If I Wanted to Go From $0 to $1M, I’d Do This

This is the fastest and most realistic way to become a millionaire. 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.
And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martellmethod.com. Step number one in your millionaire journey is to pick the right business model.
And these are the highest leveraged business models you can steal to start your first business today.

Number one, service business. Think lawn care, snow removal, window cleaning, website building.
Just pick one thing. Don't be everything to everybody.
I have a friend of mine, Stefano. He's 23 and has a 3 million a year snow removal business.
Why? Because he focused on one thing, reoccurring revenue, removing snow. He focused, he made it happen, and that's how he became a millionaire in almost his first year.
Number two, product business. Building something that people buy, direct to consumer or retailers.
And people say, well, I don't have the money to pay to buy or build the thing. Well, you can kickstart, you can crowdfund.
I have a investment I made in a company called Laundry Sauce. This is how they went from $0 to eight figures in revenue in under a year using this exact strategy.
You wanna pre-sell what you're about to build so you can use the customer's money to fund the inventory that you need to buy to give to the customers and sell new customers. Number three is consulting business.
Teach people how to do something. And if you don't know how to do it, go learn it.
You could read the top five books on how to be a great marketer for local businesses and then go teach local businesses how to market their business. It's not a done for you like a service business.
It's people paying you to learn the strategies that you've extracted from other smart people in the world. Maybe teach people how to mow their lawns or how to grow a garden or build world-class websites.
These are all things that you can get paid to teach people. Consulting has one of the highest profit margins because the cost to deliver is so low.
Essentially, it costs you nothing, it's your time. 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. Number four is agency.
And this is where people pay you to do it for them. It's one of the easiest because you are the one delivering the value.
You could do the accounting, you could do marketing, sales, whatever the business needs, and they don't want a full-time person, they're gonna hire you part-time to do that work. One of my favorite business models right now, the most profitable is AI business automation.
You could learn everything you need to know over the weekend on how AI works and connect that with workflow software like Maker Zapier. Go find businesses and tell them, I can map out your process and show you how you can remove people and costs in that process using AI and they'll pay you the big dollars.
Number five is software business. This is my favorite.
Now I'm biased because it's where I've made most of my money. And here's how you start a software business even without coding skills.
But why is this model so good? Reoccurring revenue. You code it once, it runs forever.
It's a super high leverage business model. And if you can't code, just find a problem that you could solve using code and solve it manually.
Spreadsheets. That's how most software companies start.
Then you can go pre-sell the solution. Same strategy we just talked about for the product business.
Take all that money they pay you and use that money to hire a coder online. You can find them to code the solution and then deliver it to the customer.
Here's where most people make the mistake. Picking the right model is the difference between having a headwind and making it hard or a tailwind and it's super easy.
If you want to be a millionaire fast, picking the right business model is the first step, which leads us directly to step two, which is to find a huge pain. So if you wanna be a millionaire, here's what you need to do.
Number one, find a huge pain in the market. If we solve big problems, we get paid in a big way.
Number two is solve it in a better way than any other solution on the market. When I started my company Clarity, the big problem I was trying to solve is people getting connected and getting advice from people they follow.
Micro celebrities, people on Twitter, people on Instagram, people on LinkedIn. And I thought everybody will want to reach out and have a conversation with their followers, their fans.
The problem was, is that it turns out the people that follow aren't necessarily people that pay for advice. See, I had the customer totally wrong.
And I thought it was every entrepreneur in the world. The truth is, is it's not every entrepreneur in the world.
It's the entrepreneurs that pay to go to events because they value access to knowledge and speed and to save themselves time. And they go to events to meet the experts on stage, to network with people in the crowd, and they're willing to spend money.
So sometimes you think you're solving a big pain, but it's not for the market you thought. You know, in the world of software, we talk about painkillers and vitamins.
We want to build a solution that's a painkiller, a must have, not a vitamin, which is a nice to have. If you wanna become a millionaire, the easiest way is to solve big problems for the richest people you know.
Talk to them, ask them what problems they're having, understand how they've solved them in the past, and see if there's a better way. You may not have the answer, but you could go find a consultant that already solves this problem for the big companies and they'll teach you, they'll show you.
That's how you can fast track your way to solving big problems for rich people. You just don't wanna fall in the trap of fixing broke people's problem.
They'll say they have a problem. They just don't spend money to fix it.
There's a reason why they small business they don't invest in solving big problems which leads us directly to step three which is never charge for your time always charge for the outcome so when I hire people to clean my cars they don't charge me by the hour they charge me per clean because I'm not paying for their time I'm paying for the 10 years of experience they have to be able to clean three cars in under three hours and i want them to not only do the best job but have the best tools and to be rewarded if they figure out how to do that faster if i was paying for their time they would be penalized for doing it faster which would then affect me which is kind of crazy so in your business you want to charge for the outcome not for your time people make this mistake all the time they're like're like, time and materials, time and materials. Don't do that.
Problem, solution, payment. You want to charge an amount of money proportionate to the problem you solve.
If it's a big problem, take 10% of that. That's what you charge.
If you want to make your first 100K, figure out how you can make or save someone a million dollars. It's about 10%.
Whatever value, whatever problem, how much time you save them, take that 10% and that's your fee. See, I one time had a bookkeeper come to me and she was like, I wanna be making 300,000 a year in about five years.
And I was like, awesome. I want you to be making that too.
Let's talk about what would need to be true for that to happen. First off, you need to figure out how to make me 3 million a year.
Money saved, money made, opportunities, you tell me. But right off the bat, when I say that, they were like, oh, I don't know how to do that.
And that's the whole point. I want you to be making 300,000 a year, but you gotta figure out how to create that kind of value.
Business is no different. If you wanna be a millionaire, you need to disconnect your time from your income and charge people for the problem you're solving, not for the time you're putting into it.
But you can't charge crazy amounts of money without people knowing, liking and trusting you. Which leads us to step four, which is build demand for your business.
You don't want to be the best kept secret. Here are the four P's of marketing that I use in all my businesses to generate endless amounts of people knocking on my door asking to buy.
The four P's are as followed. Number one, publish.
Think content, social media, SEO. You're educating the market.
You're producing content. You're teaching people how to solve the problem themselves.
You're giving them results in advance before they ever buy from you. And that builds great marketing and also trust.
The second P is paid. Think Facebook, TikTok, Google AdWords, where you're paying to get in front of somebody and borrow their attention.
And the key there is to make sure that whatever problem you're trying to solve aligns with what the person's expecting to see on that marketing platform. So if they're on Facebook, your ads have to be more social, more inquisitive, kind of like a Facebook post.
If you're on Google, you wanna run an ad that aligns with their search term. So that's very specific to solve the problem that they searched about.
Number three is partners. Some people call them affiliates.
I like to call them strategic partners. Other people call them value-added resellers.
But the idea is asking yourself the three Fs. What are my ideal customers currently funding? So what are they spending money on? Who are the people that they follow and only they would follow, like the experts in the industry? And then where would they frequent with their time, either online or in person? So whoever has access to those customers, those are your partners for them to maybe do a webinar with them, maybe get an email sent out to those customers.
You have a non-competitive way to add value to their customers that that partner, you can give them a piece of. Partnerships are like the best way to grow your business because they're gonna subsidize your marketing spend.
Number four is PR, and this is one of my favorites. Think, you know, podcasts, getting covered on blogs, but this is where people that have a platform are interviewing you or doing reporting on you so that you can get in front of their audience.
It's a little bit harder to get going, but once you get it going, it works like a flywheel. And it's one of the best ways to not only get a bunch of people to know about you, but to position yourself as an expert or the go-to brand in your category.
So you can't become a millionaire if no one knows about your business, but there's a difference between knowing and trusting your business. 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. Which leads us directly to step five, which is to protect your reputation.
All businesses and individuals, all they have is their reputation in the market. When you think about Apple, you think innovation.
I mean, does BlackBerry have the same reputation? Do you even know who BlackBerry is anymore? No, probably not. It's not a surprise that Apple's worth $3.5 trillion and BlackBerry, who was once bigger than Apple's, now worth less than 1% of Apple, but $1.9 billion, which it blows my mind they're still worth that much.
But here's my question. Are you known well or well-known? Do you have values that you stand for when things go bad? How do you show up? Do you deliver on your promises, but not only deliver, but do you over deliver? Are you somebody that people are talking about because your experience to work with is like truly remarkable, which is what marketing is about, is being remarkable, meaning you are remarked on, which leads us directly to step six, which is under promise and over deliver.
I once knew a guy and he had this bad habit of over promising his customers all the time. And he did it because he really wanted the business.
The problem was is that he was never able to deliver on what he sold and then people just kept leaving disappointed. You can do that for a short term, but long term, everybody's going to know you're that person.
So here's how you do it. Promise as little as possible to get them to buy and get them a result.
Once they buy, go above and beyond. The extra 10% will set you apart from everybody else.
If you want your business to be extraordinary, guess what? You have to be extra, but you won't be able to go above and beyond if you're the only one working in the business, which leads us directly to step seven, which is delegate everything that doesn't make you money. Most people spend time to save money, which sounds normal.
Instead, I want you to spend money to save time. This is where the ATF framework for my book, Buy Back Your Time, comes into play.
A stands for audit. I want you to look at your calendar and get rid of anything that you shouldn't be doing that you could pay somebody else a low amount of money to do.
That's where you got to learn to delegate. Some stuff you just have to delete.
The second part is T for transfer. First, we list everything that's involved.
We define it. Then we do it.
But while we're while we're doing it we record ourselves so we create a video and then when we hire somebody we delegate it we give them the video to watch it's the define do and delegate strategy so the third part for f is fill and this is where you have to fill your time not watching netflix and doing nothing but learning the next level skill or habit you have to add, or even beliefs so that you can increase your ability to add value. That's what you want to look for.
It's like, how do I increase my income producing skill, either as a leader or as a person? I always look at where's the next bottleneck in the business that I got to go learn so I can unblock it so I can move up and help the whole team. But once you delegate, how do you make sure those people are doing the right work? Which leads us directly to step eight, which is to train other people to do work.
I literally coach some of the top CEOs in the business space and even they struggle to get things off their plate. I mean, they buy back their time, but I tell them you have to make sure it stays sold.
If you hire somebody and then do their job, you're not really winning. So I call this process the camcorder method.
Step one is very simple. We need to outline what a 10 out of 10 for this thing getting done.
If I'm going to delegate creating a presentation or showing up for a customer site or mowing a lawn, what does a 10 out of 10 look like? It's kind of the outcome I want the person to achieve. Step two is when I evaluate the work, what are the criteria that I would use to measure if they did a good job? And I just outline them.
It could be like five things, four things, three things, but it's the criteria that I'm going to use to evaluate the work after it's done. The person shows it to me.
I'm going to go this, this, this. So take some time to evaluate what criteria it is.
Number three is you have to collect you doing the work. Screenshots, videos, templates you've created.
You wanna ask yourself, when are times that somebody else did this bad? When did they do it good? When did you do it bad? When did you do it good? You wanna like collect all the artifacts or the examples that you could give somebody. Step four is to record yourself doing the work, which is what I call net time, no extra time.
If you're going to do the work, do it, but just talk out loud. You can record yourself on your iPad.
You can record yourself on Loom, Zoom, but you're doing the work while you're creating an opportunity to teach somebody else. Number five is you transfer.
You give them all of the stuff you've collected. You give them all the videos you've recorded, and you have them create the standard operating procedure, not you.
They watch the videos, they create the SOP, in today's world they can use AI, and then afterwards they ask you questions for things that might be a gap, and you answer those questions, and then they update the SOP so it gets even more complete. Step six is review.
This is where you've given them the work to do and now you're sitting down with them and you're reviewing. How did they do? How did they meet the criteria? And you're rating them.
That way they're getting feedback. This is what I call training, but training is only one part of building a team.
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Now let's get back to the episode, which leads us to step nine, which is to deploy transformational leadership. When I was building my first company, I had 12 people reporting to me.
My life was chaotic. I would wake up and tell everyone what to do, check that they got it done.
And I wouldn't even really start working on my projects till about 6 p.m. If you've ever had a big team, you could probably relate to that.
So now what I do is completely different because I used to do this thing called transactional leadership, which is tell them what to do, check that it got done, tell them what to do next. It's the tell, check, next loop.
What I do today is transformational leadership. I start with the outcome.
So I describe what it looks like when it's awesome, when it's great. Think if I was asking you to climb a mountain, I'm actually going to describe what the mountaintop feels like, what it smells like, what you're going to see when it's up there.
So you can get like a real connection with the outcome. Number two is I'm going to give you a way to measure your progress.
Most people in business don't have a number that they use to tell them if they're doing a good job. So we're going to define what is that number that we're going to measure in the mountain climbing, it's feet of elevation gain per day, and you're going to measure yourself and you're going to report every day.
And then if for whatever reason, you don't make a lot of progress, the third step is coach. That's when they're reporting back and they didn't make a lot of gains.
You write it down, you have a conversation with them. I'm gonna teach you how I coach people and it's how I work with the top CEOs to entry level people.
The first step is I talk about the core issue. It's an acronym, COACH, okay? So CEO stands for core issue.
I don't talk about the activity, I talk about the principle that they didn't follow. So the activity might be that they got lost, but I'm gonna talk to them about how you stay on track as a principle.
Second thing is if I know what the principle is, I wanna go to A, part of coach, which is actual story. I'm gonna share with them a time where I was working on a project, and I got a little sidetracked, and I got way off track, and then my boss brought me back and explained to me the same principle, and now I don't make that mistake.
The CH stands for change, and that's where I try to enroll them into the change. So I'll ask them, based on what I just share with you, what did you take away? What are you gonna do different going forward? And they give me the answer.
Now, I know you're probably thinking this feels slow, but I'm telling you, this long-term is 100 times more fast because you don't create a bottleneck. And the reason why you have bottlenecks in your business is because they're at the top, which is you.
And the first employee, you're gonna teach them how to lead other people. So if you don't use the transformational leadership strategy, you will become the bottleneck, which leads us directly to the 10th and final step, which is to create more millionaires.
If you follow the steps in this video, you'll become a millionaire. But do you know what's more fun than making millions for yourself? Making other millionaires.
I was once working with a private client and one of the exercises I got him to do is create a vision and a vision board for how he's going to create his multi-billion dollar vision for his life. And he sat down and he created his vision board.
And when he came back and he showed it to me, I asked him, where are all the other millionaires? And he's like, what do you mean? He essentially designed this future world where he had all this stuff, proof that he was successful and there was nobody else there. There was no pictures of groups of people.
There was no teams. There was no nothing.
It was supercars and jets and yachts. And I said, okay, let's take a step back.
If you want to go fast, you go. But if you wanna go far, you need to go with other people.
See, your personal income will never exceed the amount of value you create for other people around you. It's just how the world works.
If you wanna make more money, you gotta become more valuable. A lot of people think this only applies to your clients, but it's to your team too.
If you wanna go beyond making a million dollars and make 10, 20, 30, even 100 million,

you need to create more millionaires along the way.

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