Business is Good with Chris Cooper

One on one mentorship saved my business. So I decided to share that process starting with a 200-word blog post. Fast forward to today and my mentorship practice is a 21 million dollar worldwide company with a team of 50 professional mentors. Scaling from a tiny gym business to one of the largest mentorship practices in the world meant developing simple systems that could be taught easily to others. But building a movement requires leading by example, and showing people that business isn’t evil; that building wealth doesn’t require taking it from others; and that creating value lifts us all.It’s always been important to me to succeed the right way: without empty promises or slimy sales tricks. So the purpose of the Business Is Good podcast is to share the models that will scale a business FAST; but, more importantly, to help you build a business you’re proud to own.Visit businessisgood.com for more info and resources from the show.

Business is Good with Chris Cooper is a education podcast hosted by Chris Cooper, with 164 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Chris Cooper hosts Business is Good with Chris Cooper, a education show with 164 episodes published.

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  Episode #147

  Marketing Is Conversations

  Sep 21, 202612 minS1

  In this episode, Chris breaks down the four marketing funnels every business needs — social media, content, referrals, and paid ads — and shows how each one is really a different conversation with a different person. For every funnel, he answers four questions: Who are you actually talking to? How do you start the conversation? Where is it supposed to go? And how do you move it along? Using the social media funnel as the deep-dive example, Chris explains why stopping the scroll isn't enough, why starting an argument is a shortcut to nowhere, and why the real goal of social media is getting people off social media. Then he applies the same framework to content, referrals, and paid ads — showing why treating a warm referral like a cold lead, or nurturing paid traffic like a stranger on Instagram, kills conversations that should already be moving. If your marketing feels like it's going nowhere, this episode gives you the four questions to find out why. Connect with Chris Cooper: Website - https://businessisgood.com/

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  Episode #146

  Being the Best Isn't Enough

  Sep 5, 202613 minS1

  "If I'm the best, I'll get everyone else's customers." It's one of the most comforting myths in small business — and one of the most dangerous. Being excellent at your craft is what gets you started. It's not what keeps your business alive. In this episode, Chris breaks down why skill and business survival are two different games, drawing on Michael Gerber's E-Myth concept of the "technician's trap" — the trained professional who assumes that being great at the work qualifies them to run a company that does the work. Statistics Canada's own research backs this up: the leading cause of small business failure isn't a weak product, it's inexperienced management. Chris walks through what "good at business" actually means in practice — marketing, hiring, selling deeper to your best clients, and managing people — then shows exactly how business skill has beaten better products throughout history. Betamax had the sharper picture and lost to VHS's open licensing strategy. WordPerfect was the better word processor and lost to Microsoft's bundling. Gillette had the superior blade technology and lost market share to Dollar Shave Club's marketing and subscription model. And Kodak invented the digital camera — then chose not to build a business around it, and went bankrupt as a result. If you're excellent at what you do but wondering why the business side still feels shaky, this episode explains exactly where the gap is — and what closes it. Connect with Chris Cooper: Website - https://businessisgood.com/

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  Episode #145

  The Real-World Collab: Get Referrals Forever!

  Aug 21, 202616 minS1

  Every business owner has seen the Instagram "collab" — two brands mashing up their audiences and hoping some of it sticks. What most people miss is that this idea is a hundred years old, and the best version of it doesn't happen on a platform at all. In this episode, Chris breaks down real-world collaboration through the lens of peer leadership — a concept he first wrote about in his book Help First . Find people who could benefit from exposure to your audience, help them first, and only then ask them to reciprocate. Chris introduces a two-part framework for making this work without locking yourself into a limiting exclusive partnership: open multiple pathways to your business, then actively lead people down them, because referrals don't happen on their own. Four real examples, pulled straight from Help First and Chris's own gym, show exactly how this plays out: bringing in outside speakers who cross-promote to their own list, co-promoting events with complementary businesses, selling the ad space you're not using, and building a formal referral system instead of hoping word-of-mouth shows up on its own. Each example comes with a specific action to take this week — no algorithm required. If you've been waiting for the right platform to run a "collab," this episode makes the case that the opportunity has been sitting in your own community the whole time. Connect with Chris Cooper: Website - https://businessisgood.com/

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  Episode #144

  The CEO's Blind Spot (And How to Fix It)

  Aug 7, 202615 minS1

  When Thumbtack scaled from 40 employees to 400 in a single year, its founder realized he only recognized one in five people around the office water cooler. Worse, they didn't know him either, or the mission, or the values that were supposed to guide their decisions. So they stopped making decisions and started just showing up. That's the CEO's blind spot: pouring energy into marketing to strangers, selling to new prospects, and building media for people you've never met, while the people already inside your business, your staff and current clients, quietly disengage. Growth becomes a hamster wheel, new people just barely replacing the ones walking out the back door. In this episode, Chris Cooper breaks down the fix: the One-in-Five Rule. For every five pieces of external marketing, sales, or content, you owe one piece of equal effort internally, to staff and current clients. Chris walks through three real examples, Thumbtack's daily "quick cast," the post-COVID rebuild at his own gym, Catalyst Fitness, and how Two-Brain Business kept mentor churn near zero while scaling from five mentors to sixty. You'll leave with a concrete Golden Hour Task: audit your last ten external actions, find your internal gap, and plan one fix in each of three areas, internal media, internal sales, and internal marketing, before the week is out. Retention is sales over time. Stop selling only to strangers. businessisgood.com Connect with Chris Cooper: Website - https://businessisgood.com/

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  Episode #143

  Starting A Single-Person Business: The Complete Free Course

  Jul 16, 202612 minS1

  This episode walks through a complete nine-module course on starting and running a single-person business with AI — available free, with step-by-step videos, copy-and-paste AI prompts, and downloadable tools in every module. Get the course here: https://businessisgood.com/starting-a-single-person-business-the-complete-free-course/ The course covers defining the problem you solve, building your first product, setting up infrastructure for $32, writing your first marketing post and getting your first clients, building a 30-day content strategy with AI, establishing referral and content funnels, running Meta ads without an agency, and applying the Simple Six framework for compounding growth. AI will create more million-dollar single-person businesses than ever before. It eliminates the barriers that used to require a team — websites, email marketing, content production, ad copy. Whether you love AI or hate it, those using it have a massive time and money advantage. Most young people will need to make their own jobs. Universities in Canada are years behind — their industrial-age structures can't build curriculum fast enough, and many tenured professors refuse to include AI. Students finish four-year degrees already behind peers who spent that time building and learning to leverage these tools. This course is useful for anyone starting a business, running one, or working for someone else. The fundamentals don't change: what you sell, how you sell it, how you deliver it, how you grow. The tools evolve, but the framework is permanent. All nine modules with videos, prompts, and downloads are linked in the show notes. Start at Module 1. Connect with Chris Cooper: Website - https://businessisgood.com/

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