What do your choices COST?!
Every working hour of your day as a business owner has a value to YOU!
This is NOT the same rate as your ‘billable hour’ btw.
Your hourly value is calculated as:
The income you WANT to generate in the next 12 months (e.g., $100,000)
Divided by the number of weeks you WANT to work (e.g., 46 if you WANT to take 6 weeks off.
Divided by the number of hours you WANT to work each week, or the maximum number of hours that you CAN work around your other commitments (e.g., 15).
(($100,000 / 46) / 15) = $144.93.
When you choose to ‘give away’ or ‘waste’ hours, you are making a withdrawal against your income goal.
When you choose to go meet a friend for a 2-hour lunch that takes 30 minutes to travel to and from, and then another hour to get back into work zone, you are SPENDING the cost of 4 hours – $144.93 x 4 – $579.72 in this example.
You can’t get that time back, so if it does not pay for itself, then you’ll have to compromise somewhere else… either working more hours to compensate or reducing your income goal.
HOWEVER, ‘pay for itself’ cannot always mean financially.
We are humans, not machines.
A lunch date on a weekday with a good friend or your partner, just because…
Sitting on the couch with your poorly child because you want to be there for them…
Meeting up with a client who is in your country and staying nearby for drinks because nurturing your relationship matters to you…
These aren’t necessarily choices that will reward you financially now or ever, but you CHOOSE to ‘spend’ on them because they are important to you in other ways.
My point is NOT that you should look at every choice or make every decision from the perspective of money…
Calculating your Hourly Value Rate is about making INFORMED choices.
So, when you say no to the random person wanting to ‘grab a quick coffee’ because you would NOT choose to pay them $144.93 for the privilege, you won’t feel ANY underlying guilt about it.
What’s your rate?
Veronica Pullen
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