I’ve seen this in countless business books, and it changed my life.
The easiest way to determine your number is to look at your most recent tax return, the line that reads adjusted gross income, and divide that by the number of hours you worked last year. That is how much an hour of your time is worth.
How many hours do you have left?
Well none of us know that number, but it does help put things into clearer perspective. Are you happy with that number?
The most common mistake I see (in my opinion) is that people put far more effort into monitoring and limiting expenses, and not enough time into growing income.
You see focusing on expenses is limiting, you can only get so far, your income is the ceiling. Now think about increasing income, there really is no limit. A person that is good at generating income can overcome mistakes on the expense side and still be ahead at the end of the day.
That doesn’t mean you should neglect being aware of expenses and making good use of your money, but I don’t think it should be your primary focus. In my opinion you should be putting more energy into increasing profitable income than you do focusing on expenses.
This also doesn’t mean you should chase shiny objects by jumping at every opportunity that comes along.
Be methodical in determining what you enjoy doing and what of those things is your most profitable work. The more you can narrow that down, and become the expert, the more you’ll be able to command for that service.
The specialist always earns more than the generalist.
You’ve heard me say this before, but every year, look at the 10% of your work that was least profitable or enjoyable, eliminate it and replace it with further refinement of what your best at and enjoy the most.
Little changes, big impact.
Our tools and equipment are an example of something you could be delegating if it makes sense. It is what we specialize in. We’re not going to build the buildings, sprinkler systems, or rework the facilities. We do keep our fleet current and well maintained so you don’t have to worry about that part.
Now, what will you do to increase that number we talked about?
