How Billionaires Make More Money by Working Less

10 years ago, I get an email.

I'm doing this event with Richard Branson at his home in Verbier, Switzerland. Would you like to come? Imposter syndrome through the roof.
And I'm trying to study Richard because obviously he lives a quality of life that I just can dream of. What he taught me was this philosophy of essentially replacing yourself out of the doing and really learning to work through other people.
And that's when I designed this thing called the replacement ladder.

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.

And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martellmethod.com.

My promise to every person in this room, by the end of this time together, I will give you a framework, a process, a life philosophy that if you apply it, will change the game for you. It'll actually make you feel guilty because you'll be making more money and it's not going to be as hard as you thought it would be.
Your business will grow and your time will expand. You'll be like, I should be working harder? No, that's not how it has to be.
Before I can get into that, I have to share with you a quick story. As a child, I went through tough, tough challenges.
I grew up in a home with an alcoholic mother. I had a father that wasn't around very much and the second oldest of four.
And I got diagnosed with ADHD when I was 11, put on medication. My whole life, I thought I was broken.
I didn't value myself.

I had zero self-esteem. For a long part of it, I didn't even feel like I deserved to breathe the air I was taking.
And that caused me to make a lot of bad decisions. I'm just curious.
Anybody else in this room get arrested for getting a high-speed chase from the cops? Anybody? Show of hands. Oh, okay.
I guess I'm the only one um but essentially what happened after ending up in juvenile detention twice and getting into trouble i got i got since well i got released sentence they allowed me to go get some therapy and i ended up in this place called portage and Portage was a therapeutic community for adolescents with a drug addiction and that was me. Most people do five months of therapy, I did 11.
I had some real stuff to work on. You see that? Now, this place saved my life.
It taught me my personal worth, It helped me rebuild the relationship with my brothers and my family. It helped me understand basic values.
And through that process of rebuilding, honestly, my identity, I started to have a vision for the future. And That's what I'm so excited about, the theme of this event, is getting ready for the future.
And here's what happened. At the end of this 11-month period, I decided to stay for the summer before going back out into my normal world because I wasn't ready yet.
I didn't feel comfortable. And I was helping Rick, the maintenance guy.
He'd been there for 20-some years, and he was kind of like a big brother to me. I was helping him clean out the property.
This place was built in an old church camp, so there was buildings we never used and I'd never been into. So I'm helping Rick clean out one of the camps, and I open up a door, and sitting in the corner on the table, there's this old 486 computer and a book sitting right next to it, this yellow book on Java programming.
Now, I'd never touched a computer in my life. And I walk over, I see the computer, I see the book, I open up the book, and I think it's going to read like hieroglyphics and ones and zeros like you can't read, it's computer programming.
And it actually reads like English. If this, then that, use case, like I'm reading it, I'm like, oh.
So I sit down, you know, I'm trying to work really hard, light up the computer, and just start following the first chapter of the book. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
20 minutes later, I hit enter.

And on the screen, it says, hello world.

I know.

You're thinking, this guy's a genius.

How?

Now, I know it wasn't an iPhone app.

And today it's not impressive, but it didn't matter. At that moment, at 17 years old, I thought to myself,

Thank you. in an iPhone app, and today it's not impressive, but it didn't matter.
At that moment, at 17 years old, I thought to myself, this is how delusional I was, maybe I'm the Doogie Howser of programming. If you're laughing, it tells me how old you are, just so you know.
And what that did is it put me on a journey. I became obsessed.
I became obsessed with coding, the internet, all things technology. This is 1997.
So I get out of rehab and discover this little thing called the internet. 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.

Couldn't have planned a better time.

It was the most incredible situation.

As I mentioned, my dad used to beg me.

He calls me Daniel.

I'm French.

He goes, Daniel, if you could just find something you're passionate about that isn't illegal,

I think you'd do okay with your life.

He believed in me. I didn't believe in myself.
He saw the potential. I didn't really feel, but I went all in.
Today, my life looks completely different. And it wasn't without a ton of challenges and frustration and issues and setbacks.
And I will share those with you today. I'm not going to up here and do success theater.
I am privileged and blessed, and I have immense gratitude for Cody and David for having me here, for all of you guys to be here. I don't take your time lightly whatsoever.
I just wanna let you know that on the back end of showing up, becoming obsessed, deciding to value yourself, because when we talk about time, I will let you know that if you don't value your time, nobody's going to value your time. And most people don't get what they want.
They get what they think they deserve. And if you don't feel worthy of deserving what I'm going to teach you, you will work really hard to get rid of it if you ever get it.
So today I have the privilege of flying around, on my plane, coming to speak to folks like yourself, trying to instill this belief that you can grow and the more you grow, the easier it gets. And I know it sounds like a freaking pipe dream and some of you guys are like, don't believe it.
Let's look at the map. Most entrepreneurs, okay, everybody should have something to write down because I'm going to share some lessons today.
The writer downers, I call them. Does that make sense? Say yes.
Say yes. Let's do this.
Most entrepreneurs, when they're growing, they hit what I call the pain line. And the pain line's a point where the more you would grow, the more pain you would feel.
Has anybody in the world ever felt that? Things are on fire, but God darn it, my life hurts. It's kind of like you know that you could, but you don't.
So you act to not win. Instead of playing to win, you're playing not to lose.
And you know better. That's the worst part is that the high performers, you guys are in this room, you know better, you want to play.
And what I've discovered is that no entrepreneur will grow into pain. That's a writer downer, because if you understand this, then everything I'm about to teach you

makes sense. I've never met an entrepreneur that will grow into pain.
It's like me holding a knife

to your neck and saying, step forward. Anybody play those VR games where you go up the elevator,

you got the headset on and you go up the elevator and there's a plank off the top of the building?

Anybody in this room with the VR set? Okay. Yeah.
You know what I'm talking about. You literally,

this is what happens. You put the headset on, you're not moving.
You're in the same

Thank you. off the top of the building.
Anybody in this room with a VR set? Okay, yeah, you know what I'm talking about. You literally, this is what happens.
You put the headset on, you're not moving, you're in the same, these are the little five by five grid they give you, and you're in the elevator, and the headset's on, and you feel like you're going up the elevator 40 floors, and then the door opens, and there's a plank, and you're supposed to walk off the plank, and you get to the edge of the plank, and for most people, unless you're a psychopath, when they say jump, you don't want to do it, like, and you know in your head it's not real. If you watch videos of people sitting there, and they're like, they don't want to jump and you know better So when I tell you entrepreneurs will not grow into pain, you're not going to want to do it And it usually means that you guys make mistakes What I've seen over the years is most entrepreneurs when they get to this place the ceiling of complexity is They decide to want to do one of three things.
Number one is stall. I'm good.
They get stuck in the I'm good mode. You know what? And I know a lot of you guys, best year, last 12 months, best year.
If you had a great year, make some noise. Let's hear it.
If you had a great year, make some noise. So you guys are coming into this feeling good about yourself, right? But you've probably been there where there's been a point where you just had a tough time and you had to lay off some people and you're like, I'm so frustrated.
Why is it so hard? And you might have the idea, I'm just going to stop. I'm going to chill.
I remember my buddy, Matt, he had an electrical company. And he came over to my house one day and he just goes, Dan, I watch your stuff.
I hear what you're talking about. If you're not growing, you're slowly dying.
I get it. But what if I just want to be? I said, okay, Matt, let's just run through the scenario.
I said, you're customers today. You all have customers, yes? Do you all have customers? Say yes.
Your customers, do they want less or more from you next year? Less or more? Perfect. You have vendors you depend on.
You don't want worse. You want better.
So far, so good? I said, so right off the bat, stalling is going to hurt you because your customers are going to want more from you. Number two is the world expanding or contracting, expanding or contracting.
Whether you like it or not, gross domestic product grows a couple percent a year. So the world, if you just stayed still, is going to expand, and then you're going to be on the receiving end of being inferior, even if you don't go down, just sideways, you're slowly dying.
That's why. Now this is where I got them.
I said, Matt, who are the two, three people, but let's go two, two names of people on your team that you would feel crushed if they left. Think about it for you.
I want every person in this room to think to themselves. Who are the two people? Y'all have They're your rider dies.
They're your their foundation. They're your rocket could be your partner And he gave me those names I want you to think about it for yourself.
What are those names? I said Here's what i've learned matt That those have hopes and dreams. And if your future isn't big enough, if your vision isn't big enough for their hopes and dreams to fit inside of, they will leave to find somebody who can do that for them.
Stalling is not an option. Number two is sabotage.
Sabotage is a funny one. All right.
Let me walk you through.

Sabotage is literally, write this down, manufacturing a situation that allows you to

fail that's not your fault. Some of you guys are laughing because you know what I mean.

Manufacturing a situation that causes you to fail that's not your fault. Anybody ever hire a cousin

they knew better they shouldn't have hired? And then you wonder why things aren't going good.

See you next week. you to fail that's not your fault.
Anybody ever hire a cousin they knew better they shouldn't have hired? And then you wonder why things aren't going good or you had to let them go? You knew ahead of time. A couple of them, I hear.
Sabotage is getting an email from somebody that says, I have an opportunity that could triple your business. And instead of replying with enthusiasm, let's talk, you drag your feet because you know if you say yes and that happens, your calendar is going to explode.
You don't have the capacity. And instead of replying right away, you wait on it.
You unread it, read it, star it. Not yet.
Maybe the weekend. You go to the gym on Saturday morning.
You come back, you're feeling pumped. And you're like, I'm going to reply.
You hit reply. Yeah, I'd love to talk.
Let's set it up. And they reply back.
Hey, sorry, Dan. Unfortunately, we already failed that opportunity.
Sabotage. Most people will self-sabotage themselves to the level they feel comfortable.
They don't even know they're doing it. Number three, they decide to sell.
Had a buddy of mine, Jason, call me the other day. He has an events business.
Things are tough. A few contracts didn't work out the way he wanted to.
Lost some money. He's like, Dan, I want to sell.
I said, why? I said, tell me the reasons. He gives me the reason.
I said, if those reasons weren't true, would you want to sell? He said, well, no. I said, well, then here's the good news.
You just discovered your complexity ceiling. You just discovered your level of ability of dealing with problems before you decide to pull back.
So you can leave. You can sell this business and go do the next one.
But here's what you're going to learn, Jason. In that next one, you're going to get the exact same place you're at now.
And it's going to hurt. And you're going to learn the same lesson.
So we either do it now or you do it later. But I'm telling you, the grass isn't always greener.
Do you know why sometimes the grass is greener? Because it's fake. I know what those internet people say.
Sometimes it's not true.

The grass is greener where you water it.

If you feel your pain line in your life,

you just had an incredible year,

but at the same time,

it stretched you, good.

I'm going to give you the solution to the problem.

It's called the buyback principle.

And it states,

we don't hire to grow our business. We hire to buy back our time.
It's a first principle approach. I think about it like calendar over capacity.
If you wake up and you add labor to your business and it does not buy back time out of your calendar, you're creating the prison. You're building a business, you're growing a business that you'll eventually hate.
And this is how we stop it. How many of you guys would like to learn how to do that? Say yes.
Here's how. It's called the buyback loop.
So when we feel the pain, ouch, ceiling, self-sabotage, don't, you know, you know when you're in. When you're in the zone, man, those emails come in, you're like, boom, let's go.
You know what I'm talking about? You're like making the calls, no issues. When you're in momentum, you feel it.
If you're not there, this is the process. And I have to do this, honestly, at my level, three, four times a year.
When you're growing and expanding,

you have to do this. First thing is we've got to audit our calendar.
We have to audit our calendar for time and energy. We need to know what things we do that take our energy and what it would cost

to pay somebody else to do it for us. So think of it this way.
Anytime I work with somebody,

I always make them do a two-week audit, previous two weeks. They don't have one.
They set up a

Thank you. cost to pay somebody else to do it for us.
So think of it this way. Anytime I work with somebody, I always make them do a two-week audit, previous two weeks.
They don't have one. They set up a timer.
It's every 15 minutes. It goes off.
They write in their journal what they did every 15 minutes, literally for two weeks, because I want to get a good sense of your life, personal, professional. Once you do that, then you go through and you highlight all the stuff you have on there.
Highlight it in red if it sucks your energy. Highlight it in yellow if it's like whatever.
And highlight it in green if it gives you energy. What color, scream it out, do you think I get from being on this stage? What color? Perfect.
You guys get the drill? Pretty simple. High energy, you like to do it, green.
Stuff you don't like to do, like for me,

financial, planning, bleh, anybody else?

Am I the only ones?

So, red.

And guess what?

Some stuff will start off green

and they'll eventually go yellow and that's okay.

That's actually something you gotta learn to do.

Then what you do next to each one of those tasks

is write down the dollar amount it would pay somebody else to do it for you. And I just use a $1 to $4 sign strategy.
It's not complicated. $4 signs if I had to pay somebody to do my job, CEO or whatever.
$1 is admin. It's kind of like a restaurant.
You know how they say how expensive the meal is? It's like $1 to $4. Just write it down.
Just what is it? $1, $2 signs, $3 signs, $1 signs, just go through the whole thing. Here's the fun part.
When you're done this process, you grab all the red stuff with $1 or $2 signs, you put it in a bucket. And that is the only person you hold yourself accountable to hire next.
Think about that. $1 to $2 signing costs red or yellow in a bucket.
You create the job spec. You hire that person.
That will change your life. That will stop you.
I mean, I see it all the time. People scale.
They're like, I'm a logo designer. I need another logo designer.
I'm a financial planner. I need another financial planner.
No, you need somebody to take everything off your plate for you to do that 38 hours a week or 45 hours a week or even 20. I don't care how much hours a week, but you want to do the thing that lights you up, that makes you the most money.
Now, I tell you, this sounds like fun. Say yes.
You're lying, but I get it. The next part is the transfer.
Oh, I'm going to go back.

The transfer.

So once you've got all this stuff,

now you've got to give it to somebody else.

Now, I know I'm not the only person

that's ever sat down and thought,

I read a book and I'm going to create an SOP

and I'm going to write all the steps and processes.

I do a whole off-site weekend and da-da-da-da-da

and I transfer it over.

And then I hire somebody

and I tell them where the document is. I expect them to read it.
They don't read it. They do work.
It's not done right. Anybody else experience that? Okay, that's not what I do.
What I do is I call it the camcorder method. Once I know who I need to hire next, while I'm doing the work, I record myself.
In today's beautiful world, I do Zoom calls by myself, screen

shared, recorded to the cloud, and while I'm doing the work, I'm talking out loud

about what I do. If I can get three of those recordings, I put those in a Google

document. When I hire the person, guess what their first project is? To build the

standard operating procedure. Why? Because then I know they watch the videos.

Thank you. to build the standard operating procedure.
Why? Because then I know they watch the videos. Like once you do this, you'll laugh how hard you made it for yourself before.
I remember my buddy Mark, he's a professional speaker and he's stressed out, man. He's like, I love doing it, but I hate all the extra work, the travel, the admin.
I can't deal with it. And I was like, Dan, just follow the process.

He's like, oh, Dan, I don't think you understand how your brain is different than mine.

I'm a creative, you're a systems thinker,

and you're different.

I was like, Mark, give me something you hate doing.

Surprise, surprise, he goes, accounting.

So I walk him through the camcorder method.

He literally follows the process.

Five videos, recording invoices, receivables, reconciliation, all the stuff he hates doing.

Finds a bookkeeper part-time, gives them the video.

They create the SOP.

Three months later, he calls me up.

I can't even believe it.

And this is the funny part.

I didn't even tell him the bonus.

He experienced it.

He goes, my bookkeeper just told me she's got to take some time off. She's pregnant.
What do I do? I said, you already got it, bro. You got the SOP.
You got the training videos. The next person's so much easier.
I call it zero to hero. How fast can I take somebody that's new to my team to be incredibly productive on my team? If you have this process in place, you'll never feel a prisoner to your team because you'll be able to hire and train people without taking your time.
See, most of you will accept an underperformer on your team because it takes less to deal with it than to have a gap and have to go find somebody to then train them. Does that make sense? Say yes.
You guys get it? Now, this is a philosophy that can't be disputed. If you want to build a million dollar company, you can't do it off $10 tasks.
And if you want to build a $10 million business, it's $100 tasks. Like, it gets to a point where there's not enough hours in the week.
You can't work your way out of this problem.

You have to learn how to let go.

And your inability to learn to let go

has created the prison that you live in.

So far so good?

Say yes.

All right, next up.

One of the most powerful frameworks I teach.

Simple, and it will change your frame on your team if you understand this, okay? I had the privilege of spending time with a guy named Richard Branson. Now, you got to understand, I grew up in the east coast of Canada, small town, 150,000 people, and growing Growing up as an entrepreneur, I'm 45, 17, 28, I don't even know how many, my math is

off. Is that 28 years ago? Am I that old? 28 years ago, I get into entrepreneurship, and I discover, obviously, Virgin.
And I'm reading the biography. So this was a decade ago, about 10 years ago.

I get an email.

I'm sitting in my office.

And my buddy, his name is Dan.

He has this company called Zozi.

And he emails me.

He goes, hey, Dan, I'm doing this event with Richard Branson at his home in Verbier, Switzerland, in April.

Would you like to come?

I was like, oh, what, let me check my calendar.

Clear!

And then I'm like so dorky.

I reply and I'm like, yeah, no, that should work.

Yeah, let me know.

I don't want to be like, when and where?

How much do you need?

Like, it was crazy.

Because it would even cost me.

He's like, just meet us there.

He's an investor.

He's going to his home.

He wants to hang out with some entrepreneurs

who are doing cool things.

I thought of you.

Wow.

I honestly thought this can't be real.

I want you to understand.

Imposter syndrome through the roof.

Like, he's not going to show up.

Dan's lying to me.

I don't know.

I was just like, it wasn't until I was sitting

literally on that couch.

That's the inside of his place. I'm sitting on that couch, and Richard comes out the back corner there.
And I was like, oh, this is real. So this is what I think to myself.
I can only mess it up from here. You've all thought the same thing.
Ejection is my only, it's okay. Shut your mouth, Dan.
Ask lots of questions, that way they don't ask you stories, you don't make them embarrass yourself. Okay, cool, cool, cool.
All right, so I'm there for a week, hanging out with the billionaire that every other billionaire wants to be like. And I'm trying to study Richard, because obviously he lives a quality of life that I just can dream of.
And I wanted to understand what does he do that's different than other people? That was my mission. And I'd just watch him, and I'd watch him.
Obviously, I'm not a weirdo, and I'd ask him questions from time to time. You know, just sitting there in the corner.
Man, he got me. I'll tell you a quick story.
I was having dinner with him one night,

and he sat next to me.

And while we're talking,

you know, if you ever talk with Richard,

he's kind of a slow, you know, he's high energy,

he's just very kind.

And he goes, so Dan, what do you do?

And I just, I didn't even,

I just shared a few things that I've done.

And he says, wow, your dad must be really proud of you.

And I just broke down. I didn't know if my dad was proud of me.
But for him to say that? He didn't see me get teary. I kind of pretended like I had to talk to the person on my right, but It was wild.

Here's the guy that literally I kind of pretended like I had to talk to the person on my right, but it was wild.

Here's the guy that literally could have been talking to anybody, and I'm some nobody Canadian entrepreneur.

Somehow I found my way in this room.

And what I saw that changed my life that I want to make sure that you guys understand is that what's different about Richard is he chose every day to protect his energy and to protect his time. And how does he do that? He has a beautiful person named Helen that literally acts as his defense mechanism.
When you hear he doesn't do email, it's because Helen does the email. When you hear that he builds businesses on legal notepads, it's because as soon as he draws something, he hands it over to Helen, she makes sure, she makes it happen.
And every morning, this is the kicker, every morning I watched him have breakfast with her, and this is the way he lives his life. All requests, all demands, think about this for you.
Some of you guys have executive assistants, but you're not really doing it this way. All the things come into his life.
They go through Helen. They have breakfast every morning.
She only brings to his attention the things that she doesn't know how to deal with. They discuss some options, preferences.
She locks and loads that. And then for the rest of the day, he comes and skis with us or works out or goes and talks at a charity thing or does a PR stunt.
But that's how he lives his life. I asked him once, I said, Richard, why don't you sit on any boards? His response, they're boring.
I've sat on boards. He's not wrong.
He's not wrong. I was like, oh man, he's got a different way of living.
So what he taught me was this philosophy of essentially replacing yourself out of the doing in the world and really learning to work through other people. And that's when I designed this thing called the replacement ladder.
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 Martell 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.
We've got a new episode so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode.
And the way it works, and I think about it for all businesses, and you might feel like you're doing really well, but you might have missed some steps. So I really want to ask you to do an audit at each level to go, are you at a 10 out of 10? Because if you're at a level four, but you're not doing level one right, it's going to fall down.
It's like a house of cards. So level one is you need to hire an admin because you're probably feeling stuck.
You might be feeling that pain line. The key is you've got to give 100% of your inbox in your calendar to that person.
When I say 100%, I, you know everybody brags about inbox zero?

You guys have heard that?

Say yes.

How about zero inbox?

I know, I don't do email.

Refuse to do it, Richard doesn't do email.

Some of you guys, well I could never do that,

my clients expect that.

Yeah, you taught them how to treat you.

You taught them what to expect.

Now, again, this is a 10 out of 10. There's levels to this.
I remember my brother calls me up one time and he's like, Dan, and my brother is a high-performing real estate guy. He had built a multiple eight-figure business, no assistant.
He's my brother. I talk about, I've been talking about this stuff for 15 years.
Finally, he calls me up and he goes, Dan, I think I need to get an assistant. I was like yes, brother We celebrated yeah Pain enough pain.
He's like yeah enough pain cool. Give him my playbooks give him my process whatever he needs It's yours hires an assistant off to the races Four months later.
I'm at his house for barbecue, and I'm excited I go, bro, how is this new person? Like, tell me about it. Tell me about your life.
And he goes, you know, he's flipping his bird. It's okay.
Oh, oh, I know. He goes, what? I go, no, let me, Pierre, did you hire somebody? And then when you choose, once the email comes in, you loop them in to do something when you need something done? Yeah, why? All right, reread, review, like, dude, you're not, you have to, I said your inbox is their to-do list.
You're trying to figure out what you should give them, let them figure that out. Here's what most people don't realize about their email.
It's a public to-do list of strangers' requests on your time.

Think about that. If you had an office on Main Street USA, would you allow a rando stranger to not only walk in the office, but sit down and get comfortable in your office? Would you allow that? Yes or no? No.
But yet you've accepted that with your inbox. You need somebody else being first line of defense so that they deal with all of it so that you can be here.
While I'm on this stage and having the privilege to share some ideas with you, my life is doing this. While I'm on this stage, people are being hired, business is getting done, wire details are being sent, things are getting paid, while I'm here, because I'm not first lightened of defense.
And it is a game changer. That's level one.
Level two is delivery. Services, doing the work.
Essentially, you can still be the person doing the core, but you need help with delivery. And I always think if you're feeling stalled, that's what you're missing, onboarding and support.
I want you to get to a place, if you're not there, where you bring on a new client, after that sale call is made, boom, you're not involved. You want to get involved when there's a strategic conversation about what you're seeing.
You don't want to be involved in anything else. At first, that person can be your assistant.
But if your assistant gets busy, and they should, I mean, it's fine. Guess what? My assistant has an assistant.
Yes. You want to build the people so the people build the business.
Right or downer. You might want to take that one down.
And delivery is the second level because I'll tell you, if you go from a conversation, let's say somebody introduces you to a lead and you take that call real quick and they say, yeah, I want to do this. And then you hang up and you say, well, you're going to hear from Lisa and that person can take the onboarding and the support.
Beautiful place to get to. That's level two.
The reason I've stacked these in this way, the replacement ladder, because it's the least amount of investment for the talent for the highest volume of time back. That's the math.
That's why it's a first principles approach. You can't defend it.
You can't argue that an admin is a lot less expensive than somebody who's a specialist to onboard and manage support. Does that make sense? Say yes.
OK.

Level three, marketing.

This is one of my favorites.

I had a friend, Rachel.

She had an agency.

Here's Rachel's revenue.

Does marketing?

Makes money.

Gets busy, stops marketing, doesn't make money.

Doesn't have any money, starts marketing, makes money.

Does anybody see the problem with the revenue curve?

OK. Thank you.
Starts marketing, doesn't make money. Doesn't have any money, starts marketing, makes money.
Does anybody see the problem with the revenue curve? Okay. So she calls me up.
Dan, how do I grow my business? I said, show me your numbers. She shows me a report, the last five years.
Boo,op, boop, boop, boop, boop. Rachel, you need to start doing marketing.
I do marketing? OK, sorry, Rachel. You need to start being consistent with your marketing.
What do you mean by consistent? I said you need a system for marketing. What does that mean? It means every day there's something happening to create awareness to your business, whether you're there or not, a system.
She goes, oh. See, and it could be part-time, but the moment you have somebody else that wakes up every day to make sure that you have traffic to your pages that capture contact or some mechanism for creating awareness that captures a contact that introduces to a sales conversation.
If you have somebody accountable, responsible, that wakes up every day, focuses on campaigns, focuses on traffic, then you will win. Anybody in this room ever experienced this? All of a sudden, your leads go down, and you're trying to figure out what happened, and some person updated your website, changed the style sheets, and all of a sudden, the checkout button or the submission button is the same color as the background, and the people on the page can't figure out how to submit the page.
Am I the only person that's ever had? Yeah, exactly. I see the hands.
Like, you need somebody that just focuses on lead generation. Again, we're talking levels.
The moment you put this in place,

even a part-time agency,

you're starting to build momentum.

You're buying back your time,

you're creating the space for you to do the thing

only you can do,

and you're starting to love your life again.

Awesome.

Level four, one of my favorites.

I call it the freedom level.

Why is it freedom?

Because at sales, having somebody else take the phone call to enroll the person, at the sales level, it will change everything. Let me tell you a story.
So I started coaching as a professional. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life, built and exited companies, but I felt compelled to want to work with people a little bit more one-on-one.
So I start taking calls. And I didn't realize how much pent-up demand from my social media.
We have now one of the fastest-growing social media channels. You can check it out online.
But back seven years ago, I didn't know that people wanted to learn from me. And my calendar got slammed.
I was taking all the calls with my new clients. Why? Because I thought I hired coaches in the past.
I talked to the coach. The coach needs to talk.
Like, I want to talk to the coach. I'm going to hire the coach.
I need to talk to the coach. And my wife sat me down.
This is literally my beautiful wife, Renee. She sat me down and I was like doing phone calls after I put the kids to bed because I was on the East Coast and the clients were on the West Coast.
And she just looks at me. She goes, what are you doing? You know better.
And I go, but Renee, they need to talk to me. She goes, no.
You teach this, you got to do it. And she wasn't wrong.
So I hired this guy, Michael. And Michael didn't even have a background in selling coaching.
He had a, I think his previous business was selling samurai swords on the internet. That translates for sure.
Anyways, can't make it up. The thing I loved about him was he ran his own Facebook ads.
I was like, dude, if you want to run the ads, I'll pay for them, but then you generate your own demand and then you take the calls. Let's see what happens.
I hire Michael the first day, I'm not even joking, credit card on call full pay. Okay, so think about your most expensive thing.
Imagine you hire a salesperson, first day they get somebody to buy. I call them up right away.
Once I see that transaction go through, I call Michael, what did you promise? Do I have somebody coming to my house for dinner tomorrow? Like, what did you sell?

What did you agree to? How did you get somebody that doesn't even talk to me to buy me through

you? And he goes to me, he goes, actually, Dan, I think it's better because it makes you look like

you do what you teach. Oh, huh.
All right. And from that moment on, my business went because I learned to let go.
See, this level is why it's freedom. Four hires, count them up.
One, two, three, four. If you implement this, you will be able to go on vacation.
And while you're away disconnected, you will come back to your business to have grown. Now, you still might need to be involved for the thing that you do that you love to do, but those people will have, that person would have created an opportunity or awareness of people that you exist.
Somebody would have talked to them, like a Michael, about what you do and get them to buy and roll in your thing. And then somebody else would have took that purchase and brought them up to a place and collected all the information and got them ready for you to sit down with your file to do your magic.
And that is freedom. And that's what I want for every entrepreneur in the world.
Now, the next level is flow. That's where I live my life and I want it for every one of you.
Flow is this beautiful place where you have somebody where you can partner with, where they own. This is the key.

If you're going in and you say you have a leader in place, you have a director, you have whatever you have, and you're the one telling them what to do, you're doing it wrong. I don't tell anybody on my team what to do.
They tell me what to do and we edit. It's called editing, not authoring.
You might want to write that down.

You want to be an editor, not an author.

So that leader has to own strategy and outcomes. When I say own, I mean if they're ahead of revenue, they've got to own revenue.
If they're ahead of marketing, they've got to own marketing. You've got to literally say, you come to me with the strategy to grow the business.
We're going to negotiate, and then you're going to go execute, buddy. You You got to own it.
Why? Because if people help build the plan, they won't fight the plan. Some of you guys are telling them what the plan is.
Guess what? When it doesn't work, they blame you. I want them to tell me what the plan is so that if it doesn't work for them, it's their fault, not my fault.
Those five levels will change your life. Does that make sense? Say yes.
This is the one that's going the one that's gonna hurt okay brace yourself if you don't have an assistant you are one and you're overpaid and you suck at your job just saying there's levels to this i'm hopefully shaking the brain a little bit for what's possible and inspiring you to get to a place where you can truly live in your flow and have people support you. If you're still struggling on what you could give your executive assistant, I want to give you my internal SOP, my standard operating procedure for my executive assistant.
So just find me on Instagram and send me the message YouTube EA, and I will send you a direct link to my Google doc. It's got

my North Star principles. It's got my whole meeting agenda.
It's got canned templates.

It's got preference files. It is the master document to have an EA come in, use my standard

processes to train them and really get them to be effective day one. That's number one,

big idea replacement ladder. Number one.
Number two, it's called transformational leadership. This is a completely different way to lead people.
And I learned it when I moved to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, okay? The mothership of tech nerds.

Okay, the Disneyland of geeks.

I remember as a Canadian,

I sold my first tech company living in Canada and then I got on a plane, I moved to San Francisco

because I want to learn.

I'm like, I'm 28, I want to see

what are all these young bucks,

what do they know about the internet?

And the big question I ask myself is how?

You guys have probably asked yourself the same question.

How does a 25-year-old kid raise $100 million and build and scale a company?

Have you guys ever thought that?

You guys see these Mark Zuckerberg type?

They're all over.

If you haven't been, you've got to go because it is fascinating to watch. You go to a coffee shop and all it is is pitch decks and code.
Mac laptops, pitch decks and code. It's like, and if you talk to somebody and they're like, what do you do? And you don't tell them you got a billion dollar game changing, world changing idea.
They will stop talking to you and turn around. I almost came home after three weeks.
I'm like, I'm way too nice for this city. I cannot deal.
They're hurting my feelings every day when I go out to talk to them. Luckily, and I went through challenges at this point.
I'm 28. The first successful company, I tried.
So 17 I started, failed, did another company at 19, failed,

didn't start for another five or some years.

At 24, hired a business coach,

this guy named Bob, changed my life.

First year, I went from two failed companies,

didn't know how to build the business.

First year revenue, $980,000.

24 years old.

What? How? And I just kept going. I only knew one gear and it's worked my butt off and I was scared I was going to lose everything if I didn't keep doing it.
And it took a lot from me. So I had a bit of PTSD after I sold that business because I was scared to do another one because I didn't want that same thing to happen again.
So when I was in San Francisco, I was trying to study how do these people scale? How do they grow? And I met this incredible man named Naval. Today he's famous.
How many of you guys know who Naval Ravikant is? Show of hands. Yeah, and it just tells me the level of nerdy.
If you know who Naval is, you saw him on Joe Rogan. But he's like our guru in Silicon Valley.
And I just ran into him one time at this party and I would reach out to him for advice. He taught me this beautiful framework, okay? I'm not gonna put it up on, I just wanna say it to you and then we're gonna move on to transformational leadership.
He shared with me that anything you wanna achieve in life, you just need to have leverage. So if you have leverage, little bit of effort, massive results.
There's only four ways to get leverage. They're called the four C's.
Write them down. First one is code, software.
If you know how to use code, a little bit of effort creates automation, process, things you never have to do again. I fell in love with code.
It's my love language, you could say. AI is an incredible example of code, right? Massive leverage.
You guys should be using ChatGPT or similar every day, hundreds of times a day. It is like having 10 more people on your team.
Second one is content. Second form of leverage is content.
Think about it. Camcorder method, creating a video.

It takes me 30 minutes to create a video.

A million people could see that video and it takes nothing from me.

I create an SOP, content.

I give it to a team.

I can train 10,000 people with the same process.

Leverage, content.

Third is capital.

As you guys know, money creates leverage.

If you have money, just so you know, a lot of people don't realize this, if you have a problem that can be solved with money, you don't have a problem. Say it again.
If you have a problem that can be solved with money, you don't have a problem. Capital is a massive form of leverage.
That's why you see these 25-year-olds raise $100 million. The fourth, and the one I fell in love with that I had to study that I really didn't understand, was collaboration.
Collaboration. People.
Leadership. Communication.
The economy of words. What I call polling vocabulary.
Being able to persuade. Tell stories.
Get people on board. Indoctrinate, origin stories.
Collaboration is essentially your ability to bring people along for the journey, to. Oh, pew, pew.

I didn't know.

Somebody asked me when I built my first company

and sold it, how did you do it?

I couldn't tell them.

I don't know.

I just know I worked my butt off.

I worked 100 hours a week.

It wasn't healthy for my physical health,

my relationships, my family's a little pissed off at me.

I don't know.

And when I learned the four C's of leverage from

Naval, code, content, capital, and collaboration, then it gave me a framework to go be better. Because if I could master these four master skills, I could accomplish anything.
Think about that. If you understand those four and study them and indoctrinate yourself in them and become obsessed with them, anything is possible.
Your creativity is your limiter. So I want to teach you about transformational leadership.
Transformational leadership is fascinating, okay? This is Dan Martell at 24 years old. This is how I led.
I didn't know any better. I didn't know there was another way to do it.
I'd hire somebody, I'd tell them what to do. Billy Bob, do this.
Billy Bob did that. Then I'd check.
Billy Bob, did you do it? Yep, did it. Cool.
Do this next. All right, we'll do it next.
And I did that. I call it the tell, check, next doom loop.
Some of you guys are like, what's wrong with this? I do this every day. Here's why.
At about 12, 13, 14 employees, this is what your life looks like. You wake up in the morning with a whole bunch of projects you want to get done.
You open up your inbox. You know you shouldn't, but you do.

You start processing your email.

Fire.

Uh-oh.

You start making phone calls.

One phone call leads to another phone call.

Then you realize you've got to get the team going.

And da-da-da-da-da.

You start doing tell, check, next, tell, check, next, tell,

check, next, da-da-da-da-da.

All day long.

Then you finally at 6 o'clock come home.

You do dinner with the family.

And then it's 8 o'clock, and you should be hanging out

with your spouse.

But instead, you get back to work because you didn't do

any of the projects you started with.

Does that sound familiar?

Say yes.

Yes.

Thank you. family and then it's eight o'clock and you should be hanging out with your spouse, but instead you get back to work because you didn't do any of the projects you started with.
Does that sound familiar? Say yes. All right, you guys get it.
There's a different way of doing it, a better way to do it. How young cats in the valley figured out to scale these companies.
One of my early, I mean, my early mentors were the founders of Uber and Dropbox and Airbnb. Like watching them scale.
Level one is you do an outcome. Instead of telling people what to do, you tell them where we're going.
And there's a nuance, and that's a skill. And I would encourage you guys to learn how to do that.
If I want somebody to take the mountain, I don't tell them, hey, go to this GPS coordinate and step-da-da and step here. I say, that's the mountain we're taking.
This is what we're doing. When you get at the top, it's going to feel like this.
And I paint them the picture of the outcome. Sometimes I call it the success criteria.
What is the success criteria of us updating our website, migrating our website, changing our financial system? Whatever it is, that's the outcome. You and I are gonna talk about the outcome.

Then what I do is I talk about measure.

I wanna measure or give them a feedback loop

on how they can measure their progress.

So imagine I don't tell them how they play the game

and they just start playing the game.

If somebody asked me to play cricket

and didn't give me the rules of the game,

do you think I could play cricket well or bad? Good or bad? Bad. You imagine? I'd probably get fired off the team as soon as I stepped on the plate.
I wouldn't even know where the plate is. Maybe there isn't a plate.
I don't know. I know I got a bat and somebody's going to throw a ball somewhere.
I'm supposed to hit it and I think I run back and forth until somebody tags me or something. I really don't know.
You're doing it to your team.

You I'm supposed to hit it, and I think I run back and forth until somebody tags me or something. I really don't know.
You're doing it to your team. You are playing a game with your team, and you forget to tell them the rules.
You do not give them a metric. Every person, everybody in my companies has a number that they can use in North Star to let them know if they're doing better.
That's measure, and that's what you find in Silicon Valley. The third is coach.
If somebody is off, then you coach them.

So if I tell a team member that is the amount we're gonna take,

this is how it's gonna feel when we get to the top,

every day I want you to text me how many feet of elevation

per day gain you've done.

Every day they text me 150, 180, 210,

all right, we're making progress, 26. Oh 26 oh 26 feet not good we got to dig in

i coach see that's the difference most people tell their team what to do i train my team what to do

i call it train don't tell so coaching is different coaching is sitting down with the

person that didn't make any progress and saying to them all all right, what went off? He's like, I got lost. Okay, why did you get lost? I don't know, if you had to guess.
Well, I didn't know which way was up. Why didn't you know which way was up? The trails were all over the place.
Okay, if you had to fix the problem, what could you do to fix the problem? Well, I could probably ask people next time when I'm hiking, because you ran on some people. Yeah, I ran on some people.
Did you ask them which way to go? No, I didn't ask them which way to go. Okay, so that's one option.
What else do you do? Well, I could probably get a map. You don't have a map? Nope, don't have a map.
Buy a map. Okay, what do you want to do? And then they tell you.
And then you coach them on getting better. Why? Because if you you coach them you invest in them and they get better and what happens when you hire a lot of people really quick at first there's an investment in them and then eventually they invest back into the business check that out one to 12 using transactional leadership you get to a point where your life S sucks.
About 12 to 14 people. Transformational leadership, the more you grow, the more you get back.
Why? Because you've coached the early people that start coaching the other people. See, the way you show up as a leader is how your leaders will show up for their teams.
And if they're not showing up in a way that creates expansion, it's because of the way you've shown up for them. So you've created this scenario where they're showing up doing tell check next to their team, and they're bottlenecking their team.
Do you guys see that? Say yes. It's a game changer, okay? Here's the deal.
People don't buy your standards, they buy your presence. You think they bought you.
They did not. If somebody bought from you, they're buying your standards.
They're buying your process. They're buying your methodology.
They're buying your values. They're buying your culture.
They're not paying for your presence. They need you to hold a standard within your team, and that's what they're paying for.
So many people feel stuck in their leadership style because they think they have to be there. You don't.
You have to create the environment, the game that you love to do, that they thrive in because you've created a place where they get to grow. Changes everything.
Those are the first two. The third and last.
The one-three-one rule. I learned this from my buddy Brad Pedersen.
He's actually a mutual friend of Cody's and I. He's one of the smartest minds, one of my best friends.
We hang out every week, and he's always dropping bombs and knowledge and stuff. And he says this to me once.
He goes, do you know why they call it a bottleneck? I said, no, Brad, why is that? They go, because it's at the top. John Maxwell calls it the law of the lid.
Your business will not grow past the level of your own growth. I wish it wasn't that way.
Trust me. Unfortunately, it is.
If you want your business to grow, you have to grow. If you can't grow, hire somebody that's willing to do it for you.
that's an option. But if you're the CEO, you're the leader, you need to grow.
If you can't grow, hire somebody that's willing to do it for you.

That's an option.

But if you're the CEO, you're the leader, you need to grow.

And the 1-3-1 rule helps you develop yourself in a way so that you don't become the bottleneck.

It is a game changer for actually working with teams.

One time I had an HR guy named Adam.

He was working for me.

He was new to the team. He had heard we train against the 131.
It's kind of culture for us. And we just finished quarterly planning, which I'm assuming a lot of you guys have just done.
And we're sitting there, and I could tell Adam's stressed. You know, he's new.
He's listening. He's hearing all the departments and the hiring, and he's just, you know, he's breathing heavy, and I'm watching it happen.
And at break, he comes up to me, he goes, we got an issue. I said, what's up, Adam? He's like, well, dude, we got to hire 13 people in the next 90 days.
Yeah. That's an issue.
How do we do that? I look at him. I'm like, well, I'm pretty sure that's your job.
Well, I mean, I know it's my job. I'm going to do the work.
But I mean, I don't know. Like, that's a lot of people.
I remember Steve Jobs saying this once. He says it's easy to hire people and tell them what to do.
He said it's harder to hire people and have them tell you what to do. Game changer.
Stop hiring people and tell them what to do. Hire them and have them tell you what to do.
I said, Adam, what's your 131? He literally says to me, oh, are you serious about that? I'm fucking dead serious. What's your 131? Well, I haven't thought about it.
I said, how much time

do you need to think about it? He said, I don't know.

He said, yes.

I said, tomorrow

would you be prepared? He goes, yeah.

I said, cool. Take the rest of the

day to plan it out, 1.3.1, come back

to me tomorrow morning. Like, tomorrow at this time.

It was like 3 in the afternoon. Tomorrow at 3 we'll have

a meeting and we'll talk about it. We'll review your 1.3.1.

He goes, cool. 10 a.m.
Text from Adam. I'm good.
You are teaching people how to treat you. They will not make a decision because guess what? If they make a decision and it doesn't work out, then it's their fault.
They come to you with the problem so you can give them the answer so that if it doesn't work out, guess what? It's you, not them. And you don't even realize they do this.
So here's the one-three-one rule. Follow this.
It'll be the most important thing you hear over the next few days. Number one, when somebody comes to you, ask them, what is the one specific challenge? A problem well-defined is half-solved.
Einstein said this. Most people, when you ask them, what problem are you trying to solve, they actually don't know.
They just feel in a panic. Help them.
What's the one specific challenge? Let's talk, Adam. Hire 13 people within 90 days.
Got it. What are your three viable options? See, as an entrepreneur CEO, what we do without even thinking about it is we evaluate options in real time to make a decision.
And when we have somebody else make decisions for us, it stresses us out. I have clients, they get anxiety attacks when somebody does stuff for them.
They get adrenal fatigue. Literally, they feel like they're hungover.
I have clients that have broken out into shingles because of the stress their body is under having somebody else make a decision on their behalf. It is debilitating.
Why? Because they're worried they didn't think about the scenarios. So that's why, if anything, three viable options is for you to relax, breathe, and go, okay, you did think about calling this person, okay, and then you did some research on the internet, okay, and then you did, okay, cool, those are all three viable options.
Awesome. The third one, so that's the one of the three, the third one is one recommendation.
Adam, what is your one recommendation to me to solve this problem? Would you guys be surprised to hear that 98% of the time their recommendation is the answer? Yes or no? Think about that. Would you be surprised to hear their recommendation is most often the answer? Yes or no? No, because they did the work.
And you know what's funny? The people that are the closest to the problem have the most context to solve the problem. So you don't even realize that trying to help people solve problems that you're far away from actually makes it worse because you don't have the context.
So what happens with the one, three, one is you push challenges down to the front line and you stop them from coming up. So then all of a sudden the leaders get to free up their time to solve force multiplier problems, game changer problems, leverage problems, not get bogged up in the weeds.
I'll give you a little tip. I call it the 50 to fix it.
In my companies, across all the businesses I'm involved in, if you're a frontline worker and individual contributor,

you can spend up to $50 to solve a problem, never ask for permission as long as you let your leader know after the fact you spend it, expense it, we'll pay it. Just let your leader know.
$50, anybody can do that. No questions asked, do it in real time.
I love you, I trust you. Do that.
Level up, team leads, $500.

Directors, $5,000. C-level, $50,000.
I had a CEO that works for me come to me the other day.

He had a massive problem. He was trying to solve it, da, da, da.
He wanted approval. It was $37,000.

I said, hey, bro, what's the rule? What rule? 50 to fix it. He goes, oh, yeah.
I said, I trust you. Do it.
Don't slow down. You want to make a lot of money? Stop being involved in decisions you don't have to be involved in.
Here's the way to think about it. You want your problems to be bigger.
If you have bigger problems problems it means you're living a bigger life bigger problems bigger life lots of little problems i can tell you what your life looks like small you don't want ten dollar problems hundred dollar problems thousand dollar if you're in this room i pray that you're dealing with $50,000 problems, $100,000 problems,

million-dollar problems.

That just tells me the size of your life.

The only way to do that is to create the space in your calendar to be able to do that.

That is the biggest thing for me when I help entrepreneurs unlock their time, is I want

them to go build their empire.

I'm not a four-hour workweek guy.

I'm not a get-free-and-go-travel-the-world-and-hope-my-team-figures-it-out kind of kind of guy that's not me I want to create the space in your calendar to become more see most people don't realize your biggest expense is not doing the thing that makes you the most money if you're the leader of your business being in this room is the best thing you could be doing with your time right now being here networking building relationships learning best thing you you can do with your time. Check this out.
This one will really kind of shift it all for you. Did you know you've never had a dollar come into your bank account without another person involved? You've never had money, unless you stole it, you've never had money, you've never had money come into your bank account without a relationship, a person involved in that transaction.
Here's why that's important to understand. Anything that isn't you networking, creating, collaborating, business developing, growing yourself so you can be valuable for everybody else around you, anything that is not that is not what you should be focused on.
And if you want to have yet another breakout year, you guys all had a great year, I want you to have another one. I want 2025 to blow your minds.
Be like, I can't believe that just happened. You have to learn how to buy back your time.
No ifs, ands, or buts. You might think you're good at it.
If you're good at it, you're not good at it. You gotta get better.
There's another level. Read the book, study my material.
Trust me, whole different level. Now, y'all got a copy, but I wanna leave you with this as I land the plane.
And it's why I'm here. It's why I went through what I went through as a teenager.
It's why I struggle with addiction. It's why incredible human beings came into my life to express their belief in what was possible for me in moments where I had zero belief.
It's because I actually think every person on earth is here to feel fulfilled, not be happy. I have two little boys.
I'm not talking about, hey, what's going to make you happy? What's going to make'm not talking about hey what's gonna make you happy what's gonna make you feel fulfilled what's gonna make you feel useful after I go to the gym I feel great did I feel happy when I was at the gym no so it's not about feeling happy happy is moments here's what I've learned 28 years of entrepreneurship entrepreneurship, coming to events like this every year, investing myself, 1,600 books, massive coaching. I coach with the best of the best, okay? I've learned it comes down to two things.
Number one is wake up every day to strive to become your 10.0 self. What is your 10.0 self? I have a whole framework, but I want to tell you this.
It's the person you needed most in your darkest days. It's the person that you would have listened to when you were going through it.
It's the person that you would admire. It's the best version of you.
It's like taking all the best moments in your whole life where you're the funniest and strongest and kindest and assertive and all the stuff that you, the fittest, like all of it. Take all those moments, put them into one day, stack it.
That's your 10.0 version. If you're a person of faith, it's the person that God created you in his image.
That's why you're here. It's why you desire for more.
So you wake up every day and you

aim for the 10.0 self. That's half the equation.
The other half is to share yourself with the world.

Whatever you did and learn, share it. If your world are your kids, pour into your kids.
If your world

is your community, your church, your CrossFit gym, pour into it. If it's your country, go all in.
I would actually invite you to consider to share it with the whole world, social media. It's been the most magical journey for me.
And if you do those two things, I promise you, you will live daily in a place of massive fulfillment.

Thanks for having me, everybody.

Thanks for listening to the Martell Method.

If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review?