Episode 135: How Excellence Makes You Money

The Pursuit of Excellence is a CrossFit hallmark, but it is not unique to the fitness industry.
From the start, we’ve written that excellence in coaching means great results for your clients. Excellence in business means great results for your family, your clients and your staff.
Excellence in coaching does NOT make you excellent in business. They’re completely different skillsets. And if you own a gym, excellence in business is your job.
This doesn’t mean being excellent once, or having peak moments of excellence, but being consistently excellent. Today we talk with Danielle Brown, manager of quality control at Two-Brain Business, on how to achieve operational excellence and consistency.
Dani will give us step-by-step instructions to build a framework for excellence in your business. She’ll also tell you exactly how we do it at TwoBrain: from hiring future mentors; giving mentors feedback; continuing staff education and ensuring excellence for OUR clients. Then we’ll be discussing the “Queen Bee Role”  that we mentioned in last week’s episode.
Call her Dani or Danielle; call her coach or use Her Excellency: Dani is a favorite at Two-Brain.
Danielle Brown has been with Two-Brain from the start, first as a client and now as a mentor.
She opened her CrossFit gym in 2011, where she dove into learning anything and everything about business that she possibly could. Since then she has experienced it all and knows what it takes to run a successful gym and helps other entrepreneurs achieve success in their gyms.
Join us today and take good notes as this episode will truly be invaluable. After listening, be sure to head over to twobrain.com/test and see where you are at in your entrepreneurial journey!

Timeline:
3:03 – Introduction to Quality Control.
4:35 – Danielle Brown’s journey from Two-Brain Mentor to manager of Quality Control.
7:18 – The truth about coaching and business success in CrossFit.
9:22 – How important is it to be awesome a the service that you provide?
11:11 – Where to find the best practices for your industry.
14:10 – Setting an example within your business for staff.
16:08 – How are mentors at Two-Brain selected and trained?
19:41 – The Two-Brain Mentoring quality control process.
23:52 – How to know whether your staff is running at a gold standard.
25:32 – How to gain comfortability with reviewing the performance of your staff.
26:45 – The importance of conveying what the gold standard is in your business.
28:28 – The effects of implementing a quality control system on gym retention.
30:16 – Why Quality Control might be the Queen Bee role in your business.

Greg: 00:00 – It’s Greg Strauch of Two-Brain Media and on this week’s episode we dive back into the Two-Brain vault. Originally aired on September 8th, 2018, Chris sits down with Dani Brown, manager of quality control at Two-Brain. They go over how the QC team works, providing an amazing experience and any aspiring new mentors going through the process and what that looks like. Subscribe to Two-Brain Radio to hear the very best ideas and tips and topics to move you and your business closer to wealth. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Two-Brain Business. We make gyms profitable. We’re going to bring you the very best tips, tactics, interviews in the business world each week. To find out how we can help you create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com
Chris: 00:56 – This episode is brought to you by Incite Tax. Incite Tax is founded by John Briggs, a CrossFitter, a great big tall guy with a fantastic sense of humor and John is like a coach for your books. These guys are not just pencil-pushing number crunchers. These guys will actually help you get towards your Perfect Day. If you’re a member of our Growth stage part of the mentoring program, you’re familiar with John’s videos on 1099 versus W2 contractors. See John used to work for the IRS. He’s seen the other side of labor law and he knows exactly where the line is drawn. Don’t believe everything you read, but on the tax side, John can actually help you plan to take home more money every year and save more money on taxes because John is a certified Profit-First accountant. If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know that I’m a big fan of Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First system and John at Incite tax and his staff can help you plan backward from profit to get to where you need to go. He’s helped members of the Two-Brain family buy houses in the first year that they’ve implemented Profit First. It’s helped people save more money, take home more money and make the business do what it’s supposed to do, which is pay you.
Chris: 01:53 – The pursuit of excellence is a CrossFit trademark, but it’s not unique to the fitness industry. Every service-based business, whether it’s making cupcakes or a CrossFit gym or you know, changing tires or pulling teeth, needs to concern themselves with the pursuit of excellence. But that doesn’t mean being excellent one time in 10, it means being consistently excellent every single time. And on today’s episode we’re going to talk with Daniel Brown, the manager of quality control at Two-Brain Business. Talk about how to achieve operational excellence and consistency in operational excellence. She’s going to tell us why it’s important from a dollars-and-cents perspective and not just some kind of woo woo, we think this is a big deal. We’re going to walk all the way through the quality control process at Two-Brain from identifying future mentors to hiring them, to training them, to giving them feedback like the report card that I get from Dani every month. We’re going to walk through how you do this in your gym. We’re going to walk through the importance of setting gold standards and the mission. And then we’re going to tie this whole message into last week’s podcast episode with Mike Michalowicz on what we think the Queen Bee role really is in your business. So this is going to be a great episode. Danielle Brown has been with Two-Brain from the start. She started as a gym owner and a client and now she has been there and seen it all. She’s worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs. She has encountered virtually every problem under the sun. She is one of the most experienced mentors for business owners in the world, period, not just in the fitness industry. And her insight today is going to be super valuable. So pull your car to the side of the road, grab a pen and start taking notes and get ready to take a test at the end.
Chris: 03:47 – Danielle Brown, welcome back to Two-Brain Radio.
Danielle: 03:49 – Thanks, Coop. Thanks for having me back.
Chris: 03:50 – Yeah, it’s really my pleasure to have you. And you know you’ve been on several episodes. First as a gym owner and then as like one of the lead mentors at Two-Brain and now in your new role of quality control. So maybe you can just kind of share your journey over the last year or so, so that your fans can stay updated.
Danielle: 04:07 – Yeah, absolutely. I owned my own and operated my gym with my husband Jason four five and half years and then we sold in November of ’16 and at that time I came on full-time with Two-Brain, which has been awesome. And in that time I’ve had two babies and my life just seems to morph 180 degrees every six months. But you’ve been gracious enough to kind of let me kind of carve out my own path, which is definitely something that’s really important to me as an individual. Anyways, it kind of has worked out really well, I think for myself as well as Two-Brain. And my role now is split between mentoring clients, which I will always do. I love to help people. I love helping people solve their problems, much easier than solving my own, and so I’ll always do that. But the other thing that I do now is quality control for Two-Brain. And it started back in February of this year and it’s morphed a lot. But essentially the premise of it when I think, I came to you is like, we need a system of benchmarks. We’ve got to start somewhere to make sure that we’re delivering the best product possible. Because you know, I think at the time we had five mentors, but we knew that there were several that had asked about mentoring and a few that we had our eyeball on to bring onto the team. And as the team grows and expands, as all gym owners listening and business owners will understand, it gets hard to manage if you don’t have a system in place to kind of manage being great and staying on top of things and making sure that you’re doing things the right way and that people aren’t falling through the cracks. So it just was apparent to me that we needed someone to kind of, you know, have that bird’s eye view of what was going on. So that’s kind of how it was born. And now I think we’ve finally kind of nailed down a system that works and hopefully, my hope today is that we can kind of share what we do here at Two-Brain to keep things being excellent and growing that you can basically take home to your gym or to your business.
Chris: 06:18 – That’s awesome. And I’m really excited to share this with people. We’re going to go really deep about what actually goes on behind the scenes of Two-Brain. We’re going to be really transparent about that. And also, I want to talk about this topic so much because from Day One, everything that we have ever heard from Greg Glassman, but every industry leader has been like pursue excellence. You know, just be really, really good. And I think early on, like right from the beginning, that message got confused with “be an amazing coach and you’ll have an amazing business,” right? So why don’t you tell us the truth of that statement, Dani?
Danielle: 06:52 – So if you’ve been on a mentoring call with me, you may have heard me talk about this. Like back in the day, it was easy in CrossFit, right? Like there was a big mystique about like what we did, right? So people just show up and it was like, I just want to join. And if your bathroom was clean, people were like, cool, I like this place. But now you know, we’re like a decade and a half later. People know what we do here and they’re expecting a higher level in all areas. It’s not enough—like your bathroom does have to be clean. It probably needs to be spotless. And I think that people are looking deeper, because at this point, like they have either tried CrossFit at another gym or they probably know a lot of people in their in their immediate life that have tried CrossFit. So they know what to expect now and their expectations have raised. So it’s not just enough to show up and be good at coaching. You have to be good at business or you’re not going to survive here, and we obviously see that. There’s a lot of sales, there’s a lot of gym closings, and I think people are realizing like, I’ve got to get my business game excellent. Not just my coaching. And that’s a whole different ballgame. It’s a different skill set.
Chris: 08:01 – Yeah. And to be fair, I don’t think Greg ever said just be a great coach so you can have a great business. Right? He just said pursue excellence.
Danielle: 08:08 – Yeah. I think it was just ignorance back in the day. No one knew that you’ve even had to know anything about business opening a CrossFit gym. Right. Cause we were all coaches thinking, I just want to do this forever, so I’ll open my own business.
Chris: 08:19 – Yeah. We just kind of believed what we wanted to believe, right? OK. So now that said, you have to be excellent at business, but of course you always have to have an excellent product. So Dani, like what’s the line that business owners have to walk there? How does being amazing at the service that you provide, whether that’s a CrossFit gym or you know, you’re a chocolate company or you’re a tire store, how important is that to be awesome?
Danielle: 08:47 – I think that having a system in place where you can kind of manage how well and how efficient you’re doing things is 100% necessary. And really when we look at it like, you know, we call it QC or quality control at Two-Brain, but what that really is, is it’s your retention strategy. Quality control is your retention strategy. Because there’s a couple things I talk about with my clients and that you’ve got these types of roles, right? And you’ve got roles in your gym that are operational and those are the first things that you work on as a business owner. It’s like, it’s getting your admin up and running and teaching that person the processes or you know, and/or creating the processes with them and it’s getting all of the people that are in the day-to-day kind of set up. That’s kind of your first piece of business when you open. Then that allows you to start moving up in your business and start working on the Growth rules. The things are actually going to grow your business. But if you don’t have a system in place and you’re not being awesome, you’re not checking in on how awesome you’re being in the operational stuff, it makes it near impossible to work in those growth roles, right? Because you could be running on the wheel trying to grow your business and you could have people fall into the cracks because you’re just not doing the small things, you’re not following processes, things like that.
Chris: 10:06 – So it’s critical to be excellent in your service, but it’s not enough.
Danielle: 10:12 – A hundred percent.
Chris: 10:14 – Let’s talk about like industry benchmarks and gold standards for a minute. You know, CrossFit’s been around long enough now where we kind of have an idea of what doesn’t work right? But if we’re trying to figure out like what are the best practices, you know, how does Two-Brain come up with that stuff and like where can people look if they’re not in the fitness industry,?
Danielle: 10:31 – So if you’re not in the fitness industry go to twobrain.com, because have basically everything that we’ve created for gyms, we’ve realized over time that all of this stuff can be implemented with pretty much any service/product-based business. But as far as Two-Brain goes, I think what we start with, there’s a different set of criteria when you’re looking at like a a brand-new mentor versus an established mentor that has clients that have been with them for a year, two, three years. So I’ll kind of take you quickly through that process. But when a mentor graduates our mentor-training process, which I will get to in a minute, the standards that we’re really looking for is like just making sure, again like I just brought up, kind of that that process stuff, like showing up on time. It sounds silly, but like making sure your face is well lit on Zoom, can people see you and you know, see your emotion? That’s really important. Are you communicating the Two-Brain principles well and are you listening really well? Are you relating to the client? You know it’s one thing like when people go through our Incubator, a lot of the stuff that we talk about, it’s template stuff where, you know, we’re going through the same process with everyone. We’ve got a very serious process in place for that. But every client is going to bring something different to us, right? They’re dealing with different people, they’re dealing with things at different times. So we’ve got to be able to kind of change and adapt to that. But so active listening is a big thing and as a mentor grows within Two-Brain, typically what growing means is developing their own style. And that is really the mark of excellence for us, is you’ve been a mentor for this amount of time and you’ve got 30 clients that want to talk to you month after month.
Danielle: 12:20 – That probably means you’re doing good things for the business. You’re helping them grow, you’re helping them set priorities. So the criteria definitely shifts, right? Because if they’ve done all the process stuff correctly for a length of time, people are going to see that and they see that, OK, this person has her stuff on point, that means that they’re going to stay with this person. So that’s why the criteria kind of shifts. And I think it’s the same way in business. Like when you hire someone, whether it’s at a gym or any other business, you start off with the process stuff and then it’s really up to you as a CEO to help that person grow and develop in their role. Right? And then it’s like, OK, I’ve taken you as far as I can take you. Like this is now your thing and you’ve become the expert at it. So like go be the expert at it. And I think that’s really like where you see people start to really grow their businesses, when they’re helping other people create these opportunities.
Chris: 13:12 – What do you think about how important is it to create kind of the gold standard in your business so that your staff knows like, this is a 10 out of 10? And this came up, you probably remember this, just over a year ago. We were working with a huge software partner and we had kind of a cross-referral program going with them and one of our clients said, these guys are not operating at the Two-Brain standard of care. And that for me really showed me like, I don’t care how big these guys are, I don’t care how much of our space they dominate on the software side, if they can’t live up to the Two-Brain gold standard than we are not going to be their partner. And we had kind of a painful split there. How important do you think it is? If I own a gym or if I own a bakery, to tell my staff, like here is a 10 out of 10 CrossFit class, here’s a 10 out of 10 cupcake?
Danielle: 14:01 – It’s the easiest way to help people understand what you want. So if you’re not giving them what the gold standard is and then you know what the bottom of the barrel standard is, they don’t know what is great, right? So it really is up to you to set those standards. And you don’t have to have everything from Day One, you don’t have to know everything, but you need to know the basics of it. For us, like in Two-Brain, absolute excellence, showing up for your call on time, like sharing your notes with your clients, making sure that you’ve got no notifications on and that you know, you don’t have distractions in the background and things like that. Those would all be kind of like the process kind of excellent standards. And then we’ve got a lot more that kind of go into individual kind of personality and listening and things like that. But it’s imperative for you to set that and not only set it, but also giving feedback. Like, setting aside the time to say, here’s where you are, you know, kind of on that rubric and like, here’s how you get better. You know, if you were an eight out of 10 this time, I want you at a 10 out of 10, here’s what it’s going to take. So I think it’s imperative.
Chris: 15:10 – One of the best things I’ve ever heard you say was, “If people don’t know what perfect is, how can you train them to be very good or even excellent?” And I think, like a lot of the times we’ll develop these training programs in our gyms to teach people how to coach, but we never write down, “this is a perfect CrossFit class,” so we have nothing to work toward. Like there’s no clear goal. So Dani, I’d love for you to walk the listeners through how we select and train mentors at Two-Brain based on that gold standard that you’ve set.
Danielle: 15:42 – So it really starts out, I mean, up to this point, all of the mentors on our Two-Brain team, they’ve been clients, so they’ve been mentored by either yourself, like kind of all of us that started were your clients for years before we were on the mentoring team. And then after that, there is OK, like we might not always have worked with the mentors that we want to bring on. So we’re not going to know them individually. And that’s when we started to look at different markers, like your profitability, how you’ve handled different issues in your gym, different setbacks. And now when we bring them on, there is a pretty rigorous process to go through. It’s not for the faint of heart. We start with their kind of letter of intent, which kind of walks us through their story and lets us know why they want to mentor and why they think they would be a good fit for the position.
Danielle: 16:32 – And then next step is doing a mentor panel. So they kind of get grilled on Zoom in a video conference call and we ask a lot of hard questions and that’s a key piece of it because we get to really see, when they’re nervous and on the spot, how they respond, because that’s going to happen a lot on mentoring calls, right? Where you might not necessarily have dealt with this particular situation and you still have to give some advice here. So after that and we all kind of give the thumbs up, then they start the actual process. And I would liken it to like an internship where there’s different stages and stage one is a lot of listening. Stage two is kind of like jumping in, like your shadowing portion of the internship where you’re actually taking some pieces of the call where you feel most comfortable, right? Like if you’re a coach, or if you’re a box owner and you’re bringing on a coach, like typically it’d be like, “Hey, just walk the clients through the strength portion,” right? It’s something that you know” they can get through. And then maybe the more difficult part would be like, “Hey, walk me through a full warm-up, take the class warm-up today.” And we kind of do that same progression in mentor training. And then finally the last stage is the mentor trainer becomes the person that is observing and we kind of watch them on the calls and give, you know, feedback is key there, feedback’s key through the whole process. But I think that’s a key part of quality control. No matter what business you’re running, is people are afraid to give feedback. We’re always afraid to have these tough conversations. I can’t stress that enough. Like you can have all of the best systems in place, but if you’re not able to give that feedback clearly and to tell people, hey, this is why I gave you a seven out of 10 today and here’s what I expect of you over the next 30 days when we come back to this. You’ve got to give those expectations, that feedback loop is critical and it’s not the easiest part of business. So that’s a key component of our mentor training because they get used to that in mentor training. And then even once we say, you’ve graduated, you’re a mentor for Two-Brain Business now, you know, a huge accomplishment, you’re still going to get feedback, you’re gonna get a lot of feedback. And that’s where I come in.
Chris: 18:40 – Yeah and we are going to talk about that for sure. I wanted people to understand like Two-Brain is a professional mentoring company. When I started out I was hired by a software company to mentor gym owners. I had to learn as I went, I already had a book, I was working on the second book, but the bottom line is like we did not have the dataset for example, that we have right now. And so the mentors at Two-Brain, I think, are better than any other business consultant in the fitness space because they get to benefit from my mistakes. They get to learn all of those experiences and they get access to, you know, the 480 people in the Two-Brain family now and they’ve been clients themselves. They’ve received mentorship too. So it’s a lot easier for us to train to the gold standard than it was for me to try and invent the gold standard back in the day. But it’s also challenging because now we have to hold people to the best we’ve ever been all the time, right? So Dani, now I would love for you to walk through our quality-control process.
Danielle: 19:45 – So once someone graduates from mentor training, like I said, then, kind of the first, I guess you’d call it kind of like an incubator for lack of a better term, no relation to the Two-Brain Incubator. But it really is kind of like the egg hatching, it’s under some lights, it’s under some scrutiny for us. And there’s a lot of feedback. So essentially like what I do is—really two big parts in the first part is listening into a lot of recorded calls. So our mentors actually select the calls that they want me to listen to. And you would think that they would just give me like the best of their best. And I was a little hesitant to kind of put it in their hands, I was worried that they were going to give me, you know, the good calls versus the bad calls, but no one on our team does. They want the feedback and I think that’s a testament, like, we as human beings, we want to know how to get thumbs up, how to get that gold star. So they all send me the calls and they’ll send me a note along with it, saying, “Dani, wasn’t really sure where to go with this. I wasn’t really feeling like a total connection with this new client” or “this was a client I’ve been with for a long time and I’m not sure I’m the best fit. Can you give me some advice here?” And that’s been really neat. So they get a lot of feedback from me actually listening to their calls at first.
Danielle: 21:02 – In conjunction with that, we send out client surveys, and our clients are gracious enough to kind of fill out these surveys of specific calls. So, you know, we’ll ask questions like, did you consider your mentor’s appearance professional, did they start the call on time? Do you feel like your mentor gave you a clear plan of action, things like that. And then we leave a space for open-ended comments and that’s the best stuff. Like, those are the golden nuggets right there when people really dig into what was great or what wasn’t so great about the call. And then I deliver that feedback to our mentors and we kind of come up with a plan on how to make that better. Like here’s what you can do on the next call. So that kind of happens for the first six months of a mentor’s life here Two-Brain. And then after that we rely heavily on client surveys and feedback. So calling clients, serving clients through online surveys. And that’s really, like I said, that’s the stuff that we weigh a lot more heavy for like our senior mentor team, people that have been doing this for a long time. We want to make sure, like I know that they’re doing the process stuff because I’ve been looking at it for a long time and after that really what’s important is that our clients are seeing results, that their businesses are healthy and that they feel like they’ve got, you know, a plan for when they go into retirement, things like that, the big important stuff. So that’s kind of what we look at for our more senior mentors.
Chris: 22:27 – OK. So take that down to a gym level for me, Dani, like, you know, we’ve got this huge process. We’re extremely lucky to have you managing that whole process and making sure that everybody’s consistent and living up to the Two-Brain standard and stuff. If I’m running a gym and you know, I’m in the middle of nowhere, I’ve got six part-time staff, maybe one full time. How do I know that my staff are running at the gold standard all the time?
Danielle: 22:51 – For me personally, this might not be the right answer, but like I used to do evaluations a lot with my staff and meeting with staff, you know, a lot and I brought this up when I spoke at the Summit. I was not great at this. You know, I was in that category of like not wanting to hurt people’s feelings for too long in my business. And ultimately it just ended up hurting my own business. But like having that feedback loop, you know, when someone signs on for a position and you sign that contract, that contract becomes your evaluation. This is the criteria I’m going to start you off with. And setting the benchmarks, like I want to know what the key performance indicators are that you’re doing good or, you’re not doing good, and you need to know those, too, so that we can know where we need to improve. So I think at the gym level you need to set the criteria of what you feel like would make a person successful in a role. And if you’re not setting that, I don’t know how to get there. And a lot of times we think it’s very obvious. Well yeah, if you’re a coach you should be doing this. You should be showing up 15 minutes early for class, you should have this radio station on and you cannot assume that anywhere. I can’t assume that a mentor knows how to set up Zoom properly or make sure that they don’t have distractions in the back, I can’t assume any of that. And when I first started, I kind of got back to that old mindset. I remembered how I felt in my gym of like, do I really have to bring that up? Yeah, I do. And guess what? People appreciated it. So, you have to set those standards, and again, you don’t have to have everything perfect. You’re going to learn as you go. Like I said, I’ve been working on this QC thing for six months now and I’m finally getting it to a place, I finally was able to put down the criteria that I wanted into words. But it took a while and it might take you a while, but you’ve got to start somewhere so that people know how they can improve.
Chris: 24:34 – OK. That’s awesome stuff. I can remember the first time I ever did staff evaluations and you know, I was like sick to my stomach right before. It’s nerve-wracking. What advice do you have for people who own a service-based business? Maybe they’ve just done roles and tasks for the first time or they know they should do evaluations, but they’ve never done it before and they’re terrified.
Danielle: 24:53 – Oh man. The best advice is from one of our mentors, Jeff Burlingame, and I stole this from him like the second that I heard it. He came up with this brilliant idea of—and probably cause he gave so much feedback to his personal trainers when he was at the globo gym running a team of trainers. He gives his staff an evaluation to fill out on themselves before he gives the evaluation. So it brings the stress level down and kind of brings a common meeting point and you can say, listen, I gave you a seven here, you gave yourself a six, let’s talk about what the difference was. And I just thought that was brilliant because I think a lot of times people sit down, you know, you’re like at your desk and they’re sitting across from you and you feel like you’re grilling them and you’re giving them the third degree because let’s be serious, normally your first few evaluations are not great, right, because you’re just setting forth the expectations. Yeah, I think that, and just be to the point, compliment sandwich.
Chris: 25:46 – I’ve heard you call the compliment sandwich something else in the past, and some people might get that joke. One thing that I learned was not to wait until you’re mad at them to do an evaluation. They became a lot easier for me after the first time because then I would start setting the date in advance. So, you know, I screwed it up a number of ways the first time I ever did it, and you know, one of the ways was they knew I was mad because we’d never done an evaluation before, so why now? The second way was I hadn’t given them like a list of here are the gold standards, this is what a 10 out of 10 is. So they were shooting at a moving target. That was really my fault. But after that, when we said, OK, the next time we’re going to meet is September the fifth and at 3:00 PM and we’re going to go through this list again, then everybody expected the evaluation. It was a lot calmer and probably a lot more productive for me. It’s interesting that you bring up Jeff Berlingame. Jeff, we don’t talk about you all the time bro. We don’t have crushes on you. No, I’m just kidding. But I was talking to Jeff this morning and we were talking about the Mike Michalowicz’s podcast from last week and we were talking about the Queen Bee role. And this has been such a great discussion in the Two-Brain group over the last week about what is the Queen Bee role in a service-based business? And some have argued that it’s the coach and some, including me, have argued that it’s the entrepreneur and they’re responsible for growth, and and growth is the Queen Bee role. And Jeff’s point this morning was that whoever is managing the client life cycle is actually the Queen Bee role because they’re the ones saying did they move on from on-ramp into class? Did they get a reward at six months? Have they been here two years? What are we doing for them at 10 years? And I thought that was a really interesting point. His real point was that retention is the most important part of any of our businesses. So Dani, how does implementing a quality control system actually influence retention in a gym or in a cupcakery?
Danielle: 27:38 – It influences retention because people will fall through the cracks if you don’t have these kind of checkpoints in place. Right? So you don’t have this system in place to look back and say, are we doing all of these things? It gets too easy to forget the small things. Right? Cause like we’re looking at actual retention. None of it is super complicated, right? We’re reaching out to clients, we’re essentially making contact with clients. Often. It’s not super complicated, but that is, again, it’s operational stuff and when you start going to growth roles, like you’re talking about sales and marketing and all that stuff, it’s easy for you to forget, oh I haven’t reached out to that client. It’s been a month and a half. You know, it’s hard enough when you’re coaching a class to remember “Has it been two days since I’ve seen that client or has it been two months?” That stuff is too hard to remember. So I think like you do have to have someone whose sole responsibility it is to take care of the clients that are paying your bills, right? That needs to happen before you can talk about growing because it is a lot more expensive to acquire a new client than it is to keep any of your old clients. So it’s number one. I would agree with Jeff.
Chris: 28:45 – That’s an amazing point. And you know this quick math that we did last December showed that the average gym owner could make net, take home another $40,000 a year by keeping every client in their gym three months longer than they are now. And usually the reason that they’re not keeping those clients are problems with consistency. The gym owner, you know, Danielle Brown is no longer coaching the 6:00 AM class on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And if the new coach is only a seven on a scale of one to Danielle, I’m outta here. Right? So if consistency is really like the backbone of the retention system and quality control is consistency, then really quality control should be the Queen Bee role in our business.
Danielle: 29:31 – I completely agree. I think everyone, you know, no matter how big or small your business is, you need to have some sort of quality control going and it doesn’t have to be super complicated, but like having someone in your business that’s responsible for collecting and delivering feedback on how things are running, it’s key. It’s key.
Chris: 29:54 – OK. Dani, if I am a business owner and I’m really, really interested in making sure that I’m consistently delivering excellence because excellence one tenth of the time is not excellence at all, where should I start? What should I do?
Danielle: 30:10 – You should take our test. Please go take our test: twobrain.com/test, find out what stage of entrepreneurship you are in. That is going to allow us to see exactly where you’re at and what you need, the steps that you need to take to grow and to get to the next level and to level after that.
Chris: 30:30 – That’s so awesome, Dani. Hey, thanks for leveling up Two-Brain. The quality and the excellence are really what we hang our hat on and you’re the one in that role making sure that we do it.
Danielle: 30:41 – Oh, it’s awesome. Living the dream over here.
Chris: 30:43 – Cool. And folks, she grades me too. I get a report card also.
Greg: 30:52 – As always, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We greatly appreciate you and everyone that has subscribed to us. If you haven’t done that, please make sure you do. Drop a like to the episode. Share with a friend, and if you haven’t already, please write us a review and rate us on what you think. If you hated it, let us know. If you loved it, even better. See you guys later.

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