For anyone who has attended one of our workshops, you’ll know that I often speak about how business owners and their teams spend their time. But how do you work out how much your time is worth and more importantly, how do you decide as a business owner what tasks are best done by you and what tasks should be delegated or outsourced to others?
If you are like most business owners, when you first started out in business for yourself, it would have come as quite a shock to discover that not only did you have to do whatever it is that you are really good at, the core of your role, but you also had to do all the other stuff which previosuly other people in the company you used to work for would have done. Stuff like generating new leads with marketing activity, converting those to customers, ensuring you delivered on time and implemented strategies to retain loyal customers, along with other tasks like invoicing, paying suppliers, chasing orders, looking after your IT, office, systems … the list is endless.
Some of you may still be doing all the other stuff…. and you will justify that by saying you can’t afford an extra salary, or you can’t afford to outsource, but is that always the case or are you actually costing your business money and yourself the time to do more valuable work?
Try doing a simple exercise.
- List all the tasks you currently complete.
- Mark how long they typically take
- Mark how much the task is really worth per hour
These tasks will probably fall into one of three categories. The mundane tasks such as answering the phone, opening the mail, general admin, washing up at the end of the day (no-one else will ever do that will they) etc. These kind of tasks are probably in the £10-£12 / hour bracket. HOW MUCH TIME DO THEY TAKE UP?
The slightly more important tasks of invoicing, quotes, etc. might cost you £25 / hour to outsource or maybe less to get a full-time salaried person on board. HOW MUCH TIME DO THEY TAKE UP?
Then there are the tasks you do which generate business. Take a look at your very biggest customer and how much they are worth to you over the next five years. Look at realistically, how many hours you will have to work for that revenue and then work out your hourly rate. For instance, if you have a customer who will spend £250,000 over the next five years and you have to put in 50 hours of work to get that revenue, that’s £5,000 per hour you’ve earned.
So when you look at the most valuable work, and the other tasks you currently do, do you really still want to be answering the phone and opening the mail?
Business owners can cost their business a lot of money by saving a salary ! How do you review the tasks you work on? What brings you most value?
How you then start the process of deciding what to do with those tasks you need to stop doing is a whole other story.
Come along to one of our free workshops or contact us to arrange a free business strategy review to see how much you could free up your time and increase your profits. Either click the button or leave us a message with your number in the live chat box.
