Vishen Lakhiani tells a personal story about founding Mindvalley and learning to calculate the monetary value of his time. Working from a cafe in Kuala Lumpur, he spent about four hours a day on customer support until he measured task-level hourly value and found coding/marketing work was worth roughly $50/hour while customer support was about $12/hour. He outsourced tasks below his hourly threshold (hired first employee Adele via Craigslist), which allowed him to focus on higher-value work and scale Mindvalley. The video ends with a CTA for a free masterclass with Eric Edmeads about hiring, process mapping, and an ‘alt MBA’ curriculum.
Questions this video answers
About four hours per day.
$50 per hour (approximate).
$12 per hour (approximate).
About two years into running the company.
Adele.
Chapters
Do you truly know how much you're worth? Now, what I'm talking about is not some personal growth ideal. I'm talking about an actual number of how much an hour of your work is worth. Because if you know this number, I'm telling you folks, this could change your life. Here's my story, and I want you to pay close attention, because by the end of this story, I'm going to ask you to calculate your hourly rate, what an hour of your work is worth. And when you know this number, it will change decision making in your life. So I started my company, Mindvalley, in a cafe much like this. Not as beautiful as this cafe. I couldn't afford premium coffee back then, so it was more like a tiny little cafe in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I had my laptop and I'd work from this cafe every day for six or seven hours because they had free wi fi. And I was. I needed to budget like crazy. So it was two years into the company. I was doing everything. I was doing the marketing, I was doing the coding, I was doing customer support. And as Mindvalley started growing, because I love my customers, I was spending close to four hours a day on customer support. Now, here I was, a computer programmer with a degree from one of the top universities in the world, but I was spending four hours a day just answering emails. And one day I got frustrated. I was trying to create time in my day to innovate, to work on marketing, to work on coding new applications for our website. But I couldn't because I was bogged down with answering customer support emails. And then I thought, well, maybe I should hire someone to do this. And that's when a realization hit me. I decided to measure the hourly value of everything I was doing that day. And when I was coding or when I was writing a marketing campaign that was worth $50 an hour, that was based on what a marketer or programmer would cost if I hired them on Craigslist, the job site of that time. Now, I then searched for customer support. It was $12 an hour. And I realized that by spending four hours a day doing customer support, I was actually costing myself money. I was taking away time that I could spend working on a marketing campaign on programming $50 an hour jobs and doing customer support had actually reduced my average hourly rate from 50 to 12. And that's when I decided, I will only do work that is worth $50 an hour. And anything less than 50, I will outsource. So I got on Craigslist and I put up my first job. AD now, at this point, I'd been running mindvalley for two years. I never hired a single person because no one had taught me this concept. But now I went and I hired my first employee. Her name was Adele. She was wonderful. She took off all the load of customer support and writing emails from me and I could focus on higher level tasks. Within a few months, the company grew and I could then hire my second employee that caused the company to grow again. I could hire my third employee that caused the company to grow again. And today mindvalley is the size of this because I never, ever, ever violate my hourly rate. Today, my hourly rate is significantly higher and I will not do anything below that hourly rate. I will not give a zoom talk, I will not give a speech, I will not write copy. I will not do anything if it's less than the hourly rate, which is now multiples of $50 an hour. But that's how you scale and grow a company. That's how you respect your time and that's how you become a true professional and a true expert. So if you're an entrepreneur, one of the most important numbers you need to know is not just the profit and income of your business. It is how much an hour of your time is truly worth. And when you know that what you want to do is hire someone to do any work that is less than that hourly rate of yours, respect your expertise. Now, if you found these ideas interesting, join me in a masterclass with Eric Edmeads. This is for a new program that we are launching on mindvalley, which is essentially an alternative mba. I want to give every entrepreneur out there the wisdom, the ideas, the tools, the thinking that I didn't get as an entrepreneur. I asked myself, what are the key principles that if I knew could probably double my rate of success? I'd probably have a company like Mindvalley 10 years ago. This is what we're going to start covering in our new alt MBA curriculum on mindvalley. And this masterclass is completely free. And what you're going to learn with me and our guest teacher, Eric Edmeads is precisely the next step from this video. How to actually hire the right person. How to ensure that they are doing a proper job. How to create roadmaps and process maps so you can automate, hire and scale faster. By the end of this masterclass, I promise you, the way you show up as an entrepreneur is going to change and you are going to see your income and your profits go up significantly. The masterclass is completely free Link is in the bio. I'll see you there.
