The Price of an Hour

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the subject is the one stock in your business that cannot be reordered, discounted or bought in.

Two owners work one Tuesday through,
Both busy, both with much to do.
One takes each call as it arrives,
One keeps two hours, and only thrives.
Both worked eleven. One's ahead.
What did the other sell instead?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two owners in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both worked about eleven hours that Tuesday and both would have told you, honestly, that they had not stopped all day.

The first was available. That was the word he used about himself, and he meant it as a virtue, because it is one. Any call, any message, any supplier's representative who happened to be passing, any member of staff with a question they could have answered themselves in four minutes of thinking. He never once said the sentence not now, and by seven in the evening he was sitting down to the actual work of his business: the quote that had needed writing since Monday, the two enquiries going cold, the thing he had been meaning to fix since March.

Now here is the arithmetic he had never done, and almost nobody does. He wanted a certain amount out of the business that year. Divide it by the hours he actually worked and his hour had a number on it, and the number was startling, and it was the same number whether he spent that hour writing a quote or listening to a supplier's representative describe a new range of fixings.

Two hours of that Tuesday went on interruptions that produced nothing whatever. He did not experience this as losing money. He experienced it as a busy day, which is the disguise the whole problem wears, and the reason it survives in good businesses for decades.

The second owner had done that sum, and having done it could not unsee it. So she did three dull things.

She put a price on her hour and kept the figure where she could see it, not to be charged to anyone but to be weighed against. A question that would take forty minutes of her day now had a cost, and she could tell in five seconds whether it was worth paying.

She stopped being available and became reachable, which is not the same thing at all. Calls returned between four and five. Her staff kept a list and brought her six questions at eleven rather than six interruptions across the morning. Suppliers by appointment. Nobody was refused; everybody was scheduled.

And she kept two hours in the morning for the work that only she could do, and defended those two hours as though they were a booked customer, which is precisely what they were: the quotes, the letters, the following up that had been sliding for a year, all of it the ten minutes daily that compounds while everything else evaporates.

She worked eleven hours too. The difference was that two of hers went into work that would still be earning in a year, and two of his went into a conversation about fixings.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Every hour in your day is being bought by somebody. The only question is whether you set the price. The customer's question, the supplier's visit, the member of staff who would rather ask than think, the message that could have waited until four: each one is a purchase, made with your time, at a rate the buyer never had to consider because you have never named it. Name it, even roughly, and the whole day rearranges itself without any change in your character.

And notice what the interruption actually costs, which is far more than the four minutes it occupies. Work broken into pieces is not the same work done in a different order; the returning to it is where the hour goes. A day of eleven interrupted hours will produce less than a day of five defended ones, which is why the man who never stops is so often the man who never finishes.

Then the distinction that saves this from rudeness, because you will be tempted to reject the whole letter on the grounds that your customers deserve access to you. They deserve a reply, promptly, from somebody competent. That is reachable. What they do not need, and have never asked for, is the right to interrupt whatever you are holding at the moment they think of you, and no customer in the history of trade has ever complained about being telephoned back at four o'clock as promised.

Which brings this alongside the two letters you have already had on saying yes with a price attached: while you're here and by Friday, please. Same lesson, aimed inward. Your hours are the stock. Selling them at nothing, twenty times a day, to whoever asks most recently, is not generosity of spirit. It is the one form of giving away your margin that never appears anywhere in the accounts.

Three questions, and do the first with a calculator rather than an estimate:

1. What is an hour of yours worth? Take what you want the business to pay you this year and divide by the hours you honestly work. Write the number on something you will see on a Tuesday. It is not for charging anybody. It is so that you can tell, quickly, what a request is really asking of you.
2. Where did yesterday actually go? Write out one ordinary day in half-hour blocks from memory, then mark each block as work only you could do, work somebody else could do, and work that produced nothing at all. Most owners find the third column is a morning, every day, and have never seen it laid out before.
3. Which two hours will you defend, and from whom? Name the time, name the work that goes in it, and name the three interruptions you will hold until later. Then tell your staff and your customers the new arrangement plainly, because a boundary nobody has been told about is not a boundary, it is a private resentment.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did the first owner sell instead?

His two best hours, at no charge, to a supplier's representative and a series of questions that would have answered themselves by lunchtime. He did not think of it as selling, because no money changed hands and nothing left the building. But the quote went out on Thursday instead of Monday, the two enquiries went elsewhere, and the thing he had been meaning to fix since March is still there. Both of them worked eleven hours. Only one of them chose what for.

The verse:

The day gets spent, come what may,
By you or those who come your way.
So price the hour, and hold the two,
Or every caller spends it too.

Until next time. Go and work out what your hour costs, then block two of them tomorrow morning and tell everyone who needs to know.

P.S. Watch particularly for the interruption you enjoy. The pleasant caller, the supplier who brings gossip, the small easy task taken up gratefully because the difficult one was sitting there waiting. Those cost exactly the same as the tiresome ones and are defended far more stoutly, being disguised as good relations rather than as an afternoon gone.

Also in the archive: By Friday, Please, The Potter Who Made Fewer Things and The Millwright's Two Pounds.