In Episode 122 of The Leveraged CEO, Matt Dart explains why many financially successful business owners feel trapped and unhappy despite high revenues. He begins with a brief personal update and notes a recent rebrand that sharpens his focus on the "leverage" and "lifestyle" pillars of his profit‑leverage‑lifestyle framework. Dart argues that once a business reaches a certain size, the founder becomes the bottleneck, forced to work long hours, stay on call, and miss family moments, turning a high‑paying job into a source of misery. He illustrates this with his own experience running a fitness business with multiple trainers and a gym owner who juggles fragmented software tools. The solution, he proposes, is to first secure profit, then invest that profit into leverage—hiring a capable team, consolidating software, and deploying AI automation—to eliminate or delegate low‑value tasks. By doing so, owners can "fire themselves" from day‑to‑day operations and reclaim time for lifestyle goals. Dart promotes a done‑for‑you consulting service that audits systems and promises to return roughly 20 hours per week to clients. Throughout, he emphasizes the importance of aligning work with revenue‑generating activities, consolidating tools for efficiency, and using personal time (e.g., family routines) as a benchmark for a desired lifestyle.
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Alright team, what's going on? Episode 122 of The Leveraged CEO. So we've just recently rebranded, literally last episode. So if you haven't watched that, you'll get more of an insight into what I'm kind of focusing on, on now. It's still got the same kind of pillars. So the same pillars are profit, leverage, lifestyle, except I'm focusing on the leverage and lifestyle part of it. Of course, I still help people make more money and stuff, but I want to help people get their time back. So the title of today's episode is actually going to be The Reason Successful Business Owners Are Miserable. So, and by the way, I'm not saying every single business owner is miserable, but a lot of people are actually miserable. And I'm going to go through the reasons why in a second. But Quick little update from me. I like to share some of the personal stuff that we've been focusing on as well. I don't know so much what I've been focusing on, but we went up to Townsville on the weekend, which was, you know, it was fun. Went to see the Cowboys play the Dolphins, which was awesome. But it was just good to— it was just me and Jess, so no kids. It was just good to kind of hang out., with her as well. We had a nice, uh, we ended up upgrading our flight to business class on the way home, which was, uh, which is really nice. So hard, hard to go back to economy after you fly business. Flew business a few times now, and it's, uh, anytime you go back to economy after flying business, it's very, very difficult. So, um, you know, for a lot of the business owners that kind of watch this and listen to this podcast. Um, not everyone, but a lot of you guys would be flying on business, and some of you might know how hard it is to go back to economy afterwards. But anyway, it was a good experience to fly business class again. Um, so let's get into today's, uh, topic. So I got a couple of like talking points, but I'm just going to— I like to kind of riff and just like, um, just speak my opinion rather than just like— I don't script anything here. I just have a couple of dot points that I like to kind of give me a little bit of structure, and then I'll just kind of give, give you guys my opinion, the unfiltered opinion, so that way you kind of know what you get if and when you choose to, to work together. And by the way, I'm getting some really cool conversations that I'm happening with business owners that are wanting to get their time back, which, you know, if you guys want to know how to get your time back, we offer a service now, or like a done-for-you service where we get back 20 hours a week, whether it's AI systems, or whether it's teaching you how to offload stuff to your team and showing the team how to do it properly so you can actually get some time back. So that's a nice little segue into what we're going to talk about today. So what people mostly think about success is the financial aspect of success. So yeah, you might be making $500K, $700K a year, $1 million a year, doesn't matter. And from the outside, it looks like that you've made it. Quote, quote unquote, made it. Um, but what people don't understand with a lot of the business owners that are around that stage is they literally are in a bit of a trap where everything depends on them. And because the business is quite large, uh, there's higher risk and higher stakes, uh, and to keep that business at that, at that level the, the founder or the business owner can't take the foot off the gas, or they can't take time off, or they can't go to their kids' soccer games, or they have to be on call all the time. They have to always be on their phone. So a lot of the people that I'm talking to are actually pretty miserable. You know, they don't get to see their family. They're working from 6 AM to 4 PM, coming home and then getting on the laptop and working from 4 till 7. Then kids are in bed at 8 o'clock. They see them for an hour a day, if that. And, you know, the poor, poor wife or, or husband is, um, doing everything for the kids, and it takes, takes a hit on their relationship as well. So I've been there myself when I've been at a pretty big stage in my business, uh, and it takes a bit of a toll on your relationship, on your relationship with your kids, um, but also relationship on yourself because you're always exhausted. And the hard part is most people won't ever admit that. A lot of people will just keep slugging away, you know, they'll keep, you know, working hard or they'll keep doing it because that's what the business needs, but they don't know how to get out of it. So this is what I'm seeing right now in a lot of businesses. That the money is good, the money is great, they're making the money, which is great. You know, they go on the fancy holidays, but what happened on the holiday? You're friggin stuck on the phone working. You can't take the time off to be actually present with your family and your kids. That is not a business. That is a high-paying job that you cannot leave because it's too risky to leave. Okay, so this is the difference between, you know, making money, which is great, it's not the be-all and end-all. So profit, leverage, lifestyle. So use the profit that you've got. So you need the money first to be able to get back your time, right? Um, then you, you know, either hire a team or you start to automate, delegate, and eliminate tasks that aren't required anymore, that don't require you. So you eventually, you kind of fire yourself from different jobs and you don't go back. Okay, so business owners should ideally be working on revenue-generating activities that moves the business forward. That's your highest, like, hourly rate, right? It shouldn't be admin tasks or micromanaging the team, or, um, you know, double-checking people's work, um, to make sure they've done it correctly, or answering questions back and forth in Slack, for example, or whatever software you use to communicate with your team. You guys shouldn't be needing to do that. So there's obviously a few different things that we can, we can talk about here, but the main part I just wanted to make super, super clear to you is just because someone's making a lot of money doesn't mean that they're actually happy. And a lot of the time they're not happy because I can tell you right now, you know, I've got to the stage where I'm making like $500K, $700K a year. And at times, didn't happen for very long because I made a pretty conscious choice pretty, pretty quickly. But there was times where I was, um, I was working a lot, uh, like, you know, 60, 70 hours a week. And what changed for me is when, uh, we had our daughter, who's almost 4 now. And literally, this is actually super interesting, like, literally, as soon as we, um, not so much when we had her, but when we, um, basically felt pregnant and whatnot I started to remove myself from my business, like week by week, month by month. I took away tasks that I was doing and I gave it to someone else and gave them that responsibility, that ownership of that role. Uh, prime example, this was when I had my fitness business, when I had 12 trainers working for me across 6 different gyms. Um, I had sales team, I had a social media person, I had obviously the trainers,, and I had people doing the admin stuff. But don't get me wrong, I was still doing some stuff in the business, but I wasn't required to be the day-to-day operator. So I didn't need to do sales, I didn't need to do any marketing because, um, I had the sales guy was actually doing marketing as well. Um, and then obviously wasn't doing any sessions because I had all the trainers. Wasn't— I was doing some stuff on social media, but I wasn't in control of like editing or scheduling the posts and that type of stuff. So I was pretty hands-off. But if I really wanted to, and I literally did, because when we had, when we had our daughter Winter, I took a month off, completely like a month off from my business, and I actually helped in my wife's business, which was another story, another story for another day. Because we, or she, had a hair salon that she was part owner or part profit share in, and it all just kind of fell to shit when she took time off. So I was able to sort my business out, and I basically just worked for, in my wife's business for a month or so, for obvious reasons being we had a newborn baby. So that's what I was saying. I kind of went on a bit of a tangent there, but profit, leverage, lifestyle. You start to get your leverage, which is like either from team, through, through AI. Now AI is obviously a massive part of how we're able to help business owners get their time back in terms of what's possible. But a big part of it also is the team. I was talking to a business owner yesterday who has, I think, 7 trainers, who has his own gym or studio, and he was saying that his admin manager or office manager is still relying on like 6 or 7 different softwares to fetch data where nothing is talking to each other and nothing can, you know, generate reports or data instantly, which is what you should be able to do through like AI, through software and stuff. So everything was just— everything is on, um, what's the word I'm trying to look for? Everything was just like backwards. Everything's relying on like free software here, free software there. Whereas if you just paid for a software that had like everything in one, you'll be so much more productive with your time and your staff members would be so much more productive. So it's actually going to cost you more in the long run because of how much extra time your staff members are taking to do tasks. So what I'm trying to say is you get the money first, then you reinvest that into leverage. Which could be a team, could be AI software, or could be something like our service where we obviously help you set up this type of stuff. And then you get back your freedom. Okay, it's not the other way around unless you're supposed to do it like I have recently where, I mean, no, I was actually working quite a bit before I started to leverage. So usually you would go profit, then leverage, then lifestyle. Okay, so when you have the lifestyle, and this is what we help people create, is Obviously you have your own idea about your certain lifestyle that you want. Some people still want to work like 40 hours a week, but you'd be actually working on activities that actually grew the business to give you that more, more leverage, more lifestyle, even, even more profit. That's an example. Okay, you don't, you don't want to be spending time doing like basic activities that, you know, pretty much anyone can do. So I think I went through most of the points I wanted to go there. I kind of went on a bit of a riff, which is what I like to do on these podcast episodes. But if this sounds like you and you're working a lot, or maybe you're getting frustrated by the type of work that you're doing, you're not working on moving the business forward, you know, maybe it's time to have a conversation with me. We'll do a little bit of an audit um, basically audited all your systems and processes to see what we can either delegate, eliminate, or automate, um, to get your time back. So if you guys don't know, we offer a service where we come into your business and do done-for-you one-on-one, um, pretty much consulting, uh, where we, um, systemize your business to, to get at least 20 hours a week back. So if that's you, send me a DM right now. Um, on Instagram or Facebook, and let's have a conversation to see if we can help. But I hope that was a bit insightful into what really happens for a lot of business owners, because majority of them don't have the freedom. And for me at least, that's the most important part, actually getting your time back. Like, literally every single day, uh, take my kids to daycare. I mean, they've still got a daycare majority of the week, um, but that's my choice. I mean, I could have them at home, but I want them to go to daycare. Um, pick them up— oh, sorry, drop them off, pick them up. I go to all their dance, all their swimming lessons, all that stuff. I don't miss anything. So that's how I like it. So that resonates? Send us a message right now. We'll see if we can help. See you in the next episode.
