As home-based business owners, we often find ourselves distracted on a daily basis by outside forces. We constantly tell ourselves that we are worth more than what everyone thinks, but a half hour later we are letting someone drag us away from our productivity. If you don't really know what your time is worth, you can't expect the world to know either.
One number can change your whole home-based business around. Look what it does for companies and corporations. They decide how much you are worth per hour and you only get paid when you are working. Your own busines should be the same way. If you aren't willing to caluclate what you are worth every single minute of your work time, you might as well start punching a time clock for someone else again.
What really makes this powerful is that you don't have to stop at the top of each hour. How many times have you been pulled away from your desk for just 5 or 10 minutes? These are the little distractions that kill our businesses because we allow them to happen. But after a while, they start adding up to days and even weeks of wasted time.
When you calculate how much you are worth every single minute that you are working, you can sqaush any distraction that tries to nag at your shirt sleeve throughout the day. You can say "I'm not going to check the mailbox right now because it woudl take me 7 minutes and that would be $56.72 out of my pocket!
What this is called is your "billable minute." The whole point of caluclating this is to give you a specific number to refer to that represents what you are worth. When you put your actions into numbers, results begin to happen. What you think you should be paid for every minute reminds you to get to work when you need to get to work. Just like an employer guages your worth by the hour, you must do the same for yourself.
Project into the future to when you think you've made it. When you feel that you can live at the level of success that your goals reflect, how much money do you see yourself making per year? If it's $300,000, then write it down. There is no right or wrong amount. Since it's been a long time since you took that high school math course, try to keep the numbers as simple as you can just to make it easy yourself.
Now that you have your dream income number, determine how many hours you'd like to work to generate that income. I know you'd rather not work at all and just have the money show up in a royalty check, but let's assume you are at least helping lots of people build their businesses. Maybe it's only 4 hours a day and that's fine. Just be practical and somewhat realistic.
Once you determine the amount of hours per day, decide how many days per year you'd like to work. Mine would be 220 days of working out of the whole year, so at $300,000 a year, the breakdown would be. $1,364 per day. Not too shabby! Just by dividing my income by the amount of days you would be willing to work, you can reach your daily income as well.
Since I don't want to work all day long to earn that $1,364, my next step is to divide it by how many hours I would be willing to work in a day. I guess I wouldn't be annoyed if I worked 8 full hours and took the evenings off. That would mean that I would have to divide $1,364 by 8, resulting in an hourly wage of $170.
If I am making $170 per hour while I am working, that means that every single minute I am scheduled to work I am earning $8.52. That is my billable minute. During your productive time of they day, if I surf the internet or gossip on the phone, etc. for 10 minutes, I am wasting $85!!! I don't knkow about you, but I don't think any distraction is worth that much money.
When you work for yourself out of your home, it is extremely important to treat it like any job youwould lose if you slacked off. The best part about being your own boss is that you have no one to report to. Unfortunaltey, most home-businesses fail because people don't discipline themselves enough to get down to work. Then one day they wake up and realize they can no longer support their casual lifestyle.
Unless you never want to reach your financial goals, you need to change your way of thinking so that it is no longer worth the time to slack off. The billable minute is a way to keep your valuable time in perspective by reminding you just how precious it is. Someday you will be able to make $8.52 per minute, but in order to get there you have to be responsible enough to work for it.
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