A (0:00)

When we think of entrepreneurs, we often think of working 100 hours a week and having no time for our family. But as I climbed the ladder of success and I met billionaires, along the way, I learned something simple. Top level entrepreneurs run their businesses in completely different ways, making way more money by working way less hours. And if you don't master every level, you'll be stuck in the hamster wheel of entrepreneurship, never getting the freedom you started the business for in the first place. So I'm going to show you what it looks like to run a business at every level and how to adapt to each one. Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a hundred million dollar empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. My bestselling book, Buy back. Your time is out now. Grab a copy@buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers. So level 1, 100k to 300k. This is what I call the Hustler. So at this level, you sell your time. Your goal is to prove to other people that you can deliver value. It's the proof, not the polish. So there's two signs that you're stuck at this level. The first one is you're doing everything. Everybody wishes it wasn't that way. But guess what? That's where we all start. We have to do everything. The other thing is we're selling our time, meaning that when people buy from us, we're the ones that are doing the work. That. That's why we call it the Hustler. Here's a very clear framework to help you level up to the next stage. I call it the scaling credo. The whole point is to focus, which stands for follow one course until successful. Which means we have to pick one target customer, sometimes called an icp, an ideal customer profile. Pick one customer that has the pain that your product can solve. The second is one product. Don't sell 14 offers. Sell one offer. The third is one conversion tool. One way of selling. Most of the time at this level, it's you getting on a phone and talking to the buyer and communicating the value that your product solves and getting good at communication, getting good at sales. That is a meta skill you're going to take to the next levels. The fourth is one channel. One way to get awareness. One way to create marketing and just stick with it. The fifth part of the scale and credo is to do all those four for one year. I dare you to focus for one year on four things and just hit it back to back to back. And every time you think, oh, I could do more, stop yourself. If you do that, you'll get to a million in revenue. So I wanna share some hacks that I only teach in my elite coaching. These are the five daily non negotiables that I use every day. That's really added the most value to my life. I wanna give you three that if you do, will change everything. One is you post three posts every day where you're talking to your camera as stories. It's gonna teach you at communicating. The second habit is five daily outreaches five times a day, where you either message somebody follows you, you message somebody new, you message somebody as a mentor. But if you do five outreaches every day, that's gonna build your relationships. And the more hands you shake, the more money you're gonna make. The Last1 is one offer made every day. Force yourself to do enough reps to get to a point where you're making an offer for your service every day. If you can get one, one per day, over 10 days, you'll probably get one sale. That's three sales a month. That'll get you into the flow to go from 100k to 300k, no problem. A few years ago, I was coaching this freelancer and I remember he was stuck at 100k, 150k and he wanted to grow. And I said, well, what are you selling? He showed me 14 different offers and nobody was buying quickly. All we did was go through and say, hey, what are you great at? What do you love to do and what do you think the market wants? And then we cut all of them except for one. He found out that the one thing he loved to do is build websites for local gyms. In 30 days, he sold 10. The money and the confidence followed. That is how we solve things at this level. We do less, we focus on few and we try to build that revenue up. Most people will stop doing this because they don't want to repeat what works, even if it's boring. So now that you know how to handle the boring stuff, it's time to level up. Level 2, 300K to a million. The specialist. At this level, you're essentially getting full of work. The marketing's working, the demand's coming in, but the calendar is busy. The challenge is, is that you're now the bottleneck. It's kind of like if you opened up a Restaurant, you just couldn't do everything yourself. You can't take orders, you can't cook, you can't serve at the same time. So then you think about it, it's like, okay, I gotta buy back some time. So you hire a line cook and a server first so that you can get more time in your calendar. So that not only can you be in the business, you can start working on, on the business. If you learn how not to be the bottleneck, you can get to a million a year. I remember one time I was chatting with this woman, Sarah, in my DMs on Instagram, and she had a design shop and she was feeling overwhelmed. She was answering all of her emails, staying up till midnight. She's freaking out, saying, dan, I need some help. So what I suggested, and I teach this in my book Buy Back youk Time, is hire somebody to help with the administrative assistant work. Essentially, in 30 days of her working through her EA, she ended up getting back 20 hours a week. Revenue went up. Why? She had time to do marketing and sales again. So if you wanna level up just like Sarah, here's the exact frameworks you need to get your time back. The first one is called the buyback loop. And it is a simple but crazy powerful strategy. Anytime I feel overwhelmed, my calendar has turned into chaos. I stop and I first do a time and energy audit. That's the first step. And I kind of use that audit to find the bucket of things that, that I need to give to somebody else so that I can get some freedom back, so I can focus on things that light me up, that make me the most money. The second step is transfer, which is I audit my calendar to find that bucket. Then I hire somebody. Now I gotta transfer it to them. The best way to do this is called the camcorder method. Whatever work you wanna give to somebody else to transfer, you just record yourself doing it. That way, when they join, the first week they're with you is essentially watching these videos and creating the SOP that you don't have to create because you've already documented it in the videos. And that way you can see if they got what you were teaching in the videos by what documented. See how powerful this is. The last step is to fill. Fill your calendar back up immediately with things that make you more money. Once that is filled, then you want to upgrade your skills, your habits and your character traits so that you can become more. Because each new level we talk about is going to require a different version of you to overcome that level. As I always say new level, new devil. So you got to become a new person to attack and defeat that new devil. And the second framework is called the 108010 rule. The first 10% is the ideation. When I sit down with somebody and I'm working on a project, like right now I'm working on a really cool car project, that first 10% is getting clear on the vision. This is what it's going to look like. Here's the specs, ask me the questions. Because once I give you that, that's the plan, I'm going to then go to the 80% which is execution. I'm going to allow them to execute that ideation because when I come back at the end of it, that 10% integration, that's where I get to refine things and tweak things. And even if they're not doing it at 100% of what you can do, 80 done by somebody else is 100% awesome. The truth is, at this level, the non negotiable first hire is an executive assistant. You know, your time is worth more and like not having that person is kind of playing entrepreneurship on hard mode. And the truth is, at this level, you should be able to afford it. And look, I get a lot of people don't even know what I would give my assistant. So if you want access to my internal playbook, my executive assistant playbook, just click the link in the description below and I'll send a copy over to you. Just make sure to check your junk folder. Cause sometimes those emails don't go directly to you. This is why people find this hard. Because if you don't value your time, no one else will. And the people that don't value their time are gonna be the first ones to waste yours. Great. You just bought back all your time. Now we need a simple system to stop all the fires before we get back to the episode. If you wanna jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it@martell method.com Level 3, 1 million to 3 million. I call this the operator. Now you've built something real. You have a business. It's making money, but it's time to operate it. See, without it, chaos slowly creeps in. And what we need to do, in this word, nobody likes it, is we got to standardize delivery, we have to raise prices and we have to make Onboarding smooth. Here are some signs that you might be stuck at this level. You have a strong business, but it feels crazy chaotic and you think it's normal. That's the worst part is nobody's taught you that these kind of problems at this level are abnormal. That's why I like to use like a laundromat example, because you want to get to a place where your business just runs on a rhythm. I go to a laundromat. Clothes goes in, it washes, it gets rinsed, it dries out, it gets folded. Boom. See that cycle? Same step every time. You don't do a different thing for T shirts or socks or, or your underwear. It's kinda like my buddy Viv. He has this software called Revio. It's like an AI powered sell by chat software. And for a while when he launched it, he was just trying to do the best thing for the customer. So every time he got a new customer, he created a custom solution for them. Problem is, there was no repeatability with it. He felt stuck. And then we sat down. I said, bro, let's just create a simple path for every new customer. The software did all the heavy lifting, but people still needed some process to make sure it got integrated, deployed and used by the team. That simple streamlining of his onboarding cut Churn in half, and he was able to raise his rates by 20%, making the business a lot more fun to own. So if you want to level up like Veev, here's a framework for leveling up. This framework is called the four S's. The first one is scope. I think of it this way. I need to define exactly what needs to be done to the degree I can communicate the specificity of what complete looks like or what I call the definition of done. Then the better chance the person I'm asking to do the thing, they give it back to me the way I want. That's the scope. The second step is the steps. You gotta outline the process, the sequence of actions. Now, I know for a lot of creators this is not fun, but if you want to grow, you have to have systems. System stands for save yourself time, energy, money and stress. Without a system, nobody else can do the thing, your magic sauce without you involved. So here's where you give them the steps that they follow in the checklist. That system so that they can load the washer, ensure they get everything done right, dry it and fold it properly as per your standards so you're no longer involved. Number three is standards. And I kind of alluded to this, but it's worth mentioning that standards are not what you say they are. Standards are what you accept establishing the quality expectation or rules or principles. Those are the standards. So, for example, we have a standard that you have to keep the kitchen clean. If you don't, we're gonna ask whose plate that was, we're gonna bring the plate to their desk and we're informing them that they've lost the privilege of using the kitchen for the next week, saying pretty please, asking them every time, having them continue to leave their stuff in the sink. That's not a standard, that's a request. Standards are what you enforce. Number four is a scorecard. Without the scorecard, there's no way for somebody to know if the work they're doing is at the level you want. So create a simple way for them to track and measure their performance so that there's accountability to them for you and also a quality so that they're doing it at a level that's gonna make you feel confident that the customer's not gonna be upset. At this level, this is where you hire someone for delivery and all you do is market and sell. That is your job. Now, this is how we get out of this level. Now, 3 million in revenue is pretty great, don't get me wrong. But if you're like me and you don't wanna stop there, don't we need to really dial in to get to the next level? Level four, that's 3 million to 10 million. This is what I call the growth creator. Essentially, at this level, you stop gambling. You start making bets that you know are going to work out. You build a predictable growth engine, meaning inbound, outbound, and partners are really working for you. And you can start to see how the whole thing works to get you to eight figures. If I gave you a million dollars in cash and said, what are you going to do to invest in your business that's going to guarantee 3 million back in the next six months? If you can't give me that answer, then you're stuck here, because that's gambling. For example, if you have a plane that's got two engines and one fails, you can still fly, but that's iffy. As you got four engine and one fails, you just keep going. It goes, they change out the engine. It's kind of like one of my private coaching clients. He has lawn care software and he was heavily dependent on ads. Problem was, if he had any issues with the ads, he wouldn't hit his revenue targets. All we did is said hey, let's go take some of that content that you're running ads against. Create some content answering the questions your buyers are already asking on your sales calls. That created not only different lead source, but it also made the ads work better. He wasn't dependent on one strategy, he had several which made the revenue more predictable because it took all the anomalies and smoothed them out. So an easy framework for you to do this yourself in your business if you're at this level is called the growth triangle. The first area is inbound magnet. We need to create a simple way for you to create content where you're teaching, essentially educating your market for free around the thing that you do. What's crazy is most people don't realize that same content becomes training for your internal team. Teaching them how to get the result without ever paying you, Giving them a thing that gets them a quick result and then all of a sudden you built trust that will create leads. The second is an outbound megaphone is essentially working with somebody that can sell you leads so that you can reach out to them. The whole process is following a service based approach, meaning I'm just here to see if you have a problem. If you do, reply and I see if I could be helpful. The third is a partner program, finding people that have access to the audience of potential customers that are perfect for you and having them share you with them. And then what happens is you just pay them a fee for every new customer that comes from the referral. It could allow you to go from 3 to 10 million in months. @ this level. This is where you hire a head of demand generation. Essentially somebody that comes in, is responsible for all the campaigns and the traffic to your website. You still might be the first face of the company, but they're making sure that that traffic and those conversions keep happening day over day for the consistency. They're accountable for generating leads that becomes customers. All your focus at this stage is on sales and leadership. Here's why. To go from three to 10, it's not doing anything different. It's just doing a lot more of what's working and scaling that to eight figures. But the mindset has to be right. And that's where I always say hope isn't a growth strategy. Systems are change your hope to expect. When I think of growth, it just exposes all the cracks. It's like the pressure in a foundation. If the foundation breaks, you break. So let's move beyond 10 million before we get back to this episode. If you prefer to watch your content Then go find me on YouTube. I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martel on YouTube. Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you got a new episode, so you'll never miss anything. Let's get back back to the episode level. 5, 10 to 30 million. I call this the CEO. At this level, the business can no longer be you. It can't even work through you. At this level, you have to install leaders to work through them to get outcomes. That's why we have to install weekly and quarterly rhythms. At this stage, you become the real chief executive officer, not a chief firefighter. If I'm building a building, my job is to be the architect. I'm not pouring concrete. The foreman doesn't drill screws. They set the plan with you and inspect what you expect. These are some of the signs that you're still doing things at this level. It's going to keep you stuck from moving forward. First off, you still approve every decision. The other thing is, and this is the worst for entrepreneurs is that the bigger it's getting, the slower you feel you're moving. It's so funny because I was working with a CEO the other day and he told me he approves every expense. I said, hey, first off, do you have a financial leader? Well, of course. How about you let them lead? How about you ask them to work with each department to create a budget, a structure for them spending money making decisions so that you feel comfortable with that framework. Then you can empower them. And all of a sudden, revenue grew by 40% in nine months. And he took his first real vacation with his family. I call this the decision ladder. The first one is 50 to fix it. Everybody on any of my teams have permission to spend $50 to solve any problem. They see that $50 can be spent. I'll always pay them back. They just get expensive. All I ask is that they tell their leader. That way there's somebody in the loop that knows there was a problem and it actually is a feedback loop for the leader to go fix that problem. Managers can spend up to $500, directors up to $5,000, executive C level people up to $50,000 without needing my approval. You can pick your budgets. That strategy is going to empower your leaders, and you're gonna start to learn how to work through them. If you wanna level this up, there's a second part to this. It's called leadership rhythms. Most businesses don't Have a rhythm for meetings. When it comes to leadership rhythms, these are the meetings. One, a daily 15 minute standup, simple format. What are the three things you did yesterday? What are the three things you're committing to do today? Are you stuck? The leader then spends the rest of the day getting his team unstuck. Every week, I call it a weekly sync, a 60 minute meeting per team and for the company with the leaders, where you review their scorecard, their key projects, and then any issues that might have come up that you need to solve. Monthly financial review, quarterly planning, sitting down once a quarter, not every week, to change strategy too often. CEOs aren't CEOing and they're just always coming in and creating new priorities for their team. They can't even give them at least 90 days to just work and get the thing done. And last the yearly off site at the end of the year to sit back and review the whole year. Talk about the ten year vision, the five year vision, the three year goals, and break that down into one year plan with your team and do some really fun exercises. It's one of those things that I can't imagine not doing to try to grow your business. And you're definitely gonna be stuck way below 30 million if you're not doing that. The key thing is to get out of this level. You have to work through the people. If every road leads to you, you're the traffic jam. So now that we've got leaders in place, we're going to make this a real company, not just a lifestyle business. So let's expand beyond 30 million before we get back to the episode. If you're enjoying it so far, could you go ahead and do me a huge favor and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify? Reviews help us get up in the rankings, which gives us credibility to reach out to bigger and bigger guests. We can bring them to you. It would mean so much. Let's get back to the episode level. 6:30 to 50 million. I call this the professional. At this stage, you're no longer just running a business, you're running a real company with professional standards, the right people in the right seats, structured pay performance systems and cash discipline that keeps you safe in storms. So some of the signs that you haven't done the right things that gets you out of this level is you don't have pros in the seats you say, I got leaders. Are they the best? Here's my question. Do they make your life easier? Do they teach you things? Did they come with playbooks? And the other part is every decision is data informed. It's backed by numbers. If you're still shooting from the hip making gut decisions, there's no way you're going to be able to go from 30 to 50 million. For example, Martel Ventures, which is a relatively new company, but we're already on pace to create $1 billion in the next 32 months. We had a head of finance, but they weren't as strong as they needed to be. And we found that out really quick. We swapped them out for a new head of finance, somebody that had experience managing multiple companies and creating portfolio strategies. That person came in and immediately found opportunities, things we were spending money on that we should in systems and processes that were broken. That one hire paid for themselves five times in the first three months. That's the caliber of hiring you need to really move on to the next level. So the framework to level up are called the three P's. Okay. And you need all three to become the professional. The first P is the people. We hire leaders, we develop leaders, we retain leaders. That is how you level up. Those people have to own the outcomes. You can't tell them what to do. Steve Jobs said this a long time ago. He says it's easy to hire people and tell them what to do, and it's really hard to hire other people and have them tell you what to do. When I hire one of these people, their test project to even getting on the team is to tell me what they're gonna do in the first 90 days. Number two is playbooks. We need to document and create repeatable systems to scale the business. But here's the kicker. If you're growing 30, 40, 50% per year, I want you to know that your playbooks will break every six months. The people you bring in need to be able to design those Playbooks, come with the appropriate playbooks for that new level of operation. You need to create repeatability, not heroics. The third P is profits. It's not about just tracking revenue. You have to track your margins. You have to look at your cost to acquire a customer, the lifetime value of your customer, essentially the CAC to LTV ratio. And on that, sell things that have high gross margin. And if you want to learn what these terms mean, just search Dan Martell and like how to grow your business without adding any new customers. Where I do a deep dive into the metrics. If you don't have a system for negotiating things or doing performance reviews, then you just aren't operating at this level. All these have to be in place for you to scale to 30 million and beyond. My favorite part about this is that when you implement these, everyone gets a scorecard. And clarity kills drama. So one of the philosophies I like to think about is that, like, what I tolerate will grow. So if I tolerate people doing scorecards, the business grows. If I tolerate people giving me excuses, the excuses grow. So raise your standard and stop tolerating. That's not gonna allow you to grow your business. So now that you've got the people, the playbooks, and the profit in place, it's time to level up again. Level 7. 50 to 100 million. I call this the architect. The big shift at this level is a mindset shift, because now you have to stop playing for years, and you have to start playing for decades. See, most people don't grow to nine figures, but because they think too small. If you want to get to that level, you have to build moats around your market. You can't be pushed around. You have to start thinking strategically. The job of an architect is to look around the corner 18 months and anticipate how the ground is shifting. Covid's happening. Deal with it. Government changes. Deal with it. So some of the signs that you're stuck at this stage, is that all your conversations or short term? I want to talk about next year. I want to talk about sequencing, because sequence equals success. And you need to build these moats around your business to separate and make it hard for your competitors to attack you. You know, I remember almost a decade ago, I had the privilege of being invited to spend a week with Richard Branson. And I just wanted to study, how does the billionaire that every other billionaire in the world wants to be like operate? And I asked him the question, when it comes to business, what's the most important thing? And he said, it all comes down to brand. I'll be honest with you. I didn't get it. I was, like, not operating at that level of consciousness when he said that, and I kind of dismissed it three years ago. I revisited his answer because it occurred to me that everything I wanted to accomplish would happen on the other side of brand reach and reputation. How many people know me? What do they think of me? I want to give you a framework to give you three key moats that's going to help you crack that nine figures in revenue. The first one I mentioned it, but I want to go deeper is the brand. See, a brand is not a logo. Brand is trusted reputation that makes your customers choose you by default. The Way to create a brand is through associations. People you partner with, your employees you hire, campaigns you run, the quality of your products. All those tell a story. That brand, if it creates goodwill, has positive association and connotation. Other people will represent it for you out there in the world. Like real brands. Get to a place where the market talks about the businesses and the brands every day. But without strategic focus, you don't have a brand. You just got a name. Number two is your network. Oftentimes you hear people talk about relationships. You got to invest them, right? And they'll say that your network is your net worth only if you use it. I know a lot of people, they know a lot of people and they never leverage their network. They never ask them for anything. They just happen to be in a role in a company where they just talk to a lot of people. And they take it for granted that those people are potential partners in the future. Co founders, team members, investors, I don't know. But for you to just sit back and not invest in it is a huge Ms. Moat creation opportunity. Number three is data. This is the information advantage in that category. I think of like simple stuff like Amazon recommendations or Google search data or OpenAI. It built all of that technology on top of information. Every business today is sitting on a body of knowledge that if they learn how to clean up, process and feed it into their information system, would be a massive moat to compete against their competitors. Because remember, moats beat moves every single time. Now that you've built the moat, it's time to level up one last time before we get back to the episode. If you actually want to know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work, go follow me on Instagram. Dan Martell 2 Elsa Martell on Instagram. It's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time. I'd love to see you there. Have an amazing day. That brings us to level eight. A hundred million plus the empire builder. @ this stage, you move from being just a CEO or the architect to a capital allocator and specifically a talent magnet. Now you realize that you can accomplish anything with the right people, capital and vision. That's what allows you to grow to 100 million plus. The Empire Builder understands that it's more than about them. It's about the people they get to make rich along the way. Twenty years ago, one of my mentors said this to me, guy is worth a billion plus. And he said, I have this one simple rule. I make one big bet per year. Every day I have one needle moving decision to be made. And every night I'm home by dinner with my family. He wins by picking the right people and the right problems. He knows that. Nothing more. His calendar is open, so he has the time to double click and have conversations and fix things that are massive, not little. The empire builder has learned the most powerful thing he can do every day is play. And in playing, he's creating a bigger vision. So these are the signs that you're playing at this level. First off, you're a talent magnet, meaning that every day people are reaching out to you to work for you. Your vision runs the machine, not you. Your job is to just ask people to lift their chins up and look higher. Hey, can we dream bigger? Hey, can we look at something bigger? That is your job at the empire building level. To do that, you need a framework I call the 40, 40, 20 rule. This stage, the most precious resource is where you spend your attention. The first one is 40% of your time on people. I'm talking about the key hires that aren't on your team yet to then get you ready for the new level of growth. The recruiting that's going to support that. You reaching out to people, building relationships, asking your team if they need mentorship, going and recruiting those mentors for your team, retaining a players. The Second one is 40% of capital. You're not just operating a business within budgets. You're allocating large amounts of capital ideally aligned with things you know how to do better than most, so that that compounds and grows within your zone of genius. You can't look at 100,000 or $1 million bet anymore. You have to look at the percentage of risk allocated to the size of your goal. And the final one is 20% vision. That's where you get world class at painting the picture of the future. The stories that align with investors, with your leaders, with your customers, with your employees. I think creating the future at is easy if you understand these three things. One, you want to have 100% clarity. You want to see it in your mind, completely done. You want to hold the belief, literally bringing that level of confidence to every conversation. And the third is you want to hold that 100% of the time, 100% clarity, 100% belief, 100% of the time. If you do that, you will create that vision. And if you've gotten to this level, it means you've built the machine that builds the machine. Most People live the same year over 50 times. They don't grow. Each level is designed with the strategy to help you break through so that you continue to evolve. You might be in one level for five years, but no, you can get through the next level in six months if you focus. So don't worry about being overwhelmed. Just realize that you just gotta take a step. What I call admins your most important next step. Again, if you feel like you're overwhelmed right now, you probably need to get an executive assistant. So click the link below to download my internal playbook for how to hire and train that person and have all the things they should do. The main reason I created this is because I believe starting a business is about freedom. You have to learn how to buy back your time so you can buy back your life so you can have the freedom to go and do the thing you want to do. Retirement is a weird concept. How about we just create a life we never have to retire from? That's what I want for you. Thanks for listening to the Martell Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck, reclaim their freedom, and build their empire.