Everyone tells you to work on the business, not in it. Nobody actually shows you how. In this episode I walk through the Leverage Audit, the exact first thing I do with every client who wants their time back, and the same process I used to pull myself out of my last two businesses.

Here's why most people get this wrong. They're reactive. They go "what could I automate?" before they've got any idea where their time is actually going. You can't make good decisions without the data. The audit gets everything out of your head and onto paper first, and then the answers are obvious.

Here's what I cover:

-What the Leverage Audit actually is. An honest inventory of what you do with every 15 minutes of your day. Not a productivity hack, the groundwork that shows you exactly where your hours are leaking before you automate or hire a single thing.

-Step one, log everything for one to two weeks. Set a recurring alarm every 15 minutes and write down what you're doing, personal or work, no matter how small. Tag each block with a category (sales, marketing, delivery, finance, ops, team) and an energy rating: energising, neutral, or draining.

-Work out your buyback rate. Take your annual income, salary plus profit, and divide by the hours you work a year (most people about 2,000). That's your effective hourly rate. If you can outsource a task for under 25% of that rate, you should, so you can spend more time on the $100+ an hour work like sales and marketing. Shout out to Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time for the principle.

-Run every recurring task through four actions. Systemise it, keep it, hand it off, or stop doing it completely. Keep the stuff you love or that gives a great return, like sales calls. Hand off the draining low-value stuff. Systemise it first if there's no process, then hand it off.

-The payoff. The last tab tells you exactly how many hours a week you can get back, split into what to stop, hand off, systemise first, and keep. That's your roadmap. For most clients this is a 2 to 3 month process to get their time back, and then we move on to revenue and margins.

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro: what the Leverage Audit is
00:54 Quick life update (I bought a Tesla)
01:47 What the audit actually is
02:23 Step 1: log everything every 15 minutes
02:53 Step 2: the task analysis tab
03:01 How to work out your buyback rate
04:30 Reading your time log (category and energy)
05:03 Systemise, keep, hand off, or stop
06:51 The payoff: how many hours you get back
08:54 Why most people try to automate the wrong way

Want to run this on your own business? Send me the word "audit" on Instagram or Facebook and I'll send you the full training and the exact template I use with clients, so you can log your week, work out your buyback rate, and see how many hours you could get back. This is genuinely the first thing we'd do together if you worked with me.

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back -https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

Most owners think the way to work less is to hire someone to do more of what they're already doing. It's backwards. In this episode I break down exactly what my team looks like, who does what, how many hours they work, and how it lets me run my coaching business on around 5 hours a week.

Here's the shift that changed everything for me. Dan Martell says hire to buy back your time, not to grow the business. I built my old PT business to 55k a month with 12 trainers working for me while I worked zero hours in it, only on it. Get the order right and who you hire right, and the growth takes care of itself.

Here's what I cover:

-Hire to buy back your time, not to grow the business. The one piece of advice I'd give any owner above everything else, and why chasing growth first is why most people stay stuck in the day to day.

-What my team actually looks like. An admin VA doing 20 hours a week, a graphic designer on the carousels, a videographer who shoots and edits, an AI specialist, and a client success coach running the one-on-one calls. I keep the group coaching, the teaching, the events, and the sales and marketing, because that's the stuff I love and the stuff only I can do.

-Donkeys, horses and stallions. The three types of people you can hire. Donkeys do the task you give them. Horses are reliable and proactive. Stallions are the A players you hand an outcome to and get out of the way. You need all three, but stallions are rare, hard to find, and usually not even looking for work.

-Hiring in the right order. Start with admin. There's more basic stuff on your plate than you realise and you can claw back 5 to 10 hours a week fast. What you never offload early is sales and marketing, because nobody knows your ideal client the way you do yet.

-Get your team using AI too. It's not just about you using it. A team using AI gets so much more done, and it's the fastest way to make every hire more efficient.

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro: the team that lets me work 5 hours a week
00:40 The numbers: 20-30k a month on 5 hours
01:13 Hire to buy back your time, not to grow
01:35 My actual team and what each of them does
02:16 What I still do myself
03:43 Donkeys, horses and stallions
05:19 Hiring in the right order (admin first)
06:21 Why you never offload sales and marketing first
06:30 Getting your team to use AI
07:13 Modelling the same team for The Leveraged CEO
07:57 Only doing the work that lights you up

If you're a business owner doing $250k to $2m a year and you're tired of being the bottleneck, book a free Leverage Audit with me. We'll go through your systems and processes, work out what to automate, delegate, or delete, and figure out who to hire first so you can get your time back and put those hours into doubling the business. Link's in the description.

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back -https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

Everyone thinks running a business on AI means stacking up a dozen different tools and subscriptions. It doesn't. In this episode I break down the exact AI stack I use to run two businesses on barely any hours a week, why I dumped ChatGPT completely, and why you probably only need one tool instead of ten.

Here's the thing most people get wrong. They go chasing every shiny new AI tool that drops and end up with a bloated stack that saves them no time at all. The real skill isn't collecting tools. It's knowing what to automate, what to leave alone, and pointing one good tool at the boring stuff that's eating your week.

Here's what I cover:

-The one rule I never break with automation. I automate almost all of my backend systems and processes, but I never touch anything customer facing. That line matters more than people think.

-The three tools that actually run everything. Claude, specifically Claude Code, is the brain. It builds my custom apps, dashboards, and automations, and even sets up my Meta ads. n8n is the engine room that connects the apps and runs the workflows. GoHighLevel is where my pipeline, follow-ups, and admin live. That's the whole stack.

-Why I dumped ChatGPT and don't bother with the endless new tools. I run on about 50 bucks a month and Claude does 90% of it. You don't need the max plan and you don't need 15 subscriptions.

-The automations I wake up to every day. A daily AI news brief, a Stripe payments and calendar summary, inbox sorting, ad campaign reports with recommendations, and a weekly finance update on client payments and declines, all landing in my Slack so I make better decisions faster.

-The AI sales coach on my team. Within two minutes of every sales call finishing, I get a score, what went well, what broke down, and three things to fix before the next call. Built through Claude Code, running in n8n.

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro: the AI stack that runs my business
00:58 What you should never automate
01:20 The team behind the systems
02:09 Claude Code: the brain of the whole thing
03:15 n8n: the engine room
03:40 GoHighLevel: where the pipeline lives
03:56 Why I dumped ChatGPT
05:06 The daily reports I wake up to on Slack
06:19 Automated ad reports and weekly finance
07:02 The podcast and email agents
07:57 My AI sales coach that scores every call
09:26 Why you don't need a massive AI stack
10:00 The done-with-you program

If you're a business owner doing $250k to $2m a year and you want help putting AI to work so you can get your time back, book a free Leverage Audit with me. We'll go through your systems and processes, figure out what's eating your time, and work out what we can automate, delegate, or delete so you can get back to growing. Link's in the description.

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back -https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

Most business owners I talk to are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and a lot of that time goes on tasks that do not move the needle. In this episode I break down the real opportunity cost of being too busy to grow, and why getting your time back is worth way more than most owners realise.

Everyone thinks saving time is a nice to have. It is. But the bigger question isn't the 20 hours, it's what you do with them. Because you're not going to sit on the couch and watch Netflix. You're going to put those hours back into the business.

Here's what I cover:

-Why getting 20 hours a week back is only half the story. The real value is what you do with that time, and for most owners that means sales, marketing, and training the team, the stuff that actually propels the business forward.

-The $400k conversation. I worked through the numbers with a law firm client the other day. He had a part-time GM burning 10 hours a week pulling data across five different softwares. Each big client is worth $100k a year. Free up that GM to network and prospect instead, land one big fish every three months, and that's four new clients worth $400k a year, changing nothing else.

-The tradie losing $30k to $50k a month. Too busy to get back to leads fast, so he's losing 30% of his leads to slow response time. Every client is worth at least $10k. That's the opportunity cost of admin eating your day.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro: the real cost of being too busy to grow

00:38 Saving time is nice, but what do you do with it?

01:53 The $400k opportunity cost (law firm example)

04:56 The tradie losing $30-50k a month to slow leads

05:29 Where a founder's time should actually go

06:19 The question to ask yourself right now

06:31 How a Leverage Audit finds your 20 hours

If you're a business owner doing $250k to $2m a year and you want to know where your time is leaking and what it's costing you, book a free Leverage Audit with me. We'll go through your systems and processes, figure out what's eating your time, and work out what we can automate, delegate, or delete so you can get back to growing. Link's in the description.

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back - https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

Three months ago I walked away from coaching personal trainers and pivoted to working with higher level business owners doing $250k to $2 million a year. It was not smooth. I spent about $6k on ads before I landed a single client on the new offer. Most people would have quit way before that.

In this episode I break down the four biggest lessons from making the switch, and how each one applies whether you're pivoting your niche or just trying to build a business that runs without you.

Here's what I cover:

-Blind faith and why I kept going when the numbers looked ugly. A brand new pixel, a heap of ad testing, $6k spent before client one, then another $4k that brought in four to five clients. The return worked out. But only because I didn't quit at the point most people do.

-Know your numbers and do your KPIs every week. When you know your numbers you make decisions on logic, not emotion. I can now predict what the next 6 to 12 months looks like because I know what it costs to book a call, my show up rate, my close rate, and my cost per client. That's peace of mind, not guesswork.

-Document everything as you go. Don't block out a whole day to build systems. Just record yourself on Loom while you do the task, then turn it into an SOP with AI. Most business owners with a team have no documentation, so the team keeps coming back to them with the same questions all day.

-Niche by the problem, not the industry. Instead of picking one industry, I niched on a problem: founders working 50 to 60 hour weeks who want 20 hours a week back, then want to scale the business without them. You can niche by problem, age, gender, or industry, the point is to pick a specific problem you solve.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro and why I pivoted my niche

01:59 Lesson 1: Blind faith ($6k before my first client)

04:34 Lesson 2: Know your numbers, do your KPIs

05:58 Lesson 3: Document everything as you go

07:45 Lesson 4: Niche by the problem, not the industry

09:16 Recap of the four lessons

If you're a business owner doing $250k to $2m a year, working too many hours, and you want to get your time back and scale without being the bottleneck, book a free Leverage Audit with me. Link's in the description.

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back - https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

If your business falls apart when one person leaves, you've got key person risk. And it's more common than you think.

In this episode, Matt breaks down what key person risk actually is, why most founders don't see it until it's too late, and what to do about it.

Here's what gets covered:

What key person risk is and how it quietly builds up in your business until someone quits or goes on leave and everything lands back on you.

Real examples from an allied health practice, a property styling business and a cafe, all dealing with the same problem in different ways.

Why it's not a people problem. It's a systems problem. And how to start fixing it by documenting roles so the business doesn't depend on any one person.

The order to fire yourself from roles, starting with admin, then delivery, and why sales and marketing should be the last thing you hand off.

If your team can't run without you, this one's worth a listen.

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back - https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

You're probably working 50 to 60 hours a week. But here's the thing, around 20 of those hours are going straight to admin.

In this episode, Matt breaks down exactly where that time is disappearing and what to do about it.

Here's what's covered:

The real cost of doing your own admin. At $100 an hour, 20 hours a week is $100k a year in lost time. Most founders have no idea.

Real business examples. A studio owner with disconnected free software, an NDIS provider doing everything manually, and a franchise broker wasting hours on emails from people who were never serious buyers.

The automate, delegate, delete framework. A simple way to figure out what to hand off, what to systemise, and what to cut completely.

Why a VA might be the easiest win. For $4 to $6 an hour, most of the basic stuff on your plate can be handled by someone else today.

If you're drowning in tasks that have nothing to do with actually growing your business, this one's worth a listen.

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back - https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

Most business owners doing $500k+ aren't short on revenue. They're short on time. Working 50-60 hour weeks, answering Slack messages all day, double-checking the team's work, chasing data across six different softwares that don't talk to each other.

In this episode I break down the exact process I'd run on your business to get 20 hours a week back: eliminate, delegate, automate. In that order. Most people get it backwards and end up automating chaos.

I also cover the donkeys, horses and stallions framework for figuring out which team members are costing you hours, why you should hand over outcomes instead of tasks, and how I took a full month off my own business with a newborn at home and nothing broke.

What's covered:
0:00 – Why 20 hours a week back isn't an exaggeration
2:00 – Where the hours actually hide (it's the invisible stuff)
4:30 – Donkeys, horses and stallions: which team have you got?
6:30 – Eliminate first: the tasks nobody should be doing
7:30 – Delegate: hand over outcomes, not tasks
8:40 – Automate last: AI agents, reporting, systems that talk
10:00 – Done-for-you vs being taught how (why busy founders never implement)
11:30 – What would you actually do with the extra time?

Connect:
Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattgdart
TikTok: @mattgdart

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back - https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

You've got a team. But they're still coming to you for everything. Every decision, every question, every "just checking in." You built a team and somehow ended up with more on your plate, not less.

That's not a team problem. That's a you problem.

In this episode I break down why business owners stay stuck in the middle of their own team, the difference between donkeys, horses and stallions, and what it actually looks like to hand over responsibility and get out of the way for good.

In this episode:

• The donkey, horse and stallion framework — and why you need to fire the donkeys
• Why getting out of the way isn't lazy, it's literally your job at this level
• How to set up your team so they run on KPIs and stop relying on you to function

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back - https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

You're making good money. Nice holidays, business class flights, the lot. But you're stuck on your phone the whole time, missing dinners, missing school pickups, running on empty.

That's not a business. That's a high-paying job you can't leave.

In this episode I break down why so many business owners at the $500k to $1M mark are quietly miserable and what the actual way out looks like. It's not about working harder. It's about using the profit you've already built to buy back your time through team, AI, and systems that don't need you in the middle of everything.

In this episode:

-Why making good money doesn't mean you've actually made it

-The trap that keeps successful business owners working 60+ hour weeks

-The profit, leverage, lifestyle order and why most people get it wrong

If that resonates, send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook and let's chat.

Find out how to get 20 hours/week back - https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback