How to Scale Your Business (Full Course)

Speaker 1 How do you actually scale a business? Right now, you're in one of two groups. Group number one, the chaos builder.

Speaker 1 You wake up every day reacting to what happens around you and your business runs you instead of you running it. Now, group number two is the Empire Builder.

Speaker 1 This is where you've built a machine that builds your business, a business that grows whether you're in the office, on vacation, or even sleeping.

Speaker 1 If you're in group number one right now, this course is going to get you into group number two and save you years and millions of dollars worth of mistakes.

Speaker 1 And if you're in group number two, you've probably hit a ceiling where your business has stalled out.

Speaker 1 And this course is going to help you break through that ceiling and actually scale your business to the next level. This course isn't about theory.

Speaker 1 It's built from real experience and 28 years of scaling businesses. So here's what we'll go over.
Phase number one, buying back your time. Phase number two, clarifying your strategy and offer.

Speaker 1 Phase number three, building a predictable growth engine. Phase number four, systematizing delivery and operations.
Phase number five, five, installing leadership and management systems.

Speaker 1 And phase number six, scaling culture and vision. And look, don't skip ahead because the concepts we talk about in each phase are needed to understand the one after that.

Speaker 1 Before we get back to the episode, I really want to ensure that you can use this process to get what you need out of it.

Speaker 1 So I put a whole PDF together covering everything that we're going to go over in this course. So click the link in the description to download it and follow along at home.

Speaker 1 Starting with phase one, buying back your time. Broke people spend time to save money.
Rich people spend money to save time. You can't build a multi-million dollar company off $10 tasks.

Speaker 1 It's impossible. You can't outwork the fact that per hour you have to create more value, you have to get better.
And if you're not learning how to get more time back, you'll always be stuck.

Speaker 1 The buyback principle states you don't hire to grow your business. That's what everybody else does.
You hire people only if it buys back your time.

Speaker 1 Because if you get the time back out of your calendar, then you, the most valuable resource in the business, can reinvest that time in things that make you more money.

Speaker 1 I need to get out of the doing and have other people do. And when they bring me their work, I get to edit.
I call it being the editor, not the author.

Speaker 1 What's cool is we're going to touch on a framework that's going to teach you exactly that in a second. Here are some of the symptoms that you're at this stage.

Speaker 1 Most founders are still touching every part of the business. You're approving invoices.
You're jumping on sales calls. You're answering customer tickets at 10 p.m.
I get it.

Speaker 1 Somewhere along your life, somebody told you that you have to do whatever it takes to be successful. You got to be willing to take out the garbage.

Speaker 1 You got to be willing to roll up your sleeves and work till two in the morning. Yes, a little bit, not forever.

Speaker 1 If you're running the company and it's two, three, four years later and you're still doing this, it's a flawed strategy. Here's the truth.
Your business is capped at the speed of your delegation.

Speaker 1 Imagine this. You're trying to drive a race car with one hand on the wheel while trying to fill it up with gas, changing the tires, what, with your foot? I don't know, checking the oil pressure.

Speaker 1 That is what happens when you try to be all things to all people and you get stuck in the business. So here's the framework that I need you to consider anytime you feel stuck.

Speaker 1 When you're building and more opportunity would create pain in your calendar, come back to this framework. It's called the buyback loop.

Speaker 1 So you're growing, you're building, you have a little time at the beginning, but eventually you start getting a few clients and it starts to hurt.

Speaker 1 The moment there's pain in the calendar, do the first step. It's called audit.
We need to look at everything you're doing in your calendar and track everything for a two-week period.

Speaker 1 The reason it's two weeks is because it gives you enough variety in your week to understand how the rhythm of your life looks today.

Speaker 1 So what we do is we set up a timer that goes off every 15 minutes and you write in your journal what you did in that 15 minutes. And if you scrolled Facebook, write, scrolled Facebook.

Speaker 1 If you talked to your friend for an hour and 15 minutes, right, talk to my friend, talk to my friend, talk to my friend. I need you to get a sense of what you're doing with your time.

Speaker 1 See, most people don't need to buy it back. They just need to stop wasting it.

Speaker 1 So once we audit all those different tasks, activities, places we spend our time, then we go through and we highlight in green things that we enjoy doing and red, things that zap our energy.

Speaker 1 And I mean, it could be meetings with your team, zap your energy. It could be doing sales calls for you, zap your energy.

Speaker 1 for me those are green i love talking to people maybe for you doing accounting that's green guess what hate it it's bright red in my life but once we have that then we go through and we rate each task by a cost to pay somebody else to do it one dollar sign to four dollar signs it's not scientific we're not trying to overcomplicate this i go through everything and i say is that a four dollar sign really expensive essentially paying somebody to do my job or is it one dollar sign somebody to do the work because it's administrative in nature obviously somebody to help do the work that might be $2 or $3 signs, manage the work, that could be $3 signs.

Speaker 1 You get the drift, right? Now that we have that, we put all the things that zap our energy or we don't like to do that would cost very little, $1 or $2 signs into a bucket.

Speaker 1 And if you're going to buy back any time, it has to come out of that bucket.

Speaker 1 At this point, you're probably thinking, well, how can I afford to pay somebody else to do something when I'm just getting going? Here's the way I look at it. Everyone should know their buyback rate.

Speaker 1 The buyback rate is how much money you're willing to invest to buy back an hour of your time. So here's what we do.
We take last year's income, okay?

Speaker 1 All the money you made, maybe dividends from your business, profit from your business, your salary that you paid you.

Speaker 1 Then what we do is we divide that amount, if it's $100,000, into the amount of hours worked. On average, for most people, it's about 2,000.

Speaker 1 Once we take weekends away and vacations, and I know as entrepreneurs, we don't get those, but let's just say it's 2,000. That gives us a number per hour.

Speaker 1 And because we want to get a four times return on investment or a return on buying back our time, then we take a quarter of that amount.

Speaker 1 So $100,000 worth of income or value divided by $2,000 is $50, divided by a quarter is $12.50.

Speaker 1 When I look at my bucket of stuff I don't want to do anymore, I have to find people that can pay less than $12.50 to do or I'm being inefficient.

Speaker 1 The coolest part about this is there are people in other parts of the world that will work for $3 an hour doing research, processing your email, following processes, getting things automated, literally supporting you in other areas.

Speaker 1 You just need to get better at letting go and delegating. Then we got to go to step two, which is transfer.

Speaker 1 Now that you know what your time is worth and you found somebody to take over the work, how do we get it to them so that it gets done the way we do it?

Speaker 1 The biggest fear that people have is somebody embarrassing them or costing them money. And usually I hear, well, I'll just do it myself.
Well, if you just keep doing it yourself, guess what?

Speaker 1 You will always feel stuck. Does that make sense? Here's the easiest way to get anybody else to do the work I was doing.
I call it the camcorder method.

Speaker 1 When I'm doing the work, I'm recording my screen and I'm talking out loud what I'm doing. Okay, let me show you an example.
I'm processing my inbox. I go on a Zoom call.
It's just me.

Speaker 1 I share my screen. So it's recording my screen.
I save it to the cloud. So now I have a link to a recording.
And I process my inbox. And I start at the top and I'm going through it.

Speaker 1 And I might be there for three hours, but I have a three-hour recording of how I manage my inbox, how I label things, who the people are, how I search my inbox to find a context on who they are.

Speaker 1 And essentially what happens is I have a recording of doing the work.

Speaker 1 If I'm going to hire an executive assistant to help me immediately, when they start having already recorded three or four of those sessions, I can ask them to watch those videos and then they create the document.

Speaker 1 See, that's the big mistake people make is thinking I got to sit down for an hour or two to create a document to train somebody when you just need to do the work, record yourself doing the work, talk about it, and then have them watch the video and create the document in the process.

Speaker 1 The coolest part about this is after they do that, you can use the document as feedback to you if the person got it or not. Think about it, right?

Speaker 1 Because now they've been trained themselves and tried to create an outcome that you can go, oh, they got what I was saying or they didn't and you can fill in the blanks.

Speaker 1 And I know you want to plug it into Chat GPT and say, hey, create the document for me, but then you missed the feedback loop of the person processing the video to see if they got it.

Speaker 1 Now, if they're smart, they're going to do that themselves and then they'll 100% get it. And that's a great person to hire.

Speaker 1 Essentially, this becomes the easiest way to get the highest ROI on your dollar. If you're going to spend money to get time back, you have to get a return.

Speaker 1 So you can't be spending $100 to buy a $100 hour. Does that make sense? Now, the big unlock for a lot of you is getting out of telling people what to do.

Speaker 1 And to do that, I have this principle called the 108010 rule.

Speaker 1 The way it works is when I sit down with somebody, especially a creative project project like this video, I want to sit down on the first 10%. Okay.

Speaker 1 And I call this the ideation step where we talk about the concept. Here's what I want to talk about.
Here's the outcome. Here are some high-level steps.
What do you think?

Speaker 1 We create agreement on the roadmap. Then the next is the 80% of the doing is the execution.
I let them put together the draft and the outline and the whole thing. That way they're the author.

Speaker 1 The last 10% is them coming back and us working together to integrate. So we go ideation, execution, integration.

Speaker 1 When they come back, that's where I get the chance to refine, to put my magic fingerprint on it. When you think of Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive, right?

Speaker 1 Steve Jobs, you know, the past CEO and founder of Apple, he would go into the design studio with Johnny Ive, his head of design. They would ideate.
They would talk about product ideas.

Speaker 1 Johnny would go back to his design team, try to find materials that they could use that would innovate, like the translucent cover on the iMac.

Speaker 1 And then only at the end, once they found a product they want to bring to market, does Steve sit down with Johnny and his team where they create the deck where Steve gets on stage and presents it to the world.

Speaker 1 That's the integration. That is his magic.
So that's how we transfer things on our plate to somebody else without losing control. So we did audit.
We did transfer. The last step is fill.

Speaker 1 This is where most people miss the boat and they don't get the loop, right? That last part creates a slingshot for growth.

Speaker 1 So if you know that your time is worth $100 an hour, you actually have to start telling yourself that it's worth $150 or $200.

Speaker 1 You got to fight for that time because you don't want to buy back your time and then just slide backwards doing a bunch of stuff that you shouldn't be doing.

Speaker 1 Now that we got your time back, what do we do with that time? First off, we want to look at things that make us money immediately. If you're a programmer, write code.

Speaker 1 Whatever the client's paying you to do right now, you buy back all that admin stuff. Go do more of the thing they're willing to pay you for because that's guaranteed income.
See how that works?

Speaker 1 Then if all of a sudden your calendar gets full of all the stuff doing the work, now we have to look at tasks within that and start hiring people to do the work for us.

Speaker 1 See, the mistake most people do is just fill in their time with nothing, right? Talking to their friends, watching Netflix, listening to podcasts to get all high on hopium.

Speaker 1 Like that is not what we do here. We try to find leverage in our time.
I look at three things. One, I ask myself, what are the habits that I need to stop or add to get to my new level?

Speaker 1 Because every new level is going to require you to fight a new devil. Then I look at the beliefs.
What are the world views that I have about how the world operates that might be holding me back?

Speaker 1 If you believe rich people are evil, you're going to have a hard time getting rich. Those are beliefs.
The third area I think about is your character traits.

Speaker 1 When I think about success or making more money, it's about being the person who acts like the person at that next level.

Speaker 1 If you want to get to a million or 5 million in revenue or 50 million in revenue, ask yourself, how does that person act?

Speaker 1 Act that way today. Start investing in seminars, coaching, training, programs for you to evolve to become that person today before it ever shows up in your bank account.

Speaker 1 Those activities of where you invest in you to get better, more valuable is what you have to keep in mind to fill your calendar back up with so that you don't start sliding backwards.

Speaker 1 So here's a quick recap. Until you buy back your time, you'll always be capped.
You essentially hit your complexity ceiling. Too much complexity, you can't get past it.

Speaker 1 That's why we have to buy back our time to become more. You can only scale past your ability to let go.
It's scary. It's going to give you anxiety.
You're going to be worried.

Speaker 1 Trust me, it's never as bad as you think because fear is nothing more than false evidence appearing real. It's not there.

Speaker 1 Go create some problems first. Go let go a little bit and see what happens.
You'd be surprised how when you let go, magically it happens. It gets done.
If you don't value your time, nobody else will.

Speaker 1 And the people who don't value their time will go out of their way to waste yours.

Speaker 1 So now that we've freed up all this space, let's point your energy at the right strategy so you're not just running faster in the wrong direction. Thanks for listening to the Martel method.

Speaker 1 Before we get back to the episode, if you're like a real AI founder and you have a product and customers who are paying you and you want to scale fast, here's the deal.

Speaker 1 I want to work with you at Martel Ventures. You don't need another investor.
What you need is a partner with distribution, proven playbooks, most importantly, connections.

Speaker 1 We'll focus on adding customers instead of you wasting all your time fundraising. So if you want to work with me, just go to damnmartel.com forward slash ventures.

Speaker 1 That brings us to phase number two, clarify strategy and offer. Here's what this means.
See, you can't scale confusion. Simple scales, complex fails.

Speaker 1 Early growth in any business is because you say yes to everything. You're trying to find opportunities.
But at this phase, at scale, saying yes to everything becomes the very thing that breaks you.

Speaker 1 When I started, I was worried I wouldn't have any business. So anything that sounded sounded like an opportunity was like, I can help you with that.
I can help you with that.

Speaker 1 And then what happens is you wake up and you got a lot of work, but it's a lot of different work. There's no process.
There's no structure.

Speaker 1 Everything is very bespoke and boutique and it makes it incredibly hard to actually grow. This is what you will feel at this phase.

Speaker 1 You're probably juggling too many offers or every new client feels like a custom deal. There's no repeatability in it.
Or the revenue looks good on paper and everybody's like, oh, wow, congrats.

Speaker 1 But your margins are razor thin and you're exhausted. And profit is non-existent.
So if you feel any of these symptoms, we have to get you out of this phase.

Speaker 1 Here's a simple metaphor to help you really understand this.

Speaker 1 If I'm cutting down a tree and I start attacking it from every direction and I'm just super mad and I've got my axe and I'm hitting the tree, but I'm hitting it up here and I'm hitting it down there and I'm hitting it on the other side and I've got no strategy.

Speaker 1 There's zero chance that tree is coming down. It's going to look like somebody attacked it, but it's not going to fall over.
That's what we need to fix here.

Speaker 1 So here's what we need to get you so you can get to the next phase. First off, you need a sharp, irresistible offer that scales.

Speaker 1 Essentially, we need to look at everything you've done, figure out what's the one thing that actually makes you profit that you enjoy doing, that the market wants, that you can sell easily and do just that.

Speaker 1 If we can figure out that and create a system that we'll talk about in a bit to deliver on that, that is how we scale.

Speaker 1 A couple of years ago, I was working with a client and they were running a 3 million a year agency doing everything, you know, SEO, PPC, branding, PR, even podcasts. But the founder was drowning.

Speaker 1 The whole team was frustrated. They were trying to do great work, but everything just seemed all over the place.

Speaker 1 So I ran an offer audit with them and I found that 80% of profits came from one service, paid ads for SaaS companies. So we cut the rest.

Speaker 1 And then in 18 months, surprise, surprise, revenue doubled, 6 million with less clients and way higher margins.

Speaker 1 this is the big idea most businesses don't need to do more no no no they need to do less and focus blinders on on the right thing this is the simple framework that's going to get you there i call it the value creation venn diagram there's three parts the first part is what do customers value most not necessarily what you want to do not necessarily what they're asking for what are they going to pay for see a lot of you say well everybody's asking me for this are they paying top dollar for it?

Speaker 1 No, they nickel and die me.

Speaker 1 Not a good fit. See, what do they pay for? What are they going to pay the most for? What is the most demand for? That's number one.
Number two is what do we do best?

Speaker 1 As a team, when I look at my capacity and I look at my capability, what is the thing that we do better than most? And some people call it an unfair advantage.

Speaker 1 When I look at the structure and the team and the consultants and what we do better than most people, what is that?

Speaker 1 And then the third part is, and this is my favorite one, is what's what's the most profitable? When I look at it, what can I charge the most for? Higher dollar? What makes me the most profit?

Speaker 1 Usually a product or service with high margins. And that is the sweet spot for most profitable.
And the middle, that overlap, that's your scalable offer.

Speaker 1 And some people get confused between number one and number three. Here's the deal.
Number one is what does the customers want? What is the market saying? Right now, AI, super hot.

Speaker 1 Number three is what's the most profitable? Like of the stuff you sell, where are you making your most profit? One time, one of my best friends, he's struggling his business.

Speaker 1 He wants to grow, but he's doing too many things. I said, hey, man, all I need from you is a printout of all the things you've sold in the last 30 days.

Speaker 1 And we went through all the bottom 20%, lowest dollar amount things. Okay.
Then I went through the high dollar amount stuff and I made him go through the whole list.

Speaker 1 And I said, what are your margins for each one of those products? And then I looked at it and I said, it's very simple. We cut the bottom low ticket amount stuff that have no margins.

Speaker 1 Tell the sales team, sell more of the high dollar amount, high margin stuff, and that will give you the profitability to reinvest in solving your problems, aka buying back your time.

Speaker 1 Once he saw the math, he couldn't unsee it because he knew what the customers wanted. He knew where he was making his money.
He knew what his team was good at.

Speaker 1 He just didn't look at it and was ruthless with the assessment. Everything else is just noise, stealing your attention, your focus, distractions, convincing you you should keep doing it.

Speaker 1 People are going to be mad at you. I get it.
You're scared. If you want to be successful, you have to be willing to be disliked.
You may have to fire some customers.

Speaker 1 But if you trust me, on the backside of that decision, it's going to create a business that can scale. Okay, now we have clarity.
The next step is build the machine that sells this thing on repeat.

Speaker 1 That brings us to phase three: building a predictable growth engine. Here's what I mean: companies that can scale don't gamble on growth.

Speaker 1 They build a machine that is predictable, They build a system that makes it inevitable. There's no hopium involved.
There's no like, I wonder if next month's going to be better than this month.

Speaker 1 They create a system for growth. Here's some symptoms that you might be feeling that means you got to get out of this phase ASAP.
One, revenue feels like a roller coaster. Okay.
It's spiky. It's up.

Speaker 1 It's down. It's unpredictable.
You have a good month. You have a bad month.
You get pissed off of your team. You apologize for getting pissed off.
Like it's just up and down.

Speaker 1 Or maybe one big client leaves and the whole business starts to panic. Maybe you have to lay off 20, 30% of your team because you didn't plan for it.

Speaker 1 Or another symptom is you might be over-relying on referrals or a single marketing channel. It's kind of like flying a plane that's got four engines, but only using one.

Speaker 1 And if that engine gets cut off, you f ⁇ ed. There's no growth and it's gambling.
That is not how we build predictable revenue.

Speaker 1 That's why predictable growth is like flying on autopilot with all four engines. You want revenue that's steady, scalable, and not dependent on luck.

Speaker 1 A couple weeks ago, I'm chatting with a founder on Instagram and he's telling me about his revenue and it literally looked like a theme park ride, a roller coaster.

Speaker 1 He closed one deal and then his revenue spiked because I'd be like, hey, what happened there? And then all of a sudden he lost two clients and then all of a sudden his revenue spiked again.

Speaker 1 And I was like, dude. you need to change your process.
So I shared with him the process for doing outbound. Then we layered in paid ads and then we added a simple upsell.

Speaker 1 The whole roller coaster flattened. The investors leaned in.
This founder finally found time to sleep at night. And it's not complicated.
You can do this.

Speaker 1 Here's a simple framework to solve this problem. It's called the growth engine triangle.

Speaker 1 When I think about the center, which is predictable growth, it comes from three repeatable systems that compound together to create the predictability.

Speaker 1 The first one is inbound, essentially attracting demand. How do I get customers to know who I am, to trust me, to lean in, to fill out a form, to reach out to me? That's through our content marketing.

Speaker 1 That's through social proof. I know so many people.
They're the best kept secret in their industry because they never tell anybody about the results they've gotten for clients.

Speaker 1 They literally have worked with the top people. It's so wild.
The best of the best. Nobody knows.

Speaker 1 Because they're insecure about asking, because they're worried the person won't say yes to a testimonial. Come on now.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And they haven't really built out their organic channels, meaning that if there is a lead that comes into the world and they Google their name and they look at what's been written about that person, there's not a lot there.

Speaker 1 They go to their Instagram account, there's 12 followers. They go to their Twitter, there's 126.
It's all their family members.

Speaker 1 You have to become a magnet in your market, pulling people out of it without manual effort. They literally lean in because of the quality of the messages you put out on the social media.

Speaker 1 If you just look at what I've created, okay, the fact that you're here and you're listening to this, I generate hundreds of thousands of leads every month.

Speaker 1 I know it sounds crazy to partner with people at Martel Ventures, my AI venture studio, to work with me in one of my programs, to literally do cool things, have me speak at their events every month, hundreds of thousands of people, all by creating content that pulls them in by building that inbound engine.

Speaker 1 The second part is outbound, essentially creating demand. And this is an area where a lot of people think it doesn't work anymore.
Cold emails, cold calling.

Speaker 1 These are still strategies that many companies have perfected, repeated, created, iterated against that generate predictable leads. And the last one, number three, is partners and referrals.

Speaker 1 See, when I think of referrals, these are people that went out of their way to talk to somebody, to convince them, to reach back out to you, to maybe do work for them.

Speaker 1 When I think of partners, it's kind of the same thing. A partner is somebody that has a massive audience of potential clients that you could serve for them that's non-competitive.

Speaker 1 And you figuring out how do I incentivize them to tell their clients about you. It's kind of like a referral program, but for an audience that doesn't know you yet.

Speaker 1 If you build that out, find one, two, three people that have massive audiences of people you can serve and give them a piece of the business that they bring to you to incentivize them to tell other people about you, you will create massive amounts of demand.

Speaker 1 The analogy I like to think about is the effort it would take if I wanted to build a train track or a railroad that goes from one city to another.

Speaker 1 Like just to have that, I'd have to, you know, plow through the forest and then create tunnels through the mountains. Then I'd have to lay down the track.

Speaker 1 Then I'd have to build the train that has the engine and a caboose and carts and all my stuff. And it's pulling my products or service through the mountains.

Speaker 1 Or I could find somebody that's already done all the heavy lifting, all the work and lay down that track and then build a big hook.

Speaker 1 And as they come by, I just hook on to the train because they've done all the work. That's what a partner does.
And it is the most powerful way to get customers. So here are some examples.

Speaker 1 Podcasts, incredible way. Stages, speaking at people's event, incredible way.
Webinars where you co-host a webinar.

Speaker 1 Somebody else markets your webinar and you get on there and you add value and then you ask them if they want help. And if they buy, you give them a piece of the action.

Speaker 1 Or creating a referral program where you incentivize your customers when they get a win. Hey, you ask them, do you know one or two other people just like you?

Speaker 1 Then we might be able to serve same way we did you. And if they end up buying from us through your referral, we'll give you a discount on your service.

Speaker 1 Such a simple framework to create massive amounts of demand that's predictable. So, quick recap: we have inbound, which creates a magnet of people aware of who you are.

Speaker 1 Number two, we got outbound, where we're tapping people on the shoulder and saying, Do you have this problem?

Speaker 1 And we have number three, partners, we have people that have access to our customers promoting us to them.

Speaker 1 When you run all three in parallel, growth becomes consistent, not random because maybe one month inbounds working really well outbounds not the next month outbounds down partners are up and that's what creates consistency in your growth engine if you get anything out of this understand hope is not a growth strategy systems are we're building systems to get you customers without worrying but here's the problem we have to dial in your delivery for this next one 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 Martel Method newsletter.

Speaker 1 It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness, and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it at martelmethod.com.

Speaker 1 That brings us to phase four, systematized delivery and operations. So here's what it means.
If right now, when you take on a customer, if there's issues, there's mistakes, you can't scale mistakes.

Speaker 1 I had a friend and he has defects in his business. 30% of their work comes back.
That means there's a broken process that they haven't stopped to slow down to fix so they can actually grow.

Speaker 1 And at scale, a broken delivery becomes a death sentence. This is what you're probably feeling.
You got a support inbox, it's piling up. You can't stay on top of it.

Speaker 1 Customers, they're coming and they're slipping through the cracks. Scheduling conflicts, the work that you were promised doesn't show up on time.

Speaker 1 You've got people slowly churning out, essentially coming in and quietly leaving your business as you spend more money on ads trying to replenish all the people that left.

Speaker 1 You're essentially a professional firefighter trying to put out fires. To get out of this phase, we need to create simple, clear, and airtight systems.

Speaker 1 Because without a checklist for somebody else to follow to do the work, you're never going to be able to grow. Here's a crazy story.

Speaker 1 I had a friend a few years ago go from zero to $27 million in three years. He figured out how to market.

Speaker 1 He figured out how to sell better than anybody had ever figured it out, but he didn't have a process to deliver the fulfillment. Well, what happened?

Speaker 1 All the people that bought didn't get what they thought they were going to get and immediately started complaining. And it took a while, 18 months, 24 months, and it kept going.
Why?

Speaker 1 Because the whole business was focused on selling. The whole business was focused on growth.
Nobody stopped to say, hey, How much time are we spending on actually delivering what we sold?

Speaker 1 What are we doing from a systems point of view, from our team point of view? How are we tracking, monitoring all these new clients, literally thousands per month coming into the business.

Speaker 1 And instead, word got out. See, if you use a scorch earth strategy to growing, it doesn't take long for everybody to hear how shitty you are.

Speaker 1 You've built this foundation in your business, but it's a house of cards. And you keep trying to add more cards on top and it keeps falling.
It has to be able to withstand the weight of the growth.

Speaker 1 And that's why we had to build SOPs. So that's when I talked to my buddy and like he had to rebuild the business from almost scratch.
We started with the delivery. We started with the simplicity.

Speaker 1 We started with the people to make sure that he didn't scale and cause the same thing.

Speaker 1 Six months later, he almost got back to half the revenue. Churn dropped.
People were happy. It was a way easier business to run.
This is the big idea in this phase.

Speaker 1 Retention, which is how many people stay in your business, that's the hidden growth lever. Everybody wants to talk about Facebook ads or content marketing or social media.

Speaker 1 How about I got a customer, I keep a customer. So, I want to teach you a very simple framework.
I call it the three P's of delivery. The first is playbooks.

Speaker 1 We have a document that talks about how somebody learns the skill, executes the work, how they measure their progress, how they're trained on it, what frequency they need to do certain tasks, and how to report any issues if they come up, essentially make decisions.

Speaker 1 If you have one document that covers all of that, then you have something you can give to somebody else and they can learn how to deliver on that promise. Think about it.

Speaker 1 Just like in football, they execute a play and all the players understand their position and what they got to do so that they can get a touchdown.

Speaker 1 And the cool part is because there's a playbook, it doesn't matter who's running the play. The different players could come and go and change on teams and they'll still get the same result.

Speaker 1 Essentially, every client gets the same experience. It doesn't matter who's running the play.
There's no issues. There's no surprises.
There's no messups. Number two is the people.

Speaker 1 And this is where we we have to find people that are accountable to their role.

Speaker 1 Meaning that if I hire somebody to help with onboarding, help with customer success, operations, marketing, not only do they need to do the work, but they actually have to be accountable to the results.

Speaker 1 See, too often people hire folks and then tell them what to do. I like to hire people and have them tell me what to do.

Speaker 1 And I know this might feel slow, but the upfront investment to slow down, to have them think, to present a plan means they won't fight the plan.

Speaker 1 When they help build the plan, they don't fight the plan. And that way, when you bring them on to be consistent for your clients, you're buying back your time.

Speaker 1 See how we tie that back to the first step?

Speaker 1 What you want to ensure happens is clear ownership because that ensures nothing falls through the crack because there's honestly no way you could possibly write down all the scenarios that somebody would have to do to make sure that something doesn't happen.

Speaker 1 You have to say, look, I'm not going to tell you how to do your job. I've trained you.
I've coached you. I'm going to support you.
There's tools to use, but I need you to own this outcome.

Speaker 1 If your job is customer success, it means the customer needs to feel successful with us. Ask them, check in, look at what they're doing within our world.

Speaker 1 Make sure that you feel confident that they would say, yes, I feel successful with your business. If they don't own it, there's no level of like structure you could create.

Speaker 1 other than they just have to understand they own it, which means they're going to look at it through that lens and they're going to realize that nobody's there to tell them how to do do it.

Speaker 1 They're expected to step up and solve that problem. You could hire somebody to manage your Instagram account and you can give them an SOP and all the steps and checks.

Speaker 1 Or you could say you're accountable to grow our Instagram account. See the difference? You tell me what you think you should do.

Speaker 1 We can negotiate it, but at the end of the day, if you feel confident in your plan, go execute the plan. I'm going to hold you accountable to the growth of the Instagram account.

Speaker 1 I can give you a playbook of what's worked for us in the past, but I also expect you to come in and innovate and grow that and make it better.

Speaker 1 So the ownership is the growth of the Instagram account, not did you schedule a post on Thursday at 2 p.m. That's on you to choose to do or change.
Number three is the platforms, right?

Speaker 1 These are the tools, the automation, the systems, the software. Think about it.

Speaker 1 If you have onboarding where somebody buys and you want to onboard them into your business, Is it manual or do we automate it using like a type form and maybe some kind of automation with like Zapier?

Speaker 1 The way I like to think about it is that technology becomes the glue that keeps the delivery together and scales without ballooning your headcount.

Speaker 1 See, if every time you want to grow, you got to add people to grow and you're not looking to make it more efficient, then you're going to eat into your profit.

Speaker 1 If you force yourself to operate with the same people, but get the people more efficient using the platforms that exist, AI, automation, tools, software, that's when delivery becomes scalable.

Speaker 1 Most people should just start with two areas: one, scheduling, right? Customers come in, they have to schedule their first onboarding call, they got to schedule some other stuff.

Speaker 1 Have that done through the software. The second one is support using a tool like intercom.com, where you can set it up.

Speaker 1 It's literally click, click, configure, done, and it'll respond to all the customer inbound requests to email or chat on your website so that you can spend your time actually getting new customers and ensuring they're happy.

Speaker 1 The first P, playbooks. The second P, people.

Speaker 1 The third P, platform. So what I need you to take away from this phase is one, revenue without retention is a treadmill and you're not going anywheres.
Revenue is vanity, retention is sanity.

Speaker 1 Even if you have all the systems in the world, you'll still be the reason that things stall if every decision flows through you.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 got a new episode, so you'll never miss anything.

Speaker 1 Now let's get back to the episode.

Speaker 1 That brings us to phase five, installing leadership in management. This is why this phase matters so much is businesses don't scale through the founders.

Speaker 1 The only way they can actually scale is through leaders. Here's how you know you're stuck at this phase.
Every decision in the business keeps coming back to you.

Speaker 1 You're literally the bottleneck in moving any project forward. Your team's getting pissed off.
They might be a little frustrated because they're drowning and you're not available to help them.

Speaker 1 Or when they offer feedback, you shut it down. The analogy I like to use is kind of like

Speaker 1 you're like the architect and a construction worker at the same time. You're doing a little bit of architecture, but a lot of construction working.

Speaker 1 And that means there's not enough of the blueprint or the decisions on the conflicts within designing the architecture resolved.

Speaker 1 And everybody's trying to be really helpful and they're putting up the wall here and they're pouring cement there, but because they don't have a plan and even the plan probably has issues, but there's no way for them to talk to you about it because you're just heads down doing the construction work.

Speaker 1 You end up building a building that isn't complete. And if you're feeling this, this is the reason the building isn't rising.
This is what you need at this specific phase.

Speaker 1 You need leaders who own outcomes. You cannot tell people to do enough things for them to do it.
You just got to give give them the outcome. That way you can finally step into being the CEO.

Speaker 1 The reason I'm so intimate with this specific pain is that it was my story. Essentially, when I built my company Spheric when I was 24 to 28, I did everything.

Speaker 1 I ran around and spun plates, didn't know how I was doing it, had a bunch of people that are willing to work really hard because they didn't have direction, then I was always fixing mistakes.

Speaker 1 And it just felt heavy. Like it almost killed me.
I'm not even joking. Like I had anxiety attacks.
I had adrenal fatigue.

Speaker 1 And then I had to go see a doctor because I had like this pain, bruise, rash thing on my back. And he's like, bro, are you stressed out? I'm like, no.
He goes, well, take this.

Speaker 1 I said, what's that for? He goes, you got shingles. My own body was saying,

Speaker 1 you, I'm not doing this. Please don't wait to get to this point to solve this problem.

Speaker 1 And then once I figured out a completely different way of running businesses, not only did my companies literally triple in growth, but I found a different way of being inside my business that felt almost like too easy.

Speaker 1 Like I felt guilty because it was not hard anymore. And that's what I want to share with you.
Here's the big idea. Your capacity doubles the moment you stop making every decision.

Speaker 1 So here are three very tactical frameworks you need in this phase to get free from the decision making. The first one is my favorite.
It's called the one, three, one rule.

Speaker 1 Essentially, if somebody comes to you, I want you to ask them this question. What's the one problem we're talking about? Because I've been in so many conversations with people.

Speaker 1 They're like, this is broken. This is broken.
This is broken.

Speaker 1 What's the problem? Like, what is the one problem we're trying to solve? That's a write-er-downer. You might want to save that one.
What's the one problem we're trying to solve?

Speaker 1 Then ask them, what are the three ideas or solutions you've considered to solve that one problem? Oftentimes they'll go, well, I haven't. That's why I'm coming to you.
And I said, I understand.

Speaker 1 Why don't you try? And then the third one is the one recommendation. I remember a long time ago, a guy named Adam came to me.

Speaker 1 He was the director of HR and he was struggling because he had to hire 11 people in 90 days and he's freaking out. I said, Adam, what is your 131?

Speaker 1 Well, I don't know. How long would it take you to figure it out?

Speaker 1 I don't know. Like a day? I said, cool.
How about you just come back tomorrow, same time, and let me know what your 131 is? He's like, all right. Next morning, I get a text message.
Ping. I'm good.

Speaker 1 I thought so. Like, once people understand they're empowered to make a decision, they'll make it.
98% of the time, they come to me with the problem, three solutions, with a recommendation.

Speaker 1 I go, sounds good. Winner, winner, chicken dinner, do that.
It's so funny how the entrepreneur feels the need to have to be involved, to want to be involved, to feel needed.

Speaker 1 And that creates a dependency their team have on them. Then they get pissed off that the person can't make a decision without them.
But you taught them to do that every time they're stuck.

Speaker 1 So use the 131 rule to avoid all that. The second one is a leadership rhythm.
See, a business is the byproducts of its meetings. It's the only tool we have as entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1 Essentially, there's meetings, there's goals of those meetings, and there's people on that meeting.

Speaker 1 And the conversations that happen on those meetings will dictate if you grow the business, if you have consistency, if you can scale.

Speaker 1 So I always ask myself, what are the daily rhythms every day to create awareness and alignment for my team? For most people, it's just a daily stand-up. It takes 15 minutes.

Speaker 1 Everybody talks about what they did yesterday, the top three things, what are the three things they're planning on doing today, and if they're stuck.

Speaker 1 That way, as a leader, my only job is to take all the stucks and make them unstuck throughout the day to help my team. And then they keep building.

Speaker 1 The weekly meeting is ideally at least a sync meeting where everybody comes together and they talk about the goals, how they're doing to those goals, and any issues that are holding them back so that we have a focused meeting on solving problems, not gutta-second meetings, not three-hour meetings, not Saturday night phone calls, a structure to solve problems.

Speaker 1 Then we want to think about quarterly. Ideally, a meeting once a quarter, end of year, where you sit down and you plan.

Speaker 1 You review the performance of the previous quarter, the goals for the next quarter, where are the projects getting stuck? What needs to be resolved? What does the hiring look like?

Speaker 1 You sit down, you plan once, and then you decide and you execute for the next 90 days. That leadership rhythm is a winning strategy to get unstuck.

Speaker 1 So we want to do a daily stand-up where we figure out where we're stuck to help your team. We want to do weekly meetings to make sure everybody's aligned with their goals and discuss any open issues.

Speaker 1 Quarterly is for planning and alignment. And yearly is for strategic reviews and focusing on the big picture.
The final one is a decision ladder.

Speaker 1 See, if you don't create a framework for other people to make decisions, they're always going to come back to you. What's got two thumbs and likes to make decisions? The founders.
Stop that.

Speaker 1 In every one of my companies, I have these rules. It's 50 to fix it.

Speaker 1 Anybody on the team that runs into an issue with a customer in the business can spend up to $50, no questions asked to solve a problem. All I ask is they tell their manager or leader that they did it.

Speaker 1 They expense it. We pay them no matter what.
Managers can spend up to $500, no question asked. Directors, $5,000.
Executives, $50,000.

Speaker 1 And the reason why is that I want to empower everybody on the team to make decisions on their own. If they got to stop, wait, review, plan, it slows things down.

Speaker 1 The biggest thing that makes a founder go bananas in their mind when it comes to growing the business is seeing it slow down as you grow.

Speaker 1 But you have to design the machine so that people make decisions so it doesn't slow down.

Speaker 1 And all of this ties back to the phase of ownership in people so that it never gets to that point in the first place.

Speaker 1 So if I can give you one thing in this phase to summarize everything is give your team ownership and they'll go from great players to great leaders.

Speaker 1 And again, if every road leads back to you you're not a ceo you're a traffic jam but even the best leaders need glue and that glue is culture which brings us to the final phase to scale your business scaling culture and vision here's what you need to know culture is the ultimate growth multiplier if you ignore it it becomes the silent killer if you don't have a vision for where you want to go you're only going to attract people that are looking for safety and a job nobody's going to show up willing to put in the extra work because you haven't told them why they should.

Speaker 1 If you don't design the culture, how people participate, get rewarded, support other people, then you're just going to have people acting by default. And that doesn't create a strong culture.

Speaker 1 It doesn't create a place that people want to work. You know, this morning I had a buddy of mine.
He's like, hey, found somebody who wants to work.

Speaker 1 And I'm thinking to myself, bro, you just became somebody that people want to work for. Like, there's no lack of people that will work.
It's do they want to work for you?

Speaker 1 Here's how you know there's an issue. Team morale, it's slipping.
People aren't excited and jumping to work. You've got toxic hires.

Speaker 1 Somehow they made it on your team and they're poisoning the company. And the worst part is your best people are quiet quitting.
They're still there.

Speaker 1 but they're not showing up the way they used to because that extra effort is just being eroded by the crappy people that you've got. The best way to think about culture, it's like gravity.

Speaker 1 If it's not strong, people just float away, the best people. If it's really strong, it retains them.
It attracts them. It creates like a magnet pulling them into your orbit.

Speaker 1 See, you can't see it just like gravity, but it actually pulls everything in one direction towards growth or destruction. Here's an example.
This coming Monday is a stat holiday.

Speaker 1 Somebody mentioned it in the office. Half the team didn't even know.
Why? They don't care.

Speaker 1 They're more excited about coming in to create and build the future together than worrying about getting that extra stat holiday, got my time off.

Speaker 1 That's not the kind of culture that creates something magical, but it starts with you. Here's the benefit of doing this right.
A strong culture fuels customer retention, right? Why?

Speaker 1 Because there's a players on the team that show up and care about your customers. And all of that compounds your growth.

Speaker 1 Maybe you've never heard this, but there's a company called Zappos and they sell shoes online, many other things that were bought by Amazon for a billion bucks.

Speaker 1 But they had a culture that was so strong. People would fly in all over the world just to go study it, to be toured around it, to learn from them.

Speaker 1 Even to the point where when employees were leaving to go do something bigger or better, they would cry. It was like they were breaking up with their best friend.
That to me is the gold standard.

Speaker 1 I've also seen the opposite. Founders that thought culture schmelcher, like they didn't invest in it.
They thought it was fluff. So surprise, surprise, toxic management spread across the company.

Speaker 1 Customers churned and the company collapsed under the weight of people that didn't care. The big idea that I want to leave you for this phase is that at scale, culture isn't optional.

Speaker 1 It's the oxygen for your growth. So here are three frameworks that you need to design your culture and vision.
First off, core values.

Speaker 1 And trust me, when I started, I was like, what does this even mean? Words. You see it at these companies.

Speaker 1 It's like integrity and do the extra work and they're just words on a wall and guess what that's what they are if that's how you treat them this is the way i want you to think about core values i want you to be so specific what it is you are and what you're not that you use it to hire people meaning it's a filter meaning you test against it meaning that if you think going the extra mile is important i want you to ask them when you interview somebody explain to me the last time in your work you went the extra mile and how did that look if you say personal growth is a core value and you don't ask them what book they last read to help them in their job or their life and they don't have a book that they can mention, then why would you bring them on your team?

Speaker 1 Values are things you're trying to filter people for, not try to get them to take them on. They either have them or they don't.
That's higher. Inspire.
Use them to celebrate.

Speaker 1 I call this catching people doing right. Find folks that are embodying the value and acknowledge them, celebrate them.
Like go wild. Like literally scream.
Oh my God, Bob is the best.

Speaker 1 He literally went above and beyond. I don't know.
Nobody else knows this. Bob stayed stayed up last night till 11 p.m.

Speaker 1 to empty out the inbox because he knows we're doing the new launch and there's a bunch of support tickets and he wanted us to make sure that there was nothing left.

Speaker 1 So he stayed here and he did the work. Go crazy.
Okay. That's how we inspire other people to adopt them.

Speaker 1 And then the most important part is you have to fire against them, meaning that the values aren't what you say they are. They're what you accept.

Speaker 1 And if somebody continuously misses and refuses to adopt that value, they can't stay on your team. For example, at Martell Media, I keep keep it really easy.
We have three. One, simple scales.

Speaker 1 Remember the values? Simple scales. How many values do I have? Three, not five, not seven.
See how I just did that? Two, be the example. We will never teach you to do things we don't do ourselves.

Speaker 1 I think that's really f ⁇ ed up. And some companies, unfortunately, are okay with that.
So we are always the best example of what we teach. And three, build the people.

Speaker 1 If we build the people, the people build the business. I wake up every day and ask myself, how can I make these people richer? How can I develop them?

Speaker 1 I think honestly, the point of a business is to have a place where you can develop people. That's a big idea.
It's also culture. So we use these three to hire, inspire, and fire.

Speaker 1 The next framework to help design your culture is to have a vision narrative. Essentially, what you want is to paint the five-year future.
And I'm talking visual. a diagram, an image.
Make it visual.

Speaker 1 Put it on the wall. I have one here.
It's right there. It's literally, I can see it.
It's right there.

Speaker 1 That five-year vision is so visual, clear that anybody with their eyes closed could hit the target.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like that game where you got to like flip something open and see it and then it closes and you got to figure out where it was hiding again.

Speaker 1 If people don't see or clearly what it is they're trying to hit, they won't be able to hit it again. And you're pissed off because nobody sees your vision.

Speaker 1 Well, you haven't shown them a picture of it. Now, the key is, is to repeat it until their eyes roll.

Speaker 1 My rule is if they can't make fun of you behind your back around the vision, oh my God, Dan is always like, oh, we're going to get five years and we're going to look like this and burn and burn it.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? Like they got to make fun of you because of the amount of times you've repeated it. You think they get it? Trust me, repeat it.
You think they heard it? Trust me, repeat it.

Speaker 1 You think they see it? They don't repeat it. And the last one, people systems.
In my world, I think there's two major things to focus on. We already did the first one, which is customers.

Speaker 1 How do we get customers into our world? The other part is talent. It's the people, right? How do we attract, hire, develop, and retain top talent?

Speaker 1 And the way we do that, how we select people, our process for doing that, how we develop people, our process for doing that, how do we retain people, our compensation program, our development programs, all of that, the values, those aren't just things that we say we do to attract the people.

Speaker 1 That's what we do to build the people. Those people systems is what makes your business unstoppable.
The best way to explain this is hire for the soul, train for the role.

Speaker 1 Hire the person that embodies the values, the character traits, and the kind of person that you think you want to pour into. You can train those people.

Speaker 1 Hire somebody that's great at the skill, like a world-class video editor, world-class salesperson that has the worst values, that screws people over all the time, that aren't fun to work with.

Speaker 1 That's cancer cancer inside your business. I don't care how much money they're making you, you have to cut it out and move on.

Speaker 1 To summarize this whole thing, culture is the invisible hand guiding your business when you're not in the room. It's how people make decisions when nobody's looking.

Speaker 1 Have a strong culture of accountability, of performance, of execution. Watch people make really good decisions when you're not around.

Speaker 1 Not design that, not have a vision that's big enough for their dreams and goals to fit inside of. Watch people sit on their hands and wait for you to show back up to actually start working.

Speaker 1 And now you know all six phases. But the real question is this.
Will you stay stuck as a chaos builder or step in the role of an empire builder?

Speaker 1 And if you're there, are you going to elevate and fully step into the role of CEO? That's my question to you. Why not you?

Speaker 1 Whoa. I mean, whew.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 That was a lot. But that's exactly how to scale your business.
I was thinking of a dozen people when I shot this video.

Speaker 1 People I care about, people I know that are struggling, people that I think have the potential to create something magical.

Speaker 1 I wanted to share that so there was no confusion as to what to do at what stage. Now, I don't want you to just watch this, feel motivated, but actually do nothing with it.

Speaker 1 My question to you is leave a comment below and make a commitment to me. What's the one thing you're going to do differently after watching this video? It could be small, but it needs to be done.

Speaker 1 Commit below, let me know, and I'm excited to read your answer. So as I mentioned at the beginning, if you haven't done this yet, please go download the full PDF.
It's linked in the description below.

Speaker 1 Download it and go through this video, re-watch it and fill it out. I really want you to walk away with a plan to attack your growth.

Speaker 1 This is a lot to take in, but I think the mindset for how you approach your business is more important to what to do in your business. And this one changed my whole life.

Speaker 1 The belief that I will acquire what I desire for others. The moment I stop making business about me and start making it about other people, my team, my customers, my whole world changed.

Speaker 1 If you do that, not only will this feel effortless, it'll actually get really fun. Thanks for listening to the Martel Method.

Speaker 1 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.