In this solo episode of the Leveraged CEO Podcast, Matt Dart explains how business owners who spend 40‑60 hours a week on low‑value tasks incur massive opportunity costs. He illustrates the concept with two concrete case studies—a law firm that could add $400,000 in annual revenue by freeing a general manager from juggling multiple software tools, and a trader losing 30% of leads (roughly $30‑$50K per month) due to slow response times. Dart argues that reclaimed time should be redirected toward high‑impact activities such as sales, marketing, networking, and team training. He introduces a "Leverage Audit" process to map out, automate, delegate, or eliminate time‑draining processes, and invites listeners to apply via a link in the video description. The episode’s core message is that gaining back 20 hours a week can translate into six‑figure (or higher) revenue gains when the time is strategically reinvested.
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What's going on, team? Episode 128 of the Leveraged CEO Podcast. My name is Matt Dart. We're going to get straight into today's episode. We're going to talk about like the opportunity cost or the real cost of being quote too busy to grow. So a lot of people that I'm talking to at the moment or the people that we're working with, they're working 40, 50, 60 hours a week and a lot of the time it's on tasks that do not move the needle in the business. So we're going to go through like the opportunity cost of what that looks like. So a lot of people think like saving time is like a nice thing to have, and it's true, absolutely. Like some people, when they get their time back, will spend it with family, absolutely love it. They'll spend it doing other things. But a lot of people miss out on the opportunity to progress even further. Like for example, let's just say your kids are at school, 9 till 3 every day. So even if you only work 20 hours a week, you would still have a lot of spare time to do kind of whatever you want in the business. So what I'm trying to say here is getting back 20 hours a week is great, but the more important part, or the thing to really understand, is what are you going to do with that extra 20 hours a week? 'Cause you're not, you're not just gonna sit on the couch and do nothing. The, the people that we work with are not just gonna sit on the couch and drink drinks and beers and just, I don't know, watch Netflix or what, whatever people do these days. I don't, I don't really watch Netflix very much anymore. So you want, you, you fill it, you fill it with stuff, right? So you, you start to work on the business, you start to do tasks that propel the business forward, that get you even better results. So I did, I worked this out with a client the other day and it was pretty, pretty wild to hear the potential or the opportunity cost. So this specific business owner, I'm not gonna disclose names or anything, but this specific business owner was working, you know, 40, 50 hours a week, but they also had a GM, a general manager, part-time,, but they were, they were doing about 10, 10 hours a week just by using multiple subscriptions, multiple softwares to get data where you could basically automate that process or semi-automated to get back at least 10, some sometimes even more hours per week. So for this specific business owner, he actually wanted to remove himself from the business so he could do other projects, which is completely fine. So basically wanted this GM to basically take over from all the managerial, managerial side and then grow the business as well. So what we actually determined was this particular client, which was a law firm, so pretty, pretty big player, they wanted to go after big, big companies or big fish. Now I asked them how much was each client worth that's a big fish. And he said $100K a year. And I said, okay, cool, how long is it going to take you to get a new client that's worth that? He's like, yeah, cool, if we did like, you know, 5 to 10 hours a week, it'll take us about 3 months to get one of those people. So I was like, okay, cool. So if we go back 20 hours a week and your GM spent 10 hours a week of that networking, prospecting, and working on those relationships to get one of those clients every 3 months. So saying in 12 months' time you would have 4 big fish paying you $100,000 a year. And he's like, yep. I was like, okay, that's the opportunity cost of us not working together right now. You're telling me that we could make you an extra $400,000 a year if we just change nothing else but got the GM to not have to worry about all these systems, and I could take care of that, for example. And then the GM could actually work on tasks that are gonna propel the business forward, not going back and forth on friggin' 5 different softwares. Okay, so it's huge, the opportunity cost. And it's not always gonna be that big, right? Even like Even like if you get back 20 hours a week and you can spend 5 hours a week on marketing, how much more would that make you? Like if you were to spend an extra 5 hours a week training your sales team, how much more money would that make you? That's the opportunity cost. So if the founder or the owner is stuck doing, you know, tasks that the team should be doing, or the team's always coming to them, or maybe they're doing things that you can automate, That is the opportunity cost. Okay, so for example, another one, a trader that I was talking to, too busy to get back to leads fast. So he's losing 30% of the leads that come through because he's got a slow response rate. Every single new client to him is worth at least $10K. That's like, I can't remember the exact figure, but I think it was like $30K to $50K a month that they're losing. Because of this. So you gotta think of all this like admin stuff is eating up, eating up your time. What if you weren't having to do those things? What would you be focusing on? I can guarantee it'd be, you know, in terms of the, the founder's best input, it's sales and marketing or training the team. That's what propels the business forward.. And that's what you, you guys should be doing. You should not be doing like the delivery, or you should not be doing admin, admin task. You should not have all your team always coming to you asking questions all the time. It's not how it should be, but a lot of people are stuck in this. So this is the opportunity cost. This is what I, I go through with the business owners that I'm talking to at the moment is, you know, if we were to get this time back, what would you be focusing on? And what does that look like as a return on investment? And a lot of the time it's $100K plus a year. So question, bit of a self-reflection for you guys. If you had an extra 2 days a week back every single week, what would you be doing with your extra time? Now there'll be some people on listening to this being like, okay, cool, how can that get me 20 hours a week back? So what we would do, we would do a leverage audit and we would go through all the systems processes that you're, that you're doing, figure out what's taking up the most amount of time, and I'll be able to tell you if we can automate or delegate or delete that process to get your time back, and then we can focus on growing the business. So in the description, there is a link if you want to apply to work with us. I don't work with everyone, so you need to fill in the application form, and then from there, if it's a good fit, we'll catch up and see if we can help. But I'll leave it there. Opportunity cost is the biggest factor. It's always a hypothetical, of course, but you need to have these conversations with yourself and potentially me to make better decisions on what's possible. Like, for example, that first thing of an extra potential $400K a year, anything for that GM that's like under that, under that like value, they should not be doing. Like any of these tasks that doing like pulling emails, pulling data from different softwares, that is not worth their time. Their time should be spent growing relationships, networking, and working on relationships to get those big fish. Okay, so once you understand that, um, the business will, will skyrocket. So if you guys want to help with that, in the description you'll see a, a link where you can apply. So see you next week.
