What's an Owner's time worth?

As with most small business owners, I always question whether I should pay for services from business consultants. Buying hardware or software is easy, but buying services that I could do myself always seems to be a difficult decision. As a consultant, I should be able to justify this, since I believe that specialists can do things faster (and cheaper) that non-specialists.

In a discussion with a client last week, I got a new perspective. Small business ownersdon't have a lot of time, and any time spent away from earning money is a waste. Most of us earn more in an hour than we gain from doing other work ourselves. Consider this:

• A specialist can probably do a job twice as fast as a non-specialist, because they have done it so many times before.
• A specialist has made many mistakes in the past, and has learned from those mistakes. That means that they can prevent mistakes from happenning.
• A business owner cannot focus his or her attention on a single activity. There are too many parts of the business looking for attention. You can't tell a customer to wait, because you've got more important things to do. This means that you work in fits and starts, constantly interrupted. It takes much longer to get the job done.
• If the job is really important, can you really afford to do it later?

This means that it will probably cost you three to four times as much to do it yourself, and may produce fewer results.

My client explained to me what I helped her with. I helped her to look at her operation with a new perspective, looking at how the organization could be more productive. This brought new opportunities into the discussion. Specifically looking at establishing standard processes which saved her time. When it was time to look for solutions, I was able to bring in new specialists, saving her time in finding and evaluating proposals. My experience in a broad range of technology allowed me to translate proposals that were essentially technical proposal into business terms. This again saved her time, since she didn't have to struggle to understand what the technicians said.

The biggest benefit that she described was time. Time saved by developing processes, time saved by finding opportunities, time saved by bringing in solution providers. All of this time could be devoted to developing the organization, upgrading technology platforms and generally moving ahead. Doing it herself would have increased the time requirement. There is one problem with time. There is never enough, and once it's gone, we can't get it back.

I knew this. We all know this. But why do we tend to act the opposite way?