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The saying “trading hours for dollars” refers to the practice of exchanging one’s time and labor, usually within an established organization, for a fixed monetary compensation, typically in the form of an hourly wage or salary. While many people enjoy and thrive in this type of job, entrepreneurs are different: They create and manage their own business ventures, which, for most founders, involves myriad responsibilities and loads of pressure.
For an entrepreneur, “trading hours for dollars” can limit the scalability of their business and its potential growth, hindering their ability to create passive income streams and build a sustainable business model. Below, members of Forbes Coaches Council share effective ways for busy entrepreneurs to stop misusing their precious time and focus on the bigger picture.
1. Remove Yourself From Day-To-Day Operations
The most effective thing an entrepreneur who wants to stop trading time for money can do is to focus on removing themselves from the day-to-day operations of their business. This means focusing on creating a high-functioning team, letting go of some control, creating standard operating procedures and ensuring the company can deliver products and services without depending on the founder. - Sunny Smith, Empowering Women Physicians
2. Create Scalable Passive Income Streams
Develop products or services that generate revenue independently of your time, such as digital products and subscription services, or offer your knowledge through a learning management system, selling access to your on-demand courses. Build once, sell many. - Nigel Thurlow, The Flow Consortium
3. Follow These Three Key Steps
It’s the entrepreneur’s dilemma; trading time for money is a behavior that sticks with us even after we’ve scaled our businesses. The top three steps to stop trading hours for dollars are: 1. Empower your employees to do your job and delegate to the most junior members. 2. Use the 80/20 rule by focusing on the 20% of your job that delivers 80% of the results. 3. Stop managing (doing, helping, solving) and start leading (listening). - Chris Averill, Northford Capital
4. Offer Clients Complete Solutions
Too often, entrepreneurs haven’t thought through a balanced solution and are eager to sell a client what they ask for instead of the complete solution they require. This leads to too much time being focused on finding more clients. Instead, review offerings and craft a higher-dollar package, along with the necessary client education required to help them understand and embrace the value of investing. - Laura DeCarlo, Career Directors International
Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
5. Follow Your Passion And Purpose
Everyone talks about hard work, being gritty and resilient and having a growth mindset. Yes, these are all essential abilities. But perseverance and mindset are only two-thirds of the equation. Without the fire of passion and the direction of purpose, the journey to success is like running a car on empty. - Ira Wolfe, Poised for the Future Company
6. Match Your Values With The Right Niche
Passive income would be the obvious answer, but having an online product does not guarantee that it will work and enable you to make more money in less time. Focusing on matching your values with the right niche is much more reliable. Increasing your prices to align with the real value you bring to clients with financial potential enables you to do your work for more revenue. Start here! - Julien Fortuit, Julien Fortuit Agency
7. Shift To An ROI-Based ‘Value Received’ Approach
Stop presenting the value of your deliverables based on hours worked at an hourly rate. Shift to a “value received” approach based on the return on investment. Consider the perceived value of your ideal and most profitable target markets. Consider performance-based outcomes measured by key performance indicators as a part of your unique selling proposition. Consider replicable successful aspects of your business that can be automated. - Sherre DeMao, BizGrowth Inc
8. Make A Plan To Systematically Replace Yourself
To stop trading hours for dollars, track everything you do in your business directly related to delivering the product or service you sell. Come up with a plan to systematically replace yourself. Prioritize the action items and set up a formula to assign the things that you do now to a current employee, a new hire or an outsourced consultant. It’s only then that you can stop trading dollars for hours. - Rick Itzkowich, Vistage Worldwide, Inc.
9. Move From An Employee To An Entrepreneur Mindset
You must first move from an employee to an entrepreneur mindset. Then, you can focus on scalable income streams that go beyond one-on-one services. Whether it’s offering online courses, published works or group programs, this enables you to expand your reach and foster passive revenue streams, allowing the business to grow while freeing you from the constraints of time-bound commitments. - Lisa Marie Platske, Upside Thinking, Inc.
10. Evaluate Your Beliefs Around Trading Hours For Dollars
The first and most important “action” to take is to evaluate your beliefs around trading hours for dollars. Do you believe it’s possible? Do you expect it to be doable? If you’re still in the belief system of “hours for dollars” and take action from there, your results will match your beliefs. When you find yourself feeling the possibility versus the impossibility, that’s the time to take inspired action. - Christine Meyer, Christine Meyer Coaching
11. Productize Your Service
Take the high-value services you offer, add complementary products or tools, and bundle them together for a fixed price to obscure the labor hours. Focus your sales messaging on the value prospects will receive from their investment, not the cost of the individual components. Sell the cake, not the ingredients. - Glenn Grant, Selfassembled Ventures
12. Pivot To Creating Scalable Solutions
Leverage technology to offer products or services that don’t require continuous manual effort—think digital products, subscription models or automated services. This way, you can tap into continuous revenue streams, reducing the dependency on your physical presence or direct time investment. This will also free up time for innovation and personal growth. - Lital Marom, LITAL MAROM
13. Think About Your Work On A Project Basis
Focus on the result or outcome that you will deliver to the client. If what you are solving for is enough of a pain point for the client, then they will be willing to attach a dollar amount to how much they are willing to pay for you to help them alleviate that pain point. To the client, the value is in the outcome, whether it takes one hour or 100 hours of your time. - Michele Cohen, Lead to Growth Coaching
14. Shift From Time-Based To Value-Based Pricing
Entrepreneurs aiming to move beyond trading hours for dollars should focus on pricing their services based on the value they provide, not just the hours worked. This shift from time-based to value-based pricing allows for fair compensation and scalability. Additionally, leveraging resources and systems for delivery and management enhances efficiency and growth potential. - Steve Walsh, Exceptional Transformations LLC
15. Start Growing Your Team Of Future Leaders
The best way for an entrepreneur to leverage their time and energy is to empower others to step into their own potential and produce excellent results for the business. Empowering the talent on your team creates a win-win-win for the leader, their people and the business by creating the conditions for all parties to enhance their growth and capacity. - Susan Hobson, Elite High Performance Inc.
16. Delegate, Delegate And Delegate
Forget about the notion “if I work harder, I can get it all done”—the fun of being an entrepreneur is having the freedom to delegate what you dislike doing and reserve your time and energy for more important things, such as your vision for the company, financial planning, hiring and team building. If you do this, your business will see exponential growth. - Minna Hu, AI Business Coach Inc.
17. Adopt Managed Services Versus Hourly Services
In midsize professional services, I coach my clients to adopt managed services versus hourly services. Managed services are usually sold for a set fee, often a flat monthly fee. This uncoupling of the fee from hours is attractive to clients. The dirty little secret about hourly rates is that clients hate audits and having to ask you to justify your hours. They’d rather pay a flat rate for a fair service. - Randy Shattuck, The Shattuck Group
