If you are self-employed and working every waking hour in order to maximise how much you take home every month, you’re doing it wrong. This advice is completely counter-intuitive to most people … but is an extremely important step for every entrepreneur to understand. Getting over this hurdle is vital if you want to go from surviving to truly profiting from your business.

The expression “busy fools” is important to remember. We all know them, people who busy themselves with things add no value to their businesses. They have meetings but come away with no firm decisions or progress. They’ll spend three days trying to learn accounting so they can complete their VAT return. They will spend 10 hours talking to a customer who is spending £100. These people will never be rich as they don’t value their own time so their customers never will.

She's doing it wrong!

Many startups come to a point where they are limited by the number of hours their founder/s can work before they have a breakdown. They get stuck, feeling unable to hire someone to help as it will mean a pay cut. Their business hits a ceiling and goes nowhere.

You need to take that pay cut and hire that person sooner rather than later. Before your exhaustion means you start letting down customers and before you lose enthusiasm for your job and the prospects of your business. You need to have confidence that any cut in pay will be more than compensated for as the business will have your attention again … rather than slaving for customers, you will have time to think about things like business development or marketing. This is where the energies of the founders should be, and where you add most value.

If business founders are worth £100/hour and employees £15/hour, the company will obviously make more profit on a job if an employee does the bulk of the work. You can then invest your £100/hour time in finding more business so that other people’s work is paying your salary. You’ll also be able to streamline your business, negotiate better deals with suppliers, spend time with your key accounts, etc. … things worthy of your time that will enable it to grow and become more profitable than before.

Bite the bullet, spend less hours doing and more thinking strategically… take a pay cut … and then reap even greater rewards!