How Do I Stop Working 60 Hour Weeks at My Gym?
A practical framework for reducing long workweeks and focusing on the highest-value activities in your gym business.
There are plenty of gym owners working 60+ hours week over week but not satisfied with their results.
For better or worse, there’s only four ways to reduce your workload:
- Stop doing something altogether
- Keep doing it but automate it via software
- Keep doing it but have another human do it
- Reduce the amount of time you’re spending on it
This is particularly top of mind for me today, as I’m flying to Atlanta to spend a day before our retreat with members of The Leadership Society.
This group is a cohort inside The Unicorn Society who’ve met income requirements and are making big moves: they’re opening up multiple locations, buying up real estate, and fine-tuning massive gyms to produce multiple six-figures in income.
You can’t create those kinds of empire-building results by personally grinding through crazy long work days. You have to learn to leverage time.
Here’s how I’d help you fix this if I was coaching you:
1) Respect the Gym Owner Task Hierarchy
Not all tasks are created equal.
Most gym owners spend way way waaaay too much time on $10/hour work (cleaning, errands, basic admin) when they should be focused on $100/hour work (marketing, sales, leadership).
The hierarchy goes like this:
- Tier 1: Manual Work – Cleaning, Putting Up Decorations, Facility Management, Etc.
- Tier 2: Administrative Work – Updating Member Accounts in Booking Platform, Etc.
- Tier 3: Fulfilling Services – Training Sessions, Doing Check-Ins, Etc.
- Tier 4: Marketing & Selling – Following Up with Leads, Doing Sales Calls, Etc.
- Tier 5: Leadership – Coaching Your Team, Building Systems, Etc.
Your job is to spend less and less time on the lower value tasks and more and more time on higher value tasks further up the hierarchy.
2) Do a Time Audit
Now that we know how to think about adjusting our workload, we need to get honest with how you’re currently (actually) spending time.
List everything you do in a week, both professional AND personal tasks.
For each task, note how long it takes, where it falls on the hierarchy, and how much energy it gives or takes.
You’ll probably find 5-10 hours or more of low-value work that can be eliminated, automated, or delegated.
NOTE: It’s more of a pain in the ass, but this is always more accurate when you track in real time over a few days. People are notoriously terrible at self-reporting how much time they spend on tasks.
3) Get Stuff Off Your Plate
Your first and best option is to stop doing non-productive things altogether.
A lot of gym owners “confuse activity with achievement.” They remain stubbornly committed to tasks that aren’t moving the ball forward. So we should first ask “Can I delete this task?”
If something DOES need to happen, the next question is “Can I automate this task?” via software or tools like Zapier.
If it needs to happen but can’t be automated, we then ask “Can I delegate this task?” While this won’t be true for all tasks, most gym owners can delegate a lot more than they think.
Admittedly, delegating isn’t something most people are great at without practice. But at some point you do need to master the basics here: create SOPs, train people properly, and then inspect what you expect with regular check-ins and metrics.
(This doesn’t require a huge team btw. You can barter with clients, hire fractional virtual help, or simply expand an existing team member’s hours.)
Finally, in the event it absolutely HAS to happen,
And you absolutely HAVE to be the one to do it…
Now we ask “Can I reduce this task?”
In other words, can you find ways to get a bigger bang for your buck working more efficiently?
Can you streamline your process, leverage AI to go faster, or simply get 80% of the results with 20% of the time invested?
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Final pro tip: wise owners will use some of the freed up time and put it back into marketing and sales activities.
They will also use this time to develop and train their team. So they can create bigger and better results without having to personally be the one to do every damn thing.
Once you solve for leads, you spend the rest of your career solving for leadership,
Mark
PS: Most gym owners stay stuck at 60 hours because they’ve never had help building the systems and team to get out.
That’s exactly what we do inside the Unicorn Society.
If you want a closer look, book a 10-minute intro call HERE.