The Cost of an Hour

What does an hour of time cost your business?

Well, if you have mobile employees it could be plenty!

For each hour a mobile employee is at work the business needs to recover their hourly wage, all the costs associated with employing them, the cost of any tools or equipment required for that person to do the job properly, as well as insurance and profit.

Let’s call all of that “Recovery”.

Each time a mobile employee can’t charge time to a paying customer, the businesses profitability is negatively affected.

An easy exercise for you to do is based on your gut instinct, making it a great place to start understanding what you pay for each time you lose an hour.

Think about how much time each week a mobile employee spends returning documents back to head office.  Let’s nominate that at 2 total hours per working week where that 2 hours is made up of travel to the head office, time to drop off the documents, chat to the office staff, get any requirements for the week, and head out to the 1st customer appointment.

In a standard 20 working day month that adds up to 8 hours of un-“recovered” time; a full work day!

Now multiply that by the number of mobile employees you have.  I’ll use 5 mobile employees and come up with 40 un-“recovered” hours a month.  To clarify, we now have an entire working week, for one mobile employee, that’s not part of what the business is “recovering” from its customer base.

To complete the picture, take those 40 un-“recovered” hours in our example and multiply it by the amount a mobile employee costs with all the “recovery” items added on, per hour.  Here in Australia, a good indicative cost figure for mobile employees is roughly $55.00 per hour.

Cost to your business? 40 hours x $55.00 per hour = $2,200.00 per month IN REAL COST TERMS…that’s over $26,000.00 a year!

But that’s only part of the story.  Consider how much revenue is being lost as well as costs incurred.  Replace the indicative cost figure with how much your business charges per hour for the mobile employee and now you’re really starting to understand the impact of an un-“recovered” hour.

Completing the example using $85.00 per hour for a mobile employee the lost revenue per month would be: 40 un-“recovered” hours x $85.00 = $3,400 per month or $40,800.00 per year.

That is an additional $40K without adding any additional costs to your business…amazing!

The total cost of this example is $26,400.00 in un-“recovered” time and a cost of $40,800.00 in lost revenue.

Try out your own scenario and see how much you’re exposing your business through lost “Recovery”.

Thanks for reading!

Max

P.S. Wanna know how to stop these losses?  Mobile / Digital Workflow is our specialty!  Get rid of the time it takes to drop paperwork off back in the office by sending it directly from the field, updating your systems, and billing straight away if you want OR start the journey to take payments on the spot!  Call me 0427 933 234 or email me (max_joy@gammaworks.net) and let’s get your business rolling in hours, not weeks…

GammaWorks: Yea, we can do that.