It seems that a lot of business owners try and do everything themselves – even the stuff that they are not really that good at.

Doing this simple exercise may be the single best way to get you to take some tough decisions which will really benefit your business – and end up outsourcing some of the things it does not make sense for you to carry on doing.

You can do this the easy way. Or you can overcomplicate it. Your call, really.

But we want to keep things simple here – so much so, that you may even be able to get by without a calculator.

Looking at a 12 month period:

Take the money you want your business to pay you (which will typically be a mix of salary and dividends for the smaller owner/managed business) and divide it by the number of hours you work in the business.

Tectona tip: If you are struggling to work out how many hours you work in a year, why not take the hours you work in a typical week and multiply by the number of weeks you expect to work in the year (which likely will be somewhere between 45 and 50).

The result is your hourly rate.

Let’s just say it comes out at £70 per hour – and I would be a bit surprised if it came out much less than this.

Whatever your hourly rate is, there is not much that you cannot outsource for less money.

How about your IT support?

Or your marketing?

Or your bookkeeping?

Perhaps your phone answering service. Or raising invoices?

The result of outsourcing can be hugely positive – and not just in pure financial terms.

You will find that you will have more free time to focus on what really matters in your business – and that will be the big strategy stuff, the onboarding of a new customer.

Tectona have a wealth of close partners who we can introduce you to derisk the whole business of outsourcing.

About Tectona

Tectona Partnership helps business owners sleep at night by embedding one of our 16 commercially minded finance directors in your management team.

Very often, a part time solution is the most effective solution.

We make sure you have the necessary management information and strategic insight to make informed decisions and reduce risk; and we will absolutely tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it.