I wrote a post recently about what DIY bookkeeping actually costs you in time. It got me thinking about a related question — one that’s a little more uncomfortable, and honestly, a little more revealing.

If you’ve already built past the solopreneur stage — you’ve got a team, people who help run things day to day — have you ever actually calculated what your own time is worth inside your business?

Not what you think it should be worth. Not your old salary from a previous job. What it’s actually worth, based on your own numbers.

The math is simpler than you’d expect

Here’s how to get there. Take what you’re regularly pulling out of the business — your salary if you’re on payroll, or your regular owner distributions if that’s how you’re structured. Add that to whatever’s left over: your net income, or your cash flow if that’s the easier number for you to pull.

Now divide that total by a 40-hour work week.

That’s it. That’s your real hourly rate, inside your own business, based on what the business can actually support paying you — not a number you picked, but one the math handed you.

Bracing yourself is fair

I think a lot of business owners would be surprised by what comes out of that calculation. Some will land on a number higher than they expected — proof that all those years of building the business are actually paying off, even if it hasn’t felt that way lately. Others are going to be genuinely floored, in the uncomfortable direction, by how low that number actually is once it’s laid out plainly — especially if they’ve been quietly assuming their time is worth what it used to be worth at a previous job, or what they think it “should” be worth by now.

Either reaction is useful information. Neither one is a verdict on whether you’re doing a good job. It’s just a number you didn’t have before.

Why this number changes how you spend your day

What you do with this number depends a lot on where it landed — and it’s worth being honest about which camp you’re actually in.

If your number came out healthy, here’s where it gets practical. Think about the last time your to-do list had a hundred things on it, all pulling you in different directions, and you genuinely couldn’t tell which one deserved your attention first. Now imagine an employee CCs you on an email that really just needed a decision from them, not from you.

It’s not that you’re above weighing in. It’s a two-minute reply, and there’s nothing wrong with sending it. But if your calculated hourly rate is, say, $120, those two minutes just pulled you away from the one thing on your list that only you can actually do — over a decision someone else was fully capable of making. The email still needed a reply. It just didn’t need to be yours.

If your number came out low — noticeably lower than you’d expect for the work you’re doing — please don’t read that as a verdict on your effort or your worth. It isn’t one. What it’s actually telling you is that something in the business itself needs a closer look: pricing that hasn’t kept pace, overhead that’s quietly grown too large, or a business model that simply can’t yet support paying its owner well. That’s not a “try harder” problem. It’s a business problem, and it deserves the same kind of honest investigation you’d give any other number that came out lower than expected.

In that case, the trash-can question isn’t really the useful one yet. The more useful question is: what would need to change in this business — pricing, costs, volume, structure — for my time to be worth what I actually need it to be worth?

What to do with the number once you have it

Either way, the goal isn’t to overhaul everything overnight.

If your number is healthy, start by just noticing, for a week or two, where your hours are actually going. Compare that against the number you calculated. Anywhere you’re spending meaningful chunks of time on things well below your hourly rate — and that could genuinely be handed to someone else — is worth a second look.

If your number came out low, start with the business side instead. Look at your pricing, your biggest recurring costs, and how those line up with what you’re actually bringing home. That’s a conversation worth having with whoever helps you with your numbers, whether that’s me or someone else — because a low number here usually isn’t a time-management issue. It’s a “let’s look under the hood” issue.

Either way, once you know this number, you’ll never quite look at your to-do list the same way again — and that’s a good thing.

If you’ve never run this math for your own business, it’s worth twenty quiet minutes to find out. You might be pleasantly surprised. You might not be. Either way, you’ll know — and that’s better than guessing.