63. Knowing The Value Of Your Time

As an entrepreneur, we all face the same challenge: there's simply not enough time in the day. You're juggling multiple projects, managing teams, and trying to stay on top of your game - which can lead to burnout and overwhelm. What if I told you the key to doing more of the right things (those things that make the cash register ring) in less time, is to understand how much your time is actually worth.

On this episode of The High Performance Marketing Podcast, I'll invite you take a step back and really think about how much your time is worth, where you're spending the majority of it, so you can make informed decisions about what tasks you should focus on and which ones you should delegate or outsource.

Links I reference on the show:

https://www.writebrandmarketing.com/time

Harvest Time App - https://www.getharvest.com/

Clockify Time App - https://clockify.me/

Transcript

Welcome To High-Performance Marketing, a podcast committed to helping small business owners connect with their ideal customers using simple marketing and quality content. I'm your Marketing Guide, Ali Garbero.

Years ago, I worked for a leader of a small organization, who was an amazing individual. This person would come into the office each day full of life and energy. This person lit up a room. There was a lot of passion and excitement around the work we were doing, but this leader was also a little bit like a whirlwind storm. You could hear this person coming a mile away, and as this individual walked into my quiet office space each day, where my head was down focused on the many things I was trying to get accomplished - the fires of the day were immediately listed off as urgent and in need of resolution right now. This of course was distracting and caused us to fail in our ability to make the forward progress we wanted for the business.

After some time, I presented this company owner a strategy on how we could divide our efforts to become more profitable. Much of this strategy involved my stepping into a larger role to run the behind the scenes processes, management of staff, things like that. The goal was to offload the things that didn’t make money to free up our fearless CEO, to spend more time on client-facing relationships - which as you know, are those revenue-generating-activities businesses rely on to grow. 

Part of pitching this proposal meant helping this owner look at the ways they were spending their time, what their time was worth, and why spending it trying to put out fires each day or on lower cost activities wasn't the best use of time. 

So on today’s episode of the podcast, I thought we’d lean into knowing the value of your time so that you can make decisions with clarity about what’s holding you back from making progress.

First, let’s acknowledge the obvious…as an entrepreneur or small business owner, it is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of your business. Whether it’s working to put out staff issues, or getting involved in the why a project is behind, what’s wrong with the soda machine, shipping issues, fulfillment, marketing - wearing the hat of Chief Everything Officer is common. The problem is time is a finite resource and one of your most important assets, so if you’re hitting the pillow at night exhausted feeling like you did everything but nothing at all, it’s most likely because you’re either not managing your time as productively as you could, or because you aren’t delegating to the right people.

So first, I always say “show me how you spend your time” and I’ll show you how it shows up in your bank account.  As a leader and owner of the company, time management and productivity are critical factors that directly affect your earnings. The more effectively you manage your time, the more you can accomplish in a given day, week, or month.

If you looked at my calendar you would see time blocks for everything I need to account for in my day.  

So I categorize this into buckets like

• Family
• Fitness + personal prep like Shower, dress, make up, breakfast, etc.
• Spiritual time (meditate or read scriptures)

Then of course are the driving factors for my business - the things that must get done to keep the lights on. These kinds of things include:

• Learning and attending courses, seminars, training, etc. so that I can network with other marketing leaders and stay on top of the industry.
• Then I have content creation for my personal business (the time I spend writing my blog, outlining my podcast topics, writing and producing the show, creating lead magnets, courses, etc.)
• Lead generation and Sales meetings
• Other networking meetings 
• And of course, Content fulfillment for my clients (so the time I spend actually writing for others.)

You’ll notice I haven’t really blocked out any time for admin duties like scheduling zoom meetings, buying postage stamps, buying ink for my printer, uploading my podcast for publication, etc…..those items are passed on to an assistant because those things are tasks that either don’t earn the company money, aren’t in a wheelhouse I love, or are tasks that can be done by someone earning less.

So how do you get clear about what tasks should be done by you (big picture stuff) and what should be done by someone else? 

Well this is where you have to literally sit down and calculate how much your time is worth. Here’s an easy formula you can use.

I work blank hours per week and I make $ per week.

Now divide hours by your earnings and that will give you your hourly rate.

For example, a real estate agent might say

I work 10 hours per week and I make $3500 a week. 

$3500 per week divided by 10 hours means your hourly rate is $350 per hour.

Now, that’s based on an agent earning $182,000 per year, which many entrepreneurs earn that or more.

So, once you’ve figured out your hourly rate you don’t want to complete any tasks that you could hire for a lesser rate. Your eyes also get real wide when you realize that your time is worth $350 an hour, because you quickly ask yourself why on earth are you spending time on tasks that someone else could do for $20-$75 an hour?

Think about how much time you spend cleaning your home. Let’s say it takes you 4 hours on a Saturday (and your hourly rate is $350 an hour). You know that even Mr. Clean won’t charge you $1,400 to clean your house for four hours. So why are you spending your valuable time doing it?

Next, once you’re clear about what your time is worth you need to step into the next phase of valuing your time by determining the top 3 most important things you need to get done each day to consider that day a successful one.

Those top three should be written down daily, so that first, if you get those things done, you can feel confident you went to work that day. And so that you don’t allow other less non important things to get in the way. 

For example, I have one day a week that I block out as a creative day for me to write my blog, draft talking points for my podcast, create new offerings, write my book, (yes that’s in the works believe it or not) - things like that. As a creative analytical, free time to think and use my mind to put my thoughts into the world brings me happiness and gives me energy. So block out time to do the fun things you love inside of your business. The reason you started it to begin with. Let’s say you run a bakery, if baking lights  you up, then block out time to experiment and create new recipes. If you’re a real estate agent and you started your business because you like people or seeing beautiful homes, then dedicate a day in the week, where you tour three fun properties, go with another agent or bring a friend along. 

Third, in addition to delegating or outsourcing non-revenue-generating or lower cost activities and tasks, it’s also important for you to track your time. As I coached new entrepreneurs into growing a real estate business, I was always a little thrown off by how when these individuals worked on teams, they were held to standards and accountability that they had no problems agreeing to. For example they were asked to be in the office by 9am to make prospecting calls or in software sales, we were held to standards around how many introductory calls we set up for sales executives, etc. But the second we start working for ourselves it’s like “I’m the CEO I can do anything I want.” Which one entrepreneur literally told me. She said, I’m not going to commit to being in my office by 9am if I want to be out hiking instead. 

Ok, well that’s one way to run a business and I have to respect different strokes for different folks I suppose, so I’m not so much emphasizing you be rigid, but rather that you know what you are doing with the time you are investing in your business. As a copywriter I work on a project by project basis or longer term retainers, but there are times when I’ll work a project for an agency and they want me to bill on an hourly rate. In which case I literally use one of two things….I purchased a sleek looking cool digital clock that sits on my desk or better yet, I’d recommend using one of the following apps: 

Clockify or Harvest - you can find these solutions at: 

Clockify dot me

Getharvest dot com

Both have FREE options. Tracking your time helps you identify where you are spending the majority of your time so that you can better identify is this the best way for me to spend my time? 

You’ve heard the saying “What gets measured gets done.” This means regularly measuring your time to ensure you’re focused on the best use of it and so you know how to make better business decisions - like is it time to hire an assistant, should I outsource my marketing? 

If you’d like to see the spreadsheet I used initially to build out my weekly calendar, you can download it at writebrandmarketing.com/time

Overall tracking your time will improve your results, because again time is your most valuable and finite resource.

Finally, and in the same realm of time tracking is to prioritize your time. 

Are you clear about what tasks have the most significant impact on your business's success? For example, let’s say much of your business comes by way of referral - then are you dedicating enough time or resources to generating a consistent flow of those? If most of your business comes by way of online ads - are you spending enough time responding to inquiries, investing in sales training so you improve conversion?

If most of your sales come from new products you make on an online boutique, are you spending enough time for new product development? Or are you spending more time making cute canva graphics? Which again is a lower cost effort.

To close my story loop - this incredible business owner I worked for years ago, opted not to accept my proposal to take over the day to day to free this person up for a day focused on client relationships.  My goal really was for the two of us to play to our strengths, but most importantly to use those strengths to grow revenue. 

I learned later that this person drew energy from the chaos and from putting out daily fires. And you know, that’s a shame - because this person was magnetic with clients. Clients loved connecting with this person and the organization could have quickly doubled revenue, but ultimately that wasn’t for me to take away from that person. They wanted to spend time in the mess of the day, and ultimately you have to honor a business owner’s request, when you aren’t running the business.

In this case, those of you listening to me are the head hancho. You have complete control over investing your time in a way that helps you achieve what you want from your business and your life.

But by understanding the value of your time you will spend less of it with clients who don’t meet your pre set criteria, doing tasks that aren’t worth your hourly rate and ultimately free you up to have more of it to spend on the things you enjoy inside as well as outside of your business. 

I’m cheering you on.

As a reminder - If you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet I used to build out my weekly calendar, you can download it at writebrandmarketing.com/time

Thanks for joining me today, I’m Ali Garbero, copywriting is what I do, content marketing is what I create, more customers is what you get.