ROI Calculator
The real cost isn't what you spend. It's what you can't do.
Every hour you spend on admin is an hour you can't spend closing deals, serving clients, or going home to your family. Enter your numbers below — and see what manual work is actually costing your business, your growth, and your life.
The hidden cost
It's not just about the money you're wasting. It's about everything you're not building.
Most ROI calculators show you a dollar figure and call it a day. But the real cost of manual work isn't measured in payroll. It's measured in the clients you couldn't take on, the service you never launched, the hire you couldn't afford, and the evenings you spent at your desk instead of at your dinner table.
16 hrs/wk
on admin tasks
The ServiceNow State of Work report found executives spend two full working days every week on manual administrative work. That's not a rounding error — that's 40% of your work week doing a machine's job.
68%
working IN, not ON
Business owners spend 68.1% of their time on day-to-day tasks and only 31.9% on strategy and growth. You didn't start your business to be a data-entry clerk — but that's what most of your week looks like.
41%
competitor AI surge
AI adoption among small businesses surged 41% in a single year. While you're buried in spreadsheets, your competitors are automating those same tasks and using the freed-up hours to steal your clients.
13 months
for 12 months' pay
Sage research found the average small business works the equivalent of 13 months per year — two entire days every month consumed just by financial admin like chasing invoices. You're donating a month of your life to paperwork.
Your Numbers
Now let's make it personal.
Those are the averages. Your situation is specific. Adjust the sliders below and see exactly what manual work is costing your business — in dollars, in hours, and in everything you're not doing because of it.
Your Numbers
Adjust the sliders to see your personalized ROI
Current admin cost
$1,500
per week
$6,495
per month
$78,000
per year
Recoverable with AI (70%)
$54,600
per year · 11 hours/week back
Based on 70% automation rate for repetitive admin tasks. Actual results vary by business.
What $78,000 actually looks like
It's not just a number on a spreadsheet. It's your life.
780
hours per year on admin
That's 98 full working days — roughly 5 months of your year spent on tasks that don't grow your business, don't serve your clients, and don't move the needle. You're working 17 months to earn 12 months of pay.
$234,000
over the next 3 years
Every week you wait, the cost compounds. In three years, you'll have spent $234,000 on manual work — while your competitors who automated this year will have reinvested that same amount into growth, hiring, and market expansion. The gap doesn't stay the same. It widens.
38%
of a full work week on admin
Even at 15 hours, that's time you could spend closing deals, building relationships, or simply leaving the office before dark. Every hour on admin is an hour you're choosing busywork over the work that actually grows revenue.
What could you do with 11 extra hours every week?
This isn't hypothetical. These are the choices you're making every week you don't automate.
Where that time goes now
- Copying data between spreadsheets, CRMs, and inboxes — the same information, re-entered three times
- Formatting proposals and reports nobody reads until you follow up anyway
- Chasing invoices, scheduling calls, sending the same onboarding emails for the 50th time
- Staying at the office until 8pm because the "real work" doesn't start until the admin is done
What you do with those hours back
- Take on 2–4 new clients without hiring a single person
- Launch the new service line you've been "planning" for the last 18 months
- Respond to every lead within 5 minutes instead of 5 days — and watch your close rate climb
- Leave the office at 5pm. Pick up your kids. Have dinner at the table, not at your desk.
ROI by Tier
See how each service level recovers your time and investment
Community
$100/mo
Self-paced learning with group support
Done With You
$500–$1,000/mo
1:1 sessions building your automations together
Done For You
$3,500–$5,000+
We build your complete AI system end-to-end
Fractional CAIO
$2,000–$3,000/mo
Ongoing AI strategy and implementation leadership
The competitive cost
While you're doing admin, your competitors are automating it.
This isn't just about your time. It's about the growing gap between businesses that automate and businesses that don't. Every month you wait, your AI-powered competitors serve more clients, respond faster, make fewer errors, and spend more time on growth while you're still catching up on yesterday's inbox.
Businesses that don't automate
- Capacity-locked. You can only take on as many clients as your admin hours allow. Growth means hiring, not efficiency — and hiring at $50K+/year for work a machine does for free.
- Slower to respond. Leads wait hours or days for a proposal while an automated competitor sends one in minutes. 78% of customers buy from the first responder.
- Burnout trajectory. 63% of business owners already work 50+ hour weeks. Without automation, scaling means working 60, 70, 80 hours — or hiring people to do the work machines should be doing.
- Falling behind daily. The Slack Productivity Survey found small business owners lose 96 minutes of productivity every day. That's three full weeks per year — compounding, every year, forever.
Businesses that automate
- Nearly 5x productivity. Companies using AI strategically see worker productivity increase nearly 5x. Same team, same payroll, dramatically more output.
- 91% report revenue growth. AI-using SMBs don't just save time — they grow revenue. The freed-up capacity goes directly into client work, sales, and strategic projects that move the needle.
- Compound advantage. Each automation frees up time to build the next one. Month 1 saves 5 hours/week. Month 3 saves 15. Month 6 saves 30. The advantage accelerates while manual businesses stay flat.
- Better quality of life. This is the one nobody talks about. Automated business owners leave at 5pm. They take real weekends. They stop dreading Monday because Monday isn't a wall of catching up anymore.
The uncomfortable truth: non-AI businesses competing against AI-powered businesses is like competing on foot against someone in a car. You can run harder, but you can't run faster. And every month, they pull a little further ahead — not because they're smarter or better, but because they freed up the hours you're still burning on manual work.
The real question
How many more weeks are you willing to lose?
Every week you wait is another 16 hours spent on tasks a machine handles in minutes. Another $1,200 in productive capacity burned. Another week your competitors compound their advantage while yours stays flat.
The tools exist right now. The question has never been whether AI can save you time — it can, and the data is overwhelming. The question is how many more months of your life you're willing to spend on work that shouldn't require a human being.
Wait 1 month
64+ hours lost
That's 8 full working days of admin — plus whatever clients, deals, or projects you couldn't get to because you were busy formatting spreadsheets.
Wait 6 months
384+ hours lost
Nearly 10 full work weeks gone. Plus 6 months of compounding competitor advantage you can never recover. The gap is now measurable in market share.
Wait 1 year
832+ hours lost
That's $62,400 in productive capacity. 104 working days. The equivalent of working 13 months for 12 months of pay — every single year, forever, until you decide to stop.
Stop paying the opportunity cost. Start recovering your time.
Book a 15-minute discovery call. We'll identify your highest-ROI automation opportunity, show you what "after" looks like, and help you pick the right path — whether that's learning, building together, or handing it off entirely.