What Is Your Time Worth? COLUMN BY RICHARD R. VENSEL Is your time worth $20, $30, $50 per hour or more? If you don’t know this, how do you know where you are headed? Customers are always telling us how business is going, but we rarely have peo- ple tell us what they are doing to strength- en their business position for the future. Here are a few questions you may want to ask yourself: 1. What is your company the most productive at and are you spending most of your time on that? 2. Are you trying all day to keep ahead of the fires that pop up? 3. Are you keeping track of your inventory and cores? 4. Are you calling on customers to keep track of their needs and wants? 5. Are you busy reinventing the wheel and trying to solve problems that you have already solved once but never saved the solution in a place you could always find it when you needed it? If you don’t have a good answer to all of these questions, your business is not running on all 8 cylinders. Now is the time to start on a solution, even if you are a one-man shop. Analyze your wasted time and see how much it’s costing your company per hour. You will be amazed at the money you can find. Don’t be sur- prised if 50 percent of this valuable time is wasted. Richard Vensel is owner of Vensel Enterprises, Crystal Lake, IL.