324916904: Amazon.com: Books - https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/