An Employee Without Hiring an Employee: How The Hit Lab Got 7 Hours Back Every Week with Baseline

A baseball guy first, business guy last

Joey Lewis opened The Hit Lab seven years ago. The first few years were, in his words, "semi-controlled chaos." The facility in Nolanville, Tennessee grew to about 10,000 square feet and offered everything: hitting, pitching, catching, birthday parties, a golf simulator, a weight room. Revenue was coming in, but the business didn’t have an identity. Joey was spreading thin across too many services, too many tools, and too many roles.

On the software side, things were fragmented. eSoft Planner handled scheduling. A separate tool ran the POS. The Futures App covered another piece. The website was a favor, built by someone Joey had bartered lessons with, and he couldn’t make changes to it. When he wanted to advertise a camp or update anything on the site, there was no one to call.

Scheduling alone ate hours every week. Joey ran group training, and each athlete in every group had to be booked individually. For a month with multiple groups running multiple days, that meant logging into the system, booking one athlete at a time, day by day. He estimated it cost him five to seven hours a week in pure admin work.

“I'm a baseball guy who just pretended to be a business guy. So when I saw Baseline I was like, this is a no-brainer.”

Joey Lewis, Owner

Smaller space, sharper identity, one platform

When rent at the Nolensville TN location spiked, Joey saw it as a signal. Instead of scrambling to add more services to cover the increase, he went the other direction. He moved The Hit Lab to Murfreesboro, downsized to one cage and one bullpen, and cut overhead by roughly 70%. The new rule was simple: if you’re in the facility, you’re with a coach.

That decision forced clarity. No more birthday parties. No more golf simulator. No more open cage rentals without instruction. The Hit Lab became a training facility with a real identity, offering group and one-on-one instruction in hitting, pitching (baseball and softball), and strength and conditioning programming.

The business model shift needed a platform that could keep up. Joey had been on eSoft for seven years. After one conversation with Baseline, he was done. Four separate tools collapsed into one: scheduling, payments, the website, and payroll tracking. The transition, he said, should have happened three months sooner.

The entire month booked while watching baseball on the couch

The biggest change was scheduling. Before Baseline, Joey would sit down on Sundays and spend an hour or more logging every athlete into every group for the upcoming month, one by one, day by day. With Baseline’s AI scheduling and group tools, that entire process now takes about 30 minutes, and it covers the full month. Once it’s set, he doesn’t touch it again unless something changes.

Joey’s schedule runs 9:00 AM to 8:30 PM on his busiest days. Before Baseline, he would finish coaching and then stay at the facility to knock out admin work because he knew that if he drove home first, it wouldn’t get done. He kept running to-do lists on his phone: update a card, schedule a new athlete, follow up on a payment. Now those tasks either handle themselves or take seconds.

He estimates he gets five to seven hours back every week. That time goes to programming for athletes, reviewing training video, building out social media content, and being present with his seven-year-old daughter.

“I basically hired an employee without hiring an employee. It does it for me. The admin side is done. Now I can just focus on being an instructor.”

Joey Lewis, Owner

Everyone walks in already paid

On previous systems, memberships didn’t auto-charge. Joey was the billing department: reminding parents, tracking down payments, noting who owed what on his phone after a 12-hour day in the cage. It was the kind of work that made a one-man operation feel unsustainable.

Now, all payments run through Baseline. Memberships auto-renew. Joey no longer accepts payment in the facility (aside from cash and the occasional check). When an athlete walks through the door, they’re already paid. There’s no front desk person needed because there’s nothing to process at the door.

Baseline also flags expiring cards before they lapse. Joey sees the alert, mentions it to the parent next time they’re in, and the card gets updated before a payment ever fails. No missed billing cycles. No awkward follow-up texts.

From a dead page to a working storefront

Joey’s old website was built as a trade: lessons in exchange for web work. It looked like it. The site wasn’t a priority for the person building it, and Joey had no way to log in and make changes himself. When camps came up or the schedule shifted, the website stayed frozen. Parents would land on a page that didn’t reflect what The Hit Lab was currently offering.

With Baseline, Joey built his site during onboarding, pulling layout ideas from other facilities on the platform and customizing them. He browsed what was working for similar businesses, told the team what he liked, and they assembled it. Now he edits the site himself. Adding an instructor, updating the schedule, posting a new membership option: he handles all of it in minutes with zero web development knowledge.

“I know zero about creating a website, but I know how to do basically everything I’ve needed to do on the website or on the scheduling platform.”

Joey Lewis, Owner

Step by step, with examples that made it click

Joey came from seven years on eSoft. Switching platforms after that long isn’t a casual decision. What got him over the line was the support. Torren, his account manager, walked him through every step via Google Meet, text, and screen-recorded walkthroughs. When Joey needed to see how something would look, Torren sent links to live facilities already doing it on Baseline.

Joey pulled ideas from multiple customer sites: membership layouts from one facility, an alumni page from another, advertising structure from a third. He’d say "I want our version of that," and the team built it. Quick fixes, no friction.

The Hit Lab also runs a pitching instructor with his own web presence. Baseline set up what amounts to a business within a business, giving the pitching side its own section under the main site. Torren found an existing facility with a similar structure and sent the example over. Joey approved the layout immediately.