When every quote, approval and employee or customer question still runs through you, the business carries two costs: the work that waits for you, and the higher-value work you never get to.
What is an hour of your time worth? Count those hours you spend on tasks someone else could do, find the 3 tasks that COST you the most, and hand them over to someone else, or train someone else to do them for you.
Most business owners know they’re too involved, especially in the early stages of the business journey. But few have worked out what this deep involvement costs the business.
Those Extra Costs Show Up in Three Places
Work that waits on you
Quotes sit for three or four days because you review every one before it goes out, and invoices run late because you check them first. In a trade business, for example, that delay is expensive, because the job usually goes to whoever answered fastest, and the loss never shows up on any report.
Team members not making decisions for themselves
The second cost is a little quieter. When your team knows everything gets checked, they stop making decisions for themselves, and the capable people you hired end up working well below what you’re paying them for. You become the ceiling on how fast anything in the business can move. Eventually, the good ones leave for somewhere they’re trusted to get on with it.
The work you never do
And then there’s the work you never get to. An hour spent approving timesheets is an hour you didn’t spend pricing the next quote or chasing that bigger client. That’s the most expensive part of the whole arrangement, because the admin you’re holding onto could be done for $40 an hour, and the work it’s crowding out is worth hundreds.
The $21,000 Hire That Pays for Itself
Take an electrician, for example, turning over $1.8 million. The owner spends about 15 hours a week reviewing quotes, checking invoices, approving timesheets and chasing suppliers. An admin or operations hire could take 10 of those hours off their plate, and at $40 an hour, that costs the business around $21,000 a year.
Now look at what those 10 hours are worth back in the owner’s hands. If the time goes into estimating and client work, and it wins just one extra $30,000 job each quarter at a 20% margin, that’s $24,000 a year in gross profit. The hire has paid for itself before you count anything else, and the owner is no longer the reason quotes go out slowly.
Our article on whether you can afford to hire someone this month walks through the maths in more detail.
How to Work Out Your Own Number
Track one ordinary week. Write down every task that someone else could do with the right instructions, and the hours each takes. Multiply the total by what you’d pay someone capable to do them. Then ask what you would have done with those hours, because that number is usually much larger.
Where to Step Back First
Start with the tasks that are frequent, low-risk and rule-based: invoice checks under a set amount, standard quote items, supplier orders, rostering. Write the rule once, set an approval limit, and let it run. Keep the decisions that genuinely need you: pricing on major jobs, hiring, anything touching the bank.
This is the same structural shift we covered in what makes a business easier to scale: clear approval limits and people answerable for outcomes.
The Payoff Is Compounding
Every hour you hand over returns every week. Ten hours reclaimed is 500 hours a year for estimating, client work and margin reviews.
Growth iQ is an accounting and business advisory firm based in Malvern. We support owners across trades and specialised services with business strategy and planning, bookkeeping, and Agile CFO services.
If you want help putting a number on your own involvement, book a free discovery call with our Adelaide business advisors. We are here to help you plan your next steps.