I am self employed, have been for about ten years now and spend some time doing stuff that I don't get paid for like meeting potential clients, talking on the phone to other safety consultants and people I Network with, and of course offering advice to other members of this discussion forum. There will be "employed" PAYE safety officers/managers/advisers who do similar work but they will get paid as they are "in work. If you are self employed would you consider the unpaid work to be time spent working and if you were log your working hours would those be included?

Its 'paid' work in the sense its part of being self employed - as said all, part of networking/business generation. In terms of numbers - a working year is approx 1880hrs (40hrs week and 47weeks yr worked) The trick is to achieve the highest billable hours to cover the non billable hours. In an ideal consultancy world, most consultancies I have ever worked for like at a billable rate of at least 80% i.e. about 1504 hrs charged to clients. Alternatively charge more and work less, for the same overall income/turnover. Obviously the rate you can charge, depends somewhat on the industry you work in and the perceived value that you bring to a client. I would say a minimum charge for an experienced safety consultant is at least £65/hr self employed. This gives a turnover of about £97760, which should equal a salary circa £72k.

If you consider yourself to be in full time employment, as calculated in my previous post - then yes, 'non billable hours' are still 'working hours'.

We all have our own experience - that's what I have found works.

IMHO working hours are working hours. If you are self-employed then one of the reasons you charge more per hour than you get paid is to cover the "admin" hours, holidays, sick pay etc. which you don't get but those on PAYE do. So if you do 10 billable hours in a week and 20 hours background to support this then you have worked 30 hours. I don't see how you can get away from that.