Stuart Trier, who has built, bought, and sold 11 companies, has a name for the moment an owner realizes his time is worth $10,000 an hour and he's still spending it on RRSP paperwork. Callum, who leads a mining engineering consulting firm scaling toward $25 million, hit that moment this spring, drafting six-figure proposals in stolen minutes while his team texted him about garbage pickup and Outlook passwords. The fix started with redefining what the owner's job actually is. Hiring came second.
Northline Mining Consultants runs project teams across Canada and the US. Mine plant work, First Nations partnership packages that show up with a week and a half to turn around (sometimes less), the kind of bidding calendar that doesn't leave much room to breathe. Revenue's climbing toward $25 million over the next three years. None of that stopped an employee from texting Callum directly to ask what day the garbage gets picked up at a rental house two provinces away.
"Our employees still reach out to me directly to ask what day the garbage gets picked up at the rental house. I don't want to deal with that, figure it out, call somebody, find the calendar. I'm the IT guy too, so nobody even gets into their own Outlook without asking me first."
— Callum, owner
The week that produced that text also produced two live proposals, an expanding US contract, and a fresh relationship with a First Nations partner that had just handed Northline a package with almost no notice. Callum spent real hours of that week untangling an employee's RRSP dispute with the benefits coordinator. He was also supposed to be prepping an agenda for his own advisory call with Clear Results, and hadn't gotten to it.
Andrea Adam, Clear Results' Director of Operations, was on that call too. Normally she'd be coordinating hiring with Callum's business partner, not Callum himself. But he was traveling that week, so Callum ended up in a seat he doesn't usually sit in, fielding recruiting questions instead of writing the proposals only he could write.
What's an hour of Callum's time actually worth? Depends what he's doing with it. Answering a bookkeeper's email about a payment run is real work (someone has to do it), but it's work almost anyone could handle for the cost of a part-time hire. Writing the proposal that lands a six-figure contract is a different category of hour, one only Callum, or someone operating at his level, can pull off.
Stuart had already introduced a name for this on a prior call: the $10,000 hour.
No-Shame Explainer: The $10,000/$100,000 Hour
Not every hour of an owner's day is worth the same amount. Answering a bookkeeper's email might be a $10 problem (real, but replaceable by almost anyone for cheap). Writing the proposal that lands a six-figure contract is a $10,000 hour, the kind only the owner, or someone operating at his level, can do well. Some owners even have a $100,000 hour: the deal, the hire, the relationship that changes where the whole company ends up. Forget tracking every minute of the day. Just name one high-value lever each morning and protect 20 to 30 minutes for it, even inside a chaotic week.
Callum had already started tracking his time by the minute before this call. The exercise told him something he suspected but hadn't measured: the RRSP dispute, the bookkeeper emails, the IT requests were eating the hours he needed for proposals and business development. Does tracking time by the minute fix that on its own? Not really. It just tells you which hours are worth defending.
Callum's first instinct was to hire an "operations coordinator", butStuart advised him against using this job title when writing the job description.
"We're buying back your time. This person's value to your organization isn't the tasks on their list, it's the hours they free up for your highest-leverage work."
The distinction matters because it changes who gets hired and what they're allowed to own. An operations coordinator sounds like someone who executes a checklist. What Callum actually needed was closer to an executive assistant with real judgment, someone capable of absorbing the RRSP disputes, the IT questions, and the bookkeeper back-and-forth without needing Callum to referee any of it.
Pay follows the same logic. Stuart's guidance put the role in the $90,000 to $120,000 range with an incentive structure layered on top, something like a 20% discretionary bonus at the end of a 12-month stretch, or roughly $5,000 a quarter. That number isn't arbitrary. If the hire genuinely frees up a $10,000 hour even a handful of times a month, the math clears itself.
Location mattered too. Callum considered a remote hire, then talked himself out of it.
"I understand there's probably a remote person out there who's a perfect fit, but I need them in the room. Sitting across from someone, you get a feel for how they think and react that a camera just doesn't give you," he said.
Not every business needs an in-person hire for this role. But for an owner who's still the default escalation point for everything from garbage day to Outlook, proximity buys the kind of shadowing and trust-building that a video call can't replicate in the first few months.
The hire solves a Direction problem: the owner's role wasn't defined narrowly enough to keep logistics and IT questions off his desk. But underneath it sits a Team Engine problem that a single hire won't fix by itself.
"The three of us can't do this alone. We never will."
— Callum, owner
Northline still runs on a flat structure where Callum, his partner, and a third leadership member absorb almost everything. Andrea's already working the other half of that equation, sourcing the civil project manager, the superintendent, and the project engineer roles Callum needed posted that same week. Those hires matter for a separate reason: without scorecards and clear ownership at that level, even good employees keep needing the kind of handholding that pulls a founder's attention right back to the weeds he's trying to leave.
Does this only happen in mining consulting? Not even close. The mechanics translate cleanly across almost any project-based trade.
Northline's owner discovered a competitor working the exact projects he was bidding on, just with a narrower scope focused on mine plants and mills. A commercial HVAC contractor runs into the same thing when a competitor turns out to specialize entirely in cleanrooms for pharmaceutical labs: same broader trade, a narrower and more specialized slice of it.
The hiring structure question shows up the same way too. Northline needed to split one blurry role into a civil project manager, a superintendent, and a project engineer. A commercial plumbing company moving from small retail fit-outs into hospital-scale builds runs into an identical fork: one "lead plumber" can't own the budget, the field crews, and the paperwork all at once anymore.
Even the labor arbitrage plays out the same way. Northline sends people across the border on visas because local talent in some US markets is thin, and gets paid in a stronger currency for the trouble. A Canadian structural engineering firm doing the same thing in Texas is running the identical playbook with a different stamp on the drawings.
If your team already knows your Outlook password, that's not a compliment. It's a diagnosis. Before you write a job description for your next hire, find out whether the real constraint is a role, a system, or both. Book a 30-minute call, or take the free diagnostic, and see exactly where your time is leaking and what it would take to buy it back.
Callum didn't need to work harder this spring; he just needed one hour of his day to matter more than the other seven did. Think of the $10,000 hour framework less as a productivity trick and more as a filter. Before doing anything, ask whether this is the highest-value use of the next 30 minutes, or just the loudest thing in the room.
The hire that follows from that filter looks different from a standard operations posting. It's not about finding someone to fill a title. It's about finding someone capable enough to absorb the RRSP disputes and the IT questions so the owner's highest-leverage hours stop getting spent on someone else's garbage day.
Every owner scaling past the point where they can do it all has this same decision sitting in front of them, whether the trade is mining consulting, plumbing, or structural engineering. The business that gets there first isn't the one that works the most hours. It's the one that knows which hour is worth $10,000 and protects it on purpose.
This article is based on an anonymized Clear Results client engagement. Names, business details, and identifying information have been changed to protect confidentiality. It is intended for general informational purposes and does not constitute financial, legal, or personalized business advice.
Start by naming the pattern out loud. If your team is texting you about garbage day, there's no documented alternative path for that decision. Write down the three or four categories of low-stakes issue that keep landing on your desk, and assign each one to a person or a simple rule (a shared calendar, a designated point of contact). This isn't about writing a manual. It's about making sure you're not the only option. Read more in The Owner's Trap.
Separate the tasks from the decisions. Payroll runs, benefits paperwork, bookkeeping follow-ups, almost none of it needs an owner's signature. It needs a competent person and a process that doesn't depend on you. Keep visibility with a weekly or monthly check-in instead of living inside the day-to-day thread. Read more in Why Your P&L Is Lying to You.
Pick three moves each morning that would matter most if nothing else got done that day, not a to-do list, a short list of levers. Write them down before checking email. Review what got finished the next morning and reset the list. Over a quarter, this turns into a written 90-day plan instead of a string of unconnected fires. Read more in The 90-Day Plan.
Most businesses in this revenue range are still running the flat structure that worked at $1 million, with everyone reporting to the owner. The fix is naming three functional leads, typically operations, sales, and finance/admin, and handing each one real ownership of outcomes, not just tasks. That's what actually buys back founder time, more than any single hire can. Read more in The Org Chart You Actually Need.
Stuart Trier has built, bought, and sold multiple companies, scaling his first from $0 to $8M in revenue in just three years. He then grew his second company to 28 locations in 12 months before a successful exit to a publicly traded company. Drawing on nearly 1,800 coaching calls since 2023, he helps home service business owners achieve double and triple-digit growth by implementing the systems, strategies, and accountability that drive scalable results.
