The other day I remarked that contract teaching is by far the most reliable source of income among my various little enterprises.
Editorial work, however, pays better by the hour, is less taxing, and requires little or no driving around.
Blogging is entertaining and a nice sop for one’s ego but does almost nothing for the bottom line.
Thinking about how Tina and I might market and grow our editorial business, it crossed my mind to block out a certain percentage of the day or the week for each activity, thereby allowing me to schedule in a regular slot for marketing and networking. And this led straight to the question of how much is a reasonable amount of time to allot to one’s various money-making activities?
“Reasonable” aside, how much am I already allotting to this, that, and the other exploit? I spend rather more time on the blog than I should, given the tiny amount of revenues it represents. Really, until recently FaM has been the only one of the three enterprises that I’ve worked on every single day.
Exclusive of Social Security, teaching generates about 64% of my income. Editorial accounts for about 26%, and Funny about Money, about 8%. So, it would make sense for about 2/3 of my working time to be spent on teaching, about 1/4 of my time on editing, and less than 1/10 of it on blogging.
Because so much teaching work is done up-front in the form of course preparation that happens before a paycheck comes in (and therefore represents unpaid labor), it’s difficult to estimate how much of my time actually is spent on that endeavor. I spend about 9 hours a week in class, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours in course preparation, and to grade a single set of papers can take anywhere from 6 2/3 hours to 20 hours. One of my courses is online, requiring zero hours of class time. In a 16-week semester, not counting drafts, I collect about 15 sets of papers. So it would make sense to approximate an average of 6 to 8 hours a week grading papers. That’s approximately 15 to 17 hours a week, not counting the extensive course prep time. Figure about 100 hours for that, and you can add another 6.25 hours a week, for about 23 hours a week on teaching.
That’s more than 50% of a normal work week.
Editorial? Depends on what’s in house. On any given day, I can spend anything from 30 minutes to 16 hours on editing. It probably averages around 8 or 10 hours a week.
And as for blogging, I average about two hours a day on it; 14 hours a week.
So we have 23 + 8 + 14 = 45 hours of paying work a week.
If that’s accurate, then right now I’m spending about 51% of my work time on teaching, 17% of it on editorial work, and 31% of it on blogging.
What that adds up to is this: the smallest amount of my working time is spent on the best paying work. The second-largest slab of my time is spent on work that pays, at most, about $20 an hour—probably considerably less. And almost a third of my working hours are spent on an activity that brings in a laughable $200 a month.
Well. There’s a little insight, in the “what’s wrong with this picture” department!
If one is to work smarter instead of harder, it would make sense for the largest portion of working hours to be spent on the highest-earning activity, no? That would be…yes! Editorial.
I think we (by that I mean me and my associate editor) could do far better by targeting commercial enterprises—more plumbing/HVAC contractors!—than by working with individual writers and vanity presses. We need to go out into the world and meet the people who bring you all that obnoxious advertising and who blanket the Internet with “information” about their products and services. One thing that’s clear: business executives expect to pay other businesses a fair rate. Too often, individuals do not.
And if we want to earn more from better-paying work, then we need to devote more time, proportionately, to the better-paying work.
Duh!
I should probably try to up the proportion of working hours spent on The Copyeditor’s Desk from around 15% to 20% to something more like 40% to 50%.
It would be possible to do that simply by setting aside an hour or two a day to work on marketing the little business, and then intensifying that effort during the winter and summer breaks—using time that would be spent on teaching to network and market to businesses. It might require me to spend less time on teaching, and it certainly would cut into the time available for poking at a keyboard to produce blog posts.
At $50 an hour, an editor working 15 billable hours a week should earn about $750 a week, or about $37,500 a year, given a two-week break. Double the number of billable hours for marketing: 30 hours a week, and you come up with exactly the number of hours/week I’m working right now. $37,500 is about $7,950 more than projected earnings from all three enterprises in a typical year. Helle’s belles: I just got a paycheck from the community colleges for two weeks of teaching three sections.
Is that a reasonable allocation of working vs. marketing hours: 66% in peddling the business and 33% in actual work? Various self-styled experts vary, recommending that the small business entrepreneur devote between 20% and 60% of one’s working time to marketing. So if I were spending “only” 60% of my time at hustling business from other businesses, I’d have 18 hours a week to devote to actual paid editorial work, amounting to $900 a week or $45,000 a year. At 20%, I’d be pulling in $1,800 a week, or $90,000 per 50-week year.
Now that’s working smarter!
There’s another model, of course: videlicet, I do most or all of the marketing and Tina does most or all of the editing. In this scenario, I earn a salary from the S-corporation for my services and Tina gets paid an hourly contract rate.
So let’s say I manage to bring in 40 hours a week worth of work. That’s $2,000 a week, or $100,000 in a 50-week year. We split the income 50-50, and we each earn 50 grand a year.
LOL! Not likely that I could corral that much paying work at $50/hour. But anything’s possible. One never knows until one tries, does one?
😉
Yes, BUT, I know that you know that you are leaving out all of the NON monetary aspects of blogging: the sense of community, the fashion tips, the chance to go head to head with people to the right of you, finding out who else can’t stomach eggs.
Remuneration?
Priceless 🙂
After reading your blog for a couple of years now, I think your best idea so far has been the distance learning strategy you’ve developed around WordPress. I work on distance learning courseware myself, and although our package (Moodle) seems to be a little less cumbersome than Blackboard, I can tell you that there’s lots of opportunities out there for a low-cost distance learning capability for smaller companies and municipalities.
Blackboard and Moodle licensing costs huge $$$$$. Consultancies that host learning packages themselves are worse. WordPress blogs, not so much, in fact you could probably sell advertising if your student body represents a marketable demographic.
Whaddya think?
Why does it have to be a 100-0 Work Split? Why can’t you spend 50% of your time marketing and she spends 50% of her time marketing? or 40/60 etc. Play your strengthens
I like to imagine things also.
Just make sure you are taking advantage of everything your S-Corp offers you.
SS just dumped $582 into our checking account as an adjustment so Whoo Hoo more money.
My father was self-employed for many years, so I am well-aware of both the good times and bad. It seems to me that your teaching provides a steady income–something that can’t be said for self-employment!
The best way to make more money teaching: figure out ways to do it more efficiently, esp. the grading. I am still working on this one myself. But your wage goes up as you spend less time at it.
Thus freeing time to market your biz.
@ frugalscholar: Even though the District distributes paychecks with FICA and taxes withheld, those paychecks explicitly describe what we do as “contract” work. So I regard it as a form of self-employment — by no means do I think of myself as a real employee of the community college district. No benefits are offered, no job security of even the vaguest kind exists: we serve at the pleasure of the chair, and from semester to semester we do not know how many classes we will be offered or even if we will be offered any classes at all. Nor is the income “steady”: over the course of a semester, maybe two or three checks will be the same. I really never know how much will come in on the next payday.
I think I’ve maxed out the efficiency of the teaching, in some ways I’m not free to discuss here. At this point, what I do could best be described as project management. So there’s enough time lurking in the interstices to devote to marketing. We just need to figure out how and — as you suggest about the teaching — what is the most efficient and effective way to do it.
I like Evan’s thought on splitting marketing. In any scenario, we will need to come up with a fair strategy for remuneration. Driving from pillar to post giving presentations to strangers is work and it needs to be paid (at least, in Tina’s case it certainly does). And it’s not without costs: you need to buy some decent clothes and shoes, get your hair done, wear makeup that doesn’t look like it came from the dime store, carry a presentable briefcase, buy many gallons of gas. Thus it seems to me that where my time could be spent on marketing for free or close to it, Tina would need to be paid enough to cover these costs and then some.
@ vinny:
Eventually the District will get wise to the WP thing and tell people they can’t do it. Right now the governing board is mulling over a proposition to restrict faculty’s use of any and all “social media,” which in their definition includes blogs. These will have to be hosted on the college’s servers and bear the District’s logo, among other things.
Naturally, since the District is paying for Blackboard (a possible switch to Canvas is in the works), the administration quite reasonably expects employees and contractors to use that CMS, not go off and build their own wildcat CMS sites. My sites now state specifically that they are not official anythings of the college or the district, that nothing said on them represents the college or district’s opinions or policies, that student privacy is strictly protected, and that civility is required. Course materials are distributed in hard copy as well as posted online, and course materials for the online course are also made available on BB.
I also have figured out how to have students submit papers through the District’s cumbersome, spam-rich e-mail system in a way that they can be filtered by class, making life a little easier but only if students will follow instructions. That, of course, is never a foregone conclusion.