Inside The OPEX Method: A Live Review

Oct 1

OPEX CEO Carl Hardwick & CMO Kandace Hudspeth went live to have a conversation about what The OPEX Method is, how it got here, who it is for, and most importantly how it is supporting career coaches.

Apply for the OPEX Method here.

Here is the live recap.

The thing that attracts you is not always the thing it is

Carl came to James Fitzgerald in 2011 for energy systems. OPT, as it was called then, was known in the market as the place you went to understand concurrent training and aerobic development at a deeper level than anyone else was teaching it.

That is not what he got.

What he got was philosophy, consultation, behavior, and the basic lifestyle guidelines. The same things coaches get today. The difference is that back then we attracted coaches with performance and surprised them with the rest. Today we lead with the rest, because the coach we want to attract is the one who sees the whole picture: the person in front of them, their life, their vitality, and a coaching career built to last.

As Carl put it, OPEX is not a great fit for the coach who only wants to work with competitive athletes. That is not less than us. It is just not what we are here to do anymore.

Three iterations, one lesson

Carl walked through the last three versions of the program, and the pattern is instructive for anyone who teaches.
The 2016 version was a long digital curriculum with one three-hour call per month. The self-motivated coaches with individual design experience came out the other side ready to go. A large percentage did not. The content went over their heads, they hyper-focused on program design, and they never turned in a final project.

The 2020 version fixed the content. We refilmed everything and restructured it into The Coach (principles of behavior, exercise, and nutrition), The Client (wrapping a system around those principles: consult, assess, design, deliver), and The Professional (the business). It ran well for years. But something was still missing. We were teaching the system and expecting coaches to go implement it alone.

So last October, before the first cohort of the rebuilt program, Carl and I made an agreement: make it intentionally not scalable.

What "not scalable" looks like

Three touchpoints every week for ten weeks.

Tuesday is lecture. Thursday is lab, where coaches build their own system inside CoachRx as they go, in small groups led by mentors who have run individual design practices for years. Friday is office hours for the gaps, the questions, and the rabbit holes.

Forty coaches per cohort. Ten coaches per mentor. Every application and intake form reviewed by Carl and the mentor team so the curriculum can be shaped to the actual gaps the coaches in the room told us they have. Open access to your mentor, to Carl, and to me in Slack between sessions.

Carl was direct about the limit: we do not want 200 coaches in a cohort because we cannot deliver that. And the program is alive. The first cohort was solid. The January cohort was better. April was better than that. Nothing is scripted and reread.

The ten weeks, week by week

Everything is built off one visual shown on day one: the client lifecycle. Acquire, onboard, assess, coach ongoingly. Every week reverse-engineers from that.

Weeks one and two are context: behavior and assessment.

Week three is foundation: the basic lifestyle guidelines.

Weeks four through six are program design: OPEX Gain (resistance training), OPEX Sustain and Pain (energy systems), then long-term, short-term, and daily planning with concurrent training.

Week seven is what I call the mini MBA: your metrics, your numbers, and a business plan for one, three, five, and twelve years out. Week eight is what it means to run a professional coaching practice, remote, in person, or hybrid.

Weeks nine and ten are marketing. Positioning, messaging, offer, acquisition path, and a weekly workflow so you exit with a working system to acquire clients, not a list of tactics.

Principles and a system, not a roadmap

A lot of coaches hear "The OPEX Method" and assume it means a dogmatic way of doing things.

Carl's answer: we probably should have called it the OPEX System.

What coaches leave with is a set of principles they understand and a system they can work inside of. Then they are told, every single week, to make it their own.

Brett had been coaching for twenty years when he came through. His feedback was that he had plenty of tools in his toolbox but no way to organize them. He left with a system for how he works with every single client. His program design time was cut in half and the quality went up, not because we taught tricks, but because principles sitting inside a system are faster than instinct.

Nicole came in from the other side, with coaching experience but little individual design experience, and simply implemented week over week through week ten. Her feedback was strong across the board. Carl's point was that the program alone did not do that. Her buy-in did.

The pricing conversation

Roughly 80 percent of personal trainers leave the industry within two years because they cannot build a sustainable career. Most of the coaches who come to us are piecing together remote clients, group classes, personal training, and a side job.

Carl's answer to what The OPEX Method gives those coaches financially was one word: context.

Most coaches are not comfortable with their value, and it shows up in their price points. So in weeks seven and eight he puts the question to the room directly. If what you provide is uniquely more than what the coach down the street provides, why are you charging the same or less?

Willingness to pay varies by market. But a coach running a real individual design practice is delivering something closer to a $1,500 per month service and often charging $450. The context comes first. Then the system that lets you deliver the value that justifies it.

Who this is not for

Carl is careful with disqualifiers, because a coach can look like a poor fit on paper and change entirely once their perspective shifts. But two were clear.

If you are not ready to commit to the whole process, and only want weeks three to five or the final project so you can call yourself an OPEX Coach, this is not for you.

And if you have no intention of ever working with people one to one, this is not for you. You will raise your hand and ask how to implement this with 25 people in front of you, and we will tell you honestly that you cannot

If you currently coach group but are serious about moving to individual design, do not disqualify yourself. Intention and interest are enough to start.

What Carl is most fulfilled by

140 coaches from over 40 countries have come through the rebuilt program in a year. Just under ten percent of every cohort are alumni coming back through. Carl's answer to what he is most proud of was that, across every survey and NPS response since last October, we have not yet received one that said the program did not live up to expectations.

One recent review said it simply: I appreciate the way this program made me feel. Not churned through. Taken care of.

That is the aim.

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