Time equals money. We’ve all heard the axiom. The problem is, it’s not a precise equation. There’s a coefficient missing. It should really read:
Time = A x Money
with A being some positive rational number. You see, one of the trickiest balancing acts for me in business has been figuring out when it is more beneficial for me to spend time, and when to spend money. Most of the contract work I do these days (when it doesn’t involve new designs), I do for about $30/hour. Since I have neither time nor money to spare, I figure that anything that works out to less than this rate is worth purchasing rather than doing myself. For example, I recently sourced out the screen printing of my t-shirts.
Printing t-shirts is not difficult for me to do, and I already have all of the materials, but it still works out to be cheaper overall to have them printed by another company. Mostly this is because every t-shirt needs to be ironed three times: once to get out the wrinkles before printing, and then once again on each side of the shirt to heat set the ink. This takes about ten minutes per shirt overall. At my pay rate that’s $5 a shirt. At Babylon Burning, however, it costs $1.25 per shirt at twelve dozen shirts. Therefore, when it comes to screen printing,
Time = 4 x Money
You see, I have many more profitable things I can do with my time than run my own little t-shirt printing factory. Ten full hours spent making sales calls, sending out press releases, and developing new products ultimately puts my business further ahead than the $180 I had to spend.
