Fixing the Affiliate Model - Craig Patterson, CEO of MadLab

There's people out there that call themselves business consultants and they they kind of think they're part of competition and they write ridiculous articles countering what we're saying. And and you know, they're saying that you should keep your coaches and clients away from each other and don't let them foster that haunt. I mean, dude, if you want to go bankrupt, that's a great, that's a great strategy. Whoever thinks that's the the game to play, it's a miserable life.

Hey fitness fans, welcome back to the Future of Fitness podcast interview series. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and this is episode number 42. I talk to Craig Patty Patterson. He is the CEO and founder of Mad Lab. And this episode is most certainly going to rattle some cages and ruffle some feathers, and I'll tell you why in a second. Before I do that, I want to ask you to consider some action. So, our mission at the Fitness Marketing Alliance and Future of Fitness podcast is to push the fitness industry into the modern digital age. And what that means is helping fitness professionals establishing a dominant digital presence, whether that be for their brick and mortar or their online revenue streams, whatever it is, you gotta get online and you gotta start creating. And we have a free group. It's called the Modern Fitness Pro. And it's on Facebook, it's a closed group. Uh within there, we are pumping a ton of great content, uh, Facebook lives, Q ⁇ A's, on everything from um search engine optimization to add words to uh fitness tips to all kinds of hugely valuable information and it's for free. So go check it out, uh, apply for it, and if you're a good fit, we'll let you in and all the information will start flowing your way. So it's free. Why not? Right? Now, let's talk about this interview. So I've been in the game for a while, uh, as far as CrossFit goes, since 2008. Craig's been in for a very long time. He opened CrossFit Vancouver, which is the number four affiliate of all time. He's seen a lot of things go up and down, he's seen the ebb and flow of what goes on with the affiliate movement, and we're both in agreement that things are different now, right? Ever since circa 2014, uh things have been a little bit more challenging. And what that means is people uh in the business and affiliate owners need to become better business people. They need a better business model, and the model is broken. I said it. The current model for most gyms in the crossover world is broken. And MadLab is out to fix that, and Craig is the man to do it. And I'm very proud of this interview. Um, it's authentic, it's real, it's something that everybody should listen to if you're in that sphere, even if you're not, even if you're just a fitness professional and you want to notice trends in the market, uh, Craig's your guy. So without further ado, Craig Patty Patterson, the CEO of Mad Lab. All right, fitness fans, welcome back. This is Eric Malzone, your host. And today I am talking to Craig Patterson, otherwise known as Patty. He is the CEO of Mad Labs. And I have a couple questions for you, uh Patty, just to get started. So give people some some history about who you are, uh, what you do, and within the fitness industry, what do you stand for?

That's a good one. Uh Patty, the pink pig, Wolverine, Will the Beast. Uh I never had a nickname in high school. It's funny. Uh and now since I've been uh since I've owned a gym, I've gone through like five of them. So I uh I grew up in a small town, a fishing village, uh Gas Bay, Quebec, uh in Canada. And uh, you know, we grew up in a very small community. Uh one that been there, like my it's gonna lead into why what I stand for here. So allow me a little bit of a birth there. But so it was a small town, it's a community where you know people didn't have a lot, but they were pretty rich with uh community in life. Uh, you know, when you go back a generation or two, like my mom comes from shipwrecks and the potato famine. My dad, uh his family are pioneers after the English-French Wars and founded our, I mean, his original house is not far from where I live right now, within a mile. Well, 1763. So it's got a long history, and the place is terribly cold and shitty in the wintertime, and they're economically depressed now, and you know, all the fish are gone, all the trees are cut, and all the all the minerals are out of the ground. So that's what's left, right? Uh I went to McGill Engineering. Uh I probably should have, I shouldn't have gone into business instead of engineering. I had businesses since I was 12 years old, and I've wrote a few stories about that. They're kind of interesting. But uh I got in, I was uh worked for two Fortune 100 companies when I got out of school for a better part of almost a decade. And then I um, you know, I worked at the E semester in Canada and you know, got sent out to Vancouver at some point uh 1998, I guess it was, 1996. Um 46 years old right now. So um yeah, and then I started my own engineering, worked for a small engineering firm, and then I started my own engineering firm. Uh did that for three or four years. I'd like to say I sold it, but basically uh it became so popular so fast that me and my partner had to fight over the spoil. So I learned about who had money and backing and could afford lawyers and who couldn't. But uh I got enough money where I didn't have to work for a while, a little while, you know. I had a breathing room for a few years to figure it out. And I wasn't I wasn't uh very far on that journey. I was about two days on that journey. If I I don't have to work right now, when I uh someone gave me a link to uh Greg Glassman's What is Fitness, and uh I wasn't much of a computer guide. I read it, I was like 2004, and uh I went down, he just turns out he was in Seattle the next day, like it happened really fast, and I went down and hung out with Greg, and we became uh I don't know if it was fascinated with each other or enamored or anyway. He became my mentor. And uh I ended up uh first time I met him, I think we talked for like 14 hours straight, went to lunch and dinner together, and ended up having drinks that night. And uh long story short, uh I started the fifth across the affiliate in the world in 2004. And uh it's been a long, very long journey. I've seen a lot of things uh in this industry. Uh but from day one, I there was no commercialization, no one knew what CrossFit was, no one had a clue how it was gonna run. Um Greg knew that the the group X model that's out there now probably wasn't gonna work, and you know, you could tell this story forever. Um, but we always did things a different way. And I did it from personal training. And I I CrossFit wasn't a group exercise class then. It was that was just starting to happen. Greg was a the best personal trainer probably on the planet, and he was unbelievable in the energy he had and how he trained people, and so I started off just personally training people and then eventually put them in a small group after they probably did 20 personal training sessions and and uh we went from there. And you know, uh I hired partners and we almost went bankrupt uh because we went through a group X model for about a year and had to buy them out. Actually, they paid me to leave. Uh, long story short, I went back to kind of what you see as mad labs, probably about five of MADLAB's eight laws. Uh, friends of mine joined me, one of my friends in engineering joined me. Uh friends I grew up with in the my hometown joined me, and I had like people with like, you know, we were in law school, they're like, fuck that, I'm gonna come join you. And and uh we kind of came up with a prime directive, uh Eric. And it was like it's the thing I I had to make it work for my coaches because they were my best friends. If it didn't work for them, they were gonna be pissed at me or they're gonna be gone, right? So we couldn't lose a client back in those days. No one had any clue with branding. We didn't, I didn't even have a website, it didn't have a sign over the door, I was in a legal space, and we went from five thousand dollars a month to fifty thousand dollars a month from after I got it back on track. 2005 to 2007, I went from five to fifty thousand a month, and in this equation, half to win, right? So all the eight laws and all the stuff at MADLAB stuff that uh you know, I would say it's a law. We pretty much confirmed it with you know over a thousand gyms and what works and what doesn't work, and you know what we do. I'm proposing it's the hardest way to do a gym, it's not the easiest, yeah, right. And uh it's you know, people are gonna pay uh enough money so that uh we can get them keep them around and fit for life, and the coaches make a great living, but it's not easy getting there. It's very hard. It's a long or slow approach, uh, but it's real, it's legit, uh, and it's a hundred percent. Uh I'll and I'll I'll put it out there right now that the economics of my gym are better than any gym on the planet. Uh and I've measured by six measurements average client value or median client value, you could even look at if you're a transitioning gym. So our median client value is like 275. Um, our uh churn rate was below, it's actually ridiculous. So 16 people on 300 last year. It's a stable place with very little churn of the clients, which leads the dollar per coach hour. If they can make over $50 an hour on average, that's a good trade at the very least, which leads to total coach pay. Um, they they my top coach made 104,000. Um my guys averaged around, I think it was like 78,000, six guys.

Yeah.

And they're not going anywhere. We're not right now, anyway. And we got a housing crisis in Vancouver where it's the average home is 12 times the average take-home pay, you know. So, you know, it's it's long, slow growth. And uh at the end of the day, if they can make $80,000 a year, we're probably gonna keep them and they're gonna stay in the industry, and that keeps the clients. And I basically make 20% uh net positive cash flow or EBITDA, right? Um 20.7 last year, and I made a deal with all my people and my GM. My GM made almost I think she made 68 grand last year. So I mean I made a deal with uh with them that anything over 20% I give to them as uh a 401k contribution. We call it an RRSP, but it's basically I match uh up to I guess 1.4% of their gross pay, right? So we got all that going on. So and I look back at the weal, me and you have talked a little bit. I look at what's not working in the industry and what everybody's doing, it's the exact opposite of what we do. Like if you're the challenges now are like the last you call it the scraper. I've been thinking about that. Uh I mean it's if you own a if you're a CrossFit branded gym, you probably ran out of getting leads off your website uh or don't have enough, or you you know, some of the older guys haven't got a lead in nine months and this kind of thing, right? So you and they're running a system that's not sustainable. I mean, you any anybody can go hire some kids and pay them 15 or 20 or 25 bucks an hour, um, run a challenge that brings in a whole whack of cheap clients, um, and uh you're gonna you're gonna churn like 70, 80 percent of those in a year. The coaches get burnt out, and then eventually the clients don't come anymore because you've scraped everybody in the area and and uh then you're done. Yeah. Uh and you know, you you told me you've got some firsthand experiences of exactly how that goes down. So yeah, you know, I'm just I'm on here. You you brought me on here, is I just want to say there's an there's another way to do it, which has more integrity, more honesty, is actually really about community. Clients are happy, your coaches are happy. I mean, my coaches love me. My clients will walk in there and they're like, hey Patty, you know, I haven't been on the floor in seven years, and my wife's happy with me because we make uh we make a pretty good living, like uh 20.7 percent net positive cash flow on $819,000. You can do the math, is pretty good living. Uh and I'm the CEO of Mad Lab Group, which is a completely different company, which provides me with a totally different salary, right? So, yeah, what we stand for is honesty and integrity.

Yeah, those are huge pillars to stand on. And it's and you're right, you know, I just want to from personal, I've walked that path, you know, being a a gym owner for um, well, technically still a gym owner, but running a gym for uh over eight years, I did it all. Wow. And uh, you know, I did the, you know, we won't name names, but I did the market scraper with the six speech. Yeah, and I did it a few times. And I was first of all, first and foremost, it was actually one of the reasons I'm thankful I did it because one of the reasons I got into where I am now is I was just enamored with the power of digital marketing and what can happen. But it's like one of those good you know things. It's like once you give something really powerful to people who are misusing it, it can be uh very detrimental to a great cause. And I'm still in love with CrossFit. I still train myself in principles. And one of the interesting things I want to pull out and point to people is when Greg Glassman first started it, Greg Glassman's the founder of CrossFit, it was it was private training and small group model, this huge group model that that that has come about. I'm not sure where it started or who kicked it off or how it granted you know, I think it was the the promise of of easy money for the owner, um, but I don't know how. But I I want to know I'm gonna cut it right to the CrossFit. Where CrossFit's not what it was in 2013, right? Um you know, I own the gym, things were a full steam, it was it was great. There's leads coming in all the time, uh, organically and naturally. Um it's not like that anymore for most gym owners, uh affiliate owners. What what happened? What do you think happened?

Well, uh there's there's three issues. And uh if I talk about two of the other ones, I usually get some threatening letter or get trolls on me or something like that. So I'll talk about the one that I'm I can are most familiar with and and have been tackling in my gym for 14 years, is the business model. Right? I'll allude to the other two, the affiliate model where people brand themselves uh a name where they don't own the name, can't sell the name, and can't protect the name or their reputation is an issue. You know what I mean? There's no territories, there's no franchise laws, there's no you have no rights and no protection. That whole model, I mean, it's got its got its pros. You can get up to speed quickly and get in business quickly, and it's got its cons. Uh, if you want a long-term sustainable thing, and someone's running like 1999 groupons right beside you with the same brand, uh, it's and your model is I got this fifteen hundred dollars for two months uh to join my my gym, uh, there's gonna be a problem there, right? So that's that's one number one problem, right? A race to the bottom on price and service around a brand that is not a franchise. And you can't you can't really control it at that point. There's no control it, it spun out of control. And groupon was the first iteration that spun it completely out of control. I mean, I can remember doing my first exec programs back in 2009. Um, and you know, people were coming in and doing these massive groupon things, saying it was the greatest thing in the world. And I go, how are you ever gonna train a coach with that? How are you ever gonna track a coach? How are they ever gonna learn how to do personal training, high-level services? It just it absolutely tore the asshole out of everything, right? But and then you know that's one problem. But the business model itself doesn't work. It doesn't work for yoga, it doesn't work for Pilates, it doesn't work for golf, it doesn't work for a lot of these things, but we keep on doing them. Um I I don't I'm not sure if I know exactly why, but I can tell you my experience now of you know how the group, why the group exercise model is so prevalent and people want to keep on doing it over and over and over, uh when it clearly just doesn't work. It doesn't work as you can show, you can just pull the light up to it why it doesn't work. Show me a professional coach that's not a gym owner, doesn't have an online business or some scam or selling powders or abacare or potions, some horseshit, it's just a professional fitness trainer, right, who makes eighty to a hundred thousand dollars a year, has four weeks of paid vacation, and has flex time and doesn't work more than 30 hours a week. Show them to me. Someone just go pop them out. Where the fuck are they? I got three in my gym, and we got about 35 in our organization, right? And that's not a lot after we've been in business for five years with Mad Lab Group, and we got 30 in the whole group, you know, out of hundreds of gyms. I'm not saying it's easy to do, it's not. But if you if you're in the sea of people trying to give away their training and and being preyed upon by marketing companies and and uh and so forth, right, uh it's just led to the bottom being exploited. How I really look at it, Eric, when you sit in, I sit in a meeting with a with a group that have a hundred and thirty, sorry, three point seven billion dollars under assets, and they want to invest in the fitness industry, right? Um and they get tax credits for doing so, and there's all kinds of other multiple, I wouldn't call them scams, but incentives for them to put money into the fitness industry. And when you sit down with them, they've got that all figured out. Like if you look at who brought Soul Cycle and Orange Theory and all these all these things, I think they work on a very similar way. Is they're designed from the top down, they're designed from the investment community down, uh, or they're designed to drive a fad, for lack of a better word. But I mean, they know the clients are gonna 80% are gonna be gone in a year, right? 70% in nine months is kind of a number they always throw out in the model. And coaches are all gonna be gone, all of them gone in two and a half years. The average one lasts 18 months, right? And they're just cogs in the wheel for them to get the return on investment. So, you know, and usually that they want to get the return on investment, definitely before seven years, but ideally three to five years, and they get out. So here's an example of a recent franchise that I know of, and I have inner workings of. You know, you take a franchise and you get it up to 20, you show you show your return on investment, you show investors they can get that return on investment in three to five years, you know, they they invest, and these guys can sell it for 20 times the revenue, right? So they're out. The investors take it and spend it from 20 to 500 or 1,000, they get their return on investment, and then in seven to ten years it's all done. People are left holding the bag with it with the fractured, broken fret, right? And the clients are all gone in nine months for most of them. The coaches are just completely burnt out and you leave the fitness industry, and you know, everybody's left kind of disillusioned, who gives a fuck? And repeat, start the next one. You know, uh what I we're we're trying to do is be a closer to actually be preventative medicine and to keep professional coaches around for 30 years so they can talk to physiotherapists and doctors and so forth, and they can earn a wage that keeps them in the industry and allows them to, you know, raise a family and own a home and all these kind of things, right? Uh and the mechanism that we have for that is the best one I I've seen is if there's nothing else even out there closer, close to it. No one's even thinking of this stuff yet. Uh, and I'm not saying it's easy and I'm not saying it's a magic bullet, it's long, slow, and hard. Uh, but it's rewarding. I have a very rewarding life from it, you know. So yeah, that's that's what I see.

And I totally agree. I mean, I was at a you know, a similar but different vantage point. And I think one of the things with CrossFit when it came out and the popularity and what a disruptor it was in the in the industry, uh, things things were easy for a little while. And what I noticed within the community is that, and like any coach, we love our own cooking, right? And we thought CrossFit was the end all be all, and we decided, you know what, all that other stuff in the fitness industry, we don't have to take the time to learn the history of everything because that's the third issue.

That's the third issue. The third issue is is the protocol for fitness really 100% accurate with its functional movements and that's it. It isn't intense, you gotta go as hard as you can every day, as I said I was told, and it's constantly varied. Is that still the code or prescription for fitness? Um, probably not. Uh, it's probably been improved upon. Stop it. But it didn't matter. We got, I mean, I for 10 years I was crossfit, or nine, and we did we got a lot of people fit and we had a pretty good retention rate. We've gotten a lot better now since we have our own um mechanism for delivering the fitness, not just the mechanism, but the fitness itself has changed. It's a way more gentle than it used to be. I mean, in 2009, we were going fucking mental. Uh I I got I got adrenal fatigue from my own programming. Okay. Uh right. I I was pretty hardy and my mechanics were all good and everything moved good, and I didn't get broken. Mechanically, I didn't get broken. I mean, some twinges here and there, but for the most part, it held up from 33 to almost 40. And then I just had adrenal fatigue, where the point I just didn't want to get out of bed or ever work out again because we went hard every five days a week. Yep. And it was designed to fucking crush you every day, right? So that's the third problem. You know what I mean?

Yeah, and then you throw a low carb on top of that too. Yeah, that was the issue. I mean, I yeah, I went through a similar path. I I did uh up to a certain level of adrenal fatigue. I hired uh James Fitzgerald as my coach, and first thing we did was clean all that up, right? Yeah, he knows a lot about that stuff. Oh, he knows a ton. He's a wealth of knowledge. So we've kind of identified some issues, right? Um what needs to happen? What changes need to facilitate now in order to get this thing back on track?

Well, I mean, what the the quickest change that we can make in anybody's business that works every single fucking time, unless they're like completely insecure or broken people or burnt out or something critically wrong that I can't we can't do anything with, is we you can make a one change really fast. I mean, they're still branded CrossFit and they're probably still doing a ton of things wrong. And you know, I don't know if I can get them a lead or anything. Regardless of all of that, is change your fundamentals program from a group, a group uh on-ramp to one-on-one fundamentals uh and have a coach for life kind of set up. One coach, one client, and really foster that relationship instead of trying to fracture that relationship. Uh, there's people out there that call themselves business consultants and they kind of think they're our competition and they write ridiculous articles countering what we're saying. And you know, they're saying that you should keep your coaches and Clients away from each other and don't let them foster that pawn. I mean, dude, if you want to go bankrupt, that's a great, that's a great strategy. Uh, and you're gonna be hiring and firing coaches all the time, and you're gonna have to try and find new people for your gym and and marketing all the time. Like, whoever thinks that's the the game to play, it's a miserable life. Like you got everybody in your community you run into in the street has probably left your gym, right? And the coaches you know, they disrespect you and they've left. You know what I mean? Like I run, I I run into people that are not at my gym anymore and they come over and hug me. You know what I mean? And they tell me like it was unbelievable and whatever. But for the most part, we have a very low churn rate for coaches and clients. And I make a higher uh net earnings and a higher percentage on those gross earnings than anybody else I ever talked to, right? So it starts in one place. You need to start someone with one-on-one personal training to even pretend that you're training someone, you know what I mean? To even begin that we're a training facility, we're a coaching facility. Um, maybe that's the difference. Maybe you're not a coaching facility or you're a babysitting facility trying to babysit a thousand people instead of coach coaching a hundred. You know what I mean? Like you really got to decide what you want to be. Do you want to be the low-cost, high churn option, or do you want to be the high cost, high value option? Right? That's the difference. And maybe, and you know, sometimes I feel like we're yelling out into the wilderness, but and we were picking up yoga gyms, yoga doge studios, whatever you call them, and Pilates and dance studios are now starting to get a hold of us. And we started digging around, we saw some people in the uh in the martial arts world that similar had a pretty similar um setup to us, didn't have the coach compensation all figured out. Their churn rates were low, their average kind of values were high, people were happy in these places. Like, look at Arthur Murray. Arthur Murray's been around for a hundred years, they're doing something right, uh, and it's because they do one-on-one before you go out and learn how to ballroom dance and stepping over everybody's fucking toes in a group, you know what I mean? No one wants to dance with you, dude. You gotta you gotta sit down with a coach and do like 20 one-on-one sessions before you're allowed to get into the main group and start dancing with people, you know what I mean? Just it's just common sense. I mean, if you're gonna evaluate, you got somebody over 40 years old who comes into your facility, your protocols crossfit, and you're gonna throw them into a group class. You are out of your fucking mind if you think that's gonna save uh you don't if you're you're gonna get a high churn rate from that. There's just no two ways about it. You need to properly assess them, you need to have proper progressions, and you need to actually make them know the psychology. You have to really get in there and train these people. You can't do it with seven or ten of them all at the same time. I mean, it's it's ludicrous, right? It's just fucking ludicrous that people think that's gonna work. But the marketing companies tell them, yeah, no problem, right? Um, and media companies and you know, all of them, and you know, crosswit's a media company. Yeah, that's you know, that that works, right? Yeah, they don't even have the data around it. Like I looked at 1600 gyms over two years and saw the the way they were looking at stuff through Zen Planner. We looked at the churn rates and looked at what's going on, and it was like it was ridiculous the churn rates on those things, you know. It's just common sense. People are gonna be over 35 years old, they're gonna be slightly broken and need need to do things differently. At least be properly assessed, and then you know it's not just scaling, you gotta have progressions and all this stuff in a healthy gym, uh in one of your gyms that's that's that's healthy.

What percentage of the revenue is coming in from what's coming in from group classes, and then what other revenue uh streams are you seeing?

It's a great question. It depends on how mature they are in our model, right? So a new one could could actually have 50% or more. Like, you know, actually that's just starting up, it's 100% because the first two months there's no group training, right? You know, we've got a whole bunch of new new guys coming on. We just had like 47 brand new gyms come firing them through our MADLAB 101 product, and and you know, there's lots of enthusiasm there still, and and and they're like, How do we start? I go, you don't need any group classes in the first month. You don't need any first two months, you don't need one. What? Yeah, personally train everybody and then create your little group class, and you probably only need to do three classes, like you know, month three, probably only need three if it's just you, you need three classes a week, maybe four. Yeah, most five. That's it. That's it. You got five hours of group classes a week. Yeah, yeah, you know. I mean, the mistake people make is they they they come in and they they try and get a hundred people in the gym as fast as they can. They want to tell everybody they got more group classes than anybody else, and they get like 10 hours a week, and you know, half of those classes have probably got less than three people in them. You know what I mean? Like it's just all the mistakes you could ever make. You know, what works is like 180 degrees away from what the world's telling them works, right? It just is. Yeah, it just masked the problem's masked with too many leads, you know. I mean, in the CrossFit hey day, 20 and uh 10, 11 to 2014, right? There's three or four years there when it didn't matter what you did. You could fucking up short of throwing mud in someone's face as they came to the door or stepping on their toe and punch them in the mouth. Um the amount of leads coming in masked the the structural problems with the business, right? Now they're getting unmasked, so everybody's gotta go get new leads instead of fixing the basic model of training, right? They gotta go get new leads, new leads, new leads, and they just absolutely crush their whole business and their reputation and the scrape every potential client around the market to never want to come to the gym again, right? Yeah.

Well, I think changing the business model is very uncomfortable. Uh going and trying to get new leads is is the natural and uh least resistance. And I I remember the first time when I switched uh my on-ramp to a private on-ramping. So it was a minimum of five, it's served with an assessment, five private training sessions, and the to stick it the sticker price was $350 American. I remember the first time I asked somebody that I was so nervous on the inside. I thought somebody was like, they were just gonna walk right out the door, like no thought about that. Like, yeah, that sounds good, let's do it. I I went out and told all my coaching up. I'm like, oh my God, something amazing just happened. But no, that's just the way it's always been in the fitness industry. We were just so set in this mindset of like having these unlimited amount of leads that come in because you know what? I'll just do a uh a group on-ramping program on Saturdays where it's free for the first session and I'm gonna get 10 people every Saturday. It's just that that went away. Yeah. I think what I here's what I think.

The Saturday free class, that was another big mistake everybody made. I did that a couple of weeks and was like realized how bad that was.

Yeah. I here's what I think. I I think uh I think the I think there has to be some pain before people are ready to change. I think that's just the natural condition of things. And I think that the the the movement, the affiliate movement is feeling that now. And I think their your message is gonna start ringing truer and clearer than it ever has. So I'm extremely positive about having people like you within the community because I think it's time. I think it's time people say, you know what, it's it's a long-term thing. I gotta look at my business where it's gonna be at three, five, seven years. And the missing component to it, it's not it's not the owner and the client, it's the coach. Yeah. How does the coach make the living? Because it's gotta be, uh, and I've had no numerous people within uh, you know, who I respect in the industry point out the same issue, right? It's gotta be a triangle. There's gotta be three points.

Yeah, and you can't, you you cannot give it to them. They have to learn to earn it. So they have to be some pain. Like my all of my coaches suffered for at least two or three years before they actually learned how to become professionals. And it's not that they didn't know how to like people there's tons of great technical coaches out there. That's not what makes the difference. Yeah, you need personal development, you need professional development, you need sales training, you need how to enroll in training, you need to know how to retain people, you need to have you know, there's there's so much that goes into being a great coach from the human side. It's the same as being a great engineer or a great lawyer, right? A great engineer is not the guy that knows the most about building a build a building, he's the guy who brings in the most clients, right? In an engineering firm, I mean it worked my lawyer who I've been with for 14 years, right? He's been a client, he's been my lawyer for 14 years. He's now the senior partner in his firm. And I'm telling you, that shocked me. I go, how the fuck does this work? Because the litigators, the guys I love talking to, as I was I almost went accepted a law school after engineering school, I was just too bad and I couldn't afford it. Um and if I had been a lawyer, I would have been one of those litigators, but I would have not been the best lawyer because it would have not made as much money as the partners who can bring in the most clients and deal with all the issues, human issues of all their clients. You know what I mean? So I mean, at the end of the day, if you are, I don't care what your training is, whether you're an accountant, lawyer, architect, engineer, plumber, fucking electrician, you name it. If you don't know how to sell something, i.e. yourself, if you can't enroll another person in their in your ability to do your job excellently, you're gonna be a clerk, right? And what we have right now, we have hundreds of thousands of clerks in the fitness industry. They don't know how to get a client, they don't know how to train a client to bring their friends in to be get more clients. And that's what has to happen, and that's what we're working on. I mean, we have a business model, I think it's universal, that could be used in a lot of be used in the trades, it could be like you know, our whole thing is light on the background of a business model that's revolutionary, right? And I'm gonna say it again, it's not easy. We've had lots of people try this thing and not be able to do it, but they don't hate us for it. They just know where their faults lie and our ability to get them all the training they need. Like, you know, so we now we have a pretty good platform, we've got great software, and we're you know making relationships with all the best people outside of our industry to bring those technical skills into our industry, not technical skills, personal skills into our industry, right? We need to be able to talk to doctors, we need to be able to talk to physiotherapists, we need to have our our integrity and our confidence, our self-esteem, right, up there with at least a physiotherapist or a chiropractor. You know what I mean? Where you know, if but you I mean, if people want to go back to, you know, I'm gonna pay someone twenty an hour and I'm gonna go scrape uh 80 leads this month, and we're gonna try and sell them this $500 challenge for this many weeks, and you you actually think that's gonna get you long-term success where you don't have to replace the clients and the coaches all the time, then then go ahead, play that game. But you're gonna be replacing clients and coaches all the time. Yep. And you'll be no closer to having a great life as a business owner 10 years from now.

Yeah. Oh, that's beautiful. If I'm a fitness professional or a gram right now, what's the first step in getting involved in what you do in the movement that you're creating or having um yeah, if you want to know what we're up to, um we've got a great product.

We finally, my channel is my, I call him my architect now, but he was started off as my chief marketing officer, but he's really the architect of how our ability to teach people what we do and transform their lives into professionals. It's uh we created the first step in that, which is explaining what we do, right? I mean, we could do podcasts, me and you could sit here and do a 10-hour podcast. We wouldn't even be close to understanding exactly what we do. And what we do is actually elegantly simple, but infinitely complex to understand if you've never gone down the path, right? So it's called uh it's MADLAB uh 101, the fundamentals. Um, it's a free course, 21 days. You get access to seven different parts. Uh, I don't know how many courses are in it, uh dozens. Uh it's some real learning. Uh I used to charge a thousand dollars for a product that was worse than this. Um, but anyway, uh my architects say no, you got to give away free stuff so they understand it, and then you know, they then they go into the real paid product, which is $249 for the for the machine or $500 for the machine and the human uh to consult and guide them through the whole thing. So, you know, we're learning, get better and better at the machine, but I I still love having the human there to guide you, hold your hand and guide you through it. So we're gonna figure out as we go how to make it better and better and better. And you know, this software, I mean, this software costs us an awful lot of money uh and the processes and the people, it took us a long time. You know, I kind of went in hibernation for about two years. I did uh those two podcasts, like Rob Bulls Podcast and the Wadcast Podcast. I wrote that one article on breaking muscle, it freaked everybody out. And we had 300 gyms come in, and I had no humans to really guide them. And we had an online school that was static and said, here it is, right? And no real, yeah, no real, like almost like franchise cut sheets of how you would go about doing this. It was just all concepts. So now we're ready. We have that, we have the skills and those tools and those people and the processes and everything. So uh yeah, we're pretty stoked. So madlabgroup.com, yeah, you should be able to find us. Uh MADLA on Facebook, you should be able to find us and um yeah, check out MADLA 101. Awesome.

Well, Craig, uh Patty, thank you, man. I appreciate you sticking with it from a from a macro scale. I mean, it's it would be easy for you to just kind of go back into hibernation and and just live off your gym and and not do what you're doing for the whole movement. So from uh at heart, deep, deep hearted CrossFitter, uh, I appreciate what you're doing. And uh thank you for coming on the show today and sharing everything.

Thanks, man. That actually means a lot to me as I know you actually mean that, uh, because it isn't it hasn't been easy. I've faced bankruptcy doing this fight like uh three times, not just med lab group, but to come up with the eight laws and all the stuff we do is you know, and I know a lot of people out gym owners are out there and they're in trouble, and it's not a comfortable place. It fucking sucks. And you know, most people's answers I gotta get out of the fitness industry, right? So uh I'm podcommitted over here. So thank you, brother.

All right, you guys. That's it. That's Patty from the Mad Lab Group CEO, and uh thank you for listening. We'll we'll be in touch very soon. Hey fitness fans, don't leave yet. This is Eric Malzone, your host, and I have an extremely special offer just for you. If you go to fitnessmarketingalliance.com forward slash assessment, you can claim your complimentary digital marketing audit. Are you a modern fitness professional? Do you have some sort of online presence? Do you have a sneaking suspicion that your website is not performing optimally and therefore costing you money? Well, this is how you start to find out all the details. Just like fitness, you need to start with an honest and objective assessment. So go to fitnessmarketingalliance.com forward slash assessment, fill out the form, and we will have it to you within 72 hours. It will cover your overall site performance, rank from zero to 100, how you rank for your chosen keywords. So that's search engine optimization, your website traffic history over the last six months, so the ebbs and flows and what worked, what didn't, your website speed, which is highly relevant for people coming to your website and then bouncing off because it's working too slow, your social media presence, competitive analysis, and much, much more. So this is just the tip of the iceberg, but this is the starting point for building your online business. So please take advantage of it. We're offering it because we feel it's deeply important to you and the industry overall, and you can claim it by going to fitnessmarketingalliance.com forward slash assessment. Do it today, do it right now. Don't hesitate. This offer won't last forever. So thank you for listening. Greatly appreciate it. If you ever need to reach me, hit me up, Eric at fitnessmarketingalliance.com, and I'll be talking to you very, very soon.