This is… a loaded question.

Some people would have you believe that entrepreneurs only work four hours a week. Others really like to emphasize that being an entrepreneur will eat your life and consume all your time. Entrepreneurship takes no time at all or all the time you have at your disposal… which of these is correct?

The answer isn’t exactly straightforward but it’s not too complicated either. The answer is that it really depends on you and your business. “It depends” is a pretty vague answer and a bit of a copout. 

So let’s take a better look at how many hours a week an entrepreneur needs to work. 

In the beginning: A bit of your time.

If you’re just testing the waters with entrepreneurship and business, you’ll probably only spend a bit of time on it. A lot of entrepreneurs start off with side hustles these days and that’s perfectly fine. Dedicating just one or two hours a day consistently can be enough to get your business off the ground and growing at a decent pace. 

Let’s give you an example! If you were a budding entrepreneur building a side business while working at a regular job, your schedule might look something like this. 

• 7am to 8am: Wake up and get ready for work.
• 8am to 9am: Commute to work.
• 9am to 12pm: Work at your 9-5 job.
• 12pm to 1pm: Lunch. You might be able to squeeze some extra work in here if you’re desperate. 
• 1pm to 5pm: Work at your 9-5 job.
• 5pm to 6pm: Commute home from work. 
• 6pm to 7pm: Dinner.
• 7pm to 8pm: Rest. Watch TV, read a book, listen to a podcast or something.
• 8pm to 11pm: Work on your side-hustle.
• 11pm: Lights out, go to sleep. 

When you’re just starting out building a business, you’re probably going to be spending your time:

• Doing the necessary work related to your product. If you’re selling a product, this means making it yourself, ordering them from a supplier and then fulfilling the orders to your customers. If you’re offering a service to your clients, this means providing the service to your clients. 
• Doing outreach to get more clients for your business. In the beginning, you’ll probably be less reliant on ads and instead use cold outreach. This is more time-consuming than using ads but it’s also much more budget-friendly in comparison.
• Figuring out how to make your offering more attractive to potential customers. This might mean adding extra features to your offerings or tweaking the price points of your offerings. It might even mean completely scrapping your original offering and building a new one from scratch!
• Practicing to become better at the service that your business provides. This is more relevant for entrepreneurs that are running service businesses. The more you practice, the better you get at your craft and the better you get at your craft, the more customers you’ll get!

Starting out a business is one thing but what happens after that initial period of just starting up your business?

In the middle: Every single second of your life. 

Once you gain a bit of traction… that’s when things start to get time consuming. 

You’ll dedicate every moment of your life to your business because you really want to see it grow. You’ll more than likely quit your job because you want to really take your business seriously. And you’ll need to put in all your time and energy into it because scaling a business is a Herculean task.  

Here’s an example of what your schedule would look like if you’re doing everything you can to scale your business as big and as fast as possible. For this example, you’re working on your business full time!

• 7am to 8am: Wake up and get ready to grow your business.
• 8am to 12pm: Work on the main tasks that grow your business. For example, doing cold outreach or tweaking and running ads.
• 12pm to 1pm: Lunch. If you’re seriously grinding to grow your business, try your best to eat a nutritious meal and rest a bit. 
• 1pm to 5pm: Work on your business’s less mentally taxing tasks. For example, wrapping up and sending out your customers’ orders.
• 5pm to 6pm: Dinner. Once again, try your best to eat something that’s good for you and rest a bit.
• 6pm to 7pm: Rest. Unwind and don’t think about your business. Read a book, play a video game or go for a walk.
• 7pm to 10pm: Continue working on your business. Do any tasks that you missed out during the day.
• 10pm to 11pm: Plan out the next day and brainstorm ideas for your business.
• 11pm to 3am: Realize that there are a bunch of problems that need to be solved before tomorrow. Work through the night to put out your business’s fires. 
• 3am: Sleep.

When you’re scaling your business and are trying your best to make your business huge, you’re probably going to be:

• Handling your stock and communicating with suppliers or factories. Once your business scales up, handling massive amounts of products becomes a nightmare. You’ll be running around dealing with suppliers, factories, warehouses and postal services to make sure your business doesn’t fall apart.
• Focus on customer retention. Once you get the point where you want to scale your business, returning customers should be a big contributor to your bottom line. Offering upsells and other things to your past customers will keep your business healthy. 
• Doing even more outreach to get more clients for your business. A business grows with the number of customers that it serves. So even if you have a sizable and loyal customer base, you should never stop trying to get even more customers.
• Making and running ads to grow your business. When you get serious about growing your business, you need to start using ads to get your business’s name out there. Once again, you must always be looking for more customers for your business.
• Doing even more research and development to make your offering even more attractive to potential customers. There’s always room for improvement and a great product means you have happy customers. An even greater product means even happier customers.

Growing your business to become a massive success is hard. But what happens after your business makes it big?

Check out our article on How Hard Is It To Start a Business.

In the end: As much time as you want.

After you grind it out for years, you finally do it. Your business has now grown huge and brings in an incredible amount of money every year. You finally made it past the growing pains of your business and are past that massive hump.

You’re past the hump. Now what?

Once you get to this point, everything starts to go downhill and you can put in as much time as you want into your business. You can either continue putting every single one of your waking hours into your business because it’s your passion or you can put in less than 4 hours every week into it. You can do this by hiring people to do as much work as possible and separating yourself from the day-to-day tasks in your business.

Once your business is a great success, it’s all up to you and the choice is yours.  

Let’s say you decide to do the absolute minimum to make sure your business keeps running. Here’s what your schedule might look like!

• 7am to 8am: Wake up and have a nice relaxing breakfast.
• 8am to 12pm: Do whatever you feel like doing.
• 12pm to 2pm: Have a nice and leisurely lunch. Take your time and enjoy your food.
• 2pm to 4pm: Make sure that your business is running well and all your workers are doing okay.
• 4pm to 6pm: Go exercise. After all you’ve put your body through to build your business, you should start looking after your health. Get a gym membership and use it.
• 6pm to 8pm: Go get yourself a tasty dinner. Try and keep it healthy but anything goes at this point since you’re rich.
• 7pm to 12am: Go out and do whatever you want. Or stay at home and do whatever you want.
• 12am: Go to sleep. A healthy sleep schedule is extremely important. 

At this point, all you need to do is make sure your business is running well and all your workers are doing what they need to be doing. Unless something goes terribly wrong, you’ll be doing barely any day-to-day work at your business. You grew your business to this point and purposely automated it to be able to work this little.

If you reach this point, you’ve made it. Congratulations! 

The 4-Hour Workweek: Truth or fiction?

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, And Join The New Rich is self-help and business book written by Tim Ferriss. The book is a New York Times best seller that teaches readers how to escape the 9-to-5 workweek by building a business that’s automated to the point where you only need to work 4 hours a week.  That’s an attractive proposition isn’t it?

However, many people take the title too literally and think that starting a business means that they only need to work 4 hours a week by default. If you read the sections of the article above, you know that this is not true.

That aside, is The 4-Hour Workweek legit?

The short answer is yes. However I think it is important to realize that, for a number of reasons, achieving a 4-hour workweek might take you longer than it took Tim. 

A lot of people are skeptical about the 4 hour workweek because a normal person’s workweek lasts anywhere from 40 to 50 hours. Working for just 4 hours a week seems impossible to most people. 

You need to understand that the goal isn’t to choose a business that only requires you to work for 4 hours a week. You need to build a business that eventually requires as little involvement for you as possible. You need to build your business and assets to the point where you only need to work as little as 4 hours a week. 

To put it in another way, The 4-Hour Workweek doesn’t teach you how to get a job where you only work 4 hours a week. The 4-Hour Workweek teaches you how to build a business that will eventually only need you to do serious work for 4 hours a week.

Here’s a super simple example of a “4 hour work week” business!

You can spend a few months writing a series of eBooks that you want to sell online on sites like Amazon or Gumroad. After you release those eBooks online, you can choose to only work for 4 hours a week while still making a profit from this business. You frontloaded the work first and then you chose to only maintain your business for 4 hours a week afterwards.

To make the lessons inside The 4-Hour Workweek, you really need to have a mindset shift and get away from the preconception that you have to trade your time for money. You need to understand that you can make a ton of money without sacrificing a lot of time as long as your business is made in such a way that it runs efficiently without your involvement. 

Take the lessons from The 4-Hour Workweek and focus on building your business to run as efficiently without your involvement as possible. Here’s a hint: eBooks, courses and video series only need to be made once but can be sold online infinitely without any extra production costs.

Don’t build a business and give up because you couldn’t have a 4 hour workweek right out of the gate.

Check out our article on the 13 Perfect Books Entrepreneurs Need on How to Start a Business!

Closing

This article shows you how a lot of entrepreneurs spend their time on their businesses. However, the world is huge and there’s no doubt that there are countless entrepreneurs that spend their time differently. In fact, if you choose to become an entrepreneur, you’ll probably have a completely different schedule compared to what we’ve laid out above.

You’ll never know how much time you need to start and run your business until you actually start. Everything you’re thinking right now is just going to be an estimate. That being said, get ready for the worst and assume you’re going to be dedicating a lot of time to building your business.

Don’t let it scare you off from building a business! It’ll be worth it!