Two-bay garage, two techs, I open at 7:30 and lock up at 6, then do invoicing and parts ordering after dinner most nights. I counted properly last month and it was 72 hours including Saturdays. I'm not asking for sympathy, I'm asking what specifically changed for the people whose hours dropped — because right now I can't see the mechanism.
Mine went from about 80 to about 50 and it was one change, not ten: I trained someone to close. Not to cook, not to serve — to cash up, lock the doors, set the alarm and text me one line. Writing the closing checklist took an afternoon and it bought me back roughly fifteen hours a week and every evening of my life. The opening version came a year later and was harder, because opening is where the judgement calls live.
The one-line text is doing more work than it looks. The owners who never get their evenings back are the ones who trained someone to close and then rang them at 9pm to check.
I did six years at 70-plus and then sold in a hurry at a worse price than I'd have got with a calm sale, because my health made the decision for me. The specific thing I'd tell year-two me is to take one full day completely off every week from the start, even when it's obviously impossible, and to get a proper check-up rather than assuming permanent exhaustion is the job. It is genuinely cheaper to hire six hours of cover than to sell a business in a bad month.
Honest disagreement: the hours don't come down for most people, they change shape. You stop turning wrenches at 6 and start doing VAT, rotas, disciplinaries and supplier arguments at 10pm, and it feels less physical so you don't count it. The thing that actually gave me my week back wasn't delegation, it was deciding what time I stop and treating it like the shutter coming down. Work expands to whatever you leave open.
This. I delegated the floor and immediately filled the space with admin I could have batched into one Friday morning. Nobody asked me to do it at 11pm, I just did.
Hours fall when someone else can lock up. Everything else is rearranging. Write the closing checklist this week.
@muslin_mira · 3mo ago
I kept a rough log for five years: year one about 75 a week, year two 70, year three 68, year four 52, year five 45. Nothing gradual happened — the drop between three and four is the month I hired a person whose entire job was the counter and the phone. That cost me a visible chunk of margin and I made less money that year, which is the part nobody mentions when they tell you to delegate. It came back the year after because I was finally selling instead of answering the phone.
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