Business owners should treat time, money, and attention like an investor treats capital, asking whether each use generates real return or could be better spent elsewhere. The key is understanding opportunity cost: what you give up when you choose one thing over another. Examples include ad spend, hiring help, and outsourcing tasks.
We're going to strip ROI down to the basic return on investment. Just means what am I getting back for what I'm putting in? It's not just a financial metric. It's going to apply to your time, your energy, your people, your tools. Pretty much everything you can think of, you can think of in terms of ROI. You know a few examples. So if you're spending $500 on AD, so what's your return on that $500? If it's going to bring you in 5,000 or 10,000, fantastic. That's a great way to spend 500 bucks. If it's going to bring you in nothing, then that's problematic. On hiring, if you're bringing on a virtual assistant or if are hiring a new receptionist or inside salesperson doing a job that you used to do, is that going to free up 20 hours of your time to do $200 an hour work? Because that would be a pretty good trade content creation when you guys are out doing your videos, if you spend an inordinate amount of time doing it. But it's not driving leads, it might just be something you're doing to check a box to feel productive. And a lot of the time we don't stop to measure these things. We just operate on instinct or emotion. Feels like the right thing. When you thinking like an investor, you don't care how it feels. You're asking yourself solely does it work? Could that same resource be used somewhere else for more return? So here's another part that people don't talk about as much and that's straight up ROI on your time. If you're spending 10 hours a week doing admin tasks that you could hire an admin for, for $25 an hour, you are locking up $250 a week in low return work. You really should just hire that person and offload that so that you can use those same 10 hours to build your business deal to systemize your sales process. Your ROI could be much higher. Doing work that only you can do, rather than work that you could hire somebody for and free up your time. And once you start thinking like that, you are going to find yourself asking like in almost like a way of a filter, is this the best use of my time right now? Am I getting any meaningful use from this thing I'm doing? Should I keep going? Should I reallocate this resource to somewhere else? And if ROI is the first thing we're going to look at, this next one is just as important. It's what you're missing. Out on when you make a choice, and that is opportunity cost. It's one of those things that sounds academic, but it's going to hit very real. Every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else, whether you realize it or not. If you spend $1,000 on a new truck, that's $1,000 you didn't spend on marketing or lead generation. If you spend your morning writing captions for cute cat videos you want to put onto your social media page, that's an hour you didn't spend talking to customers and closing deals or building your next offer. Opportunity cost happens everywhere, and that is what makes it dangerous. You don't feel the pain of what you missed, but you're still paying for it. This is where a lot of people working on the operator side get stuck. You're choosing urgency over importance. A client email comes in and boom, you're off to the races. Some fire pops up. You drop everything to fix it. But what are you not doing in those times? You're not building your systems, you're not driving your growth, and you're not creating leverage. It's not about ignoring problems or being lazy. It's about being intentional with your time, with your money, and with your attention. Saying yes to everything is not a good strategy. As an investor, you need to say no to good things so you can say yes to greater ones. So think back over the last two to three weeks. What did you say yes to that ate up your time and energy but didn't produce all that much? What got pushed off your calendar that could have moved your business forward? That gap between what you did and what you could have done is opportunity cost.
