I Spent $1,500,000 on Business Gurus… Here’s What I Learned

I spent $1.5 million on business gurus, from their cheap books to insanely expensive. Invite only masterminds, and I'm going to share with you everything I learned and if it was all worth it, so you don't have to spend any money and still get all the value. Let's start with the cheapest investment, and we'll work our way up to the most expensive. Welcome to the Growth Stacking Show. This is Dan Martell. If you love to read, my new book is out. Buy back your time. You can get it on Amazon or any other retailer where books are sold or buybackyourtime.com it's going to build a business you don't grow to hate. Buy back your time. If you read it. I would love, love, love a review on Amazon so it could help it get in front of other people just like you. So let's get into this episode. My first investment was $20, and it was actually a book. And it allowed my business to go from barely breaking even to grossing over a million dollars in my business just from this one book. So I was 23, and I'd never read a business book ever. I was actually working as a contractor for the government and. And on my lunch break, I went to a bookstore and I saw this book called Love is a Killer App by a guy named Tim Sanders. And for whatever reason, on that day, in that moment, it's not like I hadn't walked into a bookstore before it spoke to me. I think it's because I'm a software guy and it said killer app. And the guy who used to work at Yahoo and figured maybe he knows something I should learn. And that book changed everything. There was three key lessons that I learned that transformed my whole life. The first one was to acquire knowledge for your customers, to actually read books so that you become more valuable to the people that you want to help. Which is a crazy idea. Like, I always thought, I'll read books for myself, but to read a book for somebody else, that was a big idea. The second idea was that your network equals your net worth. You know, the people, the relationships who, you know, the size of problems you can solve through conversations. That's what creates value in your life. So invest in in those relationships, investing, going out, and be intentional. And the third thing was the value of just being a good person in business. See, I believe that all your dreams, your vision board, your goals, they sit on the other side of two things. Reach and reputation. And if you're a person that has a great Reputation as somebody that's helpful and kind and goes out of their way. I'll tell you, people will go out of their way to want to do business with you. So I did those three things. You know, here's what I believe today and it's a Harry S. Truman quote that leaders are readers. I wake up every day and I read 10 pages of a book no matter what. And I've been doing it for a couple decades now. All the top billionaires, Charlie Munger, Elon Musk, Oprah, Zuck, Gates, they've all attributed their success to reading books. Because if you already knew everything you needed to know to be successful, guess what? You'd be successful. The fact that somebody spent 25 years of their life studying and perfecting a topic, distilling it into a six hour read for $20 I think is one of the coolest trades in the world. Which brings us to the next investment, which was around a hundred dollars. And it was a marketing course by Perry Marshall. It was around Google Ads. This course for a hundred dollars taught me how to bid on keywords, how to position my company, how to design the landing pages. It pretty much was a crash course in marketing that, that at the time I was just trying to get leads. I don't know if you have ever struggled with this, but you're just trying to get attention. And I didn't know what I was doing. I was in my 20s, I had two failed companies and I was trying to give it another shot and I was just going out of my way to make sure I didn't fail. This course taught me three main things. Number one is how to dominate in my niche. To go narrow and then be known for something but not be bland like everybody else. Understanding how people searched for for solutions really taught me the psychology of marketing. The second thing I learned was the power of using language that actually converts. See if you're not specific in your copy then it might be too broad. So for example, you could say challenges, which is very broad. You could say cash flow issues, which is a little bit more narrow. Or you can go rate to running out of money. Each one of those kind of talk about the same problem, but one really hits the pain point. And the third thing is how to stand out as an expert. Speak the language of your clients, be in the minds of your clients, describe their problems better than they can. This course allowed me to scale my business from a million in revenue to 2 million plus by narrowing down and focusing on those three things. See, I learned a long time ago that learning doesn't stop in the classroom. Online education is literally a passport to the world. Anything you want to do with anybody, it's available to you. See, Albert Einstein has a great quote that says education is what remains after you've forgotten what you actually learned in school. Which I think is a great example of like real world education. And Benjamin Franklin has one of my favorite quotes on this, which is an investment in knowledge pays the best interest. You will always get an roi. Investing in yourself and buying an online course that could teach you a new skill, a new behavior, a new belief that will let you move your dreams and goals forward. 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 2 Elder 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 the next investment, which was around $5,000 for an event by David Allen in New York City. David wrote the book Getting Things Done. It's a productivity book. It's amazing. And I was already in New Jersey, so I figured going to New York City is pretty close. These are the three things that I took away from that event that changed everything for me. One, the idea of dumping my mind before I go to bed. I dump everything into my journal. Anytime I'm overwhelmed or stressed out, I dump everything into, you know, pages, pieces of paper. The whole idea is that people get overwhelmed because they have a lot of open loops that they haven't closed. So you want to take everything that's going on in your life, put it to paper, and then sort through all that information in one spot. Number two is the idea of a two minute hack. If something takes less than two minutes to move it to the next action item, you're just better off to do it right away. So that could be replying to an email. It could be making a decision about what date something should happen by. Essentially, if it takes less than two minutes to just figure out the next action item, just make the decision, move it on, get it out of the follow up. The third thing is the power of the mind. See, David made us do this exercise at the end of the event where we held a string with a paperclip at the bottom and we actually practice with our mind focusing on that paperclip to Move it to the left to move it to the right to have it move in circles. And even though hearing this, you might think that's really woo Dan. Like I don't believe that maybe or it for me, it opened me up to the ideas. Maybe my mind was a lot more powerful. Maybe my thoughts and my focus had the ability to create energy around me. And that was a big unlock for me at an impressionable time in my life. I was in my mid-20s, so those three things of dumping my mind, two minute hack and the power of my mind really unlocked another level of productivity and effectiveness in my life that I wouldn't otherwise got if I didn't invest in events. What brings us to the next investment, which is around $36,000 for a three year seminar with T. Harv Ecker. T Harv was the author of a book called the Secrets of a Millionaire Mind, which I go over in my top 10 most important books every entrepreneur should read. And what's cool about that book is that at the time when you bought it, you got tickets to his live weekend seminar. And I went to it. And at that event they talked about education and mindset and belief blockers and money beliefs and all these things that were holding us back from achieving more. And they presented an opportunity to invest in a three year education. And what was special about this event and why I decided to do this is they had the ability that if you invested in one person, you could bring a family member for free spend. So I decided to do this three year seminar event with my brother and it ended up being one of the most coolest experiences to invest in personal development, not only myself, but to do it with a family member and to do it with one of my best friends in the world, my brother Pierre. So for the next three years we traveled around going to all these different seminars to learn from arguably some of the best in the world at different topics on mindset, on investments, on business growth, on marketing. And it was a masterclass in so many different things in speaking and events. But here are the three top things that I took away over those three years that really shifted my perspective that allowed me to get more out of life. Number one was the money blueprint. See, I didn't realize how much unconsciously I was influenced by my parents. The language they use, the people around me that really capped my earning potential. Understanding my money blueprint and having a process for reevaluating it every year to try to upgrade, to edit, to try to invest in better beliefs was A fundamental shift. I mean, I had this weird belief at one point that if I didn't go bankrupt, I wasn't successful. You know, crazy that is how much pain that would have created that got wiped out through this process. Number two is just financial education in general. Being around other people that were invested in their education, in betterment, in self improvement, it made me realize that there was this huge gap around financial education that I just didn't have. I didn't understand how profit and loss statements were created, or cash flow statements, or all this other business stuff that I needed to learn to build the muscle so that I could actually get really good at long term planning. Understanding how to make a budget, figuring out what are the expenses that are normal, what are things that are variable versus fixed expenses, being able to create a forecast so that I can understand when I was going to run out of money, and what level of income do I need to generate to be able to go after growth? Because growth costs money to invest in a business that financial education was invaluable because it allowed me to avoid. Oftentimes what's expensive is not the loss of money. It's not executing or implementing opportunities where you can make a lot of money. So it's ignorance tax by not knowing what you could have done with the resources you had. That's the biggest part of financial education. I didn't understand. And then the third thing is the law of attraction. The idea of focusing on what you want to achieve. See, most people go through life looking for stuff they don't want and then they get surprised why they keep attracting the stuff that they don't want. Whereas if you can stay in an abundance mindset to create more, to become more, to get your radar, focus on opportunities that are all around you, to become more resourceful. The law of attraction isn't about doing nothing and just pretending like, you know, beautiful pictures are going to bring great things into your life. The law of attraction is the law of Goya. Get off your ass. It's not about sitting around hoping that things are just going to magically turn around, but it's the belief that it's available to you if you do the work. These three things allowed me to change my mindset specifically around money and honestly eventually exit my first software company at 28, making me a cash millionaire. Which brings us to my next investment, which was around 30,000 a year. And it was a group coaching program by a guy named Taki Moore. So see, Taki is one of the coolest dudes around. He Literally measures his life by the amount of days he doesn't have to wear shoes. And I first heard about him at an event called MMT Mastermind Talks. My buddy Jason Gaignard, he sat us together and it was almost like brothers from another mother. As soon as he told me what he did and what I was struggling with, I was laughing because I had just started coaching. It was something I was interested in. I really wanted to help people. But there was just something about the business model that I didn't like. I didn't like the grind, I didn't like the launch model. There's just so many things where I almost decided to just not do it anymore. Just keep a couple private clients and get back to business building. But Taki taught me a completely different way to look at coaching and building a coaching company. In his coaching, I learned three things. The first thing I learned was the business of coaching. See, anybody that starts in this industry, they, you know, they usually start because they want to be helping other people. It's a lot of fun being paid to ask for your advice and giving advice and seeing people get results. The challenge is waking up to 20, 25, 30 hours of one on one calls in a week to just repeat yourself, iterating the exact same things and answers that you're being asked. Sure, the questions might sound different, but the answers and the strategies are all the same. So Taki taught me the structure of building the business in a way that worked for my life and, and for my energy. For example, if I repeated myself, I should literally create a framework and then just teach it. So that way when somebody has a problem, I can just give them the answer instead of having to repeat myself. The second thing is how to chunk up my content in digestible formats. If anybody's ever tried to sit down and create a course or write a book or teach anything, give a talk, what most people make, the mistake is they try to put everything into it, right? Their talk that's supposed to be 30 minutes ends up being an hour and a half. Their book, which should have been, you know, 30,000 words, ends up being over a hundred thousand words. What Taki taught me was how to take the content, break it up into its individual value pieces, create a model, a framework around it, teach it, and make it digestible so that it worked like a building block to get a result for somebody. That was huge. It made creating content easier on me and something I enjoyed doing because I knew every time I created a new building block, I didn't have to ever Teach it again. The third thing was how to run world class events. When I say events, I mean everything from webinars to online events to in person events. He is the master at orchestrations, choreography. Understanding how to open an event and set the frame to how to finish it off to lock in the learnings. Understanding how to deliver transformative content in a live event over multiple days was one of my favorite skills because I run events every year, three, four, five events a year, and we get some of the highest ratings in their industry for satisfaction. And it's all because of the things I learned in this group coaching program. These three things helped me scale SaaS Academy, my software CEO coaching program, to over 10 million in annual revenue within five years. It's one of the fastest growing software CEO coaching programs in the world. To me, joining a group coaching program is like distilling 25 years of experience into one year. It is so potent. You get to learn so much faster and having a peer group around you of people that are on that same journey is invaluable. 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 brings us to the next investment, which was around 30,000 for the year. And it was a mastermind with other incredible entrepreneurs, which is called Mastermind Talks. And it's where I met 90% of my current friends. It's a big reason that I live in the city I live in. And when I look at all the fun things I get to do in my life, they were incredibly inspired by the people and entrepreneurs I met at this mastermind. Just a few things that actually shifted everything for me. Me over the time I was part of this group, which is almost a decade, first one which was huge. I call it the the McLaren mindset was allowing myself to buy a supercar. I know this might sound crazy, but it was people I met at the events, like Mike Brown, another guy John Bowen, people that had McLarens who told me how incredible they are, who told me I was silly for not buying one. I could afford it a long time ago, but I didn't want to give myself permission. I talk about this in other videos, but the idea of, of just giving myself permission to buy a supercar to enjoy driving, which I love, I'm a hardcore extreme adrenaline junkie. Would not have happened if I didn't meet these people at this event, which is just a small example of how our beliefs need to shift if we want to unlock another level of growth. The second one is I became a better dad to my kids. When I think of the incredible fathers and parents that I met at Mastermind Talk, guys like Jim Shields, Philip McKernan, who transformed everything for me, these people taught me how to show up better, not only in my marriage so that I could be a better husband to my wife, but also communicating with my kids, understanding what it meant to create value so that my kids could learn how to fish themselves. Because I mean, anybody's created wealth in their life, the last thing they want to do is raise entitled kids. Being around people like that, Jim and Philip taught me just a better way to live and to be a better dad. The third is writing a best selling book. My book, Buy Back youk Time, would not exist if I didn't meet the people I met at Mastermind Talks. Guys like Joey Coleman, who's an incredible author. Ben Greenfield, another legend in the space of writing books. These people not only showed me a blueprint for doing it right, but when I had questions and I needed help and I was going through evaluating different, you know, agents to work with or publishers to sign deals with, they were available to me. And I can't tell you how invaluable that was. Those are just three small examples of some of the value I got out of Mastermind Talks. I believe that masterminds are powerful because they allow you to surround yourself with people who will elevate you. Masterminds provide you with accountability, with insights. They surround you with people that are going to go further and together it makes it easier. The biggest thing is you have diversity of thought, right? You have people that essentially are unified around the process. They're on the same page and they're going the same direction. But because they're all working on different things at different times, when you come back together and you can kind of share notes, that way you can learn a lot faster. Which brings us to the next investment, which was a six figure figure investment. I can't disclose the price publicly, but it was a higher end Mastermind, which was invite only with other entrepreneurs, called Legacy by John Maxwell. Here's the deal. To even be considered to be part of this group, you have to be somebody who's obviously accomplished some pretty meaningful things in your life. So it was just an incredible honor to be invited in the first place. It's close friends of John's people supported his work over the years and it's all designed to support the charitable work that they do as an organization, which I think is the coolest. Here's why this investment was so important to me. I actually invested in the program more recently because I was hanging out with John at one of his events in Orlando. He's become kind of a mentor to me and I had learned so much by just being around him that when I heard there was this thing called Legacy, I didn't want to impose. But I did ask about it and luckily he thought I'd be a good fit. So I ended up joining. But I want to share with you the three big things that I took away by spending two days with them in Orlando that made me realize the value of being around somebody who's 25, 30 years ahead of me, where I'm going in my authorship, in my thought leadership and my content creation, my speaking. That is the value of just paying to be in a group of people that are literally executing at the top of their game. So this is what I learned watching John and being around his team. Number one is he's got a rainmaker. This is literally somebody that takes all requests for John's time, opportunities, etc. That they just look at what's going on, what the person wants, what the opportunity look likes, and they just, they monetize John's personal brand. The easiest way to think about it is everybody wants John's time. Somebody else is responsible for analyzing or viewing opportunities and deciding what makes sense and then letting the person know what the investment is going to look like. That idea of a rainmaker, which I do not have in my life yet, is going to change everything because right now I'm playing the gatekeeper and it'd be a lot easier for somebody else to be accountable for it, for follow up, for understanding, working with my assistant on my calendar. So that was a huge lesson learned. The second one is tying every business initiative to a charitable cause like this legacy program. It was. Once I saw it, it made me realize how silly I've been playing. Like, I get groups of people together. I have massive groups. I have tons of clients that I've worked with. I have people that have invested to learn from me. And nowhere's in that process have I ever tied that work with the charities I'm involved in. And it is a meaningful part of my life, working with troubled youth. And I always kept them separate. And I realized I was doing a disservice to everybody involved. The people that believed in me, wanted to learn from me and invest in my programs and coaching and then the organizations that needed my support when I had access to so many more people that would support those projects if I just brought them together. So watching John do that was incredible. And then the third thing was how to buy back my time when it comes to written content. I watch John travel with somebody dedicated to listening what he says, pulling the nuggets out of his content and writing it down to then go work with his writing team to produce the books. He's written 90 books. He's at a pace right now where if he wanted to, he could easily publish a book pretty much every six months. And it is all enabled by a key person that is a creative writer that travels with John, listens to John and pulls out all the golden nuggets. The way he says it is there's writers that speak and there's speakers that write. And he says, I am a speaker that writes. And he says, Dan, watching your content, I think you're a speaker that writes. And he's not wrong. So being able to have somebody dedicated to listening to everything I do, which I already have, but pulling out and extracting those insights, putting them into paper or in a digital format, and then working with a writing team to produce more books, I think is just a no brainer. 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 got a new episode so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to the next investment which is around 350,000 a year. And it's for my private coaches. You know, I've had multiple people that I've invested multi six figures to work with privately to get access to their brains, their experience, their strategies, right. And many some of them their networks. At the end of the day, I'm willing to pay for speed. So it was around this time last year that I asked myself what does going pro mean for me over the next 10 years? I'd already done a lot of stuff in business, but it occurred to me that everything I wanted to achieve was on the other side of my personal reputation and reach audience, getting my content in front of more people. The book was a first step, but there was so much more that I could do. So I hired somebody that had the experience in the history. This is a person with a top podcast. He's a top speaker. He's literally one of the best of the best in media, in communication, in energy, honestly, even in business. And I just wanted somebody that could teach me the strategy and the sequencing of executing on the vision of going pro. So working with this coach taught me three really important strategies that I think could absolutely transform your life. The first one is the power of visualization. Now, you've heard me talk about this, Vision boards, all that fun stuff. What's unique is the way he explained it. He shared with me that when you're visualizing, most people just look through first person as if you're driving in a car or walking into this beautiful home or, you know, stepping on stage in front of 10,000 people. But the real power comes from changing angles. Listening to it in reverse, going forward, looking at the nuance behind it, going from color to black and white, asking yourself, what are the smells? What do you hear? How do you feel in those moments to really make it feel 4D. See, most people are looking at it in 2D. 3D is better, but 4D is just like the next level where you're immersed in it. And that visualization allows you to anchor that feeling so it feels normal. See, most people, the outcomes they want to achieve, the energy that they would feel, it feels so foreign that it doesn't feel normal, so they can't attract it into their life. So the idea of visualization at that level was huge. The second one was pulling vocabulary in any key moment in your life. It could be hiring somebody. It could be negotiating an exit. It could be speaking on stage. The most important skill is to hold your vocabulary. Being able to connect the story to the message, Being able to find the right word to communicate a lesson. And working with my coach, he taught me different brain training exercises, different states, different breathing patterns, how to get my heart coherence in place so that when I was creating content, when I was looking for the right vocabulary, I was anchored in the state I needed to be, to be able to pull from my mind, pull from my experience, my stories, to be able to share and communicate in real time, just like I'm doing right now, which is crazy to me. But that skill set has been so invaluable so that I can create content without worrying that I'm not gonna have the right information or the right words to explain the thing that I'm trying to create. And the third thing is belief to go to the top. There's nothing more powerful than having somebody else believe in you way bigger than you believe in yourself. And when you're sharing your goals and your dreams and your aspirations with somebody and they go, oh, you should just call this person. Oh, you should just talk to this person. Oh, you should be on this person's podcast. Oh, you should speak at this guy's event. And these are literally the world's top stages, top people, top podcasts. And they say it in such nonchalant, matter of fact type language, it makes you really wonder, like, why can't I do that? And that is something that I think some of the best coaches will do for you is they'll believe in you more than you'll ever believe in yourself. And honestly, that's just having great people around you in general. But more importantly, a coach who's been there, done that, they've seen the playbook and they just plug you right in and they open up their personal networks and just make those introductions that sped up my whole timeline by years, if not a decade, by being able to move faster, by having a coach who's already seen it happen, did it themselves, and could introduce me to the right people to make it happen in my life. That's what I learned from spending over $1.5 million on business gurus. Now, if you want to learn how to build a million dollar business over the next 60 days, click the link below and I'll see you on the other side. Thanks for listening to the Growth Stacking show. If you get to the end of this podcast, can you do me a huge favor and leave a review? Having lots of reviews allows us to reach out to even bigger guests to bring them to you or get access to special events or activities that most people wouldn't get access to. So if you could leave a review, it would mean the world and I'll see you in the next episode.