Welcome back to the strong life podcast. This is your host and your boy, Zach Evanesh. In this episode, I'm actually gonna be answering some questions that came in from one of our coaches who works with adults at the underground strength gym. Some of these topics I've covered in previous podcasts, articles, separate, kind of like separate different podcasts. So I always emphasize, as I emphasize to our coach, hey man, go on zachavenesh.com, type in the search button, anything you want to utilize, learn about, learn from, and you're gonna find it. It is all there, takes a little bit of leg work, but I also think it's important to dig back in and maybe update the answers to some things, as things have changed. Things have changed at the underground. You know, my life continues to evolve as I'm getting older, my kids are getting older, so on and so forth. And so stay connected, stay up to date. I know it's hard, a lot of distractions out there, but it takes what it takes, team. And before we get into these, I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna answer about half of these questions. Then I'll take the full audio, answer the other half, and they will go inside the underground strength academy, which is undergroundstrengthcoach.com. Now, when you go inside undergroundstrengthcoach.com on the forum, we have discount codes for the certifications, and we have discount code for the underground strength conference, so the underground strength con is live, undergroundstrengthcon.com. A lot of people said, Zach, I don't know if I could swing it this year, maybe next year. And I'm not saying this as a business response, but you gotta understand, I did this conference 12 years ago. 12 years from now, I'm gonna be 60. I'm not sure if I'm gonna do this conference. 12 years from now, next year, five years from now, I don't know. I'm really going to test drive how hungry are people to travel, to learn, and to get the fuck away from their computer, and rub shoulders and rub elbows with the best of the best. And a lot of stuff could change in 12 years, like one of our coaches, he did his certification. He attended the first underground strength con. He did the certification a year or two before that. This guy, he's gotten near 20 gyms now. One of his gym makes over a million dollars. He's one of the speakers. So in 12 years, what can change? I mean, a lot. And why do we want to get around people? Because you must get out of your comfort zone, you must get out of your same environment. I say this all the time, right? What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. This year, this summer, is the first time I've taken myself off the coaching floor of the underground strength gym. I started the underground out of my parents' garage in 2002. That's 22 years of coaching. And I said, man, we're always making over 10 grand a month, but 10 grand today compared to 10 years ago is like 50 grand. And so the dollar value has gone down. I said, if I want to grow this gym, I must change. And if I don't change, then this gym will not change. The mission of impacting and changing more lives will not be achieved. It will not be achieved. And what does this require, team? What does change require? Guts, balls, okay? Literally, not figuratively, right? Women can have the guts and the balls to do something tough. Men can have literal and figurative balls, although in this day and age, women can have balls if we're speaking the truth. Crazy-ass world going on out there. You gotta make it happen. This is like athletics, right? You have a team, a football team, a wrestling team, whatever. Let's just say wrestling team. And every, you know, the wrestlers are saying, I want to win the States, I want to do this. Okay, those are your goals, right? That is your target. Now let's see if your actions align. Let's take a look at attendance at the underground. Okay, this month you've showed up twice. Is that gonna help you win States? No, all right. Well, your actions do not align with your target goals. So right now it's all talk. Okay, you want to win a State title. Now let's look at what you're doing outside of your own town wrestling-wise. Have you joined a wrestling club? Well, not yet, it's on my plans. Okay, so you really don't want to win. You just want to talk about it. And let me tell you, that's a lot of strength coaches. They want more, but they're not willing to change. They're not willing to do more. Underground strength con is for those who not just want more. Everybody wants more. That's easy. What are you willing to do? That's the ticket. So let me give you a little rundown of these questions. There's seven questions, and then I'm going to get into the first three, maybe the four, okay? Number one, things that I've mentioned in my certification, all my coaches go through the underground strength coach, cert, low hassle, high profit model. You know, what does that mean? How do you get there? All right, simple policies at the underground. Number two, family first, okay? Our coach had asked this question. He's in his mid-40s. He's got a daughter. They might be having another kid down the road. And so there's a lot of things on his mind with regards to how do you work but put family first? I'm going to get into that. And I've answered these questions before, but like I said, as time evolves, I evolve. Number three, writing, okay? So the third question is multiple streams of income. I began writing on day one. I loved writing. I started writing in college. I had a creative writing class, freshman year, fall semester, and I love writing. It's something I do every morning. And so the question comes down to, how do you make money outside of coaching? Well, number one, is that even the best thing to do? Just 'cause I'm doing it doesn't mean it's the smartest, best, or most effective. I say this, you know, if you're not all in on one thing, how great could that one thing be? I wanna get strong, but I also want to run a marathon. I wanna get, I wanna lift, you know, I wanna squat 500 pounds, but I also want, you know, to enter my first triathlon. So like, you know, Jim Wenler says, you know, you cannot serve two gods, right? You have to lock in on one. And then the other question is that I'll answer, but they will go to Underground Strength Academy. Small group personal training versus one on one. How do you laser focus in on a niche? Relationship friendship with Steven Pressfield, okay? Sitting in on business talks. So we, I just hired a coach full time. And so one of my coaches, or the coach is asking, you know, I, I focus, he said, I focus too much on learning, but never took action. My takeaway from your recent podcast was expand your network to expand your net worth, okay? If you ever sit down with your head coach, you know, regarding business, please allow me to join in. You know, I'm, I'm very much of the school thought of transparency. My coaches could go to any of the events we hold for free. So obviously they could go to the Underground Strength Conference. And my goal is obviously not just to make the Underground Strength gym a better place, but how do I make it better for the coaches? How do I improve their quality of life? And so our new coach, he's already got personal training clients. I taught him how to start utilizing his skill. He was a four time state champ in throwing. So I said, Nate, this could be a great way. There's not a lot of resources for this. You can do privates for throwers. And he already got his first client. And so very quickly, somebody can double their salary by just doing a little bit of extra personal training in one-on-one coaching. So that's it, team. Let's get into the show. Here we go. Welcome to the Strong Life Podcast, where we talk about dominating in strength, health, business, and life. And by the way, if you're a parent out there and you've got a teenager, get over there and see Zach. Talk about being jacked up his place. He's jacked up and ready to go. There's no better programming here. I pushed myself beyond the levels that I can go in here. Got it, it's on the ground. Have you ever seen Zach Evanesh? No, what's that? Oh, he's a trainer out of New Jersey. First of all, let me just congratulate him on his badass name. That's a great name. What's his name again? Zach Evanesh. Evanesh. Evan-- That's a pretty decent name. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right, team, time to crush this Q&A. Last week, I read off some of the five-star reviews. And people who do a five-star review get the opportunity to get put into basically like a raffle. I give you free stuff. So, excuse me, Philip Burley, I believe we hooked him up with three months free to the Underground Strength Academy. That is undergroundstrengthcoach.com. Now he's in the academy. Now he has access to the discount codes for the certification, for the Underground Strength Conference. And he's got just, man, thousands of content pieces from the world of underground strength. And I put my coaches in there as well. And our new coach Nate Stout was in there. And he's like, man, I love this website. He's like, there's so many hidden gems in there. Videos and workouts and behind the scenes footage. Yes, that is the point. But what happens in this world is people get distracted. They're on YouTube, then Instagram, then TikTok. And they're searching all over the place. And there's no focus. We had an intern couple summers ago, two, three years ago. And I basically had to let him go. And I said, you need to be more focused, okay? You're too worried about all the wrong things. When you're doing an internship at the Underground Strength Gym, everything you could assume should be from the Underground Strength Academy, from my YouTube channel and my Instagram and anything I send you through text or email. And he struggled with that. He struggled as well with living the code, with being locked in on what we stand for, the relentless pursuit of excellence. And so I got to always protect what is best for the people of the Underground. And sometimes that means you got to let people go. It broke my heart. I felt horrible doing it. And I remember discussing it with a friend of mine who coaches at a very high level. He said, you know what? It's probably the best thing that ever happened to that kid. He may not realize it now. But hopefully down the road, he'll realize that that being told that you are not doing what you need to do, you're not listening, you're not at the level we need. He said, that should hopefully inspire him to get there. All right, team, here we go. These questions came from my coach going through the Underground Strength Coach, CERT. All right, certification. Go to undergroundstrengthcert.com. You want to discount code? Go inside the academy. He's like, I was watching the business portion. And so here's the questions. Number one, low hassle, high profit. I learned that from my buddy and mentor, Ryan Lee and Jim Labady. They used to work together in the early 2000s. Ryan Lee does a lot of entrepreneurship coaching for kind of like men and women in that like second stage of life when they're in their 40s, 50s, quote unquote, older. And Ryan is amazing. And I just, you know, everything I learned in those early days, I thank him. And by the way, you notice how I give credit? A lot of people don't like to give credit. It's a shame. So coach says, well, isn't that the dream? Low hassle, high profit. Simple policies, simple software. So I have basic membership at my gym. I have software that helped us get rid of paper. We utilize WADIFI, which I love. And we have two membership models. For athletes, three month, 12 month, everything rolls into monthly. Significant discount when you sign up for a year. And the reason I did that was our best athletes train all year round. That is a fact. I knew that if I gave a middle ground, a six month option, everybody would do it. It would give them an out to be fully dedicated. They'd say, you know what we'll just do in the off season. And then, you know, in season comes we'll stop. Well, that is the most important time to train in season because a high school sports season is approximately 12 weeks. And if they skip strength training, excuse me, by the time the playoffs and the competition schedule comes the last three weeks, you have lost a significant amount of power, strength and confidence. So why the hell would we train for nine months and then quit during the most important time of the year? And so I said, I'm not doing six months. It's like going to the ice cream, you know, place and they got small, medium, large. Everybody's going medium. Listen, medium is the cop out. Large is all in. Small means, that's all I got in my stomach. That's all I could fit, okay? And so he doesn't really have any questions about it but I know this, when I had two gyms, Manasquan and first location Edison, I met the former CEO. I think he sold it, or he's kind of stepped away from that role, okay? Let's see if I could look it up. What if I CEO, Amit Shah. I believe he's kind of stepped a bit away from it. And yes, they have new CEOs, Brendan Rice and Matt Kenning. But anyway, Amit had done a podcast with my friends at Barbell Shrugged, okay? That was the early days of video podcasting. And I met them at an event. I can't remember, I always called the grid. That was when CrossFit created, or I guess this other company created like professional CrossFit training. And I remember meeting Amit in Madison Square Garden and I met him elsewhere. And I came down and visited, or they came to me first. Amit brought the whole team to visit in Manasquan. Came to see the gym. We took a walk through town. We grabbed coffee at a coffee shop. He had his whole team there, small lean team. And he said, so what's your goal with the business? I was like, dude, I can't run these two gyms. So make me crazy, I'm selling one of these gyms. And I said, here's the thing. I've got, I'm using papers. I said, I hate paperwork. I wanna get rid of all paper. I don't want my coaches having to deal with, hey, did you pay or they're training people and they don't know who paid, who didn't pay, blah, blah, blah. I said, I want a robot that basically handles scheduling, handles billing, notifies people that their credit card is expiring or your credit card bounce. I was doing everything by hand and tracking it by paper. And it was making me nuts. I couldn't stand it. And so we're in the coffee shop with our meat and his team. And he says, well, we can do that through WADIFY. And so he said, why don't you come down to WADIFY headquarters? And they were about 45 minutes an hour away. They were down, I believe in Cherry Hill, which was outside of Philadelphia, 15 minutes, 20 minutes away. And he said, come see what we do, you know, because at the time there was no strength and conditioning facilities utilizing WADIFY. It was just crossfit facilities. And I said, absolutely, I'm going to come down. I go down, we're looking at the software, kind of going over what kind of tweaks would be needed for a strength and conditioning facility that match the programming we utilize. And I said, I'm going to also need some assistance setting this up. And they provided all of that, their customer care. I don't even call it customer support. WADIFY's customer care since day one has been amazing. And it continues that way. I probably email them once or twice a week about, hey, how do I do this as their app keeps changing? And so I used WADIFY. And I remember going through the folder, looking at, you know, John Smith, Susie Smith, Eric Smith. You name it? Okay, this guy hasn't paid for a month. This guy hasn't paid three months. This person hasn't paid for six months. And it was like, if you started training with me on September 15th, then your payment was due on October 15th, November 15th. And I think about this a lot, guys, because as a dad with kids in sports, I never missed payment for my daughters, tennis, my sons, baseball. I remember one time bringing my daughter to a tennis private. And I said to the coach, did my wife already take care of this? He's like, nope, not yet. I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna be right back. I'm going to the bank. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, handle it next time. I was like, no, you don't understand it. You're working. I am going to pay for you now. I am not paying late, that is disrespectful. I zip to an ATM and I got him his money. And I was like, holy shit. There's people who know they haven't paid us. And when did those people show up? I would coach on Monday, Wednesday. They'd show up Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And I was like, man, I don't want my coaches having to say a kid, listen, your parents haven't paid for three sessions or for the past three weeks. And then somebody will pay three weeks late and then their next payment is due a week later. And I'm like, I'm getting away from that shit. Like I couldn't believe how many parents were just dropping kids off and not doing it. Those are the things I was dealing with in the early days. So today people could say, listen, here's Venmo. I'm sending you a Venmo invoice, PayPal. You could send a PayPal for recurring billing. None of that was available to me in the early days. And so that was me getting away from the hassle. I didn't want that headache. I wanted simple. I wanted all billing to recur on the first of the month. And then if you started at any other time, it was pro rated. What if I does that for me? So here's how I would tweak this for my coach, my coaches and anybody out there. Are you doing personal training? Well, how can you systematize and automate things that allow you to just focus on what you love to do? And by the way, I've got two guys that are part of the team, three guys, but two that are really in. And you can make a lot of money doing personal training and semi-private training, okay? And one on one training, you can. And then you don't have to deal with any of the business headaches. You could fire people. You can create your own schedule. You could come early. I recommend everybody listen to Andy Baker podcast I did. He works from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. And then he goes home and works online, okay? Powerful, powerful business model. And he drains four to six people at a time, all with like a starting strength method, okay? Next question, family first. I have said this many, many times before. My motto, especially as we've gotten older, my wife and I, is I tell her, if it's not a hell yes for the entire family, then the answer is no. During early COVID, I was offered a position with a government contractor to work in the military in a beautiful area. One person in our family didn't want that, didn't want to move. You know, I'm not gonna get into the details. But to my wife, that's all I need to know. It is not a hell yes for everybody. The answer is no. College offers me a salary. Is that salary a hell yes for everybody? If the answer is no, I'm declining that job. So my coach says I just turned 45. My daughter recently turned two. My daughter and my wife are my priority. I lost my father to cancer in middle school. So there's no way in hell I'm missing my daughter's life or not spending quality time with my wife. Of course, there will need to be trade-offs, especially as I'm establishing myself in a new town. I'm impressed that you pulled it off. I don't need to follow your exact path, but I need to keep my family in mind as I design my life and business. I think I already know your answer, but how did you manage time with your family while teaching, running the gym, writing books, doing online work? He said, I'm guessing great time management. So a couple of things here. When I first opened, when I transitioned from the garage to my first warehouse, I would wake up early to begin my writing, okay? And I remember back then, when I was doing that, my wife and daughter were still asleep. My daughter was a baby. And then I would leave for work around 8, 15, 8, 30. I'd be at the elementary school until about 3, 45. I'd get to my gym at four, and I began training clients at five. I did a five, six, seven. Back then, you gotta understand there was nobody else doing strength and conditioning. Mine's Joe DeFranco. I think by the time I opened my gym, Jason Farusia had closed his gym. There was just not a lot of strength and conditioning going on. You know, he had pre-sea velocity was still going on. Dwayne Carlisle had something in north Jersey and, or South Jersey as well as like Philly, but he kind of had, I think, shut it down, sold it, was moving on to the college level, the pros. So five o'clock was a fine time compared to people today opening at three or four p.m. I would, you know, during my lunch and prep, I ate lunch in my gym. Not my weight, not my underground strength gym, but at my elementary school gym. And I wrote, I'd have my computer open, and I had food next to me. And I've said this before, guys, and I hope you take it to heart, this is for everybody. I was writing an article probably every day. Whether it was on my website, submitting an article at least every week to elite FTS. Back then, people were reading articles, and I was blogging before blogging was a thing. And I asked coaches, when was the last time you submitted an article to elite FTS? When's the last time you made a YouTube video? When is the last time that you made content that helps a lot of people? And the answer is often never, you know, once a month, last month, six months ago. And so people are like, wow, I didn't realize I got to do it every day. Yes, I did that shit every day. And Dave Tate said to me, right now, he said, Zach, you have the most articles on the elite FTS, except for myself and Jim Weller. I said, yep, I'm writing constantly. I also took pride in writing for elite FTS because coming across elite FTS in the early 2000s is how I came across Louis Simmons, the Russian conjugate method. And I always say without elite FTS, there would be no underground. There wouldn't be because of the articles that changed my life and then meeting Louis Simmons and speaking with Jim Weller on the regular and so on. Those guys were saying hardcore is an understatement today, but back then, hardcore diehards for strength and conditioning. And so I'd go to my gym and I would train or eat something or write. And then I coached from five until eight p.m. Then I would clean a little bit and then sometimes I would train that night. And by the time I'd leave, it would be 9.30 p.m. You know, I had to find a way to train. And sometimes I would get a little bit of time to train before I opened that five. And so I'd get home late, you know, 8.30 to 9.30 p.m. And then my wife and daughter were asleep. So what did my wife do? She said Saturday morning, you could work until 12 noon. After that, it's family time. And she would organize all these cool trips. We'd go to farms and farmer markets and different little towns. And we would, you know, take these road trips Saturdays and do stuff together all day Sunday. And so our weekends were big family time. And what's interesting is that was not odd for, you know, parents of the eighties is mom and dad worked nine to five or longer. You know, my father worked. Man, he would leave the house at 6 a.m. and come home at 6 or 7 p.m. We'd have dinner together. And then during the nice weather, we'd be at the park. My dad always took us to the park. We'd be playing soccer and basketball, street ball. And he just took us outside. And then on weekends, we always did family stuff. And of course, back then, when dad left work, nobody was calling him from work. He was not on the phone doing things. Whereas today, the work never leaves you because you're connected to your phone. And so I really caution people against that. What boundaries do you create? And I'm gonna talk a lot about the changes I've made from the past 12 years till now with the Underground Stream Conference. There were times where I worked crazy hours. Like when I coached at Lehigh, I already had two gyms and what was I doing? Leaving the house at 5.30, 5.45 in the morning, 5.30, coaching at Lehigh, 7.30 until 10.30. That was about a two hour drive. Then I would commute to the Underground and hour and 15 minutes away, train, work. And I'd coached from three to eight. And then I would drive home. And so I drove about four hours on those days and coached eight hours. That's a guy with two gyms. But guess what I did on the other days? I had other days where I didn't work as much. I always made breakfast for the kids. I always packed their lunch. Weekends was family time. When I ran the gym Saturday morning, it was 9 a.m. So what can you do as a personal trainer who doesn't own a gym? Well, you can consolidate all your clientele to early morning hours. Maybe one day you don't. So that day is like, hey, I know I'm having breakfast with the family. But on those other days, you could have lunch with the family. You can have dinner with the family. And so a lot of people think, hey, if I open my own gym, I'm making more money. Well, that's not always the case 'cause now you are managing everything. You are managing all the money. You are managing people. People will come and go. And so running a business is not for everybody. There are many people who succeed as intrapreneurs because they're just focusing on doing the thing they love, but they have to do a little bit of networking and marketing to make it happen. I've seen this happen and I know Joe and Dan and Adam are gonna speak about this at Underground StrengthCon. So how do you turn your team into intrapreneurs and give them opportunity to make more money under your roof? And I think that's crucial if you're a gym owner, that you have to be able to help others succeed. And everybody at the Underground has the opportunity to market themselves and acquire clients and ask for referrals and get great at referrals. These are things that also require work, but I tell you what, as the owner of the gym, that everything falls back on me. It falls back on me. So I think what we gotta be careful of is, and this is not just for my coach, but everybody listening out there, we wanna do family first, but how can you put your family first if you're not making money and growing somewhere? So sometimes people will want to open a gym and I say, okay, before you could open a gym, prove to me that you could get 30 to 40 clients like training in your backyard or out of your house or as a coach somewhere else. If you can't do that, then forget about opening a gym because when you open a gym, you're the chief marketing officer. You're the chief financial officer. You're the chief idea officer. And so is running a gym for everybody? Certainly not. Can you run the low hassle high profit being part of a team? Absolutely. All right, and so why did I step away from coaching at the underground? It's been so I could implement better systems and build a team to grow, okay? I always talk about, I love Rambo First Blood. Rambo First Blood was a one man army and eventually he gets stopped at the end and you wanna go fast, you go alone. You wanna go far, you build a team. And does the team always staying? No, and I say this, like I have to learn to shut off my emotions for when a team member wants to leave because my focus that the team has taken care of the people. So once somebody has their foot out the door, you know, as a business owner, I've gotten better at shutting down my emotions. And if you know me from listening to the podcast or know me in person, you know I'm passion and emotionally driven, that's not always the best thing in business because you don't wanna make decisions based on emotion. Okay, you wanna make decisions based on what is best for the people and the business. And so when a coach is like, hey, I'm thinking about leaving, you know, we've had that happen before. All right, you're thinking about leaving, that means you're one foot out the door, I'm getting somebody else because what I'm looking for also from entrepreneurs is what are you doing to grow or are you just waiting for something to be handed to you. And so I remember when I first started coaching, I remember reaching out to Jason Farouza and said, hey, it's summer time. I'm coaching people out of my house, but if you need a coach, I'll do it. And Jason was coaching 12 hours a day. He didn't want another team member, but I could have really obviously grown myself, but I could have helped him grow his business. You know, how long can people coach 12 hours? And it's interesting that today, you know, I had, I was coaching at a division one school, running two gyms, coaching eight hours. There's people that can't do eight hours a day. They don't want to do eight hours a day. And so the truth is sometimes there is no balance when you're growing. It's not perfect, but it takes what it takes. If I want to be a great athlete, I will not be balanced. If I want to be a great business owner, there's going to, you know, I'm thinking of the business on the regular. I am. All right, last question. I'm going to answer this one. And then there's three or four more other questions. So this audio will, the remainder of the audio after this question will go to Underground Strength Academy. So the Strong Light podcast is getting half. And then the full thing goes to undergroundstrengthcoach.com. And then when you're in there, you got a discount code for the Underground Strength Conference or the certification. Here we go. Number three. I did not fall in love with writing until about six years ago. I always had the narrative in my mind that I was not a good writer because of my school experience where I struggled with dysgraphia. As you know, every perceived shortcoming needs to be challenged. Sure enough, once I gave myself permission to suck at punctuation and put words in the wrong order, my mental hurdle disappeared. And I learned to love writing. My consistent writing was eight years of running a gratitude group and posting daily prompts. After reading Tony Robbins' emphasis on gratitude, I figured it was worth learning about and sharing. And for those that don't know, I went to a Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within event. My third year teaching, I took my whole paycheck and used it to buy a VIP ticket and sit up front. It was amazing. And I began reading his book, A Week in the Giant Within, I think in '99. And it was a massive book and I would read just say, okay, two pages a night, minimum. I'd read 20 pages a night. I was so fired up from it. So my coach here says, now I want to write about strength, my experience working with clients, my journey at the beginning and now reclaiming strength as a 45 year old with a family. The reason I mention all this is I'd eventually love to author a book. But I think the practice of daily writing helps sharpen the sword. You're one of the few people I subscribe to who writes a daily newsletter. So you guys can, those you'd listen in, go to zackstrength.com, free training courses, daily newsletter, a couple of minutes to read, to empower and kick ass for your day. So he says, I want to ask about your experience, daily writing, why did you self-publish the second edition of your Encyclopedia instead of going with Dragonor again? How did you come to author books that appeal to an older crowd while training younger athletes? And lastly, how did you juggle writing and selling e-books with in person? So yep, I've answered all these questions on previous episodes. And this is kind of like when you're a coach telling an adult, listen, you're gonna eat chicken and rice, salad and fish. You might need to skip breakfast in the morning, just to kind of expand a little intermittent fasting window. And then they keep coming back to you with the same questions. You're like, hey, you're not really listening. So for those of you that ask these questions, you have to go on zackgivnish.com to dig in. So I'm gonna do this a little bit. And let's see where I want to get with it, where I want to go. All right, so, you know, why did I go with the Encyclopedia self-publish? Well, during COVID, drag into a stop publishing my book. That's number one. Number two, drag into or had so many books for sale. They weren't really helping me as, you know, a publisher and an author. You know, when you partner with somebody, you're hoping that there's gonna be some benefit from it. And you don't get paid a lot when somebody publishes your book. You get a minuscule percent. So that's number one. Number two, during COVID, I think John Duquesne was getting his books published in China. And then COVID, as you know, with the big implication on China, that got next and he was just selling it as an ebook. And I don't need somebody selling an ebook for me. I started doing that 22 years ago. I could sell my own ebook. So after a little bit, I, you know, back and forth with John, I simply said, "Hey, what does it take to get the rights back to my book?" And it was a very simple process. And I got the rights back to my book. And I had to do something similar when I first wrote the book and had photographers. I was with a publisher, a major publisher. And they blew it. I was partnered with a shitty co-author who was basically a chicken shit. And I let him know. And so I had to purchase back the photos and the time they took to do it. And I had to get it done. Why did I do it? Because I'm always telling our kids, our athletes don't quit, see it through, stick it out. And then I'm like, "Damn, I'm about to quit this thing. That means I'm a fraud." And so I said, "I gotta make it happen." And I've spoken about that too. Had a meeting with Tim Ferriss talking about different publishers. And he had mentioned Dragon Door, which was on my mind. And so I went with Dragon Door in the early days. But once COVID happened, it kind of ruined the publishing business. And so I simply said, "You know what? I'm going to self-publish this sucker." And that's what I did. We made it happen. So that being said, there are times where you have to take things in your own hands to get the job done. Sometimes the solution is easier to do and it's more difficult in your brain, right? You complicate things. You make stuff hard on yourself. Men do this all the time. All the time. And so, you know, the question here is, why did I do second edition? I said, you know, people always asked for a longer workout. If they gave it like a average review, rather than a great review, they're like, "I wish there was workouts." Well, there are workouts in there. Every chapter had a three beginner, three intermediate and three advanced workouts. But people want things handed to them. Welcome to the, you know, to the year, the 2000s, whatever this era is. They want their butt wiped. That's a fucking problem in this world. People want shit handed to them. And I know I shouldn't be cursing, but I do it anyway, across the line. It's too late. So, I said, all right, I'm gonna put together a program, 15 weeks, I'm gonna add some more old school photos that I love, that would be inspiring for me and others. And I'm gonna self-publish and get it on Amazon because everybody is on Amazon, everybody. And, I remember bringing the book to our local bookstore in Manasquan. And they were kind of mad, like, oh, you self-published, it's on Amazon, we can't sell it. Well, to me, when that's the problem, right? It's like, guys, I've gone already the route of going with a publisher. So, I'm going with Amazon, somebody I could count on, somebody where they purchase it, they sell it, they ship it, and if you don't wanna sell my book and I'm a local author and it has to be this big event, forget it. Now, how did I come to author books that appeal to an older crowd while we train younger athletes? Well, the training I do is oftentimes harder than what the athletes do. Maybe I don't jump and sprint and do the movement prep as much as them, but I'm still, I could hill sprint, I can jump and jump rope and lift heavy, and then we get it in our head, that men, old, quote unquote, older men can't do this. So, obviously, a lot of strength coaches were reading it, strength athletes, and I've always kind of had this like two-sided thing going on where, at the underground, we're training athletes, but a lot of my online work was based on training people my age. So, when I started writing, I was in my mid to late 20s, and here I am, creeping up on age 50, you know, 49 in two months, I was writing about what I'm going through, injuries, time constraints, so on and so forth, and there's two things to this. Number one, where's the niche in that? Well, it's very hard for me to niche down because I insist on writing and doing from the heart. And in my heart, I love helping adults get strong, and I love to train athletes. And to deny one of them would not be my true self. And so, that's why I write about both. Now, yep, I wake up early, I often still work before my family and the dogs want to get out of bed. You know, this is kind of a normal thing I do, and I'm still very busy. You know, I'm working at a high school, and my hours are pretty good, but my kids have a lot of activities, so it's not odd for me to get home, eat, and then I'm actually driving back up north 30 to 45 minutes, taking my kids somewhere. And then I find myself, you know, trying to work, you know, on a picnic table somewhere. And I published books guys before, and it was all self-published before there was such a thing as self-publishing on Amazon. And so, I was self-publishing books through a print company, but back then, things were not as expensive. I was selling the underground strength manual for like $97. It was three manuals. It had a DVD and like eight CDs, and I was still able to make a good amount of money from it, but the cost of everything went through the roof. And so using Amazon self-publishing, I believe it's called Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP, is great. And several years ago, I stopped doing it, but I've had many mastermind groups. And one of the assignments in the mastermind group was writing a book. And the majority of the book was stories, transformational stories about your clients. So you could gift it to your clients. And I remember Ryan Lee teaching this way back in the day, and that's how I wrote my first book. And I simply passed on those lessons. And so, people want free time. People want to make a lot of money. People want family time. People want work-life balance. But if you want to do something good, forget great. You just want to be good at something. It takes a lot of fuck at work. And what you can do out of the gate is just lock in your schedule, you know? So if somebody wanted to be a personal trainer only, can they do personal training at the underground strength gym? Yeah. So our coach runs our morning groups 5.30 to 6.15. He could have, and by the way, private training is one-on-one. And personal training is, you know, up to four people in a group, I would say. It's personalized attention. It's personalized workouts. And they're in a group kind of rubbing shoulders together. But private training is going to be premium. You could call it semi-private if you want to. But in my opinion, our groups that we run are capped at 12. We have four to six people showing up. That right there is semi-private training. And so some food for thought there. So for my coach, we have a group now at 8.30. Well, if you are training people until 6.15, well, you could train somebody from 6.30 to 7.15. You could train three to four people at that time. And then 7.15 to 8 a.m. You could train three or four more people. And the way we work it at the underground is they, we do a 50/50 split. So let's just use a simple number. If it's $1,000 a month and we don't have, we do, if it's three days a week, it's over 1,000 a month. Let's just say it's 1,000 bucks a month. $500 goes to the gym. $500 goes to the coach. And if they've got five people, that's another $2,500. And five people could be trained within one group. So it's literally two or three hours of your week. And that's a pretty good gig. By the way, there's a massive company out there. I don't think they've changed their model on this, but I know people who have worked with them. Massive gym marketing company. And they tell the coach, they say one third goes to the personal trainer. They recommend the other third goes to the owner. And the other third goes to the gym business. Why? Because your overhead is usually one third or more. You've got your rent. You've got your expenses. You've got your equipment upkeep and upgrading. When things start to break and fall apart, you've got all of the paying people to clean. You've got the taxes. You're getting crushed on it. I like 50/50 because I want our coaches to be well taken care of. I do. And so look at the Andy Baker model. Listen to the Andy Baker podcast. 5am to 10am is basically his schedule. Then he goes home and he writes and he has a lot of online programs. He's written a book, but he's still got his boots and he has no employees, zero employees. And then what he does with his gym is he has a flat rate for another coach who comes in and then trains athletes from something like 3pm until 6 or 7pm. So three to four hours a day of coaching. He said the guy doesn't have a website, doesn't even have a business card. Everything is word of mouth. And I remember Ryan Lee teaching me about this back of the day. He said most trainers burn out. He said, well, you could do four hours coaching, four hours writing, put in an eight hour day. I think what people got to be careful of is they, they just see the time that you're on the floor. There's a lot of behind the scenes work that I'm doing a lot. And so I work a lot with a crap ton of quality time with the family. And I don't expect people to be like me, but I do encourage people if you want to be successful, what I work hard, got to work smart. All right team, the rest of this is going to go to undergroundstrengthcoach.com. That's the academy. You want to discount on underground strength conference? Get inside the academy. You want to discount? Are you involved with any of the train road programs? Gladiator Strong or Dad Strong? Discount there and then the biggest discount goes if you've been certified. We have a private Facebook group. There's a big discount code there. Now if you're waiting for next year or waiting for this, well, you're going to be waiting. And people who succeed, they know how to kick life in the balls and get after it. That's the truth. When you put stuff off, I believe you will regret it. You cannot expect greater business knowledge and a greater life experience and growth. If you refuse to leave your neighborhood, and we've had this many times when I would travel to California, I was doing certifications in Austin every year, Florida. Let me know when you're in my neck of the woods. Oh, you mean I just flew here for five hours and you could drive here in 45 minutes, but you won't. Guys, I'd be lying to you if I said that's okay. Well, it's okay if you don't want to grow, but if you want to grow, you need to make it happen. You work another job, we use sick days to do it. That's the truth, guys. I've used many sick days from, I share this story all the time. Sick day on a Friday, drive down to Florida, attend a seminar Saturday and Sunday, left that seminar an hour or two early, drove through the night, got home at, I don't know, 3.30, 4.30, 5 a.m., whatever the hell it was, wake up at 7 a.m., sleeping two to three hours, protein shake, back to work, driving through the night. We have lost our toughness in life because we have this phone and this computer and now people favor convenience over excellence. Well, you want to win. Sometimes it takes a bit of a uncomfortable ride to get where you got to get. Okay, remember, convenience and excellence are not found on the same road. The remainder of these questions will be answered inside UndergroundStrendCoach.com. I'll see you over there, team. Make sure to head on over to zackstrengths.com and get exclusive content. A badass, free training course, along with a special discount code for any of our training courses. Thanks to everyone for leaving Five Star Reviews. (dramatic music) People ask me, what warrior, what are you passionate about? It finally came to me years ago. You know what I'm passionate about? I'm passionate about fucking passion. I'm passionate about intensity. All the self-help books, all the motivational books, the inspirational tools that you can buy, the bottom line in them is, do the work. Once you get through all the pages and all the rules and all the principles and all the formats and all the plans and all the templates, it comes down to that, do the fucking work. And sometimes the only way to go about doing the work is get fucking raw and get fucking intense. Get angry and aggressive and make it fucking happy. The experts, the gurus and health and fitness, they will tell you that rest and recovery, eight to ten hours sleep a night is what you need. Let me speak blunt with you. None of those fucking triple-gen, punchy belly, pasting face, motherfuckers, can prove the groin hairs on a warrior. What is that for you? Is it gets you? What is it gets you? Is your fucking enemy? And you need to kill it. Your fears, your doubts, you're like a confidence, you're like a belief in a certain absolute destiny you have to do something unique and great on this planet. Start today at 6.15 am and you're already up and you're already dragging ass by 6.16. You can change your fucking perspective of the world. Love your life. My advice, fucking do it. Dig, fucking deep and get it done. Life is not worth living without passion, without intensity. Warrior men, what's your passion? Life passion is fucking passion. Intentioning for life, whatever you do. [BLANK_AUDIO]
