Divide what you pay yourself in a year by the number of hours you actually work in a year. If you take home $180,000 and work 55 hours a week across 48 weeks, that is 2,640 hours and a real rate of about $68.

Most owners guess high because they think in terms of revenue or their billable rate. Your real number is usually lower, and it is the only figure that tells you what an hour of your attention is worth.

Include your salary and any owner distributions you take, before taxes. Leave out business expenses, payroll for your team, and money you reinvest, because those are not payment for your time.

On the hours side, count everything: client work, admin, the Sunday catch-up session, and the evening you spent reformatting a proposal. Undercounting hours inflates your rate and makes delegating look more expensive than it is.

No, and confusing the two is where most delegation decisions go wrong. Your billable rate is what you charge a client for an hour of your expertise. Your effective rate is what you actually earn per hour once every unbillable hour is counted.

The gap between the two is the price of the work you have not handed off. A $250 billable rate paired with a $68 effective rate means a lot of your week is going somewhere that does not pay.

Multiply your weekly admin hours by the weeks you work, then by your effective hourly rate. Fifteen hours a week across 48 weeks is 576 hours, and at $68 an hour that is roughly $39,000 of your own time spent on scheduling, inbox, invoicing, and reporting.

Our clients typically reclaim 15 or more hours a week once that work moves to a dedicated assistant. The point is not the savings on paper. It is what those hours produce when you spend them on the decisions only you can make.

It happens, and it is worth knowing. If your effective rate is $35 and support costs $45 an hour, the calculator will show the difference as a real added cost rather than hiding it.

That result usually means one of two things. Either you are working far more hours than your pay reflects, which is its own problem, or you are early enough that automating a few tasks beats hiring for them. Both are useful answers.

Automate anything that is identical every time, like data moving between two tools or a reminder that always goes out on the same day. Delegate anything that needs judgment, tone, or a decision, like client follow-up, calendar triage, and chasing the information nobody sent.

Owners often try to automate the judgment work and end up supervising the automation, which costs more time than doing it by hand. Sort your tasks first, then decide.