You only have so much time in a day right?

So wouldn't it make sense to focus as much of your time as possible on the things that produce the highest payoff.

I don't know about you but most small business owners are do-it-yourself types and get sucked into doing the littlest silly work faster than you can say "Oh look, the copier is jammed again."

If you want to achieve any of your goals and finally start making what you are worth then you’ve got to stop doing $5/hr work. Period.

As you might have guessed by now, I believe that every business owner's highest payoff work, or best use of time, is any amount of time spent creating effective marketing.

Here's a little math quiz that I suggest you play with to help drive home this point. Figure out how much money you make annually or, better yet, how much you want or need to make annually to achieve your dreams and goals.

Now, divide that number by 2080. (That's the number you get if you work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year - I know, I know, you work 80 hours a week but just work with me here.)

The answer you get is what I call your "PAY" or Personal Average Yield. (I should probably trademark that it’s so clever) The idea here is to pin down what you are worth an hour and realize that if you can hire someone to do any of the things you currently spend your time on for less than that number, you can't afford to do it yourself - did I mention that you could use the spare time to do some marketing.

So let's run some numbers. Let's say that you want to make $150,000 per year. Well, using our little formula, that means that you need to be doing work that is worth a little over $72/hr - 8 hours a day.

But guess what...we haven't even factored in any overhead or costs of doing business. That number might really get big if you've got those as well.

This is the point at which many people finally come to understand that they are undercharging for their services…but that’s another issue all together.

So I ask you. Is fiddling with the copier, chatting with the mailman, running to the office supply store, making deliveries, or returning meaningless email paying you $72/hr? For that matter, doesn’t mowing your own grass, washing your own car, picking up your dry cleaning, and getting your oil changed take you away from marketing your business? I know, now I’m asking you to consider giving up most of the fun things you like to do everyday but hey, if you can get the neighbor kid to mow your grass for anything less than $100/hr, therefore giving you 3 hours to write a killer sales letter - it’s probably a steal

Figure out your PAY number, paint it on the wall in your office, and then go about setting up your business in a way that allows you to focus on the only things that can really pay that kind of money: marketing, innovation, and customer service – cause everything else is just a cost

Copyright 2004 John Jantsch

This article was posted on May 17, 2004

About The Author

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant based in Kansas City, Mo. He writes frequently on real world small business marketing tactics and is the creator of “Duct Tape Marketing” a turn-key small business marketing system. Check out his blog at http://www.DuctTapeMarketing.com/weblog.php - get these kinds of killer tips weekly by sending an email to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it '; document.write( '' ); document.write( addy_text67077 ); document.write( '<\/a>' ); //-->\n This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it