8 Rules to Start a Business That Runs Itself

There's only eight specific frameworks that a business needs to run on autopilot and make you money while you sleep. Without these, a business can't scale effectively or make you financially free.
While some of these seem counterintuitive, they're what I use today to run multiple companies that make me millions of dollars where I'm not involved. And what I've learned spending time with some of the richest people on the planet.
So without further explaining it, these are the eight frameworks to build a business that runs itself welcome to the martell method i went from rehab at 17 to building a hundred million dollar 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 the first framework is the 1080 10 rule most people don't ever understand how to get free from their business as an example this video if i use the 1080 10 rule it's the first 10 is ideation it's when i sit down with my team and we ideate around the ideas the positioning the packaging the thumbnail the titles to really get the core concept right that That's the first 10%. I'm involved there.
The next 80%, I'm not. That's all about execution.
Think about the production side of it, about choosing locations, the videos, the lights, the setup. I just sit down and show up and talk to you guys.
Everything's outlined. Everything's figured out.
That's the 80% that's managed by other people on my team. And then the last 10% is when they call me in to review the integration.
How does the video get published? How do we engage other people to promote it so we get more audience? If you do it this way, that's how you get a lot of creative projects done without eating up all of your time. For example, Steve Jobs would do this with Johnny Ives.
He'd go into the design studio and Johnny was there and they would collaborate and ideate and Steve would learn about this new little hard drive

or this new technology for screens or whatever it is.

And he would just share that with Johnny

and then Johnny would go off

and the 80% is the prototyping,

creating simulations or playing around

with the different ideas.

And then the last 10% is the integration

is when Steve would take a finished product

and then present it on stage at one of their events.

That is still how Tim Cook does it today. The first 10% is the roadmap and figure out where they're going to go.
80% is done by Johnny. The last 10% is integration.
Most people just assume, well, I'm a magical snowflake and I'm very different and my process is very artistic and nobody else could do it like me. That's a story you're telling yourself to stay stuck.
And the sooner you address that, the sooner you're going to get free from your business and actually build a business that other people can grow and scale and you can collaborate with. And I'll tell you, it's just a lot more fun.
Which brings us to number two, which is the drip matrix. And I copied this right out of my book, Buy Back Your Time.
I believe every task sits on two axises, one of money and one of energy. Bottom is things that light you up, that give you energy.
There's probably work that you do every day that honestly you'd probably do for free. That's the kind of stuff that I call green energy.
But in the same token, there's probably things you're working on that would suck your energy that just feel like a chore. And those are red energy.
On the other side is things that make you money. There's like $10 tasks in your business that got to get done, but they're not making you money versus actually doing the work.
If you could spend 40 hours a week just doing work that makes you a hundred dollars an hour, that's how you get rich. So I broke it down into these four quadrants and this is the drip matrix.
The first is D, which is delegation. You wanna look at your time and ask yourself, what are things that I'm currently doing that I really shouldn't be doing anymore? Then we move up to replacement.
As you start a company and you build, you wanna replace your time with other people that own these areas of the business. Replacement is really the idea of saying over time, as my business grows, I have to stop doing certain types of work.
Once you get that time back, then we go to I, which is investment. And investment is about understanding how to fill your time with things that light you up, that make you more money.
Because if you do this, this is how we build a business that you don't grow to hate. The top level is production.
This is the work that you love to do, that you want to do, that honestly, if you could do for the rest of your life, there'd never be a moment where you'd have to retire from. In my book, I call it building an empire because an empire is a life of unlimited creation you never have to retire from.
If you spend all of your time in the top right corner of the quadrant, it's impossible to get to a place where you feel overwhelmed, where your calendar's sucking and there's chaos in your life to not wanna continue building the business. 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.
Which brings us to number three, which is ATF. Some people read my book and delegate everything and then call me and say, man, this is great.
Like I have barely any work to do. And I'm like, that's not the key.
See, the whole point is to buy back your time to then reinvest it in things that light you up, make you more money, or build the machine that runs the machine. That's why it's called the production of the investment quadrant.
So my philosophy is that anytime I feel overwhelmed, I always go back to this process. The first step is audit.
And what I want to do is I want to look at the previous two weeks of my life and do two things. I want to first highlight everything in my calendar that's red, that takes my energy, yellow that feels good, but honestly, I don't love doing it.
And green are things that I absolutely love doing. That's the energy side.
Then I want to evaluate every one of those tasks through a cost. How much would it cost me to pay somebody else to do for me? So $1 sign is a very cheap task, like a $10 task.
And then $4 signs is paying somebody to do my job. $1, $2, $3, and $4.
So then what I do is I take the overlap of everything that's red in my calendar or yellow that's $1 sign or $2 signs and I put that into a bucket and that is the only next hire I make step two is to transfer so whatever you identified then you take that and you transfer it to somebody else the way I do that is a framework called the camcorder method because I believe it's easier to just record myself doing the work talking out loud have three or four or five of these recordings so that when I hire that person and they come on board, I just have them watch those videos so that they get trained up without taking my time. That's called net time, no extra time.
The third step is F, which is fill. You wanna fill your time with activities in the production or investment quadrant, things that light you up, that make you a lot of money and honestly make you a better person.
The truth is, is the world will not get easier, you get better. So if you want to make more money, you have to add the skills, the habits, the beliefs that are going to allow you to do more, because if not, you just won't be able to make more money.
So there's two parts. Most people will never let things go because they're worried that they're going to make a mistake or embarrass them or honestly cost them their business.
But if they can learn to at least let things go, then the next step is to actually value themselves. See, most people just don't believe they're worth it.
So they don't invest in training, coaching, mentorship. And because of that, they never get exposed to new ideas because they have this subconscious belief that they don't deserve their success.
And those two things of fear of letting go and don't believe they're worth it are going to stop people from a bigger life. Which brings us to four, which is the camcorder method.
I coach a lot of the top CEOs in the business space and even they struggle to get things off of their plate. My philosophy is that if you buy back your time, make sure it stays sold.
So I'm gonna share with you a very simple six-step process that nobody ever talks about that's gonna take anything on your plate and give it to somebody else and make sure it gets done 100% the way you want it without taking a bunch of training. The first step is the outline.
So I want you to sit down. Let's say we take social media posting, like somebody posting on Instagram for you.
I want you to outline what that process would look like. Number two is you want to identify the criteria.
So what makes a good social media post? Maybe you've never outlined it, but maybe it is that it's got your humor. It's follows your brand guidelines.
It's got great copy. It's posted at the right time of day.
Think about what are the five to seven criterias that would tell you it was done right. Cause you're gonna use this later.
Number three is to collect examples of highest performing stuff you've done in the past. Bad examples where somebody messed up, you might've messed up.
You wanna take any training videos or any links or checklists that you might have and collect all of that and put it in a document that you're gonna give the person. So step four is to record.
And you wanna literally record yourself doing the work. I like to use my iPad often where I'll share my screen, record it and even the voice.
Loom is great. Zoom is another one where I'll have a meeting by myself.
myself but the key is to do the work talk out loud and have that recording of you doing the thing you want somebody else to do step five is to transfer this is when they start i have people start on day one and they don't do anything other than watch videos for three or four days so you give them all the recordings you bundle it up you put it in a google doc and say start at the top watch every link in this document. Then you have them create the checklist or the standard operating procedure for how people should do it themselves in the future.
Why? Because that's going to tell you if they understood what you put in the videos, have them write down questions that come up as they're going through the videos so that you understand that they understood what you asked them to do. Quality of their questions is going to tell you the quality of their understanding.
The last step is review. And this is where as they're doing the work, you use the criteria you outlined at the beginning to review and give them a rating based on how well they followed those steps and produced the output.
That's where you coach them to get better and you train them to get better. If you follow these six steps, it's impossible for the work that you give somebody else to end up back on your plate.
Before we get back to the episode, if you actually want to 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 number five, which is the 50 to fix it. I remember one time I was coaching the CEO and I asked him why he was so overwhelmed.
And he showed me his calendar and it was crazy. He had about two hours in his calendar dedicated almost daily where he was approving every transaction in his company.
Like nobody could spend money

without requesting it. And he reviewed it and he approved it.
The challenge with that is that you

then become the bottleneck and the bottleneck is called that because it's at the top. What I like

to do is I like to push decisions down to my team and the 50 to fix it is an example of that. No matter who on my team is struggling to solve a problem, if they can get the problem solved for $50, I encourage them to just spend the money and expense it.
Now, this might sound crazy to some of you because you feel like you lose control real quick. So what I always do is say, after you spend the money, you have to tell your leader so that they're aware.
Because what you'll find out is oftentimes people are spending money to fix a frustrated customer, a vendor that didn't show up, a designer or somebody on your team that's not delivering fast enough to just hire some contractor to do the work. And that's a feedback loop to the leader that there's something broken in the business.
So you never wanna stop somebody from making something better, but you also wanna get that feedback loop so you have an opportunity to improve your process. Now, for me, I take it to another level that most people would be scared to do.
So managers can spend up to $500 without permission. Directors can spend up to $5,000 without permission.
Executives can spend up to $50,000 without permission, even if it's outside their budget. The only thing I ask, no different than my frontline employees, is that they tell their manager on their next one-on-one.
So again, they can have conversations about priorities and planning and budgeting and just learn to make better decisions unlocking that ability to empower your team to make decisions to solve problems and move forward will bring so much revenue into your business this calendar year it will overpay for the amount of people spending that money the reason why the 50 to fix it works so well is that it allows you to empower people to make decisions so that you're not involved so while you're on vacation vacation or you're spending time with your family, everybody in your business is making decisions without you having to be an approver. If everything rolls up to the top, then you'll always be a prisoner to your business.
You wanna empower people down within the company, within reason, to make decisions, to solve problems, to make things better without you being involved. Which brings us to number six, which is the one-three-one rule.
A long time ago, I hired this HR guy named Adam and his job was to hire people. We were growing really fast and I needed somebody dedicated to recruiting.
And after our first meeting, he comes to me and he's in a fluster and overwhelmed. And he's like, man, we got to hire 13 people in the next quarter.
And I'm like, yeah. He's like, I've never done that before.
And I said, cool. And he's like, I don't know how to do it.
I say, good. I mean, I'm pretty sure you'll figure it out.
He's like, well, how should I do it? And I said, well, Adam, I didn't hire you to tell you how to do your job. You came to me with the experience.
I'm assuming you're a problem solver. I said, do you have a one, three, one? He had heard me talk about it before, but he's like, are you really doing this to me? Yes, I'm doing this to you.
So I said, how about we meet up tomorrow? You take the time to evaluate the different options and then we'll meet tomorrow morning. The next morning he texts me and he says, I'm good.
See, Adam understood once he went through and defined the problem and evaluated the options that he knew the path forward. So here's how we get your team to make decisions without you feeling like you're losing control.
So the first step is one is define the problem. Most people don't have a well-defined problem or they're talking in circles about three or four different issues.
So my question to them is, what problem are you trying to solve? Please define it crystal clear because a well-defined problem is a problem half solved. The second step is three viable options.
I want the person to present to me, Adam, what are the three options that you're gonna consider to solve your recruiting process? As an entrepreneur, we need to hear this just so that we can feel calm. If we don't feel like they've exhausted all the options, we're feeling like they're being lazy or they're not aware and it just doesn't feel good.
I wanna say this, doing nothing isn't an option. The third step is one recommendation.
After they review the different options with you, I wanna hear what their number one recommendation is based on those three. And I'd say most of the time, I just agree.
And I empower them to move things forward. And if you ask everybody that comes to you with a problem to define their one, three, one, what you'll learn really quick is you'll build a business that can run without you.
Why? It pushes decisions down to your frontline workers where they have the most information to actually solve the problem. Honestly, most of you should not be trying to solve problems because you don't know what's really going on.

So when you empower your team to make decisions,

the business will grow without you.

Before we get back to this episode,

if you prefer to watch your content,

then go find me on YouTube.

I have this episode on YouTube.

I'm Dan Martell on YouTube.

Just subscribe to the channel,

turn on the notification bell

because then you'll get notified in real time.

It'll tell YouTube to tell you.

You got a new episode, so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode.
Which brings us to number seven, which is transformational leadership. When I was building my first successful company, even though I failed my first two, at that point, I think year two, I had about 12 employees reporting to me.
And I was trying to lead. I'd wake up every day and I'd be like, okay, I got to get everybody doing the right thing and make sure all the plates were spinning because I was just scared the whole thing was going to fall down on itself.
So I'd wake up, I tell everybody what to do later in the afternoon. I checked that they were on track and that it was getting done.
And then by the end of the day or the next morning, I tell them what to do next. And I thought that was normal because that's all I'd ever been exposed to.
The problem with that is that you don't get any of your own work done until later in the day. I mean, I would sometimes only start on my own projects at 6pm and have to work till 11 or one in the morning because things had to get done the next day for clients or for partners or whatever.
What I was doing is called transactional leadership and it'll create a complexity ceiling that you can't break through. And it's a simple process of telling people what to do, check that they got done, and then tell them what to do next.
Usually at about 12 employees, 13 employees, about 1.2, 1.4 million in revenue, it becomes chaotic. And at that level, most people end up getting to a place where the growth and the pain hurts too much.
They either sell the business, they either sabotage their way down, which is crazy, or they decide to stall their growth. And for me, that's not an option.
The better approach is what's called transformational leadership. And here's how it works.
There's only three steps, but they're very powerful. Step one is you want to define the outcome that the person you're managing has to achieve.
You don't tell them how to do it. You tell them what it looks like.
You tell them how it feels. You tell them who's going to be involved.
You got to get really good at painting a picture of success. Step two is you choose a number, some kind of measurement that's going to let them know if they're making progress.
So if it's sales, it's how many sales did you get today? If it's marketing, how many leads did you get? Is customer support? How many emails did you reply to? Give them a measurement so that they know they're making progress towards that ideal outcome. The third step is coach.
And this happens all the time where somebody is doing something, they're measuring their progress and they don't deliver. The whole idea is that anytime you see them do something that's wrong, you write it down and you use your one-on-ones to actually train them up.
If you do this, you invest in your people and eventually it'll take less and less and less time with that person, meaning that over a six month or 12 month period, your team gets better and better and better and it frees up your time if you keep telling people what they got to do and check they got done tell them what to do next you'll never build leaders in your business and the whole point is build the people the people build the business which brings us to eight which is the coach framework have you ever felt like sometimes you're on a hamster wheel giving the same feedback the same advice to new team member, and it just feels like it's the same thing over and over again? This is how you eliminate repeating yourself. It's using a framework that nobody ever teaches in business, which is actually how to develop your people or coach them up.
So I break this down into three steps. The first one is core issue.
See, when somebody does something wrong, I don't attack the behavior or the activity. I talk about the principle.
What was it about their behavior that violated a principle about how I think you should approach your work? And then I wanna write that down. The principle, not the task.
The second part is actual story. And it could be either my own story of how I learned this thing I'm about to teach them, or it could be an example of somebody I saw do it.
And to use an actual story just makes it so much more real. So saying, hey, when I started off, I used to think this and I was always rushing through my work and that meant that I ended up having to do rework and it took more time for me to do the rework than if I just did it right in the first place.
I remember my boss told me that one day and he showed me within a week that I could save 10 hours a week if I just didn't do the rework by slowing down sometimes. So the is sometimes we go slow to go fast the third part is change and change is trying to enroll them or invite them into committing to us what they're going to change based on what i just shared with them so i always tell the story and i just ask based on what i shared what's one or two things you're going to do different going forward and it's their decision at the end of the day to make that commitment why because then they help build the build the plan, build the future.
See, when people help build the plan, they don't fight the plan. And your job is to just present the information in a way that's really compelling for them to make a commitment to you to change their behavior so that they get better.
The more people on your team get better, the less effort it's gonna take you to manage the team. Thanks for listening to Martell Method.
If you liked this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review?

This helps us get the podcast more ears

and helps more people get unstuck,

reclaim their freedom and build their empire.