If you work and are paid by the hour, your income is limited by the number of working hours you have at your disposal.  Like everyone else, all you have is time and your time is finite.  If, however, you are able somehow to expand the time available to you, without expending any more effort or acquiring any more skills or expertise…. becoming a brain surgeon for instance, an estate attorney for the seriously affluent or a used car magnate…you will be able to earn more.

How do you do this?  How do you expand your time? Every affluent person knows the answer to this.  One way or another, you have to find a way to climb out of the traditional and perpetual trading hours for dollars method of earning money.  Yes, you can earn some money that way but only with your core expertise.  And let that money be your launching pad.

Here’s how the people who start climbing towards wealth do it.

Take Anna.  Let’s say she’s a seamstress.  She makes so many dollars an hour sewing.  She buys a sewing machine and the automation allows her to work faster and make more money.  She is able to hire more workers, buy more machines and the next thing you know she has a small factory.  Anna is now able to use her time training others, moving from doing to delegating, overseeing quality, and spreading the word about her sewing enterprise. Business picks up.  Anna is starting to make a lot more money

Anna is on her way to attaining wealth because she  was able to stop trading hours for dollars.  How did she do this?  She had a skill and developed a reputation around the quality of her skill.  She could have raised her prices incrementally and continued to get more customers but, in the end, she would have been limited by the time she had available to work.  Instead, she invested in automation and labor, which freed up her time to market her services.  All her customers knew Anna, liked the quality of her work, and felt comfortable that if they dealt with her, she would guarantee good quality.  They didn’t care who sewed the material or what brand of sewing machine they used.

Whether you are an online entrepreneur or a work at home mom, you can do the same thing. Once you have established your business and built it up to a certain point, you have some choices to expand your supply of time so you can do what you do best, which is probably to design, produce, sell and maintain the quality of  your product or service:

1.  Automate – If you’re not a techie, ask a local tech guru or college student to set up as many automated features as possible on your computer.  Have emails with a certain subject line go into their own email box.  Set up an auto responder with a series of messages that fit your most common situations.  Set up a service to answer your phone and fax then send a voice mail to your in box. Don’t answer your phone except during a certain, designated time each day when you return calls. Put as many of your bills as possible on auto pay. See what other repetitive chores can be automated.

2. Outsource -Give up all the routine, administrative work someone else can do for you: from book keeping to setting up online accounts, there’s someone out there you can find through Google or eLance.com who can do it better and faster and free up your time to create, oversee and market, which pays a lot more.

3. Offload non-essential tasks. This means getting rid of anything that’s a time consumer and not an income producer, including in your personal life.  I hope you’re not still mowing your own lawn or cleaning your own home, if you’re trying to start, grow or run a business at the same time.  I have a friend who works at a top national radio chain.  She pointed out that the common denominator of every successful female executive she knew was that they had household help.

4. Invest for Passive Income – Aside from the fact that you want to save and invest, you want your money to be working for you.  It’s the same principle as hiring an employee or contract labor: someone else is carrying some of the load while you are out doing what you do best.  And your hours have been stretched. Plus which, if you’re ever injured or can’t or don’t want to work, investments producing passive income keep working for you.

5. Diversify - My father used to say  you should always have at least three businesses because there will never be a time when one of them isn’t doing badly.  Scale that back and say three revenue streams.  Same principle as not having only one big client. What do you do when they drop you, hire their brother-in-law or go under? What do you do when one revenue stream dries up or sinks like a rock in river?  Better have another to fall back on.

Lessons From My Business

In my web business, I devote my skills and attention to the creation or gathering of high quality content, graphics and business processes for the website or blog I am producing or overseeing for another organization.  Someone else can do the rest. I do some of the tech aspects since I had to learn to do them when the web was still getting cranked up and there were few techs and no automated software around.  But if I can pay someone, say $300 to handle a tech piece, while I am creating, say  $1,000 or $1,200 in revenue, that seems to me like a pretty good trade off for everybody. The tech gets more jobs, the client gets a great product faster, and I create more revenue for my company.  Everybody wins.  Right?

Tell us what you think.  Tell us how you stretch your hours.  Does this post help you?  Share your thoughts with us.