Cody McBroom on Building a 7-Figure Coaching Business With Zero Ads

It boils down to the same two things because their values shift as they become healthier. And they are somebody or something is encouraging that change. Right. This is why the divorce rate goes up if one person loses a bunch of weight and the other one doesn't. Because this person who didn't lose the weight, their value system is different now, and now there's clashing. So this person either removes their new values and goes back to their old ways and values the old things that got them where they were before, or they leave. Unfortunately, it's sad, but their identity is shift. And nobody can look at a person who is 50 pounds lighter and say they're the same person as they were before. They went through something that changed them physically, physiologically, and psychologically. Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited to the stuff we're going to talk about today. It's good.

Yeah, it is really good. And uh, you know, I've been kind of tracking you for a while. I mean, I know you've been in this industry for for quite some time. You know, one of the things that I'm most excited to talk about, which I I don't, to be fair to to to my audience, like I don't really talk about the online coaching market very much because I I chase headlines often, right? Like what's the big PE deal? What's you know, the CEO of XYZ company. But, you know, just just to set the table, we are going to talk about online coaching very extensively because you've been very successful in that. And I want to get your take on it. But before we do that, I want to talk about some of the stats that I was pulling up prior to the interview. So online fitness market is valued at 28.9 billion. That was in 2025, and expected to get up to 120 billion in 2031. So that's a run rate of 26% or annual growth rate. 26% annual growth rate, but a huge run rate over five years. North America accounts for 38% of that global market. So by far largest, right? 70, here's the one we're probably going to get into too. It's like 71% of people who start online fitness programs quit in 90 days. I believe it. I was an online coach for a while too. Not to the scale you were, of course, but I feel that. Uh the creator economy is worth over 250 billion and it's flooding the market with fitness content from influencers, YouTubers, coaches, varying levels of credibility from total shit to people who really know what they're talking about. So you've been successful. Let's start with this, Cody. Like you built Taylor coaching method. Now it's been what, 13, 14 years? Long before kind of the creator economy started. What does it take to actually build a real business in this space?

So I think that's good. No, the amount of time is totally different now for everything. Even like growing a social media page is totally different than it was years ago and everything. So I believe you need to be an in-person trainer first. I do believe that. I don't care if you like we do more nutrition coaching than we do training specifically, even though I, to be honest, I love training more. It's just there's more to talk about. But with so many people being influencers or content creators and liking to work out, and then they just slap, you know, trainer or online coach in their bio, and now they're an online coach, the barrier of entry is just so low. Whereas, like, you know, for a gym owner, for example, barrier of entry is getting a ri a loan, having an established brick and mortar, filling that up with equipment, finding people in your community, and then them seeing you in your community all the time. Like the barrier of entry is really high. So there's a lot of respect there. Online coaching is not the same. And I think that the the things that you learn in person just help so much. Like I was a trainer at a gym working for an amazing gym owner and coach named Luca Hosovar for seven years, almost six and a half years. I was, you know, I met him when I was 18, started interning, became a coach, and I worked there. And he was actually the first person that told me this too. He said, you know, I told him I wanted to build an online like fitness thing. And he said, you know, how are you gonna make money? And I was like, I actually don't know. I said, Jason Frugia, Nate Green, do it somehow. So I'm gonna do it. And uh he laughed and he was like, All right, train people for five years straight, and then you'll have the right to do that. So I trained people for almost seven years, six and a half years, six days a week. I was there seven days a week, half the time, just lived in the gym learning. At Lucas Gym? At Lucas Gym, yeah. And and I still go up and hang out with the Microsoft Sub. I mean, he's probably 45 minutes away from me at this point, but like I did that for that long before stepping in person. And then now I've been running to a coaching method for almost nine years. So it'll be nine years in October. So now, do people need to go train people for six and a half years? Maybe not. But I do think you need that experience a little bit. So I think part of it is you can't just jump from I post fitness content on social media to I am an online coach running a business. Like I do think there is this aspect of getting your feet wet, figuring out if you're even an entrepreneur versus an entrepreneur. Like I have people on my team that don't want to be entrepreneurs and they shouldn't be, but they're amazing at being on my team and they know that. And so I think you learn a lot of self-awareness. I think you have time to study, you have time to shadow and watch and see how people are doing. That to me is step one. And then step two, I do believe is is rooted in core values and your true like method of philosophy in what you do. There's the science-based approach of that, like this is what we do on paper and how we program and how we write nutrition and how we coach. But there's also just the values of the company. And I think in today's business landscape, personal branding is so big. But the reason personal branding is so big is because it allows people to attach themselves to a value system, to a world belief, to a worldview. Like you don't have to be hyper-niche and say, I coach 34-year-old Christian men who want to do this, this, like that it gets ridiculous. But if you have values, people see those traits. If you embody those values, people believe and trust in what you produce and the results you can help people create. And I think that does a lot, man. We've to this day have never ran ads for that for my coaching company. We started running ads for my personal branding for the mentorship. But to this day, I mean, we built the company to do well over seven figures out a year, year round, consistently, no paid and folds, no advertising, all the things that businesses say you're supposed to do. And I'm not against them, but great coaching and great, like honest values at the forefront is what built a strong team and built the results, and that's what's carried us, you know. So without going into the nuance, I think that's what it is.

So Cody, you've you've obviously built a highly successful business in the online fitness space. How'd you build it? Like layer by layer, what are the the pillars that it stands on? Revenue streams, give us the give us the details.

Yeah, a little unorthodox actually, but we so I'm a big believer in be a master at the one thing, and I don't think you ever really reached mastery, but I didn't want to sell five different products and five different programs and a bunch of different packages. We literally stuck to our core, and it was training and nutrition or just nutrition. We never even offered just training. And the reason for that is because we mostly just do fat loss. Like I do have clients in other realms, especially now that I get to be personally nitpicky, because I still love coaching people, but I have clients that are jumping in Ironmans and then bodybuilding shows and higher offs. I love the competitive aspect. But for the most part, you know, my team, like we're body composition. We help people transform physically. Fat loss and muscle growth, mostly just weight loss, fat loss, like that's our thing. Nutrition and mindset and adherence, like that's the big ticket, right? Behavior change and nutrition. So nutrition coaching has always been our primary pillar, our primary product. And then we have training and nutrition for those who need both, right? They need the training because they don't have somewhere good to train or they do, but they don't know what to do in the gym. We always had a three-month minimum commitment. We have it as a four now for some nuanced reasons inside the business and payroll and stuff like that. But minimum commitment was three months, and we literally did not accept a paid in full until actually we started doing it just recently on occasion, mostly because people wanted to earn like miles and stuff because flights are crazy right now. But we built it on the fact that everybody else was doing paid in fulls. Like that's a very common thing. You just do paid and fulls. And we were getting these people that were like, Well, I did this six-month package after a month, I just could not stick to the program. And then I just noticed they stopped sending me check-ins, and then it's just kind of like I don't know what happened. And the coach leaves with their money happy, and the client leaves with no results and an empty wallet. And so our whole thing was we don't offer and we don't accept paid and fulls because if we're not showing up and you're not getting results, you will not continue to pay us. So it's our accountability for performance, which is a ballsy move in a way, yeah, but it worked and we get really good results. Like that's just what we focus on. So we've built the whole company on that, honestly. And I have an app, so it's a separate business. The Tailored Trainer is my app and it's just daily workouts. And in a way, it works as like a low-end front front tier offer. 29 bucks in a month gets you workouts, gets you in the door. It's also a good way after people are done with coaching, if they want programming, they can jump into that, but they're not technically associated together. So that is a tier, but it is not, that's not part of our revenue stream. Like, I don't even count that towards the the recurring revenue that we've built with Taylor Coach Method. And then the mentorship is a more recent thing that I just launched the mentorship a few months ago, which I've been mentoring some people for the last probably year or so. Just on the side, people reach out. Hey, can you help me? And I just get on free calls. And then it was like, you know what? I can like let's keep doing this. I can help you build your business. And you can't scale that because you're spending a lot of time and you can't work with everybody and you don't need to be on one-on-one calls with everybody. And so we built the group pretty recently, probably three months ago now. And we haven't run any ads to it, haven't done any promos, but we have like 40 something coaches in there now. They're all learning, they're all making more money, they're getting better results for their clients because we're charging less than the typical business mastermind that costs thousands of dollars every month. And we're not just teaching how to DM 100 people tell you book calls. We're teaching them, we're teaching them actual marketing and actual business systems and actual coaching. Like legitimately, like, how are you going through a client check-in to create behavior change? Like, let's go through that together and let's help you become a great coach. So you could say those are the four pillars, but the app and the app was a long-term play. I've just invested all the money back into so I can have an asset. And the business mentorship is very recent. So we truly built TCM off of great results and two things nutrition coaching or training and nutrition, which is still just one-on-one coaching. We've never done, we didn't do challenges all the time. We did never did group coaching. It's always just been one-on-one tailored coaching.

Yeah. That's great, man. And behavior change, right? I mean, really, I've said this on record so many times. Like we're not really in a fitness industry, we're in a behavior change business. That's that's what we do. I mean, if you ever spend time in a gym or coaching people or training people, you know, like that's that's what it is, man. You got to get them to subtly shift behavior to a way that is, you know, uh conducive to the goals that they want to achieve. And that's that's not easy. It's easy to say. But humans are are challenging.

They are. I uh I can I can break down what it actually comes down to if you want. Like, I it's taken a while to figure this out. But and I even I filmed a video about this today, actually. That's a good example. I haven't posted it yet. But there's this viral thing going around right now where and it's funny and it paints the picture well, but about the all or nothing mindset. And what it is is like somebody's drinking like a cup of coffee or something, and it spills a little bit and they go, they splash it all in their face. And it's to paint the picture of like, you don't do all or nothing with everything else. The problem is, is they show this and people go, Yeah, that's me. You're right. I need to stop this all or nothing mindset. But what do they do? How do they stop it? And is that actually a good demonstration of it? No, because spilling a little bit of coffee on yourself doesn't trigger dopamine, right? When you have an Oreo or a glass of wine, it does. And you want more. You get addicted to that loop. And then you get stuck in it. And the next thing you know, it's hard to break. Not hard to break the pattern of spilling on yourself because you don't enjoy it and you don't keep doing it right after you do it. So what we've really, really doubled down on, and it actually stemmed from paying close attention to the transformations we were getting, specifically with myself. And then I have Ariel on my staff who I brought up as director of coaching. She has her master's in psychology and a second master's in curriculum organization. So when it comes to like laying down the systems in a sequence, she's unbelievable. And she started really like picking up on what I was doing with clients and then telling me what was actually going on that I didn't even realize. I'm like, I just coach, this is what I do, and it works. And so then we used AI to go through all of our reviews, all of our testimonials, all of our conversations with clients, applications, like all these different things, and just weed out all the common threads, common themes with people who got great results and the people who got the fastest results stayed the longest and left us a Google review or a testimonial or sent in their pictures. Those people all mentioned identity and values in those reviews, always. If you look at the research, and values. So when you look at the research on sustaining weight loss, it boils down to the same two things because their values shift as they become healthier. And they are somebody or something is encouraging that change, right? This is why the divorce rate goes up if one person loses a bunch of weight and the other one doesn't, because this person who didn't lose the weight, their value system is different now, and now there's clashing. So this person either removes their new values and goes back to their old ways and values the old things that got them where they were before, or they leave. Unfortunately, it's sad, but their identity has shift. And nobody can look at a person who is 50 pounds lighter and say they're the same person as they were before. They went through something that changed them physically, physiologically, and psychologically. So we lean into that. We call it identity-based coaching. And basically what we're trying to do is we we look at the first the values and the traits that they developed: self-control, self-discipline, self-belief, and self-respect. Those are the four big pillars in the pathway that we focus on. Self-control is what they need, self-discipline is what they develop, self-belief is what they want because they want the confidence. Self-respect is what they don't realize is the ultimate goal. When you have respect for yourself, you have autonomy. You don't need accountability. It's already in you. You treat yourself a certain way, right? Just like you treat somebody else that you respect at a high regard. So we're shaping them through this path as they're losing weight and we're anchoring these traits and identity-based statements inside of our coaching every single week. We we rotate the questions we ask them on check-ins, we have specific conversations, we tailor our content to be a certain way inside of our members' page. Like everything is geared to helping them make this shift. And when they do, they're able to sustain the weight loss much longer. And it's because their values have changed. We've encouraged that. And then we show them how those values develop this new standard of living. And it's, if I'm being honest, it's not easy. No, it's not an easy thing to coach. No, it's taken a long time to figure out. But that's why we started building the certification I was telling you about before, too, is because research supports it and all the evidence we've pulled from our own coaching supports this. And we've watched coaches that we mentor as well as coaches that we bring on staff when we start training, go from a retention rate of about three to four months to 14 months on average just because of this one thing. And mind you, most people come to us, we we should be able to get them to lose the weight they want to lose within the first three to four months. That's the goal, and we do it, and we don't require them to stay longer than four months because we still only have a four-month agreement, but they stay so much longer, maintaining the weight. And it's because of the values and the identity.

It's you know, if I'm a young coach and I'm listening to this and putting myself back into like Eric of you know, 2008. I'm like, no, man, just just give them the plan. It's all about programming, right? It's all about having a great program, adhere to it, like you just got to increase the adherence. And it's like, no, it's just not you want it to be that way, but it's not it's not that way.

Right. And so that's actually a perfect example too. Because so for me, I I lost weight in when I was like 17, 18, I really I got like obsessed. This is my life. So, like my life and my worldview is surrounded by being fit. I identify as a fit person, I identify as somebody who trains every day. I identify as the guy who still hits the hotel gym for a quick workout when he goes on vacation. I identify as the guy who eats healthy foods because I identify with those things, it's easy for me. So when somebody else doesn't adhere, I'm like, come on, it's so simple. Just be this way. And that's what a lot of coaches do. They want to shake people.

Yeah, yeah.

Just be like me. Yeah. Yeah. So what we have to do, perfect example. I'd have a client who is actually a therapist, and I go through this stuff with her and it works. And she, she knows what's going on. And she, her deep-rooted identity is an athlete. She used to be an athlete. She's no longer an athlete. Kids, life, work, right? And so we were going through, we were trying to, I was trying to find a negative situation that was pulling her away from that identity. And the situation we landed on was eating a bag of chips. She was eating a bag of chips on the couch and they fit into her calories, right? And so she was like, but it was funny. She was like, Well, they fit in my calories. I just adjust some things, and there were sun chips. So it's it's not too bad, you know. And it wasn't a it was it wasn't a ton.

Yeah.

And so I'm like, okay, but are you somebody who identifies as an individual who sits on the couch and eats out of a bag of chips? If you do, that's fine. She's like, Absolutely not. I was like, doesn't athlete no. Okay. So how do we change that?

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Check it out at us.perfectgym.com. Because the reality is if I say, hey, you can't have chips, what does she want to do? She wants to eat chips. And she doesn't know why. It's like telling your kids because I said so. They're going to want to do it because they want to know why. So with her, it's the identity. We attach the identity. What is the identity you want? If you identify with a flexible dieter who can do that, then that's great. That's going to help you actually be able to do that the right way and fit them in your macros. But if it's that's not the identity you're chasing, you're going to slip up, you're going to overeat. It's just, it's a common theme, right?

And this is why I call it the art of coaching. It is, it's, it's, it, it's so, it's so nuanced in detail. Like, you know, my coach uh always says, if I'm confused or slipping on something and I'm having a questioning things, he's like, the man that you want to be, what would he do? I'm like, uh it's so it's like you you just reframe it like that. You're like, oh god, that makes sense. That's so clear now. Like I know exactly what the man I would want to be would do in this moment.

I'm just not doing it. And the power of that question, too, is that he's asking you versus telling you what the man you want to be would do. Because there's a lot of buy-in when you are determining and answering that question, right? And even for we have found a lot of people, you know, there's some people we run into, like entrepreneurs and stuff and business owners. It's like, what are your core values? They'll they'll list them off. They know everyday person who's busy with life, we ask them that, like, I don't know. I mean, I believe in this and I think you should be this way. And I'm like, let's spend some time. Like, your values don't need to match mine, they need to match who you want to become. Like, let's let's list that out. And we actually have them write them out, we have them create their identity statements. And I was I was resistant to it at first, to be honest with you, because it gets into a level of woo-woo in psychology that is just it's deep. I love program design. I love nutrition science. I'm a sports nutritionist by trade and a strength coach. Like, that's not, you know. But between the art of coaching, which I that is huge with me, and somebody on my staff who's also a great coach, but has her master's in psychology, and we put those two things together, we started to really see this and we tested it, and it's just it's worked so well. And I think it's it's just one of those things when you can get somebody, I mean, dude, you can after you can go look at the reviews. Some of them people are talking about how life-changing the coaching program was. And there's been times where I've had to comment on them and also add the 40 pounds they lost that they forgot to mention because I want people on Google to see that, but they don't even they don't even think about it, right? You know, it's they they could lose that weight, and if it wasn't a good experience, they would not leave a review and say it was a bad experience.

Yeah. So you know, there's uh I'm sure you're fully aware of this, but probably over the last from 2020 to 2024, there was a flood of online coaches, right? And there was a lot of mentoring going on, and it was all templated. It was like you pick a niche, right? Pick uh, I don't know, commonless like busy executives, right? I helped busy executives lose 50 pounds in X amount of day. Like it was it was just formulae, like pick a niche, pick the thing, pick the time, like, and then this is the promise, right? And then you just put that up on your website, you start DMing people, you know, you hold a webinar and you're gonna make over $10,000 a month, right? Just that easy. So there is this, I'm sure I imagine, and you can tell me, but this is just I have no stats to back this up, but there was a huge, you know, explosion of online coaching. And I feel like maybe there's is there a retraction going on right now? Is it is it maturing into something different? Like, where do you think the whole state of things are now post-pandemic? Because it's a different world.

No, yeah. So we saw a big increase before and at the beginning, like right before Coast, because I started my online company in 2017. So it wasn't a ton. And so my niche was fat loss. That's it. Not much, like not nearly as specific as some of these gurus want you to be. And and I do think you should probably be a little more specific now, but there wasn't there wasn't as much of this noise. And we were growing really well, and then COVID hit, and I didn't know it was gonna happen, and then we grew more because everything had to go online. But now, all these years later, 100%, like last year, I think was a big year of people falling off. I started seeing all these people who were like running online coaching companies all of a sudden just do business coaching. They're just mentor now, they just are business, which I've made a big point of even recently because I do the mentoring now, but I do it because I want to help and I want to change the industry. My bread and butter is tailored coaching method. Like we help people lose fat. Like that is my that pays my bills. Like that's what we do. And so all of last year I saw a lot of that. I saw a lot of people quitting, just giving up and getting other jobs because it was starting to be that way. And then this year we're starting to see only so many people left or like the really good coaches being able to make it. I think it is just a matter of market sophistication. You know, every time there's a new industry or a new thing, the market explodes and everybody's doing it. It's supplements were probably the same way. There was like a million different types of whey protein or types of pre workout or creatine or these things. And then eventually it kind of just fades off and these other companies fizzle out, and only the ones that were rooted in a really good product or service or meaning stick around because. The market and the audience, the people, the buyer, they've been more educated on what is good and what's not. And it's a lot easier to pick it apart now, you know. So I think, and the hard part is that if I look at even just what I did as an example this whole time, it's not stuff that is quick wins. Like it's not gonna go from zero to 100k a month overnight. It, you know, it's deliberately coaching people and creating content that's valuable, not viral, but valuable. And every once in a while, one gets a ton of views, but I've never had a viral post. It's just been this like snail-paced growth over the last 16 to 17 years. And I think that's not that you can't have fast growth, but I do think that's like it's it's unusual. It is. It's like the iceberg picture, you know, where it's like the top of the icebergs over the water, but most of it is underneath. You can't see it. Yeah. I think that's kind of how it is.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's my mindset, but whenever things are going too well too fast, I'm like, what is going on? Like, what's gonna happen? Something's gonna happen. Something's gonna happen. This isn't this isn't natural. And you know, the same thing happened with the gym owner space. And I came from the CrossFit gym world, and there was a lot of subpar operators, gym operators, who became consultants and coaches, right? In fact, I yeah, I mean, I I will won't name any names, but I was part of like a somewhat exposing one, and I was like, wait, this doesn't make any sense. And it happened. So you gotta, I think here's the thing if people are picking a mentor, just do your homework. Like, don't don't get fooled by the the social media posts and the the Lamborghini and all that shit.

I know. What I always tell people is if you number one, Google the person. If they actually are who they say they are and they are successful, something should pop up. You know, you should get some information, good or bad, I guess. But most of the time there should be some stuff that like you can see and read their history on. Number two, if they're teaching you how to run a coaching business, especially or run a gym or anything, you should be able to find the gym or the coaching business they ran. There's been multiple people that have like grown as these social media business coaches for coaches. And I will look everywhere and I'm like, I don't even know what company you ran. What who did you coach? Where are your transformations? Like, how do you, how do we know that you you knew what you were doing? And it shouldn't be that hard to find. And then number three, it's look at their values, like I talked about before with our clients, even. Do they align with your values and do they live a life that you want to live? It's part of finding a mentor too is looking at what they have in life and saying, Do you want to emulate this? You know, there's like I'm very I'm very big on family. And so there's a lot of things that I don't do because of the time it would require me to do, I'm not willing to do. Like I'm not willing to post three times a week on a day during the weekend or get all over my story and share my family life and everything all the time. I'll post funny pictures of my bulldog or my daughter every once in a while. But when I'm home, I'm home, you know. So it's there's certain things that I think you have to look at. And what does that person possess or have in their life? Do you want that? If you do, then they might be a good mentor for you. But if if they just have money, I don't know about that, you know.

Do they like do they? And do they, yeah.

Yeah, that's the biggest thing.

I mean, any anyway, yeah. Anytime I see someone posing with a nice house, right? Super hot girlfriend or super hot boyfriend and like the nice car, I'm like, that's that smells, it stinks, right? It stinks. How do you have time for all this? I want to talk about AI and it's it's gotta have, I mean, it's having a I just published a LinkedIn article today on and I sorry for people who listen to this show regularly because I say this stat all the time. Because when ChatGPT Health came out uh in January, they made the announcement. The this this number uh punched me in the face. It was they at 230 million users every week make a health-related inquiry, right? So I wrote a whole thing about, you know, this is and it's changing consumer behavior. You know, it's it's becoming the first line of many things of inquiries, questions. It's gonna be the they're gonna first try to write a program on Chat GPT. Yeah. So when you look at like its its direct effect on the online coaching space, like where where is where are the opportunities and where are the threats you think for for your specific vertical?

Yeah, I just did a whole presentation on this the other weekend at the mastermind when we rescheduled. I had a mastermind here, all on AEO, answer engine optimization, which is basically the new SEO. Both are important. And this is actually a big piece of why my business has grown the way it has, is actually been SEO. It's been my website and the fact that I've always I wrote a blog this week. I've always spent time putting out information that people can find when they search, because nobody goes to Instagram or TikTok and searches what are the best training splits for females trying to build muscle. But they will go to Google and I'm gonna pop up because I wrote an article on that. So I think AI is is changing the industry in a good way, to be honest with you. I'm I'm actually very excited about it. And I would even wonder, because I didn't read that, but I'm I'm wondering what the inquiries are because we have somebody apply for coaching at least once, if not two or three times a week, solely from an AI search engine. They go to ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude and they ask specific questions or inquiries and they stumble upon me and my company. And it's by design. And so I think if you're a good coach and you understand business, not just social media, but business, you can leverage this time to get discovered way easier, especially if you have good information to share. Because I can take I can record a podcast and then I can take the transcript of that podcast and I can prompt AI to write an article in my words and source its sites from my website because I've been writing articles for 16 years. And then I can formulate it in a way that's optimized for AEO so that when they ask questions and it's giving them answers or that it's writing a workout, they're linking the tailored coaching method because it's pulling information from my website to give them the advice, right? And so they're gonna trust my logo because they see that as the source that AI is using it. AI is a genius, right?

So do you want to know some of the top inquiries? Because this was part of my research yesterday. Yeah, absolutely. So number one, this won't shock you. How do I lose weight fast but keep it off? Number two, what should I eat to build muscle and lose fat? Number three, create a workout program for my goals and schedule. Number four, how do I recover faster after hard workouts? Number five, what supplements should I actually be taking? I could keep going on a couple other ones, but those are the big, those are the top five. No surprise, right? The first two are really about nutrition and fat loss, which is still the thing. And GLP ones fall in around number eight.

Yeah. Good. Glad they're number number one. So, with knowing that, what I would be doing is writing an article on my website that's optimized for SEO and AEO about how to lose fat fast and sustain it for the long run. So, because that's what they search, literally. And it's gonna give advice on that. There's a lot of different ways that AI trusts you, but you, you know, 60 to 65% of Google searches are no-click searches now, which means that they stop with Gemini's summary. So they search something, they see the summary, they stop there. I do that all the time. I do it all the time. There's only three links that it provides in that summary. The question that coaches should be asking is how do I become one of those links? Because if they're gonna click anything, it's gonna be in there. And if they don't click one of those, they're gonna click show more. Show more gives them more answers. And then it becomes a chat window. So even if you don't have the Gemini app, it becomes a chat on your browser and it goes, Would you like me to search this too? And you go, Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm the guy that looks at that and I go, okay, after it asks for this fat loss thing or whatever, what's Gemini saying they should look for next? Because they're probably just gonna click yes instead of typing up another question. And man, we've seen so many different things. Um, it'll ask about pricing, and a lot of people don't put pricing on the website. I do now. Um, there's a lot of times it'll ask, people will ask. I don't know if Gemini's prompting this or not, but they will say they want somebody who's not an influencer, which is interesting and really cool, actually.

So I've had multiple people specifically ask for not an influencer.

Yeah, I've had multiple people hire a company and they tell us that um when they're on the said the the onboarding and sales call, they'll tell the coach that they were searching uh for fat loss coaches who were well known but weren't influencers. Like one person said, uh, have a big following, but not too big of a following that they become an influencer. Because you think about it, they're just talking to it, they're typing or texting like this, so just sharing its thoughts. So then you go, okay, well, how do I portray that I'm a great coach? I'm well known, but I'm not an influencer. I gotta figure out how to portray that on my website because AI is gonna find that. So it's it is tough. And it it's one of those things you have to update constantly. So I have a block every single week that I update my A AEO and SEO. I'm going through my website and I have different softwares I use to figure out, you know, what is AI looking for to make me trustworthy, to make me be more searchable and discoverable.

What are some of the softwares that you'd recommend?

So, first I would tell people to read this book first because some of the softwares won't really make sense unless you read on this stuff. But the book uh Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan, I think it is. It's a black cover with like a colorful Endless Customers. It's all about AEO. And they talk about, I think it's trust, education, experience, something else. Like they have their acronym, but they go over so much. And it's it was the most eye-opening book I've read in the last couple of years. And he has a software, and I can't remember what it's called off my head. It's some kind of like AI trust thing. And I pay yearly for it, and I just every month I get a report of what's doing well and where it's lacking. And sometimes it can be as simple as this morning, one of the things I, because my block was today on Thursdays, one of the things I fixed was that my address on one search engine place was different than my address at the other place for the facility. And it, you know, it looks at Bing, Apple Maps, Google Maps, Yelp, like all these different places, and then your website, each footer in your website, and then Google. And the difference was parentheses around the area code on one and not the others. That was it. And then one time it was um it was street instead of ST, period. So all that recognizes is differences and goes, that's not trustworthy, which is crazy. And it's not gonna like knock everything, but all these little things add up. I had a source that was cited incorrectly for a peptide article we did, and I just had to fix the source. But like I would have never looked for that if I didn't have AI looking for me and then telling me, go fix this. Right. So again, if you are business savvy and you're looking at what AI is doing, it can be a really powerful tool to get people in front of you. I think where people go wrong is where they just use it to be chat bots, and then people are talking to robots or they have it create content for them to the point where it's so scripted and obvious, or it's clear that you didn't create that. There's a balance to be had, I think, with using AI to create content faster or like get your juices flowing and then manually go from there, especially now because people are craving it. You know, it's almost like less edited content does better because people want just real, which is funny. But yeah, I think like the AI thing, I totally believe it, man. The I think the searches are going up and up and up. And at some point, people like AI doesn't have a value system, so nobody's going to get attached to that that search in or that bot or that app. And it's not going to help people transform long term because it can't tap into your values. It can't help you shift your identity. It can just give you information. And so it's not going to replace coaches, but it's going to guide them to a point where they get some result, maybe, if if any, but if not, they're going to get frustrated that somebody's not really holding them accountable, right? And not helping challenge their values and their beliefs and their like their future self. And when that point comes up, they're going to ask AI to give them the best recommendation for a coach. And I know we're going to get recommended by the people we want it to recommend us to because they're our avatar. And it's because of these little things.

What about threats? I mean, there seems some pretty obvious ones, right? It's like it's going to write a program. I mean, I talked about this recently too. Like, I think it was back in it was back to I was watching a football game and ChatGPT had a commercial come on and it was like this young man puss in, you know, inquiries like, uh, hey, write me up, I want to be able to do 10 pull-ups by February, right? So it writes about the plan. And I was like, oh shit. Like they're going right after the fitness professional, right? That's like a very targeted ad. So that's like the obvious stuff. Like, what where what where do you see the threats for the online coaching space?

I see the threat is for bad coaches. I think it's just like I literally have zero worry about it at all. I think I'm actually excited for a lot of the market sophistication I was talking about earlier because I think this is part of what's going to weed out the bad ones because I see that and I go, cool, you can get kickstarted quicker, but what happens week three when your shoulder's bugging you or you got bad sleep, or all of a sudden you realize you can't do as many as you did last week because you haven't deloed and your nervous system's fried from the travel that you did. AI just doesn't, it's not going to pre-plan or program those things, and you have to prompt it so many times to do it right that people don't want to do that. And when you don't do it, you skip a workout, it doesn't make you feel bad. So it's like, you know, you have to be attached to it personally, right? So you have to have a coach that respects you. And if a I I've played with it too to C, and I just don't think it, I don't think it can write as good of a program. Even like if you think of full-blown training sessions, the sequencing of exercises between start to finish, as well as what I do today going into morrow, the overlap just from an anatomy perspective and a muscle tissue perspective, tendons, ligaments, like it just it doesn't comprehend those things. It can't factor in some of those nuances that is like, to your point, the art of coaching. And I think the only people who understand program design on that level, though, they've put a lot of years into programming and understanding it. And so I think it's going to actually clear out the just bad coaches from the industry, hopefully, and help the good ones stand out more.

Yeah, it makes total sense, man. You know, the the few minutes I got left here for you, I got to ask this question because you, you know, you do focus on fat loss. Like, what what are you doing with GLP ones, man? Like it's it's everywhere. You know, I I can say it anecdotally. Like I was at a barbecue uh on Monday for Memorial Day, and like I talked to at least three people who just flat out told me, like, I didn't even ask. They're like, oh yeah, I've been taking trosepatide. I'm like, oh, well, yeah, I can tell. You've obviously you're very skinny. But yeah, where's your stance? Are you learning to live with it? Are you learning to um work with it? Are you kind of keeping it at arm's length? Like, where do you guys, where do you guys stand on it?

My my thought process on the whole entire peptide scene, specifically for fat loss, like weight loss peptides, and you know, whether we're talking about that or some aglutide or anything, I believe it from a medical perspective, I think it can be honestly great. You know, if somebody is 350 pounds and they should be 150, then ASAP, go get a prescription. You know, it's gonna help. When we talk about the behavior change aspect, changing the behavior of somebody who has become 200 pounds overweight is difficult. That's rewriting an entire life and environment, you know. So if a drug can help speed that up, I am all for it. I think it's a shame that during the Super Bowl they had Venus and Surrey and Williams and Kim Kardashian and these people saying that they're taking it and that's why they look the way they look, which is not true. They've looked that way. I mean, she's been a professional tennis player. She's looked that way since she was a kid.

Yeah, she's always looked great.

So that stuff, I have a daughter. So like seeing anything remotely close to like influencing daughters in the wrong way. My wife modeled before I met her, and so she's had her fair share of just the mental side of, you know, being thin and people telling you you need to be thinner. I just that part gets me. But my response to it often too is like, awesome, what's next? Because if you're getting it for being overweight and your doctor's prescribing it, when you lose the weight, your insurance isn't gonna pay for that. It's expensive. You're not gonna pay for it. You didn't form the habits, you didn't develop self-control, self-discipline, self-belief, or any self-respect because you took a shortcut. So it's you're not doing the things that are actually gonna help you sustain that long term. So you took a shortcut, which is way more satisfying. Don't get me wrong, because you got to put in the work. That's like our personal brand and our podcast and everything. It's choose hard because we were telling clients that forever. It was like, hey, choose hard. Choose hard today, live easy tomorrow. Like that was always the thing. And it's not easy, but it gives you what you want long term. It's choosing what you want most over what you want now. And I think that every time I've talked to somebody about this, and this is partially because they come to us already making that decision. Like, I don't want to go that route. So it is easier for me to say this. But in general, I'm not, I'm not overly concerned about it because I've just I've seen, I mean, now we're seeing studies of, you know, muscle atrophy and bone loss and all these things. And not to mention, most of these are just an extreme appetite suppressant. And so when you get off of it, you're probably gonna gain the weight back. And so once we start peop seeing people gain weight again, it's we're gonna go back to the drawing board and they're gonna start trying to create the next drug that doesn't cause that. And it's just, you know, it's not even if what is it, like lap band surgery or whatever, they put a rubber band around your stomach. The suicide rate goes up when you get that surgery. And you know, part of the reason is because those individuals have a coping mechanism of eating food. So they don't know how to handle stress and depression and anxiety. So they eat. And when you put a band around their stomach that doesn't allow them to eat, they can't handle stress, anxiety, or depression. Suicide goes up. Like all these different strategies. There's always a consequence and it always leads back to you got to do the work. And I believe the future of coaching is the identity piece, the future of online fitness, regular, even gyms. Gyms have it. We've I was just in Texas teaching our entire identity-based coaching model to a gym. They have three gyms, so all their staff met up at one place, and I would run them through a full day of learning on this because half the half the battle's already done for them. If you grade a good gym and you have good retention, people walk in the doors and they feel the energy, they feel the values, they feel the identity shift. You don't have to do anything. I'm on a screen across the country. I gotta, I gotta have some strategy here to make this happen. So gyms have it even easier, right? But I think like the more I see all these things happen, AI can't provide that. Semaglutide and traceptide and all these things, they can't provide that. Lap band surgery, all these other surgeries, they can't provide that. It all boils down to identity and values. And honestly, it's hard for people because there's a lot of coaches in the space who aren't in shape and they don't practice what they preach and they're not out there busting their ass and tracking their macros and doing the things they tell their clients to do. So they don't possess the identity or the values. So the client's not going to respect them enough to do it too, right? And then the other side of it is they don't know how to teach it. It goes back to that all or nothing mindset. I can joke around and say, I'm drinking this rock star, I spill some and I dump it all on my head. But how does a person watch that and go, okay, now I understand how to change my behavior so that I don't go all or nothing on the next, you know, shot or glass of whiskey I have? They don't. They have no idea. So it's it's a difficult path. So I think it's again, it's gonna weed out some coaches because they don't know what to do with this stuff. I know that it's not gonna hurt us because we give something that it doesn't give. And those people who go that route, unless they were the 350-pound person, even them, honestly, they're gonna come to us because that person might lose 200 pounds and then gain 10 or 20 back. Big deal. That's a huge win, right? But now they want to lose that 10 to 20 and they need to shift, they're gonna come to us. So it's it's sad the way it's going. I think it's like a lot of modern medicine and the medical side of tech and stuff, it's great. It's great advancements, but I think it can be a very bad thing depending on how it's used. Yeah.

Oh, that was great, man. That was probably the most thoughtful and human-centric answer I've gotten to the GLP one question on this show. So well done. Thank you. Man, I know uh I know you gotta run. So Taylor made coaching, you have a certification coming up. Your podcast is killer. I really uh, you know, I'm not a consistent listener, but I do kind of duck in every once in a while, pick out an episode and listen. So um, you know, as one podcaster to another, I think it's an X excellent work you do there. Um yeah, man, where where do you want people to go? Where do you where do you want people to find your stuff?

Yeah, I mean Google My Name or TailoredCoaching Method.com, you're gonna find all this stuff there. Instagram I post pretty regularly, Taylor Coach or just Cody McBroom. Podcast is choose hard, as I said before. Uh I I would encourage people if you if you're into the stuff I'm talking about, um this the certification, this is actually cool. I bought the the business license online coaching specialist certification in like 2018 and just sat on it. I was like, I know I'm gonna do something, and I didn't start until this uh just this past year in 2025, we started building it out. So the first level won't be out until the early 2027. Uh we're starting to test it and use it with some of our mentor clients and stuff, all on behavior change level one. But for some of the stuff that I'm talking about, like even my podcast, I have a series one science of self-control, science of self-discipline, science of self-belief, and then science of self-control uh respect. You just Google my name and Google those things, or Google my name and uh identity, standards, values. I've done content on those where it's a really big deep dive into the science about why this matters so much. So if there's coaches listening that are interested in how do we how do I get my clients to actually do that stuff, you know, go check out some of the free podcasts that I talk about. This it's I mean, it's it can be honestly such a game changer for your business. Awesome, man.

Well, Cody, thank you very much, sir. It's been an absolute pleasure. And uh yeah, man, I look forward to hopefully getting it back on. Maybe next year we can uh give me a little catch up on the online fitness space. Yeah, I would love to, man. Thank you. Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, Cody McBroom.