83: How my business earns me 23 hours a week

Summary: In this episode Dan explores why business owners should stop measuring success only by money and start valuing time as their true currency, helping you design a more profitable and balanced business life.

4 things you’ll learn in this episode:

1. Why revenue and profit can be misleading measures of business success
2. How tracking hours worked reveals your true hourly rate and workload
3. What it means to switch from 'dollars as currency' to 'minutes as currency'
4. Practical ways to redesign your business to earn time, not just money

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Transcription:

I think just about every single one of us is measuring the wrong thing in business.

I’d like to share something I’m struggling with a bit at the moment.

My very first business was selling shells I’d picked up off the beach. My business premises was the top bunk of my bed. My customers were Mum and Dad. I was six.

From this moment, the measure of success of my little business was how much money it earned. And from that moment forward, every business I had was measured by the same metric. Money.

And it makes sense. We live in a capitalist world. And I’m fine with that. I believe that people should get paid for solving other people’s problems.

But living in that world makes it really hard to gauge the success of your business by anything other than the size of your bank account. That mindset has been drilled into us since before we could walk.

Money is our measure of business success, and for some of us, it’s also a measure of life success.

Society tells us that dollars are the currency that matter – they’re the scoreboard that tells us if we’re winning the game.

And we know it shouldn’t be like this, but it is.

So back to the thing I’m struggling with.

I’m struggling to break way from a lifetime of ‘money as the measure of success’.

Within the last couple of years, I’ve made some major structural changes to the businesses I run. Let me take you back to what business looked like before these changes.

I was working around 45 hours a week on multiple businesses, I had a team of 12 staff, brick and mortar premises, and my wife and I owned a home and three investment properties. Revenue was high – I was earning more than I ever thought I would. But the nature of running businesses in that way meant expenditure was high too – but not so high that there wasn’t a very tidy profit margin.

And it’s that profit that was my scoreboard. If I profited more in February than I did in January, I was becoming more successful. Sure, it was pretty stressful, and I was always worrying about something, but that’s just a cost of doing business right?

But then, I made some very deliberate and intentional changes to how I worked.

Fast forward to today. Zero staff, no premises, no investment properties, lower revenue.

By most traditional measures, you’d say I’m now less successful than I was.

However, expenditures dropped by about 75% and profit (which is the only financial metric that only really matters to me) dropped by only about 10%.

And importantly, most importantly by far is something the accountant can’t see. I’m achieving this off the back of an average of 22 hours per week of work – that’s all types of work – billable work, admin, business development… everything.

You’ll remember I was working 45 hours a week. And it’s now about 22. That means I’m doing HALF the amount of work I was. 50% of the work for 90% of the profit. That’s a massive increase in profit per hours worked, and probably a 90% drop in stress too.

But you know what, there’s a tiny little niggling part of my brain that’s still telling me I’m less successful than I used to be. Because of that small drop in profit.

Part of me is still a slave to the notion that dollars are the true and only measure of success.

I’m working really hard on this, and I think I’m slowly winning. I’m slowly honestly believing that the currency that measures the success of my business is not money, but time.

Time is the currency. Time is the resource I’m earning.

I’m flipping my thinking. I no longer engineer my work to optimise for financial earnings, but to optimise for temporal earnings – earnings of time. I base business decisions on the time they’ll earn me, not the money.

The changes I’ve made are paying me 23 hours a week. That is the value of the business I’ve built. That’s the salary my business pays me. Not money, but time.

A traditional approach would see people put that 23 hours back into their business. For my highest financial value tasks, I charge my consulting out at a rate of $300 an hour. That’s just under an extra $7000 a week if I was to trade my free time in for money. But you know what, I’d rather have the extra 1,380 minutes per week than the extra $6,900.

Bear in mind that I started my business 19 years ago – and I’m not denying the need for hard work and long hours. But I am denying that that mindset needs to continue just out of habit. Just look at the number of depressed, divorced billionaires. I believe there is a better way.

How could your life be changed by switching from ‘dollars-as-currency’ and adopting more of a ‘minutes-as-currency’ mindset? It’s a change that’s worked for me, and something I explore in great depth with the business owners I mentor.

If you want to start making this change, I recommend you start by introducing some new KPIs to the metrics you track. Start tracking your hours of work across all work types, and then calculating your TRUE hourly rate. How about also implementing a self-administered ‘quality of life’ scale each month – just as a regular reminder of what’s most important. What get’s measured get managed, and you can’t manage your time without first measuring it.

Episode 61 of the podcast is called ‘I tracked every minute of work time for a year. Here’s what I learned.’. Listen here, or read the article here. I’d recommend you check that one out if you’re interested in how I track my time. And all the way back in episode three, I spoke about ‘Your REAL Hourly Rate: The True Cost of Running a Fitness Business’ (podcast | article) Those two episodes are a great place to start if you want to switch to a minutes-as-currency mindset.

If you’re interested in the philosophy of money, time, work, and life in general, I’ve got one more resource for you.

This is an article I wrote and released as a podcast, where I break down my general philosophy of how to live a full and good life. In it I attempt to answer questions around:

• The role of pain and suffering in life. How do I remove them? Should I remove them?
• How can I balance ambition with contentment? Striving with settling? Journey and destination?
• How can I balance work, productivity, time and money, to give me a ‘good life’.
• When I strip back the work I do, who am I?
• Do I use busyness and work as a distraction from the question of what I actually want to do with my life?
• What are the elements of a ‘good life’, and how do I get more of them?

That episode was published in May of 2025, I hope you check it out (article | podcast).

And I hope you can consider a switch to a ‘minutes-as-currency’ mindset. My life has never been better than since I made that change.

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Your action steps:

1. Start recording every hour you spend on all business tasks to calculate your true hourly rate.
2. Add new KPIs that track time, such as weekly hours worked and a monthly quality-of-life score.
3. Analyse which tasks or structures reduce your hours without harming profit and adjust your business model accordingly.
4. Resist reinvesting every freed hour into more work; protect and use reclaimed time for life and health.
5. Revisit your definition of success regularly to ensure it aligns with both profit and lifestyle goals.