Back in 2019 I built WP Feedback to fix a problem in my own agency. Thousands of other agencies ended up running on it, which meant something I hadn’t planned for: I suddenly had a lot of people I could just… ask.
So I got on calls with more than fifty of them. Freelancers, small agency owners, people running the same shape of business I’d run.
One question mattered more than all the rest.
What does an hour of your time actually earn you?
Almost nobody knew.
Not because they were bad at business. Because it’s not a number anyone puts in front of you. Your invoices show a rate. Your bank shows a balance. Nothing on either of them tells you what an hour of your life is worth.
So we worked it out, right there on the calls.
How to work out your real rate
It takes about ten minutes and you’ll want to stop halfway through. Do it anyway.
Take one finished project. Not an average, not a typical month — one real project you can remember properly.
Write down what you billed. The full number that landed, before tax, before costs.
Now write down every hour you actually spent on it. This is where it gets uncomfortable, because it’s not the hours you tracked. It’s:
- The scoping call, and the second scoping call
- The proposal you wrote and the version you rewrote
- Every hour of chasing — the follow-ups, the reminders, the “just checking in” emails
- The revisions nobody paid for
- The calls about the work, which are not the work
- The admin at the end. The invoice, the handover, the tidy-up.
- The Sunday night hour you don’t count because you were on the sofa
Divide the first number by the second.
That’s your rate. Not the one on the invoice. The real one.
The number
Across those fifty-odd calls, the answers landed between $7.50 and $13 an hour.
People running businesses. Fifteen years of experience, some of them. Charging perfectly respectable day rates. Landing at less than a barista.
And profit margin on top of that? Forget about it.
I want to be clear that I wasn’t sitting there judging. I’d fallen into exactly the same trap for years, and I only worked out my own number well after I should have.
Here’s the part that took me longest to accept: the more responsive I was, the less I made.
That feels backwards. Responsiveness is supposed to be the thing that separates you from the agency that ghosts people for a week. And it does — clients love it. It just doesn’t get paid for. Every fast reply is an hour going into the denominator of that sum and nothing going into the numerator.
You get better at your job and your effective rate goes down. That’s the trap, and it’s mostly invisible because nobody ever does the division.
Why raising your rate doesn’t fix it
The obvious answer is to charge more. Sometimes that’s right, and if you’re genuinely underpricing, go and fix it.
But it doesn’t solve this particular problem, because this problem is a denominator problem.
If you double your price and the unpaid hours double with it — bigger project, more stakeholders, more chasing, more revisions — you’ve moved nothing. Plenty of people have made that exact jump and felt no different, and concluded there’s something wrong with them.
There isn’t. The hours going into the bottom of the sum are the thing that needs to change, and almost none of them are the actual work. They’re the layer around it.
The way out, and why it used to be closed
The only real way out is getting ahead of your clients. Meeting the request before it lands.
That’s not a productivity trick. It’s an entirely different economic position. When work arrives as a request, you’re reacting — and reacting is unpaid by definition, because nobody scoped it. When you turn up with the work already identified, scoped and priced, it’s a quote. Same work. Completely different sum.
Every agency owner I’ve ever spoken to knows this. The reason nobody does it isn’t ignorance. It’s that getting ahead of your clients has always required a big team, real SOPs, and enough scale to afford someone whose whole job is looking.
Without those, you’re back to reacting, because reacting is what fits in the gaps.
That’s the bind I was in, and it’s the bind those fifty calls kept describing back to me in different words.
What I did with the calls
Since 2019 I’ve been collecting what works from thousands of agencies — the calls, the support threads, the community, seven years of watching what separates the ones making real money from the ones just staying busy.
Most of it isn’t clever. It’s the same handful of systems, run reliably:
- Pre-launch QA, so the launch isn’t a 2am event
- Monthly reports that go out whether or not anyone’s watching
- Update rounds and security scans on a cadence
- Content refreshes to win back rankings that quietly slipped
None of that is a secret. Every agency owner reading this could write the list. The difference between the agencies making money and the ones staying busy was never knowledge of the list — it was whether the list actually ran when the week got busy.
So we built those into Atarim as workflows you can point at a client and leave running. Not because the systems are novel, but because the reason they don’t happen is that there’s one of you and the list needs someone.
That’s the whole argument. The hours in the denominator are the layer around the work, and that layer is the part that doesn’t need to be you.
Do the sum
Genuinely, before anything else: take one project and do the division. Ten minutes.
If your number is better than $13, good — tell me, because I’d like to know what you’re doing differently, and so would everyone else.
If it’s worse, you now know something you didn’t know this morning, and you know which number to attack. It’s the bottom one.
What did yours come out at? 🤘
