- Is your day filled with impactful important events that are growing your business and moving the needle?
- Or is it a big to-do list full of menial items that aren't doing much, but need to get done?
Determine What Is Worth Your Time and Money
You know, as business owners, we are very good at evaluating things: evaluating pricing, evaluating employees, and what matters; putting things in front of people, and compensating them accordingly. Our employees, our contractors, our vendors, our service providers – we constantly evaluate what they do and the value that it brings to our business, and we pay them accordingly. But we don't do that well for ourselves. We rarely look at how we spend our time and if it's worth the money we're spending on ourselves. In order to figure that out it’s a three-step process.Calculate Your Current Hourly Rate
The first thing is you need to determine, as the owner, what is your hourly rate. Which is pretty simple math: take what you paid yourself last year, divide it by 2000 hours (and yes, I know it's a pipe dream to say that you work 2000 hours in a year. I get it, but it makes the math easier). Take the number, divide it by 2,000, and that's your hourly rate. If you made00,000 last year, your hourly rate is
00. If you made
00,000 last year, your hourly rate is $50, and so on and so forth. So you've got the number and you know what your hourly rate looks like.
Assess How You Spend Your Time
The next step is: look at how you spend your time. Look at the to-dos on your list and look at the things that you do regularly in your business, and decide if you pay someone your hourly rate to do that job. If there's something on your list that you see as a5-an-hour job and you're paying yourself $75 an hour, why are you doing it?
Eliminate What Doesn’t Fit Into Your Hourly Rate
The third step in the process then is to find those things that don't match your hourly rate and get rid of them. Move them off your plate. Delegate them to an employee, outsource them to a contractor, a vendor, or maybe a piece of technology – or potentially even just eliminate it altogether. The results are, you will find yourself spending your time on more high-value activities: those things that match or exceed your hourly rate. It will allow you to leverage and empower the people around you: your employees, your team, your vendors, and your contractors to do those other things that matter – they just don't matter for you to be doing them. Then, ultimately, you are going to grow your business. You're going to have a team full of people who are doing the jobs that matter. You're going to be doing the job that matters for yourself. Success will follow, growth will follow, and a great team will be behind you.Start Identifying Your Hourly Rate Today for Business Growth
So how do you put this in a process? I'll give you a great action step: email me athompson@focalpointcoaching.com. In the subject line, put “My hourly rate.” I will follow up with a worksheet that allows you to:- (A) Figure out what that hourly rate is
- (B) Rate and note all the things you do on your plate
- (C) And then decide: is that something that you should keep, something you should delegate, something you should outsource, or something you should eliminate altogether?
