Profit Value of Your Time: How Much is too much ‘labor’ costing you and Your Business?
September 7, 2009
The US Labor Day Holiday, celebrated the first Monday in September, started in 1882 with America’s first Labor Day parade in New York City.
While Labor Day celebrates the contributions that workers have made to the strength, prosperity and well being of America, most of us associate the Labor Day Holiday with summers ‘last hurray’ and is a time for picnics, cookouts, sporting events, leisure and spending time with family and friends.
And in some areas that haven’t already started the new school year in August, Labor Day also signifies ‘back to school’.
Interestingly enough, along with kids going back to school, also comes a renewal of commitment to re-focus on whatever we had slacked off on during the sun and fun of summer.
As you get re-focused on your business now that the kids will be back in school, it’s a great time to also consider how you can have more of the Labor Day holiday celebration in your life throughout the entire year.
You can quick and easily add more time for family and friends and more profits to your bottom line by integrating the ‘Leverage’ Strategy – ‘Profit Value of Your Time’ which allows you to more efficiently and effectively leverage your personal assets of time and productivity.
HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU WASTE?
To effectively integrate the Profit Value of Your Time Leverage Strategy, you must first ask yourself the question, ‘how much time do you waste during an average workday – not throughout your entire day but just during the time you have designated to work’?
And by wasting time I mean:
- How much time have you spent looking for a document on your computer and had to end up re-creating it because you couldn’t find it?
- How much time do you waste each day looking for things – important papers, bills you have the money to pay but can’t find, phone numbers, names and addresses of potential clients and JV Partners, resources or cool, must have tools you’ve written on the back of an envelope or deposit slip, etc.?
- How much time do you waste rearranging the paper clips in avoidance of something you’re afraid of, don’t know how to do, etc. such as picking up the phone to call a prospect, or connect with a potential JV partner?
- How much time have you spent staring at your computer screen wondering what you really needed to focus on but didn’t really know where to start or what was the most important, money making activity to start with?
- How much time do you waste starting a task, then looking for something to complete that task, and then as you are looking something else catches your interest. Then you realize that you had forgotten to do something else and get distracted by that and never get back to the original task you were working on?
- How much time do you waste procrastinating on the next step of monetizing a project or marketing strategy because you don’t know what to do next or you don’t know where to find the perfect resource.
- How much time do you spend on Twitter and Facebook, justifying to yourself that you are actually marketing your business – but not really understanding how to generate your own leads with social media?
Would you say you waste 10 minutes during a business work day on these activities (or others), 20 minutes, or even 30 minutes? How about more than 30 minutes of each business workday?
Most entrepreneurs and small business owners do!
Do the math:
Let’s be ultra conservative and assume you only waste 20 minutes each business day.
That would be a total of 7,300 minutes or 121.6 hours each year…
What could you do with an extra 121 hours?
- Take a vacation
- Spend more time with family and friends
- Spend more time on the golf course or at the spa
- Develop an additional product, service or passive revenue stream to your business…
If your billable rate was $100 per hour, that adds up to $12,167 per year of lost revenue – money you are leaving on the table…money that isn’t in your bank account!
Increase it to 30 minutes of wasted time each day and you can add an extra $18,250 to your annual bank account – all without working any additional hours!
That’s a pretty significant addition to your bottom line profits and a perfect example of the tremendous power of leverage!
ACTION STEPS:
Complete the ‘Profit Value of Your Time Leverage Strategy’ exercise:
- Determine the amount of time you waste or that you are unproductive during an average day
- Multiply those minutes by 365 days (for the total time amount of minutes you waste each year)
- Divide that number by 60 minutes (for the total number of hours you waste annually)
- Multiply the total number of hours you waste annually by your hourly billable rate or the dollar value of the clients you would be able to gain if you spent that wasted time securing new clients.
- Decide how you’re going to use your extra time!
So what are your thoughts? Care to share how much money you can add to your bottom line profits? Please join in the conversation and share your thoughts and the amount of money you can easily add to your bottom line business profits!
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