Louis Swart sold a business for five million dollars at thirty. He scaled another to 450 staff. The tool he says changed his working life most is a post-it note, and he showed it to me on camera.
Here’s the whole method. Decide what you want to earn this year. Divide it by 2,000 hours, which is what you would work for an employer at forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year. Write the number on a post-it. Stick it on your monitor.
“During the day, every time I’m doing something, I look up and I’ll ask myself: would I pay somebody a hundred dollars an hour to do this task?”
Two hundred thousand a year makes it 100 dollars an hour. That is the number he looks at all day.
The arithmetic that makes it bite
The part I had not thought about properly is what a cheap task actually costs. Swart’s example is moving a book on a shelf behind him — a ten dollar job a VA could do.
“I’ll just quickly do it myself because you know what? I actually saved ten dollars. The reality is that I’ve actually lost ninety dollars … The next hour I need to do a hundred dollars plus ninety dollars that I lost the hour before.”
You did not save ten. You spent an hour earning ten against a hundred-dollar target, so you are ninety down and the next hour has to carry both. Do that six times in a day and the maths stops being recoverable. He has watched people aim at two hundred thousand, land at fifty, and have no idea where it went.
What this looks like in an SEO consultancy specifically
I run a one-person consulting practice, so I am the one doing the ten dollar tasks. Mine are not books on shelves. Mine are things like reformatting a client export by hand, chasing a screenshot, re-typing figures out of one dashboard into another, renaming files so a folder sorts properly.
The uncomfortable bit is that those tasks feel like work. They produce a visible artifact. They are the easiest thing to do at 4pm when you are tired, and they are exactly what the post-it is designed to catch.
- Above the line: the audit call, the thing only you can diagnose, the recommendation that changes what a client spends next quarter.
- At the line: writing the deliverable that carries your reasoning, because that is the product.
- Below the line: anything where the output would be identical if somebody else did it. Formatting, exports, file admin, data re-entry.
Why I think it works better than a time tracker
A time tracker tells you where the hours went after they are gone. The post-it interrupts you before the hour starts, which is the only moment when you can still do something about it. It also survives having a bad week, because it is a piece of paper and not a habit you have to maintain.
Swart’s own framing is that the number should feel slightly uncomfortable: pick what you want to earn, and when you get comfortable with that figure, double it. The point is not accuracy. The point is having any number at all in front of you when you decide what to do next.
The catch nobody mentions
This only works if something else can absorb the ten dollar tasks. If you have no VA, no automation and no team, the post-it just tells you that you are doing cheap work, and then you do it anyway because it still has to happen. That is not a failure of the method, it is the method telling you what to build next.
So before the number goes on the wall, make a list of everything you did today that somebody else could have done identically. If that list is long and you have nobody to hand it to, you have found your actual bottleneck — and it was never your hourly rate.
Louis Swart is the founder of Iron Brij. The full conversation is on Unscripted Small Business. If you want the same treatment applied to your search programme rather than your calendar, that is what foundational consulting is.