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Dan Martell: How to Grow Your Business SO Fast it Feels Like CHEATING
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This is to the Point a Rhino experience voted one of the top home services, marketing and operations podcasts. Cutting through the and getting to the point.
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Hey, what's up to the point listeners. It's your boy Chris. This is going to be a short and sweet episode. So if you remember correct, last year I shared one of my favorite episodes I listened to. I would, when I have my drive into the office, about 15 minutes or so, I listen to other podcasts to kind of get me motivated. A lot of it's motivational, some of it's business, mostly it's motivational. But I want to share another one with you that's more business related and it applies to everybody that's listening. And Tommy, my buddy Tommy, sent this to me when we were headed down to Costa Rica a few weeks ago and I listened to it on the plane ride down. And it was by somebody he loves named Dan Martell. And it was. He wrote a book called buy back your time. Tommy's a big believer in buying back your time. And what's your, what's the value of your time worth and what are you willing to give up and at what cost? You know, based on whatever you value your time per hour. It's, it's really interesting. So this, this episode is only 17 minutes long. It's really, really short and I wanted to share it with you, but it's really, really good because it, it's the name of, it's called how to scale your business so fast that it feels like cheating, which is an appealing title. But the way that he describes it, it does actually start to feel that way. Then he shares how he implemented it and how and what the actual scale was within his 10 businesses that he's currently running and how he sold them for millions and millions and millions. And now he's into a billion dollar portfolio. Like he's just kind of redoing the same things over and over again. So clearly it works. It's interesting. Now for somebody like me who has adhd, he goes through these eight steps and I won't share them all with you, but I get to like step two. And I'm still thinking about step two and he's now talking about step four. So I gotta keep rewinding the podcast and going back and listening to it, so that way I can clearly understand everything that he's talking about. But once I got the chance to go through all of it, I was able to find about four gaps in a process that I've been running for a long time to help me scale businesses as I work on like Prolific Brand Design or any of our other companies that we've invested in. So but clearly if you're on a home service businesses like most of you are, all these are applicable to you. So I'm excited for you to hear it and enjoy this podcast. Not from me and Chad, but from Dan Martell on how to scale your business so fast it feels like cheating. Sorry for the interruption listeners. I want to give a quick shout out to our title sponsor of Rhino X 2026, Evoke AI, also A to the Point sponsor. We're grateful for them and in my opinion the best AI answering service in the game that actually keeps a human being us based in the loop. So if you hit zero you can get to a human being. When I put these guys up against the other competitors, they won hands down. So again, shout out to our title sponsor for Rhinox and our TTP sponsor Evoca AI, the best AI agent in the game. Check out the link below for Evoke AI in the show Notes Attention to the Point listeners. Branding has never been more important. Is your brand in serious need of an upgrade? Do you have a new company and need a new brand but don't want to wait six months or pay a ridiculous amount to get it done? If your brand looks like everyone else's, well guess what, you are everyone else. But Prolific. They build brands that dominate from the first Google search to the driveway. Prolific Brand Design can help you be more of you because you are the unique difference that sets you apart from all your competitors. So let's be real for a second. Your brand is either winning new customers or costing you money. Just ask some of our clients like Ken Goodrich, Ishmael Valdez, my boy Chad Peterman, and even myself. Prolific Brand Design is the creative pros behind some of the best home services, logos, truck wraps, websites, and now email marketing campaigns. Wouldn't you love it if your email marketing open rates were 30, 40, 50%? And don't go into the spam folder. Hell, that's how we roll at Prolific. So check them out at prolific brand design.com and ask for the to the Point promo. Prolific Brand Design Be More of you.
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Be Prolific I built and sold three companies in under 10 years for millions of dollars. They scaled so fast it felt like cheating. One of my latest companies, Martell media, scaled to $2 million a month in under 18 months and today I own Martell Ventures in portfolio of company that's on track to become worth $1 billion in less than three years. I'm going to break down the strategies I use to get to this level of speed so you can apply them to your own business, even if you're starting from zero. Number one, focus on cash, not perfection. Stop trying to make everything perfect and just start selling. Everybody wants to start a business, but nobody wants to start selling. I always say the moment you sell something to a stranger is the moment you become an entrepreneur. So the more money you can get in cash upfront before you spend a lot of money to deliver what you sol sold, then the easier it is to grow your business. Because there is a massive difference between receivables or invoices and revenue versus cash. Because I can't pay people in invoices, I can't pay people with receivables. But to actually get people to give you their money, you need to present the right offer. Number two, make people feel dumb to say no. First off, you need to build a transformation focused offer, not a bunch of deliverables. Too often people are like, well, well, if you buy my thing, you get this, you get this, then you this them to death. People don't want a bunch of features. What they want is their problem solved. They want to know that you understand them. And then you got to add urgency, scarcity, and risk reversal. If you don't put that into your offer, then people will sit back and wait or talk to their spouse or think about doing it in the future because they don't believe that they'll actually do the work. By telling people you only work with certain types of clients, it creates a scarce resource that only certain people that are approved can actually buy. Or urgency by saying that you are a small team and you like to be very personalized and customized, that you can't do it for everybody, so you only take on a handful of clients per month. Or the risk reversal saying, if you don't achieve a certain outcome, then we'll give you a full refund. Now, that might sound scary to you, but you can also say it's on the back end of you agreeing to doing all these things that you know it would be ridiculous for them not to get a result if they followed all those things. And the reason why this kind of offer will feel like you're cheating is because better offers equals higher close rates in premium pricing. All right, so you did all that. You've got your offer down. Now let's make sure people actually see it. Number three, build a marketing system, not a marketing plan. You know what I've learned with most Entrepreneurs is they feel guilty if the machine is working to feel less guilty about growth. You need to build a system that creates predictability in the business. And if you do it right, it will feel like cheating. And I need you to stop yourself from throwing a hand grenade in the business and blowing the whole thing up, because it's actually working. To build the marketing system, you need to build a system and most people over complicate it. So I'm going to break it down. So first thing, we have to start with the camcorder method. If you're doing something to generate leads, you have to record yourself doing that activity. So that way you have a training video and you can have multiple videos of you doing the activity that generates those leads as an example. Then we want to create the course, we want to document the steps that we outline in those videos so that somebody can come in and follow 1, 2, 3 and create predictability. Next, we want to focus on the cadence. What's the schedule? What do they do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? If it's marketing, if it's sales, you have to document the cadence and set up the schedule so somebody can create a system of predictability. Finally, we want to generate the checklist, the seven to 10 things in their day that if they do every day, they will generate the result that you want for you in the business. And if you build this out, you'll create a marketing system, not just a marketing plan, that generates predictable leads. And predictable leads generates predictable cash flow that allows you to scale your business. So now that leads are flowing in, now it's time to make space to close them. Number four, audit your day. It's interesting because people read my book and they still get it wrong. I had a CEO in one of my portfolio companies in Martel Ventures who realized he was spending four hours a day on admin and customer support. And I sat down with him and I was like, okay, you could be doing sales that's going to generate cash. When if I look at your buyback rate, I know what you're taking as a salary. I know the opportunity ahead of you. You're not making efficient trades. If your goal is to make a million dollars a year. Anything that isn't a $500 an hour activity is costing you the difference. Because there's 2,000 hours of work an average person does. And at $500 an hour of income, that's your million dollars a year. See, most people just spend all their time doing $10 tasks. Wonder why they haven't built a Million dollar business. Here's how you get ridiculously efficient with trading your time for money.
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Sorry for the interruption, listeners. I want to give a quick shout out to Rhino X 2026 keynote sponsor, ProBook AI. It's ProBook AI. You can check them out in the link below. ProBook AI finds the money you're losing without you having to do anything. It scans your books to catch missed invoices, underbuild jobs, leaks, all kinds of stuff. So let it do the hard work for you on finding out where you're leaking money. Thanks again to our keynote sponsor, Rhino X 2026 Pro Book.
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First off, you need to track your time. So I do a two week audit of everything I've done for the last two weeks, going off every 15 minutes. There's a timer, ding, ding, ding. It goes off, you write it down. That way there's no bull. If you spent three hours scrolling TikTok, I want you to write it down. Then I want you to go through and I want you to highlight in red anything that sucks your energy. Then we got to figure out what your time is worth. Because if you're going to trade your time and pay some money for somebody else to help you out, it's got to be a good trade. So you take the amount of money you make in a year divided by 2000. Take that divided by four. That's your buyback rate. If you're not happy with that number because it's less than five bucks, it just is what it is. Charge more for what you sell or figure out way to become more valuable. The more you buy back your time and reinvest it in things that help you sell more, generate more leads will equal more money in. That'll help you scale faster. That will feel like cheating. But freeing up your time is only part of it. Next, you got to learn how to schedule it. Number five, rebuild your calendar. Now that you've bought back your time, I need you to reinvest that time in things that are going to make you money. Too often entrepreneurs wake up at the beginning of the week and they're like, I hope I grow. It's not in your calendar. If you have a problem, put it in there, schedule it, focus on it. Here's what I mean. Block 10 to 15 hours a week, focusing on high revenue activities, things like sales calls, generating leads. There's probably things in your business that are broken that you don't know are broken because you haven't put the time to actually improve it. To take this to the Next level, here's a number one hack you have to schedule for energy flows. For example, if you know that your best time to do any kind of creative writing is first thing in the morning, do it first thing in the morning. So now that your time is protected, let's make sure that your systems don't break. Number six, delete the fricking bottlenecks. So Elon Musk has this rule. If he's getting a meeting to solve problems, there's 25 people in the meeting and somebody says there's a constraint and, and that person's not in the meeting, guess what? Somebody call that person. He will fly people in all around to be in one meeting so that if the bottleneck exists and it needs to be solved, the person is in the meeting who can solve the problem. If it's not everybody, get back to work. So, for example, if I've got a plant that makes cars and takes three parts to make a car, the tires, the engine, and the chassis, and I can make four tires per day, which I need for one car, and then I can make 10 engines per day and I can make 100 chassis, how many cars per day can I make in that plant? One. Because my number one constraint are those four tires. So any time, energy, resources, anything other than increasing my ability to make fricking tires is not a good use of the time. And that is what you need to focus on. So the way I fix constraints in my teams is using a very simple but incredibly powerful tool called 50 to fix it. So essentially, any person that sees a bottleneck, a constraint in the business, if they can solve the problem for less than $50, they're allowed to spend that money. They can expense it. Nobody asks questions. The only ask is that they tell their leader or manager after the fact. I go 50 for individual contributors, $500 for leaders, 5,000 for managers, and 50,000 for C level people. That way the throughput is always increasing and bottlenecks are getting unblocked and the business is making more cash. That will lead to scaling and make you feel like you're cheating with speed fix. Now it's time to scale yourself. Number seven, replace yourself. The best way is having an executive assistant. And there's two things they have to focus on your email in your calendar. Because your email is nothing but a public to do list on your time and your calendar does not need you to be there. If you create a system for them to interact with so that you can focus your actual time on things that make you money to Grow. The coolest part about this process is that you start to buy back 10, 15 hours a week to reinvest it in things like sales and growth and partnerships. And that's how you scale the business in a way that's going to leave you feeling like you're freaking cheating. Now if you want my complete playbook for how I interact with my executive assistants, like 42 pages, just go to Instagram, find me Dan Martell, two Ls and Martell follow me and then message me the word EA YouTube. Then I'll know you came from here and I will send you the direct link. No, opt in for my complete playbook on how I work with my executive assistant to get back 30 or 40 hours a week. Now that you're not the bottleneck, it's time to increase your ability to hire better Number eight.
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Sorry for the interruption folks. Want to give a quick shout out to our Rhino X Day session sponsor, Chirp. Also a to the Point sponsor, Chirp. Oh I love Chirp. I love Ryan Finn. I love Justin Judd. Those guys are fantastic. The virtual Ride along game. They are the best and they integrate directly in with service time. What more could you ask for? These guys are the best of the best. Check out the link below in the show. Notes to the Point listeners, listen up. What if the biggest thing holding back your business isn't marketing or hiring, but your bennies? The Benefits For Home Service companies, a better 401k can be the difference between great techs and losing them to the shop right down the street. Basic Capital, our newest sponsor, is the only 401k built to actually put your team on a real path to retirement. Companies that switch over see higher participation, happier teams, and dramatically low turnover because your crew finally gets a plan that's a true benefit, not just a checkbox. Don't wait until your best people walk, make the move and click the link below to get 12 months with 0 employer fees when you join Basic Capital.
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Increase Talent Velocity Every business comes down to two key funnels. One is the Customer funnel. How do I get customers? How do they buy all the things we just talked about? The second part is the Talent funnel. How do we attract, retain and develop top talent? If you have a bunch of customers, you have the right people to deliver for those customers. Then the business will easily scale on its own and you'll feel so guilty that it's just working. So the easiest way to do this is in 12 months as my revenue grows. Whatever that target is, I want you to design what the Organization, organizational, team is going to look like at that size, that's going to give you the gap. Then you create a people plan, which is essentially all the people you got to hire that aren't on the team right now. And sequencing it based on dollar spent, that's going to get you your time back the fastest. That's going to allow them to go make money for you to reinvest in things that make you money so you can scale easier. If you do this right, you build the people and the people scale the business. And that's why you'll be able to grow the business in a way that feels like cheating. Now that you've hired help, it's time to focus on building their knowledge. Number nine, pay for the blueprint. You know what money likes? Money likes speed. If you want to generate $83,000 a month in your marketing agency, you better learn from somebody else who's done it or it's just going to take you a decade. How do I know this? I was that guy. I went years trying to figure out because that's what I thought I had to do, learn every part of the business. Instead, I finally hired a coach, and that one Coach made me $960,000 in the first 12 months. Why did I wait so long? Because I was scared. I was scared that I was going to waste my money paying for somebody who's going to give me a blueprint that wasn't going to work for me. That was the problem for me to solve. And that's what you need to do yourself. When I invest in my people, I focus on three things. One, the coaching. Who is going to be their coach? Well, people say, well, what if I invest in coaching and I train them up and then all of a sudden they leave? What if you don't and they stay like, do you see how silly that is? What are the tools they need? Who are the other people on your team from a talent point of view, to support that person? The more you can invest in coaching tools and talent to grow, you will have more resources to invest in the business. I mean, just ask yourself this simple question. What would the 10x version of you do today? Because if you were already the person you needed to be today to win, you would be winning. If you're not where you want to be, it means there's parts missing that you got to go buy. Paying for the blueprints is the fastest way to scale. So now you're moving fast. Awesome. But are your clients sticking around? Number 10, resolve your retention there's nothing worse than building a business that has a bucket where all the customers come in and there's a big hole at the bottom. So you spend all this money and time and energy trying to get a bunch of people in your business to just have them slip out the bottom of the funnel because you've not designed a way to keep them around. I had a client of mine once where he had this big churn problem. He's losing 10% of his customers every month. If you're losing 10% every month, that means every 10 months, you lose 100% of all your customers. All we did is ask ourself how can you get a quick, quick win for your customers as soon as they join. So we created A list of 12 different quick wins that they could do with that client to get them a result that would make them feel silly for quitting because of the results they got in the first seven days. We implemented that. All of a sudden, churn goes down to 3% a month, meaning that the customer is worth four times more to them over the long term, which also meant they could spend more money to acquire them. That is the game changer when we fix retention. To do this for yourself, ask yourself, what's the fast win? You can get a client as soon as they join. I'm talking 48 hours. If you can get them to make their whole investment in working with you in the first 48 hours, they're going to talk about you to every one of their friends. Then you want to add strategic upsells, referrals, or other ways you can create value for your business. Maybe it's case studies, testimonials. Have them on your podcast. And then we want to track the churn weekly because we don't want to ignore it. If we fix it by getting referrals and upsell upsell to get them to buy more things that you have, then you got to make sure that you monitor it so that if it goes bad again, you can fix it. See, it's not something you can just set it and forget it. You have to monitor it like anything that's important. And when you have better retentions, you'll have higher lifetime value of a customer, which means you're going to have better margins, which means you have more resources to scale faster in a way that absolutely feels like cheating. Now that you got results, now it's time to multiply them. Number 11, scale sales without scaling you.
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Sorry for the interruption, listeners. I want to give a quick shout out to our evening Sponsor at Rhino X 2026. Good leap. I love Good Leap. They've been a sponsor for multiple years. They are the best financing option in the game. I know that Peterman Brothers uses them. Redbird Roofing uses them. Rhino has used them as their vendor partner because they're that dang good at getting contractors clients approved. So thank you to Good Leap for being a sponsor yet again for IMAX 2026. Check out their link below in the show notes.
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One thing you'll hear a lot from Bluon users, they've stopped ordering the wrong part. Derek from FH Fear used to trust vendors for parts only to send his text out with the wrong one costing time, money and customer trust. Since bringing on Blu on, their misses have dropped to zero. He even says that if a mistake happens now, it's usually because someone didn't run it through Blueon. It's become essential to their parts process. And here at Peterman Brothers we're definitely seeing that impact too. Click on the link in the description and grab a quick demo. It will be worth it.
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I remember the first time I hired this guy named Michael to be my sales guy and he was selling my coaching program and that was a weird idea to have somebody else sell me on my behalf and me not talk to them. First call he had Dan, I got somebody to buy how he's like, dude, I think they bought because you demonstrated by having me sell you that you can teach them how to do it for them. And it was crazy for me to believe this because up to that point, sure, I'd built companies that sold products, but I hadn't had a sales team that sold me and I had a belief that nobody else could sell like me. And it turns out that's not true. And if you have that belief, it's the reason it's going to hold you back. And we need to learn how to multiply. So here's how we do this where you feel like it's going to work and it's not going to go sideways really quickly. First thing is we got to scale your sales calls and objections. Everything that you know people are going to bring up, you have to script it. They're called talk tracks and you put it in a document and you got to be very detailed. If there's six parts of your sales process or nine parts to your sales process, write it in. Add talk tracks and questions to guide the buyer to make the decision to buy your product. Then we do my favorite thing, which is record winning calls. Winning sales call, winning chats it doesn't matter to train the new salespeople because if they see what winning looks like and they pattern match that, then they're just going to have some good best practices from day one that they just follow to get the same results that the person who won on the call got for themselves. Then we want to hire salespeople that are commission based. See, if you pay them too much of a base, they're going to stick around even if they're not making any money. Because they don't need to make money because you're paying them a good base. What I like to do is pay them enough to cover their expenses but not enough to get rich. And then I pay them a commission based on what they sell so that the more they sell, the more money they make, the more money the business makes because I'm, then I'm not incentivizing somebody who can't sell to stick around. And this is why using this process to scale feels like you're cheating. Because the more closers means the more sales without you working more. Now that we get sales off your plate, last but not least, it's time to protect your productivity. Number 12, stay in your zone of genius. I want to be out there spreading the gospel. I want to be talking about my mission, my vision, where I see the world going. And in doing that, I'm going to attract customers and more importantly, like I said earlier, talent. Your job as a CEO is sustain your zone of genius. Focus on three things. One, the vision. What should exist in your business, it doesn't yet. That is vision. Do you see around the corner? The other one is money. Do you have the capital to support support the scale, the growth, the investment in the business. And the third, are the people right? When you think about it, do I have the right people to build the business? Because you can't build enough systems and automation and all these wonky things that are going to make it happen. You have to have the people on your team. They're going to level everybody up. If you do that and you stay in your zone of genius, that will make you the most money. But it'll also make you feel guilty because you're going to grow and it's not going to be hard because you're doing the thing that feels easy.
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Easy.
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When you get to a place in your life that looks like work but feels like play, you've won. When people say, why don't you retire? You're now making all this money and you think to yourself, why would I retire from being me. Because what you do every day in your zone of genius is just an expression of who you are, and it feels effortless. That's what you want to get to, and that's how you scale a business so fast it feels like cheating. Now, if you want to learn what I learned about culture from a billion dollar company, click the video and I'll see you on the other side.