The owner's week: where 40% of it goes

Ask a school director, a studio owner or the founder of a small service company how they spend their week, and the first answer is the work: teaching, designing, serving clients. Ask them to write it down hour by hour, and a different picture appears.

The European number

In 2024 Visma and Kantar surveyed 2,000 entrepreneurs across Europe (Visma and Kantar, 2024).

The survey was commissioned by a software company, so treat it as an industry estimate. The direction is confirmed elsewhere. US private music teachers report 2.8 hours a week on bookkeeping and business tasks alone (MTNA, 2024). In a school with several teachers, much of that lands on the director.

On a 40-hour week, 40% is 16 hours. Two working days.

The one-week exercise

For one normal week, keep a running note. Every time you switch task, write down what you're doing and for how long. At the end of the week, sort the time into these categories:

1. The work itself. Teaching, serving, making.
2. Schedules. Your staff's and your clients'.
3. Changes. Reschedules, cancellations, extra sessions.
4. Money. Chasing, reconciling, passing figures to the accountant.
5. Messages. Answering questions that someone else could have answered.
6. Evenings. Anything you did at home after hours.

Then mark each item in categories 2 to 6 with one of three letters:

• D — only I can decide this.
• P — I'm just passing information between two other people.
• C — I'm checking something a system could check.

Everything marked P and C is the first candidate to take off your desk.

What it looked like in a real school

In the music school from our portfolio, the director was the switchboard. Teachers' schedules, students' lesson times, every reschedule, every payment check. Most of it was P and C.

After the system went live:

• Teachers fill in their own schedules. The director approves.
• Teachers and students agree lesson times in the app. The director checks that lessons match payments.
• Payments arrive automatically, with a copy to the accountant.
• Parents request reschedules. The teacher and the administrator confirm in the app. Nobody has to forward anything.

The director now spends at least a third less time on admin and messages, sometimes half. Work no longer goes home in the evening. The school opened a second location.

On a 16-hour admin week, a third to a half is roughly five to eight hours: about one working day. That is our arithmetic on a typical week, not the director's measurement.

Growth, not efficiency

The same Visma survey found that 46% of entrepreneurs put growth first and only 13% put efficiency first. That's worth remembering. The point of taking admin off your desk is not a tidier week. It is the hours to open a second location, take on more students or finally build the thing you keep postponing.

Small is an advantage

Owners of small businesses often assume systems are for large companies. The evidence says the opposite. McKinsey found that digital transformations in companies with fewer than 100 employees are 2.7 times more likely to succeed than in companies with more than 50,000 (McKinsey, 2018). Fewer people, fewer approvals, faster decisions.

Related: Why we said no to the payment button · Missed lessons and moved lessons