You ever notice how, in business, there’s this unspoken rule that if you want to make more money, you’ve got to give up your free time? It’s like the universe is telling us, “You can have profit or time—but not both.” Well, that’s exactly the myth I want to bust today.

This idea came up during a recent Mastermind meeting I was part of. We were talking about that constant tug-of-war between free time and profit—how more of one usually means less of the other. The truth is, it doesn’t have to be that way. Somewhere along the line, a lot of us carried over employee logic into ownership. When you worked flat rate as a tech, more hours meant more money. So naturally, as owners, we think, “If I want to make more, I’ve got to put in more time.” But that mindset keeps us chained to the shop instead of running it.

Here’s the thing: profit isn’t just about the amount you make—it’s about how long it takes you to make it. If I told you I made $500,000, you’d probably say, “Nice!” But what if I said it took me ten years to make that? Still impressive? Not so much. Time gives profit context. Just like we measure gross profit per hour, we should be measuring our personal profit per hour.

Let’s say your shop brings in $200,000 a year, but it takes you and your spouse 4,000 combined hours to do it. That’s $50 an hour. Not bad, but what if you could make the same $200,000 working half the hours? Suddenly you’re at $100 an hour without changing your bottom line. That’s what working smarter—not harder—really means. You’re increasing your hourly value by buying back your time.

And that’s a key difference between the poor and the wealthy. Poor people buy things. Rich people buy time. If you make $15 an hour, it doesn’t make sense to pay someone $40 an hour to mow your lawn. But if you make $1,000 an hour, mowing your own grass is just bad math. The same applies in your business. If your time is worth $400 an hour, why are you doing $20-an-hour work?

So, how do you know what your time is worth? Add up everything you make—salary, benefits, profit—and divide by the hours you actually work. Don’t guess. Track it. Whether it’s clocking in or journaling your time, get the data. Then, look at how much of that time is spent in the business (checking out customers, shuttling cars, ordering parts) versus on the business (training staff, creating systems, building strategy). The goal is to shift more hours to the “on” side—that’s where the real leverage lives.

At the end of the day, time is the most valuable thing we have. I always say, if I offered you $10 million but you couldn’t wake up tomorrow, you’d turn it down in a heartbeat. That means waking up tomorrow is worth more than $10 million to you. So stop trading something priceless for something you can always make more of. Measure your time, value it, and protect it—because profit without time isn’t freedom, it’s just another job.