I’m 45. If You’re 18 to 30, Watch This…

became a cash millionaire at 27 years old, but if I had to start from zero at 18 and go from broke to millionaire before 30, these are the exact choices I would make at every point in my journey.

Welcome to the Martel Method.

I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best-selling author.

In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.

My best-selling book, Buy Back Your Time, is out now.

Grab a copy at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers.

The first choice I would make is college or no college.

Here's the thing.

The pros, you get to learn how to learn.

I can't tell you how many people finished high school and they didn't learn the skill of learning.

College is going to teach you that because it gives you creative freedom over the courses you get to pick.

It also gets you access to incredible mentors.

You know, when I think of like the professors and the other teachers I've met at the college or university level, because they're going to be getting called by other CEOs of companies saying, who are your your top students and recommending the people in those classes?

And the truth is, if you go to college, you will come out with a higher pay.

If you get the degree, you get paid accordingly if you stay in that lane.

Not going to college, I mean, first off, you get to start the thing you actually want to do.

See, college is in many ways a reason to delay just doing.

If you don't go, you get to start right away.

One of the big ones is the cost of college.

If you look at the cost of college, it's gone up five, six, seven times.

Guess what has not gone up accordingly?

Your pay.

And then finally, how does AI change college?

What if nobody needs it?

Because AI is your co-pilot.

It has perfect information and PhD level knowledge to help you do anything you want.

Is college really even needed?

That could very much be true in the next 12 months, 24 months.

So if I was 18 again, my opinion, don't go to college.

I just don't think taking on debt and becoming a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer is the fastest way to a million anymore.

So now that I've decided to skip college and save myself four years of sitting in a class, it's time for the next choice.

Getting a job or starting a business.

So pros of getting a job.

First off, jobs come with built-in mentors.

You're going to be around other people that are doing the thing that I'm assuming you're going to start in the future if you want to start your own business.

So you get to fast track your learning by getting paid to learn.

The other one is structured skill building.

If you go work at the right place, you're going to be put in maybe into marketing and then they're going to move you into sales and then you could go into operations.

In four years, you might come out of there as a freaking weapon.

The other one is that it's low risk.

You're not putting your own money and time into something and hoping it works out.

You're gonna be learning the skills, and somebody else is gonna be paying you to do it.

So, it's a heck of a lot lower risk than starting your own thing.

On the other side, we have starting your business.

First off, unlimited income.

You could literally get as rich as you possibly can get based on your skill level and the opportunity and the market.

It's up to you.

That is not true in a salaried position that you get when you do your own thing.

Then you have unlimited upside, maybe relationships or do really cool projects or travel the world doing what you love to do.

And the last is faster decision cycles.

I can't tell you how soul sucking working for somebody else can feel if you're in the wrong place.

When you're doing your own thing, guess what?

You decide what you want to work on.

It's incredible.

That may not come if you're working for somebody else because you're going to be stuck in their vehicle instead of building your own.

So if I was 18 again in this world, I'm doing my own thing.

Why?

Because the world has never been ready for people to decide to do their own thing than right now.

All the tools that didn't exist, all the opportunities, the people, the customers are all available for you to talk to.

There's no lack of places to go learn.

If anything, you're going to be overwhelmed, but that's the beauty.

So now that you decided to do your thing, the next choice I would make is co-founder or go solo.

Both are awesome.

Having a co-founder, the first thing is it has built-in accountability.

See, when you're doing everything yourself, it is easy to decide to go down a path that to any other person, if they're actually watching you, would stop you from going down that path.

Having a co-founder can fill in the gaps around around skill sets that you don't naturally have that they bring to the table and can be world class at.

The other thing is having somebody else that also believes in your crazy idea sets you up in case you want to raise money because an investor is going to go, okay, if you convince one other person that what you're doing could work, then that's a good sign.

But then you could also go solo.

There's a lot of reasons why you'd want to do this.

First off, it's a lot faster.

You don't have to build consensus when making decisions.

The other thing is you get to keep the whole business.

If I bring on a co-founder, I might have to give up 50% of my business, even more if they've got more skills and more capital that they're bringing to the table.

And that might create more risk in my business.

The other one, the truth is, is it costs less.

You might have to pay yourself a little bit to get started.

And if you bring another person that also needs to take a salary and you've saved up some money, all of a sudden those savings start to dwindle really quick.

If I was starting over today, the decision I would make is neither.

Because the truth is, is I think you should look at a third option, which is finding somebody could be a partner.

It doesn't mean a co-founder.

Language aside, a partner means that they're involved in the business.

They might have a little bit of equity, but you're still driving things forward.

I've been doing this for 28 years and I'll tell you, everybody is in until it starts to hurt.

And then we'll see who actually shows up.

So I like to use the word partner.

So there's two benefits to this strategy.

First off, you don't give up one of the most expensive things, which is equity, meaning the ownership in the business.

If somebody buys your business for $10 million and somebody else owns 50% and they're no longer part of the business, trust me, when you write that check for $5 million to that person, it's going to eat you up inside.

So to fix that, and this is the second part, you need to use use vesting.

And what that means, essentially saying, like, I'm willing to give you 10% of this business as a partner, but I'm only going to give you pieces of it over time.

Most lawyers know how to set this up and it's absolutely normal.

The reason why this works the best is you get the benefit of having a co-founder, aka partner that helps you to grow to be accountable to, to pull you up when you're feeling down and you're still driving the business and have the most ownership in the company.

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Now that we established that, this next step could make or break your business.

Bootstrap or raise money.

Bootstrap, which means you start the business through sweat equity.

You're doing the grind, you're borrowing resources, you're trying to sell to customers, you got no money.

The other one is you raise money from somebody else, which means they get a piece of your business and some profit in the future.

So my first successful company that I ended up building and selling completely bootstrapped.

I own 100% of the company after I bought out my partners.

The other two companies, I raise venture capital for both of them.

So I have experience in both sides of the equation.

So the pros of raising money, first off, fast scale.

You literally can get the money, execute, buy the stuff, find the customers, hire the team.

It is very fast.

You get a built-in investor network.

Think about it.

Having somebody give you money, well, now they're incentivized to see you win.

So if you need an introduction to somebody that you otherwise wouldn't get to know that they know, they'll make that introduction.

The doors open faster.

And the last one is validation.

If you can sell investors to part with their hard-earned dollars to invest in your company, it's a good sign you can sell customers.

Think about it.

Shark Tank, if an investor is investing in your company, they're going to want to see you win.

So like Mark Cuban was actually an investor in one of my companies.

So when I was hiring a CTO and I knew that they really like Mark's work, I could ask Mark to send them a quick message to nudge them along the way.

That is powerful.

So not only did I get his resources, his money, I also got his time and influence to help move the business forward.

Now, if you look at bootstrapping, here are some of those pros.

First off, you keep the ownership.

When you go exit your company for $10 million, you get all $10 million.

And the most expensive equity is the early equity you might have to give to an investor.

You also have no vision drift, meaning that you have nobody else's agenda or ideas steering the ship.

You get to make the decision with your vision in mind and the only one that gets to decide that.

You also get to grow it at your own pace.

I mean, if you have investors, they've got a window where they want to see a return.

And if you're building for them, then you got to push and you might not want to do that.

I mean, at the end of the day, when they say lifestyle business, you can still become a multi-millionaire creating a lifestyle business that's incredible for your lifestyle.

So if I was starting over today, the choice I would make is technically neither.

I would do a thing called customer financing.

Essentially, I would pre-sell to customers and have them invest without giving up equity to pre-buy my product or service so that I could get their capital to start the business.

If you want to start a lawn care company, go get 25 customers to prepay you for the season, then go buy the lawnmower, show up and start cutting their lawn.

See how that works?

This is my version of bootstrapping that works even better because you get customer validation or validation from the market and you get the capital you need to go faster.

So this way, again, you get the best of both worlds.

So now that you got your plan for ownership, it's time for the next step, which is making the choice of niching down or going broad.

People often say the riches are in the niches, but are they really?

So when I started my first company that finally made me money, I had to niche down from just building software for everybody to only Fortune 500 companies.

We're talking Procter ⁇ Gamble, Dole Foods, Johnson ⁇ Johnson, these big companies, because that's what I knew really best.

And it turns out they were willing to pay the money I needed to invest in my team.

With that being said, there are a lot of pros to keeping it broad.

So first off is that it's easier to find them.

I mean, you can literally like sell to a small business and run into about a dozen of them in a day at the mall.

And lastly, it's just easier to start when the market is broad.

You don't have to have so much experience in the specific niche.

You don't have to spend so much money on like a specific solution for a customer type.

You can essentially just get started and find the customers easier.

So now that we've addressed the pros of staying broad, now we got to talk about why there's a benefit of going niche.

First off, cheaper acquisition.

When you're creating ads and you're being super specific, you're essentially spending less money because the ad platform doesn't have to try to find the customer.

You can literally tell it that I only want to sell to this type of person and it's only going to show the ad to those people.

It also comes with higher close rates.

If you think about when you're having a conversation about fitness, if I specialize in helping menopausal women with specific fitness goals, that's a lot more interesting than just saying I'm a personal trainer and I help everybody.

So the women are going to buy quicker because I specialize in their specific pain.

The last one is the word of mouth flywheel.

Because you're so specialized, people that buy from you and you get them results a lot quicker, they're going to tell everybody.

It's like the wind that you get them infects the whole market and everybody starts referring to you because you only do that thing and you're not broad for everybody.

So with all of that in mind, if I had to make a choice today between going broad or staying super niche, I would niche down as soon as possible.

The reason why is that when you start, it is so hard to get traction that if you try to be everything to everybody, you won't be anything to anybody.

I'm telling you, the marketing is harder, the sales conversation is harder, the product is harder.

I mean, I see people literally going out of business, not because they don't have enough opportunity, it's because they sell too many different things to too many people and they get overwhelmed.

And then there's bugs and issues and complexity in their business.

Picking a niche will make you rich.

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Now let's get back to the episode.

So now that you've decided to go niche, the next choice you got to make is, do I get a coach or do I do it myself?

When I started, I went at it alone and I struggled.

I had two failed companies before I ever made my first dollar.

And the truth was, is I eventually had to hire a coach, this guy named Bob, who taught me how to do it.

And it was crazy because I was paying him 1500 bucks a month and it completely changed my business.

But I've also started businesses and I didn't have a coach and that had a completely different outcome.

So let's talk about the pros of either doing it yourself or hiring a coach.

If you do it yourself, first thing, simple, you save the money.

I mean, when you start, cash is tight and every dollar that goes out is a dollar you don't have.

The other pro is that you get to build the business through your vision, not taint it through somebody else that might have done it five years ago because the world's completely changed.

On the other side, getting a coach is like a mentor and mentors bring the map.

Having somebody that you could pay to give you access to the map to show you exactly how to build your business is incredibly fast.

The other benefit is you have somebody else to give you feedback.

And the cool part is they've been there before.

And so you get to avoid giving up equity or raising money from investors.

So you get all the benefits without losing control.

It also comes with accountability.

You know, when you spend money to get advice, trust me, you will pay attention.

When we pay, we pay attention.

And oftentimes I say transformation for ourselves happens at the transaction.

So again, if I was starting out from scratch and I had to make that choice today, I would 100% get a mentor.

I personally have an unlimited budget for my health and education.

I mean, think about it for yourself.

If you've gotten good at something, maybe it took you 10 years to learn an instrument, knowing what you know now, if I took everything away from you, how much faster could you have gotten there?

That's the benefit of having a mentor in your life is they'll save you literally decades of time.

So these choices will help you get to your first million.

But we don't want to stop there.

How do you multiply it?

The final choice you need to make is do you scale or exit?

Exit the business, make a bunch of cash, or keep scaling it to generate more profit.

I get the call all the time, people going like, man, I'm burnt out and I think I want to sell or others going like, man, I'm getting calls from people who want to buy my business.

Should I keep building or should I exit now?

I don't know.

When I was 28, I was getting those emails, those calls.

Hey, Dave, we want to buy your business.

Hey, Dave, we want to buy your business.

But you got to understand, I just built this thing, struggled for two, three years, finally was getting some momentum.

And I didn't have anybody to turn to who had gone through this, trying to wrestle with the pros and cons of selling or keep building.

So because of that, I had to think like, what are the pros to each decision?

Selling gives you cash in the bank.

Essentially, it reduces the risk of being in the market.

It gives you liquidity and you can take that money and invest it.

And if you do it right, you may never have to work another day for the rest of your life.

The other benefit is getting that capital creates an opportunity for you to reinvest and have ammo to do bigger deals.

I mean, now you can transition from being an operator and just stressing under the build of the business to investing in other people and creating diversity in your investments.

So you don't have all of your personal net worth tied up into one company.

On the other hand, you have the option of keeping the business, which the truth is, check this out.

If you actually ask yourself how much money per month you would need to live this wildly awesome life, it's not that much.

For most people, it's like $100,000 a month, which I know sounds wild.

But if you think about that potential of building the business to that level, then you have the beautiful home, a couple of really cool cars, the ability to travel the world, and that monthly cash flow becomes consistent the bigger the business gets there's a lot of benefits to keeping the business first off you don't have to worry about what are you going to go and do with all that money trust me most people that exit their business they can't find a safe reliable thing to invest in that was as predictable as their previous business they just exited having that company just creates consistency in your life so it makes it less stressful you also get more upside because you take that money you reinvest it in your existing business, which you know really well, and it keeps growing.

So you have more upside later.

I mean, somebody might give you 10 million today, but they might give you 50 million in three years.

And that path is a lot more predictable than selling today.

So if I was starting over today, my choice would be to sell, specifically when growth plateaus or passion fades.

I mean, when I think about selling my companies, when I felt that either, hey, I didn't love to sell to this customer anymore, it kind of grew into something that I didn't enjoy, or the opportunities to keep learning and growing was not found in my current business.

So the passion faded for the thing thing I was doing.

And then exiting made a lot of sense.

The key here is to call it before it's too late.

If you look to sell once you're like absolutely burnt out and tired, the buyer is going to have the advantage.

You want to get that decision made before you get to that place.

Think about like a UFC fighter.

Them deciding to retire is always best to do it at the height, not after they got completely knocked out on the last fight.

But there's an asterisk.

If you really enjoy your business, then maybe you keep building.

And here's why.

If you're buying my business, you're essentially buying years of perfect execution.

So if you're only buying one year of perfect execution regards to what you're going to pay me for it, then I'm probably just going to keep building.

Like when I look at my life today, I've got Martel Media and Martel Ventures, and both of them have actually been built up.

So I could exit them today.

I think it's just a great way to build a company, but I wouldn't because if I sold them, the first thing I would do the day after the transaction completed was to do it over again.

Because my life that I'm living is literally the life that I wanted to design.

That is the thing that you want to get right so that you don't struggle with these decisions.

So those are the choices I would make if I wanted to go from broke to millionaire starting at 18 years old.

And that's essentially the advice I gave my friend Josh.

He was 18, struggling in life.

Parents wanted him to go to university.

He's like, I just want to start.

And I said, bro, if you know it's on your heart to start a business in the future, you don't have to go to university to start.

Just make a commitment to yourself.

Bet on yourself.

Go all in on you.

It won't be easy.

You won't have your parents' support.

You will have a lot of people misunderstand you.

You got to be willing to go long periods of time being misunderstood before you win.

But guess what will happen?

The day you win, your parents will tell all their friends, oh my God, my son is so successful.

But there's going to be a period where you're going to have to go through it and make these decisions.

But trust me, on the other side, it'll all be worth it.

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