Starting with the very next chapter, we dive into very specific how-to strategies, but first, I think you’ll find it useful to understand how I arrived at my philosophy of valuing time and how I value time.

Now, if you happen to be an attorney, none of this matters. It seems lawyers bill out hours whether productive or not. Here’s a joke: 35-year-old lawyer in perfect health suddenly drops dead. He gets to Saint Peter at The Gate and argues: “You guys screwed up. You pulled me up here early.” Saint Peter checks his clipboard and says, “No sir. Judging by your total billable hours, you’re 113 years old and we’re late.” Lawyers.

But the rest of us can only collect on genuinely productive hours.

When I wrote the first edition of this book in 1996, I was charging about $3,500.00 to write an advertising campaign for a client. By the time I updated this book in 2013, that fee had multiplied five times. Today, a full campaign bills at $75,000.00 to $150,000.00 plus royalties. Since the time required is about the same—possibly less as my memory bank of material and proficiency have grown—this puts more and more weight on any time wasted. I also now target a yearly income upwards from $1.5 million, so the ideas and methods I describe in this book are a lot more important to me financially today than they were in 1996 or in 2013. Of course, it’s arguably true that I can more easily afford to repel some clients and annoy some people with these methods now than then, but I contend I got here, in part, by thinking about time in this fashion and doing these things long before I could ostensibly afford them.

Anyway, let’s roll back the calendar and assume that my base earnings target number required an hourly average of only $340.92. If you travel in business, you have to think about this a lot. I once lived in Arizona, and then traveled for business constantly. I currently have homes in Ohio and in Virginia, grew to loathe travel, and now do it as little as possible, insisting that the clients, coaching groups, and even events I speak at occur in my home cities. But when I was traveling, if there were two days of travel bracketing a day of work, that put three days’ cost to that work. Using the $340.92 hourly number, that’s $8,182.08 of cost.

Few people ever factor cost of their time (or their staff’s time) into product, service, or deliverable cost, or the maintenance of each client of variable value or much of anything else. But you should. At just $340.92 an hour, a client who comes to you costs only for the hours he is there. A client you must drive an hour to visit and an hour to return from costs $683.84 more. If that’s four times a year, one costs $2,735.36 more than the other. Consider two customers, each worth $3,000.00 a year, but one is needier and more demanding than the other. One consumes eight hours—the other three. The first may not even be worth having, particularly if there are enough of the second to be had. This, by the way, is why I book 20-minute, not 30-minute, calls with my coaching clients. I can do three per hour at 20 minutes each but only three per one-and-a-half hours at 30 minutes each. In a year, 10 minutes saved per month per client = two hours! Times 20 clients, a full week!

So again, let’s say my number is $340.92, calendar rolled back. Here’s how I have to use it.

First, it has to be on my mind constantly. Is what I’m doing worth $340.92 an hour to do? I believe you need to be hyper-conscious of the disappearance of time by the minute or the hour—not in retrospect at the end of a week, month, or year—and hyper-conscious of the dollar value of what that time is disappearing into.

Second, it puts a meter on others’ consumption of my time—that unnecessary 12-minute phone conversation just cost $68.18, and the same goes with 12 minutes on Facebook or Twitter. This exercise forces you to think of time and activity in terms of investment and expense. It enables you to quantify what is going on in your life. About this, something of a discovery I’ve made in just the past 10 years: the more you think like an investor-entrepreneur than just an entrepreneur, the better you do financially. It is “investor-think” that makes you wealthy. If some activity, project, person, series of meetings, etc. is going to consume 40 hours in total, using the $340.92 number, you have to ask yourself: would I invest $13,636.80 in this as a venture? You also have to consider lost opportunity cost, meaning: if I wasn’t investing $340.92 . . . or $13,636.80 . . . of time in this, is there something else I could invest that time in more profitably?

Third, for me it sets the base cost for hours given to a speaking engagement, consulting assignment, copywriting assignment, and other things I do that are directly billable. And if you do anything but earn a fixed salary, you have to weigh this base cost against every activity to set your fee or to decide whether or not to bother.

I’ve learned to think about time cost and time cost of travel a lot. When I first started shifting from going to clients to getting clients to travel to me, I used differential pricing. At that time, a consulting day billed at $8,300.00 if I came to you but only $7,800.00 if you came to me. Why? Because it’s worth money to me to stay home, be able to write for an hour in the morning before the consulting day, finish and be at home at 4:30, be able to drive in harness races and not miss any, sleep in my own bed, and be at work in my home office promptly at 7:00 A.M. the next morning vs. losing that hour the day of, losing a half day or so to travel on either side. Gradually, I eliminated the differential pricing and simply mandated that clients travel to me. I finally converted to flying only by private jet, and that exorbitant expense to be absorbed by a client has pretty much ended any discussion of me coming to them. In a way, that expense added to fees has recreated differential pricing; the cost of even the client plus a couple staff people traveling commercial to me is a lot lower than my fee plus my private jet bill. Looked at side by side on a sheet of paper, it’s dramatic if the client fails to factor in the dollar value of his and his staff’s travel time, which most clients do not calculate. Differential pricing is useful for a variety of purposes—within GKIC membership, there are a lot of lawyers, accountants, dentists, and others who charge a higher fee if they do a client’s work than they do if they only supervise the work done by subordinates.

You don’t have to be flying the unfriendly skies to do travel-time cost math. Many years ago, when I was in the field, selling, I quickly figured out that you could fit in two, three, four, or five appointments per day, depending on how you routed yourself. A salesman half as good at selling as a competitor but twice as good at efficiently routing himself and clustering prospects makes the same amount of money. With this in mind, I’ve long “clustered” as much productive activity as possible, if traveling, or even when leaving the house. We’ll talk more about that in Chapter 6. By not “clustering,” most people allow a great deal of inefficiency to sneak into their lives.

By working at home, as a writer, consultant, and tele-coach, as opposed to going to an office, I make a lot of money each day just by not commuting. I have conditioned myself to go directly from bed to shower to work in 15 minutes. If I were leaving the house to go to an office, I’d have those 15 minutes plus another half-hour, maybe an hour commute, then another 15 minutes getting settled in at the office—not to mention the commute at end of day. And the stops at Starbucks.

I have nothing against Starbucks. At different times, I’ve owned the company’s stock. If I’m at the mall, I might stop in for a cup. But the person who stops there every morning easily surrenders at least a half-hour every day, 110 hours per work year; about 2 full work weeks to parking and standing in line. At the $340.92 per hour number, $37,501.20 has been spent plus the price of the coffee! Get a Keurig and buy Starbucks K-cups, and do something more valuable with those two weeks! Heck, even take a two-week vacation. Almost anything beats this very expensive Starbucks habit.