8 Simple Rules of Business I wish I knew in my 20s and 30s

15 years ago, I came across an idea. An idea that could have saved me 15 years of business mistakes.
And it's that a business will never grow past the growth of the CEO. And if you don't evolve and grow past these four levels of business, you will be the one holding it back.
Level one is, your first $100,000 is made from skills, getting crazy good at what you do. Level two, your first million dollars is made from hiring, building an awesome team around you.
Level three, your first 10 million is from systems, refining your process and operations. Level four, your first 100 million is from building your people and coaching your leaders.
And I made mistakes at every one of these levels, but today I'm gonna share with you the eight simple business rules that got me to that $100 million level without working 100 hour weeks and hating my life. Welcome to the Martell Method.
I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.
My bestselling book, Buy Back Your Time, is out now. Grab a copy at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers.
Starting at the 100k level with rule number one, model then modify. A lot of first-time entrepreneurs make this huge mistake.
They decide to get into business and create a product that's never existed before and they try to make everything up as they go. They think if I do it this way it'll be innovative.
The problem is if you don't understand why certain things are done a certain way, then you're going to fail. It's like learning to play a guitar.
You don't start by writing songs. You start by playing other people's music to understand how the notes work with each other.
If you don't find a blueprint that's worked before to give you that foundation, then adding innovation on a sloppy foundation will only fail. So here's what you got to do.
Find the people who have what you want and do what they did. One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking they have to be unique to win.
Even today at a hundred million in revenue per year, I still call people to get advice on how to start something new because they've been there, they've done it, and I can usually get there three to five times faster copying somebody else's process and trying to make it up myself. But now that you're up and running, your attention will get sucked into new problems.
Which brings us to rule number two. Profit solves all problems.
Oftentimes when I'm coaching new clients, I catch them working on things that are good for the business, but don't make them money. It's a lot of busy work, creating systems, creating content, fancy funnels.
What they

should be doing is whatever gets them to sell something. Anything other than generating revenue is just playing the game of business, but actually not being a great entrepreneur.
Here's my philosophy. If the problem can be solved with money, then it's not a real problem.
The other issue is that people confuse revenue with profit. That's why every one of the businesses I'm involved in, I focus on what's called gross margin.
It's not what I sell it for, it's what it costs me to make. Things that have 80% or higher gross margin, like information or software, are the best businesses because what's left over after you pay people to operate the business is profit.
So a lot of people focus on revenue, which is top line number, but what they should do is focus on the profit, what's left over at the end of the day, because I can't pay bills with top line revenue and I can't pay it with invoices. But if you want to reach level two at a million dollars, you got to think way differently about hiring, which brings us to rule number three, don't hire to grow the business, hire to buy back your time.
After struggling for years and finally making it work at my third company, Spheric Technologies, I thought I had to work 100-hour weeks. I thought that my job was to keep all the plates spinning.
What I didn't realize then that almost killed me was the fact that I should have took some of that profit and reinvested it in hiring people to actually get me my time out of my calendar. Instead, I just kept adding capacity to the business, which meant I had more people to manage and I didn't learn to let go.
So here's a big idea. If you don't have an assistant, you are one and you're probably overpaid.
And honestly, you suck at your job. Here's why I say that everyone's first hire should be an executive assistant because it's the least amount of money you have to pay somebody to buy back the largest portion of your time.
If you look at your calendar where you're doing things that don't actually make profit, it's things more like calendar and inbox. It's not stuff you need to do.
What's cool is I actually wrote about this in my book, Buy Back Your Time. It's called the buyback loop.
That's where we focus on three core areas. First, we have to audit our calendar for time and energy.
Number two, we got to take the things that are taking our energy that we don't want to do, transfer it to somebody else. That's usually your executive assistant.
Then we want to fill our time up with things that make us more money that we can charge for right now or go learn new skills to uplevel our abilities to grow the business. If you're struggling trying to figure out what you should give your assistant, then just find me on Instagram and message me the word YouTube EA.
And I will send you my internal executive assistant playbook that has the principles, the process, the agenda. It is the most complete system out there.
And it's my gift to you for free, but having the right people can make or break your business. Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell method newsletter.
It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it at martellmethod.com.
Which brings us to rule number four, culture over cash. A long time ago, I was operating my business and everything was going great until I realized I had people I was working with that weren't aligned with my vision.
It got me so upset that after weeks of feeling like I was starting to hate interacting with my team members, I decided to do something crazy. I went into Slack and wrote this post.
This is the vision I'm after. These are the kind of people that are going to support that vision.
If for whatever reason you don't feel aligned with that, feel free to resign and I will pay you $15,000 cash. No questions asked, just resign as soon as possible.
Now, the essence was there. The execution could have been done better.
The unfortunate part is that people that I loved actually decided to take the money because they were concerned, why would he say this? What I learned in that moment is that if you don't focus on creating the culture of your business, you may wake up one day and hate the company you've actually built. So my philosophy today is hire for the soul, train for the role.
Most people will say to me, how do you find these great people? First off, you need to be the person that they would want to work for. You have to sell the dream.
You have to have vision. Many entrepreneurs are just scared to state it because they don't want to scare their team or they don't want to be held accountable to having to build something big and massive.
But the truth is, if your dreams aren't big enough for your team's goals and dreams to fit inside of, they'll find somebody else where that is true. So to do it right, we want to make sure that we hire people that have the skills.
That's why I always do a test project. I call it the test first hiring method.
Essentially, it's a 10 hour project that they have to do that simulates the actual work they'll be doing on the team. And we pay them for that.
So it doesn't feel like paid consulting, but it is a lot cheaper to pay somebody for a test project than to make a bad hire. The other thing I like to do is to interview people in person.
Recently, I was hiring a revenue leader and he was like, Mr. Chad, you know, Mr.
Success, sales guy, led teams. And we went on a hike and within three minutes, he couldn't keep up.
And I was curious to see if he would try to keep up. And unfortunately, a third of the way up, he started falling back.
He fell back into the arms of my general manager who then dropped him again. So if you think that somebody is going to be the head of revenue, can't fight to keep up to the CEO of the company or to the general manager who's involved in hiring him, that person was never going to succeed in our culture.
But this next one will save you years getting to the $10 million level. Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube.
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Which brings us to rule number five, DRI, which stands for don't repeat yourself. I first learned this concept in my teens as a software programmer because anybody that's ever written code knows that the best code is dry.
I also take this philosophy and apply it to my life and my business where if I make a decision, I want to make it once and never repeat myself. So one of the core principles for me is principles versus process.
See, everybody knows what a system or a playbook, a checklist looks like, but what if you go one level above and think about what's the principle that drives that outcome? What's the philosophy around the work? Teaching people how to think in principles is more scalable because then they'll have a framework to look at their work that applies to multiple different areas. The other idea is I like to use budgets and allocate amount of money that I'm willing to spend per year, per month on different things.
On a personal level, I might have a travel budget. On a business level, I might have a marketing budget.
That way the team can operate within that and they never have to come to me asking for approvals for every little decision. They know what their budget is.
They operate within it. And then that way I make the decision once at the beginning of the year or the quarter and never again.
It saves me so much time. If you're the bottleneck because you haven't created the principles or the budget for people to operate within, you'll always hit the complexity ceiling in revenue and never get to 10 million.
But without this next one, you won't actually know if your processes are getting results. Which brings us to rule number six, what you measure expands.
So often I have people message me because we've added 3 million followers in the last year on our social media and they asked me how we did it. My only question to them is how many followers have you added in the last day? What are your views in the last day? Most of them can't tell me.
That answer shows me they're not measuring their revenue. They're not measuring your social media.
They're probably not even measuring their profit. What I learned a long time ago is that a scorecard measured daily will get you results.
Here's a big idea. If you don't measure something, you can improve it.
Most entrepreneurs would rather live in this like fun land of creation and innovation. But the truth is, is for you to improve any aspect of the business from your revenue, your marketing, or your sales, the precision of measurement and the frequency, if it goes up, the revenue goes up.
That's why for me, it's all about being visible. I have it on dashboards all over the office.
We have spreadsheets at full access. We even have these things called sensor.
Think about like a water sensor in your basement of a house. If it goes off, it shuts off the water so you don't flood your whole basement.
We do this for every department in our business so that if there's an issue with a customer or a funnel, it catches it early so that we can address it, fix it, and then turn back on the traffic. If you don't do this, the time between an issue happening and you finding out is so long that it costs you time and energy.
What you want to do is figure out what are the five to seven metrics you need to monitor in your business and then put those up on a screen, put it where everybody can see it because what that does is it brings attention to it or I like to say sunlight and what happens with sunlight, it sanitizes all problems, it fixes things before they ever become an issue. But the path to 100 million will only happen if you build leaders.
Before we get back to the episode, if you actually wanna 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.
Which brings us to rule number seven, teach, don't tell. When I was in my twenties, I used to run around and tell people what to do.
The problem is that created a bunch of people that sat back waiting to be told what to do. So if I didn't show up that day, because I was busy with clients, nothing in the business moved forward.
What I've learned since then is a completely different process. And the big idea behind this is your ability to scale depends on your ability to work through people.
So the old way where I was the bottleneck is a thing called transactional leadership. What I used to do is I tell people what to do.
I checked that they got done and then I told them what to do next, which sounds logical. That's how my boss did it with me when I started off.
But a better way is what's called transformational leadership. And that transformed my whole business.
I start with outcomes where I'm clear about the vision or how this thing gets done, and it feels complete. Then I talk about the measurement we're going to use to let the person know, are you making progress? If people don't know how you're going to measure success, then how can they make better decisions day to day to improve their activities? The third part is if I see anybody off course, I write it down and I use our one-on-ones to coach them up so I could teach them how to think about overcoming that problem.
That way, the more I coach them, the higher level individual I'm developing. The goal is to build the people and the people build the business.
That's why for me, I do a weekly leadership training where I'm writing down things I see in the business that apply to the most people that if resolved would make me the most money. Then every Monday afternoon, I have a chance to upgrade and coach the team up so they can get better week over week.
The reason why this works to get to a hundred million is one, it removes the emotional shrapnel you might feel when you're frustrated with your team, not performing to it codifies your thinking and shares with your team what you've paid other people to coach you, or you went to seminars to learn, or you read in a book. It allows you to take that and transfer it to them so they can feel like they're learning.
And third, when your team feels like you're investing in them, they will show up excited, growing, learning how to use these new skills you've taught them. But you don't even get close to 100 million if your team isn't motivated.

Which brings us to rule number eight, dream for your team.

Recently, I was on a call

with one of my private coaching clients,

and I asked them, tell me specifically

what your executive leaders want to achieve

in their life over the next five years.

And they said, well, they wanna make more money.

I said, that's not what they want.

I said, what are their personal goals?

What are their personal dreams?

What do they want to achieve in their life? What kind of impact do they want to make outside of the business? See, if you can't tell me those direct reports, dreams and goals, then you can't lead them. Your goal is to figure out where they want to go and map where you're going in your business to making those things a reality.
So I just want to share some things. These are non-negotiables.
Number one is you have to know your team's goals. You need to know their personal and professional goals.
I always ask this question on first interview. It doesn't matter who I'm interviewing for whatever role, even if they never report to me.
See, financial goals are simple. What I'm more interested is the personal ones.
I want to know what is the title you want to have in five years? Where do you want to live? What kind of work do you want to create? If I can get you clear on that and connected emotionally, then everything else gets so much easier because you'll be intrinsically motivated to push yourself forward. Then you have to map their goals to the work they're going to do in your company.
That way they'll be motivated to do the work, to expand, to grow so that they can get ready to maybe do their own thing someday or get in a position where they can grow. And I also believe how you lead is how you will teach your leaders to lead.
And the best thing you can do is not only do this for your leaders, but encourage them, invite them to ask their team. If everybody on the teams know what everybody else wanna do, personal and professional, where they wanna end up, they will just feel like a cohesive unit building and creating their future together and it just makes it so much easier thanks for listening to martel method if you like this episode could you do me a

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