How much should your business depend on your own hours?
A full client calendar can keep a business earning and leave little room to change how it works. Start with the work you want to keep doing yourself.
Start with the working week you want to sustain. Which work do you want to do personally? How much time does that work require, and what income does it need to produce? Compare those choices with how your business uses your hours today.
Depending on your own hours can be a deliberate choice. You may want a practice where clients work directly with you. The difficulty comes when the business requires more of your time than you want to give it, or when every change you would like to make has to wait until client work is finished.
Decide which work you want to keep
Some of the work may be the reason you became self-employed. You enjoy doing it, clients value your contribution and you want to remain involved. Being personally necessary for that work can fit the business you want to build.
Other responsibilities may have accumulated around it. You carry every client relationship, answer each small question and make every delivery decision. Look at those responsibilities separately. Which ones need your judgement? Which ones are there because that is how the work has always been arranged?
Naming the work you want to keep and the responsibility you want to change gives you something concrete to review. A possible change then has to preserve what clients value about working with you.
Look beyond the hours you invoice
Use a recent week to see what the business actually required of you. Include the work around delivery, such as preparing for a client conversation or following up after an assignment. Then look at the time left for finding future work and developing the business.
The way you charge does not settle this question. A fixed-fee assignment can still depend on your time throughout delivery. If you personally handle every part of it, changing the invoice from hours to a project price has not, by itself, changed that dependence.
Compare the week with the income it supports and the pace you want to sustain. If the business only works when you give it every available hour, you have a specific constraint to examine. You can then ask what would need to change in the offer or its delivery for a different week to be possible.
Change a specific part of delivery
Take one responsibility you would like to change and describe why it uses so much of your time. Is the promised scope unclear? Do clients need you to make a decision before work can continue? Do you stay available throughout an assignment because no one has agreed when a question should be discussed?
Suppose, for example, that a service involves frequent questions between planned conversations. You could examine whether agreeing what each conversation should cover, and which questions need attention in between, would make delivery more predictable. Try it in an assignment where the client agrees to those working conditions.
Look at the client's side of the change as well. What do they need from you to get the value they are paying for? Which decisions still need your attention? Making fewer hours necessary is useful only if the revised delivery still does the work you agreed to do.
Try it while protecting the business you have
Choose a change that you can test in a suitable assignment. Write down what you expect it to change in your week and what you need to learn from the client's experience. You are looking for evidence that the revised arrangement is workable before making it your usual way of delivering the service.
Afterwards, compare what happened with what you expected. Did the work use less of your time? Did questions still arrive outside the arrangement? Could the client make the decisions they needed to make? An experiment that exposes another dependency can still tell you what to examine next.
Include the income consequence in that review. Having more room in your week may be important, but you still need the business to earn. If the change reduces income or moves work into another part of the week, that belongs in the decision about whether to keep it.
Return to the life the business should support
The question about your own hours sits beside two others on my coaching page: What pace can I sustain? What must remain possible outside work? Those questions help you judge whether a different way of delivering the service would create the working life you want.
You may decide to keep more work in your own hands, or change part of an offer so delivery needs less of your time. Judge the choice by how it fits the income you need and the week you want to live.
In my coaching for self-employed people, we can examine those choices using the business you have or the one you are planning. We can meet online in English or Danish, wherever you work, or face to face in Copenhagen.