What is your time worth?

A wage earner may suggest that an hour of your time is worth the amount of your hourly wage. As an entrepreneur, however, I assume that you aren't working just to receive a wage. You are also trying to create value in your enterprise. So an entrepreneur hopes that the hour he spends will ultimately pay dividends many times greater than his hourly wage.

Assuming that you agree with that, let me pose a question that I ask of myself all the time: What are you doing with your time? I have to confess that on occasion I am embarrassed with the answer to this question and realize that I need to make adjustments.

I am a huge proponent of entrepreneurs making the sacrifices needed to build their businesses. I have even written about this in past columns. This means that the entrepreneur must often wear several different hats because there are limited resources. I have been in that stage of business several times. I have even cleaned my own office when there weren't enough resources to hire a cleaning service.

As a company grows, however, more resources become available. While this is what we are working for, sometimes it can be difficult for an entrepreneur to take off some of the hats he has been wearing. It makes good business sense to focus your time and energy on those things that will pay big dividends in the future. To do that, you will likely need to offload many of the roles you previously played and delegate them to others within your organization.

As our company has grown during the past few years, it has yielded more and more resources to utilize. Yet on occasion I find myself reverting to the old ways of doing everything myself. While some of these activities are kind of fun and may keep me busy, they are certainly less meaningful

to the company's overall success and a less effective, less efficient use of my time as I work to move the business forward.

It is actually pretty easy to figure which activities fall into this category. Let's say you pay yourself $100 an hour (whether through actual salary or business profits). Just ask yourself: "Would I pay someone $100 an hour to do this?" If not, then you should offload the activity to someone else. Obviously, you want to minimize the $8-an-hour activities you are spending $100 an hour to complete.

Obviously, this same logic can be utilized with your employees. You want to make sure that you have the right person doing the right job. Not only will this help your business, but your employees also will be much happier and have greater job satisfaction if they are working on projects and activities that are consistent with their experience and pay.

My guess is that a lot of the activities that bog you down are clerical in nature. One of the very best (and most important) hires you can make is a good administrative assistant. If you find the right one you may actually find that you can have them complete some $100-an-hour activities for a fraction of that amount.

As the business owner, you are the one within your company who is most committed to its cause. You have the vision. You have the passion and the drive. Give yourself time to be visionary, to be passionate and to drive the business forward by appropriately delegating less meaningful tasks and functions to others within the organization. You will be amazed at how much you can accomplish for the good of the company with this extra time.

And how much your time is worth.