What 15 hours a week of repeat work actually costs you
Most owners guess low. Here is how to count it properly for your own business, using your numbers rather than an industry average.
The short answer
Count the hours in five buckets: answering the same questions, re-keying the same job, booking and confirming, chasing quotes, and building and chasing invoices. Multiply by your loaded hourly cost, not your wage. For most small service businesses the total lands between 12 and 18 hours a week, which is a part-time salary being spent on work that repeats identically every time.
The five buckets
Repeat work hides because none of it feels like a task. It feels like running the business. Splitting it into buckets is what makes it countable, and countable is what makes it fixable.
Loaded rate means wage plus payroll tax, insurance and the overhead that hour carries, not the hourly wage. It is usually 1.25 to 1.4 times the wage. Fill these before publishing.
Why the number is usually higher than this
This model ignores what the hours displace. Fifteen hours spent on re-keying is fifteen hours not spent quoting, and the quote is where the margin lives. It also ignores the error rate: a transposed house number at 4:45pm costs a truck roll, and truck rolls do not show up in any admin budget.
What actually fixes it
Three real options, and one of them is bad. Hire someone: solves office hours, costs [$X] a year loaded, still leaves nights and simultaneous callers uncovered. Buy more software: usually adds a system for a person to retype into rather than removing one. Automate the seams: the phone, the inbox and the hand-offs between the tools you already pay for.
If you want the mechanics, what we automate walks through all twelve systems, and call answering covers a real call end to end.
Frequently asked questions
How do I count my own hours without tracking every task?
Take one normal week and mark a tally each time you answer a pricing question, retype a job, or confirm an appointment. A week of tallies beats a year of guessing, and the free audit does it with you.
Is 15 hours realistic for a one-person business?
It is usually higher, not lower, because there is nobody to hand any of it to. The buckets are the same; the hours land on one person.
Want your actual number?
The free audit counts it with you and puts your loaded rate against it. Fifteen minutes, findings yours regardless.
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