Group Your Hats and Price Them

[Click here for Google Doc (Click File > Make a Copy)]

Welcome back. If you’re reading this, you’ve finished your 7-day time log. That log is the raw material of every decision you’ll make for the rest of this course — and right now, it’s messy. This lesson turns it into something usable: a single one-page table that tells you exactly which roles you could hire tomorrow, how many hours each would free up, what it would cost, and what kind of revenue each one touches.

We’ll build it together, step by step, using a real example first. Then it’s your turn.

What You’re Building

The deliverable of this lesson is a single document called your Role Table. It’s a spreadsheet — 5 columns, one row per role. That’s it.

Here’s what those 5 columns are:

1. Role name — what you’d call the person if you hired them
2. Tasks included — exactly which tasks from your log belong to this role
3. Hours per week — the total time currently going into this role
4. Monthly cost (€) — what a realistic local hire would cost you
5. Revenue impact — Direct / Indirect / None

The Role Table is not decoration. It is the factual foundation of every hiring decision you’re going to make in Module 3. Without it, the decision is a guess. With it, the decision is a data-driven calculation — literally. In Lesson 2.3 you’ll calculate your hourly rate and compare it against the numbers in this table. In Lesson 3.1 you’ll use this table to pick your first hire. In Lesson 3.2 you’ll use it to plan what you do with the freed time.

So take your time here. The table is the lesson.

One concept before we start. A hat is a cluster of tasks that a single hired person could reasonably handle. Most gym owners wear somewhere between 6 and 9 hats. You just didn’t have names for them until now.

The Grouping Logic — Meet Lars

To make this concrete, we’re going to walk through the full process with a fictional gym owner. Meet Lars.

Lars runs a CrossFit gym in Aarhus. 80 members, one part-time coach named Tobias, a small space with 4 classes a day. He’s just finished his own 7-day log and tracked 52 hours of work across the week. Here’s a representative slice of his log — 15 of the 200-ish task entries he captured across the 7 days:

Now watch what happens when we group these.

Step 1: Read through the whole log first, without grouping

Before you touch a highlighter, read your 7 days cover to cover. No grouping yet. You’re just getting familiar with the shape of your week. Note the things that surprise you — a task that shows up way more often than you expected, or a time block you’d completely forgotten existed. That’s data.

Step 2: Identify each distinct task TYPE

Go line by line. A task type is different from a task entry. “Reply to member email” appears maybe 14 times in Lars’s log across 7 days — that’s one task type appearing 14 times, not 14 task types.

Lars’s distinct task types from the full log come out to roughly 18 different things. Examples: member email replies, direct debit processing, schedule updates, lead replies, weekly social posts, reels editing, class coaching, PT sessions, cleaning, supplier orders, bill payments, WOD programming, 1:1 with staff, trial follow-up calls, invoicing, Instagram captions, new member onboarding, complaint handling.

Step 3: Ask the key question for each task

For every distinct task type, ask: “Who would I hire to do this?” The answer is the name of the hat.

Lars goes line by line:

• Reply to member emails → Member Admin assistant
• Process direct debits → Member Admin assistant (same person — they’d handle both)
• Update the schedule → Member Admin assistant (also same person)
• Reply to leads → Sales / Lead follow-up person (different skill — sales, not admin)
• Post to Instagram / edit reels → Social media manager (different again)
• Coach class → Coach (himself or a hired one)
• Cleaning → Cleaner (entirely different role)
• Program WODs → Head coach / Lars (strategic, hard to hand off)
• 1:1 with Tobias → Lars himself (management, cannot outsource)
• Pay bills / invoicing → Bookkeeper or admin assistant

Notice what Lars is doing here: he’s not grouping by topic (“all the admin stuff”). He’s grouping by who would do the work. That’s the whole game.

Step 4: Name the traps — under-grouping and over-grouping

There are exactly two ways to get this wrong.

Trap #1: Under-grouping. Everything becomes “admin.” Replying to emails, processing invoices, cleaning, ordering supplies, posting to Instagram — all collapsed into one giant “admin” bucket. This is the category-level mistake from Lesson 2.1 creeping back in. The result is exactly the same: no hire decision is possible.

Trap #2: Over-grouping. Every single task is its own hat. “Email replies” is separate from “complaint handling” is separate from “freeze requests.” You end up with 15 hats, none of them hireable because they’re all 1–2 hours per week. You can’t hire someone for 1.5 hours a week of freeze-request processing.

The rule that solves both:

If the same hired person could realistically do both tasks, they belong in the same hat. If they’d require different people, they’re different hats.

When in doubt, ask: “Could I post this one role on a job board?” If yes, it’s a hat. If no — either it’s too small (merge with another) or too broad (split it).

Pricing the Hats — Lars’s Completed Table

Once Lars has grouped his tasks, he fills in the remaining columns. For each hat:

1. Hours/week — add up the total time from the log
2. Monthly cost (€) — what a realistic local hire would actually cost
3. Revenue impact — we’ll get to this in the next section

For pricing, Lars doesn’t guess. He does one thing: he checks a job board for each role in his city. Ten minutes of research beats an hour of mental estimation every time. If you’re unsure, look up one listing. Use that number.

The ranges below are what Lars found when he did his own research in his local market. Your numbers will be different — rates vary enormously by country, city, and whether you’re hiring formally or informally. Use these as a rough shape, not as the answer.

Lars landed at the lower-to-middle end of these ranges because informal hires and smaller-city rates tend to run below big-city formal ones. Your local reality might be half these numbers, or double — that’s exactly why the rule is look up one listing, not copy these figures.

Here’s Lars’s completed Role Table after the grouping and pricing steps:

One table. Seven hats. Fifty-two hours. Everything Lars is currently doing, categorized by who could do it, priced at what it would realistically cost.

Before we explain the revenue impact column, notice one thing that’s already visible in this table: Lars’s time is not distributed the way he thought it was. He thought he spent roughly 6 hours a week on member admin. The log shows 10. He thought he spent 2 hours a week on social. The log shows 5. These are the surprises the tracking exercise was designed to find. Yours will look similar.

The psychological block: “I don’t want to pay someone to do something I’ve been doing for free”

Most gym owners hit a mental wall at the pricing step. It looks like this: “I don’t want to pay €380 a month for something I’ve been handling for free.”

Here’s the reframe, and it matters:

You haven’t been doing it for free. You’ve been paying with your time. That time has a cost. In Lesson 2.3 you’ll calculate exactly what it is.

For now, just accept the premise: nothing is free. Either someone else does it for money, or you do it and pay with hours you can’t get back.

The Revenue-Impact Tag — And the Coaching Trap

The last column is a tag. It has three possible values. Each one matters.

• Direct — this role directly generates revenue. Examples: a sales person closing memberships, a coach running a PT session that the member pays for.
• Indirect — this role enables revenue but doesn’t generate it. Examples: marketing, member retention, onboarding, social media.
• None — this role has no revenue connection. Examples: cleaning, invoicing, paying supplier bills.

Tag every hat. Lars’s tags are in the table above.

And now we’re at the most important moment in the whole module. Look at Lars’s table. Which role generates the most direct revenue? Floor Coaching — 22 hours a week. That’s more than any other hat.

If you stopped here and trusted intuition, you’d say: “Coaching is the direct revenue work. I should protect it. So I should hire out of it first.”

That would be wrong. And it’s the single most expensive mistake gym owners make.

There’s a principle that prevents it. It’s called The Replacement Ladder, and it says: fix administration before delivery. Admin comes first, delivery comes second, and coaching — as much as you love it — is a delivery role.

Here’s why. Three reasons:

1. Admin consumes your strategic capacity. Every freeze request and supplier email is a small interruption during your most valuable hours (08:00–17:00). Coaching happens in predictable blocks, mostly early morning and evening — it doesn’t interrupt the same way.
2. Admin is cheaper to replace. A part-time admin assistant costs Lars €380/month. A part-time coach he’d trust costs €700+. The math is different.
3. A new coach adds management work before it removes any. You hire a coach, they need onboarding, programming guidance, member introductions, feedback loops. In the first 6–12 weeks, a coach hire often adds hours to your plate before it removes any.

The Direct revenue tag does not mean “hire this first.” It means “this hat generates money if someone is doing it well.” In most cases, that someone should continue to be you — at least until the admin load is off your plate.

Most gym owners hire backwards. They hire the role they love managing instead of the role that’s actually draining them. This lesson is where you stop doing that.

Now It’s Your Turn

You’ve seen the full walkthrough. Now build your own.

Do not read Lesson 2.3 until your Role Table is complete. This isn’t a soft guideline — the next lesson’s calculation is meaningless without this table as input.

Here’s your step-by-step, one more time:

1. Open your 7-day log. Read it all the way through once, no grouping.
2. Go line by line. Identify each distinct task type.
3. For each task type, ask: “Who would I hire to do this?” Write the hat name.
4. Group tasks with the same answer into the same hat. Aim for 6–9 hats.
5. Total the hours per hat (add all the entries, divide by 7, multiply by 7 for the weekly total).
6. Look up one job-board listing in your city for each hat. Use that number for monthly cost.
7. Tag each hat: Direct / Indirect / None.
8. Circle any hat that takes more than 5 hours/week — those are your priority candidates for Lesson 3.1.

Use the Role Table Template in your course resources (Google Sheets). There is also a pre-filled version showing Lars’s completed table on Sheet 2 for reference.

When your table is done — and only when it’s done — move on to Lesson 2.3.

Key Takeaways

• Your Role Table is a 5-column spreadsheet with one row per hat. It is the factual foundation of every hiring decision in Module 3.
• A hat is a cluster of tasks a single hired person could reasonably handle. Most gym owners wear 6–9 hats.
• Group by who would do the work, not by topic. If the same person could do both tasks, same hat. Different people, different hats.
• Under-grouping is category thinking. Over-grouping produces hats too small to hire for. Aim for the middle.
• You haven’t been doing it for free. You’ve been paying with time. Price each hat at a realistic local rate — one job-board listing beats an hour of estimating.
• Direct revenue does not mean “hire first.” The Replacement Ladder puts admin before delivery. Most gym owners hire backwards.

Next Steps

In Lesson 2.3 you’ll calculate your Effective Hourly Rate — the actual amount of money you earn per hour of work. You’ll compare that number against the monthly costs in your Role Table. The roles where the replacement cost comes in below your hourly rate are the ones where every hour you keep doing them is a losing trade.

It’s the most important single number in the course. And you’ll only be able to calculate it if your Role Table is done.

Go build your table.

Remember: The Role Table is not busywork. It is the decision document. Every hire you make for the rest of the business’s life will start with this exact exercise. Do it once, now, properly — and you’ll never have to guess at a hire again.