Business is Good with Chris Cooper

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 e...

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 f...

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 t...

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 the...

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.)...

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: ht...

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...

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 yo...

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...

“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-pr...

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 oursel...

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 ho...

"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...

"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...

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....

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 p...

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 Ph...

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 ra...

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 whe...

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 enou...

"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...

"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 Deat...

"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...

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 nov...