Business is Good with Chris Cooper Chris Cooper

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/

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/

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...

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/

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...

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/