Take what the business actually earned over the last twelve months and divide it by every hour you put in, including the Sunday paperwork and the twenty minutes on hold. That figure, not your charge-out rate, is what your hour is worth. Then count the hours in a normal week that somebody else could do off written instructions, because those are the ones you can buy back from A$14 an hour plus GST. The catch is that the bought hour only pays if you put it into work that earns.
You have probably never worked it out. Most owners haven't. You know your charge-out rate, or roughly what a good month looks like, and you carry a general sense that your time is valuable — but you have never divided one number by the other and looked at what came out the bottom.
It takes about fifteen minutes and two figures you already have. Do it before you decide whether to hire anybody, because that decision usually turns on the answer, and most of us make it on feel instead.
The top of the fraction
Take the last twelve months, not the last month. A single month is too short and every business has a strange one.
If your time is the product — you consult, you treat, you build, you are on the tools — use the revenue you personally generated. Not the business total if there are other billable people in it. The part that came from your hands.
If you own a business that runs on other people's hours, use what the business earned before you paid yourself: net profit plus your own drawings or salary. That is the money your involvement produced, and it is the honest numerator whether you took it out or left it in the account.
Neither version is precise and neither needs to be. You are after the size of the number, not the cents.
The bottom of the fraction is where the honesty lives
Now every hour you put in. Every one. Not billable hours, not the hours in your calendar. The hours.
The ones people leave out are always the same. The Sunday afternoon on the paperwork. Invoicing at six in the morning because it is the only quiet part of the day. Twenty minutes on hold. The drive between two jobs. The ten-minute task that takes forty because you had to find the login first. Answering the same question by text on a Saturday night. None of it feels like work the way a client meeting feels like work, which is exactly why it goes missing from the count — and every hour you leave out makes the final number look better than it is.
If you genuinely do not know, run one normal week. Note what you did in half-hour blocks, on paper, and do not tidy it up for your own benefit. Multiply by the weeks you worked, then add the periodic stuff separately — month end, the quarterly lodgement, the annual scramble.
Divide the first number by the second. That is your effective hourly rate. It is almost always lower than people expect, and the reason is almost always the denominator rather than the numerator.
Split the week into two piles
Take those same hours and sort them.
The first pile is work only you can do. Selling. Pricing. Deciding. The delivery your clients are actually paying for. The relationships that would notice if somebody else turned up. Anything carrying a registration, licence or signature that belongs to you personally.
The second pile is work with a right answer somebody else could check, once the instructions exist. Invoicing, reconciling, data entry, scheduling, following up quotes, chasing what you are owed, listing, formatting, the first draft of the thing. Not unimportant. Just not yours.
Sorting a real list is harder than it sounds and it is an exercise in its own right — the properties that make a task travel is the qualitative version, and the four-question framework gives you an order to hand things over in. For today you only need a number. How many hours in a normal week sit in the second pile?
Now put the two numbers next to each other
A full-time dedicated team member through us starts at A$14 an hour plus GST for Australian clients, and from US$9 an hour for US clients. Specialist roles sit higher. There is no placement fee, no recruitment retainer, no setup charge and no exit fee, so the hourly rate is the whole number. Forty hours at that rate is A$560 a week plus GST, and for Australian businesses the GST is claimable.
Put that beside your effective rate. The comparison is usually blunt rather than close. If your rate came out in three figures and there are ten hours a week sitting in the second pile, you already know what the sum says. If it came out near A$30 and there are four hours, it is tight enough that the answer is probably no, or at least not yet.
Three corrections before you trust it, because the raw comparison flatters us.
One hour of theirs is not one hour of yours, at least not early — a new person is slower on your systems than you are, and there is your review time on top. Two to three hours a week for the first month is the figure we give people, so budget it rather than hoping it away. And the comparison is not A$14 against your rate for the same task. It is A$14 against what you actually do with the hour you get back.
If what you want is the local comparison rather than the personal one, the savings calculator handles that side, the cost guide explains why quotes for the same work run from single figures to eighty dollars an hour, and hiring locally is the head-to-head. This page is about a different number. Yours.
The hour you buy back only pays if it earns
Here is where the arithmetic quietly falls over for a lot of businesses, and it has nothing to do with the rate.
An hour you free up is worth nothing at all until you put it somewhere. There are three honest destinations. It goes into work that earns — selling, delivering, the thing that brings money in the door. It goes into work that compounds, like the process you have never had time to write down or the system you keep meaning to fix. Or it goes back into your life, which is a perfectly good reason to hire someone but is not a financial return and should not be presented to yourself as one.
What happens instead, often, is a fourth thing. The hour fills with different admin. Slightly more interesting admin. Three months later the owner concludes that offshore support did not pay for itself, when what did not pay was a decision nobody ever made about where the hour was going.
So make it before you hire, and make it specific enough to check. Not "I will have more time." Something with an edge on it: two more quotes out every week, Friday afternoons on the thing that has been sitting there since March, home by six. Write the sentence down. It is the only part of this calculation you can get wrong for free and never notice.
There is a harder version of the same point. If there is no more work to be won — if your constraint is demand rather than capacity — the freed hour has nowhere profitable to go, and your problem was never the admin load. It is the pricing or the pipeline. A hire does not fix either, and the sum will look excellent on paper right up until the year ends.
When the numbers say don't
Four cases where we would tell you the same thing.
If the second pile is two or three hours a week, that is not a hire. It is a template, a better form, or one afternoon spent setting something up properly.
If nothing is written down anywhere and nobody can spare time in the first month to change that, wait. The most common reason an offshore hire comes apart is that the process only ever existed in somebody's head, and the five causes are worth reading before you commit rather than afterwards.
If the work is regulated — lodgement, credit advice, personal financial advice, clinical judgement, anything carrying your registration — it does not move, however well it scores on everything else. The boundary map names the regulator for each one so you can check your own position.
And if your effective rate came out low because of what you charge rather than how you spend your hours, fix the price first. Buying cheaper hours underneath a rate that does not work only gets you to the wrong answer faster.
Fifteen minutes, this week
Twelve months of what the business actually earned, divided by every hour you actually worked. A normal week sorted into two piles, with the second one counted. Then one sentence about where the bought-back hour goes.
If the number still looks good at the end of that, it probably is good. And if it does not, you have learned something considerably more useful than a quote.
Who takes the second pile off your week
The arithmetic above tends to end in the same place: a list of recurring, checkable work that is currently being done at your effective hourly rate. That list is a role, and it is the one we place most often.
- Runs the recurring work you counted in the second pile — invoicing, reconciling, data entry, scheduling, quote follow-up and chasing what you are owed
- Absorbs the friction that never shows up in your calendar: the hold music, the portal logins, the supplier who only answers the phone
- Writes each task down as they learn it, so the process stops living in your head and the next handover is faster than this one
- Reports back on where the hours actually went, so the next version of this calculation runs on real numbers rather than a guess
- Pricing, selling and deciding — the first pile, which is what the freed hours are supposed to be spent on
- The sentence you wrote about where the bought-back hour goes, and checking a quarter later that it actually went there
- Anything carrying your registration, licence or signature: lodgement, credit advice, personal financial advice, clinical judgement
- Real review time in the first month — two to three hours a week is the honest budget, and it is what makes month two work
Frequently asked questions
How do I work out my hourly rate if my income is different every month?
Is A$14 an hour the whole cost, or are there fees on top?
How much of my own time will managing an offshore team member take?
Should I put my prices up instead of hiring someone?
What happens if I hire someone and the work is not there?
How long does it take to get someone started?
Alfie is a natural facilitator with a passion for building meaningful relationships. A true people person, he thrives on creating genuine connections and bringing people and businesses together, and he excels at fostering collaboration and teamwork. At StaffingSolutions.io he is usually the first person you speak to: he maps the role, writes the brief the recruiters work from, and stays on the account long after the placement.
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