“How Do I Value My Time When I’m Just Starting Out?”
It is imperative to your business that you value your time appropriately.
Truly value your time in the literal sense. So set a literal dollar figure of what an hour of your time is worth to your business. It is the fastest possible way to scale and grow. Even if your business is unable to pay you that amount right now. For instance if you expect your clients to pay you $100 an hour, set $100 an hour as what your time is worth to your own business as well. Why does this matter? Because it will keep you on the important stuff and it will keep you away from the unimportant stuff.
As an example, my clients pay me to solve complex ecommerce problems, help them run comprehensive digital marketing campaigns on a global scale, or help them create their analytics and attribution environments, so they know exactly what is driving revenue for them and what isn’t. That’s where my focus needs to be for the success of my business – things that are driving revenue. There are some aspects of my business that I have to do myself, for example videos like this, which goes into my library, it gets posted on social media, helps create awareness, etc… But there are many other elements to my business that I don’t have to do myself.
I don’t do my own graphic design, I don’t do my own accounting or tax or payroll, I don’t manage all of my channels on social media, I don’t manage everything by myself. A huge mistake many new businesses make is they believe they have to do everything themselves, literally everything, they wear all the hats. Everything I just mentioned and much, much more like packaging or deliveries, God only knows what else is relevant to your specific business, but you don’t have to do everything yourself and it’s silly to even try.
That’s why many businesses fail to make it out of their first year. Outsourcing – extremely valuable people think they might not have the money to outsource, but trust me you do, and here’s why. If you set your own hourly pay rate, then for you to manage your own social media, it’s that $100 an hour that I mentioned a moment ago. I’m currently paying $200 a month to have my pages managed for me, which includes several posts a day, necessary reporting and analytics, so that I can learn what to do more of, what to do less of.
My job is to provide quick, raw materials for them to post, which sometimes it is also something that I can outsource. There are dozens of freelance platforms, I cover a bunch in my program, that help you with everything from graphic design, website development, social media management, much, much more. Things you may not be an expert in, and also things that you might not even have the time to bother with, or to learn to how to perfect. So now your time is freed up to do the work that you are specialized to do. Client work that pays you money, that contributes directly to your bottom line.
Once that happens, you’ve created a cycle where now you can outsource even more. Free up more time, get more paid hours in your week or in your month and grow your business. You’ll also notice that you can apply this methodology elsewhere in your life, to create more working hours and more billable time. A real world example that makes me shake my head every time I see this is the gas station at Costco.
Those of you in Canada and the US will know that Costco undercuts other gas stations by a few cents, and as a result, at least where I live, the lineups are outside of the parking lot and halfway down the street. There’s maybe a 30 or 40 minute line to get gas! And my guess is with an average vehicle, you know fifty 50-60 liter, or like a 20 gallon gas tank, you’ve saved yourself maybe $3 or $4. So 30 to 40 minutes gives you $3 to $4 savings on on a tank of gas. You’re valuing your time at less than half of minimum wage. So putting a dollar figure on your time is hands down one of the best and fastest ways to get into a money making routine, utilize your working hours for the most important projects that directly impact revenue and grow your business.