What Are You Worth An Hour?

In today’s fast-paced world, the entrepreneurial minded are always looking to do two things with their business: do it faster, and do it cheaper. Those two concepts alone are enough to found an entire business on, yet small businesses everywhere continue to do time-consuming and exhaustive tasks themselves, because they want to “Save Money”.

Here’s the thing about saving money though: just because you saved a dollar, doesn’t actually mean you saved a dollar.

Confused yet?

Let me explain. In the business world, everybody has a price on their head. Some are worth 10$/hour, some are worth $1200/hour. It all comes down to skill-set, experience, and ability to adapt and learn new things.

When you run your own business, you are telling the world that you are outside of the normal citizen, and that your skills will be used to your own benefit for your own profit. Whatever it is that you do, regardless of products or services offered, your time is still worth money.

So, if you sell lamps at a lamp store, and you can sell maybe 5 an hour at 20$ profit for each lamp, your time in that business is worth 100$/hour. If a lamp stops working, and you spent an hour fixing it, did you really save 20$, or did you lose 80$?

See, that’s where outsourcing comes in. On the internet there is a ton of things out there, and for most of you starting a business online, chances are you’re not an expert in most of them. So yes you can spend the time to learn each and every one of them, and learning is fantastic, but if it’s not a skill you deem very valuable for yourself to possess, why not just pay someone else to do it?

You have to figure out what you are worth an hour, calculate how long you think the task at hand would take you, and you will come out with your value limit for the specific task. Chances are there are a ton of things in your business that you could outsource for far cheaper than the value limit you come up with, so what’s stopping you?

What about quality?

The elephant in the room right now is quality. Yes you can outsource pretty much everything for cheaper than your value limit, but if you want it done right…You know the saying.

Quality is a big issue when outsourcing anything, but really, it just takes someone with the skill to estimate quality assurance to give it the go-ahead. Now this is the number one fear with most business owners, and it is actually the reason they tend to do everything themselves. You have to learn to take a few risks and test the waters though, or your business can never really grow anyway.

When you outsource something, sure you can hire the wrong guy, but when you find the right one, the work they produce is worth more than you could ever pay them. Just like you have your skillset and you specialize in that one thing, they too have a skill-set, which just so happens to be the one you need.

A perfect example of this is design…I had a website business a while back, and I would design and code the site myself. The thing is I’m more of the code-oriented person, so sometimes I would struggle with design for hours and still not get something to look perfect. When I finally decided to hire a designer for each of my website jobs, I paid the designer 1/5 of the cost to produce just the design, and let me tell you, it was absolutely the best decision I’ve ever made.

The website designs this guy could dish out in an hour were better then something I could come up with in 5 or 6, and the lifted workload of not having to do the design work made my part of the job much more enjoyable. Not to mention coding the site would only take me an hour or so, the design would take me much longer, so it was well worth the money.

The thing with business owners though is that a lot of them just don’t see it that way. For a $500 website, doing the design themselves would be saving $100, instead of realizing the bigger picture, and the fact that when you outsource the design, you can get more sites done in the same period of time, ultimately making more money.

Conclusion

So the moral of the story? Know what you’re good at and look at the big picture. Saving a dollar but losing an hour could be a bad deal, and you need to be aware of what’s going on. You also need to be very straightforward with yourself when it comes to your limits. A healthy drive is a good thing, but having to have constant control over everything can end up crippling you.

Your business is your baby, I get that. In business though, ESPECIALLY on the internet, when your time becomes more valuable than a task you have to do, outsource it and move on. If you keep with this pattern, you will have built a business without even knowing it, and that is one step to everyone’s goal: passive income.

So what do you guys think? Have you ever outsourced any work before? Were your experiences positive or negative?

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