The Leveraged CEO

Hosted by mattdart21

Business Entrepreneurship

Website RSS feed LinkedIn YouTube

Episodes

134

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

About the show

For business owners who want to stop being the bottleneck. Matt Dart breaks down the systems, automations, and mindset shifts to build a business that runs without you.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

September 8, 2026Episode 1358 min

Ep135: 5 Signs Your Business Owns You (Not the Other Way Around)

Everyone starts a business chasing freedom, and most people end up with a very expensive job instead. In this episode I go through the five signs I keep seeing in conversations with founders right now, the signals that your business is running you instead of the other way around, and what's actually behind each one. None of these are about how hard you work. Plenty of the owners I talk to are doing $500K, $1M, even $3M a year and still working 50 to 60 hours a week. Revenue was never the problem. The business being wired to depend on you is. Here's what I cover: -Sign #1: you're waiting for problems to land in your inbox instead of being proactive. Reacting to everything means you never get into a state where you can actually think, make good decisions, or be creative, you're just putting out fires. -Sign #2: your team asks permission for decisions they're already capable of making. This is the one that kills your ability to switch off, take a day, or actually be present with your kids, because everything still runs through your head first. -Sign #3: you know every password and every system by memory because none of it's written down anywhere else. I talk about a business we worked with where the team kept hammering the manager with questions, so we loaded their SOPs into a chatbot the team could message instead, and it freed up hours of the manager's week overnight. -Sign #4: you've cancelled something with your family because "only you" could handle it. The worst one on the list, and the one that costs you the most if you let it keep happening. -Sign #5: your revenue keeps climbing but your hours never drop. Growing revenue should buy you time back through reinvestment and hiring. For most owners it does the opposite. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro: the five signs your business owns you 00:40 Sign #1: waiting for problems instead of being proactive 01:52 Sign #2: your team asking permission for calls they can already make 02:42 What real freedom actually looks like day to day 04:00 Sign #3: every password and system living in your head 04:50 The SOP chatbot that stopped the endless questions 05:32 Sign #4: cancelling on your family because "only you" can handle it 06:03 Sign #5: revenue climbing while your hours never do 06:32 Who this is for and how to apply 07:34 Why waiting too long to fix this costs you the relationship If more than two of these sound like you and you're doing $250k to $2m a year, book a free Leverage Audit with me. We'll go through your systems and processes, work out what to automate, delegate, or delete so you can get your time back and put those hours into growing, and into the people who actually matter. Link's in the description. Find out how to get 20 hours/week back -https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback1

September 1, 2026Episode 13410 min

Ep134: 6 Things That Built My $55K/Month PT Business (While I Did Nothing)

Most people wait until they can "afford it" to invest in themselves. I did the opposite, and it's the reason I ever built a business that ran without me. In this episode I go through the six things that actually got my first PT business to $55K a month with a team of 12 running it, while I did next to nothing in the day to day, including the time I got fired with zero notice and cried in a car park with a gym lease already signed. None of these six things are complicated. None of them are secrets. But most owners won't do them, because most of them cost something, money, comfort, or control, before they pay anything back. Here's what I cover: -The $26K coaching agreement that forced my hand. I paid $10K upfront out of $12K total in my bank account. No backup plan. I've since put around $250K into my own skillset, and every dollar of it made me move faster because I had to make it work. -Why I stopped hanging around people who only talked about business. My high school mates never built anything, so I stopped seeing them and surrounded myself with people already doing what I wanted to do. -The moment I realised I was the actual problem. Twelve staff, and I kept inventing changes to things that didn't need changing. The business grew the second I got out of the way. -Opening a gym right next door to the one that sacked me. Fully booked in two weeks, then a fired trainer, a toxic club manager, and a termination letter left on my desk with zero notice, while I'd already signed a lease and had nowhere to train my clients for three months. -The car park moment. Crying after getting terminated, a gym lease already signed, and $4-5K a month in overheads about to start with no clients to put through it. Still the best thing that ever happened to me. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro: episode 134, quick Tesla update 00:51 The six things that built the business to $55K/month 01:53 #1: the $26K coach that forced me to perform 03:17 #2: cutting out mates who weren't in business 03:43 #3: changing my environment on purpose 04:19 #4: realising I was the bottleneck with 12 staff 05:32 #5: opening a gym next door to the one that sacked me 07:11 The termination letter with zero notice 07:20 Training clients out of my parents' garage for 3 months 08:05 #6: crying in the car park, the lowest point 09:07 Fully out of the business, running on a team of 12 09:37 PT Mastery today, 5 hours a week 10:09 How to apply for a Leverage Audit If you're a business owner doing $250k to $2m a year and you're still the one holding the whole thing up, book a free Leverage Audit with me. We'll go through your systems and processes, work out what to automate, delegate, or delete so you can get your time back and put those hours into growing. Link's in the description. Find out how to get 20 hours/week back -https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback1

August 25, 2026Episode 1337 min

Ep133: I Gave a Business Owner 3 Days a Week Back (Live Case Study)

Most people think automation means buying some off the shelf software and hoping it fits. Sometimes it doesn't exist yet, so you build it. In this episode I give you a live look inside a client project we're finishing up right now, a real estate stylist who was running her entire business off memory and a Google Drive, and how I built her a custom system from scratch that gets her almost 3 days a week back. This isn't a hypothetical. I walk you through her actual business, what she was doing manually before we touched anything, and then I share my screen and show you the exact tool I built her, live availability, checklists and all. If you're running any part of your business off memory and spreadsheets, this is what the other side looks like. Here's what I cover: -What her business actually does. She styles properties for sale, real estate styling, moving furniture from a warehouse into a house so it looks better for buyers. Simple business, but the logistics were eating her alive. -Everything she was doing manually before. Checking a Google Drive to see what furniture she actually had, going off memory for availability, meeting the removalist at the warehouse in person, then meeting the stylist at the property in person. She was the bottleneck for every single job. -What I actually built her. A custom job planner with live furniture availability (down to "2 left out of 6"), auto-generated pickup checklists for the removalist, and auto-generated return checklists so she doesn't have to be at the warehouse at all anymore. -How it's built. Mostly vibe coded in Claude Code, with Airtable storing live availability and n8n connecting it all together. Took a few iterations to land on the right stack, and around 30-40 hours of build time so far. -Why we only take 4-5 clients at a time for custom builds like this, and what it should get her back once it's fully live, 20-30 hours a week or more. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro: a live case study, episode 133 00:20 She's getting almost 3 days a week back 00:44 The business: real estate property styling 01:23 Everything she was doing manually 02:14 What I built her: a custom job planner 03:14 What's next: remote access for the stylist 03:47 Screen share: behind the scenes of the app 05:10 Built in Claude Code, automations in n8n 05:42 How long it took: 30-40 hours 06:15 Why we only take 5 clients at a time (one spot left) 07:20 Done-for-you vs done-with-you, how to apply If you're a business owner doing $250k to $2m a year and you're still running parts of your business off memory, spreadsheets, or your own two hands, book a free Leverage Audit with me. We'll go through your systems and processes, work out what to automate, delegate, or delete so you can get your time back and put those hours into growing. Link's in the description. Find out how to get 20 hours/week back -https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

August 18, 2026Episode 1329 min

Ep132: You're Not Bad at Delegating. You Never Actually Did It.

Most owners think they're delegating. They're not. They're dumping a task on someone with no training and hoping it gets done. In this episode I go through the five or six reasons your delegation keeps failing, and the exact process to hand something off so it never lands back on your plate. Here's the thing. If your mindset is "I'll just keep doing it myself," that's the exact thing keeping you stuck. You've got the right intention, you know you need to delegate, you're just not doing it properly. So it becomes a never ending cycle where you hand something over, it comes back, and you take it back. Here's what I cover: -You didn't delegate, you dumped. No training, no SOP, no process, and then you crack the shits when it's not done the way you pictured. Most of your team are donkeys, and donkeys do great work when you train them. They can't read your mind. -You expect them to do it exactly like you. They won't, ever, because they're not you. Ask instead what 90% as good as me looks like. That standard is still a great outcome, and it frees your energy for the work only you can do. -Nothing's written down, so it all comes back to you. If every little question routes through you, you're never actually off the tools. What happens when you're sick or want a holiday? I share how we turned one client's manual into a chatbot trained on their SOPs so the team stopped asking the owner the same boring questions. -You yanked it back the second it wasn't perfect. The first version is never as good as yours. That's the cost of buying back your time, not a reason to quit. Give feedback and let them run it again instead of taking over. -You handed an outcome to a donkey. "Post seven times a week and get 100k views" is a stallion job. Sending an invoice is a donkey job. Match the task to the person, give donkeys step by step processes, and save the open-ended outcomes for your A players. -The actual process to hand it off. Film yourself doing the task a few times, drop the transcript into AI and get it to bulletproof the SOP so a fifth grader could follow it. Send it over, do the task together once while they drive, let them do it solo with the SOP in front of them, then hand it over as their responsibility and their KPI. Now even if they leave, you give the SOP to the next person and you never touch it again. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro: why "I'll just do it myself" is killing your business 00:38 Reason 1: you dumped it, you didn't delegate 00:53 Donkeys, horses and stallions recap 02:04 Reason 2: you expect them to do it exactly like you 02:37 Reason 3: nothing's written down, so it comes back to you 02:54 The SOP chatbot that saved a client hours 04:12 How to document a task the easy way 04:46 Reason 4: you yanked it back too soon 05:08 Reason 5: you handed an outcome to a donkey 05:57 The full delegation process, step by step 08:08 Handing it over for good (making it their KPI) If delegation and your team is exactly where you're stuck right now, send me a message on Instagram or Facebook and I'll send you the training that walks through this properly, so you can document a task once, hand it off, and stop being the person everyone comes to for answers. Find out how to get 20 hours/week back -https://leveragedceo.com.au/getyourtimeback

August 11, 2026Episode 1319 min

Ep131: The Leverage Audit: How I Find 20 Hours a Week in Any Business

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

August 4, 2026Episode 1309 min

Ep130: How I Only Need To Work 5 Hours a Week (My Exact Team)

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

July 27, 2026Episode 12911 min

Ep129: I Deleted ChatGPT and Run My Whole Business on One AI Tool

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

July 21, 2026Episode 1288 min

Ep128: The Real Cost Of Being Too Busy To Grow (Why Getting Time Back Is Worth $100k+)

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

July 14, 2026Episode 12710 min

Ep127: 4 Lessons From Pivoting My Niche (After Spending $6K To Get My First Client)

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

July 7, 2026Episode 12610 min

Ep126: Key Person Risk - The Silent Killer in Your Business

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