Do the work!

This week I had a great conversation with a friend who does freelancing consulting. She was facing the challenge of hitting her income potential. She’s a one-person operation and has a fixed number of hours that she can work. So say she has 40 hours a week available and, accounting for other non-billable activities, can bill 25 of those. Let’s say she currently bills at $50/hr. She has 2 choices: work more billable hours, or raise her rates. Working more billable hours is simple. Raising rates is more complex.

Raising rates has to do with two drivers: the quality of work performed, and the supply of talent available for the given skill set. The question is: how are the 15 hours of non-billable time being spent? If my friend is spending those hours honing her current skill set, then she can raise her rates for those services. If she’s spending her time exploring and formally training on new skills that are in scarcity, then that could create a new service for which she could charge more per hour, keeping her rates the same for her original services. Either way, investing that 15 hours into learning and improving can make her more money. In the consulting world, this is very simple to track and analyze. As an entrepreneur, it becomes a little more challenging to do this type of analysis.

Can you break down your day into “doing the work”? Do you track your time and review your calendar? What skills are you intentionally working on improving every week? Reading blog posts is informative, but not necessarily deep enough to really be skill additive. When is the last time you cracked open a text book?

If you’re working a 9–5 job, the 40 hours a week that you’re paid for are to produce based on your current skill sets. It’s the after-hours learning and skills development that drives the ability to earn more. I’ve seen this with some of the top salespeople that have worked for me in the past. Salespeople have a finite window of their day that they can be “selling,” so they don’t want to burn daylight on anything but selling. This forces them to work on their product, industry, and technical skill development after hours. A lot of other functional roles have the ability to take their work home. They put in more work after-hours in an attempt to produce more with their current skill set. By focusing on the quantitative measure of their work, these people are missing out on the opportunity to refine their current skills and create new skills in order to produce different, higher value things at work.

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