I Figured Out How 20-Year-Olds Built $1B Companies

Welcome to the Growth Stacking Podcast. This is Dan Martell. Most entrepreneurs, when they're growing their business, it doesn't matter if it's their first 100k or 300k or million. They get to a place where growing is painful. Does that make sense? Yes or yes. Exactly. And in that spot, they usually do one of three things. They either stall. Okay. They say to themselves, this year, I made more money last year than this year. I'd rather slow down. Right. And just not grow. The problem with that is that the market's growing. Right? Gross domestic product grows. Your customers will demand more from you this year than last year. And the worst part is your top people. If you don't create a future that's big enough for them, then they will go find somebody else can do that. Does that make sense? Your dreams, write this down. Your dreams have to be bigger than everybody else on your team's dreams and goals. Write it down. So that's stall number two. Sabotage. This one's fascinating. Some of you guys don't even know you're doing this. I have a friend of mine, Tracy, business was going through some challenges. Six months of hell. We've all been there. It's tough. And in that storm, Tracy tells herself, need to give myself a break. And she decides to take a four week sabbatical. Do you think a company that's struggling, the CEO of the company should take a four week sabbatical? Yes or yes. No. Perfect. You guys are on the same page. It's great. But she didn't realize she was sabotaging her success. She had opportunity to keep growing. Because when we're going through the worst, just so you know this, when we go through the worst, we're actually developing our skills to get to the next level. Huge. Okay? So understand when you're challenged, you should say, thank you, worthy opponent. This is gonna shape me to become the person I need to become to get to the next level. Instead, Tracy went on to sabbatical. She missed the opportunity to grow. The third is sell. My buddy Jason calls me one day and he's like, hey, man, I think I'm gonna sell my company. He has an agency, 2 million in revenue, been doing it for about seven or eight years, and it just became really tough. And I said, jason, write down all the stuff that you don't like about your business today. And he made me a list. And I said, if those things weren't true, would you sell the business? He's like, no. I said, well, let me invite you to consider A different perspective. I know you want to go do something else. You think the grass is greener. Here's what I know. You've just hit your new complexity ceiling. We all have them write down complexity ceiling, complexity ceiling. Anytime it gets hard, I want you to look at that term. I said, it doesn't matter if you solve it now or you leave and start something else. You will hit the same level of complexity where you decide, I don't want to grow anymore. It's your pain line. So what I want to share with you today are three strategies to overcome that pain line. The first principle that I want to share with you, and it's a universal principle. It's the buyback principle. We don't hire people to grow our business. We hire people to buy back our time. It's a calendar over a capacity strategy. See, most entrepreneurs when they're growing, they go, well, now I need to hire another logo designer. I need to hire another real estate agent. I need to hire another electrician. And I would say, no, you start with your calendar first, because here's the deal. If you do the second, you get the first. But if you do the first, you definitely don't get the second. Most entrepreneurs get to about 1.2 million, about 12 employees where their life starts to get really painful. That pain line is screaming at them every day because they violated this rule. This is the framework. Draw this loop, okay? It's a loop. You need to go through these three steps to move forward. So every time I hit a pain line, okay, today I own dozens of companies and my calendar completely shifts two or three times a year. So I'm going to teach you the exact same thoughts of how I look at my calendar every time I hit my pay line. First step is we got to audit. We got to audit our calendar for time and energy. It's not enough to just look at what we're doing that we can pay somebody else to do. It's what are we doing that sucks our energy? What I call green or red stuff. If we can replace that with green, we will transform our lives. Then transfer is the ability to give what we're doing today, the work to somebody else. But check this out with the taking any extra time using the camcorder method. And then the third, the problem with Phil is most people get to the first and second step and then they decide to do a four hour work week. I ain't here to do a four hour work week, okay? I.