Your Time Is Not Free

As Small Business Owners it is easy to disregard your own time as having any worth since “it is your company” and “well someone has to do it”. But, is your time really free? Isn’t everyone’s time worth something? And, if it is worth something, then could it be better spent on other tasks?

As a ridiculous and simplistic example let’s say you have calculated your Cost to be $3,000 per week, your Billable Rate is $100/hour, and you typically bill 30 hours a week ($3,000), so you are covering your costs.

You spend 2 hours of each week sweeping the floor. Is that really the best use of your time since (a) your regular costs for the week are already covered, (b) your Billable Rate is $100/hour, and (c) the cost to hire someone is significantly lower?

You decide to test the theory and hire the neighbor kid to do the sweeping for $50 per week, which brings your weekly cost to $3,050. But, now you can bill out those 2 hours, bringing your weekly billable hours to 32, at $100/hour is $3,200 - This means you now have a Net Gain of $150!

As Business Owners we need to be mindful that no one knows our business as well as we do, and sometimes it is worth the cost to actually bring in more revenue.