Take, for example, a website:  A company’s website is often the first thing a prospective client might go to when considering doing business with a company.  (According to ZeroMillion.com, a recent DoubleClick study suggest that more than 50% of people will look at a  company’s website before making a purchase decision.)  They’ll look at site design, content, ease of use and finally, if they are serious about doing business with you, keywords that are appealing to them. Just in list of what browsers immediately observe, there are a number of items that only a professional would have the expertise, ability and time to tweak.  Testing, promoting, optimizing and submitting the website to different search engines are some of the background tools that many business leaders don’t even check.  However, these are the tools upon which you can begin to gauge a return on your investment. Even if you don’t pay cash or barter for the services to get your website done and do the website yourself, there is an opportunity cost to it.  Opportunity cost says that if you were not building your website, perhaps you could be doing something else, perhaps even something else related to earning revenue for your company.  The easiest way to evaluate it is to look at the return on the time spent.

If you, for example, compared 10 hours of your time spent learning how to and building a website to 10 hours spent prospecting for new clients, assuming you can sell, the prospecting activities would probably result in better payoff.  Now, if you spent a little bit of money and hired a professional to build the site, you might spend 3 hours working with them, then could spend the remaining hours prospecting and sending people to your website for more in-depth information about the company.  The result could be like having your cake and eating it to.