The price of an hour — and why buying time back compounds.

Step one: price your hour

Take what you earn in a year and divide it by the hours you work. At roughly 2,000 working hours a year, $250,000 a year is $125 an hour. That is what an hour of yours is worth, whether you spend it well or not.

Anything that gives you back an hour for less than that is not a cost. It is a purchase that pays for itself. Buy back your time first; spend the time you bought on the work only you can do.

Step two: how many hours a month pays for a board

Hours a month = the plan’s monthly price divided by what your hour is worth.

Step three: where the hours come back

Not from doing your work for you. From the hours you lose around the decisions:

• Deciding the same thing twice. Your board remembers what you decided in March, so you do not rebuild the reasoning in October.
• Re-briefing. Each advisor keeps their own memory of you. You never explain your situation from the top again.
• The second-guessing loop. A decision with a date on it is a decision you can stop turning over until that date.
• The expensive mistake. One call you would have got wrong, caught early, can be worth more than a year of any plan here.

We do not promise you a number of hours. We give you the arithmetic, and a record to check it against.

That is the point of keeping the record. A year in, you will not have to guess whether your board paid for itself. You will be able to see which of its answers you followed and how they turned out.