What is your hour worth? Start there.
Three simple questions. Find your governing hourly rate — the true dollar value of your time — and see what doing routine administrative tasks yourself is costing your business every year.
How the math works
Target Income ÷ (Working Hours × 48 working weeks) = base rate. Multiplying by 3 accounts for the fact that only about a third of work hours are directly billable or revenue-generating (a standard executive productivity formula). Delegated hours × 48 weeks × your governing rate = annual lost value.
Put your own numbers on it
Your hours, what your hour is worth, and what managing a hire or a freelancer actually costs you. No number of ours is printed until you ask.
What you want to take home personally from the business this year.
All the hours you actually put in each week across everything.
Email inbox, sending invoices, booking meetings, social posts, and routine data entry. Most owners underestimate this by a third — pick the realistic number.
Never do a task yourself if you can delegate it for less than this number. When you spend time on routine $25/hr admin work, you prevent the business from earning your true rate.
- Base rate
- $104.17
- Focus multiplier
- × 3
- High-value share
- 68%
Only ~1 in 3 hours directly produces revenue; the rest is overhead. Of your week, 68% is owner-level focus today.
Gets you to a sustainable ~40-hour work week without giving up any core business growth.
Comparing 4 ways to cover these 16 hrs
Compare what it really costs each month to do it yourself, hire a full-time employee, manage freelance contractors, or use a managed Office Clone.
Market base salary for this administrative or operational role.
How much time you spend briefing, answering questions, chasing, and checking their work.
This feels "free" on paper, but it is actually your most expensive choice because it takes your attention away from winning new business, delivering for clients, or resting.
You pay a full 40-hour salary, plus ~25% in employer taxes, health benefits, software seats, and your own management overhead — even if you only have 16 hrs of work.
The hourly invoice seems low, but you end up doing the hidden heavy lifting: screening freelancers, explaining instructions, answering questions, and fixing mistakes when someone leaves.
Brief your dedicated Client Concierge once. They document your procedure, coordinate the specialists, and deliver finished work back to you. No hiring, no 40-hour minimums, and zero management fatigue.
Transparent calculations: delegable hours × 4.33 weeks × your governing rate. Employee loaded cost = (salary ÷ 12) × 1.25. Freelancer management cost = chosen % of task hours × your governing rate. Change any input above and the figures update.
Comparing 4 ways to cover these hours
Compare what it really costs each month to do it yourself, hire a full-time employee, manage freelance contractors, or use a managed Office Clone.
Option 1 · Doing it yourself
This feels “free” on paper, but it is actually your most expensive choice because it takes your attention away from winning new business, delivering for clients, or resting.
Option 2 · Hiring an in-house employee
A full 40-hour salary for a part-time need. You pay the full salary, plus ~25% in employer taxes, health benefits, software seats, and your own management overhead — even if you only have a part-time need.
Option 3 · Freelancers and gig platforms
Low cost per task, high cost in your own time. The hourly invoice seems low, but you end up doing the hidden heavy lifting: screening freelancers, explaining instructions, answering questions, and fixing mistakes when someone leaves.
Option 4 · An Office Clone
Custom quote
Exact hours needed, with full management included. Brief your dedicated Client Concierge once. They document your procedure, coordinate the specialists, and deliver finished work back to you. No hiring, no 40-hour minimums, and zero management fatigue. Your management time: ~0 hours.
Three levers to pull before you spend anything — ours or anyone’s
The guide’s money chapter is blunt about it: in a tight economy you control your own outcome by managing cash, not by wishing for revenue. Two of these three are things a finance-ops clone does for you; the third is one most owners have never tried.
Cash flow — get paid on time, automatically
Invoice the day the work ships. Automatic reminders at seven, fourteen and thirty days. A small discount for paying early. Most late payment is nobody asking.
Expenses — review every subscription, quarterly
Renegotiate the contracts that renewed without anyone reading them. Go paperless where it is still paper. Cancel the tool that duplicates the other tool.
Barter — trade what sits idle
Empty appointment slots, off-peak capacity, surplus stock — list what you have, name what you need, and find the business that has the reverse. Organised exchanges exist for exactly this.
Hand off one thing and see
Pick the task that has been sitting longest. Three short steps, and you can watch the enquiry arrive on our side, already sorted.