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What are the nights actually costing you?
Nobody sends you an invoice for the hours you spend on this after tea. That does not mean they are free — it means nobody has added them up.
Your after-hours bill
46 working weeks. The hours are valued at your charge-out rate because that is what an hour of yours is worth when you choose to sell it — not a claim you could have billed every one of them.
Why this one stings
Six hours a week does not feel like anything. It is a Tuesday night, a Sunday morning, twenty minutes here and there while the kettle boils. Over a year it is closer to seven full working weeks.
And it is the worst seven weeks you will work, because it comes after the ones you have already done. Nobody does their best thinking on a laptop at nine o’clock with the telly on.
The subscriptions are the quiet part
Most trades we look at are paying for three or four tools and using a fraction of one. The software is not the problem — nobody has the evening spare to learn it properly, so it sits there billing monthly.
Work out the number first. Then decide whether the answer is doing less of it, or handing it over.
This runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.
What this number is, and what it isn’t
It is not a claim you could have billed those hours. Nobody has forty-six weeks of billable evenings sitting there waiting to be sold. Valuing the time at your charge-out rate is a way of saying this is what an hour of yours is worth when you choose to sell it — it is the price on the hour, not an invoice you failed to send.
The subscription figure works the same way. It assumes you would actually cancel what you are not using, and most trades never do, because cancelling means admitting the tool was never the problem.
What it leaves out is the part that costs the most. Decisions made at nine o’clock at night after a full day on the tools — which suburbs to go after, what to write, whether that ad is doing anything — are not your best decisions. They are the ones you make because nobody else was going to. A year of those compounds in a way no hourly rate picks up.
So treat the total as a floor. It is the smallest defensible version of what the evenings cost. Then work out whether the answer is doing less of it, or handing it over.
Rather see where those hours are going?
The free visibility audit shows what a customer sees when they look for you — which is usually where the after-hours work should have been pointed all along.
Run the free audit