Your business is good, but it is wearing you out
Although your customers praise the work and your weeks are long, the money that your business earns stays at the same level year after year. If that description fits you, then you are unlikely to be short of effort, because your week is always full.
Why you no longer earn more when you work more hours
What you earn from a week depends on the kind of work that you spend it on, while the number of hours that you put in matters far less. Nobody sets those kinds of work out for you when you start a business, so the obvious answer to earnings that stop rising is usually to work more of the same hours. Suppose that two owners each work a sixty-hour week, and that one of them makes the product with her own hands while the other decides what her company builds and who it serves. Both owners spend the same sixty hours, but the second one earns more. How much an hour of work is worth tends to depend on how many people receive the value of it, and on how hard it would be to replace the person who does that work.
The four kinds of work that you can spend a week on
In every article in this study, I measure the work against one ladder of four levels, which I call the four levels of value. The bottom level is implementation, which is the work that you do with your own hands. However skilled you become at it, you still serve only one customer with each hour of implementation. The top level is imagination, which is the work of deciding what the business builds and who it builds for. Everybody else in the company spends their hours carrying out those decisions, which is why one hour of imagination can be worth so many of theirs. The ladder has two further levels between those two ends, and with each level that you climb, more people receive the value of a single hour of your work.
Most of what you earn depends on the level of that ladder at which you spend your week, while at each step up it you have to do something different.
What wealth means here
Wealth, in this study, means the distance between the value that your business delivers to its customers and the hours that you personally spend producing that value. An owner who works at implementation keeps that distance at zero, however skilled she becomes at the work itself. That is why you need more than the craft that you base your business on to grow it.
The subject of this study is how you earn the money in your working week in the first place, so I set aside markets, investments, and the question of where to put money once you have it.
What you will know by the end
I cover the subject in five articles because I divide it into a diagnosis, a map, and three separate climbs. If I only summarise a climb, you will learn where it ends but miss how to make it, which is why I give each climb an article of its own. By the end of the study you will know the level at which you spend your own week, what you give up by staying there, and what you would need to move up from it.