What I covered, and everything I pointed people at. Most of the value is in the second half.
I made three claims. Your life matters, a lot. Your vision is not big enough. Run your club more like a business — not despite the mission, but because of it.
Webinar recordings
Mindset
The thing holding most clubs back is the person running it. That was the uncomfortable part. You are not yet who you need to be to get the club where you want it, and the fix is boring: sleep, eat, move, and put real hours every week into learning from people who have already done it.
Being a nonprofit is not a vow of poverty. You can hold a surplus. You can pay people properly. Nonprofit describes where the money goes, not whether you make any. Three beliefs do more damage than any competitor: that charging real prices is unfair, that you have to be underpaid, and that overhead is waste so you should never hire the help.
Systems
Your club needs an operating system — something that runs the week whether or not you are in the room. A vision that is written down. The right people in the right seats. A meeting rhythm you actually keep. A short list of numbers you look at. And three to five processes written down instead of reinvented every September.
Governance is where clubs quietly lose years. The board hires and fires the chief executive, approves the strategy, reads the numbers without micromanaging, and does whatever it can to bring in resources. Everything else belongs to the executive.
Growth
Growth is not vanity. It buys better coaching, more scholarships, and a club that survives a bad season. Start with who your ideal member actually is — then write down who you are not for, which is the harder half. After that: position, product, price, promotion.
Then the numbers. What a member pays, how long they stay, and what it costs to sign them up. Work those out and you stop guessing at your growth budget. Almost every club I do this with finds the same thing: keeping members is far cheaper than finding new ones.
The resources
Everything I mentioned, and why.
Be a better coach for your team in 10 days
Ten days of short, practical resources for coaches who want to lead better, which I put together with Drew Ginn. The reading list and the training deck.
Grow yourself, grow the club
The club is capped by the person running it. Brian Johnson’s Heroic is the most practical daily system I have found for energy, work and willpower; his Optimal Business 101 is a short course on running the thing you have built.
10X thinking
Multiply next year’s goal by ten and ask what would have to be true. 10X forces a different plan; 10% only forces more effort. Grant Cardone’s The 10X Rule is where the idea got its name; 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy is the calmer version.
Nonprofit education
Learn how your own form works — structures, restricted giving, endowments, matching, gifts of stock. National Council of Nonprofits for the basics; IRS charities pages for the rules; look up any club’s Form 990 on ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer.
CrewLAB Club Management
One system for registration, payments, waivers, rosters, scheduling and SafeSport-compliant communication across every team in the club crewlab.io/club-management.
Our payments research
We surveyed clubs on how they actually collect money, and what fragmentation costs them: most run on seven or more disconnected tools, and coaches lose hours a week to admin that is not coaching. Read the findings.
EOS — the Entrepreneurial Operating System
Six components, and the tools that make them real: the V/TO, the accountability chart, rocks, the weekly scorecard. Start with Traction by Gino Wickman, or the free tools at eosworldwide.com/eos-tools.
Buy Back Your Time — Dan Martell
“Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.” Run the time and energy audit from Buy Back Your Time. Stop spending time to save money.
The One Thing — Gary Keller
“What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?” The best question I know for a leader with too long a list. the1thing.com.
Unit economics
Retention, price, lifetime value, cost to acquire and payback period. Stripe’s plain-English explainer is the easiest start; two rules of thumb: a member should be worth at least three times what it costs to sign them, and you should get that back inside a year. Brian Balfour’s Channel Model Fit explains why what you charge decides which marketing you can afford.
Net Promoter Score
One question, asked every quarter: how likely are you to recommend this club, 0 to 10? Promoters minus detractors. Above 30 is good, above 50 excellent — benchmarks by industry. Bain, who invented it.
Bonus: things I did not get to
Two that did not make the hour, and would have.
Good to Great, and Ikigai
The hedgehog concept: what you love, what you can be best at, what pays. Jim Collins explains it here. Ikigai is the same map from a different tradition.
Leading Change — John Kotter
Read it before you change anything significant. Kotter’s eight steps, free.
One question to leave with, the one I use when a decision is genuinely hard: will it make the boat go faster?
