Nicolas Cole argues that working more hours stops making sense once your business scales past hourly billing. Instead of sacrificing weekends for a few thousand dollars, cap your work time and focus on doing more in those fixed hours.
The mindset that works in the beginning is if I work harder, I make more money. Where does this mindset come from? It comes from the fact that we are all anchored to charging per hour. Our earnings are tied to this idea that the more hours I work, the more money I make. That is actually true for a long time in the beginning. The problem is that as you go and as you grow, it becomes a mistake at a certain point to think, okay, my business is doing $10,000 a month or $12,000 a month or $15,000 a month. But you know what? If I give up my Saturdays, I can make $16,000 a month. And if I give up my Saturdays and Sundays, I can make $18,000 a month. That is where all of a sudden, in the short term, you think my business is growing, that's the right thing to do. But it's not until you make that decision and then you do that and you have no life for 3 or 4 months that you start to realize the extra $2,000 a month was not worth that decision. So one of the best things that you can do, whether it's from a client capacity standpoint, whether it's from a time perspective, you want to create fixed containers for yourself. You're like, I am willing to work this hard. And so when you make decisions, the decision has to be, I cannot make the box bigger. This is the amount of time that I am willing to block for this thing. The question is not how to make the box bigger. The question is how to make the box more efficient.
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