Who is the most expensive employee in your company?
Look in the mirror.
Most business owners never do the maths on what their time should actually be worth. If you’re running a $1 million business, your time needs to be valued at around $500 per hour. If you’re aiming for a $10M business, you’re looking at $5,000 an hour. Yet many owners spend most of their day doing tasks that pay $25 an hour because they don’t trust their team to handle them.
The result is brutal. Every time you make a $5,000/hour decision but then get stuck doing $25/hour admin, you’re throwing away $4,975 in opportunity. Multiply that across an eight-hour day, five days a week, and it adds up to $199,000 of potential lost every single week.
That’s not being “hands on.” That’s being expensive.
The trap of doing everything yourself
It often feels like you’re the team, not just the leader. You’re checking emails, signing off on every little job, re-explaining instructions, and getting pulled into the weeds. Meanwhile, all the strategies you want to put in place get pushed aside because the day-to-day work is screaming louder than the long-term vision.
The business doesn’t grow because you don’t have time to step back. Instead of running the business, the business is running you.
How things change when you fix it
The answer isn’t hiring more people to keep you busy managing them. The real shift comes when you start hiring (or developing) systems thinkers – people who can set up processes that run without you having to be in the middle of everything.
When the right systems are in place, your business starts to run smoothly. Decisions don’t always need to flow back to you. Staff know what to do and how to do it. You finally have time to focus on growth instead of being buried in operations.
Why a business consultant can help
As a business consultant here in Timaru, I work with owners who are tired of being the bottleneck. Together, we create a plan that gets you out of the $25/hour work and back into the $5,000/hour work that actually drives business growth. We set up practical systems, clarify roles, and get your team running without you needing to micromanage every step.
You get back your time. Your team gets clarity. And your business gets the growth it’s capable of.
If your business has a turnover between $1M and $10M and you’re feeling stuck in the day-to-day, I’d be glad to talk about how the Business Success Programme can help you stop being the most expensive employee in your own business.
