This "small task" costs $53,000/year

Read Time: 2 Minutes

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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.

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#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:

1. Creating the lead in Salesforce
2. Figuring out which rep gets it
3. Slacking the rep to follow up
4. 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.

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#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.)

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#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.

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#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.

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Put simply

1. Pick one repeated task that “someone always handles”
2. Write down who does it today
3. Convert salary → hourly rate
4. Multiply by time spent per day/week
5. Annualize it (that’s your cost of doing nothing)
6. 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