34 - Why We're Doubling Down on The Mentor Team

Help Best

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

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

But WHICH basics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wasn't clear enough on the framework.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I added an expectation: in the first year, 20% of our clients would hit their NOB goal, with more reaching their incremental goals to set them up for success next year.

I kinda flubbed that explanation - I apologize. I'll do better next year.

Then I turned down two opportunities to start new projects, and ended my own META project so that I could reinvest close to 1M in training the mentor team - including the mentor summit, some experiments in mentorship, speakers, incentives and even this podcast. We made a few hires to help too.

My goal - the thing that fires me up and pulls me through the hard data-collecting and decision-making - is not to make TBB more profitable or to make TBB bigger. The only thing I want to make TBB is great.

One more thing: nobody else is doing this. No other biz coaches are worrying about client outcomes at all. Very few even track client outcomes. The ones who do tell me that if 20% are successful in the program, then it's a successful program. They say things like "20% will win no matter what, 20% will lose no matter what, and if you can move any of the remaining 60% a little closer to their goals, you have a winning program."

That's not good enough for me (and I don' t believe it's good enough for you, either.) Being the best business coaching program in the world is a huge goal. But it's attainable - and the path is to get the clients the best results.

Thanks for listening.