Help First - give free content - 95% of what we publish we give away for free.

Help Most - do it for them. But this isn't the same as helping Best.

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime.

We want people to see fast results and overcome paralysis. We also want to set them up for success long-term, by teaching them skills. This might seem like a dichotomy, but really it's a matter of timing.

Most of our clients need really quick wins in the beginning. The way we help them best is not by giving them a ton of options or a bunch of knowledge. That doesn't work. The way we help them best is to say "do exactly this thing."

Most of our clients don't want to do paid ads. But the way we help them most is to show them how paid ads work, and then set them up and teach them to monitor them themselves. Then they can decide if they want to continue or not. So sometimes helping best is getting them to go through short-term pain for long-term gain. Parents know what I mean here. "You can't say you hate it until you've actually tried it."

Helping best almost always means saying "this is the answer" instead of saying "you have two options." The bigger the decision, the more valuable the clarity.

For example, the reason we recommend Kilo for websites is because it's the best. Gym owners can spend a month researching the options and weighing pros and cons, asking for opinions and advice, and be no further ahead. But Kilo was built specifically for TBB gyms. John and Mateo bought a website company, said "what do TBB gyms actually need?" and "what do the numbers support?" and built that thing. Ditto GymLawyers and Colm's new DoneForYou marketing plan.

So recommending these isn't a conflict of interest - it's in our client's BEST interest to just tell them the best answer. We're not a publicly-elected body that has to be responsible to government oversight. Our job is results, period. Every month spent deliberating on a decision by a client is a month they don't get results.

Over time, in fact, we should narrow the options we present. We narrow these options by collecting data and understanding it. This is the scientific method, and it's one of our core values; we make decisions based on evidence, not opinion.

So the stuff in the toolkit is chosen by data. It works in one gym - great. We find out about it. We test it in other gyms. If it works, great - it goes in the toolkit and we present it as mentors. When something stops working, we remove it. We don't just add stuff because it's novel or new or shiny. We test everything, because it's our duty to help BEST. Putting unproven stuff in the toolkit would be helping MOST - but just really creating more client overwhelm and getting less results.

Helping BEST means focusing first on the client's end goal. It often means 'addition by subtraction' - removing the problems of optionality and saying "this one is best." It means accepting the burden of proof, and building a case through data, analysis and experience instead of "here's something I hear don a podcast" or even "here's an idea people are talking about in Tinker."

Helping BEST isn't the easy road. But it's the only road for us, because the only way to be the best is to help your clients best.