Most business owners can tell you their hourly rate for a client, a project, or a service. Far fewer can tell you what their own hour is worth.
That’s a strange gap, when you think about it. The hour you spend on a client’s behalf has a clear price. The hour you spend on your own admin, scheduling, and follow-ups, the hour that’s arguably more valuable, since it’s the one that determines whether the business grows, usually doesn’t get priced at all. It just gets spent.
This week, we want to walk through a simple exercise: figuring out what your hour is actually worth, and then looking honestly at where those hours are going. It’s a calculation that tends to shift how owners think about their week, not because the math is complicated, but because most people have simply never done it.
Step One: Find Your Number
There are a few ways to calculate this, and none of them need to be perfectly precise to be useful.
The simplest approach: take your business’s annual revenue goal, not where you are necessarily, but where you’re trying to get to, and divide it by the number of hours you realistically work in a year. For most owners working something like 50 hours a week, 48 weeks a year, that’s 2,400 hours. A $240,000 revenue goal divided by 2,400 hours puts your time at $100 an hour.
A second approach, if you bill clients directly: look at your billable rate, then add a premium, because your time as the owner is doing more than service delivery, it’s also generating the next client, the next decision, the next stage of growth. Many owners find their real hourly value is two to three times their billable rate once you account for that.
A third approach, if neither of those fits cleanly: think about what you’d have to pay someone with your specific judgment, experience, and relationships to make the decisions you make in a week, then divide that by your hours.
Whichever method you use, write the number down. This part matters more than it seems, because most of this exercise is about having a concrete number to hold the rest of the math against.
Step Two: Track Where the Hours Actually Go
Once you have your number, the second part of the exercise is more uncomfortable: look honestly at your calendar from the last week or two, and sort your hours into two piles.
Pile one: work that genuinely needed your judgment, your relationships, or your specific expertise. Strategic decisions. Key client conversations. The work only you could do.
Pile two: everything else. Inbox triage. Scheduling and rescheduling. Status updates. Coordinating between vendors or team members. Administrative follow-through that didn’t require your judgment, just your attention.
For most owners, pile two is bigger than they expect. Often significantly bigger.
Step Three: Do the Math
Now multiply your hourly number by the hours in pile two.
If your time is worth $100 an hour, and you’re spending 15 hours a week on pile-two work, that’s $1,500 a week, roughly $75,000 a year, of your most valuable resource being spent on work that didn’t need you specifically to do it.
This is the moment the exercise tends to land differently than expected. It’s not that $75,000 is being “wasted,” exactly, the work itself is necessary. The inbox does need triaging. The schedule does need coordinating. But it’s being done by the most expensive, least replaceable person in the business, when it could be done just as well, often better, because it would get consistent attention, by someone whose job is exactly that.
Why This Number Matters More Than It Seems
It’s tempting to look at a number like this and think about it purely in dollar terms, as if the fix is simply “save $75,000.” But the real cost isn’t the dollar figure. It’s what pile two prevented from happening in pile one.
Every hour spent on inbox triage is an hour not spent on the client relationship that needed more attention, the strategic decision that got rushed, or the new opportunity that didn’t get pursued because there wasn’t time to think it through. The dollar figure is just a way of making an invisible cost visible. The real cost is the growth, the clarity, and the energy that pile-two work quietly absorbs.
This is the core truth behind everything we do at My Azimuth: time is the only resource that cannot be replenished. Every hour spent on work beneath your specific value is an hour permanently gone, not deferred, not recoverable, just spent.
What Changes When Pile Two Moves
Here’s what we’ve seen consistently with the owners we work with: when pile-two work is handled, not by a tool they have to manage, but by real ownership of the work itself, pile one expands to fill the space. Not because the owner suddenly has more hours in the week. The week is still 168 hours. But the hours they do have start going toward the $100-an-hour work, instead of work that was never worth that to begin with.
That’s the entire premise of “already handled.” Not less work happening. The right person doing the right work, consistently, reliably, without the owner needing to manage it.
Your Number, Your Choice
You don’t have to do anything with the number you calculate this week. But once you know what your hour is actually worth, it’s hard to look at fifteen hours of inbox triage the same way again.
That’s not meant to create guilt. It’s meant to create clarity, about what your time is worth, and what’s currently being asked of it.
Not sure where your time is actually going? Take our complimentary Time Audit and find out what you should never be doing yourself: myazimuth.com/time-audit/
The most successful business owners aren’t doing more. They’re protecting their time better. You can too.