How to Make $10,000/Month (even if you’re broke)

Everyone wants to know how to make 10K a month. The only issue is there's a lot of BS out there.
And there's a lot of people that make it seem way easier than it actually is. So I'm gonna share with you the five main steps you need to take in order to get to your first 10K a month.
Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million 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 at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers. Starting with picking the right business model.
I struggled from 17 to 24 and it wasn't until then that I made my first 10k a month. Picking the right model can be the difference between a headwind pushing you backwards or a tailwind pushing you forward.
So I analyze all the business models, all the industries for the past 12 months, and I put together the top four best business models in 2025. Number one is a product business with 50 to 60% gross margin, which means that if I buy something for a dollar and I sell it for five, $4 is my gross margin.
You don't wanna choose a business with a low gross margin. For example, restaurants, really low gross margin.
Stay out of that. A product business is essentially finding some kind of product or a widget that people are buying today, seeing if there's a unique twist that you can put on it and selling it online.
This is all the drop shipping businesses, the e-commerce stuff, the micro brands. What makes the product business one of the best business models in the world is that you can actually sell it without ever building it, taking possession of it and fulfilling it to the customers.
It's like the easiest set it and forget it business model out there. Number two is agency model.
The agency model is usually between 60 and 70% margin. And this is where you find problems that customers have, productize your service to them, and then do the thing you sold them.
So this is copywriting agencies, marketing agencies, e-commerce agency, AI automation agencies. Agencies are powerful because they're the easiest business models to start.
Find the customer that needs leads and then sell them lead generation and go find somebody who can actually help you do the work on the back end. Number three is consulting.
And this one is my favorite with 70 to 80% margins. And the reason why, if you know what you're talking about, you can come in, analyze the data and give a report, give some direction to a business to solve their problem.
Now they can do it internally or they can hire somebody else to do it, but you don't have to actually do the work. It's a great business to be in, especially if you come from an industry and you have a lot of experience.
Number four, SaaS, which stands for software as a service, which is my world and all I've pretty much done my whole life with 80 to 90% margins. It's one of the most profitable business out there.
And it's this model that I used to hit my first 10K back when I was 24 years old. What I love about software is that you build it once and you can sell it literally a million times for the same price and it costs you nothing more once you build it.
But picking the right business model means nothing if you can't do the work. 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, 2Ls and 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. So the second step to your 10K a month journey is build a six-figure skill.
My first six-figure skill was learning how to write computer code. And it's crazy because I learned it in rehab.
As a 16, 17-year-old, I got myself in trouble, ended up with an addiction, and I had to go to 11 months of working on myself to try to become not only sober, but honestly a better version of myself. It was at the end of that experience that I learned how to write code and I just fell in love.
Some of you guys actually have passion something and you're worried it's like i'm working too much no if you are into it go all in because that's what i did and that's what made me great at what i do so what are the most in-demand skills that you can build a six-figure income in 2025 the first one is coding i know it sounds difficult if you've never programmed before but trust me you go online and there's apps and tools that'll make it so frigging simple. It's one of the easiest things to learn today because it literally writes itself.
The second is video editing. Why? Media and personal brands are exploding.
Every product company is becoming a media company and every media company is becoming a product company. You know what they all need? Video editors.
My 12 year old-old is editing videos for his friends. He's getting paid, and he has been for a couple years, to edit other people's videos on their YouTube channels or create clips, and it's something that anybody can learn.
The tools are out there, and it's not hard. Number three is copywriting.
Words sell. Stories sell.
The cool thing about copywriting, why I think it's one of the best skills to learn, is that it's a meta skill. Understanding how to persuade, communicate, demonstrate value through the written word.
Even though AI can do a lot for you today, great copywriters are still some of the highest paid people in the world because they know how to generate revenue from their craft. Number four is sales or more specifically chat sales.
I have dozens of friends today that make a million dollars a year in commission selling over chat. I'm talking no funnels, no webinars, no calls, just chat.
Understanding the psychology of a sales conversation over chat, getting people to purchase without ever talking to anybody. Sales is one of those meta skills that if you learn, you can make six figures, but you'll bring that with you for the rest of your life in every interaction you might have.
Number five is AI automation. It is the new hotness.
I got to tell you, I just got added to a community that one of my friends leads, 14,000 people standing by learning this skill. It is growing.
And guess what? If you ask a hundred business owners, if they're doing AI right now, they'll say, I use chat GPT. That's not AI automation.
If you want to learn a skill that's going to future-proof your career today into the future, that's the one you want to take. But if you really want to get to 10K a month, skill alone won't put money in your pocket, which brings us to step three, sell before you build.
I was such an idiot. Every time I started a new business, I would go and build a bunch of stuff and then see if somebody wanted to buy it.
And the problem with that is that people are nice to me and they say, oh yeah, if you go build it, I'll buy it. And then I would sit there and I'd code and I'd build these apps and I'd show it to them and they wouldn't buy.
And I'm like, you said is a good idea. I should build it.
And they're like, yeah, you should. I'm just busy.
It's not something I want. Do you know how many people go buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory and then don't have customers sell before you build? It's the winning recipe.
You won't get to 10K a month if you can't collect payment before you do the work. What's interesting is what I'm about to share with you is something you're gonna have to learn to do whether you have a product or even before you build it.
So you might as well do the hard thing first so that you don't find out nobody wants to buy it. So how do you pre-sell? Number one, find your customers.
I always ask myself, who's got my list? Where are they hiding? Who's got the problem that I solve with my product or service and how do I get in front of them? That you want to start with. Number two is you got to sell the opportunity.
Whatever you're selling, you got to understand how to communicate its value and demo it so that people go, wow, that's amazing, I think we need that. And third is learn to collect payment.
Get comfortable asking for money. 50% upfront as a deposit, a whole payment upfront for the year, but whatever you do, ask for the card.
If you didn't sell something, you didn't become an entrepreneur. That's how you get to 10K a month is actually collecting payment.
It always makes me think of this quote, a closed mouth will never get fed. If you're not asking, if you're not communicating, then you're never going to get paid.
But now that you got paid, you got to deliver on your promise. Before we get back to the episode, if you want to 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 at martellmethod.com.
Which brings us to step four, automate your delivery. I have a client in my community and when he started with me, he was doing 11K a month.
Last week alone, he collected $35,000. He's freaking out.
Why? Because he's gotta do all the work now. He got really good at marketing and selling and now he's freaking out because he's hiring his first employee and he's overwhelmed by all the work he's got to deliver because he didn't sit down and workflow the automation of actually delivering the product.
And this is why you don't want to mess it up. Your reputation is based on the feeling and the promise you deliver to a customer.
So here's how we automate our delivery in our business. Number one is we simplify our offer.
Elon Musk got this great framework about engineering and creating stuff. And his first rule of his five is remove anything that's not needed.
See, a lot of people sell whatever the customer asks for because they're just trying to get paid. What you want to do is figure out what's the simplest form of what your offer or product is and just keep it at that and don't add anything extra.
Keep it simple. Number two is engineer success.
Here's a great question my buddy Dean Jackson asks often. He says, how would you design your product or your service if you only got paid if the customer was successful with your thing? See, then you're engineering success.
You're starting with the end in mind. You're actually making sure that when the customer starts working with you, the result is almost guaranteed.
You wanna make those things non-negotiables on both parts, your customer side and you as a business so that everybody wins. For example, the clients in my fitness program, when they start, they have to do a 16-day cleanse.
It's a non-negotiable. Guess what? That sets them up to build momentum, which almost guarantees that they're going to lose weight.
Number three is implement AI. The truth is, is any workflow from the first intake form you ask the customers to fill out to any kind of support calls, any email, any payment systems, AI is picking up and taking care of automating the whole process.
Now those four steps, they'll help you get to that magical 10k a month. But this next one is what's going to help you blow past it.
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.
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You got a new episode so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode.
Which brings us to step five, buy back your time. See, when I started my first successful business that made me that first 10K, I was working 100 hours a week.
The reason why is I didn't know what process I should be following to be more productive. I just knew one thing, which is get things done.
I was just all in work all the time because I was worried that if I'd stopped, the whole thing would fall down on itself. The truth is, is millionaires build systems.
Billionaires build people. See, I thought that if I just keep saving all my money that someday I'll become a millionaire.
I didn't realize that millionaires understood how to build systems, but billionaires built people to actually buy back their time. So that's why I created the buyback loop.
It's the process I use three, four times a year to analyze my calendar, to figure out if my time's being efficient and then reinvest it to grow my business. So step one is to audit.
Our calendar has everything we need to understand, is this high leverage? Can somebody else do it? Or does it take my energy versus give me energy? Things that would cost me very little in money to pay somebody else to do that suck my energy are things I shouldn't be doing. That's the bucket of activities that I hire a contractor or full-time employee to take off my plate.
Number two is transfer. And this is all about taking those low leverage time sucking activities and giving it to somebody else.
I use the camcorder method, which I detail in my book because I literally record myself doing the work, then I upload it to AI so that it creates the playbook. And then when I hire the person, they've got the recording plus the playbook that they can follow to do the work exactly the way I did it.
Number three is fill. And this is all about looking for things that give me energy and that make me money.
If I buy back my time for a little bit of money and then reinvest that in doing activities

like marketing and sales and hiring great people,

then I'm going to make more money

and that's why that trade is incredibly efficient.

Buying back your time to hang out on a beach

and do nothing will not make you rich.

So here's what I know.

If you made it to the end,

I have no doubt that you're gonna make

your first 10K a month.

But the truth is, is that it's gonna require you to stay with your plan, not get deviated, not go do a bunch of things, not worry, am I doing the right thing? It's not about doing the right thing. It's about making a decision and making that decision right.
You follow that process, focus, follow one course until successful, you will make 10K a month. 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.