Owner Time Value Calculator
What your hour is worth, what low-value work costs you, and what delegating saves.
Your numbers
Your result
- Hours you work per year
- 2,750
- Your effective hourly rate
- $76.36
- Hours per year on delegatable work
- 750
- Cost of doing that work yourselfYour time valued at your own effective rate.
- $57,273
- Cost to hire it out
- $24,000
- Direct savings from delegating
- $33,273
- Gross profit if you spent those hours selling insteadDelegatable hours × revenue per selling hour × gross margin.
- $283,500
- Net gain from the swap
- $259,500
Your hour is worth $76 — you're spending 750 of them a year on $32 work
Handing that work off costs about $24,000 and frees hours worth roughly $283,500 in gross profit if you spend them on sales and strategy. Net gain: about $259,500 a year. The delay is almost always trust, not math.
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What this number actually tells you
Owners do fifteen dollars an hour of work because it feels responsible. It isn't. Every hour you spend on something someone else could do is an hour not spent on the two things only you can do: selling and deciding.
Your effective hourly rate is what you pay yourself plus the profit the business earns, divided by the hours you actually work. Most owners are shocked by how low it is — and by how much of it they spend on tasks a $20-an-hour employee could handle.
The real cost isn't the hourly comparison. It's the opportunity: what those same hours would produce if they went into sales, pricing, hiring or process instead.
How the math works
- 01Effective hourly rate = (owner pay + business net profit) ÷ (hours per week × weeks worked).
- 02Cost of doing low-value work yourself = delegatable hours × your effective hourly rate.
- 03Cost to delegate = delegatable hours × burdened hourly cost of the person doing it.
- 04Opportunity value = delegatable hours × revenue you generate per selling hour × gross margin %.
- 05Net gain = opportunity value − cost to delegate.
What to do with the answer
- List every task you did last week and mark the ones someone else could do at any competence level. That list is your delegation plan.
- Delegate the whole task, including the decision. Keeping approval on a task you handed off keeps the interruption and loses the leverage.
- Start with the highest-frequency task, not the biggest one. Recurring work compounds.
- Reinvest the freed hours deliberately — write down what they're for, or they fill with more of the same work.
Want someone to read these numbers with you?
The Growth Assessment is a 30-minute conversation about what your numbers are telling you and what to fix first. No pitch deck, no PDF.
Schedule Your Growth Assessment Or call (737) 888-0415Questions owners ask about this
How do I calculate what my time is worth as a business owner?
Add your compensation and the business's net profit, then divide by the hours you actually work — not 2,080. If you take $120,000 plus $90,000 of profit and work 2,750 hours, your hour is worth about $76.
Isn't it cheaper to do it myself?
Only if your time is free, and it isn't. Doing $30-an-hour work with $75-an-hour time loses $45 every hour, plus whatever those hours would have produced in sales or strategy. That second number is usually the bigger one.
What should an owner never delegate?
Pricing strategy, hiring and firing decisions, key customer relationships, and the standards the company holds. Almost everything else — scheduling, purchasing, invoicing, routine estimating, admin — can and should move.
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