Are You Worth $10/hr? A Simple Formula To Determine If You're Focusing On The RIGHT Things

What is your time worth?

Here's how it went down. I was sitting in my office with our CFO. She gave me a detailed story of overwhelmed she was. And it was no exaggeration. 

I looked her straight in the eye’s and asked…are you worth $10/hr? Am I paying you too much? 

A nerve was hit. It caused a shield to deploy. She was on the edge of her seat ready to battle.

And yes, often, I’d re-word certain things. But this was a fact. 

She was overwhelmed by the wrong tasks. She was letting $10/hr activities burden her. What she needed to do was to delegate, manage, and lead her team's strategic initiatives. 

Are You Worth $10/hr? A Simple Formula To Determine If You're Focusing On The RIGHT Things

Think about it. What is your time worth? Or, where is your BEST time spent? 

This is a question that can vary widely. It depends on your areas of responsibility. Your focus. And what your strengths are. 

For me, my TOP priorities for Skylink are: 

• Setting our marketing strategy and leading the marketing team.

• Owning our vision.

• Providing the proper resources, whether it be capital, technology, or team members.

• Building our culture. Think vision, mission, values and action plans.

• Making key decisions.

• Delivering performance.

And now, we’re creating a B2C brand, JetFuel Coffee Co. and my priorities are vastly different:

• Hire marketing and fulfillment team.

• Oversee website design through Marketing Manager.

• Create and manage pre-launch campaigns.

• Create order fulfillment processes and delegate.

Now, the question is...

What is the highest value activities you should be doing? Here’s a simple framework…

I put a dollar value on every project and task I decide to participate in. 

The higher the value and the less downside for my companies, the more I’m jumping all in and structuring my days accordingly. 

Here’s how it goes…

The $10,000/hr activities 

These are my highest level activities. The ones that only I can do. The ones that have the highest value to me and my companies. I listed some of them above in the Skylink section. 

If they fall in these areas, I can’t delegate them. I own them. These are mine and mine only. I’m the CEO of Skylink, and I must act like it. 

Think of it this way. If I put in one hour of time into these activities, I will produce 200x the value. 

When I plan my week and days, these are where I start. These tasks and projects get and deserve a massive amount of my attention. They require significant mental energy. They’re not busy work activities. They’re strategic. 

These are my A-level activities and projects. 

The $1,000/hr activities 

A lot of these activities fall within my area of focus and responsibility. A $1,000/hr activity could be writing the market, message and media strategy for Skylink and JetFuel Coffee Co. or it could be sending my weekly from the CEO email to the Skylink team which helps build our culture. A culture of accountability. 

It could be helping close a $1M contract with Evelyn Rios (Director of Sales) or working with Amanda Drawert (Director of Operations) in structuring and deploying Skylink Defense. 

These are things I should own. It’s a higher level priority and delegating it is a bad idea.

If I put in one hour of time in these activities, I will produce 64x the value. 

These are my B level activities and projects. 

The $100/hr activities 

You can’t avoid these. These are typically management level activities. 

They’re necessary but don’t create the same level of value. Some of the tasks that fall into this category for me are training, one-on-ones, following up with a project, updating a procedure, or having to step in on a client issue. But since one of our core values is creating a WOW experience, depending on the severity, this may escalate to a B-level priority. 

The key is in the amount of input vs. the output. So if I put in one hour, these tasks will produce 16x the value. 

These are my C level activities. They’re mostly administration tasks to keep things moving.

The $10/hr activities 

These are my D activities. Why are they D? Because I should delete, delegate, defer or design these tasks out. 

I want to spend very little time on these tasks. So for me, a good example would be data entry, dealing with a small HR issue, or resolving a nagging vendor problem. These are not a high-value use of my time. For my CFO, these tasks would have been helping pull parts from the shelves for our inventory scrap project or filing paperwork. 

If you put in one hour of time into these activities, they will only produce 1x the value.  

From an investment standpoint, it’s putting $1 in the no-interest savings account. BAD INVESTING!

There you have it. You have a simple framework to put a value on your time. 

Just remember, your A-level activity could be my D-level activity. It very much depends on your goals and roles. Please understand each person is different. And next quarter, as you become more organized and efficient, your C-activities might move down to D-level activities. 

Focus on your A and B activities. And begin putting a talented team in place to start focusing on the other areas. This is critical in driving performance in your company and your life. 

And as Dr. Emol Fails said, “you don’t build a business—you build people—and then people build the business."

Nate Anglin