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Are you undervaluing your own time?

As a business owner, little more is valuable to you than your time.

Running and growing a business takes a significant amount of hours that you won’t get back. Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in the day, so you need to make sure every moment of your time counts towards something valuable. Are you sure you’re valuing your own time correctly?

Assigning value to your time

It’s all well and good to say that your time is valuable, but how much is it actually worth? Unfortunately, it’s not really enough to say “a lot”. Instead, you need to translate that time into monetary value, reflected in the fees for your services or prices for your products.

This is critical because if you’re not properly factoring your own time in when calculating your prices, the chances are you’ll end up overworked and underpaid. And without a precise understanding of the value of your time, it’s hard to know which activities to focus on and which to delegate, outsource, or drop altogether.

To judge whether you’re effectively valuing your own time, you could look at it the other way around. You can work out how much your time is currently worth by dividing your average weekly income by the number of hours you work a week.

With that number at hand, you’ll have one of the clearest indications you could hope for as to whether you’re making a decent living based on the amount of time you work.

You might find it helpful to compare your new-found ‘wage’ to the wages of employed job roles equivalent to what you do – if you run a dog grooming business, for instance, are you making more, less or the same as an employed dog groomer on a steady wage?

Track how you spend your time

If you’re receiving little for the time you put in, what should you do? The knee-jerk reaction is often to put in even more time, keeping your business open for longer hours, or taking on additional work.

We would warn against this, though. No one, including the self-employed, should be working to the point that they have to sacrifice all their personal time. Besides, tiredness and stress is a sure-fire way to make mistakes that could cost you money in the long run.

This is why you need to accurately track how you spend your time. As you do, think about the value of each task – is it directly contributing to work that you’re charging a client for?

Your first task should be to find a way to delegate as many of those ‘invaluable’ tasks. If you can, you hire an assistant (virtual or in-person) to handle tasks not directly linked to generating revenue.

Consider an accountant too, who will handle your statutory accounting and tax tasks. The time we take away is time that you can use to focus on actual revenue-making work – increasing your profitability all the while.

Next, if you realise you’re getting very little for the hours you put in, consider increasing what you charge your customers and clients.

This might come as a shock for some long-term clients and customers, and may even mean some of them end their relationship with you, but the ones who are staying are finally paying a fair fee.

Remain conscious of your time

In business, you never stand still. As it grows, things constantly change. You get employees and are suddenly in charge of payroll. You need to reach more clients and decide to get into content marketing.

The important thing is to always bear in mind that whatever extra tasks crop up during your business journey, you always need to ask yourself: ‘is this worth my time or should I delegate it to someone else so I can focus on money making?’

We would say you should evaluate your time and your own areas of expertise as much as possible and focus on moving low-value work off your plate.

That might not always mean hiring someone else to do it. It could also mean using your time in a smarter way. Scheduling your week in an optimised way, for instance, works – just make sure you stick to it!

Final thoughts: cloud accounting

Technology is also a great way to do more in less time. We would highly recommend that you consider subscribing to a cloud accounting platform, like Xero or Sage.

These technologies allow you to automate all sorts of tasks, while all your financial information will be automatically displayed and updated in a home dashboard.

Even communicating with your accountant is far easier with cloud technology – no more emailing back and forth, and no more searching for financial records. Instead, everything is right there on the cloud for us both to see.

We believe your time is valuable, and promise not to waste it. Get in touch with us for a range of fantastic services today.