The $10/Hour Trap: My Biggest Agency Mistake (And How You Can Avoid It)

May 13

I'm going to talk about the biggest mistake I ever made as an agency owner and one that, if I'm not careful, I will continue to make. And a mistake that most agency owners I speak to are either making now or have just learned how to stop making.

This is a huge one. Let's get into it.

The Mistake That's Killing Your Agency

Okay, so that was a lot of preamble and you're probably thinking, "Sean, just get to the point. What is the mistake?"

It's very, very simple, which is why it's so easy to make. And it's essentially holding on to too many things, doing too many things, and basically being the de facto bottleneck of your agency.

This is so typical of people who decide to start a business or to start an agency. We start it by doing everything ourselves. And we get this sense of pride doing it, but we also get this overinflated sense of our own importance in the process. We think, "I'm the only one that can do this" and "I'm the only one who can do it the way I like to do it, and so therefore I should be the one that does it."

And for a while that IS true. When it's just you, when you're a freelancer, when you are a solo printer, yes, it's just you. But I would even argue in those cases, there are still reasons to not be doing these things yourself.

Why This Is Such a Problem

To put it simply, not all tasks are created equally throughout your day. If you're doing everything, you're going to do a wide range of tasks. And if we assign an hourly rate to those tasks, it becomes very, very apparent.

A lot of tasks that we do, we could pay somebody:

$10 an hour to do
$20 an hour
$25 an hour
$50 an hour
$100 an hour
$200 an hour
$1,000 an hour
And even potentially $10,000 an hour

And this is going to relate directly to leverage. The more leverage a task has, the more it's worth. Basically, if I devote more time to doing this thing, what is the value, the long-term value that it brings my agency? It might not be value today, which is why these are things that we often don't spend as much time on as we should.

But these are things that the agency owners out there who are crushing it right now, whose agencies just seem to do no wrong, seem to always win. These are the agency owners who have found a way to offload those smaller, those lower value tasks, those lower leverage tasks, and focus as much as possible on those thousand dollar an hour plus tasks.

The $10/Hour Time Trap

One thing that I've noticed in my agency journey and also coaching lots of different agency owners on this very topic is the $10 to $20 an hour tasks. Things like:

Responding to emails
Checking your LinkedIn
Commenting on LinkedIn
DMing people on LinkedIn

These things are important and need to be done. They're the lowest value tasks. They're things that you can actually outsource to somebody else. You can train someone else to do them.

But here's the funny thing about these tasks: they also tend to take up the most time.

So if you are in this headspace of "I'm the only one who can do this," well, guess what? You're going to be lowering your effective rate because you're going to be the only one who can DM and the only one who can respond to emails and the only one who can leave comments and check LinkedIn. And you're basically a professional social media manager rather than an agency owner.

What Are High-Value Tasks Worth?

Now you might be saying, "What kind of task is worth a thousand dollars per hour or $10,000 per hour?"

$1,000/Hour Tasks:

Doing sales calls with your perfect prospects that are potentially going to be worth multiple thousands of dollars per month. If you can close that person, that's definitely a thousand dollar per hour task
Working on your offer, making your offer better, which is going to allow you to do a better job of connecting with your ICP
Building systems and processes, which are going to allow you to scale beyond your current capacity

$10,000/Hour Tasks:

Business strategy
Doing your one year plan
Your quarterly leadership retreat with your team where you're setting the tone and saying, "We need to win. Here is how we're going to win" and then aligning everybody to that
Strategic partnering with other businesses or agencies where you can now start to share business back and forth

If you dedicate a few hours per quarter to strategic partnering, that's going to have compounding beneficial effects for your agency. That's easily a $10,000 per hour task.

How to Get Out of the Low-Value Task Trap

I hope that I've made a clear case for the fact that you're probably spending a lot of time on low leverage tasks. The next step is how do we get out of that? And it can be very, very difficult, but it's not rocket science.

Essentially, we need to:

Look at our tasks objectively
Create a list of all our tasks and approximate what we think the value is of those tasks and how often we're doing them
Look at our calendar and download and analyze that

Once we've actually looked at where all of our time is going, we can identify the lowest leverage tasks first. If your calendar is dominated with $10 per hour tasks and you find that on a regular basis you're doing seven or eight different $10 per hour tasks, here's what you do next:

Document those tasks
Create processes or SOPs
Train somebody on your team to do it or hire somebody
Get them to do it with those processes and SOPs
Get that time back

This is a key thing that everybody needs to do. And I said this was the biggest mistake I made in my agency: I held on to the majority of these things for far too long. And the negative effects were quite great.

The System That Changed Everything

I created a system that fixed this problem, and I'm going to share this system with you. There's a document I'm going to provide a link to in the show notes, and you can go and download it for free.

The Task Assessment Matrix

This document comes with something that I call the Task Assessment Matrix. You can either fill out the task assessment matrix or download a snapshot of your calendar as well. Essentially, the task assessment matrix is a way for you to categorize all of your different tasks you've been doing.

It includes:

Tasks and details: What are you doing and what is the desired end result?
Task hourly value: What could you expect to pay someone else to perform it?
Task frequency: Daily, weekly, monthly, or infrequent?

We have it broken down into multiple buckets:

$10 per hour tasks
$50 per hour tasks
$100 per hour tasks
$1,000 per hour tasks

Real Examples from My Matrix

Here are a couple of examples I added:

$10/Hour Tasks:

Responding to social media comments (Daily)
Posting on LinkedIn (Daily)
DMing my ICP on LinkedIn (Daily)

$100/Hour Tasks:

Building rapport with guests in podcast prep meetings (Weekly)

$1,000/Hour Tasks:

Recording podcast guest interviews (Weekly)
Anything literally nobody else can do except for me

$50/Hour Tasks:

Client meetings (Daily, because you can hire account managers for $50/hour or less)

The Magic: Task Optimization Advisor GPT

After filling out the worksheet, I paste it into the provided Task Optimization Advisor GPT (linked in the PDF). And what it does here is so fantastically helpful. I use this for myself even now.

It gives me:

A time leverage summary based on what I filled out
Key insights about where my time is being wasted
Task-by-task recommendations for what to delegate or eliminate

For example, it might tell me: "You're heavily bogged down with $10 per hour work. Over 40% of your tasks fall into this category. These are prime candidates for delegation or automation."

Creating SOPs the Easy Way

The final step (and this is all linked in the document) is creating a simple SOP using Sean's SOP method. There's a link to my transcript-to-SOP GPT and a video walking you through how to do this.

Essentially:

Based on what the Task Optimization Advisor GPT tells me, I highlight each task
Do them one by one and film myself on Loom performing the task, talking myself through it
Take that transcript and throw it into the transcript-to-SOP GPT

Now I have not only a training video showing how to do the task, but also a detailed SOP outlining why this is important, what the outcome is, tools needed, who this is for, etc.

The Bottom Line

This all started by just looking at how my time is being spent and finding the lowest leverage uses of my time and offloading it. This is such a powerful thing that everybody should be doing.

You should be doing this analysis of your time at least on a quarterly basis. You're going to find that little things start to crop in and you start to develop routines for things that you probably shouldn't be doing, just because you need to get stuff done. I get it. This is the agency world. There's a million things coming at you day in and day out.

Get the System for Free

Right here!