Profits & Pints Recap — August 2026
Your Business Doesn’t Need More of You
How to Build a Business That Doesn't Need You Every Minute
Watch the Full Workshop Replay
If you missed this month's Profits & Pints, you're in luck! We recorded the entire session for you.
Catch the replay to learn a practical framework for evaluating opportunities, creating focus, and making decisions with more confidence.
Download the Worksheet:
The Big Idea: Your Business Doesn’t Need More of You
If you’re a business owner, chances are you’ve had this thought:
If I just had a few more hours in the day, I could finally get everything done.
But at our latest Profits & Pints, Samantha Doyle challenged us to look at the problem differently.
Most business owners aren't struggling because they aren't working hard enough. In fact, many are already working 50 or 60 hours a week and still ending the week without getting to the things that matter most.
The problem may not be the number of hours you have.
It may be how you're deploying them.
What Is an Hour of Your Time Actually Worth?
Not all hours create the same value.
During the session, Samantha introduced two ways to think about the value of your time:
Replacement Cost: What would you pay someone else to do the work you're doing?
Opportunity Value: What could your time produce if you spent that hour somewhere else?
That second question is where things get interesting.
Imagine a business owner spends five hours on sales activities and those five hours ultimately generate $4,000 in gross profit.
That means those sales hours are worth roughly $800 per hour to the business.
Now compare that with an hour spent doing administrative work that could potentially be handled by someone else for $25 or $30 an hour.
Suddenly, doing it yourself because it's "cheaper" doesn't look quite so cheap.
As Samantha asked the group:
“Can you do it 27 times faster?”
Because if your highest-value work can produce $800 an hour and you're spending that hour doing $30-an-hour work, being a little faster at it isn't enough to close that gap.
Not Everything Valuable Produces Revenue Today
Of course, sales aren't the only valuable use of an owner's time.
Some of the most important work you do may be harder to attach a dollar amount to:
Strategy
Leadership
Culture
Systems
Financial decisions
Key relationships
Innovation
Those activities build enterprise value.
Sales may create value today. Strategy, leadership, systems, and culture help build the company that creates value tomorrow.
And when an owner's schedule is consumed by administrative work, project coordination, production, and putting out fires, these are often the activities that get pushed aside.
“But I Can Do It Faster.”
This is one of the most common traps for business owners.
I already know how to do it.
It'll take longer to teach someone.
No one will do it as well as I do.
I'll just take care of it myself.
And sometimes, you probably can do it faster.
But that's not really the question.
The better question is:
Is this the highest and best use of me?
Every hour you spend doing something that another employee, contractor, fractional resource, system, or automation could own is an hour you aren't spending somewhere else.
That opportunity cost is easy to overlook because it doesn't appear as an expense on your P&L.
But it's still costing your business.
Can You Afford NOT to Hire Someone?
Samantha also challenged another familiar thought:
“I can't afford to hire someone.”
Hiring absolutely requires an investment, and the math has to make sense. But instead of looking only at the cost of the position, consider what that position could unlock.
During the workshop, Samantha walked through the example of hiring a $75,000 project manager.
If freeing the owner from project management allowed them to create an additional $20,000 in monthly revenue, at a 40% gross margin that could represent $96,000 in additional annual gross profit.
And the potential return doesn't stop there.
That hire could also create better execution, more capacity, fewer mistakes, a better customer experience, and more time for the owner to focus on strategy and leadership.
So the question shifts from:
“Can I afford to hire them?”
to:
“Can I afford not to?”
The Bottleneck Test
One of the most practical tools Samantha shared was a simple way to evaluate the work currently sitting on your plate.
When you notice something consuming a meaningful amount of your time, ask yourself:
Does this actually require me?
Do I uniquely need to perform, decide, or own this?
What is it costing me to keep doing it?
What am I not doing because this is taking my time?
Who or what could own it instead?
Could it be an existing employee, new hire, contractor, fractional resource, automation, process, or system?
What will I do with the capacity I get back?
Where will those reclaimed hours intentionally go?
That fourth question matters.
Because delegation isn't the goal. Reinvestment is.
Freeing five hours from your week doesn't automatically make your business better.
The value comes from intentionally reinvesting those five hours into sales, strategy, leadership, systems, business development, key relationships, or even creating the breathing room you need to lead more effectively.
Are You the Bottleneck?
Think about a typical 50-hour week.
How much of it is spent delivering client work, handling administrative tasks, coordinating projects, answering emails, solving day-to-day problems, and doing things someone else could potentially own?
And how much is actually spent on sales, strategy, leadership, systems, financial planning, and building the future of the company?
If the overwhelming majority of your week is spent working in the business, you may not have a time problem.
You may have a deployment problem.
And the resource being deployed is you.
The Big Takeaway
Your business doesn't need every available hour you can give it.
It needs the right hours from you.
So instead of asking:
“Can I do this?”
Start asking:
“Is this the highest and best use of me?”
Because the goal isn't simply to get more off your plate. It's to create the capacity to spend your time where you can make the greatest impact on the business.
And sometimes, the return isn't just financial.
Toward the end of the session, the conversation turned to something that can be even harder to quantify: quality of life.
What is it worth to have more mental capacity?
To stop running on fumes? T
o show up as a better leader because you're not buried in work every waking hour?
As Samantha pointed out, the 50th hour of your workweek probably isn't producing the same quality of work as the seventh.
Creating capacity isn't only about growing the business.
Sometimes, it's about building a business you actually have the capacity to lead.
Try This in Your Business
Choose one meaningful activity you're currently spending time on and ask:
How many hours does this consume each week? What would it cost for someone or something else to own it? Does it genuinely require me? And most importantly, what higher-value work would I do with that time instead?
You don't have to redesign your entire role overnight.
Start with one bottleneck.
Save the Date!
📅 September 22, 2026
🕓 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
📍 6th Street Bar & Grill | Eugene, OR
We'll explore why so many businesses become dependent on the owner, how that limits growth, and practical ways to create a business that can thrive without you being involved in every decision.
The Topic:
What Does Good Look Like?
How to Build a Scorecard That Makes Performance Measurable
RSVP for the next Profits & Pints event or join our email list to receive future invites.
Until next time, cheers to smart moves and great conversation.
— Samantha & the SBC Team 🍻
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