8 Minutes an Hour.
Thousands Lost Every Month.
Ethan runs an automation agency. He’s analytical, precise, and genuinely passionate about what he does. His team likes working with him. He came to me a year and a half ago with a clear goal: grow the business, expand, build something bigger.
We worked together on strategy, on processes, on finding the right direction—months of real work.
Then one month, his cash flow dropped.
Not a crisis – but enough to notice. When he told me, I started digging. What changed? What happened? We went through the numbers together.
Then I asked him something that caught him off guard: “How many hours did your employees log for clients this month?”
He checked. The number was lower than usual.
“Ethan – is it realistic that someone might miss logging 8 minutes per hour?”
He wasn’t sure where I was going.
I explained: 8 minutes an hour sounds like nothing. But over an 8-hour workday, that’s a full hour that disappears. An hour worked for a client, never logged, never billed. Times two employees. Times every working day in the month.
The math came out to thousands of dollars a month, but it simply didn’t reach his account.
Ethan went quiet for a moment.
“I never thought about it that way.”
But I stopped him before he went to talk to his team. Because I knew what would happen if he walked in with “you’re not logging your hours properly.” They’d get defensive. They’d feel accused. The trust he’d built would take a hit.
I suggested a completely different frame.
“Tell them you understand it’s easy to miss 8 minutes an hour. That it’s completely human. That you want to think through it together – not to point fingers, but to make sure the work they’re doing actually shows up correctly in the reports.”
He did exactly that.
Within less than a month, logged per-employee per-day hours increased by 1 hour to 1.5 hours. The gap closed. The money came back – and kept coming since, because tracking became part of his routine from that point on.
What stays with me about Ethan’s story isn’t just the numbers. It’s that he’s a sharp, detail-oriented person who loves data – and still, like all of us, couldn’t see what was right in front of him. Not because he wasn’t good at his job. Because when you’re inside your business, it’s genuinely hard to see what someone on the outside spots in ten minutes.
Sometimes growth isn’t a new client. Sometimes it’s the hour that disappears every single day.
