Welcome back.
If you’re hearing this, you’ve done something most gym owners never do. You’ve tracked your time for seven days — task by task, not category by category. That log in your hands is the most honest picture of your week that has ever existed. And over the next twenty minutes, we’re going to turn it into something you can actually use.
[PAUSE]
By the end of this lesson, you’ll have one document. One page. Seven or eight rows. It’s called a Role Table, and it’s going to answer questions you’ve probably been asking yourself for a year.
Which tasks am I actually spending the most time on? What would it cost to hand them off? Which ones generate revenue, and which ones just eat hours?
And — most importantly — which one do I replace first?
We’ll build it together, using a real example first. Then it’s your turn.
[PAUSE]
The deliverable is simple. Five columns. One row per role.
The columns are: the name of the role, the tasks that belong to it, the hours per week you currently spend on it, the monthly cost of hiring it out, and a tag for revenue impact.
That’s it. That’s the whole lesson.
But don’t mistake simple for easy. This table is the factual foundation of every single hiring decision you’re going to make in Module 3. Without it, the decision is a guess. With it, the decision becomes a calculation.
One concept before we start. I’m going to use the word hat a lot. A hat is a cluster of tasks that a single hired person could reasonably handle. Most gym owners wear somewhere between six and nine hats. You just didn’t have names for them until now. That’s what we’re fixing.
[PAUSE]
To make this concrete, I want you to meet Lars.
Lars runs a CrossFit gym in Aarhus. Eighty members. One part-time coach named Tobias. Four classes a day. Lars just finished his own seven-day log — and he tracked fifty-two hours of work across the week. His log has around 200 task entries in it, but they collapse into maybe eighteen distinct task types. Things like: replying to member emails, processing direct debits, updating the schedule, replying to leads, posting to Instagram, editing reels, coaching classes, running PT sessions, cleaning, ordering supplies, paying bills, programming WODs, 1:1s with Tobias — and so on.
You’ll find Lars’s full Role Table in your document. Open it up alongside this audio if you can. I want you to see what a finished one looks like before you start your own.
[PAUSE]
Here’s the first move, and it’s the most important one. When you look at each task in your log, you don’t ask “what category is this?” You ask a completely different question.
You ask — “Who would I hire to do this?”
The answer to that question is the name of the hat.
Let me show you what this looks like in practice. Lars goes line by line through his log.
Reply to member emails. Who would I hire to do this? A member admin assistant. Write it down.
Process a direct debit. Who would I hire? Same person. That admin assistant can do both. Same hat.
Update the class schedule. Same person again. Same hat.
Reply to three leads from last night’s ad. Who would I hire to do this? That’s a sales person. Different skill. Different hat.
Edit a thirty-second reel. That’s a social media person. Different again. Different hat.
Coach the 6 AM class. That’s a coach. Different hat.
Clean the changing rooms. That’s a cleaner. Different hat.
See what Lars is doing? He’s not grouping by topic. He’s grouping by who would do the work. That’s the whole game. Grouping by topic gives you “admin.” Grouping by who would do it gives you a hire decision.
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There are exactly two ways to get this wrong, and you should know both of them in advance.
The first trap is under-grouping. That’s when everything collapses back into “admin.” Emails, invoices, cleaning, ordering, posting — all one giant bucket. It’s the category-level mistake from the last lesson creeping back in. If that happens, you’ve just undone the work of seven days of tracking.
The second trap is the opposite. Over-grouping. Where every single task becomes its own hat. You split email replies from complaint handling from freeze requests — and you end up with fifteen hats, none of them more than two hours a week. You can’t hire someone for 1.5 hours a week of freeze processing. It’s un-hireable.
The rule that solves both traps is one sentence. Listen to this one carefully.
If the same hired person could realistically do both tasks, same hat. If they’d need different people, different hats.
And when you’re not sure — ask yourself: “Could I post this as one role on a job board?” If yes, it’s a hat. If no — either it’s too small or too broad.
[PAUSE]
Once Lars has grouped his tasks into hats, he fills in the rest of the table. Hours per week — he adds up the entries from his log. Monthly cost — and this is where people get stuck.
Most gym owners try to guess the cost. Don’t. There’s a better way, and it takes ten minutes.
Look up one job-board listing in your city for each role. Use that number. Seriously — that’s it. Ten minutes of research beats an hour of mental estimation every time.
You’ll find a table in your document showing what Lars found when he did his own research in his local market. Cleaner, admin assistant, part-time coach, social media freelancer, and so on. Important — your numbers will be different. Rates vary enormously by country, city, and whether you’re hiring formally or informally. Use Lars’s numbers as a rough shape, not as the answer. The rule is: look up one listing in your market. That’s it.
Now here’s where a lot of people hit a wall. You look at the numbers, and something in your head says — “I don’t want to pay this much every month for something I’ve been handling for free.”
I need you to reframe that, right now. It’s important.
You have not been doing it for free. You have been paying with your time. Your time has a cost. In the next lesson, you’re going to calculate exactly what it is — down to the hour. And the number is going to surprise you.
Nothing in a business is free. Either someone else does it for money — or you do it, and you pay with hours you can’t get back. Those are the only two options.
[PAUSE]
The last column is a simple tag. Three possible values.
Direct — this role directly generates revenue. A sales person closing memberships. A coach running a PT session the member pays for.
Indirect — this role enables revenue but doesn’t generate it. Marketing. Onboarding. Member retention. Social media.
None — this role has no revenue connection at all. Cleaning. Invoicing. Paying the electricity bill.
Tag every hat. Lars’s tags are in the table in your document.
[PAUSE]
And now we’re at the single most important moment in the whole module. I want you to really hear this part.
Look at Lars’s table. Which role generates the most direct revenue? Floor Coaching. Twenty-two hours a week. More than any other hat.
If you stopped here and trusted your gut, you’d say — “Coaching is the 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 in this whole course.
There’s a principle that prevents it. It’s called The Replacement Ladder. And it says: fix administration before delivery. Admin first. Delivery — including coaching — second.
Three reasons.
Reason one. Admin consumes your strategic capacity. Every freeze request and supplier email is a small interruption during your most valuable business hours. Coaching happens in predictable blocks, mostly early morning and evening. It doesn’t interrupt the same way.
Reason two. Admin is cheaper to replace. A part-time admin assistant costs Lars €380 a month. A part-time coach he’d actually trust costs €700 or more. The math is different.
Reason three. A new coach hire adds management work before it removes any. You onboard them, you program for them, you introduce them to members, you manage feedback loops. For the first six to twelve weeks, a coach hire often adds more hours to your plate than it removes.
[PAUSE]
So — the Direct revenue tag does not mean “hire this first.” It means “this hat generates money if someone is doing it well.” And in most cases, for now, 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.
[PAUSE]
You’ve seen the full walkthrough. Now it’s your turn.
Open your log. Open the Role Table Template — the link is in your course resources. There’s also a pre-filled version of Lars’s table on sheet two so you can see the finished form while you work.
Read your log cover to cover once. No grouping yet — just get familiar. Then go line by line and identify each distinct task type. For each type, ask the question: “Who would I hire to do this?” Group tasks with the same answer into the same hat. Aim for six to nine.
Then total your hours per hat. Look up one job board listing for each role. Use that number for the monthly cost. Tag each hat Direct, Indirect, or None.
Circle any hat that takes more than five hours a week. Those are your priority candidates for Module 3.
Do not open Lesson 2.3 until your table is complete. The next lesson calculates your effective hourly rate — and then compares it against the numbers in your Role Table. Without the table, there’s nothing to compare against.
[PAUSE]
One last thing before you go.
The Role Table you’re about to build is not busywork. It’s the decision document. Every single hire you make for the rest of the business’s life is going to start with exactly this exercise. If you get it right once, now, you will never have to guess at a hiring decision again.
So take your time. Fight both traps. Use one job board listing per role. Tag every hat. And trust the walkthrough — Lars’s table is right there in your document, and yours is going to look structurally similar.
When it’s done, I’ll see you in Lesson 2.3. We’re going to calculate the most important single number in this entire course.
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