Cutting Isn’t the Risk. Not Reinvesting the Time Is.

This clip looks at why cutting low-margin work doesn’t actually help unless the time is reinvested intentionally.

The post below goes deeper into opportunity cost, why small jobs feel safe but cap growth, and how service business owners can use freed-up time to create real leverage instead of more busywork.

Many service business owners know exactly what they should cut.

Low-margin work.
Jobs that eat time.
Projects that technically pay, but barely.

They just don’t feel like they can afford to.

The thinking usually sounds like this:
“I need every dollar coming in this week to cover the bills.”
“I can’t turn that down.”
“At least it’s revenue.”

And on the surface, that logic makes sense.

But it’s also how businesses stay stuck.

Why cutting feels scary (and why most people stop there)

Cutting isn’t hard because people don’t understand the math.
It’s hard because of uncertainty.

You know exactly what you’ll get if you take the low-margin job.
You don’t know what you’ll get if you don’t.

That unknown is what keeps people saying yes to work they already know isn’t helping.

But the real risk isn’t cutting.

The real risk is cutting and then wasting the time you just freed up.

Doing less only works if you do something better with the time

This is where a lot of advice falls apart.

People talk about efficiency.
Saving time.
Working smarter.

But time saved doesn’t automatically turn into value.

If you cut a job and then:

• scroll

• wait

• stay reactive

• or just feel relieved for a minute

Nothing changes.

Cutting only works if you reinvest that time with intention.

A simple example most service businesses recognize

Someone wants a small job done.
It takes three hours.
They’re willing to pay $150.

You look at the calendar.
You’ve got nothing booked.
You’ve got a tech standing around.

So you say yes.

On paper, you just added $150 in revenue.

But here’s the part most people never calculate.

That same three hours could have been used to:

• stop by two local businesses

• introduce yourself

• build a relationship

• follow up on a quote

• schedule a larger job later that week

You didn’t just choose $150.

You chose it instead of the opportunity you couldn’t see yet.

And the scariest part is you’ll never know what you missed.

Opportunity cost is invisible, which is why it’s ignored

Service businesses don’t fail because owners are lazy.

They fail because opportunity cost doesn’t show up on the invoice.

You can see the $150 you made.
You can’t see the $800, $2,000, or long-term relationship that never happened.

So the decision feels “safe.”

It’s not.

It’s just familiar.

Why you need breathing room before you can make these moves

There’s an important reality here that gets skipped over too often.

If you have zero runway, everything I’m describing feels impossible.

If the bill is due in five days and the bank account is tight, you don’t have the flexibility to experiment.

That’s why the first cuts usually aren’t:

• staff

• core services

• critical capability

They’re often:

• marketing that isn’t converting

• tools you don’t really use

• efforts that feel busy but don’t pay off

Freeing up even a little breathing room changes what decisions are possible.

Thirty days.
Sixty days.
Ninety days.

That space is what allows intentional reinvestment instead of panic-driven choices.

This isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing better.

The goal isn’t to work less for the sake of working less.

It’s to stop spending your best hours on work that caps your upside.

When people finally reinvest freed-up time into something that actually compounds — relationships, higher-margin work, clearer marketing, better positioning — the reaction is usually the same:

“What was I doing?”

That’s not regret.
That’s clarity.

If this feels uncomfortably familiar

If you’re reading this and thinking, “I know exactly what I should cut, but I don’t feel safe doing it,” that’s normal.

This isn’t about discipline.
It’s about designing space so better decisions are possible.

And that almost always starts with cutting — not randomly, not aggressively — but intentionally.