Owner time audit.
Five categories, one week, and the honest arithmetic. Where the week actually goes, how many hours someone else could be doing, and what those hours cost at your own effective hourly rate.
The honest arithmetic.
Five categories, because that is enough.
Most time-tracking dies because it asks for too much detail. Five buckets is enough to find the problem, and you can fill them in from memory on a Friday afternoon.
- Owner-level work — the things that only you can do. Deciding direction, pricing, the key relationships, leading the people who lead others, and the important-but-not-urgent work that never has a deadline attached.
- Client delivery — you, personally, doing billable work. This is not a bad category, and in a young business it is most of the week. It becomes a problem when it is still most of the week five years in.
- Delegable work — work someone in the business could do to an acceptable standard today, at a lower cost than you, if it were handed over properly.
- Admin — invoicing, chasing payment, scheduling, expenses, inbox. Separated out from delegable work because owners consistently underestimate it, and because it is usually the cheapest hour to buy back.
- Firefighting — unplanned work created by something going wrong. Kept separate on purpose. It is the only category where the answer is almost never delegation.
The arithmetic, in full
Your total week is the five categories added together. Multiplied by the weeks you actually work, that gives annual hours. Your effective hourly rate is what you take out of the business — salary, dividends, drawings, everything — divided by those annual hours. That single figure is usually the uncomfortable one. Owners tend to have a number in their head for what an hour of their time is worth, and it is rarely the number this produces.
Delegable work and admin are then added together and treated as the hours that could move today. Those hours are valued twice: once at your own effective rate, which is what they currently cost the business in owner time, and once at whatever you would pay someone else, which is what buying them back would cost in cash. The difference between the two is shown, with a warning attached, because the difference is not a saving until the released hours are used on something worth more.
A worked example
The figures the tool opens with are illustrative, not a client. An owner logs 6 hours of owner-level work, 20 hours of client delivery, 10 hours of delegable work, 8 hours of admin and 6 hours of firefighting. That is a 50-hour week. Over 46 working weeks it is 2,300 hours a year. They take £60,000 out of the business, so their effective rate is £26.09 an hour.
Delegable work plus admin is 18 hours a week — 36 per cent of the week, 828 hours a year. At £26.09 an hour that is £21,600 of owner time a year. Bought in at £18 an hour it would cost £14,904. The gap is £6,696, and it is only real if those 18 hours go somewhere useful.
The more revealing line is the one at the top. Owner-level work is 6 hours out of 50 — 12 per cent of the week. Everything else is either delivery, work someone else could do, or the consequences of something breaking. Move all 18 delegable hours out and this owner either works a 32-hour week, or keeps the 50 and takes owner-level work from 6 hours to 24. Firefighting alone is 6 hours a week, £7,200 a year of owner time, and no amount of delegation fixes it — the fix is upstream, in whatever keeps breaking.
The assumptions, stated plainly
- Your effective hourly rate here is based on what you take out of the business, not on profit, and not on what you bill clients. It is a measure of what your hour currently costs you, not what it could earn.
- Every hour is treated as equal. In reality a fresh hour on Tuesday morning is worth several tired ones on Thursday night, which is why the categories matter more than the total.
- Delegation is not free and the tool does not pretend it is: the buy-in figure is wages only, and it ignores recruitment, management time and the weeks before someone is any good. The true cost of a hire calculator covers that properly.
- Nothing you type leaves your browser. There is no database behind this page.
Questions about this tool.
What counts as owner-level work?
Work that would not happen, or would happen badly, if you were not the one doing it. Setting direction and saying no to things that do not fit. Pricing decisions. The two or three relationships that matter disproportionately — a key client, a lender, a landlord. Developing the people who develop everyone else. And the important-but-not-urgent work: the process nobody has written down, the review that keeps slipping. If you find yourself arguing that a task technically requires your judgement, it is probably delegable work with your ego attached.
Should client delivery count as a problem?
Not by itself. In a young business the owner is the product, and delivery being most of the week is exactly right. It becomes a problem when it is still most of the week after five years, because at that point the business has a capacity ceiling set by one person’s diary, and no amount of marketing gets through it. The number worth watching is the trend across a year, not the level in one week. If delivery is not falling as revenue rises, you are buying yourself a job.
Why is firefighting kept separate?
Because it is the one category where delegation is the wrong answer. Firefighting is unplanned work created by something upstream being broken — a process nobody wrote down, a client who was sold something you cannot deliver, a system that fails every third Tuesday. Handing it to someone else moves the interruption without removing it, and now two people are losing their week instead of one. Above roughly a tenth of your week it is worth stopping and asking what keeps producing the fires, because that question is cheaper to answer than the fires are to fight.
My effective hourly rate looks depressing. Is it wrong?
Probably not, and it is meant to be uncomfortable rather than flattering. It divides everything you take out of the business by every hour you put in, including the unbillable ones, which is the honest comparison. Two things usually move it: the hours, and the mix. An owner drawing £60,000 across a 50-hour week is on roughly £26 an hour; the same drawings on a 38-hour week is £34. Nothing about the business changed except which hours stopped being spent on work someone else could have done.
What hourly cost should I put for someone else doing it?
Use the real employment cost rather than a salary divided by 2,080. For an employee that means salary plus employer National Insurance, pension and the rest — the true cost of a hire calculator works it out properly and the figure is usually 20 to 25 per cent above the headline salary. For a bookkeeper, virtual assistant or outsourced function, use the quoted rate, which already includes their overhead. If you genuinely do not know, put in what you would grudgingly pay and see whether the arithmetic still works.
Is the difference between my rate and theirs really a saving?
No, and the tool says so on the page. Your drawings do not fall because you delegated the invoicing. What actually changes is that a block of hours moves from you to someone cheaper, and those hours become available for something else. The gap only turns into money if the something else earns more than the hours cost. If the freed time goes into sales, pricing or fixing the thing that causes the firefighting, the return is usually large. If it goes into being available for interruptions, the honest answer is that you bought yourself a shorter week, which is a legitimate thing to want.
How long should I track before using this?
One honest week beats four estimated ones. Keep a note on your phone for five days and write down what you actually did in half-hour blocks — it takes about thirty seconds a time and the result is nothing like what you would have guessed. If you cannot face that, fill this in from memory and then do the tracked week afterwards to see how far out you were. The gap between the two is itself useful information, and it is almost always in the same direction: admin and firefighting are bigger than you think, owner-level work is smaller.
Want the tracking sheet?
We will send you the half-hour tracking sheet this is built for, plus the delegation sequence: what to hand over first, in what order, and how to hand it over so it does not come back.
Want a second opinion on the number?
A 30-minute discovery call. We will tell you honestly whether coaching is the right next step for where the business is.
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