Why selling your time by the hour is a bad idea (and what to do about it)

If you’re selling your time by the hour, you may find you’re working really hard but not earning as much as you want. Why? Well, if you’re working part time around children you may only have twenty hours a week to work. Once you’ve lost up to half of that time doing your admin and marketing you may only have ten hours left. You need to be charging a lot per hour to make much money from ten hours a week.

And even if you do charge a high hourly rate there will always be a limit to how much you can earn because there are only 24 hours in a day.

A big advantages of this type of business are that you can get paid faster than other businesses – you don’t need to manufacture anything – and you don’t need to buy or store stock, so it’s a great way to get a business off the ground. But to grow your business (and your bank balance) you’ll need to think of other ways of increasing your income.

How about setting up another income stream that doesn’t involve selling time? If you’re a complementary therapist, you could sign up with a direct selling company and sell health, beauty or environmental products, for example. It won’t cost you much to get started, you don’t need to buy much stock and the direct selling company will provide you with things like brochures, order forms and posters.

Can’t find what you want in direct selling? There are lots of creative mums out there, look around for one who makes a product that your clients would love.

Or how about selling an e-book or on your website? You don’t even need to write it yourself, you could become an affiliate for someone else’s product. Being affiliate means that you tell clients, or even friends and family, about a product and you get commission for every sale you make. Look at products you already use and like, then take a look at the seller or manufacturer’s website for how to  ‘become an affilliate’ (it’s sometimes called a ‘reseller’ or ‘rep’ instead).

If you’d like to know about more ways you could boost your income as a mumpreneur, take a look at my e-course Earn What You Deserve as a Mumpreneur.

Photo credit: Katerha

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