The Value Of Time
You'd be amazed at how often "we can do it ourselves" costs more than paying someone else to do the same thing. A story of how I learned this.
A long time ago, I worked at a small startup in Idaho Falls. One of the owners of the company taught me an important lesson on how to value time. I don't know that he did this on purpose, but he presented a scenario that I think really exposed how he thought about things.
TL;DR
Math. Take the hours a job might take, times it by how much your time is worth, and figure out if it would be cheaper to pay someone else. I do not discuss in this post how to figure out what your time is worth, that's a story for another day.
The Scenario
You own a small, scrappy startup and along with all the other tropes of #startuplife you've also adopted "the we all wear a lot of hats" concept. The staff is small and is engineer heavy. At one point, you have ~10 people stuffed into a room and the background noise is starting to cause issues with customer calls and just general happiness.
Praise be! you find someone offloading cubicle walls on Craigslist for $0. This is the highest level of accomplishment for a startup. Stuff that makes you look like a real business, but it doesn't cost anything. To make the deal even better, you manage to swing free delivery to the office, you just need to unload the trailer that everything is already in.
Here's where you get into the rub...
Can't really ask your customer support or sales departments to help. They're too busy being #lockedin to the #grindlife and supporting your growing customer base. This leaves marketing, product, and engineering to help unload the trailer.
If we're being very...very generous (and making the math easy) lets assume the average hourly pay across those departments is $20 an hour. So if you take your three engineers, two marketing folks, and one product person that means you have a total of six people involved.
It's a mega trailer and it takes two hours to just unload the trailer.
This means that for that two hours, it cost the business $240 to unload the trailer. If you added the time it would take to assemble and put everything where it goes, that number balloons at a rate of $120 an hour. That's not including the lost revenue because you're not promoting posts on LinkedIn, planning your next #disruptive feature, or finishing the features the sales department promised that next big customer they were on the phone with while you unloaded the trailer.
The Consideration
Now we know that our working rate for these kinds of projects is at least $120 an hour in labor costs and an unmeasurable amount in opportunity costs. You're small, you're scrappy, you're #lean and looking for any bit of profit you can find. Not really sustainable to be throwing away labor costs like that.
Let me introduce you to an important thought technology...
High school wrestlers.
Labor costs are lower, they enjoy the work because they like picking things up, and they'll probably bang it out a lot faster than your engineering team.
(to be fair, the engineering team will probably come up with a much more interesting way to move the stuff...just won't be the most efficient.)
This little experiment has changed the way I think about almost everything in my life. In and out of any business context.
Application
An oil change on my car is something I can do. I have the tools and the skills. The oil and filter will probably cost me ~$46. I will need to pull the car into the garage, jack it up and put it on stands, drain the oil, replace the filter, refill the oil, remove the stands, and bring it back down. This process, on a good day, will take me around an hour if you don't count the wardrobe change.
Let's assume that my hourly pay is still at that easy $20 number. That would mean that the oil change is going to "cost" me around $66. It also means that I'm taking an hour away from whatever else I could be working on...but that cost is harder to quantify so we'll leave it alone.
However, the dealership is on my way home from the gym. If I can get on the schedule at 8am and throw my laptop in the car they'll have it done in an hour. They'll also rotate the tires and wash the car along with an inspection of all the important things. Thanks to the glory of remote work and pretty well universal wifi access, I can make my morning stand-ups and not really miss anything.
The cost, $99.
Yes, this is a $33 increase over what it would cost me to do the oil change in my driveway, but I didn't miss anything at work, didn't have to change my blouse, and I'll leave with a clean car and a rough idea of how many miles I have to do the same math on replacing my brake rotors.