It depends on your business, but for most small business owners it’s several hours a week. Sometimes more. The best way to find out is to do some quick math on your own week.
Let’s walk through it.
How much time goes to busywork today?
Most owners underestimate this. The small tasks don’t feel big one at a time. Five minutes here, ten minutes there.
But they add up. A 2024 Slack survey of 2,000 U.S. small business owners found they lose about an hour and a half every day to tasks they consider wasted time. That’s roughly three weeks a year. The same survey found the average owner juggles four different digital tools every day. (Salesforce/Slack, August 2024)
Other surveys put the total time owners spend on admin even higher, at around two full working days a week.
Do the math for your own business
Grab a piece of paper. Think about a normal week and estimate how much time you spend on each of these:
| Task | Hours per week |
|---|---|
| Answering calls, texts, and messages | |
| Scheduling and rescheduling | |
| Sending invoices and chasing payments | |
| Following up on quotes | |
| Social media and marketing | |
| Paperwork and filing | |
| Total |
Now multiply your total by what an hour of your time is worth. Use what you charge customers, or what you’d pay someone else to do the work.
For example: 10 hours a week at $75 an hour is $750 a week. That’s about $39,000 a year of your time spent on tasks that aren’t your actual work.
A before-and-after example
Here’s an example of a small landscaping company.
Before:
- About 4 hours a week returning calls and texts, many after dinner
- About 2 hours a week texting customers to confirm visits
- About 2 hours a week sending invoices and chasing late payments
- Several missed calls a week from new customers who never called back
After setting up a few AI helpers:
- Calls and texts get answered right away. The owner reviews a short summary once a day.
- Visit reminders go out automatically.
- Invoices go out when a job is marked done. Late-payment reminders follow on their own.
- Missed callers get a text back within a minute, and many book a visit.
The owner gets back most of those 8 hours. More importantly, fewer new customers slip away.
Let’s be honest about the limits
AI won’t save you every one of those hours. A few things to keep in mind:
- Setup takes some time up front. Someone has to teach the AI about your business, your prices, and your policies.
- You’ll still review some things. A good setup checks with you before doing anything important.
- Results vary. A busy service business with lots of calls will save more than a quiet shop with a few regulars.
A realistic goal: start with the one task that eats the most time. Saving even two or three hours a week gives you back more than a full week of your life each year.