Hours Up, Money Flat: The Pay Cut Nobody Announced

Aubrey R. worked 80 hours a week for 15 years. She never took a vacation. And her sales were flat the entire time.

Read that twice, because it's the most common story in business and almost nobody tells it straight. Fifteen years of 80-hour weeks, and the number didn't move. By the time she came to me she was in a wheelchair, and her doctors had told her she might never walk again. She'd been working herself to death, and the business hadn't grown a dollar for it.

I've coached business owners for 29 years, since 1997, and I'd like to show you the thing Aubrey couldn't see, because I'd bet some version of it is sitting in your calendar right now.

The pay cut you signed yourself

Take two numbers you already know: your revenue last year and your revenue this year. Then two more: the hours you worked each week last year, and the hours you work now.

If your hours went up 20 percent and your revenue stayed flat, you didn't have a slow year. You gave yourself a 17 percent pay cut for every hour you work. Nobody announced it. There was no meeting. It happened one Saturday at a time, one late night at a time, one more call after dinner.

Most founders I meet have never put a number on this. They feel it, though. They feel it as the sense that they're running faster and the ground is moving with them. That feeling has a name in my work, and we'll get to it. For now, just notice that it's real and it's measurable.

Why the reflex is always more

When the money stalls, the advice every founder has heard is the same. Work, work, work. Keep your nose to the grindstone. Almost every motivational speaker and guru delivers that message.

It sounds responsible. It feels like leadership. And for a while it works, which is exactly the trap. Because when the business stalls, that advice has only one answer: more. Earlier mornings, later nights, the phone at dinner. The hours climb, the revenue holds still, and the founder decides they must not be working hard enough. So they climb again.

The advice isn't wrong because founders are weak. It's wrong because it assumes effort is the thing that's missing. For nearly every stuck founder I've coached, effort is the one thing they've never been short of.

What Sheila's numbers said

Sheila V. was working 70 hours a week and making $5,000 a month in sales. That's about $16 in sales for every hour she put in. She'd already tried other money courses and she wasn't sure anything could be different.

Her sales grew to over $75,000 a month.

Here's what she told me afterward: it wasn't the program she doubted. It was herself. That's the pattern with the hardest-working founders. They trust effort more than anything, so when effort stops paying, they add more of it. The hours were never the lever for Sheila. They were the symptom.

My own legal pad

In December 2006 I was sitting in my parents' basement in Maine at a card table, with a folding metal chair and a yellow legal pad. I added up everything I owed: $42,000 in credit card debt. Ten years earlier I'd started my business with $823 in the bank, and I'd worked hard every one of those ten years. I'd gone from one basement to another.

That night I didn't need another strategy. I'd read them all, and I'd paid a lot of people who told me to push harder. What I needed was to find out what was actually holding me back, because it clearly wasn't a lack of effort.

The question to sit with this week

Here's the question Aubrey's story asks you: when your hours went up, did your revenue go up with them?

If the honest answer is no, then whatever is happening in your business, it isn't a shortage of work. It's a bottleneck. Owners tell me the same thing in different words: everything still runs through me. You're pressing harder and harder, and the business isn't going anywhere faster, because it's waiting on you. Working harder doesn't fix it.

Aubrey eventually doubled her income in 12 months, working less than she ever had before. We'll get to how that happens in this series. First, it helps to see your own number.

I built a free 1-minute check that does exactly that. Four numbers you already know and eight sentences you'll probably recognize, because owners like you wrote them, and it shows you where you're the bottleneck and what it's costing you in dollars. No email, no call. Take the 1-Minute Bottleneck Check here.

Take the free Caveman Quiz at NoahStJohn.com