4 CEO Skills to Get to $10 Million a Year

Welcome to the Growth Stacking podcast. This is Dan Martell. These are the four CEO skills that you need to get to 10 million a year. Number one is value. And this is how we grow. This is at the base of Every great company. 0 to 300k is about finding a huge pain in the market and collecting resources to solve it. I, I first learned this strategy reading the book the Four Steps to the Epiphany by an incredible entrepreneur named Steve Blank. In that book, he goes over the four steps that you use to pre sell your product before you even build it. And I know that sounds crazy. I actually used these four steps recently in launching my new AI product before we even went to market. Whether it's a consulting company, a service company, honestly, a coaching company, whatever it is, make an offer. But see, most people mess it up because they're just trying to do a sale. What they don't get is how to validate their idea with the market. So here's how we do it right? The first thing we have to get right is discovery, okay? And discovery is all about talking to the market. We want to talk to real people. We want to get outside of our office, not hide behind our keyboard and pick up the phone or go into the world and, and talk to people that have the problem that we think we can solve. We want to ask them questions about the challenges they face around the solution that we want to offer. We want to figure out how they make decisions about solving these problems. We want to understand, do we have a painkiller or do we have a vitamin? Is this something that's meaningful for them to want to solve? Because if not, you can spend all your time in your office behind your keyboard trying to solve a problem. When you finally go out there to sell it, nobody wants to buy. The second step is validation. Validation. Once you have an idea of how your market wants to buy that they have a problem, then you want to go collect data. You want to understand how big the market is. You want to figure out what the one clear problem is. You want to see how people have sold to that market before, what's the channel they've used, what's the language, what's the offer, what's the ads? You can do a lot of work on the validation stuff before you ever build anything to so that you don't waste your time. The third step is to test. Okay? And the way we test is we build a clickable prototype. We simulate the offer. Some people call it a mevo, a minimum, economical, viable offer. I like to create clickable prototypes. When I'm building software and I want to show it to real buyers, I wanted to show it to people that have the problem. And through that process, I get free feedback, actually on simulated software or on a solution, an offer, specifically where they can evaluate it and then ask me questions. Doing it that way ensures that we don't just get a bunch of people that say nice things and tell us, hey, this is a great idea, Go off and build it. And then we wake up one day and realize nobody wanted the thing we built. The fourth step is offer. Here's why this one's so important. What we want to do in that step is get money. Get dollars. Get them to pull out their wallet, give you a credit card, pay with real money. I can't tell you the amount of times that I've had people say to my face, great idea, amazing. Keep building it. I would love to be a customer. And then I spend all the time, hire the engineers. I build a prototype or I build a team. I build the whole thing. And when I go back to these folks that said it was a great idea, they go, oh, I'm busy. Send me the link. I'll sign up. And they never use the thing that I've built. We want to get real dollars so that people validate with their money, not with their words. So if you want to go from 0 to 300k, make sure that you create value in the market to make sure that you don't mess this up. Step one, focus on discovery. Then validate, talk, Figure out the market sizing, Test your idea by talking to people, and then make an offer where you get paid. Number two is delegate to go from 300 to a million. These are the areas that you need to focus on and go from that 300k to a million. It's all about running as fast as possible while backfilling those roles in your company. See, once you're solving a problem in the market and collecting dollars for it, you need to redeploy that dollar to buy back your time. See, there's a lot of people out there that are specialists, like doctors, lawyers, et cetera. And they always peter out at that 300 level because that is the most they can make as a specialist. But as you build your business, you want to start buying back your time to do more of the thing that only you can do. The makes you money. So if you're a logo designer, design more logos. If you're an artist, create more art. If you're a developer, develop More write more code. Don't hire somebody to do that because that's the thing that you do that makes you money. So you can scale. Instead, you need to use the replacement ladder because it'll show you the clear strategy to backfill your time so you can focus on the things that are gonna make you the most money. So the first level is admin. Okay, so you might be feeling stuck. Stuck. The way we fix this is an admin hire. And the key is they gotta manage your inbox and your calendar 100%. If you don't give up the emails that are coming at the scheduling so that you can focus 100% on just the thing that makes you the most money, then you'll have a hard time scaling up. You might grow, but then you'll fall back down. The second rung is all about feeling stalled. If you're stalled, the key hire is somebody to help with delivery. So once you sell whatever you sell, that person comes in, they take the customer relationship and they move it forward. The key ownership is all about support and onboarding. That means that once you get somebody in your world, they onboard them and they support them so that you can still do your genius, but somebody else takes care of ensuring that delivery is done well. The third level, you might be feeling friction. And to fix the friction in your business where it's not growing too well, you need to focus on marketing. This is where you can hire somebody part time or full time. The key ownership that most people mess up is they don't give people. Focus on traffic, making sure that your landing pages still get traffic, your social is growing. And campaigns. Campaigns are ways to focus your marketing energy to enroll people per season. You want somebody coming up with creative ideas to communicate to the market how you do what you do in a unique way. The fourth level, you start to feel freedom. Why is that? Well, freedom is where you hire somebody to help with sales. And I know you might think I'm the best salesperson. Why would I hire away that? Well, here's what I know at this level. The reason it's freedom is because if you have somebody taking all the calls and doing the follow up, you now have an engine. This is only four hires. Admin, delivery, marketing and sales. And this means that you can go on vacation and have somebody else generate an opportunity, somebody talk to that person and get them enrolled in your service or your product or your business, and then have somebody else deliver on that promise that the salesperson made, et cetera, so that it moves forward while you're away. This is at the level with four hires, where you now have a business that makes money while you're not there, which is the promise we've all wanted. Now, the fifth level, this is where you start feeling flow. Why is it flow? Because this is where you start creating without feeling the constraints. To do that, we need to hire leadership. Leadership that owns two specific areas. Okay, you don't hire leaders and then have to tell them to do this. So they're going to come to you with strategy and outcomes. They're going to own those outcomes. This means that they come to the business with playbooks, they come with the tactics, they come with the know how to move it forward. But most people get stuck here with leadership. And that's what I want to talk about next. So to go from 300k to a million, you have to work your way through the different hires in the replacement ladder. But most people, they get stuck right here around leadership. And that's what we're going to address next. The third skill is leadership. So to ensure you Keep growing from 1 to 3 million, you need to use the transformational leadership strategy. See, most people get stuck here and they do transactional leadership, which is really tough, where you essentially do one of three things. You tell people what to do, you check they got done, and then you tell them what to do next. The challenge with this strategy, that it's really around 12 employees, about 1 million to 1.2 million in revenue, where you get to a place where you wake up every day and you spend most of your day telling people what to do, check they got done, answering questions, and you hit this area called the pain line. The pain line is where the more you grow, the more pain you feel. And what I've discovered is entrepreneurs will not grow into pain. So to solve that, we need to use transformational leadership. Here's how it works. So I learned this strategy by watching some of the top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs scale these companies. I mean, you gotta understand, these 20 year olds build $100 million companies in five, six, seven years. I mean, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and Square, you know, two billion dollar companies, he focuses on this concept called the editor, not the author. See, if you're spending all your time trying to author all the strategies and then you're not going to have time to actually think strategic. What you want to be is an editor. You want other people to own the outcomes so that you can coach them to move things forward, but not have to be the ones to always give people the answers. Here's how we do it. Number one is we got to start by focusing on outcomes. And outcomes is really about talking about what it looks like when it's done. Talk about the mountaintop. Don't tell them how to get there. So the difference is, hey, I want you to go set up the whiteboard, go get the cameras and put them here, here, and here. And then I want you to connect the wires on the set. That is transactional leadership, because you're telling them what to do. Transformational leadership would look totally different. It says, hey, I need you to set up the podcast set, or I need you to set up the studio so that we can have great lighting, that the audio works. Everything set up, you explain. Explain the future, and you say you own the outcome of setting it up. Now, that doesn't mean that they don't have a checklist to follow, but you're giving them ownership of the outcome. That is called get ready to shoot. Because if not, then if they forget a step or you didn't tell them to do it, then the thing doesn't get done where you want them to use their mind to actually create an outcome. Now, once we have that, the second thing is we gotta measure. How do we measure? We have to pick a number that tells them this is how we move forward. So if I was trying to get somebody to climb a mountain, like we're all doing in business, I'd want to figure out one number that I could get them to measure every day that would give them feedback on their progress. So if we were trying to climb a mountain, it might be elevation achieved per day. And then that way, every day, they could report back and say, I made 17ft or I made 25ft of elevation. And you're like, why only 17 today? They're like, well, I got lost. Well, and then it goes the third step, which is coach. Okay. Coach means that when they come back and they're not performing, I have the opportunity to give them some strategy. So if they didn't gain a lot of elevation that day, one of the coaching questions would be, what are ways that you could get better insights to stay on course? And they go, well, I don't have a map to get to the top of this mountain. Hmm. Could you buy a map? Yeah. I think I've met somebody that had a map. Maybe I could borrow their map, take a picture of the map. That's a great idea. Is that a commitment you're making to me? Yeah, I'm going to do that. Perfect. Any other ideas? And that is how we coach. See, too often, if we just keep telling people what to do, check they got done, and then tell them what to do next, we're not building the people. And why transformational leadership is so powerful is because it's one concept. Our goals as leaders is to create other leaders. We build the people, the people build the business. And. And that's how we grow using transformational leadership. Number four in the CEO skills is brand. That's how we go from 3 million to 10 million. Now, I've got a unique approach to this that you're not gonna wanna miss. Here's how it works. So this is how brand works. The four levels of luck. Check this out. It's all about brand. See, a long time ago, I was talking to one of my mentors, this guy named Naval Ravikant, and he's one of the, you know, luminaries in the Valley. And he shared this idea of having four levels of luck that propels businesses forward. And honestly, it's not even just to go from 3 to 10 million. It's from going to 10 million to 100 million to 500 million. You'll see why in a second. The first level is pure luck. Okay? Pure luck. This is, you won the lottery. It's pure luck. You did zero to achieve lucky status at level one. Level two is grit luck. Grit. Luck is you just are in the game and you're grinding. You're not strategic about it at all, and you get lucky. Now, the third level is where it starts to get interesting. This is skilled luck. And skilled luck is you're working on your craft, you're working on your skill. You're becoming an artist in your field. And because you're doing it, you're actually getting lucky. You're focusing. Focus. It's more strategic. This is just brute force. This is more strategic. Now, when you get to the top of your field because you've worked, you've got decades of focus and outputs and a reputation. That's when you get prepared luck. Prepared luck. This is the beautiful place where everybody else who's working hard, who's top of their craft, who are artists, and they're getting lucky. Because you are the tip of the spear. They bring their luck and opportunities to you. This is Warren Buffett, this is Mark Cuban, this is Richard Branson. These are the luminaries in their industry. And because of it, they're getting other people's luck. And they're being presented opportunities to partner with them. This is what makes this exponential and the Only way it works is to have a brand. Most people don't know how to build their brand. So I want to show you how that's done so you can have prepared luck. So let me tell you this next framework with a story. About six years ago, I got the privilege of spending time with Richard Branson at his home in Switzerland. And I was in shock, you understand? I grew up in a small town in eastern Canada. The fact that I got invited kind of blew my mind. So I'm sitting there and I can only go one way. Getting kicked out. So I don't say a lot. I'm being quiet, I'm just observing. And I remember we are having dinner and Richard was sitting next to me and I had the chance to ask him a question. And the question I asked him is, what do you think the most important thing is to get right in business? And he pauses and he thinks about it. And then he says, brand. Now you gotta understand, at the time I was expecting like leadership or go to market or sales tactics or some crazy financing thing about bringing companies public. And he just says brand. And I didn't get it, honestly, because now I've learned that brand is not a name. Brand is not a logo. Brand is not your product. Brand is not your customers. Brand is everything about reach and reputation. It's association, it's do people have a positive association with your company and are they aware of it? The reach. So how do we increase our reach? You've got a ton of different options, but I'm going to show you the ones that I've focused on over the years. Number one is paid running ads to have people be aware of you. Number two is organic. Creating content that serves your market no different than this video so that people share it, but it's all done through organic or social. Third is cold reaching out, having conversations, opening conversations, messaging people. I call it your personal economy. Most people are not talking to enough people and they wonder why is my business not growing. The fourth is partners. Partners is having other people that your customers or the market trust to talk about you. Huge opportunity to get distribution quick. It's actually one of my favorite ways to create reach. If you're starting from scratch. And the last one is referrals, having your existing customers asking them, is there anybody that you trust that are just like you, that you think that we could serve with our product or service and, and getting them to increase your reach. Do these steps and you will build a massive audience of people that are very familiar with your work and believe in what you sell. Now, reputation is totally different because some of you may not have the most positive reputation. Cause you're starting off and you're doing some stuff and you're wheeling and dealing and you may have made the wrong decisions and you gotta fix. For me, it's all about delivery. Can you deliver on your promise? This essentially means that you're out there and you're making promises to the market through your marketing, through your sales team, through your partner. And you need to show up and not only deliver over deliver based on what people are saying. Number two is focusing on being world class. It takes nothing for you to decide right now that you want to be the best in class. It may not mean that you're the biggest, but you can literally decide in this moment, no matter what you do. You can say, I want to be world class at this. And give yourself a decade. I call it a dedicate. Give yourself the time to be the best in class. Just like Buffett, he's like, I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life and I want to be the best at what I do. And he called his shot. You can do the same thing. The third are values. If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything. I want to ask you a question. What do you stand for? What do you believe in? What would you fight for? What are your values? What do you believe? And do you share those? Because if you have that, you'll have reputation. People know that they can expect certain things from you based on what you share with the world. The fourth is integrity. Integrity is powerful because it's not what you do when things are going good that matter. It's how you react when things go bad. I've seen too many people when everything business partnerships, employees, customers, everything's good, no issues, two, three years. But then one major thing happens and everybody just totally falls apart. The integrity is not there. If you want reputation, especially if you're focused on reach. You want to make sure that in those moments, you do the right thing. And the last one, which is the most important is to shine your light. Shine your light, share with other people. Here's the deal. There's nobody else. That is you, your brand, who you are. You're the ultimate niche. You are the biggest competitive advantage. Your name, literally your personal brand. If you're out there and creating a reputation and increasing that reach through organic, through paid, through partners, speaking at events, that will allow you to attract other people's luck, that will put you to prepared luck, put you at the top the stack so that as everybody else in the market grows, you inherently grow just as fast if not faster by doing half the work because you will have those opportunities presented to you. That's how we go from 3 million to 10 million really fast and honestly beyond. So those are the four CEO skills to get to 10 million value, delegate, leadership and brand. Now if you want to learn how CEOs schedule their day, click the link and I'll see you. See you on the other side. If you like this week's episode, be sure to visit itunes, leave a review that'll help us get in front of other founders just like you. And if you're looking for more resources and video trainings, be sure to check out dan martell2lsdemartell.com to subscribe. Keep up the hustle, keep stacking your growth and I'll see you in next Monday's episode. Peace. Grow Peace. Bye bye.