Your Multimillion Dollar Franchise-Start From The Bottom-Then Live The American Dream with Bedros Keuilian

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Your Multimillion Dollar Franchise-Start From The Bottom-Then Live The American Dream with Bedros Keuilian

I have the privilege of bringing you another super successful entrepreneur. He’s a titan in the fitness industry, a professional speaker, a high-performance coach and CEO of two-time Inc. 5000 listed businesses. Bedros, welcome to the show. Give us a little bit about your background. How did you get into what you do now?

We have to go back to my immigrant story. I’m an immigrant to the United States and we escaped the communist Soviet Union in 1980. I was six years old when we came to the United States. We were broke. We were poor. My dad only had $185 and it was a family of five of us. I was the child. My brother was fourteen years older than me. My sister was sixteen years older. As you can imagine, we didn’t speak English. We didn’t even know the culture. The next day, my parents were already delivering newspapers, pumping gas, working at a pizzeria washing dishes because they had to make the money so that we could have a roof over our head. For that first month in the United States, a friend of a friend of my dad has agreed to let us stay in his one-bedroom apartment. The five of us stayed in a one-bedroom of his apartment. He said, “After one month, you have to go because this is my apartment. I need to stay here. I’m doing my friend a favor.”

Growing up, I’ve eaten out of garbage cans. I’m not just talking about once or twice. It was standard practice for my dad to come after his third job in the evening, take me to the back of the grocery stores. These stores throw away foods that are expired or foods that have gone bad but they’re not completely rotten. My mom and dad would have me fish out that food out of the dumpsters. They would pick off the mold and we would eat it. This is how we had to get by. To give you an idea, in the first couple of years in the United States, I lived in fourteen different apartments. We got evicted and kicked out regularly. One apartment was worse than the next. One was so bad that I had lice. We were so broke that we couldn’t afford lice treatment from the drugstore. My mom had my dad siphon gasoline from a nearby car that was parked and she washed my hair with gasoline to kill the lice. I say this to draw the picture for you and your audience that people who think that they have it tough now, that they’re in a place of adversity and challenges. What we need to do is open our eyes and go, “I’m grateful that I can turn on the switch and light goes on. I can turn the faucet and water comes out. I can open the door of the refrigerator and there’s food inside. I don’t have scabs on my head because I have so many lice eating away at me.”

Fast forward 37 years in this great country, in the United States. Throughout that time, I was a fat kid. I ate a lot of junk food, a lot of government-assisted food. In high school is where I decided that I was going to get in shape so that I can go to prom. I had my eyes set on this girl named Laquaia. I knew that if I could lose 30 or 40 pounds and get in shape that by the time prom came around, I could ask her out. I was convinced that she was going to say yes. I did lose the weight in the summer before senior year and I read every muscle magazine I could get my hands on. I ate as clean as I could. I worked out like a machine but unfortunately, I still didn’t have the confidence to ask Laquaia to the prom so I never went. However, that was the biggest change-maker of my life because not only did I physically change. I started to gain confidence, self-worth and self-esteem. I started looking at my friends in the eyes instead of looking over their shoulders. I didn’t even have enough confidence to look at you in your eye when we’re talking, that’s how stunted my self-esteem was.

When I leave high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to work with cars, be a mechanic, a smog technician for a car. I was convinced that I was going to be a personal trainer and that I was going to help people in my community lose weight. Not only can they be healthy, that they can experience this life-changing, confidence-building thing that I did. Now being somebody pretty big, well-known and an authority in the fitness industry over the last many years has brought me. I own different coaching programs for fitness business owners, multiple live events and seminars. Our biggest animal is the Fit Body Boot Camp international franchise.

That has helped you too because of what you did for yourself. You can see the changes, the confidence and the transformation. You want to spread the knowledge, the insight and that transformation with people. From there, how did you transition as a personal trainer into a real business?

Multi-Million Dollar Franchise: If somebody wants to buy it, it is a desirable business to be bought.

I was a personal trainer. I was reading those muscle magazines and in the back of those magazines, there are the direct response ads and the little fractional ads that say, “Call this 800 number. Pay us $250. You get certified as a personal trainer because the average personal trainer makes $100 an hour.” In the mid ‘90s, the average personal trainer did make $100 an hour, but it was the average trainer who was a personal trainer to the celebrities and the stars. I got certified and all I had was one client. It was my neighbor’s mom and she was paying me $11 an hour. I would show up with dumbbells and exercise bands to her house three days a week and I realized, “I’m a certified trainer. I have what people want and need, but no one’s buying it from me. No one’s kicking down my door to get it.” I ended up working as a fry cook and as a bouncer at a bar on the weekends to make ends meet. It was the most embarrassing thing because I remember thinking, “There is no doctor who has a side job trying to make ends meet. There’s no nurse, there’s no chiropractor, there’s no architect, lawyer that has a side job.” Yet as a personal trainer, I have two side jobs and I knew other personal trainers who had two side jobs, three side jobs to make ends meet.

By this point, I had three clients about a year after being certified as a trainer, I had three one-on-one personal training clients. I was working at a Big Box gym similar to the ones you guys have, Good Life Fitness and out here it was called LA Fitness. I’m working there and my client one day stops halfway through his workout, his name is Jim Franco. He always called me kid. He goes, “Kid, you have a problem.” I go, “Jim, what’s my problem? We’re having a great workout. Did I screw something up with your workout?” He says, “No, you have a problem. You’re an order taker, you’re not a closer.” I said, “Can you explain more?” He said, “You’re like a waitress at a restaurant where I came to and I said, ‘I want to buy six months of personal training, three times a week,’ and you simply took my order. Every day that I see you when I come in here and I’m warming up to work out with you, I see you letting people walk that you could be selling thousands of dollars of personal training.” That was like being punched in the nuts. At that moment, I was depressed. I was in a funk. Truly I was offended because he likened to me to a waitress. He says I’m an order-taker. This guy was my first mentor. He’s in his 80s now. He was in his 60s then. It was the best lesson he gave me.

The next day, he showed up with a Tom Hopkins sales tape. He goes, “This guy, Tom Hopkins, is going to help you sell,” and I go, “Yes but it says selling for real estate agents.” He goes, “Anytime he says real estate agent, you mentally pretend that he’s saying personal trainer.” I go, “Okay.” All I knew was this client of mine is a millionaire. He drives up to the gym in four, five different cars every week. He works out 2:00 PM when everyone else is working. He knows something that I don’t. Tom Hopkins’ tape leads me to Brian Tracy. Brian Tracy tapes lead me to Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy leads me to Zig Ziglar. I’m listening to Tony Robbins’ cassette tapes. By this point, I’m buying burnt DVDs from eBay and engulfed in sales, direct response, influence, persuasion and marketing. Over the next few years, I had five of my own personal training gyms that I was running in San Diego.

There’s no relationship between being good at what you do and getting paid, but there’s a huge relationship between being able to close and getting paid. During those few years, what do you think are some of the things that you did or you’ve learned? Share two or three top lessons that you think propelled you to that success.

One of the biggest lessons for me is that there are people’s ability to buy and then there’s their desire to buy. I’ll say as Jim did, you can replace everything I’m saying about a personal trainer and say accountant, real estate agent or lawyer. As a service professional, we often think that because they have the ability to buy, they’re going to buy our services or they have the need. In my case, the person is 50 pounds overweight. They have high blood pressure. They have diabetes, yet they would give me an objection like, “I need to think about it. I need to go talk to my spouse,” and I realized your ability to buy does not make you a client. Your desire, your willingness to buy makes you a client. My job is to sell you the vision, the experience to overcome those objections before you ever give them to me. That when it’s time for me to ask for the sale the only answer you can give me is, “Yes, I’ll take the three or the four times a week,” and either one you buy, I win and you win. I win your money and you win your life and your health back. That was the ability to sell based on people’s desire to buy by making them want to buy instead of going, “She drove up in a BMW, of course she has money,” and therefore I expected them to buy. I never stirred their emotions, their desire to buy. That was thing number one.

Thing number two was and this goes for so many different industries. I know many people reading might say, “My industry is different.” In the mid ‘90s, personal training was sold like this. You would come up and you would say, “I’m interested in personal training.” I would put you through one free workout and I would say, “Do you want to buy five sessions, ten sessions or a twenty-session block?” Whether you bought five, ten, twenty, it didn’t matter. When those sessions were done, I would have to take off my personal trainer hat, put on my sales hat and go, “Do you want to buy five more? Ten more? Twenty more?” It’s always this uncomfortable situation. There are many weird businesses out there that should have their clients on a recurring income, recurring revenue.

I remember Jim Franco, my mentor, telling me, “How come I’m paying $40 a month to this gym and they take it out of my credit card, yet you keep selling me blocks of sessions when my blocks run out?” I said, “I don’t know, that’s how we do it in the industry.” He goes, “Forget what the industry does. What’s best for you and the client?” I go, “What’s best for me is to sell you once and then train you. I don’t want to be a salesperson. I want to be a trainer. What’s best for the client is to stay with me for the long haul so that I can only not help you lose weight but teach you a lifestyle so you can maintain your weight loss.” He goes, “Why aren’t you selling me a $600, $700, $800 a month program?” I go, “I don’t know, it sounds like it’s a lot of money.” He goes, “For me, it’s not.”

I was transferring my feelings then because I was a broke trainer and because of my industry, that wasn’t an industry standard for me. I assumed that nobody would pay $500, $600, $700, $800, $1,200 a month, which is ironic because now there are 1,800 of my clients. My coaching clients pay me $2,500 a month on a recurring basis. My coaching business came from the many years ago lesson that I learned from Jim Franco about my personal training business. When I opened up my personal training studios, all of my clients were on recurring income. The big third lesson he taught me was to always build my businesses with legs. Build your business with the assumption that if somebody wants to buy it, it is a desirable business to be bought. I said, “Jim, I want my five personal training studios and I’m going to have them forever.” He says, “You don’t know that,” and he was right because then a big brand of personal training studios was coming through San Diego and that’s where I lived at the time. The only reason they bought my gyms was that I had over 600 clients on recurring revenue for a twelve-month commitment. They were buying my receivables. I had built a business with legs because Jim forced that upon me. It was because of that I had my first multiple six-figure buyouts in my late twenties, which to me it seemed like $1 million at the time.

I have five salons and spas. I was the first guy who introduced the membership concept recurring into the industry. I also sold it for multiple six figures. I started a coaching business in the salon and spa industry. You sold the business. You accumulate a lot of knowledge and experience in the industry. How did you transition that to a retail business to being a thought leader, a coach in the fitness industry?

The timing was right. It was 2002 that I sold. The internet bubble had burst in 2000. I had this money in hand. The internet was starting to pick up again. I remember thinking, “I could either open up more gyms or I can start helping the industry.” The reason I even thought of helping the industry is when I had my five personal training studios, they were pretty small, probably the size of your salons, about 3,000 square feet was my biggest one. Personal trainers would call me from all over the country and they would say, “I heard you have five personal training studios. I’m trying to open up one. Can you give me some tips?” I go, “Are you located in San Diego?” If their answer was no and they weren’t located in San Diego, meaning they weren’t competitive with me, I would help them. I would follow up with them. I’d go, “These are the lead boxes I’m putting in. Don’t put your lead boxes in health food stores, it doesn’t work. Instead, put them in places like taco restaurants, burger joints, pizza parlors because that’s where people feel guilty about eating all that stuff.”

Multi-Million Dollar Franchise: One-on-one coaching is dead; it’s a waste of your time because it’s not anymore a scalable thing.

Everything I would learn I would teach these five or six guys who are from different parts of the country. They would follow up with me and they go, “It worked. I made the money. I’m opening up my gym. I’m signing up new clients,” and I did all this for free because why not? I enjoyed it. When I sold my gyms in 2002, I already had a fiancée who’s now my wife. We were going to get married in 2003. I said, “Maybe I want to coach and consult personal trainers.” I went all in. I parlayed that money and I didn’t even know how to build a list. In late 2002, I had my fiancée who’s my wife now. I said, “I want you to Google personal trainer Los Angeles, personal trainer Seattle, personal trainer Vancouver, personal trainer all over big cities. Find their website, scrape their email address and put it on the spreadsheet,” and I didn’t know what an opt-in was. I didn’t know there was a platform.

At the time I was using Constant Contact to send out mass emails. I’ve got 1,400 email addresses scraped off of a website, which I’m not proud of. Back then there was no CAN-SPAM law or anything anyway. I started emailing them individually and saying, “I’m creating this digital course called the PT Business Course. I’m the guy that started five personal training gyms and sold them for multiple six figures. This might be a good program for you if you’re struggling to open up your personal training studio,” and people were paying me $99 and buying it off my website. That parlayed into sales tools and I created Close Clients and then System 9 marketing tools. Facebook stuff came in and they’re asking if I do coaching. I go, “I guess. I’ve done coaching before for free if you want to pay me.” I charged $5,000 for a year of coaching. I didn’t even know how to price myself. I enjoyed the experience so much that it started to compound on top of itself.

In 2007 I decided, “I want to get in front of a big audience of personal trainers and teach them the business of fitness. I’m tired of still hearing from trainers who have side jobs.” I literally put on my own live event. I only got 118 people to come to it for $110 or $120 a seat. We have over 1,000 people come. We have some of the best presenters from the fitness industry and from the marketing industry like Frank Kern, Lewis Howes and Dan Kennedy. You name the person and they spoke at a Fitness Business Summit. That’s what I used to fill up my coaching and consulting business. That’s the event that I used to move people into Fit Body Boot Camp, our international franchise. I’m blessed and lucky that I get to serve the industry that I love so much.

There are so many people who do coaching but I know you are the behind the scenes genius that helps entrepreneurs and thought leaders how to scale and structure their coaching programs. Walk me through that. What do you do differently? How do you structure yours? What advice do you give to them?

I did this for Jason Capital. I did this for Craig Ballantyne. Lewis Howes, I taught him how to structure a coaching mastermind program. I worked with Chris and Lori Harder. The way I look at it is one-on-one coaching is dead and it’s a waste of your time. The reason is that it’s not a scalable thing. You can’t expect to get on the phone with coaching clients if you have more than 40 or 50 of them. I’ve got 1,800 coaching clients amongst my four different mastermind groups. I have to have them in a room. What I did is I created the mastermind environment where we meet up three times a year. Each time we meet, we meet for two days. Day one of the mastermind meeting is the teaching day. I teach what’s working in my business. Our top clients in that group teach what’s working in their business. I’ll bring in an industry thought leader, a marketer, a salesperson, someone who’s a Facebook traffic buyer and they’ll teach. We do a lot of teaching on day one.

On day two, we have the individualized hot seats. At that point, we go through with every single person. We’re all sitting in a room. What’s your biggest opportunity that you have in your business? What is the biggest bottleneck you have in your business? What answers do you need from this hot seat group to take advantage of the opportunity and to clear the bottleneck? The reason I have the hot seats on day two is that usually, they’ve gotten most of their questions answered on day one from the teaching day. If I do my job right as a coach, I’ve given them newer, better, more sophisticated problems for day two. This is what I want.

I want my clients. I want to be able to stir up the most sophisticated problems. I call it third world problems, first world problems. A third world problem is, “Bedros, I have a personal training studio, it’s struggling. I signed a lease for three years and I’m already two months behind,” that’s a third world problem. You don’t get clients. You’re behind on your lease. Your wife is about to leave you. A first world problem is now you’re on location three and you’re realizing that location one and two are kicking butt, but location three is struggling. You have a leadership problem there. You don’t know how to fire the person because you’ve never been put in a position to fire a person. That’s a first world problem. You want that problem. That’s a moneymaking problem. My job as a coach is to answer most of their third world problems on the first day so that on day two, we can go to their first world problems.

We also put them in a private Facebook group. I do a weekly Facebook Live and I follow it up with Q&A. Everything I do is in a scalable fashion. If I have the ability, I can scale my masterminds to 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 people. People ask me, “How do you do the hot seats on day two?” This is what I taught Lewis and Jason Capital because once you get over about 25 clients, you can’t do the hot seats anymore by yourself. Usually, by the time you’ve got to 20, 30 mastermind clients, you’ve probably been doing this for six months to a year. This means you probably have a client or two who are already starting to think like you, operate like you, they’re almost like a mini Dan Lok. The first sign of this for me was one of my clients, his name is Cable. He came up to me and he goes, “When some of these new guys ask questions, in my head I answer the question and then when you answer it, it’s the same answer 99% of the time.”

I realize that that’s a byproduct of environmental exposure. If I’m around you a lot, I start thinking like Dan Lok. This is a good thing. I go, “I’m having a problem trying to figure out how to create a second hot seat day. Do I run six masterminds a year instead of three?” I go, “What if we have one teaching day but then on the second day, I run a hot seat day with 25 people, you run a hot seat day. Do you feel comfortable?” “Yes.” I go, “I’ll pay you $2,000 a month for the months that we do that.” Three times a year I paid my coaches $2,000. Now I have all these coaches who run a hot seat. My next mastermind for my 7 Figure Formula Group, because I have four groups, is in Las Vegas at Planet Hollywood. We pretty much buy up their entire meeting centers and we have ten rooms running with ten coaches, 25 people per room. I’ve got my hot seat room and the other nine have theirs. On day one, it’s a giant seminar where we teach and help solve problems. On day two, a big hot seat and we take them out to dinner that night. Everybody flies off to their own part of the world to dominate.

Multi-Million Dollar Franchise: Once clients trust you, they’ll go anywhere with you.

The selling system that I teach them is a live event, which is why I had Lewis Howes start his Summit of Greatness program live event and phone closing. I have phone closers who work for me here at the headquarters. The prospects go to an application page. They fill out the application. They click the button that says, “Yes, I agree that I can afford $2,500 a month if this is the right mastermind for me,” then they get on the phone with my closers. I have three days to fill up my masterminds for anyone in your group who runs a coaching program. One of them is the big live event Fitness Business Summit three-day seminar where then I have an offer from the stage. The other one is an ongoing process, which is the phone closing that happens. Every day they’re talking to people and moving them into the mastermind. The third one is three times a year when I have the mastermind, I open up six seats. We have six extra seats where you can pay $2,500 to come and sit in on a mastermind. I have a sit-in day. You sit in, you’re with the mastermind group. You break bread with us. You learn with us. At lunchtime on day two, those six people have lunch with me. I make them the offer and pass out the application. Typically, it’s about a 60% to 65% close rate.

I can see a lot of mastermind groups, even I have a mastermind group but I keep it relatively small. I didn’t think of this model. Now you can scale it to over 100, 200 people. In my mind I’m like, “I have 30 something people. That’s already taken a lot of my time besides running all my other companies.” This way I can see the teaching. You have different rooms. The hotel would love you because you bring them so much business. Do you do always the three events a year at different locations, the mastermind groups?

I found that when you have them at destination locations, there is this other fanciness about it. We do Las Vegas, San Diego and Miami. We found that they like that. I’ve also run some here in Chino Hills. We’re just outside of Orange County, California. It’s nothing fancy but once they trust you, once you’re an authority, they’ll go anywhere. When someone is starting out a mastermind, I always tell them to have them in destination spots. Santa Monica, Las Vegas, San Diego so that people have yet another reason to go, “I can stay a couple of days and enjoy a holiday out of it.” Give them a reason to want to buy.

All of the four groups that you have, do you charge the same $2,500 or they have different tiers, different price points?

Different price points. One of them is the $50,000 a year period paid in full. The other two are $2,500 a month. I have one for our Fit Body Boot Camp franchise owners. If you have a franchise, doesn’t matter if it’s a sandwich franchise, yogurt franchise or fitness franchise. At least about 15% to 20% of your clients want higher-level access to coaching and mentoring. We charge them $1,000 a month more on top of their franchise royalty fees.

They want a little bit more personal access, you just pay a little bit more. Out of the 1,800 mastermind members you have, how many days altogether, besides running a business but running the mastermind groups, do you devote to the business?

Four masterminds, each one meets three times a year, that’s twelve. There’s usually travel on either side of that. I travel the day before and I usually travel the day after the mastermind. I never come home that night because I’m tired. The three-day event to fill those, and that’s it. It’s a total of maybe 20, 25 days. The weekly Facebook Lives in their respective Facebook groups, but those are about fifteen minutes that I do off my iPhone. I don’t even take questions on the spot. I know exactly what I’m going to teach that week if it’s leadership, if it’s sales, if it’s funnels, if it’s referral generation. I go, “If you guys have any questions about this or anything else about your business, leave the questions down below in the comment box. I’ll come back 24 hours from now and answer all your questions so that your peers can have those questions answered as well.” I do it in my convenience. When you structure it this way, it becomes infinitely scalable as long as you have coaches in the pipeline.

You’re about the other people supporting you.

You have to be able to breed coaches who you’re going to trust, who is going to be noncompetitive.

Do you find that you get the best coaches? This has been my experience from my own students.

Absolutely. There’s a gentleman named Michael Perella, he’s another coaching client of mine. He owns a kickboxing franchise called iLoveKickboxing. I helped him start that. He came from the martial arts world. I went to New York because he’s based out of New York and I speak at his event every year. I noticed that a lot of these martial arts school owners are older white dudes and they got pretty smoking hot younger wives and girlfriends. I noticed this a couple years in a row, so one year I said, “Michael, what is going on? These guys look like toads and they’re old, but their wives are hot. Explain this.” He goes, “These guys were in their twenties, in their 30s when those students were nine, ten, eleven, twelve, in their teens. They went from white belt to black belt over an eight, ten, twelve-year period. Now the instructor’s in his late 40s. These girls are in their late twenties and they look up to the instructor. It’s almost like hero worship.” It’s the only way he described it. I go, “I can see how that happens.” These guys help them build their confidence, their self-esteem, saw them grow up into women.

Multi-Million Dollar Franchise: When clients are part of your mission, they would never leave.

The same thing in a non-creepy way happens in the mastermind group, where a struggling business owner comes to you and says, “My marriage is on the rocks. My business is on the rocks. I’m in debt, $50,000, $100,000. I’m ready to stop and go work at a Big Box gym, work for someone else. This is a last-ditch attempt,” and then you help them turn their mindset, their business, the impact and significance that they have. You reignite that. They are forever loyal and in debt to you. I stop charging them. They no longer pay $2,500 a month. I pay them $2,000 each time for the three masterminds for them to run the hot seats. I fly them out and pay for their hotel. The second night I have a giant dinner with all the mastermind members. In Vegas, we buy out the STRIPSTEAK restaurant and we load it up with 250 clients and all the coaches. On day one, I take the coaches out. I show them a good time. I show my appreciation. As long as their gyms and boot camps are growing, as long as they’re having a fun time coaching and they feel part of my mission, my personal mission is to impact 100,000 or 100 million lives worldwide through all the different personal trainers that I help. They’re part of my mission, they would never leave.

When they facilitate and what they teach also reinforces what they learn from you. Sometimes the best way to learn is to teach. They feel like not only are they growing, they’re learning, they’re facilitating. At the same time, they’re also giving back and they feel good about that. That’s what you’ve helped them do. Now they can help other people as well.

I always tell my wife, “Running masterminds, coaching clients is the most selfish thing I can do because I end up somehow coming up with a strategy that I gave them.” I go, “I stopped running that strategy and it worked.” I always end up getting some value after a mastermind weekend for my own businesses.

You’re running a mastermind group. You’re working with a lot of people, entrepreneurs, smart people, sometimes the type-A personalities. How do you sometimes handle that? What are some of the issues that you faced that you’ve overcome?

I faced issues of people coming in and they go, “I can be a coach too,” and they start poaching. You have to part ways with those people. It happens. You think about all the what ifs. What if someone starts poaching clients? It’s going to happen. Grow any business big enough and something like that will happen. I look at that as a first world problem. When I didn’t have any coaching clients and I was broke, that was a third world problem. Another thing is when you have type-A clients who believe that their way is the best way, you’re butting heads with them. I sometimes have to let them not drown, but take on a little water and then save them. I’m sure you’ve seen this too where you go, “Do it this way.”

I thought I was the only one that does that.

You’re going to appreciate this because I’m sure this happens to you. They think they were drowning and they saved themselves. You just let them drown a little and you pulled them up right when they need it. I never let them go fully underwater, but they have to taste the salt water and they have to feel the difficulty of breathing a little bit so that they can go, “I tried that and it didn’t work.” Sometimes they get too smart for their own good. I’ve been this way. I’m in Joe Polish’s Genius Mastermind group. The first couple of years, I took every marching orders he gave me. You’re number three, I became, “I know more than him.” Dean Graziosi told me to do something, he goes, “This is how we do it.” I go, “I’m going to do it a little differently,” and I went to do it a little differently. I lost $300,000 in a four-month period in ad campaigns. I went back to doing it the way Dean said, and that was a great drowning lesson for me. I drowned just enough to go, “I better do what he says,” because sometimes you forget that there are guys who have been down that road before and you need to model their success.

What about for someone let’s say reading this, they are not in the fitness industry and say, “Bedros, I need some help.” What would you recommend them? What programs that you have you would recommend them to start?

I’ve got one coaching program for anyone not in the fitness industry and that is the Empire Mastermind that Craig Ballantyne and I run. The Empire Mastermind is for all businesses. We’ve got Super Bowl NFL champion, Steve Weatherford, in that group. We’ve got Vince Del Monte, a fitness guy in that group. There’s a supplement guy in that group, a guy that owns a $10 million clothing brand line in that group, a guy that owns the hot tubs for old folks’ homes. If someone’s got a company that’s doing $1 million to $5 million, we’ll help them scale that to $10 million, $15 million, $20 million and that are to build an empire out of that. I don’t have any courses or any educational things for non-fitness people. The first thing that I’m making and it’s because Lewis Howes said, “You taught me how to run masterminds. I keep sending people over to you. You keep charging them an arm and a leg,” because Lori and Chris Harder are coming and they’re taking up my time. I want to help them but that is my time they got to pay for. What I did is I’m creating a course called the Mastermind Mastery course and it teaches anyone who’s a thought leader or is a business expert in any space to run, structure, sell their own masterminds. That will be the first product I have outside of the fitness industry.

Multi-Million Dollar Franchise: Running a mastermind is not about you; it’s always about the group.

I work with online coaches, consultants so that’s a great program that they could benefit from. You’re one of the few people that I’ve talked to that could run the mastermind group that way and hear from you the two, three golden nuggets I could see this. I want to emphasize something. It’s not just, “I’m running a mastermind group or I’m running a coaching group.” It’s not the money aspect, it’s you can impact so many more people. It’s no longer just about you, it is about the group. They join my group because of me but stay with me because of the group. Our mastermind members have been with me for a few years. After a while it’s not just because of me, it’s because of the community. I call that the business family that they have. Would you agree with that?

Think about the family that you’ve created where it’s almost a brain trust. Where someone new says, “I have this question,” and you go, “Have you considered doing this?” Then you might go, “Hey, Bob. Hey, Sally. Hey, Joe. You guys have encountered that. How did you fix that problem?” You can literally tap into other people’s brains that have been down that road and they’re in your group. That brain trust brings everybody up higher faster.

Including you. I also want to quickly ask you something about personal branding because I can see what you did with the fitness industry and what you did with your own personal brand, and how you have two brands going on. One is the fitness industry. One is your business empire building brand. What’s your take on personal branding and maybe share a couple secrets with us?

My take on personal branding is to be as authentic and transparent as possible and to push the free line. Give your best stuff away for free. This isn’t anything groundbreaking. Eben Pagan was saying this in 2007, 2008. The only difference is we used to just give a little bit, now give a lot. I tell people who are trying to get into the coaching consulting space and they go, “Should I create some info products first?” I go, “No.” Now when I’m helping people become gurus and I’ve helped a guy, Mark Costes, in the dental space, Peter Osborne in the chiropractic space and Jason Silverman in the gymnastics space become business coaches, none of them have info products. It’s because if you give all that information that you’re going to put on your information products away for free on social media, through email, through YouTube, people forget now YouTube, Instagram and Facebook as well as your email list, those are like networks on television. It’s like ABC, NBC, CBS.

I say, “How much money would you pay to be guaranteed an hour a week on ABC or NBC?” They go, “I’d pay so much money,” I go, “How come?” “Exposure, access.” I go, “What if I said there are three networks that have the exact avatar that you’re looking for and you can get access to them for free? You can buy even more access to them if you want?” They go, “There is?” “Yes, social media.” Start looking at social media as networks and you are the full-time show. You put all your best content out there that was going to be an info product first and be authentic and transparent. There are probably other guys who do what you do. I know there are at least nine guys in the fitness industry who do what I do but I charge the most but I’m also polarizing and I’m also entertaining because I teach boring stuff, marketing. The only time a personal trainer comes looking for me is when your ideas, your certifications, your equipment, your mentality of what a personal training studio should be didn’t work. That’s the only time they come looking for me, with their tail tucked between their legs. They Google fitness marketing coach and they reluctantly give me money.

No one’s looking to get fitness marketing certified. They want different certifications, same in your industry. The way I look at it is when you find me, I’m going to entertain you, educate you and make sure you fall in love with me so that you take the stuff I give you and apply it. Branding is just that. Make people fall in love with you by being authentic and transparent. Give your best stuff. Give people a peek into your life and then they go, “I like what he stands for and I’d rather give him my money even if he charges more because I connect with him.”

I got off a coaching call and it’s the same thing I said to my mentee that you’ve got to view yourself not just as an educator or the guru in this. You’re your own media powerhouse. You’re cranking out content. You’re your own reality show. You’ve got to do whatever it takes to get people’s attention because when people look at your stuff, they go to YouTube. They investigate and check you out anyway on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, all these things. Jason Kaplan, our mutual friend, we talked about this. Jason and I always say, “YouTube is huge.” I never expected that. I started my YouTube channel about a few years ago. Putting and uploading conference footage that I had, recycle the content. I never expected it would grow to this point. Now we have almost 65,000 subscribers. It’s growing by 500, 600 a day. I started uploading about a couple months ago because I’m a martial artist, martial arts content. Every single YouTube expert told me, “Don’t do it.” They say, “The valid proposition is confusing. It’s a different type of audience. They won’t like it. They subscribed for business stuff not martial arts stuff.” All this BS. I didn’t listen to them. I uploaded that and I launched a program a couple months ago. 30% of the clients come from the martial art videos. Is that interesting?

Good for you for using your instincts and trusting your gut.

Totally in alignment with what we’re talking about. Give people a glimpse of your life and who you are and what you stand for, not just one-dimensional, “He’s a business guy or he’s a coach or he’s a speaker.” Show them your life. Show them what you’re about and they resonate with that.

You nailed it, that’s it. I want to know more about you. The picture I see on Skype is you in this fancy red suit with a bright white shirt. My dad was a tailor and I have a lot of custom suits. Instantly there’s another point of connection. When we meet and we have beers, I’m going to ask you about this suit. I want to know is it custom made? How many more do you have? What colors? You’re a brilliant marketer but this is another point of connection. The more points of connection we have, the more affinity we have and more trust and likeability.

Share with us one of your biggest failures and what have you learned from that?

One of my biggest failures was I started a software company called High Tech Trainer. Over a fifteen-month period, I borrowed $126,000. I go, “This next $10,000 I know it’s going to make us profitable. I know we’re going to start getting it.” It was an online personal training software. My biggest failure was it was online personal training software. Let me emphasize the word online because, like an idiot, I kept going to live events and sponsoring in a booth. I would go places where personal trainers were and I go, “It’s online personal training software.” They go, “What does it do?” “It helps you create online workouts for clients who are outside of your region so you can charge more clients’ money who are far away from you.”

I would go to industry events and expos and stuff and I’d buy a booth. I realized after $126,000, although some of that money was in program development programming it, what am I doing? I’m in one aisle inside this giant convention center and I have a 10×10 booth. Unless a person walks by me in my aisle, I can’t access them. This is an online platform. I finally decided to do online marketing. Sometimes common sense is not too common. It wasn’t too common for me. After $126,000 later, I decided to go all in and start doing online marketing, grow that email list. Start making YouTube videos about how personal trainers can use online technology to create workouts for clients who are outside of their reach and the business took off.

Even sometimes we have blind spots ourselves too. I want to emphasize that Bedros and I have the same thing. People look at the successes that we have. I can pretty much any time go into the room and say, “Maybe I’m successful. I probably have failed than most people in this room.” Is it the same thing as you?

Same here. I’ve got a bigger list of failures than wins.

I don’t remember too many of those bad things, otherwise I’ll probably get depressed. I remember the good things, “I did this and I did that.” Share with us any final thoughts and your contact information if our audience wants to find out more about your upcoming program or even your mastermind group.

Man Up: How to Cut the Bullshit and Kick Ass in Business (and in Life)

I wrote a book. People always ask me, “Man Up, what does that mean?” I said, “It pretty much means stop being scared, take control of your situation and rise to your potential.” If I’m speaking to other coaches, entrepreneurs, thought leaders here, I want to let them know that you and I both know there’s way more potential in your business, in your market than you’re tapping into. They might be blaming it on circumstances, on the market, on the economy, on their bad employees. They might be blaming it on the competition. The reality is it all starts with them. Man Up is about you becoming an effective leader, a great communicator, having a vision for your business. Building a strong team of high-performers and not just a group of employees and then dominating that path. More entrepreneurs need to start embracing leadership. I know it’s not as sexy as marketing, retargeting and upsells and all that stuff. Leadership is what got me from a $5-million company to now a company that’s almost valued at $100 million.

What’s the website to go to get the book?

We’ve got an interest list we’re building and we’ve got a lot of great content on there. The website is ManUp.com.

Definitely check out Bedros’ YouTube channel because he’s got a lot of great videos. He’s got 200 somewhat videos on there. I’ve watched quite a lot of them. Exactly walk the talk, a lot of great information. A lot of those videos, they could be courses on its own.

Thank you. I’m a big fan, Dan. I appreciate the opportunity to get on this interview with you.

I appreciate that and thank you so much for inspiring us with great ideas. This is a great conversation. To my audience, read the next show.

Important Links:

• Fit Body Boot Camp
• 7 Figure Formula Group
• iLoveKickboxing
• Genius Mastermind
• Empire Mastermind
• Man Up
• ManUp.com
• Bedros Keuilian on YouTube

About Bedros Keuilian