In August I hired a designer to help me think through a user journey.
I've known him for years. He's very good. We did it on a video call, and I worked the way we always do at lifestack: pen and paper first, screen second.
Partway through, I turned the questions round. I asked him to open the last five emails he'd sent and the last few photos on his phone. Then I asked where he wanted to be, and what he actually enjoyed.
His children. His partner. And the relationships he builds with clients, which he genuinely loves.
Then we did his arithmetic.
He sells a 45-minute call.
Before it, he spends about an hour working out what he wants to land. After it, another hour writing it up so it reads as though it was written for that one client. Because it was.
That's three hours. Except it isn't. If the call is next week, he carries it all week. Notes on the train. Ideas at the school gate. Realistically, five or six hours.
His client sees 45 minutes. That's somewhere between six and eight hours of work for every one that shows up on an invoice.
He went quiet. Longer than people usually do on a call.
The hours weren't hidden from his clients. They were hidden from him.
This isn't a pricing post
I didn't tell him to put his prices up.
The hidden hours are why the visible 45 minutes are so good. Strip them out and you get a worse call. The invisible work isn't overhead on the job. It is the job.
The problem isn't that the work exists. It's that it's never been counted.
Work you haven't counted is work you can't defend. It doesn't get a slot in the calendar, so it takes whatever slot is soft. The evening. The Sunday. The hour you'd already promised to somebody else.
And the people closest to you have usually noticed long before you have.
The move
Take the thing you sell most often. A call, a proposal, a review, a site visit.
Write down three numbers:
The time the client sees.
The time before and after that nobody sees.
The time you spend carrying it around in your head.
Add the second and third together and divide by the first.
Whatever that number is, you now have three honest choices. Protect it, by putting those hours in the calendar where they can't be taken. Price it. Or cut it, on purpose rather than by accident.
The only option that doesn't work is the one most owners are on. Pretending it isn't there.
P.S. If you're anywhere near Milton Keynes, the next lifestack Business Club is Friday 6 November at Planet Ice. Owners talking to owners, on paper, nothing sold: lifestack.studio/business-club