In this solo episode of The Leveraged CEO, Matt Dart warns founders that they typically waste 20‑25 hours each week on administrative tasks, translating into a massive opportunity cost. He walks listeners through a simple calculation: at a conservative $100 per hour valuation, 20 admin hours per week equals roughly $100,000 of lost revenue annually. Dart argues that any task priced under $100 per hour should be either automated, delegated to a virtual assistant (often available for $4‑$6 per hour), or eliminated. He illustrates the problem with four concrete case studies—a studio using disconnected free tools, an NDIS provider with manual onboarding and email triage, a franchise resale broker drowning in non‑qualified inquiries, and a concreter missing 20% of high‑ticket quotes. For each, he highlights specific admin bottlenecks and how a proper CRM, automated email workflows, or a VA could resolve them. The episode culminates in a three‑step framework—Automate, Delegate, Delete—and invites listeners to apply for a “leverage audit” to identify and reclaim their hidden admin time.
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Alrighty, team, episode 125. Welcome to the newest episode of The Leveraged CEO. I hope you guys are having an epic day so far. So today we're going to talk about admin, specifically the hidden 20 hours a week that you're losing to admin. So I've been talking to a lot of business owners about the admin that they are still doing, which is a complete waste of their time in most cases. Okay, so let me just quickly talk about, I've got a couple of examples that I'm gonna go through today with some specific businesses that I talked to over the last couple of weeks and what they're kind of wasting their time on. But I mainly wanna talk to you guys about the opportunity cost of doing admin. So most founders guess when they say how much time they're spending on admin, and they might say, you know, a couple hours a day, or they'll be on the tools all day and they'll just finish up a little bit of admin at the end of the day. But when you actually map it out, it actually works out to be about 20 to 25 hours a week. And a lot of people that I'm talking to, and probably a lot of people that listen to this podcast, you're probably spending, or you're probably actually probably working like 50, 60 hours a week. And probably more than likely 20 hours a week of that is admin and stuff that you could probably either automate or you can delegate to like an admin assistant or a virtual assistant that can do a lot of this stuff for you, especially the super basic stuff. So let's start with some math here. So let's just for example, just say you're doing 20 hours a week for admin and I'll do some other examples as well, but let's just start with 20 hours a week. So if you're spending 20 hours a week And again, I'm just gonna assume this. You might be worth more, but the average business owner is worth $100 an hour for their time. Okay, you might think you're worth a lot more, and probably you probably are worth a lot more. Some people that I talk to are worth like $1,000 an hour. So let's do some math here for a second. And this number is probably gonna scare you a little bit. 20 hours a week is 20 hours times 52, 1,040 hours a week. Okay, so if you divide that by, uh, how many hours would you work in a day? Let's just say 8 hours in a day. It's 130 full hours, uh, full days a year. That's wild. That's absolutely wild. Divide that by 5, which means it's 26 weeks. Basically half the year. Half the year you guys are spending on admin. Now, some things you might not be able to fully get rid of. I do understand that. But if you're charging $100 an hour for your time, 20 hours a week, you're basically throwing away $2,000 a week of income, of lost income and opportunity, $100,000 a year just on that. So basically what we should be doing here is anything that's under $100 an hour, you should be delegating to someone else or automating it. I can guarantee you'll be able to find people for less than $100 an hour. In fact, you know, for example, we, we help people find VAs. So virtual assistants are anywhere from like $4 to $6 an hour, and I can almost guarantee they'll be able to do most of the admin stuff that you're doing. So a lot of the admin stuff that you might be able to do, uh, for a VA is like basic bookkeeping, getting reporting, analyzing social media content in terms of getting the data for you, all the data that you can think of, um, payroll, um, pretty much anything to a zero, uh, a VA could do. Sending out invoices, following up missed payments or following up for payments, getting contracts signed, uh, even sending out quotes if you've got a system and process behind that, um, or you do up the quote and get the VA to send it out. There's so many things that they can do. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about some specific examples of some of the business owners that I'm talking to in terms of what they're doing, because this is gonna give you some insights into a lot of the problems that these business owners are having and what I'm helping them fix. So, Jimena, a studio owner, was using all the free types of software that's not connected. So like MailChimp for email marketing, Trello for managing their their boards and their team, Google Sheets, a separate system for rostering. It was all free softwares, which is in theory great, but nothing ever talked to each other. So anytime their office manager or their studio manager had to find something, they had to go to multiple different softwares. And you can imagine how unproductive that person was. They were just doing admin stuff all the time for like, you know, $30, $40 an hour. Where if for one thing, if they just had the one, like a proper CRM where everything could pretty much be in that one spot, then that admin person will be so much more productive. And they would also be able to automate a lot of these reports and stuff that they're using as well. So even like Mailchimp, to be able to generate the automated reports, you could automate that as well rather than the admin person doing that. Another example would be an NDIS provider, manual onboarding. They've got over 20 staff members with a high turnover. Every single time they're doing manual onboarding, it's a very high turnover industry. Rush rings all done manually and email triage. So emails are done all manually. So the business owner or the founder is all reactive. Whatever comes into their inbox is what they do, like literally all day that is in their emails, clearing out emails, stuff that doesn't need to go through them is taking up a lot of time. So they estimated about $45K a year in lost productivity. And then another business owner, which is a franchise resale, um, business— so basically any type of, or any type of franchise that wants to sell businesses or resell businesses, then it's like, it's like a business broker— manually sorting out inquiries. So basically If you guys don't know, you have to like sign like a non-disclosure agreement when you want to look at purchasing a business. And he was going through all these emails going back and forth to people who weren't even willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement, like completely pointless talking to them, just completely wasting time every single day. So every single morning, the first thing he was doing was going through all these emails. So we just needed an email triage or a system to automatically send out a non-disclosure and he would only talk to people when they've signed that non-disclosure, because they're actually serious. So this is the type of stuff that we're talking about in terms of you just wait— completely wasting time on tasks that you should not be doing. So the process that we go through with all of our clients is 3 things: you either automate it, delegate it, or delete it. So a lot of these admin tasks can be automated, or at least 70-80% automated, and then you can get a VA or an admin assistant or office manager to check it and, and finish the task, but 80% of it is already done. Uh, or you delegate it completely to a team member, uh, if a human needs to do it. Like quoting, for example, uh, you probably can't get that fully automated. You probably need to actually do the quote, and then you can automate the backend. Uh, or you completely delete the system that is not serving you. Prime example a business that is using all the free versions and just being so unproductive and they would actually save money if they were just to invest in a proper system that did most of that stuff for them because their team would be so much more productive. So I want to kind of leave you with this in terms of, you know, what would be possible if you were to get back 20 hours a week? It doesn't have to be 20, even 5 or 10 hours a week. How much more money do you think you could make? Because I can guarantee you, if you were to focus more on moving the business forward, working on the business for like sales and marketing, you would make way more than, you know, if you were to get someone to come in and do this type of stuff, whether it's being a VA or completely automating some of these tasks. Because a lot of, a lot of the time, like, if you guys are doing like high-ticket stuff— I was talking to a concreter the other day, each each extra job that he does is at least $10,000 to $20,000, at least. And he said, he said he was missing about 20% of quotes because he just couldn't get to them in time. Because guess what happens? People just go with the first person that gets back to them. And that's it. As simple as that. So I want to ask, where are you losing time to admin and What can you either automate, delegate, or even completely delete from your business to give you more time? Because time is the most important asset here. Everyone that's listened to this podcast, you guys are probably making some money, but you've got no time. So if this is resonating for you, in the description there's a link you can apply to work with us. We'll review your application, and if you qualify, we will, um, you know, book, book in a call, or you can book in a call if, if you qualify, and we can actually do a what we call leverage audit where we do this exact thing and see, you know, where you can either automate, delegate, or delete certain systems and processes from your business to get your time back. So I'll see you next week.
