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A licensed plumber, an electrician, and a kid mowing lawns all earn more per hour than the average 7-figure business owner. Run the math on your own life.
Think Big Minute #29
Top BigLaw partners bill over $2,000 an hour. The average 7-figure business owner pulls $40 an hour if they're lucky and tells themselves they're winning.
Same hours worked. Same intensity. 50x the math.
Your effective hourly rate is total revenue divided by hours worked. Most business owners are running at $40 an hour if they're lucky, and a lot are pulling $15 or $20 and don't know it.
The number nobody runs on themselves.
You'll spend 6 hours optimizing a $20 ad spend decision and never run the number that measures whether your time is worth anything.
Look at the people who built generational wealth.
Warren Buffett has said publicly he spends 5 to 6 hours a day reading. Berkshire makes 5 to 6 big capital allocation decisions a year. The rest is reading and thinking.
Charlie Munger called his approach "sit on your ass investing." Most of his time wasn't spent doing. It was spent waiting for the right thing to do.
Howard Marks at Oaktree writes a handful of memos a year. Few in number. High in impact. One memo can move billions in client capital. He's optimized for output per hour, not hours.
Naval Ravikant has talked publicly about having a minimum hourly rate. If a meeting can't clear it, he doesn't take the meeting. Most business owners would feel embarrassed to even ask the question.
Tim Ferriss built a $200M+ investment portfolio after writing The 4-Hour Workweek. The book wasn't about working 4 hours a week. It was about asking what your actual hour is worth and refusing to fill it with $20 tasks.
Different industries. Same pattern.
The people who built fortunes don't work fewer hours than you.
They work different hours.
Now here's the part most people get wrong about this lesson.
The goal isn't to work less. The goal isn't to cut your hours in half so your rate doubles on paper.
The goal is to produce more revenue out of the same hours.
That's the actual game.
Working less to raise the rate is a math trick. Producing more revenue in the same hours is a real change in the business. One is accounting. The other is building.
I didn't pay myself anything at Legiit from 2018 to 2022.
For four years I was working long hours and pulling $0 in salary. The freelancers got paid. The team got paid. I just chose not to pay myself.
My effective hourly rate for the first four years of building Legiit was zero.
Zero.
I told myself it was discipline. It was avoidance. I was scared to confront whether the business could support me, so I structured it so the question never had to be asked.
When I finally started paying myself in 2022, the number forced different decisions. Different pricing. Different hiring. Different boundaries on what I'd say yes to.
The hourly rate didn't change because I worked harder.
It changed because I started measuring it.
Here's why business owners specifically are bad at this.
Most of us came up grinding. Volume of hours was the input. More hours equaled more output. The early years rewarded showing up and putting in time.
That wires your brain to think hours are the variable that matters.
Then you hit a scale where they aren't. The next dollar of value doesn't come from the next hour worked. It comes from the next big decision made well, the next price raised, the next bad client fired, the next product priced for the value it actually delivers.
Most business owners never make the switch. They keep working 60-hour weeks at year 8 the same way they worked 60-hour weeks at year 2.
The hours look the same on the calendar.
The hourly rate drops every year and nobody is calculating it.
Here's how to fix it.
1. Run the number this weekend. Total revenue from the last 12 months divided by total hours worked. Be honest about the hours. The number is going to be uncomfortable.
2. Audit one full week. Every task. Every meeting. Every hour. Then ask which ones produced revenue and which ones didn't. Most business owners spend 60% of their week on tasks that produce 0% of their revenue. Same hours, more revenue, just by cutting the dead time.
3. Set a personal minimum hourly rate. If a 7-figure business owner is pulling $40 an hour if they're lucky, your floor should be $200. Refuse any task that pays less. Delegate it, eliminate it, or charge more for the work that produces it.
4. Kill the calls below your rate. Most "discovery calls" with prospects who will never buy are below your hourly rate. So are most "quick favor" calls with people who aren't paying you. The hours you free up don't disappear. They get reinvested into revenue-producing work in the same week.
5. Raise prices until the math works. If your effective hourly rate is $40, your prices are wrong. Most business owners discover that raising prices 30 to 50% loses them the customers who were making the math impossible. Same hours, same effort, more revenue.
6. Build assets that produce revenue inside the same hours you're already working. Content that compounds. Products that sell while you're on calls. Systems that produce while the team is asleep. The same Tuesday now generates 3 revenue streams instead of 1.
7. Track this number quarterly. The metric you don't track is the metric you don't fix.
8. Compare it to what you'd make in a senior corporate job. If your 7-figure business is paying you less per hour than your last W-2 was, you don't own a business. You bought yourself a job with worse benefits.
The number you don't run is the number that quietly bankrupts your life.
Stop measuring hours.
Start measuring revenue per hour, and raise the second number without lowering the first.
Think Big.
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