I don’t like to take risks.
I also haven’t had my own business for very long, so I’ve felt like every penny I made had to be sealed away in a vault for safekeeping in case I’d wake up one morning and have no writing assignments, no consulting clients, and no speaking engagements.
Mentors told me I needed to invest in my business, but I didn’t really listen. The thought of parting with any of my hard-won cash made me feel a little sick. What if I didn’t get that money back?
So even as my business grew, I did everything myself. And I mean everything. If a book needed to be overnighted to a new contact, I ran to the post office over lunch. I learned the rules of small business accounting. I became a scheduling pro.
In the last year, I decided to develop two workbooks for my corporate seminars on recruiting and retaining members of the Millennial Generation. I designed the first one myself. It looked pretty decent – after all, I do have a modicum of talent when it comes to print design. The only trouble was, all the formatting and tweaking and formatting and tweaking some more took me 22 hours over the course of a week.
Online print firms charge about $200 to design the same type of workbook. My hourly consulting rate is $100, so I spent $2200 of my own time.
That was when I realized that doing any and all tasks myself to save a few bucks was actually harming my business. I could have been spending those 22 hours fostering new client relationships, or improving the ones I already have. These are the relationships that allow me to do what I do, and without them, I wouldn’t have the freedom to do the work that’s personally meaningful to me. Things needed to change.
So for the next workbook, I decided to get smarter. I let an online firm handle the design. They finished the project in a week, and it looked just as nice as the first one. I saved $2000. And incidentally, this $2200 figure doesn’t take into account the speaking engagements I do every other week, which command a much higher hourly rate. So if I had used the workbook design time to secure additional speaking gigs, I would have saved thousands more.
Even if for some reason I didn’t care about the clients or the money, my 21 month old son would love to spend 22 hours with me. I would take him to the park and music class. I would watch him run around the Chicago Children’s Museum squealing with excitement. I would pocket the memories of these hours, because he’s never going to be 21 months old again.
You all are just as busy as I am. And while there’s this pull to be independent, we need to realize that our time is worth something – a lot, actually. We can all be happier, wealthier, and more successful if we play to our strengths and spend our time doing things that only we have the unique combination of talent and experience to pull off.
Except for one little thing: “fostering new client relationships, or improving the ones I already have” doesn’t pay $100 an hour, does it? There’s a chance you might get a new gig, and you’d be a fool to pass up hard, cold cash to do your craft project instead.
But you didn’t lose any money doing your craft project. You effectively used idle time to save a known quantity of money, rather than pounding pavement or massaging existing clients for an unknown payoff.
one thing missing as well, you can actually enjoy spending the time doing that activity, and maybe learn something new.
i spend a lot of time doing assembly (electronics), so this is a bit oriented towards manual labor: i learn soldering/assembly skills which are valuable when doing bug-hunting/repairing; i find it terribly soothing; i get to listen to a lot of audiobooks/lectures/podcasts; i get to do a lot of deep thinking (doing something repetitive with your hands). all in all, while i of course may not be doing this all day, i get a lot of incredible advantages of not outsourcing part of the assembly, even though it can be done by machines for thousand times less money than my time is worth, in the end, i think the part of labor i keep is very well worth it.
in the case you mention, you have done it already, and maybe it was not very pleasant or fruitful, but in the case of something unknown where you know you can manage to do it (maybe not “well”), it can be worth it to give it a try. and maybe if that first one worked out alright but not too good, try it again. also gives you an appreciation of the job once you outsource it.
It’s all about working smarter. Determine the smartest path and decision to take.
-Denise
Very well put Alexandra!
Beautiful last sentence too, I was moved.
Goes along with a tweet from Neil Patel saying “do what you love, love what you do and outsource the rest”
There’s an expensive limited-access toll road (the Dulles Greenway) in the DC metro area that I had avoided for years simply because it was expensive, opting instead to take the free (but clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic) local routes for my commute. At $5 a shot, taking the Greenway cost me roughly $1000/year.
Someone I used to work with also took the Greenway. Every day. I asked him why, because I couldn’t fathom why anyone would pay that much.
“Well, what is your time worth?” he says.
Indeed. I’m making $54/hr. The Greenway cuts about half an hour off my commute each way, for $4.75 each way. So during rush hour, I look at it as a magic wand that gives me a half-hour commute for $4.75.
So I’m spending about $2,000+/yr in tolls, but I’m gaining 260 hours of free time (which I never have enough of to begin with).
Great article Alexandra. My first instinct is to always handle tasks on my own, so I appreciate the food for thought.
Joe