Gym Owners Who Take Home More Than $20,000 a Month? Believe It!

How much do gym owners make each month?

Chris Cooper has the exact figures.

In this edition of "Run a Profitable Gym," he serves up the Top 10 leaderboard for net owner benefit in June 2023. It runs from US$17,000 to $45,000!

And this isn't gross revenue for the business. It's exactly what each gym owner took home. The numbers are actually three-month rolling averages that ensure huge year-end disbursements and other anomalies don't cloud the stats. These are consistent, sustainable levels of income.

After a run through the numbers, Coop offers four reasons gym owners must focus on making money. Then he explains how financial success allows fitness entrepreneurs to invest and transform the communities around them.

Take inspiration from these gym owners, then build your own business to provide for your family, serve clients, create careers and improve your city or town.

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Gym Owners United

0:48 - The Top 10

3:16 - Four reasons gym owners must make money

9:47 - From income to investment

13:52 - Tinkers: top-level gym owners who invest

15:43 - Entrepreneurial success helps communities

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym and today I'm gonna tell you which gym owners made the most money in the world in June. Then I'm gonna tell you why your gym needs to pay you and how it can create income, and then how it can create investment opportunities and then how it can create impact in your community. The reason we're all here first, the net Owner Benefit leaderboard, the top 10 gyms in the world for take home income in June . Here we go. What I love about this leaderboard this year is that there are so many different countries represented and if you go to gym owners united.com, you can see this leaderboard, I've just blurred out the names to protect their anonymity. People in Tube Brain know who they are and they can talk with them live on Facebook or in Zoom meetings or whatever. Um, so we're gonna start with the bottom. These are all in US dollars. So even if you know a gym is in Norway for example, we've converted that currency into US dollars. Just so we're comparing apples to apples here. Number 10, and again, this is the the dollars that the gym owner took home. It's not the revenue that the gym made, it's what the gym owner took from the gym. We use a rolling three average to figure this out just in case somebody takes like a big year end disbursement. We don't want that to like have them lead the leaderboard and then not make very much next month. So these are three month rolling averages. This is what the leaders took home in June, 2023. Number 10, $16,000, 721. So 16,721 bucks. This gym owner took home to their family in June and this is the 10th place. Okay, here we go. Number nine, 16,920. They only beat 'em by about 200 bucks, but imagine what taking $16,000 home next month would feel like. And again, these aren't like flashing the pan. I ran this special challenge or I mortgaged tomorrow for the sake of today to make this money. This is a rolling three , average number eight $17,253. Imagine making that in a month number seven, $19,948. I bet you that gym owner is giving themselves a $52 a month raise right now to bump themselves over 20,000. The rest of the leaderboard, the top six are all over $20,000. US in take home in June at number six $20,379. Take home at number five $20,852. Take home at number four. This one's from Europe. $21,600. Take home at number three. Here's where things start to get really nuts. $22,033 take home income for the gym owner in June. Amazing second place was from Great Britain and they took home in US dollars 23,256 bucks in June. Amazing. And this is what they should expect to do every month. It's not a flash in the pan, it's not a big bait and switch month or some secret trick that they did that they can only do once and it poisons their gym forever. This is what they're making as the CEO owner of their gym and the number one gym last month in Tube Brain took home $44,922 us . That's the owner's pay. Again, incredible. Now if you're listening to this and you're like, no, I chose the life of service. I'm just out there because I wanna get people healthy and fit. I don't care about the money. If I can make five grand a month, take home I'm happy. I've got a job. I love it . It that's enough reward. Now I want to tell you the top four reasons why your gym needs to make money and be profitable. Obviously your gym exists to serve, but it also exists to pay you. And this is a really uncomfortable topic for many of us because we've been raised to associate money with greed or with taking from others or with fraud or trickery like that, that guy's so rich, he must have screwed a thousand people. And especially in our industry, making money from your gym seems like asking too much, right? Like we already love our jobs and we're already solving the biggest problems in the lives of our clients. Making money seems extra like a cherry on top or maybe even too much to ask, right? I've certainly thought that way. But that thinking holds us back. It stops the growth of our gym. It limits the opportunities we're able to offer to our staff, our team. It diminishes the experience of our clients and of course it reduces the reward that our families earn for taking this risk with us. You need to make money. Here's why. Number one, your family. Every job is a tradeoff. You have to exchange time with your family for money. Entrepreneurship carries the promise of trading a lot of time upfront for more free time and more money later. You work harder than most people do to start, and then you work less than most people do later. You earn less than most people at start up to earn more than most later on. Money creates opportunities for your family and that's what your gym should provide. If your gym has you working more than average and earning less than average than is not rewarding your family. In fact, I can remember some very dark days when my gym had me working from 5:00 AM until 9:00 PM earning half what my friends earned at their day jobs and fighting with my wife over the grocery bills. I was very tempted to just go get a job at a , you know, a phone answering company. Money doesn't solve every problem, but it solves the money problems and most of the time problems. So if you think earning more money is somehow greedy, ask your spouse what they would do with an extra a thousand bucks a week. I'm betting it's not buying a private jet. It's probably getting new shoes for your kids. The second reason your gym needs to make more money is your team. Your team members wanna do their best work and to do that, they have to earn good incomes. They might absolutely love their careers, love their clients, and love your gym, but they're facing the same time and financial pressures at home that you are. If your gym isn't successful, you can't pay people what they're worth. For the last a hundred years, personal trainers and fitness coaches earned low wages. The industry was mostly transient, though the average salary is still low. Some gym owners are now actually changing things by making fitness coach a real viable career. And it's up to you to make these opportunities happen. The more successful your gym is, the more successful your staff can be. The third reason your gym needs to make money is your clients. Your clients are best served. If you and your staff are well rested , well fed and happy, your martyrdom, your poverty is not helping your clients. It's an obstacle. If you're broke and hungry and tired and desperate, they will see it. They won't enjoy the experience in your gym because they know you're stressed and distracted even if they don't know why. And let's face it, you're vulnerable. If any little problem arises, your client's beloved gym could be taken away from them. Remember the gyms that were forced to close after the first month of Covid lockdowns? It's because those gyms had no buffer. They were fragile. The owners weren't making enough to carry the gym through a tough time. And when they went under, the clients lost key parts of their support system . Some of those clients never worked out again. Making more money to help your clients isn't about buying more equipment or taking more risk on a larger space or putting in a soak tub. It's about being able to afford thank you cards and being undistracted when you're serving them and having your staff members dress sharply and being able to provide all the little niceties that make you proud to own your business. If you're proud of your gym, your clients will be too . And if you're financially successful, they will receive exactly what they deserve for years to come devoted a plus service that will change their lives. The fourth reason that your gym needs to make money is the gym itself. If you're really gonna make an impact in your community, your gym is gonna need to last a few decades. People don't try one class and then completely change their lives. Clients need to stick around for a couple of years, build lasting habits, and create the physiological adaptations that will increase their health span and their lifespan. They need to make the changes that will save their lives. And that doesn't happen overnight. New clients need to be welcomed by long-term clients. Groups need to have happy veterans to model the movements and new kids to bring the energy too . Gyms that just break even don't last long enough to create community impact because the owner is still trading off their time to run it and at some point they're gonna stop volunteering at their nonprofit gym. So these are the four reasons that your gym needs to make money. And I just read you the list of like the top 10 earners , uh, for gyms in the world and what they took home. And I gotta ask you like, do you think these people are Grady or do you think that these people are creating opportunities for their team members that you wish you could creating income for their families that you wish your family had and creating great outcomes for their clients that you wish you could do? Of course, they're not greedy, they're gym owners. They're exactly like you are. You're not running a nonprofit . If you can't make more income from owning a gym than you would as a trainer, then it's time to upgrade your skills as a ceo . The goal of our growth Growth program is to generate income. It's to make you a hundred thousand dollars per year, which is an appropriate reward for owning a single location micro gym. But now I wanna tell you what happens after you're making a hundred thousand dollars in income a year, which is uh , the next goal is to move from income to investment. And I just said that every gym owner should be able to make a hundred thousand dollars per year from a single micro gym location now at Two Brain . We've seen gym owners reach this level so many times now that there's really no reason to suggest that an entrepreneur can't earn a hundred thousand a year from a fitness business in our mentorship program. It's no longer a matter of if an owner will reach that level if expert guidance and support or presence. It's simply a matter of when a deserving focused owner will earn that reward as long as they take action. Some gyms get to a hundred thousand dollars in net owner benefits slowly because they have lots of problems to fix and mistakes to undo. It took me like six years to fix the problems that I made at startup . Some gyms get to a hundred thousand dollars in net owner benefit really quickly, and these are often the gyms that invest in our startup program before they're even open for existing gyms whose owners start working with a mentor. It's possible to reach a hundred thousand dollars in net owner benefit quickly. Usually if the owner follows the mentor's explicit directions and takes really quick decisive action and other gym owners earn far more than a hundred thousand dollars net owner benefit per year. I just read you some where the owners were making over $20,000 take home per month, right? And these are rolling three month averages, so they're doing it all the time. But what comes after that, after you're making a hundred thousand dollars in income, which is by the way, far better than the national average earnings in North America, Europe, or Australia, and you can set your own target depending on your country and your and your needs. I'm saying a hundred k net owner benefit because that's what we hear the most often. After you hit that number, your opportunity to serve grows, it means you can better serve your family, better serve your team, and better serve your clients. And for the first time, you'll have enough money to serve your community better. When you hit that income goal, you can start investing first. You can invest in your family. You can begin to invest your money to create long-term wealth for your kids. You can invest in things that will let you retire someday. You can invest in properties for your kids to inherit and in tax expertise to minimize their burden. You can invest in experiences that will change their lives. You can invest in coaching for yourself to make you a better leader and entrepreneur and maybe a better dad. Second, you can invest in your team. Earning a hundred thousand dollars from your gym is a signal that your business is stable enough to pay others a salary too. In fact, you shouldn't pay any anybody else's salary until you are making a salary of a hundred K a year because that proves that you have the systems and processes that can create careers, right? And your career is the proof. Only after you're earning a decent salary should you offer a salary to somebody else. Third, you can invest in your gym. You have a working model that you can now duplicate in other locations, or you can buy the building in which your gym sits, which secures its future. You can reinvest in different modalities to help your clients more. You could buy therapy modalities, right? Or you can simply fix the broken stuff. Buy the new PM three monitor or whatever it is, PM five now I guess. Fourth, you can invest in your community. Hey, when you've got some extra money and time, you can spend it volunteering. You can buy bikes for kids. You can find places where $10,000 will make an immediate and profound difference and then just donate the money. You can hold fundraisers and charity events in your gym because you have the time and energy to do that. Here's a quick note. A lot of gym owners are so generous that they try to do these things too early. They try to buy a building before their gym can afford it, or they promise salaries to their staff before the owner is making a decent income themselves. Or they open second locations before their first has proven itself to be viable as a business model. Or they run charity events when their own business is unprofitable. Remember income first, then investment feed the Golden goose. Now our Tinker program is built to teach gym owners how to invest. And my upcoming book, millionaire Gym Owner, is all about the journey from income to investment. There are really four ways that we found that the tinkers invest. First, they invest in scale. They put money back into the business they know and love. They open second locations successfully because they have a proven model that they can just duplicate over and over again. They expand their offerings to serve more people, or they might open an overlapping business like a ninja gym for kids. Second, they make external investments. They put money into cashflow assets like real estate, overfunded, whole life insurance policies, bonds, crypto stocks, or boring businesses like self-storage units and laundromats like I have. Sometimes they might offer private lending to other people who need it or even act as angel investors. In startups , I do both and it's awesome. Third, they make internal investments. They invest in mentorship to become better leaders and remove the bottlenecks in the growth of their businesses. This has been absolutely massive for me. And fourth, they invest in lifestyle. They invest in work life integration. They invest in experiences and time. Some invest in mentor certifications so they can help other G owners and other local entrepreneurs succeed, or they might invest their time into service. All of this sounds great, right? But you can't invest until you have a good income first. The reason that I wanna make gym owners wealthy is because there are no better people on earth. I wanna put more money into the hands of generous, service-oriented people who are dedicated to improving the health of others. I want the good guys to win, and I want them to win big because that's how others win too. Now I wanna talk about the next stage, which is going from investment to impact. I'm gonna share how your success helps everyone around you . I wanna start with my own personal slogan now, which is make lots of money, give it away. This has been my guiding principle for the last three years. Some people serve others by donating their time. For example, they might mentor local youth or they might serve soup to hungry people every day . Or you know, they might walk around at night giving blankets to homeless people. But some people can serve better by making money and sharing it with those who don't know how to make money. As an entrepreneur, you've taken a huge step toward creating real and lasting impact in your community already. You create jobs, you create wealth, you create tax revenue, you build your economy, you donate the extra, and of course you're creating health. So let's take a moment to reflect on just how big that is. Colleges don't create jobs. Banks don't create wealth. Governments don't create tax revenues. The Federal Reserve doesn't build the economy and doctors don't create health. Nobody does all five of those things except for you. That is impact, and that means you deserve success. The real reason I wanna make gym owners successful is that their success doesn't end with them. No gym owner is hoarding their money in a Swiss bank account or buying private islands to live out their days in seclusion. They're dedicated to service and they will serve others with or without money. By the way, it's much better to serve others with money. And here's why. If you've made it to this point where you've got some investments, you're taken care of, you've got good consistent income, then you are good at making money and very few people are. The best way that you can help others is to keep making money and giving it to the people who don't know how to do that. Second, most people won't be entrepreneurs. Most people will not trade potential upside for their current comfort level. They want jobs, not ownership. And the way we make more jobs is to open more businesses. Third, our free market system makes democracy possible. Capitalism is the foundation, not the fruit of democratic processes. You cannot have democracy without capitalism. Success in business elevates our democracy by paying for social benefits like healthcare, like road infrastructure. Success in business elevates our culture by creating surplus time and money for things like art and success in business elevates our species by funding science and exploration. Fourth, you are an inspiration for the next generation. Our parents spent their careers in one company, one job, one career. Our kids will mostly have to build their own careers and their teachers and schools don't know how to teach them that. You and I must be the examples of entrepreneurship for future entrepreneurs, but also for the future gig workers, for the future, independent contractors and everyone else who has to forge their own path. Now, here's the cherry on top. If you make lots of money, you can give it away whenever and however you want. I wanna talk quickly about paying your dues and skipping bureaucracy, making lots of revenue and paying lots of taxes supports the social systems and the infrastructure that I just mentioned, and that's good. You really are paying for the police and the hospitals and the highways. That's a win for everyone. Thank you for doing that. But if you make even more money, then you don't have to filter your impact through the bureaucracy all the time. You can find places where money will have an immediate and profound impact, and then you just give the money. For example, I pay over $500,000 per year in national, like federal taxes from one company alone. That's not including my real estate taxes, my income taxes, my sales taxes, or all the other taxes from all the other companies. That money supports our system of government, our healthcare system, our education system, our roads, our police, our fire departments and more. And I'm proud to make such a large contribution. Even when I'm frustrated by the process, I'm proud of the outcome, but sometimes a local kid just needs a bike and they can't wait for the subcommittee on youth fitness in Northern Communities to decide to fund a single bicycle in a community, a community of 2000 kids. So I just go to the bike store and buy the bike and we've been donating 50 bikes every year to local kids in foster care. This year we donated another 60 to kids in foster care. And then foster care kids said, that's it, everybody's got a bike. And so we went to Big Brothers Big Sisters and we said, do you guys need bikes? And they said, yeah, we could use eight bikes right now. And so I drove to the store and I bought eight bikes. We just bought them. We didn't have to apply for a grant. We didn't have to write an application to a government. We just had the money. And so we spent it. Other people volunteer as big brothers and big sisters to these kids. Other people work as foster care workers. My contribution is not greater than theirs, but it is different and it is necessary. Other people work for companies and apply for government grants. I'm not good at those things, but I am good at making money. And so I give money and that's how I make an impact. Now I'm sharing this stuff to inspire you. It's okay to make lots of money. It's okay to pay lots of taxes. It's okay to invest money or build wealth or give cash away, but you have to make money first. So start with an income. Feed the golden goose. Get your gym to pay you a hundred thousand dollars a year. Then make investments, expand your flock. Then think about impact where you're going to leave the golden eggs. Look, I'm lucky, but I'm not special. You can do this too. I'm Chris Cooper. This has run a profitable gym . I kind of went off on a rant on you there, and I hope that this inspired you to make your gym profitable. And um, to kind of give you a view of the future and where you can go. If you wanna talk to me about this stuff more, just go to gym owners united.com. That's our free group. I'm pretty active in there. I try to hop in once a day. But there are 7,600 positive happy gym owners in there who are just eager to help you solve these problems. Thank you for your service. I really hope you get to the point where you can just give away the golden eggs for the rest of your life.