In a recent Two-Brain survey, almost 60% of gym owners said they don’t earn enough money.
Under 30% said finding or keeping good staff was their top problem.
Most owners look at those two answers and see two separate problems, but they’re actually one problem.
Your income is limited by two things: the number of hours you work and what each of those hours is worth.
You can’t add more hours. If you’re like most owners, you’re already in the building from 5 a.m. until dinner. So the only way to pay yourself more is to make each hour worth more.
And the only way to do that is to stop doing low-value work yourself. That means hiring someone to do it.
The $25 Cleaner Who Made Me $400
I learned this the hard way.
In the early days of my gym, I did everything. I mopped the bathrooms before the 6 a.m. class. I coached at 6 and 7, did personal training at 8, tried to eat breakfast at 9 and coached again from noon until 9 p.m. I hated cleaning, and the gym probably showed it.
My first mentor, Dan, told me to hire a cleaner.
I told him I could barely pay myself. How could I pay a cleaner?
Dan said, “While the cleaner is cleaning, you’re going to sit at the front desk and do marketing.”
So I hired Sean. On his first day, while Sean mopped, I sat at the desk and wrote an email to my clients. That email sold a personal training package.
I paid Sean $25, and I earned $400.
That’s when the light went on for me. Your time is the biggest lever you have as an entrepreneur. When you trade a low-value hour for a high-value hour, your gym grows and so does your paycheck.
Find Your Real Hourly Wage
Before you hire anyone, you need one number: what you actually pay yourself per hour right now.
Add up everything the gym paid you last month. Include your wage, profit distributions and anything the business covers for you personally. Then divide that by the hours you actually worked.
Say the gym paid you $4,000 last month and you worked 240 hours. You’re earning about $16.67 an hour.
That’s your effective hourly rate. Every hire should get measured against it, and your goal is to drive it up over time.
Most owners skip this step. They hire because they’re exhausted, or a client complained about slow replies, or they feel like they need another coach. So they post a job ad.
Those feelings tell you the gym has a problem. They don’t tell you whether solving that problem will pay you more. If you only ever hire to plug gaps, you can spend years adding staff and still take home the same paycheck.
Hire the Cheapest Task First
The next hire is almost never the one that feels most important. Owners usually want to hire another coach, a general manager or a salesperson.
Instead, hire someone to do the cheapest task you’re still doing yourself.
Cleaning and front desk work are worth about $15 to $20 an hour. Owners skip right past these jobs because they feel too small to hand off. “It’s faster if I just do it myself.”
If you’re doing $15-an-hour work for 10 hours a week, that’s 10 hours you aren’t spending on anything that grows your income. It’s the most expensive mistake in the gym, and it shows up as a paycheck that never moves.
Here’s how to find your next hire:
- Write down every role you fill: coaching, cleaning, admin, sales, marketing, programming and anything else.
- Rank them from lowest hourly value to highest.
- The task at the bottom of the list is your next hire.
Have a Plan for the Time You Buy Back
This is where most hires quietly fail.
An owner hires a cleaner, gets five hours back and fills them with random tasks. No plan. No target. Nothing new happening in the business. That hire is now a cost with no return.
Freeing up time doesn’t pay you more. What you do with that time pays you more.
A good rule: The work you move into should generate at least 2.5 times what you pay the new hire. If your cleaner costs you $150 a week, your freed-up hours should bring in at least $375 a week in new revenue.
So before you post the job ad, decide exactly how you’ll use the time. Sales calls? Lead nurturing? A marketing push? Launching a new service? The project your mentor gave you?
Write it down. When the new hire starts, go do that work.
Three Steps to a Raise
If you want to pay yourself more, do these three things in order:
- Calculate what your time is worth right now.
- Hire someone to take over your cheapest task.
- Put the time you get back into work that makes money.
Repeat that process and every hire you make will raise your income.
If you want a mentor to help you build a hiring plan that actually increases your pay, book a call here.
