After Summit 2023, I knew that our theme for 2024 would be "Virtuosity".

It was already becoming clear that the fastest-growing gyms were sticking to the basics and repeating them over and over again, avoiding distraction and staying focused.

But WHICH basics?

I started to dive into the numbers. We knew the average TBB gym earned an ROI of about 2.3x the cost of mentorship per year (we actually peg our rate to the ROI clients receive.)

But this was the mean average. The median wasn't as good. This meant that there was a subgroup of clients who were dragging the average up.

So I dove in, and here's what I found.

12.5% of our clients grow nearly 3x as fast as everyone else.

While very few clients get a negative ROI on mentorship, this small group of 12.5% are way ahead. So what do THEY do that the others don't?

It turns out that there's no one thing. That wasn't a surprise. What WAS a surprise was this: they do everything their mentor tells them. No more, no less.

They take action. They avoid distraction. They focus. They just say "got it" and they get it done.

Obviously, these are dream clients. And our courses and call templates were set up for these clients. But it's not the majority of our clients. And - uh oh - most of our mentor team comes from these clients.

Short version: we're a team of people who say "tell me what to do" and then just go do it. We don't hem and haw and delay and second-guess. We're not cynical and we don't try to reinvent the wheel. We don't procrastinate. We focus. We have good work habits.

And we don't usually understand people who aren't like us.

This knowledge was depressing, at first. As John said at Summit, I spent months in my basement going through numbers. It was kind of a weird time, because I was frustrated by the inconsistent results we were getting; I didn't know how to improve them; and, to be honest, I'd just been offered a big number for Two-Brain.

I knew that I didn't want to sell, but I also didn't want us to only be successful sometimes.

So I went even deeper. I really don't remember much of July, August or September. I didn't write any new books (MGO was already written and in the editing process.) I was discouraged because I was sure I'd see a clear trend, but didn't. In fact, I found more problems: inconsistent delivery, lack of planning, and clients really being ignored. I read hundreds of client emails and watched 130 call recordings, and started getting angry....because this was my fault.

I wasn't clear enough on our objectives for each client.

I wasn't clear enough on the framework.

I didn't incentivize client outcomes or create clear expectations for client outcomes.

But the long-term result was amazing: I didn't want to sell TBB. I didn't even really care about growing TBB in revenue, profit or client headcount.

I wanted to make TBB great. And making TBB great meant one thing: getting clients great outcomes.

Every client who signs up for mentorship with TBB should expect a great outcome regardless of the skills they start with. That's a tough expectation to live up to, but it's my expectation for all of us (including me, who struggles with coaching clients more than most.)

First, I removed a couple of mentors from the team. Their heart just wasn't in it anymore and it showed.

Then I revamped the Growth Call template for clarity. If you're a fan of G2G, this is called "freedom adn responsibility within a framework." The framework was the call template; the freedom was all the gaps between the big cues in the template. The responsibility was to deliver client results.

Then I added an incentive: when a client hits their NOB goal, you get a bonus. Strump said this better than I ever could: we all want to do our best job. The bonus is nice, but everyone is trying really hard and cares a lot.

Then I added an expectation:...

Help First - give free content - 95% of what we publish we give away for free.

Help Most - do it for them. But this isn't the same as helping Best.

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime.

We want people to see fast results and overcome paralysis. We also want to set them up for success long-term, by teaching them skills. This might seem like a dichotomy, but really it's a matter of timing.

Most of our clients need really quick wins in the beginning. The way we help them best is not by giving them a ton of options or a bunch of knowledge. That doesn't work. The way we help them best is to say "do exactly this thing."

Most of our clients don't want to do paid ads. But the way we help them most is to show them how paid ads work, and then set them up and teach them to monitor them themselves. Then they can decide if they want to continue or not. So sometimes helping best is getting them to go through short-term pain for long-term gain. Parents know what I mean here. "You can't say you hate it until you've actually tried it."

Helping best almost always means saying "this is the answer" instead of saying "you have two options." The bigger the decision, the more valuable the clarity.

For example, the reason we recommend Kilo for websites is because it's the best. Gym owners can spend a month researching the options and weighing pros and cons, asking for opinions and advice, and be no further ahead. But Kilo was built specifically for TBB gyms. John and Mateo bought a website company, said "what do TBB gyms actually need?" and "what do the numbers support?" and built that thing. Ditto GymLawyers and Colm's new DoneForYou marketing plan.

So recommending these isn't a conflict of interest - it's in our client's BEST interest to just tell them the best answer. We're not a publicly-elected body that has to be responsible to government oversight. Our job is results, period. Every month spent deliberating on a decision by a client is a month they don't get results.

Over time, in fact, we should narrow the options we present. We narrow these options by collecting data and understanding it. This is the scientific method, and it's one of our core values; we make decisions based on evidence, not opinion.

So the stuff in the toolkit is chosen by data. It works in one gym - great. We find out about it. We test it in other gyms. If it works, great - it goes in the toolkit and we present it as mentors. When something stops working, we remove it. We don't just add stuff because it's novel or new or shiny. We test everything, because it's our duty to help BEST. Putting unproven stuff in the toolkit would be helping MOST - but just really creating more client overwhelm and getting less results.

Helping BEST means focusing first on the client's end goal. It often means 'addition by subtraction' - removing the problems of optionality and saying "this one is best." It means accepting the burden of proof, and building a case through data, analysis and experience instead of "here's something I hear don a podcast" or even "here's an idea people are talking about in Tinker."

Helping BEST isn't the easy road. But it's the only road for us, because the only way to be the best is to help your clients best.

https://members.twobrainbusiness.com/index.php?pda_v3_pf=/_pda/2023/11/Sell-Week-Worksheet.pdf