The five minutes that kill your business

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

zoom out & you got screwed

Today is a heavy one. But stay with me, because it can make you a lot of money if you do NOTHING ELSE.

Many business owners think that, instead of spending an hour creating a step-by-step instructional (and our VSA clients are spending less than 10 minutes) to take a task off your workload...they've saved time and money by doing a task themselves.

Like they've been given a gift of 55 minutes. Like training someone to do it is too inconvenient, too costly, and not a big deal.

Okay. Let's do math.

Let's assume:

1. You have an assistant that you pay $10/hour (which doesn't exist in California) to, and works full-time. That means that, with payroll taxes, workers compensation, HR-related costs, it actually equates to $15/hour.
2. Your company generates $500,000/year in sales, and yields $200,000/year in profits.
3. You work 60 hours a week. By dividing your profits by 60 hours a week, you make $69/hour ($200,000 profit / 12 months a year / 4 weeks in a month / 60 hours a week).
4. The task mentioned above needed to be done once every day.
5. Half of your day is filled with administrative tasks that can and should be systemized and delegated.
6. Your assistant is only 80% productive, with 20% that can be better-used. 20% of a 40-hour work week is 8 hours of usable time.

If this is the case - by doing that 5-minute task above...

1. An assistant doing that 5-minute task for you would've costed $1.25, versus hiring yourself at $5.75. The cost is ACTUALLY $7, because you didn't maximize the assistant you paid for PLUS your time.
2. If the task needed to be done every weekday, that would be 240 days a year (20 weekdays a month x 12 months). Having an assistant do that costs $300, plus the loss of your time $1,380, for a total of $1,680 a year.
3. If half of your time is filled with administrative tasks that can and should be systemized and delegated, that's 30 hours out of a 60-hour week of tasks like this. Instead of maximizing your assistant at 30 hours a week and paying $450 for that week, you've opted to "do things myself" and pay $2,070. That's $8,280/month and almost $99,360/year.

Here are the realities:

1. Even if your current assistant was fully-maximized and you hired another 40-hour assistant solely focused on taking off your delegate-able 30-hour workload, $28,800 is still A THIRD cheaper than you doing the work.
2. If you delegated all 30 hours of administrative tasks and work that a business owner shouldn't be doing...and if you did nothing else, your company just became 50% more valuable, instantly, from $200,000 to $300,000 in profits.

Here are the opportunities:

1. Making $100,000 extra and instantly, without any extra work (less work, actually), is just the short-term benefit. If you were to sell your company, the fact that most of the company runs without you earns you a higher multiple and ultimate sales price.
2. If 30 hours of your time wasn't spent growing the company and 30 hours was spent buried in administrative tasks - and you reinvested the recaptured time into growing the company, you essentially can double your company's revenue instantly, too. $500,000 will become $1 million. But what's more exciting is your take-home. If you had to add another full-time assistant to keep up with the growth at $28,000/year, your profitability would've jumped from $200,000 to $771,200 ($300,000 costs - $100,000 from systemizing + $28,8000 assistant pay). You may have doubled your revenue, but you've TRIPLED your profits.
3. If you're a Pro Sulum client and only pay less than $10/hour, the math is infinitely more profitable; and doubling revenue isn't just a dream - but something that can be engineered and enjoyed almost immediately.

Oh - I forgot to mention the cost of one-hour's worth of your time (5 minutes, if you use our service). Hope you won't hold that against me #sarcasm. AND, I forgot about the costs and problems that arise if you were unable to do the work (you got sick, an emergency came up, etc.)...but those never happen, right? #moresarcasm

I've created a calculator on Google Sheets that you can use to plug in your own numbers (areas in green are where you plug in your numbers; leave the red areas alone, since the formula is being calculated there). When you access it, click on "Use template" so that you don't tamper with the sheet and you can have your own copy.

Hope this gets you off reactive mode. Remember that "I'll just do this myself" is a mindset, and that encompasses every thing you do. That means that you'll be saying that to 1,000 things that happen to you throughout the week, and you'll be dying by 1,000 cuts and not even knowing it.

Even if you don't use the service (not sure why you wouldn't - it's more affordable, faster, and easier), please focus on systems. Not all tasks are created the same; and systems are an asset that generates money for you. In fact, everything you systemize goes straight to the bottom line.

Work on your business instead of in it. Systems are the way.

**************************************************************************

I've been using VSAs for years now. They've enabled me to: own/operate a chain of ten restaurants, generating $20 million in revenue // grow my consulting practice internationally // and write, podcast, direct a nonprofit, tinker with ideas, be with my family more, and enjoy all of what I do. 

To this day, I still believe that they are the smartest and most affordable way to grow. 

Myself and so many other business owners have used the service to offload lead generation, sales, customer service, bookkeeping, and anything you can think of (and we also share things you DIDN'T think of).

All it takes is a commitment of five minutes a day. We'll show you how. 

Visit www.prosulum.com or message me if you'd like to learn more.