Your $200-an-Hour People Are Doing $20-an-Hour Work

There’s a strange problem inside a lot of businesses.

The most valuable people are often doing some of the least valuable work.

Owners are scheduling appointments. Sales managers are fixing spreadsheets. Top salespeople are chasing paperwork. Executives are formatting presentations, answering routine emails and sitting in meetings where they barely need to be involved.

Everyone is busy.

Being busy isn’t the problem. Being expensive while doing cheap work is.

If someone creates $200 an hour of value when they’re selling, leading, negotiating or making decisions, every hour spent doing work that someone else could handle has a cost.

The problem is that it rarely feels expensive.

Nobody gets an invoice for the hour the owner spent fixing a spreadsheet. There’s no charge on the company credit card when the best salesperson spends half the morning dealing with administrative work.

So the cost stays invisible.

But imagine paying someone $200 an hour and then asking them to spend three hours stuffing envelopes.

You’d immediately see the problem.

Businesses do the equivalent every day.

Sometimes it happens because the company is trying to save money. Why hire someone to handle administrative work when I can just do it myself?

Because doing it yourself isn’t free.

If you save $20 by spending $200 worth of your time, you didn’t save anything.

Other times, the problem is control. It feels faster to do something yourself than explain it to someone else. And sometimes it is faster.

Once.

Do it every week for three years and that calculation changes.

This is especially common with top salespeople. The better they become, the more responsibilities they seem to collect. Eventually the person you hired to generate revenue is spending a growing percentage of the day doing everything except generating revenue.

Your highest-value people should spend as much time as possible doing the work only they can do.

That doesn’t mean anyone is above administrative work. Sometimes everyone needs to jump in and get something done.

The problem is when temporary becomes normal.

Look at the people who create the most value in your business and ask what they actually did yesterday. Not what their job description says they do. What did they really spend their time doing?

You might discover that your growth problem isn’t a lack of talented people.

You may already have the right people. You’re just using them for the wrong work.

Stanley Barsch
Founder, Motion Wins