Do You Wanna Make $10 Per Hour? Or $100, $1,000, or $10,000?
Do you want to give your self a raise? Apply the 80/20 Power Curve to the time you spend in your day. An 8-hour day has 480 minutes. Let’s say you get paid $20 per hour. How much is the work you do actually worth? $20/hour x 8 hours/day = $160. If we look at your day in terms of 8 hours, it looks like this: Number of members = 8 Total output of members = $160 The Power Curve, in Figure 15–1, page 116, shows that the least valuable hour in your $160 day is worth $8.96 and your most valuable hour is worth $53.74. It gets even more interesting if we divide your day into 480 minutes:
• Your average earnings per minute is 33 cents. • The least valuable minute of your day is worth 7.6 cents. • The most valuable minute of your day is worth $15.49. Fifteen bucks a minute? Now what does this actually mean? It means that when you’re filing your fingernails or chatting with your friends on Facebook, your value to your employer is very low. To say you’re worth 7.6 cents per minute to your employer while you’re texting your fishing buddy is generous, to say the least. It also means most people really get only about one to two hours of real work done each day and the rest of it is busy-ness. It means the true 80/20 individual can work one day a week and take the other four off. You just have to make that day really COUNT.
What activity is worth $15 per minute for an entry-level employee? Answering the phone professionally and competently; finding an error in an invoice; paying close attention in a conversation and relaying critical information to another staff member. Greeting visitors in such a way that creates an overwhelmingly positive impression; paying someone a sincere compliment and brightening the atmosphere of the office; noticing that a customer has a problem that is easily solved, and solving it without delay. You see here that the most valuable 30 minutes of a $20-per-hour employee’s time is actually worth $150 per hour. Also notice: 15 dollars per minute is $900 per hour. Did you notice that? For at least one minute a day, even a $20/hour employee is worth nearly a thousand bucks an hour. Which means a $200-per-hour employee (doctor, lawyer, business owner) is worth ten thousand dollars an hour. Wow!
“Can I Get a Raise? A Thousand Bucks an Hour, Por Favor.” You increase your income by focusing on all these activities and find some other way, or some lower-paid person, to do the low-value activities. You move resources from the left side of the curve to the right side. When you do that, you are suddenly on a new curve . . . but the curve is still the same shape. You’re on a $50-per-hour curve instead of a $20-perhour curve And guess what? • The least valuable minute in your day is worth 19 cents. • The most valuable minute in your day is worth 39 dollars. So you’re always climbing, climbing the Power Curve. In doing so, you naturally create opportunities for people below you, and they start climbing the curve, too. The Power Curve permanently alters how you think about time. About a year after I started my consulting firm, my friend Michael Cage mentioned that he was starting to make a lot of money doing teleseminars: Getting 10 or 100 or even 1,000 people on a conference call, and selling something.
I enlisted the help of my friend John Paul Mendocha and carefully scripted a presentation about replacing cold calling with guerilla marketing. I invited my subscribers to listen in, I got 200 people on the line, and in one hour I sold $11,000 of products and consulting. Ten thousand bucks an hour. Wow. Dang. I sold as much money in that one hour as I usually sell all month. Once you have an experience like that, you’ll never forget it, and you’ll never want to go back to the old way. That was about two weeks after I’d read Richard Koch’s 80/20 book. I realize that I’d inadvertently applied 80/20, and I needed to master the 80/20 principle. A hundred thousand dollars per year equals 2,000 hours at $50 per hour. Most people think of those hours as roughly equal, but nothing could be further from the truth. The typical $100,000-per-year person spends the vast majority of their time doing trivial $10-per-hour tasks, a decent amount of time doing $100-per-hour jobs, and occasionally—and somewhat accidentally— executing highly productive, $1,000-per-hour tasks. You can verify this for yourself; all you have to do is watch people closely. Even highly paid executives waste large spans of time on low-value activities. In the last chapter I showed how even a $20-per-hour, $40K-per-year person probably spends at least one minute each day earning $900 per hour; he or she just doesn’t know it. And once you’re aware of this, you see the huge disparity. It doesn’t take a genius to realize there’s even more $1-per-hour tasks, plus a very few $10,000-per-hour tasks. For a secretary, $10,000-per-hour opportunities do exist, but they aren’t exactly plentiful. But you’re in sales and marketing. Maybe you even own the company. If you strongly influence sales in your company, $10,000-per-hour opportunities are everywhere around you. Which means if you’re making less than $100,000-per-year, you won’t be for long if you follow the 80/20 principle. Let’s rank your opportunities in dollars per hour (see Figure 15–2). Notice that many times $10,000-per-hour jobs don’t pay off until a lot of $10- and $100-per-hour infrastructure has been put in place. Tragically, so many million-dollar ideas don’t see the light of day because one person
$10 per hour $100 per hour $1,000 per hour $10,000 per hour Running errands Solving a problem for a prospective or existing customer Planning and prioritizing your day Improving your USP Talking to unqualified prospects Talking to a qualified prospect Negotiating with a qualified prospect Creating new and better offers Cold-calling (of any variety) Writing an email to prospects or customers Building your sales funnel Repositioning your message and position Building and fixing stuff on your website Creating marketing tests and experiments Judging marketing tests and experiments Executing “bolt from the blue” brilliant ideas Doing expense reports Managing Pay-PerClick campaigns Creating Pay-PerClick campaigns Negotiating major deals Working “social media” the way most people do it Doing social media well (this is rare) Doing social media with extreme competence (this is very rare) Selling to high-value customers and groups Cleaning, sorting Outsourcing simple tasks Delegating complex tasks Selecting team members Attending meetings Customer follow up Writing sales copy Public speaking
Driving to meetings Establishing values and culture Making trips to the store Performing basic customer service Building websites
Spelling everything perfectly
is so bogged down in $10- and $100-per-hour jobs that they just never finish. Plus, the person capable of recognizing and executing $10,000-perhour tasks is usually bored stiff by $10-per-hour work. The fastest way to find more $1,000-per-hour opportunities is to simply get somebody else to do your $10-per-hour jobs. I know what you’re saying: “But my company will never hire an assistant for me.” That’s right, they won’t. Hire him or her out of your own pocket. The average, non-80/20 sales rep will never do this. (In fact, a surprising number of sales reps won’t even buy a book about sales and learn how to improve themselves.) Every solo entrepreneur is sorely tempted to do everything himself. But let me explain why the smart ones swim against the stream and outsource anyway.
Outsource the Easy Stuff First! Most of the items in the $10 column are pretty easy to hand off to someone else—bills, receipts, checking voicemail, etc. But if you’re just starting out, you should also seriously consider getting someone else to do household tasks like: • Washing clothes • Cooking • Cleaning • Shopping • Putting gas in the car This will easily free up 10 hours per week. In most cities, other people will do stuff like this for $10 per hour. Your productivity doesn’t have to improve that much to pay for the help you’re hiring—and remember, you don’t have to pay them until two weeks after they start! Business tasks are tricky to outsource. A lot of people try to outsource things like copywriting and Google campaigns (hard to hand off successfully) when they should really be hiring a kid to mow their lawn or shovel the snow. Sometimes the handiest person available for stuff like this is your spouse. That’s where Laura and I were 15 years ago—a 20-something couple taking care of a little baby and spinning a thousand plates.
15 / Do You Wanna Make $10 Per Hour? Or $100, $1,000, or $10,000? 121
80/20 SALES AND MARKETING
As soon as you have any margin, as soon as you’re starting to get any traction at all, you need to start handing off those $10-per-hour tasks to others. When is it OK to do this? As soon as you’re personally earning $100 per hour on any kind of consistent basis.
Take Back Your Life! The point of making $100 or $500 or $1,000 per hour is not to become a slave to your work but to be the master of it. This book isn’t just about selling more. It’s about getting your life back! It’s about regaining a sense of control, of setting your own priorities. It’s about being able to take that three-week vacation and shut off your cell phone—without guilt.
IS YOUR CASH REALLY TIGHT? DO THIS
If you barely have any money to spare, you can buy four hours of help per week for twenty bucks. You can hire virtual assistants online, often overseas for $5 per hour or less. Sometimes you can even find domestic or local help for that little money.
You will probably have to sift through a few to find a good one—and you should expect to. But they can speed all kinds of tasks for you. “Suzie, can you please research this for me, and get back to me tomorrow?” Handing off simple requests like that easily frees up several hours per week. Most important, it reduces your stress.
Now, begin every day with a question:
“What items on my to-do list can I hand off to my personal assistant?”
You will find that you can usually give one-fourth to one-half of your list to your assistant. The feeling you get when you can cross 10 things off your list and not have to do any of them yourself is wonderfully addictive.
The nice thing is, you don’t have to fill all that extra time with work. You can enjoy your family and do fun things, too. (Imagine that!) If you have a traditional job this is still a great strategy—but you must be respectful of any issues your employer may have with this.
Not long ago, a guy came up to me at a seminar and told me that his mother had gotten sick and he’d spent the last two years by her side. He had learned his marketing chops in Planet Perry, he’d mastered 80/20, and when the bad news came that she had a terminal illness, he knew exactly what to do. He shifted gears and did what was really important to him. There he was thanking me for what he’d learned. We enjoyed a hearty handshake. Most people experience some degree of heartburn about hiring “servants.” It feels elitist. It seems very strange to have someone coming over to your house, doing stuff that your mother used to pay your allowance for. It may go against everything you were ever taught. Get over it. 1. The only way you may ever achieve the real, interesting, fascinating, über-productive things that you really want to accomplish in your life—your Big Contributions and your “bucket list”—is by shedding a whole bunch of utterly forgettable, trivial, uninteresting busy work. 2. Somebody wants that job. As a matter of fact, they were praying that a job would come along, just yesterday. YOU are the answer to their request. Your “inner head trash” about achieving great things and exercising your authority only robs them of their opportunity to climb the ladder. 3. This is the fastest, easiest way to solve the unemployment problem. If 5 percent of the people in the world hired a personal assistant, 10 percent unemployment would suddenly become 5 percent. And you already know that the top 5 percent of people in the world can well afford the extra help. You were not put on planet Earth to clean toilets. Someday no one will be cleaning toilets—the robots will be doing that job. Move that stuff off your plate and get on with what you were really put on earth to do.
————————————————— PARETO SUMMARY —————————————————— p When you apply the Power Curve to time, you see that even a $20-per-hour person is worth $1,000 per hour at least one minute of every day. p Your job, in managing your time, is to climb the Power Curve. p As you climb the Power Curve, bigger opportunities always show up. p Divide everything you do into $10-, $100-, and $1,000-per-hour tasks. p As fast as possible, hire out the $10-per-hour tasks to others. Eventually you’ll be delegating $100-per-hour tasks, too. p Remember, basic household jobs are far easier to outsource than complex business tasks.
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