How to Succeed as a Dadpreneur - With Carl Taylor

[00:00:00] Being a dad is not easy. And when you add being a husband and a business owner on top of that, it can make being a dad feel very stressful. So in today’s podcast, we’re talking with Carl Taylor, the founder of Dadpreneur. What’s interesting about Carl Taylor is that he’s not only a really exceptional entrepreneur, but also a dad.

One of his businesses, he manages to run on just four hours a month, which is absolutely insane. So we’re going to dive into how Carl manages this. We’re going to look at the three things he recommends for being a successful dadpreneur: how to run your business the right way, how to manage your relationships with your wife, and how to manage your health and wealth.

We’re going to dive into some of the strategies that he teaches so that you can have it all while being a successful dad. Let’s jump in. Thank you.

**Greg:** Carl Taylor, it’s awesome to have you on the podcast. Welcome, mate.

**Carl:** Thanks, Greg. Great to be here, man.

**Greg:** So, Carl, it’s great to have fellow entrepreneurs on the podcast, especially ones like yourself who’ve managed to grow and scale businesses. What I’m fascinated about is how you’ve actually removed yourself from business to pursue other passions that you have. Maybe as an introduction, you can talk us through that. I know you created this business automation agency. Do you want to talk us through how you managed to scale that and get yourself out of that business?

**Carl:** Yeah. So I’ve been in business for 20-something years, 23, 24 years. I lost track. I was 15 years old. I’m currently, I’m turning 38 this year. So someone else can do the math on that. And the business. I had a business with my father for about eight years. We sold that in 2011 and that business required a lot of me and it really impacted the sale price. When we sold the business, I had to be contracted to the new owners for a whole year. And that kind of sucked, all of a sudden having a boss for a year after running a business. So when I started Automation Agency, I was really clear on not wanting that to happen. Like from day one, I was like, this business is not going to rely on me. However, even with that intention, probably about six months in, I started, I looked at my model that I was doing. I was like, what am I doing? Like I’m building myself a job here and I had to completely change the model. And so to give context for people, my initial model was, you know, it was me plus one other team member in the beginning and I was doing funnels, marketing funnels for people. And so I was the consultant. I did the strategy call and I laid out the plan and then I was the copywriter and I had some help on the tech and design side a little bit, but mostly a big part of it was me because I was the solution provider. And so when I had a really hard look at myself and was like, okay, I’m building a job to remove me, I got two options. I could hire someone to do the strategy piece the way I’d like them to do it, which would probably be quite expensive. And the really good people, frankly, would want to run their own business and not work for me. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but that was the thought process in my head. Right. And so, I decided I was like, what if I just removed it completely from the deliverables? What if the client was the strategist? What if we didn’t provide strategy at all and we just did delivery, then it doesn’t need me. And so that’s what we did. We switched to a model that if you go to automationagency.com now you’d see it’s a flat rate monthly fee gives you access to our big team of graphic designers, video editors, web developers, funnel builders, automation people. So we just basically give you access to the team and I built the system around that to have you directly talking to the team that you don’t have to hire, find, train, manage, etc. So it was very intentional but even with that intention, I still screwed it up. So many business owners, we do, we screw it up. We make these decisions that end up being kind of prisons. Right. So yeah, so Automation Agency just turned 10 a couple of weeks ago. So we’ve been doing what we’ve been doing for 10 years and yeah, to give the context for your listeners, my involvement in Automation Agency now is four hours a month a month.

And I know when we were chatting about this podcast, you joked, you’re like, Oh, move aside, Tim Ferriss, forget the four-hour work week. It’s the four-hour month. And I’m happy to talk, you know, break down what that looks like and what those four hours are actually spent on, but it took time to get there, but it’s allowed me to then focus on other things.

**Greg:** Yeah, that’s absolutely incredible. And I think we do need to just dive into that a little bit because when you create an agency like this and this, even this easier model, if you like, that you’ve potentially created. It’s still so, well, I guess this is the question, isn’t it? How have you been able to remove yourself and make that model work? So I presume it’s all process-driven, is it? Is this how you’ve managed to step back and allow others to do things to the same quality that you would have?

**Carl:** Well, there’s your first thing. It wouldn’t be at the same quality that I could do. So one of the first things I think as business owners, you have to, I don’t know, at the end, the word I’m looking for here is get over or let go of is perfection. The reality is my best-ever clone of me that I created in the team was my first automation hire. She was with us. She’s no longer with us now, but she was with us up until about a year and a half ago. So almost eight, nine years. And she was the closest mini-me I created on the automation techie front. Cause that’s my background. I’m a techie. I was really good at that. And even at her height of being the best and the closest to me, she would probably take twice as long as me to solve something and still couldn’t necessarily get wouldn’t approach it the same way I would. And, but the difference was when I had her and a whole team just on the automation side, we were able to deal with hundreds of clients versus if it was just me, I’d probably realistically be able to handle 10, maybe. And so one part is actually realizing that they’re not going to be as good as you. Some people in some areas will be better than you, but if you’re really good at something, if you’re trying to go, well, I want to get someone who’s going to be as good as me, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Like you’ve got to actually accept that. You know what? Maybe a little bit less than your quality is okay. Maybe your 50 percent or 60 percent is actually amazing for a lot of clients out there. And we’re not for everyone. You know, there are some people who want this super fancy person, and they’re going to go and hire an expensive consultant compared to our 500 bucks a month service. So you’ve got to get your model right. Your pricing, right. But if you want to go to that really high-quality bespoke approach, you’re usually going to trap yourself as either you’re being the person or you’re going to have to pay some really damn expensive, good people. It’s doable. So that’s the first thing I would say.

The second thing is it is process-driven, but not to the degree that probably a lot of people think like we’ve got a lot of processes, but not necessarily a lot of procedures. So if you think about what we do, every client could be different, you know, what one person wants on graphic design or one person wants on a funnel could be very different. So it’s not like they’ve got these step-by-step playbooks that they’re just following every single task. If we’d done that scaling would have been even easier. So if you can do that in your business, it’ll be even better. But the reality is for a lot of business owners, that’s a business model in the service industry. That’s not possible. There’s an element of you can have a bit of a box and a framework, but it’s not every single job that goes exactly the same way. So you got to be more process-driven in that every client gets the same onboarding process, the kickoff call, the process of how they log tasks and everything’s very systemized in that way. But the actual deliverable piece, while it relies on checklists, it’s not a. So checklists are like quality control and checklists are checking before they’ve done it and things that they’ve done after. But in the middle, you’ve got to have people who are just smart who can work within that framework to actually solve a problem.

**Greg:** Yeah, I think you’ve raised two really important points there because thinking about the listeners to this podcast, construction business owners, the first thing that most construction business owners have to deal with is that they’re on the tools. First of all, when they’re small and they then think, well, how do I scale this? Because no one can hang that door as good as I can and I can build that wall as good as I can. So that that’s the first thing they’ve got to get over that actually if they’re gonna scale up to that next phase of becoming a manager of your business, you need to get over that then once you’re

the manager of the business. Same thing happens again, doesn’t it? Is anyone going to be able to project manage this job as good as I can? Am I going to have to put up with someone that’s not quite doing it quite as well? So we do have to go through these phases, don’t we, as we go through business of removing ourselves. And I think that’s just a really valid point that don’t expect perfection because people aren’t necessarily going to do it as good of you, but at the same time, if you’re scaling, then if someone’s doing 80 percent as good, but you’ve got five people doing that 80 percent as good as what you were, you’ve reached much more capacity. Haven’t you been able to do it that way?

**Carl:** And, you know, depending on the motivation, you know, if you’re money-driven, then you can just make a lot more money. If you’re service-driven, like you just really want to make an impact and help people, you can help a lot more people in two ways. One by helping put food on the table for your team and upskilling them and providing an amazing workplace for these people. And secondly, as I said, automation agency would not be serving hundreds of clients around the world. If it was still the model that highly revolved on Carl, it just, it just wouldn’t be able to serve that. And so if you want to make a bigger impact, you’ve got to, and someone once said to me when I was really grappling with this, they said, if you want to make an omelette, you got to break a few eggs and the point he was making is, you know, things are going to go wrong and that’s okay because that’s part of scaling and growing and you, you learn from it and you improve where you can and you start to identify what are the things that are worth trying to improve versus going, that’s just how it is.

You know, if you’ve done any kind of project management stuff, you probably familiar with the, I can’t remember what they call it, but the triangle, right? Where it’s like, you want fast, you want cheap and you want high quality, but the catch is you got to pick two, you can’t have all three at once. And it’s, you’re kind of going to go through phases like that. As you remove yourself out, you’ve got to keep going. Okay. In this particular role or this particular process, what’s important to me? Is it speed? Is it cheap? Is it quality? Or which one when one has to give? Because it doesn’t always have to give in the beginning of automation.

I think we did all three really well. And then over time it became obvious we had to let one of them go, which one was it going to be? And for us, it was speed. We let speed go mostly. You know, most often that’s our biggest reason someone leaves is they want an internal team member kind of turnaround time and it just was like, we just can’t offer that. We just can’t hit that level of turnaround time for you.

**Greg:** Yeah, I think that’s really important. We need to know where our strengths are and how we’re gonna make our model work for us and for our clients. Just going back to the second point you said too, because I just want to tie this in with our listeners about a business being process-driven using quality control checklists and things like that. Again, that’s so similar to construction businesses because you can’t always have, if you’re, again, you’re building a wall or you’re building an extension or whatever it’s going to be. You can’t have a set procedure for the job every single time. It’s always going to deviate, but you can have quality control and you can have certain procedures that you’re going to follow. But it just goes back to your point that you do actually just have to have smart people that pull it all together because there are going to be variances. So sometimes I think we can get a little bit too hung up on it’s got to be exactly this way and I’ve got to get these processes in place when sometimes it’s a little bit more principles that work rather than actual systems that are concrete and there’s no flexibility in.

**Carl:** Yeah. It’s a bit different to teaching someone how to make a burger or how to make a coffee, right? Which you can be step by step, do this, do this, do that. And this is the end result. There’s problem-solving there. So you’re kind of setting the outcome. Here’s what success looks like. Here’s some things to make sure you check in on in the beginning, like make sure we’ve got the brief, make sure we understand all these things and follow the process. And then at the end, you know, there’s two types of checklists. There’s the do check, right? Where you’ve done the work now go and check. And then you’ve got the check do, which is like more of a step by step, check this off, then go do it, check this off, go do it. And usually at least in automation agency, we have a mix of both. Right. There’s a mix of there’s the, you’ve done the work now check it off and there’s also components of the process where it’s actually no, this is the thing you need to now go and do it, check it off, do it.

**Greg:** Yeah, that makes complete sense.

**Carl:** I think something that’s worthwhile adding here too. When people, often think about, I need to build SOPs and you do standard operating procedures, playbooks, whatever you want to call it, like a process on how to do things, like documentation on how to do things. A big mistake that I see a lot of people make is they build them without realizing you’re going to have two types of users looking at a playbook or an SOP. You’re going to have the people who’ve done this a thousand times. And you’re going to have the people who’ve never done it before. And so you want to build your SOP to work to those two. There’s kind of got to be two levels. You’ve got the high-level process, and that’s more that you’ve done the work. Now check it off or how you just need a quick reminder of what you are doing. So you’ve got the high-level overview of the process that the person who’s done it a thousand times should be looking at it. They should actually still be looking at that SOP to make sure they’re following the process. The big mistake longtime employees make is they’re like, I’ve done it a thousand times. I don’t need to check the process. So you need to build a culture in your business that whether you’ve done this once or you’ve done it a thousand times, you still refer back to whatever it is. But the way you make it usable is you don’t make them have to go through all the clunky stuff. There’s a high-level cheat sheet, there’s the fast whatever, and then it’s only the people who have never done it before or they come across something that they are a bit unsure of. Then they’ve got the option to click in deeper or to find the documentation or whatever it is that shows them the detail of how to do it which is for the newbies or the people who’ve forgotten a little bit of what the detail is.

**Greg:** Yeah, 100%. That makes complete sense, Carl. So just want to dive into briefly how you’ve managed to get down to four hours a month and what are those four hours made up of?

**Carl:** Yeah, so the four hours now, it’s two operations meetings. So every two weeks we connect for an operations meeting, me and my operations manager, and really she drives that meeting. So one of the first things I did is I made sure that I was a participant of meetings and not the host of meetings. So when I started kind of removing myself, especially when I was more in that manager state, the first stage was just getting it to be okay. These meetings happen regularly and I will be a participant, but I’m not the host. And then over time, it became, hey, I will be at the meeting sometimes. And, but the meeting still needs to happen. So, and then eventually it’s like, oh, Carl’s not coming back to this meeting ever again. So now I have two meetings that I go to. I’ve got the operations meeting, which happens every two weeks. And then I have a one-on-one, which I actually did just before recording this with my operations meeting, which is a more personal coaching with her. And that’s my entire involvement in the business. There might be a few Slack messages here and there with a bookkeeper and things. But that’s pretty light. It’s the real thing is just those meetings.

**Greg:** That’s absolutely incredible. And you know, well done for being able to create a business that serves you in that way. But what’s fascinating about this, and the main reason why I’ve got you on the podcast today, is what that’s now enabled you to do. Because freeing up all that time obviously gives you time to focus on what you’re truly passionate about. So tell us about what you’re currently working on.

**Carl:** Yeah, so I started a new thing called Dadpreneur. And it’s interesting, you know, for a long time, I’d pre-Automation Agency, I’d been doing some coaching, teaching people about buying and selling businesses and things. And for a while, I’d had the idea, well, wouldn’t it be nice to do coaching and I have a business Automation Agency, the obvious thing would be to add a coaching component to the existing business, but it wasn’t really where my heart was. They could do it. I could talk marketing. I can, I’m happy to, and I’m pretty good at it, but it’s not the thing that really fulfilled me. And so finally, after a while of Automation Agency not needing me, I was like, you know what, let’s just properly step back and instead of going in and breaking, if anyone’s listening, who

started to remove themselves in the business, there’s a tendency of you get bored and you need to feel needed. So you start innovating and changing things in your business that maybe don’t need to be changed. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don’t. And so I was doing that. Like I wasn’t needed more than those four hours, but I’d still find projects and things to improve in Automation Agency. And after a while of doing a few things, like we added AI copywriting and that added bloat and headaches. And like, that was a nice idea, but really did we need to do it? Probably not. All right. I’m going to start something completely new. And so Dadpreneur is basically a coaching community and a podcast helping entrepreneurial dads. And I’m one of them to better balance the world of being a business owner, because let’s face it. As a business owner, you already have a child, your business. You know, for some of them, it’s a needy newborn, for others, it’s a toddler, some it’s a teenager and others they’ve like for me, I guess, in a way, it’s kind of left the home, it’s out there doing its thing and just comes back to raid the fridge every now and then. But then, and then at home, you’ve got family demands, you’ve got actual real children, you’ve got your wife slash lover, you know, depending on your marital status. And then you’ve got you as a man. And what I found is so many men, entrepreneurial men in particular, they have the belief that they have to sacrifice. If I spend time with my family, then I’m sacrificing growing my business, right? Like my business is not where it is because I’m choosing to, to be around for the kids, to take the kids to school or to pick them up or whatever it is, or, you know, spend time with my wife or take weekends off. And, and they believe that they’re sacrificing. And yes, it might mean they don’t have the same number of hours that a single 20-year-old dude can, who works all the time, late into the evenings, works on weekends. Yes, there is a time constraint, but there doesn’t have to be a sacrifice in terms of the success of the business. And then on the flip side, you got the people who are like, well, I’m busy building the business. And they believe they have to sacrifice their relationship with the kids. Like, I’m just going to miss that phase of their life. I’m not going to see the first steps. I’m not going to be there. You know, they don’t realize that maybe their marriage is in trouble because they’re so busy focused on, or maybe the other option sometimes is home’s a bit of a mess. They’re not really liking the conflict and whatever’s going on at home. So it’s easier to go and hide in a business that’s controllable and feels fun. And then there’s a few of the guys out there who will go, business is great, home life is great. And they’ll think everything’s good. It’s like, but how’s your health? What’s your wealth look like outside of business? And so they’re sacrificing their friendships, their physical health and mental health. And a big mistake too, is entrepreneurs, we get so focused on our business and we reinvest our money back into our business and we reinvest and we’re so often so optimistic of here’s what the future is going to look like. And then if something goes wrong or you go to sell your business and find out it’s not worth as much as you thought it was going to be, and then you’re left there going, well, I’ve got nothing outside of the business. I’ve got nothing left to provide for me, for the family in retirement. And so that’s what I’m there to help is just help guide. How do you, you don’t actually have to have sacrifice. You can have it all, but it takes, you know, focus. You’ve got to actually go, I’m choosing to do this and here’s what I’m going to do.

**Greg:** Yeah, really interesting. So I think a lot are going to be able to resonate with this because as men, I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head that you do feel like you’ve got to provide in your business and provide for your family, but it can be a challenge, you know, what is going to go because sometimes I think it’s great that you can say that you can have it all and we’ll dive into how you can have it all, but a lot of people don’t get that balance and it’s hard to try and strike that balance because you either go one way or the other. So let’s dive into how you get that balance right. And maybe first of all, we can start off with getting the business right. So what steps would you encourage people to do if they’re, you know, under pressure as a dad, they’ve got a family, they’re in a relationship. I guess the business side has got to be managed first. So how do you manage that process?

**Carl:** You first as a mental shift, if you haven’t already got it, you’ve got to start thinking like a business owner and not a business operator. Now, everyone’s different. You might have zero team members. You might have a small team. You might have quite a large team and depending on where you’re at, the lever in particular that you need to pull and how quickly you can pull yourself out is going to differ. But if you can make the shift of your mind to go, okay, I’m currently operating my business and I want to be an owner of a business and the owner of a business, the way I define it is you’ve got two levels of ownership. You’ve got two levels of operating and two levels of ownership. So operating, you’ve got self-employed where it’s just you and maybe a freelancer bookkeepers, a couple of contractors, but it’s really just you. Then you become a manager. And so now the manager is you’ve got a team, could be a big team, could be a small team. And this is where so many business owners actually stop. They get stuck at that manager stage. And the manager stage is now you’re busy trying to improve the business, but you’re also putting out the fires that your team members are creating. It’s become this kind of merry-go-round of putting out fires. And often that’s just where they get. And that’s why so many people will go, I just, I want to burn it all down, or I want to get rid of my team and go back to being me. Because that can be a really messy and tricky stage to master. But if you can master it, you move up to the first level of owner, which is where you become a leader. And so the leader is where you’re the one setting the vision. You’re still could be involved on a more, more than four hours a month. You can still be involved doing things, but you’re no longer the one who’s managing the managers. You’re truly in that leadership role. You’ve got an organizational structure of some kind. That’s not just, he’s a bunch of people who work for me. There’s actually meetings happening without you. There’s reporting happening without you. There’s a bit of self-accountability. There’s some planning happening even without you and that’s the first level. And then the next stage of ownership is where you become more of that investor level and the investor level is a lot more hands-off. You might be completely like, you might just have a CEO in place and you’re just sitting on the advisory board. Or you’ve sold most of the portion of your business and you’re just receiving dividends. So that’s kind of a different stage. But if you can get at least to the leader stage, now, how do you do that? It comes down with going, okay, I need to automate the business. That’s using technology and team. You’ve got to start looking at what are all the things I’m doing? Where is my mind telling me that I’m the only person who can do this? Challenging that and asking yourself, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, how would this happen? Who could do it? If I could no longer do this anymore, what would I do? And often people go, well, no one could do that. Well, I’m an example of sometimes changing the business model can be the answer. Removing that piece completely might be the answer. It might not be, but at least asking yourself again, okay, if this could no longer happen, would it matter? A lot of business owners, especially in the agency world, I imagine potentially in the construction world too, there’s this belief of, I have to do this thing. Clients need this. I have to do that. Maybe if you stop doing it, it actually wouldn’t make the difference that you think it would. And so sometimes just completely stopping certain processes saves you a bunch of time, removes a lot of headaches and frees you up. So you need to get you out layer by layer. How do I get myself out of this? How do I get myself out? And the first place to get yourself out of always is delivery. If you’re on the tools doing the work, I’m a huge proponent of the sooner you can be off the tools and now more in that manager phase, the better. Because only once you’re off the tools can you start to truly scale. When you can sell without you having to do the delivery, the pain is removed. Dan Martell, if you’ve talked about him before, he talks about the pain line. I really like how he talks about the pain line. It’s like, you will never move into towards pain. You will never move into something you associate with pain. And often when you’re the person who does the work, if you’re also the person doing the quoting or the selling, if you equate making this sale into hard work for you. You’re not going to want to do the sale because you don’t want to do the work. When you’re not the person doing the work and you can just see the great opportunity to do the sale

, you’ll make the sale because the pain is not yours. If there’s going to be some pain, your team will deal with it. And so it can make a huge difference getting off the tools and getting out of delivery. Obviously, if you’re still stuck in delivery, the place to look would be admin type tasks, bookkeeping, billing, making sure that all that’s being taken care of answering phones, etc. You like deal with that stuff. But as soon as you’ve dealt with that stuff, it’s then how do I get myself off the tools? What do I need to do to get myself out of delivery? Only then do you start then learning, okay, do I take people out of myself out of marketing? Do I take myself out of sales? Whether you go sales or marketing first, in my opinion, depends on you and your personality. If you’re a better talker and you’re really good at sales, then get yourself out of marketing first. If you’re better at not as good at the sales stuff, then get someone else doing sales and you keep mastering marketing. I think marketing is usually one of the last things, at least in my world. I mean, I come from a world of marketing, is usually one of the last things that I think as a business owner, you should let go of.

**Greg:** Yeah. Marketing is absolutely crucial, isn’t it? And so I just want to recap on some of the stuff you’ve said there because some people are going to be listening to this and they’re going to think, right, okay, I know I need to free myself up with certain things. And what you’ve said there is start from the basics, get your admin stuff done, get your bookkeeping handed off. We’re talking tasks that are 10, 15 pounds or dollars or whatever an hour that can be given to someone else. But then the barrier to then going beyond that is a lot of business owners will say, well, I can’t afford to go and hire a sales executive to do all my sales or I can’t afford to do this. What advice would you give them over there? How do you get over that mindset to look, you’ve got to do this if you want to scale to the next level? Because that would be the big barrier and resistance.

**Carl:** Yeah. Couple of things. Firstly, the thought that you can’t afford them may or may not be true. And so the first thing would be to figure out your automation rate and automation rate is basically to figure out how much you earn as an owner per hour, how much you take out of your business, and that that’s, so that’s money you’re taking out of the business. In Australia, that’s things like superannuation. That’s also if the, you know, the business is paying for cars and mobile phones and those things, all of that, figure out what is your package in dollars terms that the business is providing you, and then divide it by the number of hours you work in a year. Don’t know how many hours you work in a year, how many hours you work in a week times it by how many weeks you work on average you’re working in a year, but that’ll give you what your owner’s hourly rate is. That’s how much you as an owner are actually making out of this business. For some people you do that exercise and you become depressed because you realize you’re not making as much money as maybe you thought you did for others. It’s like, oh, okay, that’s good. And then you do the next part, which is to take your, your, or your owner’s hourly rate and turn that into an automation rate. And basically you could go, well, I’m, let’s say for simple numbers, I’m making a hundred dollars an hour. Well, you don’t want to go and hire someone at a hundred dollars an hour because you get yourself an hour of time back, but you’ve got no arbitrage. You’ve got, you’re just swapping time for money still in, in that regard. So you want to get a certain element of arbitrage. So if you could get someone, you pay, you know, you’re getting 100 now, but you could pay someone 50 an hour. That means you get an hour of your time back and you’re still making 50. Like that’s a pretty good deal. It’s like, hey, I’m going to go and hit, hit the beach or go to the pub and I’m going to spend 50 bucks at the pub. And I’m actually going to, not spend any money because technically I just made 50 bucks for being at the pub. So that’s what we’re looking at. And so the automation rate is typically depending on how much, if you’ll make, if you’re making less than 50 an hour, then you want to do divide it by two. Right. But if you’re doing over 50 or 100 or higher an hour, try to get a four times multiple. So you divide it by four, but you can play with those numbers to figure out. So that’s the first thing is go, what can I actually afford to hire? And this is not just for people. You can also use it for technology. If you’re going to invest in a piece of technology, a CRM system, a project manager, a quoting system. If you ask yourself, okay, by having this set up, it’s going to save me four hours a month. You know, your automation, right? Let’s say it’s 25, four hours a month. That’s a hundred dollars a month. The software, how much are they charging? 90 a month. Great. It’s within the automation, right? I’m going to get four hours a month and it’s within that price point. It’s a no brainer. I should do it. Now, does that mean you shouldn’t invest in something that is over that comes to the second part? So the first part is the fact you think you can’t afford it may be wrong. So there’s a formula or a lens to use. The second part is going, okay. Maybe I can’t afford it now. So now the next question is going, if I hire this role and it frees up my time, what will I be able to use that time to do? So if you’re stuck in the delivery right now and you’re, you know, maybe throw me some numbers so I can make it relevant to your audience, but give, give me some like actual numbers your audience would probably be playing with.

**Greg:** Yeah. So what, like a yearly, yearly wage are you talking about? Or yeah,

**Carl:** I’m thinking like in terms of like revenues they might do or what an average dollar sale might be,

**Greg:** let’s, let’s say a business owner is doing say a million pounds or two, 2 million revenue a year on average, the listener, and they might earn themselves. 150, 000 or 300, 000 Australian dollars a year, that sort of thing.

**Carl:** Okay, perfect. And so what would an average job be typically like, are we talking 50 grand? Are we talking?

**Greg:** Yeah, maybe let’s say 150 grand. Yeah. Okay. 200, 000 a month.

**Carl:** So, so they can get themselves a, if you’re stuck in the delivery. And let’s say all of a sudden you could free up two days a week. Let’s say even just two days away. You’ve got two days a week out of delivery, meaning someone else is doing the delivery. You’ve made the sale and someone else is doing the delivery. So the job’s getting done. The business is earning the income. You’ve got to pay those people and you paying those people eats into your profit margin. Yes. But now you have two full days that you can be focused on something that could replace that income and you can target higher value rates. Right. Like if your owner’s hourly rate right now is a hundred dollars an hour, you would be like, how do I target me doing activities that are worth 200, 300 an hour, so I can start to raise my owner’s hourly rate. And so those would be things like joint ventures, partnerships, or it could just simply be selling more, picking up the phone and calling the existing leads. It could be systemizing the business, having conversations like this where you step up and you go and you look, because when we’re stuck in the weeds of our business doing the stuff, we’re not coming up for air to look. At where we need to make changes. You know, my example earlier where I said. Even with my intention, I just started building a business that was actually a jail. I was building a job. It was only when I actually paused and went, hold on a second, what am I doing? So there is value in freeing up your time to then be able to look at the business in those ways. I guarantee you that if you invest in your learning, you invest with coaches such as Greg or myself, or there’s so many people out there, you will find a way to make more money than you’re freeing up. And that that’s, if you really need it, you know, other times. It’s not about putting more into the business. It’s actually going and focusing on other areas of your life. But yeah, if you think you can’t afford it, you’re thinking too small. Bottom line. Yeah. The only other exception to that would be like, if you truly can’t, like for me, when I was looking at hiring someone to replace the strategist piece, I was like, that’s a lot of money where I’m at right now. I just was like, well, what’s another option? What if that role just didn’t exist? What if it just wasn’t a part of the model? Is that viable? What would, what would it look like?

**Greg:** Yeah, that’s, that’s really important. So I think just again, to recap is anyone listening to this work out what your hourly rate is. I think Carl’s really on the money there with that, because so many people don’t

actually understand what their hourly rate is. So do that first of all, something we actually teach in our program, which is so similar, Carl, but we do it a little bit of a different way. And it’s quite interesting is when we do a little bit of a time audit and we. work out what the hourly rate is. We actually, first of all, look at what they’re doing when they do the time audit. So we do a time audit and we think, right, you’re spending 50 percent of your time on admin tasks and we value that at whatever, 15 or 30 an hour, whatever it’s going to be. You’re spending so much time on project management. We value it at this time. And then we look at the high level tasks. When you actually work that out of what you’re actually spending your time on, it almost always comes back to what you’re earning in a year. So let’s say you’re earning. 50, 000 pounds, but you really want to be earning 150, 000 pounds. You can almost work out why you’re only earning the 50 because all your time is like 50 percent of your time is all spent on those low value mundane tasks. And it’s, crazy to think like that. It’s actually quite obvious really, isn’t it? If yeah, that people don’t realize. So I think what you said there, work out that hourly rate, work out what your high value tasks are. And then if you do hire someone replace it and make sure you’re focusing on those those high value things and you’ll then be able to start freeing yourself up. So yeah, good, advice there, Carl. Let’s just talk about the next step then. So let’s imagine we’ve got the business a little bit more automated. We’ve brought people in to replace us and we’ve elevated ourselves up as a leader. What’s the next step in this holistic model that you’re proposing here? Because business is solved, I guess the next step is relationships and family.

**Carl:** Yeah, home life. And it’s actually again, like one of the things when someone comes and works with us, we actually get them to do some foundational things first. So it’s not like I got to sort out the business and then I deal with relationships because if you do that, there’s a chance that it’ll be too late. And I’m speaking from experience. You know, you often as men, we often don’t realize there’s a problem until she says I’m leaving. Sometimes, sometimes we’re aware and we put our heads in the sand and we don’t realize we delude ourselves. We think she’ll never leave, you know, that it’s all fine. I can speak from my own experience that I was a complete shock to me when my partner of six and a half years left me for another man. So, you know, these things happen. Now I’m very, I’m grateful it all worked out in the grand scheme of things, that life is so much better and I wouldn’t be able to teach this stuff without it. But if I can help you avoid a situation, I really want you to know that it’s worth investing, even just little things. And the simplest thing you can do, we get every client to do, as soon as they join our community, start doing a weekly date night. And I mean weekly. If weekly is impossible, at bare minimum, do a monthly date night. Like we’re talking 12 a year. Now here’s a couple of things. As the man, lead the date. You don’t go to your wife or your woman and say, Hey, what do you want to do, babe, this weekend? Or, Hey, I’m thinking of seeing a movie. What do you want to see? No, no, no. This is not one of those things. You’re not abdicating this. You are taking total control. And the purpose of this date is you are creating an incredible experience for the two of you to connect. And it’s a great magic, a magic moment. And it’s the magic of the moment that will increase attraction between the two of you. Importantly, her attraction to you. And ideally yours will, you know, it’ll change the energy dynamic and you’ll find attraction to her too, but it’s so, it’s super important that you take full ownership of her. Even if she says, Hey babe, how about I do one week? You do the next week. Your answer to that, in my opinion, should be no. It’s like, no, this is my thing. We’re doing this. Also, when I’m saying a date night, I’m not saying this is a night where you’re going to go, yes, I’m going to get lucky. Now, if it leads to intimacy and sex, great, amazing. But that should not be the focus. The focus should actually be no, this is about this. And if it naturally progresses and we’re very happy, cool, but that’s not what we’re doing it for. And so you can do a date night. I don’t care what your excuse is. Even if you’re like, Oh, I can’t get a sitter. I’m stuck at home. We have a two and a half years worth of date night ideas. I can’t remember the exact breakdown off the top of my head, but a huge chunk of that is stuff you could do at home. Another huge chunk is stuff that you could do out of the house. And that’s weekly date nights, two and a half years of weekly date night ideas that you could do. So it can be as simple as watching a movie, sure, but watching a movie is boring. You need to add the mystery, the excitement, or something that makes it fun. And I’ll give you an example from my own life. We recently went and saw that Wonka movie.

**Greg:** Oh, yeah.

**Carl:** And so she didn’t know that that’s what we’re seeing. She didn’t know we’re seeing a movie. And so it was like Thursday night. Date night, I always tell her what to wear. So I’m like, Hey, this is what you should wear. I’ll, I’ll meet you at the front door at seven. And so when I met her at the front door, I had a little, just a little envelope thing and inside the envelope was a golden ticket that I’d made. A little golden ticket for Willy Wonka. Also, when I met her at the front door, I had a top hat on and I was holding, I just found it at like one of those thrift-type variety stores, but it was, I think you’re supposed to put it in the garden, but it’s like, it was just like a little windmill-y thing that was multicolored. I just, it just screamed Willy Wonka-ish to me. And so there I’m wearing a top hat, holding the flower thing and an envelope to give her. Now, before she even opened the envelope, she was like, are we going to see Willy Wonka? She’s like, she figured it out. She’s a smart woman, but it’s like creating these little breadcrumbs, creating this excitement. So, and then when we got in the car, we got to where we were going, I then said, okay, cool. Well, this is yours. And I’ll wear the top hat. And yes, she felt a bit embarrassed, but it’s like, let’s walk through the shopping center and let’s take some photos. Let’s have a bit of fun. We’ve got to get some funny, figure out some funny photos before we go to the movies. And it’s just little simple things like this, make it memorable, show her that you’re a fun guy. You’re potentially pushing, pushing her comfort zone. Like she might not feel comfortable being around a bunch of people wearing this funny thing, like, but you’re showing your confidence and that’s a very attractive trait. And just, it just made it fun. And then, you know, went to, went and saw the movie and just watched the movie as normal. But just these little things can just turn something as simple as I went to the movies into a whole experience.

An at-home example, again, I’ll use a movie, not that I’m encouraging it being a movie. In fact, I’d say the opposite, but we have a projector at home. We don’t actually have a TV, but we have a projector. And this is before we could get a sitter every week. I created a comedy night. Downstairs in our area where we had the projector, I got a little microphone. So kind of this microphone, but I put it on a stand and I had it at the front in front of the projector. I put printed out posters, put them all around the wall. These posters of different comedians. I printed some tickets. And so again, you know, I met her at the top of the stairs. She didn’t know what we were doing. I was like, great, we’re going, we’ll I’m actually taking you somewhere. And then we’re walking down the stairs, there’s some posters of the comedy. There was a candy bar. So I quickly, I went from being with her to being the man ripping the ticket to then being the man behind the candy bar and the price for the candy was a kiss and you know, just, just fun things. And then I opened the door to where the projector was. And it’s like, I was then the man who introduced the comedian and the comedian was just a YouTube video. I just found a YouTube video of a comedy show. We put that up on the projector. And we went to a comedy club. But it’s, it’s those simple things that just, you put in effort, even if in the beginning she doesn’t seem to like it, I guarantee if you stick to it, we just had one of our guys for the last six months, he’s been doing the weekly date nights and his testimonial was like, it has transformed his relationship. Absolutely transformed his relationship. And this is the thing, you can do that even while you’re building a business. And the way I think about it, if you start

to think, Oh, I don’t have time. If you had a really important customer, really important client, you’d pretty well bend over backwards for them. They call you, you know, if they’re the biggest revenue of your business, they got a complaint, you answer their phone. So this is a meeting with your most important client. The woman, the mother of your child, or, you know, if she’s not the actual mother, she’s the woman who’s part of your children’s life. You know, so just treat it as that, put it in your calendar as an appointment. It’s an important meeting with one of the most important clients you’ve got and show up and delight. So that’s the simplest thing you can do. There’s a lot more to it. You know, some guys are struggling with different things. You know, some guys are struggling with a completely dead bedroom. Their relationship has, they’ve become roommates. They’re platonic. They might like it. Hopefully they at least like each other, but the intimacy, the sexual spark has disappeared completely. And often the man is feeling he’s given up. He thinks he’s not interested, but most men I’ve met when you dig a bit deeper, if they’re in that situation where they think they’re not interested in sex anymore, it’s usually just, they’ve been bitten so many times. That now it’s just, they don’t want, it’s too hard to even try to initiate. They don’t. And so they’ve just kind of given up. And because you’ve given up, that’s just, it’s a spiral. There’s all this, there’s dead bedroom stuff. Then there’s other guys where it’s just bring back the connection. Like the intimacy is okay, but we just need to get some connection. And other times it’s, you need to know how to handle conflict. You know conflict is healthy. My previous relationship, the one where the woman left me, I used to pride myself on the fact that we never fought. We never fought. Well, guess what? Because we never fought, we never dealt with some of the issues that I didn’t know were going on underneath the surface that eventually turned into something where she just had met another man and left. So fighting is actually healthy because it’s communication. If you’re not fighting at all, there’s a high chance, I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but there’s a high chance that it means there’s stuff not being said, not being resolved. So conflict is not bad, knowing how to handle the conflict in a way that doesn’t turn it into this big blow up. That’s a skill in itself, how to help her reset when she’s triggered and how to help you stay calm when you’re triggered. So yeah, relationship’s a huge piece, but if you just did a date night, just do a date night, it can transform your relationship.

**Greg:** Yeah, really interesting, Carl. I think you’ve touched on some really valid points there and sometimes it’s just small things, isn’t it? Just thinking outside the box a little bit and just putting a little bit more thought into it, you know, how you’re going to do that. So I love that. I think you gave some great suggestions there. Let’s just focus on the last piece then. So we’ve talked about work. We’ve talked about relationships and connection. What about the other side, which was, I think you said it was health and wealth.

**Carl:** Yeah.

**Greg:** What do we do with that?

**Carl:** Move your body. So let’s talk, let’s talk health for a second. I mean, there’s two components to health. There’s your mental health and there’s your physical health. They’re interlinked. If you can cut down on the vices, ideally even cut them out. I’m not anti drinking, smoking, you know, whatever, like, you know what your vice is. So some people it’s alcohol, others it’s drugs, others it’s sex, others it’s gaming, others it’s pornography. You, listener, as I say this, you’ll probably think of whatever your vice is. For some of us entrepreneurs, our vice is work. We just keep working. So identifying, just kind of taking an audit and go, what are my vices? What am I leaning into? And then what are the things that I’m running away from? Because they’re hard. Now, where am I going to the easy rather than facing the hard? So this is the more the mental piece of looking at what’s going on emotionally. What do I run to? It could be food, could be chocolate, could be drugs, could be sex, could be whatever. So we get clear on what our vices are and we seek some support. That could be through counseling, therapists, coaching, or a community like Dadpreneur, but you’re finding a community you can connect into to get some support on how do you start to adjust your behaviors. How do you handle why you go to the vices? Usually it’s childhood stuff or some form of trauma. You know, the trauma that I had to deal with from a relationship breakdown. That was huge, but that trauma that came up really at the foundation, that was just childhood stuff that just got ripped apart at a much later age. That’s all. So the cut was there. It just became a gashing wound later in life. And that’s usually true. So you, you need to start delving into, at least become aware of where your issues lie and then seek some help.

**Greg:** Just on that, Carl, is that when you’re diving into where the relationships, the issues align, is that seeking professional help from that? Do people need that? Or is it something that you can be a bit introspective and work these things out yourself?

**Carl:** I think it can you work these things out yourself? Yes. Is it easier with other people? Definitely. Professionals are help, especially if you’re dealing with some really dark stuff. Professionals are really useful. I’m, I’m a fan of lots of different modalities. You know, I go to a, I’m not a big fan of talk therapy. Sorry if a listener is a talk therapist, but I’m not a fan of talk therapy. I’m a fan. If I go see a therapist and I do I’m looking for people with practical things like they do EMDR or IFS known as internal family systems. I’m looking for a specific therapy type that’s interventional, not just say, let’s just talk about it. Then, you know, outside of that, I’m then looking at trying to understand my own behavior. I don’t think like some people can give up. Alcohol, whatever, just by going cold turkey. If you can do that, that’s great, but there are other ways to handle it, right? You can go through a 12-step program. You can get support with mates. You could do a health challenge. You know, I gave up alcohol. Because I joined a six-pack challenge and had some friends who were all like, let’s get a six-pack and part of getting a six-pack, the trainer said, well, you need to cut out alcohol to at least get the six-pack. And because I was so focused on the goal of, I wanted to get a six-pack, which is done in the kitchen, by the way, if you ever want to get a six-pack, it’s not working out, it’s the foods you consume and the drinks you consume. Well, once I kind of got there and I’d been building the habits. I started to be like, Oh, I don’t really need alcohol actually. Like I found an alternative and that’s the thing you’ll usually need to find an alternative for your vice. So for me, it became soda, water, and lime. Instead of ordering a beer or a wine or whatever, it’s just soda, water, and lime. And over time, you just get used to that. It just becomes your thing you do. So it’s about changing the behaviors. And that usually starts by creating new routines and the routines and sticking to them. It becomes, if all of your friends drink and you’re used to going down to the pub and having a drink every day after work, those routines are creating the results of your dad bod or whatever’s going on. So you need to get some help around that. And ideally, you need to also look at the behaviors you’re doing on a regular basis, who and who around that is enabling that. It doesn’t mean you can’t be friends with those people, but maybe you just like to distance yourself a little bit or say, Hey, instead of meeting at the pub, how about you meet me for a walk or let’s go for a kayak or let’s go and do this other thing that’s away from the pub. And so you can just shift your behavior. So the mental and physical stuff definitely work out at least once a week if, I mean, you guys, your, your audience is more construction. So while they’re on the tools, they’re moving about, but once they move into the stage of sitting behind the desk, a lot more. You become sedentary. It becomes really important to go to a gym, get a personal trainer. You can do stuff at home in part of what we do at Dadpreneur. We have every Tuesday, we have a personal trainer online over zoom who runs a session every single week. It’s like as part of the program, if you don’t have anything else going on, come to this session and you can move your body and work out. And if you did nothing else this week, you at least had one session that you moved your body. Because frankly, to get rid of the dad bod movement, isn’t so much about getting rid of the dad bod. The movement is more about fixing your posture, your alignment strength, to make sure you don’t hurt yourself when you’re picking your kids up or as you get older, having injuries. It’s more about what you eat and consume. That’s going to get rid of the dead body.

**Greg:** Yeah. Yeah. Without a doubt. So really useful points there on routine. Interestingly enough, I’m currently doing a 75 hard challenge

. I’m about 50, 51 days and I’m really counting it down now. But but it’s amazing. And anyone listening, if you don’t know what 75 hard is, it’s. Two workouts a day, no alcohol, and you’ve got to stick to a diet and the kind of other bits and bobs that you’ve got to put in there. What I’ve found though is that replacing the alcohol and having either non-alcoholic beers or another drink altogether actually, once you get into that routine, life just carries on. It’s not as if like, oh, I’m not going to go to parties anymore. I’m not going to go to restaurants because I’m not drinking. You just replace it and it’s fine. It’s, you know, you think, well, actually I don’t need this as a crutch to, to hang on to.

You can easily have just as much fun without it. And, yeah, I, may, I probably will go back to having a glass of wine and that when I finished the routine, but at the same time, it’s, definitely not as important in my life as it was before I started the challenge. So sometimes it’s just getting yourself into a completely new habit, isn’t it, to break some of these vices and then you realize actually you don’t need it anyway, you know, life’s just as good without it.

**Carl:** As you said you point to you start to notice how you used to use it, you know, and go, Oh, okay. I would use it in this way. You didn’t necessarily at the time, you wouldn’t have seen how to use it. But now once you stopped using it, you start to notice, Oh, I would have it because I thought this, but I don’t actually need it for that. And it doesn’t, yeah, it doesn’t mean that like, I’m never one of those people. Like you should all give up alcohol. I still would have a drink occasionally now too. But I think everyone should give it a go, especially if you drink a lot to actually go, okay, let’s step back. Let’s change, try and change this behavior to see what power it has over me. And then dig deeper either with professional help or your own inquiry of why does it have that power of you? What are you using it for?

**Greg:** Yeah, 100%. So you’ve talked about the health. What about the wealth side?

**Carl:** Yeah. So I think I touched on this at the beginning of the convo. A big mistake I think all entrepreneurs make, but men in particular, is we’re so optimistic. We keep reinvesting in the business. The business is our thing and we, it’s our baby and I’m going to keep growing it and investing it. And so you’re either pulling cash out to just spend, or you’re pulling, you’re not pulling cash out. You’re just putting the cash back into the business, more staff, more equipment, more advertising, more whatever, bigger premises. And then at the end of the day, if something goes wrong or when you choose to sell, if you haven’t built a business that works without you, the valuation, your company’s potentially going to be a lot lower than you’d like it to be because they’re buying a job. They’re not buying a well-run business. And so then you get this payout and you go, yeah, that you find out doesn’t set you up for life in the way that maybe you thought it would. And so I’m a big fan of you need to be regularly taking cash out and we aim for our members is how do we get you to have at least 100,000, I’m talking Aussie dollars here, but 100,000 a year minimum in cashflow that’s investable. How do you at least have a hundred thousand dollars investable cashflow that you can be throwing into, into your, your other assets?

And so when I’m talking other assets, I’m talking things like cryptocurrencies, that’s like Bitcoin. If you’re not sure what that is like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and some of those other types of ones out there we’re talking share market. You can be as simple as things like ETFs. Now, I’m not a financial advisor. I’m not giving advice here right now, but I’m just telling you generally the things I invest in cryptocurrencies, shares, and property. Personally, I’m a big fan of commercial property. In Australia, there’s a religion of residential property. I don’t really buy into that. I do have residential property, but I, I just don’t think it’s the thing that everyone else thinks it is. But whatever it is, you need vehicles to park your money to protect as one. So not only do you need to be putting money out elsewhere that is generating cash flow, and that’s the other big mistake. That’s why I’m not a big fan of residential here in Australia is most money in the residential game in Australia is made through capital gain. Right. A lot of property is not cashflow positive. If you won’t make enough money to cover their, the mortgage prepayments. And you want to generate more cashflow. If the business is continuing to fund your lifestyle, all that means is you start building this machine that is compounding more and more cashflow. So if you had a hundred thousand in investable cashflow from your business, and you invest that and now you get to a point where you’ve got another 100,000 investable cashflow coming from all those investments, you’ve now got, even if you didn’t take any more from the business, you’ve got 200,000 a year. Investing every single year, the compound of that will grow to a point that it’d probably be outperforming ideally your business. And we aim for a few different targets. Like your first level is how do you get to financial security and financial security is your passive income. That’s that money coming from the investments. Is covering your necessities to live we’re not saying it gives you beautiful travel holidays but we’re talking about food shelter your general basic minimal necessities to live that even if your business shut down that you would be able to make sure all that was taken care of. And then the next level up is, you know, financial freedom, where you actually now can cover your, all your expenses, including lifestyle costs. And then you can have abundance. And then you can have critical mass where it’s a snowball, like I was talking about, like you could, you basically couldn’t outspend unless you dramatically upgrade your lifestyle. You couldn’t outspend the money that you make. And that’s all outside of what the business is doing. And some of those investments, by the way, can be investing in other businesses as well. It doesn’t have to be just in those other asset classes, but while you’re definitely the operator of your business, you should not be investing into another business unless you’re purely a private money investor. And that’s all you’re doing. That’s my opinion.

**Greg:** Yeah, that’s great. And I think it’s really important just to bring this up because sometimes we can be just so fixated on our business right here and right now that we’re not thinking of what I want the next 5, 10, 15 years to look like. And without that plan and without that strategy, you’re just spinning your wheels and you’re not actually making progress in life. So I think it’s really important that people just take a step back and think, well, what actually am I doing to progress my actual wealth rather than just focusing on, you know, the here and now with business? So really valuable stuff you’ve highlighted today, Carl, just to recap on those three things for everyone. We looked at the importance of relationships and connection. We looked at the importance of your business and how to automate and potentially step up as a leader and empower more people to do things for you. And then we looked at how to improve your health and your wealth. So, much value there that we’re going to be able to take away from that. And I certainly will as well, Carl. You mentioned you might have some goodies or giveaways that people can download from this podcast. What were they, Carl?

**Carl:** Well, I think something that could be really useful is the date night stuff, right? I truly think that if you’re not doing a regular date night, or if you are, but it’s just the basic, hey, we go for dinner every week. It’s a good start, but you’re missing the magic. You’re missing the variety that’s going to create the excitement, especially in her end. But I get it. You’re hard. It’s hard. You’re a business owner. You’re focusing on business stuff. Coming up with ideas sucks. So just take ours. As I said, we’ve got two and a half years worth of weekly date night ideas, some stuff you can do at home. And by the way, all the home things are not watching a movie. Every single one of the home ideas is not watching a movie. So there’s at least a year’s worth of that. And then I think it’s a year and a half of outside of the house. So you can get that at dadpreneur.com/datenight. Dadpreneur.com/datenight. I’m sure it’ll be in the show notes and stuff. But yeah, if you go there, you can download our full PDF guide of all of these date night ideas. So just steal them and put it into your, into your relationship. I guarantee you it’ll make a huge difference.

**Greg:** Awesome. I think I’ll be downloading that. And when everyone sees me on social media, my Willy Wonka hat on, you know where I’ve stolen the idea from. So sounds brilliant, Carl. Really interesting conversation today and really appreciate you coming on and sharing that value. And I wish you all the best with Dadpreneur and Automation Agency.

**Carl:** Pleasure. Thanks for having me.