Surely a lot of this is more about cashflow vs opportunity cost rather than the "value" of your time.

I would imagine many small businesses fail because they are making the decisions that would make a lot of sense if their company was the big established company that they wanted it to be but not the tiny cash strapped thing it is.

Just about any successful small business founder (not necessarily tech founders) I have spoken to has told me stories of staying up entire nights stuffing envelopes, traveling all over the place to beg/borrow expensive equipment that they required but could not afford or trying to learn HTML themselves so that they could get a basic website up.

Of course for an established company it makes no sense for the CEO to do these things but at this point survival is priority #1.