A guy I know runs a landscaping company with six trucks. Good business, twenty years in, the kind of place where customers ask for him by name.
Last February he mentioned that he’d spent Sunday afternoon at his kitchen table typing the week’s job sheets into a spreadsheet so he could send invoices on Monday morning. Three hours, roughly. He does it most Sundays between March and November. He said it the way you’d mention putting the bins out.
So I asked him what he’d charge a customer for three hours of his time. He said four hundred, more if it was short notice.
Then he went quiet for a second, which is the whole point of this article.
The number is worse than it looks
Here’s the arithmetic almost nobody sits down and does.
Take what the business brought in last year. Divide it by the hours you actually worked, and be honest about the evenings. A company turning over four hundred thousand, with an owner putting in fifty hours a week for fifty weeks, is moving about a hundred and sixty dollars for every hour that owner is at work.
That’s not profit and it isn’t your wage. It’s just the rate at which money goes through the business while you’re standing there.
Now hold that number next to the Sunday spreadsheet. Three hours a week, thirty-five weeks a year, is a hundred and five hours. At a hundred and sixty an hour you have quietly booked yourself sixteen thousand eight hundred dollars of work that no one is paying for.
That’s the cheap version of the calculation. It assumes the hour you spent typing was worth the same as any other hour, and it wasn’t.
What the hour was really for
The expensive part is the thing you didn’t do instead.
Sunday afternoon was three hours you could have spent on the two quotes sitting in your drafts folder. Or the supplier conversation you’ve been putting off for a year because you’re never at a desk with the numbers in front of you. Or the phone call to the property manager who gave you four buildings in 2023 and hasn’t heard from you since.
None of that is urgent. It never is. That’s exactly why the admin wins, because the admin has a deadline and the growth doesn’t.
Every owner I’ve met has a list of things they’d do if they had a clear morning. The list is usually the highest-value work in the entire company and it has been waiting eighteen months.
Where the hours go
When I look at how the week actually breaks down in an owner-run business, the same handful of things turn up over and over. They’re rarely the jobs anyone would name if you asked them what takes the longest.
Carrying information from one place to another. Job sheet to spreadsheet to invoice. Enquiry to inbox to calendar to text message. Nobody ever decided this should be a job. It grew, one system at a time, and now somebody spends part of every day retyping things that already exist somewhere else.
Chasing. Following up the quote you sent nine days ago. Reminding tomorrow’s appointment that it’s tomorrow. Asking, for the third time, for the measurements you were promised last Tuesday. Chasing is worse than it looks on paper because it doesn’t come in blocks. It comes in interruptions, and an interrupted hour is not an hour.
Answering the same question again. Most businesses have about seven questions that account for the large majority of what people ask. Hours a week, and hours spent thinking about nothing new.
Working out what happened. Somebody has to know how many jobs went out, what came in, which customers went quiet. In a lot of places that’s a monthly ritual involving three exports and a lot of copying, and the person doing it is nearly always the one whose time is worth the most.
That last one is where I’ve seen the strangest waste. I’ve watched an owner spend an afternoon assembling a report that only he reads, so he can find out something the business already knew.
The test
You don’t need a framework for this. There’s one question that sorts nearly everything.
Would you pay someone your own hourly rate to do this job?
If the honest answer is no, and you’re doing it anyway, you’re paying that rate regardless. You just aren’t seeing the invoice.
Two things make the answer clearer. The first is how often it happens, because a twenty-minute job you do daily is worth far more attention than the four-hour job you do twice a year. The second is whether the job actually needs you. Not your business, you specifically. If any competent person following instructions could do it exactly the same way every time, then it doesn’t need you, and the fact that you’re doing it is an accident of history rather than a decision.
Judgment work stays. Talking to a customer who is upset, deciding whether to take a job, pricing something unusual. That’s what you’re for.
Getting the time back is only half of it
Here’s the part that catches people out.
The time comes back and then it disappears again, because it goes into whatever shouts loudest. Six weeks later you’re just as busy and you can’t point at what changed.
The owners who get real value out of this decide in advance what the hours are for. Not in a grand way. Just a decision, written down somewhere, that Tuesday mornings are now for going after the work you want rather than the work that found you. Then they defend it, badly at first, and better after a month or two.
That’s the difference between saving time and using it. Saving time on its own is a hobby.
The landscaping guy got his Sundays back last spring. He didn’t do anything clever with them at first. Then in June he started calling the property managers he’d worked with years ago, four or five calls a week, nothing systematic. By the end of the season he’d picked up two commercial contracts, which are the accounts that carry a business through a slow winter.
He’d have told you all along that reconnecting with those people was worth more than his invoicing. He knew. He just never had the afternoon.
Where to start
Not with software, and not with a list of everything wrong.
Sit down for twenty minutes and write out what you did last week. Not what you were supposed to do, what actually happened, with rough times against it. It’s a dull exercise and it’s uncomfortable in a way that’s hard to describe until you’ve done it, because you’ll see how much of the week went to things you would never have chosen.
Then pick the one that made you wince the most. That’s usually the right place to begin, and it’s usually not the one you’d have guessed on Monday.
If you’d rather have someone look at it with you, that’s what a first call is for. Tell me the job you end up doing every week that nobody pays you for. You’ll get an honest read on whether it’s worth handing over, roughly what that would cost, and whether there’s something more useful to fix first.
Sometimes the answer is that it isn’t worth it yet. You’ll hear that on the call, for free, rather than at the bottom of a proposal.