You can’t manufacture more hours, but you can stop wasting the ones you have. Most small business owners spend 60 hours per week on $25/hour work, even though their strategic thinking is worth $100+/hour. The business grew, but their calendar got worse. More meetings. More fires. More decisions that shouldn’t require their input but somehow do.
Dan Martell’s buyback principle is simple: every hour you spend on low-value work is an hour you can’t spend on high-value decisions. The opportunity cost compounds against you every single week. The fix isn’t working smarter. It’s buying back your time systematically and redeploying it where it actually multiplies value.
The $25 Trap
Calculate what your time is worth. Target annual income divided by 2,000 hours. Want to make $200K? Your time is worth $100/hour. Now the audit was last week. How many hours did you spend on work that someone could do for $25/hour? Answering emails. Scheduling meetings. Data entry. Social media. Customer support. Filing expenses. Updating spreadsheets.
If it’s more than 10 hours, you just found $40K–$50K in annual opportunity cost. But the real cost isn’t money—it’s what you didn’t build because you were buried in tasks that don’t require your judgment.
The Virtual Assistant Advantage
A VA is the highest leverage first hire most small business owners will make. At $5–$7/hour for 20 hours per week, you’re looking at $400–$560/month. If they handle 20 hours of work you were doing at your $100/hour value, you just bought back $2,000 worth of your time for $140/week. That’s a 14x return before you’ve done anything with the recovered time.
One additional client closed per quarter because you had time to focus on sales? That VA just paid for itself 10–50x over.
Here’s what a competent VA handles immediately:
- Email management and calendar coordination
- Travel logistics and expense tracking
- Meeting preparation and CRM maintenance
- Administrative follow-up and basic customer support
This is 15–20 hours per week that you’re currently doing that prevents strategic work. A VA doesn’t just give you time back—they free up cognitive capacity for decisions that require your judgment.
The Three Levels of Buyback
- Level 1: Administrative Elimination
Email, calendar, data entry, and expenses. Hire a VA. Most founders recover 10–15 hours per week. - Level 2: Repetitive Execution
Social media, customer support, bookkeeping, and content formatting. Hire specialists or contractors. Free up to 10–20 hours. - Level 3: Strategic Delegation
Marketing execution, sales calls, project management. Document your process and train someone. This unlocks 20+ hours per week.
Most people stop at Level 1 and wonder why nothing has changed. Level 1 gives you everything you need. Levels 2 and 3 provide you with leverage.
The Transfer Protocol
Chris Voss teaches that the best negotiators make the other side feel understood. The same applies to delegation—you must transfer context.
- Record yourself doing the task. Use a Loom. Walk through the process and explain decisions.
- Create the checklist. Break it into steps: document tools, logins, edge cases.
- Do it with them once. Let them execute while you watch and answer questions.
- Let them do it on their own, then review. Give feedback on decisions, not just output.
- Hand it off completely. They own it now.
This takes 2–4 weeks. Most people skip it and blame the hire when things fail. The hire wasn’t the problem—your refusal to build systems was.
The Reinvestment Decision
You bought back 20 hours per week. Now what? Most founders fill the space with more tactical work. That’s not a buyback—that’s redistribution.
Deploy recovered time where it creates leverage:
- Build systems that scale beyond you
- Develop talent so they become more autonomous
- Create content that generates inbound demand
- Close bigger deals that compound revenue
- Think strategically about where the business is going
If you’re not doing at least two of these, you’re just renting time, not building leverage.
The Resistance
“Nobody can do it as well as I can.”
They’ll do 80% as well, which is fine because you’re doing it at 100%, which prevents you from doing what only you can do.
“It’s faster if I just do it myself.”
Today, yes. But you’ll say the same thing six months from now. Training is an investment. Continuing to do it yourself is a recurring cost.
“I can’t afford to hire yet.”
At $400–$560/month for a 14x return on your time? You can’t afford to.
Voss would say these objections aren’t about money—they’re about identity. You built the business by doing everything. Letting go feels like losing control. But control is the enemy of scale.
The Compounding Effect
Month 1–3: Training people, building systems. It feels inefficient. This is where most people quit.
Months 4–6: Things start clicking. Less firefighting, more strategy.
Months 7–12: Leverage kicks in. Fewer hours, faster growth.
Year 2+: The business runs without you in the day-to-day.
Most founders never get past Month 3 because they’re not willing to be inefficient temporarily to build efficiency permanently.
The Real Trade
Every hour you don’t buy back is an hour you’re choosing to stay small. Every task you hold onto is a bet that your time is worth less than the cost of replacing yourself. That bet compounds against you. Five years from now, you’ll either be running a business that scales without you, or you’ll still be doing $25/hour work, wondering why you’re not growing.
Start today. Audit your week. Pick one task. Replace yourself. Use the time you bought to build something that compounds. That’s how you stop renting your time to your own business and start building leverage that actually scales.