Watch the video below for a more in-depth walkthrough of Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. If you haven’t read the book, you can get a copy here.
My daughter is 4 and just started playing soccer.
And by the end of that day, I understood Dan Martell’s entire book — Buy Back Your Time — better than I did when I read it.
Let me walk you through the day, because it matters.
I’d worked a full week. Founder, CEO, the works. Saturday was supposed to be the day I finally caught up on everything around the house.
Here’s how Saturday actually went:
Up at 7:30. She’s up at 8:15. Soccer’s at 10:00 — which means a not-quite-four-year-old has to wake up, get dressed, and eat breakfast. If you have a kid that age, you know that’s not a thirty-minute operation.
Soccer for an hour. Home for a snack. Then errands — the sports store for cleats and a water bottle now that it’s getting warm, some groceries, a few other things. Home at 2:30. Lunch. I watched 45 minutes of F1. Pool at 4:00. Home at 5:30 and straight to the grill, because we’d planned chicken wings.
By the time the wings were done it was 7:15.
We finished dinner and she was an hour from falling asleep standing up.
And I sat there and did the math:
I didn’t do a single thing I needed to do around the house. Not one.
Not because I’m lazy. Not because I couldn’t. I’m completely capable of running errands and fixing things and handling the list. We’d also just moved countries, so the list was longer than usual.
But it didn’t matter. The day ate it.
And here’s the part that makes it a trap:
On paper, that was a great Saturday. Present dad. Present husband. Out with my family from morning to night.
But the small stuff still slid. It always does.
My wife needed her bike fixed so she could go for a ride. Small thing. Ten minutes, maybe. It didn’t happen — and the little things you let slide don’t disappear. They wait. And eventually you pay for them. Sometimes with your spouse. Sometimes with your own sanity. Always later than you’d like.
That’s the no-win every business owner knows. You can do the family day exactly right and still lose ground on the things that quietly hold the home together. There aren’t enough hours to be the founder, the dad, the husband, and the guy who fixes the bike.
And the answer was never “wake up earlier Saturday and grind harder.” The answer was sitting right in front of me:
I should be paying someone $10 to $15 an hour to take the entire around-the-house list off my plate.
That’s it. That’s the whole realization.
And that’s the entire premise of Buy Back Your Time in one Saturday.
Except Martell wrote it about your business. I just lived it on a weekend with a four-year-old and a tray of chicken wings.
TLDR — Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell
Key Takeaways
- The author’s busy Saturday with family highlights the need to delegate tasks for better work-life balance.
- The book *Buy Back Your Time* by Dan Martell emphasizes hiring to buy back your time, not just to grow your business.
- Martell identifies key concepts, like understanding the ‘Pain Line’ and recognizing that the founder often becomes the bottleneck.
- However, the book overlooks practicalities, such as effective time audits and the best order for hiring based on specific business needs.
- Overall, while the book is a valuable guide, it doesn’t address the execution aspect of hiring properly.
Table of Contents
What This Review Actually Is
I’m not going to cliff-note this for you.
This is a review of Buy Back Your Time from a company that has placed over 1,100 people into the exact roles the book tells you to hire — across 35+ countries. We don’t theorize about your first hire. We make it. It’s what we do.
Which means I read this book differently than most people who review it.
Here’s the short version:
Martell is right about where you’re going. The book, because it’s a book, misses a lot of the “what comes next”.
Four things he nails. Four things he gets wrong.
Let’s start with what he nails.
4 Things Buy Back Your Time Gets Right
1. “Don’t Hire to Grow Your Business. Hire to Buy Back Your Time.”
That sentence is the whole book, and it’s correct.
Most people think about hiring backwards. They wait until they’re “big enough” to need someone. They hire to add horsepower. To grow.
Martell flips it. You don’t hire to grow. You hire to take the low-value, soul-draining stuff off your plate so you can spend your hours on the two or three things only you can do.
He even puts a number on it — the Buyback Rate.
Take what you earn in an hour and divide it by four. That’s roughly what you should be willing to pay someone to take a task off your hands. Earn $40 an hour, hire the task out at $10, and the math works in your favor every single time.
Here’s why this one matters:
We watch founders sit on a hire for a year. A full year. Because they’re waiting to “need” it. The ones who flip the switch to “I’m buying back my time, not adding headcount” are the ones who actually pull the trigger.
That reframe is the most valuable thing in the book. He nailed it.
2. The Pain Line
This is the part that hit closest for me.
Martell describes the Pain Line as the point where your business demands more than you can give without it costing your health, your relationships, or your sanity. He puts numbers on it — somewhere around twelve direct reports and a million in revenue — but the real definition is psychological. It’s the moment growth starts to hurt more than it’s worth.
Here’s where I’d push on it, though:
You don’t just hit the Pain Line. You can fly right past those numbers and not feel a thing for a while.
They’re a good first impression, not gospel. You might blow past twelve reports and a million in revenue completely energized — building, shipping, holding the whole operation together with duct tape and Band-Aids. And it all works. Right up until it doesn’t.
That’s the part the clean numbers hide. The line and the consequences don’t arrive on the same day. You can cross it six months to a year before the bill comes due — and by the time you feel it, you blew past the warning a long time ago.
And when the pain finally lands, Martell says you do one of three things:
You stall. You quietly decide not to grow, which is a slow death.
You sabotage. You subconsciously blow up your own progress, reverse decisions, start fires.
Or you sell. You dump the business to escape the pain, then carry the exact same problem into the next thing — because you were the problem.
His line on it is perfect. If the business depends on you, you don’t own a business. You own a job. And in Martell’s words, “it’s the worst job in the world, because you’re working for a lunatic.”
The best detail is that the Pain Line isn’t a one-time wall. He says he hits it himself every few months and runs the same loop each time. So it’s a recurring signal, not a milestone.
Every founder who calls us is standing on the Pain Line. They don’t call it that. They call it “I’m drowning.”
Same thing.
3. The Part Where He Admits You’re the Problem
Chapter three is about the “5 Time Assassins” — the Staller, the Speed Demon, the Supervisor, the Saver, and the Self-Medicator. Five behaviors that quietly eat a founder alive.
But the framing underneath the list is the best part.
Martell argues that most founders come from chaotic backgrounds, got good at surviving chaos, and now subconsciously manufacture it — because calm feels wrong. All five assassins are just the different ways you light your own fires.
That’s the least flattering thing in the book. It’s also the truest.
The one I’d circle is the Supervisor. The founder who hires someone, then does the job for them anyway. We place a great Executive Assistant, and then watch the owner hover over every reply until that hire either quits or stops thinking for themselves.
The book is right. The bottleneck is usually sitting in your chair.
4. The Definition of Done
This is the one I use every single day.
For any task you hand off, you spell out exactly what “done” looks like — the facts, the feeling, and the functionality. What it should contain, how it should feel, what it has to do when it’s finished.
Sounds small. It’s the whole game.
It’s the difference between a hire who comes back to you with forty questions and a hire who actually finishes the thing. Most “bad hires” aren’t bad hires. They’re people who were never told what done looks like.
Steal this one. It works.
4 Things Buy Back Your Time Gets Wrong
(Or doesn’t get to)
Now the other side.
The book is good. But there’s a pattern of places where it tells you what to do and goes quiet at the exact moment doing it gets hard.
Here are the four that matter.
1. The Time Audit Nobody Actually Does
The book’s very first hands-on assignment is to log every fifteen minutes of your day for two full weeks, then go back with a green and red highlighter and mark what gives you energy versus what drains it.
It’s a great idea on paper.
Nobody finishes it.
I’ve talked to hundreds of founders about hiring assistants over the last few years.
And I’ve given our our own time audit templates, and talked to so many people about this…
…and it just doesn’t get done.
I’ve made time audits down to the most basic version possible: Write down what you did in a day, then try to write how long each thing took. That’s it. No fifteen-minute blocks, no two weeks, no color coding.
I’ve tested it. I’ve given away templates. I’ve given away everything.
The number of people who actually finish it is maybe 20%.
It doesn’t matter how simple I make it. It doesn’t matter how many times I strip it down. Getting someone to do the audit is a chore in and of itself — which means the entire DRIP Matrix, the framework the rest of the book leans on, sits on top of data almost nobody collects.
Now here’s the ironic part:
The best person to audit your time would be…your Assistant.
If you had one.
The person who’d actually pin you down and ask, “What did you do today? How long did that take?” is the hire you’re trying to justify. You need the audit to make the hire. But the person most likely to get the audit done is the hire. That’s the loop, and it runs backwards.
The SOP and operational advice has the same kind of hole, just in reverse.
People don’t avoid writing processes. They overbuild them. They treat documenting a task like it’s a documentary project, so they never start.
It doesn’t need to be that. Record two or three quick Looms of yourself doing the task. Pull the transcript. Hand the transcript and the videos to AI and let it write the steps. That’s your SOP. You wrote nothing. Then you hand it to the new hire and let them refine it.
Martell’s playbook chapter tells you to record yourself doing the task. True. It just stops right before the part that makes it actually happen.
2. The Replacement Ladder Can’t Be a Fixed Ladder
This is the big one.
Martell gives you an order to hire in: Admin, then Delivery, then Marketing, then Sales, then Leadership. Climb the rungs in sequence.
The problem isn’t that the order is wrong.
The problem is that no fixed order can be right.
A book has to generalize. It has to hand every reader the same order of operations.
But the correct first hire is reverse-engineered from where your specific business is actually bleeding time — and that changes completely depending on what you do.
Run an outbound-sales-heavy shop?
Sales is the twenty-hour-a-week monster — writing messages, chasing follow-ups, managing reps — while marketing is a campaign you touch once a week. By Martell’s own logic of buying back your time, the Sales Rep should come off your plate first, not fourth.
Run an ecommerce brand?
“Delivery” is a 3PL and a supplier that mostly runs itself, so that rung is irrelevant and your first real hire is probably a customer-service Virtual Assistant or someone running ads.
Run a service business?
Delivery is the product. It’s the most labor-intensive thing you own, so it might be rung one.
Run a software company? The thing drowning you might be support tickets landing in your inbox every night, which bumps customer support ahead of everything else on his list.
Run a local business — a clinic, a contractor, a studio?
The phone, the scheduling, and the front desk are what’s burying you. An office admin is rung one, and “marketing” is something you get to much later.
The right first hire is a function of your model, not a staircase everyone climbs in the same order.
And this is the one thing a coaching book physically cannot do for you. It can’t look at your operation, find your bottleneck, and tell you which hire actually buys back the most time. That requires someone who’s placed people across every one of those models and watched where the time actually went.
A book can’t reverse-engineer your business. That’s the gap.
3. One Hiring Process for Every Hire
Martell’s “Test-First” hiring method runs the same playbook on every candidate — a video application, an assessment, a paid test project, then you pick the top candidate.
Parts of that are good. A paid work-sample really does predict performance better than any interview.
But it’s one playbook, and it’s the abundance playbook.
Here’s the thing the book misses:
How much friction you’re allowed to demand in a hiring process depends entirely on how many qualified fish are in the ocean, lake, puddle, or pond you’re fishing in
Stay with me on the fishing analogies.
When you’re hiring a basic Virtual Assistant role, you’re fishing in an ocean. Hundreds of applicants. Stack all the hoops you want — the video, the assessment, the paid project — and let it filter. That works.
When you’re hiring a great Executive Assistant or a closer who already has offers on the table, you’re fishing in a puddle. Every hoop you add is a likeliness that you don’t get the right person.
The good one looks at your video-then-assessment-then-project gauntlet, compares it to the company that’s already at the finish line with them, and walks. Sometimes speed wins the hire, full stop.
In a puddle, you invert the whole thing. You compress the process. You lead with speed. And you sell them.
Martell has been fishing in an ocean for a decade — known brand, inbound applicants lining up. So he wrote the ocean playbook. Makes sense. Most of his readers are standing over a puddle for the exact role they need, running his hoops, and losing the good ones.
And here’s the part the book never touches: You can shrink your own puddle.
Martell has the dream brand — millions of followers, applicants stacked up. He gets to pick. Most founders don’t have that pull, which already makes the pond smaller. Then they go and make it worse. They pile on wild requirements, or they offer a salary nobody serious would take, and the puddle shrinks to a droplet.
Basically: Dan can post an Instagram story and be flooded with world-class candidates, with a full hiring team to evaluate them all.
You…get to post on LinkedIn and hope.
Because hiring is a two-way offer. Both sides of the table are deciding. You’re evaluating them, and they’re evaluating you.
So before you run anyone through a gauntlet, ask yourself one question: Are you a place a good person would actually want to work?
That one question simplifies everything. People say, “I’ll just hire an Assistant, it’s simple.”
Sure. But are you offering something an A-Player Executive Assistant would actually choose? That matters more than your screening process ever will.
One more, on the take-home test specifically: Match the test to the real job, or it’s worthless.
Send a Sales Rep a written “respond to this client” assignment and you’re testing AI plus twenty-four hours, not the person.
A real sales test is a live role-play on a call, because that’s the actual job and AI can’t sit in.
A Virtual Assistant who’ll use AI every day on the job? Let them use AI in the test. The mismatch is the bug.
4. It Prices the Wrong Tasks
The book treats your to-do list like a flat list. Score each task by value and energy, delegate the cheap draining ones, keep the few that light you up.
But your tasks aren’t a flat list. They’re a chain. And the cheap tasks are sitting on top of the expensive ones, blocking them.
Two examples almost every founder has lived.
You finally carve out time to start making video. The content everyone keeps telling you to make, the stuff that actually builds the brand.
Except you can’t just hit record. First it’s a decent mic. Then software to edit, or hell, hiring a Video Editor. Then lighting, because the first clip looked like a hostage video. Then figuring out where the files even go. Then the camera won’t talk to the editing program, so now you’re forty minutes deep in driver settings.
You sat down to make one video. You made zero, and lost the afternoon.
Or you want a simple page up to sell something. One page. Should be quick.
Except it’s buy the domain, set up the hosting, learn the page builder, write the copy, wire in the payment processor, install the SSL cert — and then it loads sideways on mobile and you’re back in the settings again.
One page. Two days. Still not live.
The task in front of the task.
This is death by a thousand cuts, and it’s the most relatable failure mode there is. Every founder has lost a day to exactly this and felt like an idiot about it.
So here’s the line the book misses:
A blocker is worth what it blocks, not what it costs.
Martell prices that kind of setup at thirty minutes of admin. Wrong number. Its real price is the month of content that never got made, or the sales page that still isn’t taking orders.
And that flips how you price the hire — which is the part that matters. The book sells the assistant as “buy back the thirty minutes the task eats.” The truer pitch is “buy back the work the task was blocking.” The person who handles your setup work isn’t worth thirty minutes a week. They’re worth every video that finally ships and every page that finally goes live — and the revenue that rides on both.
Much bigger number. And it’s the real one.
One More: The Perfect Week
Quick aside, because this one isn’t really a disagreement.
Martell tells you to block your entire week in advance, hour by hour. For some people that works great. For others, the first surprise client call detonates the whole thing and they spend the afternoon feeling like they failed.
The version that holds: Protect one deep block at your peak hours — three or four hours when you’re sharpest. Pick the three things that actually matter that week. Cascade those into three to five things a day, max. And stay honest about what the day will really allow.
Put the slack in the planning, not the accountability. Plan light enough that you don’t need the forgiveness — then actually land the three.
That’s it. Moving on.
The Pattern Underneath All Four
Notice the shape, because it’s the same shape every time.
The audit he assigns but you’ll never finish. The SOP he tells you to record but not how to actually complete. The ladder he hands you but can’t fit to your business. The hiring gauntlet that costs you the best candidate. The blocker he prices at thirty minutes that’s actually eating your whole day.
Every single one, Martell names the principle…but stops at the exact spot where the real problem starts.
The entire distance between “I should do this” and “I actually did this” is paved with little frictions the book doesn’t cover.
And there’s a reason for that.
He’s writing from the top of the mountain. Known brand. Deep capital. Applicants lining up. A polished operation with systems already in place.
You’re on the ground.
The book is right about the view from up there. It’s quiet about the climb.
What the Book Can’t Do for You
So here’s where I land on Buy Back Your Time.
It’s a good map. Maybe the best one in this space. It tells you where to go — buy back your time, get the low-value work off your plate, hire so success gives you freedom instead of pain. All correct. Read it.
But a map can’t hand you the person.
It can’t look at your business, find your real bottleneck, and put the right hire — vetted, in your pool, matched to your model — in the seat. That’s not a map problem. That’s a terrain problem.
And the terrain is the part we do.
You book a call. We get clear on where you’re actually bleeding time — which, half the time, isn’t the role you walked in thinking you needed. We write the job description. We search our database. We headhunt. We screen. We run the trial task from start to finish.
We present candidates in 5 business days. You show up to the interviews. We handle everything else.
One all-in monthly fee. No salary breakdowns. No hidden costs. Payroll and compliance handled. College-educated, English-speaking talent from a global network. And if a hire doesn’t stick, you get unlimited replacements — we don’t win unless the placement does.
Martell told you to make the hire.
We’re the part where it actually happens.
Closing Thoughts On Buy Back Your Time
I think about those weekends. A lot.
Nothing about it was a tragedy. Soccer, the pool, chicken wings on the grill with my daughter. That’s the good stuff. That’s the point.
The lesson wasn’t “do more.” It was that the around-the-house list never belonged on my plate to begin with — and the only reason it stayed there is that I never handed it to someone for fifteen bucks an hour.
Your business is the same list. Bigger numbers. Same lesson.
Martell will tell you that. He’s right.
The only question left is who actually finds you the person.
