Stop Working Hard - 12 Laws of Business

The more money you make, the less you should have to work. That's only if you know these 12 laws of running a stress-free business.
I know it's possible because I went from 100-hour work weeks and burnout in my 20s to today running a $100 million empire working less than 40 hours a week. And you don't need 160 IQ or spend millions of dollars on consultants to implement these.
So without further explaining it, this is how to run a million-dollar business without going crazy. Welcome to the Martell Method.
I went from rehab at 17 to building a hundred million dollar empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.
And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martellmethod.com. Starting with law number one, you create the rules.
When I started my first successful business, I almost went bankrupt in the first three months because I didn't understand a concept called cash flow. And I remember talking to one of my mentors, explained to him what was going on in my business.
And he just laughed at me. He goes, why are you doing that? And I said, what? He goes, why are customers only paying you like 60 days later? And then the money gets locked up in your bank account because you're a new business.
And essentially you don't have the money to for your growth, your employees. It says, why don't you make the customers pay 50% up front? Well, I didn't know I could.
It turns out you get to create the terms of engagement with your customers and your business so that you can build the business the way you want to. The way I like to think about it, it's called the infinite game.
Your business, your rules. You need to design the game so that you can play it forever without pain.
So for example, I won't ever finance a customer's growth. If you want my product or services, then you pay upfront so that I can invest in the business to deliver on my promise.
If I don't work well with a client, then I don't work with them. I fire people all the time.
Some people accidentally come into my world and I realized quickly their philosophy on business and mine are completely different. I don't put up with it.
Not because I'm being rude, not because I'm angry, not because I'm upset, because I think you get to choose who you want to do business with. And that energy for your team, for your bank account can be negative.
If you don't want to do custom work for people, you're allowed to say no. Just because you do landscaping, for example, or an HVAC and somebody comes to you with something above and beyond, you can say no.
You can refer them to somebody else. You can choose simplicity and scale over complexity and potentially fail.
The key is that if you have a client and you keep making exceptions, you essentially taught them how to treat you. And the funny part is that the moment you put your foot down, they're going to get upset, but it's your fault because you let it go on and on.
Creating your business in a way that you want to do business is rule number one of being successful, running a business that you don't hate to grow. But even once you're making money, distractions might be the thing holding you back.
Which brings us to law number two, never open your email. You know, people often say, you know what's really cool? I got to inbox zero.
You know what's cooler than that? Zero inbox. I remember I spent a week with Richard Branson and I watched a guy who runs 400 companies.
He has two CEOs that runs the holding company that manages those companies. The guy doesn't do email.
He literally strategizes on a legal pad and he built his life where there's no devices, just the notepad so that he can move things forward without having to be involved and distracted. And it sounds crazy for a lot of you because you're stuck to it.
You're addicted to it. Your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list of other people's priorities on your time.
The first thing you want to do is get an executive assistant or a virtual assistant or an admin or an office manager. Honestly, whatever you want to call them.
But every entrepreneur should be spending all their time doing the thing that makes the money. Anything else that is administrative in nature, scheduling in nature, running errands, have somebody else support you so that you can make the most money per hour, pay somebody else, you create jobs, and that way get some time back.
The key is to have them manage your inbox. So all inbound requests have to get filtered by somebody else.
They can bump stuff up to you if you need to so that you're in the right place with the information you need to do the task. You literally have somebody else manage you like you're a five-year-old, putting you in the right place with the details to be able to be the most productive you possibly can.
It's so effective, and it's what all the top people that you follow on the internet, all those famous people, all the athletes, etc., that's how they run their life. The big idea behind having an assistant is a few things.
They don't have any emotional response to an email. I know that I've gotten an email from somebody and it felt overwhelming or felt big and I mark it as unread and maybe I'll look at it tomorrow and deal with it in the morning and then that might turn into two days and three days and eventually you just leave it there.
So you don't respond quick enough and then the opportunities come and go. Whereas other things might be happening while you're on vacation or your meetings and they got to get moved forward.
So if you think about the response time of a request or the ability to move something forward when you're not involved because it's in your inbox and you could be doing something else, your assistance pulling revenue forward into your life. I think it's two to three months for me.
Some people it could be more, some people could be less, but usually for a business that two or three months pays for that hire right out of the gate. But you can't build a business with just one hire.
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Find it at martellmethod.com. Which brings us to law number three, don't hire to grow your business, hire to buy back your time.
Most entrepreneurs build their business completely backwards. I have a friend that's a logo designer.
He got overwhelmed, too much work, he hired another logo designer. And then he was spending all of his time managing projects and running errands and dealing with all the office administrator instead of designing logos.
But the new guy did and he was paying top dollar and then he's spending all of his time dealing with all this admin stuff that he could have paid anybody else to do. And then all of a sudden he's not making any more profit.
Why? Because he didn't have enough business to actually support two people. The right way is to hire somebody to take the low cost activities off your plate so that you can do more of the money making moves.
The big idea around this is that million dollar companies were not built off $10 tasks. You could be the hardest worker in the room.
And if you have to manage every small detail of a company that does a million in revenue, there's not enough hours in the week. Learning to delegate, having other people support you, that's what leaders do.
So here's the way you want to think about it. I call it the replacement ladder and I teach it in chapter five of my book, Buy Back Your Time.
It starts on the bottom with admin. You might be feeling stuck and what you need to do is get out of your inbox or scheduling things in your calendar.
Then you move up to level two, which is delivery. This is once you made a sale, somebody else taking over that relationship, that conversation and really moving it forward in regards to onboarding that customer into your business or supporting them with the questions around billing or scheduling, et cetera.
If you don't, you'll feel stalled. The next level is level three, which is marketing.
And this is where you might feel still a little friction in your growth. The reason why is you need somebody to own campaigns and traffic, somebody that cares about how much leads you're generating every day and ensuring you're running new marketing campaigns to get new audiences.
Level four is sales. And I call this level freedom for a big reason, because if you do it right, have somebody else take all those sales calls, all those opportunities and do follow up properly.
You now have a system at four hires where you can go on vacation. Somebody can have that conversation with that lead and bring them into your business and buy your services and then onboard them into the delivery of the service.
Even if you're still involved, all that can happen while you're gone, while you're sleeping, while you're on vacation. That is beautiful and rare for most entrepreneurs.
Level five, this is when things get really fun, is leadership. If you have somebody that owns strategy and outcomes, you get to come into work and really create the way you want to as entrepreneurs.
Focus on problems, make them better, support your team, become a better leader. That replacement ladder strategy is the least amount of money to get the most time back to get the biggest bang for your buck.
But here's what's crazy is then people go, well, what if I don't have the money to hire? Which brings us to law number four, which is profit solves all problems. Every entrepreneur does it wrong.
They start, they think I got to get this inventory. I got to make this widget.
I got to have this skill and then I get to sell it. Nope.
A business is started when somebody sells something to a stranger. Every one of my software companies I've ever started, I pre-sold the software using screenshots.
I had to find the customer, something you'll need to do. I had to know how to sell them, something you have to learn.
And I had to ask them for the money. Most people don't.
And if you do this, then you actually have the profit, the revenue from the business available to you to actually go build things or recruit talent. This is a massive idea that most people miss.
When you can't grow your hours, grow your profit because then you go buy everyone else's hours. See, unfortunately, most entrepreneurs focus on top line revenue because it's for show.
However, profits for dough. Most people don't make enough profit to be able to solve major problems in their business like lead gen or sales.
The truth is, if you have a problem that can be solved with money and you have the money, you really don't have a problem. The way you actually increase profit is one, have the customers buy bigger amounts of things ahead of time before you have to invest any costs.
Two, increase your prices because most people are undercharging because they don't value their self-worth. And three, ensure that you focus on the thing that actually makes you the most gross margin and sell more of those things than selling a bunch of things that don't actually make you any profit.
Now, here's the crazy part. Almost every entrepreneur is guilty of ignoring this next one.
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Which brings us to law number five, teach, don't tell. When I was 20, I would constantly be running around my office telling people what to do.
And honestly, it became exhausting because it was like spinning plates. As soon as I didn't tell somebody what to do, they didn't do anything.
And then I got frustrated with them. And then I learned a completely different way.
And that is all about developing the people, teaching them principles so they can make decisions and make movement on their own. Here's a principle that will really help you integrate this.
An answer solves today's puzzle. A principle solves tomorrow's.
Where most people go wrong because they've never been taught is they do what's called transactional leadership, which they tell the person what to do. They check that it got done.
They tell them what to do next. Problem with that is you then become a bottleneck if you don't shut up for work because they don't know what to do.
A better strategy is do transformational leadership. That's where you show up and you talk about the outcome of their work, their project.
You tell them how you're going to measure their progress or success. And then you coach them if they're not on pace to where you need them to with principles that help them grow.
Now to make that really easy on a weekly basis, you want to be doing leadership training. I know so many entrepreneurs that are frustrated at their team and they got this list of things that their team's not doing.
And I go, show me in your calendar where you're teaching them. Where are you teaching them how to be more productive, how to communicate clear, how to manage their inbox better, how to be making better decisions? Because these are all things entrepreneurs had to learn.
But unfortunately, they feel like, oh, the person should just know this stuff. Every week, schedule time to develop your team.
I think it's one of the most powerful habits to get the most out of your team. But you can't expect your team to hit an outcome if you don't give them a framework to move fast, which brings us to law number six, 50 to fix it.
This sounds crazy, but most people do it completely wrong. When you have somebody that you delegate something, you have to empower them to solve the problem.
Recently, I had a team member that kind of bottlenecked because they were sending out a bunch of swag and things to our community. And I empower them by saying, if it costs less than $50 for you to fix the problem, just fix it and just let your leader know after the fact.
So they went out, bought a shipping printer and got that bottleneck solved without anybody being involved because nobody needs to give you permission to solve a problem. It's less than 50 bucks.
And that's the power of 50 to fix it because it pushes the decision down to the person has the most information to solve the problem. See, a bottleneck is called the bottleneck because it's at the top and you're the person at the top.
So build the structure. Anyone on my team can spend $50 to fix a problem as long as they tell their boss afterwards so they can understand if there's a system issue, but it empowers people to solve problems.
Allow them to do it themselves. Now, I elevate this without permission.
Managers can spend up to $500. My directors can spend up to $5,000.
My executives can spend up to $50,000 without anybody's permission. I want to push decisions down to the team so they keep the momentum going.
But leading isn't just about what you say, it's about what you don't say. Which brings us to law number seven, lead like a five-year-old.
About a year ago, I was in my studio and we just built some built-ins and my GM, Todd, comes in. He's looking at me.
He's looking at these shelves

and he's going, hey, what are you putting on the shelves? And I just kind of stared at him. I was

like, and he goes, oh, I guess that's my job. I said, ding, ding, ding.
I teach the person how

to treat me. I teach them where to find the answers.
See, the problem is if you keep giving

people the answers, they keep coming to you back with the next problem. So here's a fun concept.

When you buy back your time, make sure it stays sold. Don't hire somebody and then do their job for them.
Hire somebody and let them be empowered to move things forward. I just believe that the problem is most entrepreneurs and managers give the answers all the time because they don't even understand the downside of doing that.
This is where the 131 comes into play though. Any of my direct reports that comes to me with a challenge, I always ask them to present their 131.
One specific problem. What problem are you trying to solve right now? Two, what are the three viable options that you've considered? All of them, I want you to explore the option set.
And then the third is what's the one recommendation out of those three that you recommend we move forward with? 90% of the time, I agree, things move forward. The fun part about this is that every time they come to me with something big, they know they need the 131.
Most of the time, they actually solve it themselves. So I don't even get presented with them because they actually do the work that I want them to do, which is to try to solve it.
And I only get the really meaty stuff that actually requires my unique perspective. Now, there's a massive difference between delegation and abdication of responsibility, which brings us to law number eight, 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome.
Most people think they're art, they have to do all of it. For example, I was recently giving a talk at Tony Robbins Business Mastery and most people would think, oh my gosh, that was a great talk because Dan gave so many examples, very personal, very action oriented.
Man, that was incredible. What they don't know is I worked with my head writer to create that presentation.
The way I did that is I used the 108010 rule. Now, here's a big idea.
You can do anything, but you can't do everything. You need other people to support you.
The way you do these type of artistic projects is following this process. Here's how the 108010 rule works.
First off is the 10% upfront. That's the ideation step.
This is where you collect all of the information, you know, the stories, the topics, whatever it is you're creating, you bring it together and you sit down with the person that's gonna do the project and you give them all of your ideas, all of the stuff you've done, all the research. The next step is 80% of the work, which is all about execution.
This is really about having them go out there, do more research, put together first drafts, try to figure out how they're going to deal with the conflict. Like they obviously have to know how to do the work, but they're doing most of it.
Then the last part is 10% integration. And this is where the slides are presented to me with the outline for my talk.
And I reviewed to make sure that it had the personal touch, that it had the magic, that it had the soul of what I wanted, but I got to save 80% because somebody else did the execution part and I only had to do the ideation and integration. The best example is Steve Jobs comes in, works with Johnny Ives on the 10% ideation.
Johnny Ives goes and builds prototype with his team. That's the execution.
And then Steve Jobs takes all of that, refines it, and then goes to present it on stage. That is the integration.
But the truth is it can still be hard to step back and get out of the details. 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 law number nine, everything needs a DRI. As I mentioned, Steve Jobs is one of the best leaders of our time, and he had this philosophy called direct responsible individual.
His philosophy was that any project in a business needed one person, one name who is accountable for it. That was the DRI.
Most businesses suffer because they don't have clear ownership. Unclear ownership is just delayed failure.
So the big way I look at it, one person, not 10. If I'm launching a new product, one person.
If I have a department, one person. If I'm starting a completely new business, who's the who? I want one person.
And what I do is I track down all the metrics for that person. I put their name next to it.
And that way they know what part of the performance in the business they own so that they can be accountable for moving it forward. No accountability, no productivity, which brings us a lot.
Number 10 results over effort. Don't confuse motion with movement.
A lot of people are busy, no results. I remember there was this marketing person I assigned once to fill a hundred person webinar.
That was the goal. And then 13 people showed up.
And I'm like, what did you do? And they're like, oh, we ran ads. We did email.
We did everything. Interesting.
So you told me you did full effort with 13% of the results. See, unfortunately, if you're building a business, you have to hold people accountable to the results, not their effort.

I don't care if you worked weekends.

I don't care if you worked long hours.

If you can't produce the result, that's the only thing I can hold you accountable for

because I'm not sitting here to do your job.

Right from the beginning, I don't hire people with the expectation that I have to check

in for them to get a result.

I mean, the truth is what doesn't impress me is people being in the office all the time,

working crazy hours, trying really hard, and then falling short on the results. What does impress me is hitting your numbers.
I'm more impressed with a person that works five hours to hit the results that I thought it would take 40 and they do it in a fraction of the time. The big idea is to set clear expectations with your team and hold them to it.
Your standards are not what you say they are. They're what you accept.
And you might say, these are our standards and this is how we work here. But if you accept underperformance, that's what you're communicating to the rest of the team.
But as your team grows, you can't monitor everything that happens. Which brings us to law number 11, create culture, not rules.
Your employee handbook can't be big enough to deal with all the situations that are going to come up. It's funny because a friend visited my studio recently and he told me, holy crap, this entire team came up and shook my hand.
And I'm like, yep. Did you tell them they had to do that? Nope.
Why'd they do that? Culture. Culture is what you expect of people.
It's your values. It's how you hire.
It's how you show up. Culture is not what you tell people to do.
It's what they do when nobody's watching. And for what it's worth, I believe this.
With the right culture, you don't need rules. It's crazy when I see people change their business for folks that have left.

Instead of changing their business for the folks that are staying that are performing.

I believe it all comes down to one thing, your values.

And your values represent beliefs.

And if you're not clear with them, then you won't be able to hire properly.

Because that's what it should be used for.

Or you won't be able to fire properly.

The way I think about it is hire for the soul, train for the role. Do they have the skill and the will? If so, they will win.
However, the best entrepreneurs know it's not all business strategies, which brings us to law number 12, work harder on yourself than you do on your business. In my 20s, I used to work crazy hours, shifting things around, working harder, going crazy.
And I always felt like I was underwater. I wasn't making ground.
Then I shifted it to working on me, Dan Martel, not the business. And it turned out me being better.
I was better for my team. And the whole thing shifted all around me.
For example, my fitness. I believe that I exhaust the body to tame the mind.
If I work on my mind, I have a calm mind, then I can move things forward. One of my favorite quotes is summarized this by a guy named Naval, and he says, a calm mind, a strong body, and a house full of love is earned.
If I want to have those things in my life, I gotta work on me. They're not things I can buy.
They're not people I can delegate to. Those are things that I have to earn.
So here's what I do. First off, I always prioritize the pump, the workout, the exhaust, the body, tame the mind.
It has to be there because it gets me ready for the day. I also read every day.
Why? I consider it my opportunity to find like an offering to the world, some passage that really resonates with me. And then I can share with people as I meet them throughout the day.
And if I don't have the answer, I go external for help. I was telling this to my team the other day.
It's like, if you guys aren't good enough, please go find a mentor, find somebody that could advise you, find a course you want to buy, a seminar you want to go to. If you think we have the answers in this business, we're all in trouble, including myself.
The truth is every Monday I do leadership training and I tell my whole team this right off the bat. You all have to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.
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