Great question raised this morning at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe – “Do you value your time?”
It sparked an interesting debate about the perceived value of your time. Do you give it away freely? Do you calculate free-time in terms of lost opportunity? Is your time worth more or less to you than to your clients?
In a service sector, time is what I sell. If I am not charging for it then by default I am giving it away. How much can I afford to give away before I start to devalue it?
As ever, it’s a compromise. I need to give a bit away to “show what I’m selling”. The time that I choose to invest in networking needs to have some ROI.
I was reminded today that time spent with some people is priceless.
Tags: Cash, Finance, IBM, price, support, Time
February 10th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Interesting perspective Ed.
Coincidentally I recently wrote a piece on my blog (aimed at accountants) taking a rather different view.
I entirely agree that time is the adviser’s main resource and that advisers need to generate a good return in respect of the time that they devote to servicing and advising their clients.
But beyond that I’m not at all sure that “time is what we sell”.
http://bookmarklee.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/what-do-accountants-sell-the-answer-is-not-time/