Have you ever done a time audit on yourself?

Most people don’t realize that wasting just 10 minutes a day adds up to more than 43 hours per year, the equivalent of losing an entire week. As business owners, we often underestimate how much time slips away on seemingly small tasks until it’s too late.

About three years ago, I began working with the owner of a small HVAC company. He was generating around $400,000 in annual revenue but walking away with only $17,000 in profit. Our goal was to help him grow the business without adding new resources. So, we started by tracking everything—every dollar, every task, every minute.

The first thing we identified was a pricing problem, which we corrected quickly. But what really stood out during our discovery process was the enormous amount of wasted time. He was losing hours to trips to the supply house, chasing down payments, handling inbound calls, and driving inefficient routes to jobs.

We conducted a full time audit and tracked every minute of his day for a month. What we found was staggering:

• He was spending 18 weeks per year on the phone.

• He spent 7 weeks per year driving to and from the supply house.

That’s 25 weeks a year - half the year - wasted.

We showed him the true cost of this lost time and made a strong case for hiring someone to handle incoming calls. He also wasn’t tracking any customer data, which meant every job required starting from scratch.

To address that, we implemented a tech stack that included the Jobber App and Zoho Warehouse. We worked with the supply house to stock his shop weekly, cutting out 95% of his supply runs. We also converted his service trucks into rolling warehouses, stocked with commonly used parts like capacitors, motors, and refrigerant.

Jobber streamlined operations—it mapped job routes, stayed in touch with customers, tracked service history and equipment specs, and even allowed customers to schedule service, receive reminders, and make payments directly through the app.

Once we locked in his pricing strategy and eliminated inefficiencies, the business transformed. Today, that same HVAC company is profiting over $600,000 per year.

The key takeaway?

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure what you don’t track.