What's your time actually worth?

If your business turns over £5m, an hour of your time is worth a lot more than you think.

Most owners I work with across Rotherham and the surrounding areas have never actually done the maths. They know their hourly rate when they invoice. They have no idea what they cost the business when they spend a Tuesday afternoon chasing a small receipt or rewriting a quote that the sales team could have written themselves.

Here is a simple way to think about it. And here is the exercise that follows from it.

Draw the graph

Pounds per hour on the vertical axis. Time spent each week on the horizontal axis.

Now plot the things you actually do in a typical week.

Bookkeeping and admin sit in the bottom-left corner — low value per hour, but you might be spending three or four hours on them. Replying to operational emails sits there too. Chasing a small invoice. Rewriting a junior person's proposal.

Now plot the high-value things. Meeting a key client who could double their account with you. Designing the next quarter's plan with your senior team. Spending an hour with the leader you are about to promote so they actually understand what good looks like. These sit top-right — high pounds per hour, and worth spending more time on, not less.

The picture this paints is uncomfortable. Most £5m+ owners I have done this exercise with discover that 40 to 60 percent of their week is spent in the bottom-left quadrant. Tasks that cost the business money every time the owner does them.

What an hour is actually worth

Round numbers. If your business is doing £5m turnover at a typical owner-managed margin, your contribution to the business is somewhere between £200,000 and £500,000 a year. Spread that over a working year and an hour of your time is worth somewhere between £100 and £250.

That is the floor.

The ceiling is much higher. The hour you spend in the right meeting, with the right client, designing the right plan, can be worth £10,000, £50,000, or — once or twice a year — actually six or seven figures.

So when you pick up a £30-an-hour task because "it is easier to do it myself", you are not saving money. You are losing it. You are spending an asset worth £250 an hour to do work that someone else could do for £30. Every hour you do that, the business loses £220.

Multiply that across a week, a month, a year. That is the cost of not knowing what your time is worth.

The 3D rule — Delete, Delegate, Defer

Once you can see your week on the graph, the next move is simple. Every low-value task gets one of three labels.

Delete. Does it actually need doing at all? A surprising amount of admin in £5m+ businesses is genuine make-work — reports nobody reads, meetings with no decisions, processes that exist because they always have. Kill it.

Delegate. Could someone else do this for less than your time is worth, even if they do it 80% as well? If yes, give it to them. Permanently. Not as a one-off. With clear standards and a deadline.

Defer. Some things you genuinely need to do, but not this week. Block them into a focused hour at month-end and stop letting them eat your prime time during the week.

Everything that survives the 3D rule — the things you genuinely should be doing yourself, this week — gets the prime hours of your diary. Not the leftovers.

What this looks like in practice

Take Holistic Care 4 U — a care services business based in Rotherham, working across domiciliary, residential and training. When Taurai first came to me, the business had no real business plan and no working profit model. Busy day to day, but not building anything that compounded. Since we started working together, the business is back into profit, with a solid business plan and a clear methodology for growing margin. The biggest single shift in his week was protecting time for strategic work and pushing the operational tasks down to the team. Same business, same market, same people. Different week.

“Working with Tim has been a game changer for our business. He has a real talent for cutting through the noise and helping us clearly identify what truly matters. What sets Tim apart is his ability to bring structure to our thinking—turning ideas into clear priorities and actionable plans. He doesn’t just advise; he challenges, guides, and holds us accountable to the standards we set. If you want a coach who will help you focus, think better, and actually execute, Tim is the one.” — Taurai Tongoona, Director, Holistic Care 4 U

The exercise — do this in the next week

Block out next Monday lunchtime. Bring last week's diary with you.

For every hour, write down two things: what did you actually do, and what is the pounds-per-hour value of that activity (using the £100 to £10,000 range above as a guide).

Add up the hours that were under £250 per hour and the hours that were over £1,000 per hour.

If under-£250 hours are more than 30% of your week, you are leaving serious money on the table — and you are training your team to keep handing those tasks back to you because you have shown them you will pick them up.

The fix is not working harder. It is changing what you do, and getting the disciplines in place that stop the low-value tasks from finding their way back to your inbox.

Are you ready to spend the week on what is actually worth your time?

If this article landed because you recognise yourself in the bottom-left quadrant, the next step is to get specific about where you are losing time, energy and money.

Step 1: Get your data. Take 7 minutes to score your leadership operating system. You will get an instant, personalised report showing exactly where the gaps are between how you are spending the week and how a well-run £5m+ business should be running. Score your leadership →

Step 2: Let us talk. Book a 30-minute Discovery Call directly into my diary. We will look at your scorecard results, do the time-value exercise on your actual week, and map a practical plan to get the hours back. Book a discovery call →

Alternatively, if you are based in Rotherham or across South Yorkshire and want a quick chat first, call the office on 01709 242751 or email me at timcoleman@actioncoach.co.uk.