By the Numbers: Effective Hourly Rate

Realities of Leadership

What are you worth to your business?

I know you’re probably a good coach, but what’s your value as a CEO?

One of the ways to measure that value is your effective hourly rate (EHR)—what your business pays you as the owner per hour worked.

Hopefully, the number is higher than what you’d make as a coach.

Here are the top gym owners, ranked by EHR, for August 2022:

A leaderboard showing the top gym owners by effective hourly rate, from $180 to $867.

There are two ways to improve the value you receive from being an entrepreneur:

  1. Pay yourself more money.
  2. Work fewer hours.


Here’s the best advice from our Leaderboard winners:

  • “The thing I focused on the most: my SOPs. At first, I SOP’d every detail within every role the way that I did it or wanted it to be done. As the staff member grew in the role, I removed details and had the staff member replace them with some of their own ideas. This allowed the staff member to have even more ownership of the role. I spend about 30 minutes per month with each staff member reviewing their roles and updating SOPs. This has allowed me to replace myself in virtually every role in the gym.”
  • “I allow the team to perform the tasks assigned to them and then let them work.”
  • “I mentored my GM so she could take the reins and lead the staff: specifically, setting KPIs for them so that she could control maintaining the growth of the gym while I was no longer serving time in there. This was key in increasing the revenue.”
  • “I also outsourced all of my last roles: nutrition and social media. I spent 4 months rebuilding our nutrition program after it tanked, and as a result I had a stronger program, more incoming revenue than before in it, and a coach who was now properly suited to maintain and grow that program. I spend about 30 minutes a week in the gym right now, total.”
  • “Offhanding my PT clients when my dad got sick last winter was crucial in making the actual time in the business less. But overall: increase the revenue, then mentor my GM to mentor the staff to uphold that growth, and outsource the remainder of your tasks. Make sure Profit First is in place so you’re now getting paid better, too.”
  • “What I did most was learn to make the best use of my time by planning ahead of time a work schedule and having a list of items I want to accomplish. It enables me to get a great deal accomplished in a short period of time. Having systems in place helps immensely with time management as well.”
  • “We focus on the action items our mentor gives us and we do our best to not let ourselves get distracted.”
  • “Everything I’ve been working on with Peter, it’s starting to fall into place, so I’ve been able to recover my team and I’m focusing on new projects. I’ve only words of appreciation for Two-Brain, Chris Cooper and Peter, my mentor.”
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One more thing!

Did you know gym owners can earn $100,000 a year with no more than 150 clients? We wrote a guide showing you exactly how.