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How To Make Your Time Worth $100 An Hour Or More

If you only work “IN” your business or even worse, “On the tools”, you are limiting your business in a big way.

You need to re-design your business and your weekly calendar to allow you to work “On” the business.

Working “On the business” is time spent to plan, strategize and grow your business.

A Builder first needs to calculate his hourly rate.

You might say “I want to make a profit this year of $200,000.”

Then break this down into the hours available so you can work out what the value of your hourly rate needs to be in order for you achieve this profit goal.

To keep it simple, assume you have around 2,000 hours a year to play with.

(2,000 hours is 50 weeks times 40 hours week.)

This means if you are going to make $200,000 profit this year, you as the owner of the business, needs to be doing work that is worth $100 an hour.

So what type of work is worth $100 an hour? (Or more.)

First of all, it’s not work that you can be paying one of your team $35 an hour to do.

If you want to charge higher prices (and enjoy better profits on what you do) one thing that helps you to do this is to develop a more effective quoting system.

In other words, you develop a quoting template that allows you to charge more money and get more of your potential clients to choose your business over your competitors.

It might take you 1-2 days of your time to develop a great quoting template.

But this improved quote could easily increase the hourly rate you can charge $10.00 or more an hour because your quote now looks so much better than your competitor’s quote.

Prospective clients will look at your quote and think “wow this person is professional. He understands exactly what I want to do and he’s already done great work for a lot of other people in similar situations. I need to work with this business.”

And they will also look at some of your competitors’ quotes and because their quotes don’t look as professional they will be reluctant to use them.

Another valuable use of your time is to develop your Unique Selling Proposition.

In other words “What makes you different to all the other businesses in your field?”

Here’s a good example:

I worked with a builder who was working as a general builder doing all types of building work.

We noticed that there were a lot of people in his area doing kitchen renovations but not nearly as many doing bathroom renovations.

So I encouraged him to position himself as an expert builder for bathroom renovations.

He already enjoyed doing bathroom renovations and was good at it.

I encouraged him to make that his niche that he specialised in, and it worked well for him. His margins went up, he got to work with the type of clients he wanted and he started enjoying higher profits.

All from investing some time wisely and working out what he wanted to specialise in.

The secret of mastering your time is to make sure that you, as the business owner, spend a lot of your time doing work that is worth $100 an hour or more.

In other words you are spending a good amount of your time working on your business and not just working in your business.

Action Exercise:

What activities can you do this month that is worth at least $100 an hour or more?