What is invisible work?
Start here if the term is new.
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What does invisible work
actually cost you?
Most founders know invisible work is a problem. Very few have put a number on it. The number, once you calculate it, tends to be uncomfortable.
At a glance
- What this is
- The calculation, with a table you can find your own row in
- What you need
- Your effective hourly rate and your weekly admin hours
- The usual range
- £28,800 to £168,000 a year across the illustrations below
- What it decides
- Whether fixing the problem is worth the money
The formula
Three numbers,
one multiplication.
You need your effective hourly rate, the average hours a week you spend on work that needs none of your expertise, and the number of working weeks in your year.
If you do not have an hourly rate, use your day rate divided by eight, or your annual drawings divided by 1,600 hours. Neither is perfect. Both are close enough for a decision.
What comes out is not what admin costs you in salary or software. It is what it costs you in expertise: the value of the time that disappears into work that should not need you.
Illustrations
What the number looks like
at different rates
Find the row closest to your own rate, then the column closest to your own week. Four to ten hours a week is a realistic range for sole practitioners and founder led businesses with nobody whose job is admin.
Illustrative annual cost of invisible work, assuming a forty eight week year
| Role | Rate | 4 hrs a week | 7 hrs a week | 10 hrs a week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consultant solicitor | £350/hr | £67,200 | £117,600 | £168,000 |
| Independent consultant | £250/hr | £48,000 | £84,000 | £120,000 |
| Founder led team, CEO | £200/hr | £38,400 | £67,200 | £96,000 |
| Agency founder | £150/hr | £28,800 | £50,400 | £72,000 |
These are illustrations, not measured results. Each figure is simply rate multiplied by hours multiplied by forty eight weeks. The point is the order of magnitude, not the precision. Your own rate and your own hours give the only number worth acting on.
Three reasons the real number is higher
What the simple
calculation leaves out.
Context switching. Admin does not only cost the time it takes. It costs the transition in and out of focused work. A twenty minute task that interrupts a deep session can cost considerably more than twenty minutes. This is hard to quantify and real.
Evenings and weekends. Most founders leave this out of their first estimate. If you are invoicing on a Sunday evening, that time has a cost, even though nobody billed it.
The rest of the team. If the founder is spending admin time, others usually are too. A team of four each losing four hours a week is a different problem in scale, even when the cost per person looks manageable.
The decision
When fixing it
makes financial sense.
The number only justifies action if fixing the problem costs less than living with it. In practice the case is clear when three things hold at once: the annual cost is material, the tasks are genuinely repetitive across clients or time periods, and the work is not going to disappear on its own.
I do not publish a build price, because a figure quoted before the mapping would be a guess. The Audit is from £950 excluding VAT. Process Design and the build are scoped and priced separately, once there is enough detail to quote honestly. Comparing your annual cost against a real quotation is the only comparison worth making.
If the numbers do not support building anything, the Audit says so. That is a legitimate outcome and much cheaper to reach at this stage than after a build.
A payback calculation built on an invented build price is worth nothing. Get the quotation, then compare.
Before we talk
What people ask
about the number.
The calculation raises the same three questions almost every time.
My rate is not really a billing rate. What do I use?
Use your day rate divided by eight, or your annual drawings divided by 1,600 hours. It is a proxy, not an accounting figure. It only needs to be good enough to tell a £30,000 problem from a £3,000 one.
Is it not cheaper just to hire someone?
Sometimes. A person absorbs the work rather than removing it, so the cost recurs every year and returns when they leave. The hire or automate comparison sets out when each one wins.
What if my number is small?
Then you have your answer, and it cost you nothing to find out. A small number is a good reason not to spend anything, and I would rather you reached that conclusion on the free call than after an Audit.
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Your business
What is your number?
Tell me how your week works and I will calculate the annual cost of your invisible work and tell you whether fixing it makes financial sense.
15 minutes · No charge
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