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Read Time: 2 Minutes
Payroll hits.
You see the total.
And you think:
“Why does it still feel like nothing’s improving?”
Because startups do this all the time.
You pay high-level salaries to run low-level work.
Lead routing. Status updates. Copy/paste. Data cleanup. Owner chasing.
“It’s just a few minutes”… becomes half of someone’s week.
So here’s the system:
A time-to-money calculator for any business task.
#1: Name the task
Pick one repeated thing that “just has to get done.”
Example from a real client:
Website leads were landing in an email inbox.
A VP of Ops (Carol) was manually:
- Creating the lead in Salesforce
- Figuring out which rep gets it
- Slacking the rep to follow up
- Cleaning up mistakes (wrong email, wrong phone, bad data)
It worked.
But it was also 10X more expensive for the business than it needed to be.
Which meant – less dollars to spend on higher priorities.
#2: Identify who does it
To make this fair and simple:
Let’s say Carol (VP of Ops) was making $150,000/year.
- 50 working weeks/year
- 40 hours/week
That puts her around $75/hour.
(Yes, she probably worked more or got paid more… but we’ll keep it conservative.)
#3: Measure time spent
We sat with her and watched the process.
On average: 2 hours/day.
Not once in a while.
Every. Single. Day.
And it was growing, because lead volume was growing.
#4: Convert it to dollars
Now, do the math:
- 2 hours/day × $75/hr = $150/day
- Roughly $750/week
- About $52,000–$53,000/year
So the business was spending 25% of a VP of Ops role doing…
Glorified data entry + follow-up babysitting.
That’s the exact moment leaders went:
“Oh… so that’s why we’re not scaling…”
Because payroll didn’t go towards high-level strategy
It went to support low-level admin work.
And oh yeah, do you know how much they paid us to automate this?
$2,000.
Yep, they spent $2,000 to save $53,000.
Complete no-brainer.
Put simply
- Pick one repeated task that “someone always handles”
- Write down who does it today
- Convert salary → hourly rate
- Multiply by time spent per day/week
- Annualize it (that’s your cost of doing nothing)
- Automate it or delegate it to dramatically lower costs
3 Quick Things:
Here’s the free time-to-money calculator
Here’s the full video walkthrough
Here’s how to work with us

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