Hire Other People: Interview with Cooper Mitchell, Founder of Garage Gym Reviews
I recently went one on one with Cooper Mitchell, founder of Garage Gym Reviews.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Coop: I studied finance in college and thought that was the path my career would take. I was interested in investment management and financial planning and ended up starting my own financial planning firm in college.
Around that time, I also wanted to start building a home gym but noticed there were no resources out there on how to even get started. There were so many products but no real opinions on them from people in the home gym space. To me, that was a massive gap in the market, and it was one that really intrigued me, so I started to create content around how to start a home gym and began obsessing over the quality and value of gym equipment–thus Garage Gym Reviews was born.
GGR started out as a super simple website, and I had no idea that you could make money from a blog like that. At the time, I thought the coolest thing in the world would be for a brand to send me a piece of equipment to try. The first time I got sent a jump rope, my wife and I were jumping up and down out of excitement and just thinking, "This is the coolest thing ever."
As time went on, I learned how to create articles that rank, build a website, and use SEO principles to scale my business. Then, I decided to start a YouTube channel for GGR and had to learn how to create a thumbnail, title a video, push out an email newsletter, and everything else that goes along with multimedia. At that point, both my finance and equipment reviews businesses were successfully growing side-by-side.
About a year into running Garage Gym Reviews, an equipment company reached out to me and said, "Hey, we won't only send you equipment to review, but we will also pay you if people like the review and click a link to buy the product, and it doesn't cost the buyer any extra." That's when I learned about the affiliate marketing world and how it could work with what I was doing with GGR.
I began to research affiliate marketing and learned that most of the time, people create blogs to make money – I thought they were just nice and wanted to sell clothing or something. Once I had a better grasp on this industry, I started adding some affiliate links to the pages already living on my site and telling people, "If you purchase through this link, I can get a kickback. It helps me sustain the blog and doesn't affect what you pay for the product." I had already started to build a community with others who trained at home, so this approach worked really well for me.
Suddenly, my side hobby was rapidly ramping up, and I realized that I could do the thing that I loved (talk about home gym equipment) and make money at the same time.
That's when I started scaling the business even more and incorporated multi-channel content on social media, YouTube, and the website.
Ultimately, using all of these resources, I built GGR into the leading equipment reviews site in the industry. I wanted to be the first result when a shopper was typing a query on home gym equipment into Google. I wanted to outrank my competitors, and I wanted the largest subscribership in this niche on YouTube. Slowly but surely, I started to get there.
I think the biggest challenge I faced throughout this process was staying focused on my end goal. I really struggled with the approach of doing a few things really intentionally instead of trying to do it all at once.
In the earlier phases of the business, I was trying to build too many features into the site, and I felt like I was operating on a hamster wheel. I was seeing okay results with everything, but as the saying goes, "A Jack-of-all-trades is a master of none." So, when I actually sat down and started zeroing in on the most important aspects of the business to get to my end goal, that's when GGR really took off, and we began to grow further and faster.
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?
Coop: Garage Gym Reviews came about because I noticed there was a gap in the market that no one was taking advantage of. I was interested in having a home gym and had some basic equipment, but wanted to purchase more. Whenever I want something, I usually try to figure out how to get it cheap or free.
At that point in my life, this was especially important because I was a poor college kid and didn't have the means to invest huge amounts of money into the type of equipment I wanted. I built the site in hopes of eventually being sent products and solving this problem while also helping others to make more informed purchasing decisions when it came to gym equipment.
My advice for coming up with great ideas is that it isn't actually the ideas themselves that are great, but the execution of those ideas that makes them stand out. Anyone can have a unique idea, but the reason that some people get it done and others don't is you have to be willing to take risks and execute. Ideas are nothing without leg work. I could have so many businesses by now based on really bad ideas. Still, they would only grow if I was committed to learning the ins and outs of the industry and had a strategy for taking them to the next level.
Adam: How did you know your business idea was worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?
Coop: I knew this idea was worth pursuing because I saw a need for it in the market; there was nothing else out there when it came to strength equipment reviews, and as someone who grew up in the gym and was passionate about the topic, I knew I would have great content to offer from my perspective. I think my best advice for testing a business idea is to just go for it, execute with intention, test, and see what happens.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their business to the next level?
Coop: The best piece of advice I can give here is to hire other people. I needed to do this more, especially when I was beginning to grow GGR. I was so focused on working for the business and needed to be more focused on working on the business. Getting qualified people I trust to help create content instead of writing, editing, and filming everything myself was vital to scaling GGR to the next level. The first employee is always the hardest to hire, but it gets easier after that. Being a solopreneur is always an option, but I guarantee you will be limited by your time and abilities. If you hire people you can trust, as cliche as it sounds, the sky's the limit.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Coop: Don't just pursue what you're interested in, but find a market with little competition and a high potential for growth, then build your business from there.
You can be a world-class salesman in a competitive market and do okay, or you could be a really bad salesman with a fantastic offer in a low-competition market, and you will still absolutely crush it. To reiterate, it's all about having a great offer in an uncrowded market. I was lucky to find this sort of niche opportunity with Garage Gym Reviews.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Coop: I think I take a lot of my ideas about leadership from the way I think about being a father. With my kids, I don't just want to tell them how to act or how to do something; I want to SHOW them. The same principles apply to leadership. If you want those that you are leading to follow, you've got to be an example of the qualities you are espousing. If you say one thing but do another, you'll quickly lose respect, and no one will care what you do.
Similarly, to me, it's a bad sign if a leader isn't on the front lines and isn't doing a bulk of the work alongside their team. A good leader is a direct communicator and challenges the thinking of those around them while empowering them to do their best work and chipping in to shoulder some of the load.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Coop: This goes back to the point I was saying earlier about only being able to accomplish so much on your own. The ultimate job of a manager is to hire well and fire quickly (said by Naval Ravikant).
If you hire well, you don't have to fire. Train the person a ton, and the person will be able to figure out how to succeed on the job. Hiring the wrong person for a role doesn't do you or them any favors. They won't enjoy the job or reach their potential and will drag the rest of the team with them. Make sure you've got the right people sitting on the right spots of the bus, so to speak. Be willing to make hard decisions for the benefit of you and your team.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Find an opportunity gap in a market to build your business and have a fantastic offer for your customers.
The riches are in the niches, so find a niche. There's no need to go after everyone, and if you cast too wide a net, you won't catch anyone at all. Instead, focus in and build an archetype for who you want to attract. There are billions of potential customers and money out there. There's no need to grab everyone.
Don't compare yourself to others. For example, you've got an entrepreneur buddy doing really well – growing his business and making lots of money. Keep in mind that you might be in different stages of the cycle, and don't worry too much about where you are in your journey. The nature of business is to constantly be comparing bank account to bank account, employee count to employee count. Remember that just because someone has these things doesn't mean they have lots of net profit.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Coop: Be selfless in your leadership. Care more about others than yourself, and others will end up caring about you.
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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