Good morning to each and every one of you fabulous salespeople and businesspeople! I hope you’re approaching this day with a level of excitement, commitment, and determination to do all that you can to convert opportunity into results. The only part of the equation left to plug in is you … let’s get moving!

So … what is the value of an hour and how jealously should we guard it? A couple of interesting questions for sure. One of the things that I like to look at with all of the clients that I coach is how much money they make for each hour that they spend in lead generation. The last time that I figured it out, the average for all of my clients was $467 per hour … and just last week I had one client who pegged his average at $482 per hour, while still one other one who we rang up at approximately $700 per hour—at least over the previous 30 days!

Now why is this so important, and what do we do with this information? Well, let me share another one of those quaint discoveries that I came to a long time ago …

A bucket of water with a hole in the bottom ends up just as empty as the bucket of water that gets kicked over.

There are many ways to lose water, many ways to lose money, and many ways to lose time. Through blatantly wasting time, being horribly inefficient, or just making poor choices (like not pre-qualifying, for example), it’s scary how easily we can lose at LEAST an hour a day. Let’s say it ~was~ just one hour each day … and let’s round the value to $500.00 to make the math easy. Now let’s say you worked 250 days in the next calendar year. $500 x 250 is …?

Yep. $125,000! Gone … poof … bye-bye!

Knowing what your time is worth isn’t just about bragging to your friends and family. As a businessperson, understanding the value of an hour gives us the opportunity to figure out how to best invest that hour … and it SHOULD also give us a stronger drive not to walk around with a slow, unplugged, leak in our ‘bucket of time’.

Unless losing $ix figure$ a year excites you, or you’re a professional government worker who just makes this kind of thing a way of life, today’s conversation should bother you. Start paying attention to how well you make use of the time you’re given each day. Plug the holes in your schedule and in your thinking about the value of an hour. Then let’s REALLY get out there and make today count!

(Photo courtesy of betstories.com)