These 10 Simple Laws Took Me From Broke to Millionaire

I'm gonna share with you the 10 laws of making money

that took me from a broke 23-year-old

to a multimillionaire.

And anyone can start using them today

to get rich fast, even if you're broke.

Welcome to the Martell 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.
Law number one, sell before you build. I've seen it a thousand times.
I even had a buddy recently that made the same mistake, where he had a software idea, went into his basement, wrote a bunch of code, spent months on this software, finally launched, nobody bought. The key is try to sell it before you build it.
If you sell before you build, your future is filled. Meaning that all the hard part that you need to figure out, you start with that.
You don't wait till the end. Building something is actually not hard.
The hard part is actually finding out if anybody wants to buy what you've already built. It's actually exactly how crowdfunding has been doing it forever.
Kickstarter does this. Indiegogo does this.
I'm actually involved in a company where they pre-sold $20 million of a physical hardware before they ever shipped their first unit. Why is that important? It proved that there was customers that wanted to buy the product before they ever spent any engineering time on building it.
Tesla did it too. They pre-sold the Roadster.
Back in the day, it was a $100,000 deposit to say I'd buy the rest of the car once it gets built. And they proved that people wanted to buy that Roadster before they ever built one.
This can be applied to literally anything. I've seen it with consumer goods.
I've seen this with coaching. I've even seen it with a car parts company.
You might've heard the shoe company Zappos. They're a billion dollar company got bought by Amazon before the founder ever bought a pair of shoes.
They sold them on the internet first to prove that people would buy shoes over the internet. And when they got their first order, you know what they did? They ran down the street, they bought it and they shipped it.
Did they make any money? No. Did they prove that the customer was willing to buy that way without trying them on first? Yes.
And that's why selling before you build is the only way to build your business. If they don't pay, then they won't pay attention anyways.
It's like my book. If I just give my book away thinking people are gonna read it and get value from it, they won't.
It's a bad strategy. A better strategy is to make them pay anything because when they do, they'll pay attention with their time to get the value from the book.
But what if you don't have a product or service to sell? That's where law number two of making money comes in. Make someone else rich.
My top salesperson cold emailed me. A long time ago, he ended up in my inbox with a proposition that said, you pay me nothing, let me send an email, and if I sell anything, you give me a percentage of that.
Now, he works with me and he makes over seven figures a year in commissions alone. Why? He helped me make more money.
I gave him a piece of that. It doesn't require a product or service to sell.
It requires that you're good enough to make that proposition. The way it works is you connect someone else's product to a buyer and then you get paid.
This is how real estate works for a lot of people that do wholesaling. They find a property or project, they lock it up, and they sell it to somebody else that's looking for projects.
It's how affiliate marketing's worked forever. It's how network marketing's worked forever.
You can sell somebody else's product and get a piece of that. Build a whole team of people selling the product and get a piece of it.
And here's a tip if you're a world-class salesperson and you're like, well, what product should I sell? Pull the list of the fastest growing companies in the US called the Inc. 500.
I would sort it by software because software is a great product to sell and then go join their sales team. Why? Because they've already proven that their product has product market fit, has high demand.
And what they're looking for is skilled salespeople that can sell. You'll literally be taking orders, selling somebody else's product, getting rich while you're doing it.
But here's a big issue broke entrepreneurs face, their time. And that's where law number three comes in.
Sell value, not time. You've probably heard the analogy of the plumber that came into an emergency situation at somebody's home and he fixed the problem in like 15 minutes.
And then when he gave the invoice to the homeowner, it said $5,000. And the homeowner's like, what the heck is this? You were only here for 15 minutes.
And he replied by saying, it's not the 15 minutes I spent, it's the 15 years of experience I have that told me exactly where I needed to look to solve the problem. He knew what his experience was worth.
If you took everything you know up to this point about the thing you do, and it got taken away from you, and you had to pay to get it all back, how much would you pay for that experience? How much would you pay for that knowledge? How much would you pay for all of those little hacks? You take all this stuff for granted. Whatever you would pay for that is what your value is.
And for a lot of you, it's a lot of money and you don't charge enough. You have to value yourself.
There's only three levels of trading money. The first level is employee and the employee trades time for money.
That's essentially your income, your salary. And most people start out here.
It's where I started because it's the easiest and you just find somebody that's willing to pay you to do a job and you trade your time doing the job and you get paid. Now it's the easiest place to upgrade because you're pricing yourself on time and if you learn to be more valuable, then you can start figuring out how to charge for your value, not your time.
Level two is entrepreneur, which is where you start trading money for time. This is leverage.
If you think about every business owner, if they have an employee, what they're doing is they're taking dollars. They're hiring somebody to do something for them, buying time so that they can take that time and go invest in some results that might make them more money than what they paid.
But if you get really good at becoming more valuable and creating more value for other people, then you keep trading money for more time and that's how you scale your business. The third level is investor and that's about trading money for money.
And that is truly freedom. The day that you're able to live off of the income that your money generates, not your time, not the business because you have leverage with people, but actually the capital and cash you've saved up and invested, that's when you finally can look around and say, what do I really want to create with my life? What impact do I want to have? How do I want to show up? What are the opportunities in front of me? Where do I want to spend my time? And that makes you dangerous because now you don't do anything for anybody that you don't wanna do.
And I believe the person that needs nothing can't be controlled. So you wanna move as fast as you can from time for money for money for time to money for money as you improve your ability to trade up.
Before we get back to the episode, if you wanna 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. But if you are trading your time for money, law number four is how to leverage your time to get rich.
Find rich customers. I coach a lot of entrepreneurs and one of the things I always get pushed back on is when I tell them to raise their prices.
They always say, my customers will leave me. They'll find somebody that's cheaper.
They'll be upset with me. I've been working with this person for 12 years.
I can't do that. And the reality of it is if you keep working with people that don't pay you what you need to be paid to invest in your business, then you'll always have a small business.
And you'll be more worried about your customers being upset with you than actually having a team that you love to work with because you can't afford to pay for great people. You should always be looking for better customers because people that pay more are just easier to work with.
They ask less questions. They always pay their bills on time.
They're usually a lot more emotionally stable and they're more likely to refer you to their friends because they're happier, which means they're gonna tell people about you, which makes the whole thing better. You should always be raising your prices.
A good rule of thumb is every six months, you wanna change some aspect of your product pricing. It could be individual products, it could be the overall setup pricing, whatever it is, some aspect of what you charge should go up so that you're always able to invest in the business to be able to grow.
So if you're struggling with the idea of raising your prices, let me ask you a few questions. Did your company get bigger in the last few years? Because my gut tells me you're probably better.
Did the world get more expensive? Yup, which means everything you pay for got more expensive. Did you add more value to your product or service? Did you give your team any raises? I'm hoping you did.
Did you increase your prices? No, you got better for your customers, for your team, for everybody around you, except for you. And the customer hasn't been paying that.
And guess what? Everything else in their life got more expensive except for your service because of your fear of raising your prices. But you can't just magically get rich customers.
You need a strategy, which brings us to law number five of making money find bigger rooms when i was 28 i moved from my hometown where i grew up my whole life to san francisco where i didn't know a soul the main reason i wanted to get around better people i realized the better people i got around the better it would force me to be and if you are the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room if you're the smartest person street, move streets. You can't grow if you don't have people around you that are growing way past where you're at and they help pull you forward.
Once you expand, you can't contract. You just need to be around people that make you feel expansive.
They'll show you by their actions how they've grown. It might even mean moving cities.
Pretty much every seven years, I've moved the city I've lived in because I'm always trying to expand. I'm always trying to learn.
I'm trying to be around people that inspire me. And oftentimes after a few years, I might make some good friends, but I know I've gotten what I needed out of a certain area and I moved to go find and experience new things.
You need to get comfortable being the smallest person in the biggest room. And I understand imposter syndrome is a real thing.
I've been there where I got invited to things. And before the day started, I was thinking, I just got to keep my mouth shut.
There's only one direction from here and it's down as long as I don't say anything stupid. I remember I got invited by a buddy to go hang out with Richard Branson for a week.
And here's Tim Ferriss and the founder of Square and Brian Johnson, the blueprint guy and all these famous people. And I was like, I'm a nobody Canadian tech entrepreneur.
If I don't say anything, then maybe they won't realize I don't belong in this room. But I showed up and that's the key.
I think too often we sit on our bed in our hotel room, we sit on the couch in our house, and we don't go out because we don't feel worthy. And you will never grow if you don't push yourself outside your comfort zone.
A long time ago, I read a book called Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. And that book, even though at first I thought it was bananas, he argued that not only should you break bread with other people that you're trying to build relationships with or network with, but you should maybe even consider having them come and work out with you.
And I was thinking, that is so crazy. Today, I host founders dinners.
I do a founder psych every Tuesday. It's open to the world.
It's in Kelowna, British Columbia at Knox Mountain Park. We leave at 620 in the morning in the parking lot.
And I would never imagine doing meetings with people that didn't involve physical activity. If you feel like you don't have that peer group, it might require you to do a friendmentory, which is auditing the people in your life and asking yourself, are these people closer to my goals or closer to my past? Oftentimes, it's the people you know the best that are comfortable because they know who you are, but they're not the right people because they're not on the journey of where you want to go.
So if you feel inspired to do something big with your life, take action and move ASAP. But making money isn't just about being around better people.
It's about what you can do for them. Which brings us to law number six, become more valuable.
The ability to create value for other people is everything. And some of you might think, well, I don't have a lot to offer other people.
And I would say, not true. My favorite example is of a homeless person in our community named Oscar.
And even though he has nothing that he can give any other person, he goes to the mall every day and he stands there at the entrance and opens the door for people coming in. And he sits there, he opens the door, he smiles.
Sometimes people give him stuff for doing that, but he literally has nothing and found a way to be valuable to other people. So how can you do that for yourself, even if you're starting at zero or even further along? Here's why creating value is so important.
When people choose who they spend time with, they're going to choose the person that solves problems for them. And the value could be entertaining you.
It could be teaching you about the world. It could be holding space to listen.
These are all skills that you could build. These are all skills you could acquire.
They're all skills you can get better at. And what's crazy is some people think, well, I need equipment to do the thing, like shoot videos.
I need to buy all this gear. No, you don't.
You just need to pull out your phone and talk to your camera, post it on social media, just do the reps. So many people think that to get a skill, they have to spend money.
And the truth is they just have to spend time. Broke people have TVs, rich people have libraries.
Learning how to solve problems for other rich people is a great way to add value to their lives. And those solutions to the problems are in books.
So even if you don't have a business that you're building for yourself, think of some people you wanna network with and add value to, reading books to help them to provide perspective or teach them things about their industry that they may not know because you went down the rabbit hole and studied it is a really great way to become more valuable. But here's the deal, don't just read the books, study the books.
One of the things that I do every day is I read and I study. Study means underlying, cataloging, writing things down in my phone that I'm going to teach other people, referencing it, trying to rewrite certain passages in a way that I understand for my brain.
That way I integrate it into my life and my being. So it's not just getting the task of reading a book done.
It's integrating the lessons into my life. The number one investment you can make is in yourself.
I have young entrepreneurs coming to me every day asking me, hey, I got an extra 500 bucks. What should I spend it on? And I always say, in yourself, in you.
The course, the material, the knowledge, the experience to fly somewhere, to go to an event, because you will take you with you for the rest of your life. Every business, every interaction, every communication with another person, whether it's this business or the next business, you will always be there.
Make more bets on you, because your personal income is tied to your personal development. The more you grow, the more you'll earn.
But even with all of this, I see some broke entrepreneurs making a huge mistake.

They think they have to build everything themselves

from scratch.

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Now let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to law number seven of making money, model then modify.
When I was 28, I decided to move my life to San Francisco. The only reason I moved is I wanted to learn what the best of the best did to build their software companies, to raise $100 million, to exit for a billion dollars.
I wanted to see how the best did what they did. Here's why.
And Tony Robbins says it best. He says, success leaves clues.
You want to study what successful people do and do exactly what they do. I like to think about it as like copy the container, not the content.
If you see somebody winning that competes against you, just look at the container they've built for how they've won. Don't copy exactly how they're doing it.
Put your own content inside of it. Make it your own.
But why would you reinvent the wheel? Somebody else has shown you the pattern to be successful. I think about this all the time.
Make it your own. Maybe you choose a different market to be in.
Maybe the way the product's built is your own product. Maybe the stories are the personalities.
You can take the blueprint, make it your own and customize it so that everybody sees it as a unique idea. But you're following best practices, you're modeling other people's winning formula, but making it your own.
Here's the truth. I'm not that smart.
The reason I win bigger than most is because I'm willing to pick up the phone and call others who have done the thing I'm about to do before I ever start. Before I have ever started a new company and I've started several.
Before I've ever gone into a new market and I've done this dozens of times. Before I've ever invested in a certain company that I've never invested in before, I pick up the phone, I call the people and I ask questions.
I say, if you were my situation, what would you consider? What's changing the market? Knowing what you know now, what would you do different? Knowing what you know about me, how would you suggest that I start? And I listen to them. I don't argue with them.
I don't complain about what they said. I don't pretend like I didn't hear it.
I copy it word for word because they're the expert. I'm the student and I was here to learn.
I called them to learn. It's so fascinating that people think, oh, I already know how I'm gonna make this work.
And then they launch and the whole thing falls on their face. Why didn't you just copy the Chipotle menu? Why didn't you just copy the number one HVAC company or lawn care company in your city? There's a reason why they price things the way they price because they've been doing it for longer.
And you come in thinking you're going to undercut and win everybody's business by being the cheapest. That's a fast way to lose your business.
Use ChatGPT to give you the answer to the test. If you've never built a business before, ask ChatGPT.
AI has access to all the knowledge. It's all there.
All the information, all the experience, all the blog posts, all the books. And if you ask it a question, it'll give you a pretty darn good first draft.
Way better than what you have because you've never done it before. But even though you know what to do, maybe you're stuck in a planning loop, preparing, researching, learning, which brings us to law number eight, default to action.
I've worked with a lot of over planners in the past. There's a time for research and planning, but almost everyone takes it too far.
My philosophy is that as soon as it speaks in my soul, if I feel like I have the strategy, I default to action. I move to the next step.
Anything to validate my riskiest assumption. Most people prepare way too long to get ready to finally take a shot on goal.
I say start before you're ready. The truth is, if you're not embarrassed by your first draft, your first prototype, your first thing, then you've waited too long to show it to somebody else.
The better bet is to take small, quick bets, shoot the bullets towards the target so you can find out where the target is in the first place. And once you land a couple bullets, you load up the cannon and you shoot.
Doing it this way creates a forcing function because it shrinks the timeframe. If you force yourself to do the work in the next three days, not 30 days, then you'll at least get some feedback on what's working or what's not.
Anybody that works with me, they will tell you Dan's knowing doing gap doesn't exist. I've been in meetings where I've asked somebody to leave the meeting to go make a phone call to get the answer to come back to let us know because there was a decision that was blocked because we didn't have the answer.
Why wait? Why schedule? Why tell me end of the week? How about right now? What's missing for us to do it right here, right now to move it

forward? Too many people sit there and ruminate about all the different ideas and then they get

in their head and they get scared and then fear shows up and fear gives bad advice because it's

false evidence appearing real. And then they never take action.
In the moment when you're inspired,

when you're ready to make a move, do it before your brain convinces you not to. It's essentially

I'm sorry. and then they never take action.
In the moment when you're inspired, when you're ready to make a move, do it before your brain convinces you not to. It's essentially JFDI.
If you don't know what it stands for, Google it. It's a license plate on my car.
It's been my core philosophy at everything. It's on my manifesto.
It's on there because it is everything. It's what's allowed me to win at a higher level because while everybody's getting ready to start, I've started and already won.
But if you're anything like me, I've always struggled with ADHD and specifically stay in focus. And this next one is critical to making money.
Before we get back to the episode, if you're enjoying it so far, could you go ahead and do me a huge favor and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify? Reviews help us get up in the rankings, which gives us credibility to reach out to bigger and bigger guests. We can bring them to you.
It would mean so much. Let's get back to the episode.
Law number nine, stay focused. When I decided to move on from SaaS Academy, my previous company and hire CEO Johnny to run that, to start Martell Media, my whole calendar had to change.
The reason why? I had to reset my focus. I knew that what I focus on would expand.
If I wanted this thing to be successful, I had to go all in, make it a priority, show up in my calendar, and put the blinders on, and go. Here's why it's important.
First off, focus stands for follow one course until successful. I can't tell you how important this is.
Some people say to me, well, I have focus. I go, you have three businesses.
Yeah, I know, but all three businesses support the same customer and they're super integrated and it makes a lot of sense. And I'm like, no, it doesn't.
Because anybody that's built a business knows that every product has to be written up and supported, marketed, sold. And each one of those things provides overhead that is three times bigger than the initial decision to do the thing.
That one little side business is not one little side business. It's a new business that's going to distract you from your primary business because you're not focused.
The whole idea is single focus, single file. And if I tried to get you to count one to 26, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, you'd do it really fast.
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, all the way to Z really fast. If I made you go 1A, 2B, 3C, it would be 10 times slower.
So you might think you're focused, but you keep context switching, which is going to slow you down. And it's proof, the math maths.
This is how I know what your priorities are. First off, you need to invest.
And there's two places that you need to invest in your bank account and your calendar. If I can't see by the transactions that you spend every day, every month on what you say is a priority, because I can see by the investment of dollars, or I look at your calendar and see where you've allocated your time to that project, to that initiative, to a loved one, then don't tell me what your priorities are.
I can decipher it by what you spend time and money on. If you want to demonstrate focus and priorities, start your day with what's a big rock.
I call it the five to nine strategy. If something is new and it's a side hustle, show me five to nine, 5 a.m.
to 9 a.m., 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Don't tell me you don't have time. You have the time, just make it a priority.
Start your day with that initiative, work your rest of the day doing whatever your other thing is, and then come back at it. But there's one part that might be missing, a rich mindset that hasn't shifted yet, which brings us to the last law of making money, the law of 300%.
Growing up, I loved to skateboard. As a teenager, that's what I spent most of my time doing.
And there was this big set of stairs called the big five. And the vision I had was to backside heel flip this thing.
And it was crazy. I remember I tried it a hundred times.
I just wasn't able to do it. And I remember there was this older skateboarder that always hung around.
His name was Morris. And he was sitting there one time watching me.
He goes, Dan, do you know why you're not able to land that trick? And I said, no. He goes, because you don't believe.
I watch you approach it and you hesitate as if you have no confidence in actually landing the trick. What you need to do is visualize and believe that you can do it.
A week later, I pull up by myself, charge it, backside heel flip, catch it, stomp it right away. Freaked out.
See, I had 100% clarity, but what I was missing was 100% belief 100% of the times I tried it. And that's why most people aren't successful.
Here's what I've learned over the years. If you can have 100% clarity and you can believe that vision and you can hold that 100% of time, it will pull into your life what you want.
Now, I know some of you don't have the whole plan. I'm not asking you to have the whole plan.
I'm asking you to dream, to have a vision, to actually go to the end and look around and ask yourself, how does this feel? Be in that energy. And once you know what that is, hold that belief, have that clarity and try to hold it 100% of the time.
Go another level deeper and even shop your dreams. If you want to drive or own a really cool car, go look at that car.
If you want to live a certain lifestyle, go spend time in that place. Be in that energy.
Visualize it. Act as if you've already gotten it because you'll never get a penny more than you think you deserve.
And the problem is if you don't go and shop your dreams, you definitely don't feel like you deserve it because you're not even pretending like someday it'll be yours. You need to create from the feeling of having already achieved your goals.
You actually got to go to the place and ask yourself, if I got the car, if I got the house, if I got the money, how would I feel? With that energy, create your dreams, create your business, create your life. The law of 300, having 100% clarity, 100% belief, 100% of the time is how entrepreneurs go from broke to being rich.
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