If I Wanted to Go From $0 to $1M in 12 Months, Here’s What I’d Do

I became a cash millionaire at 27 years old. But if I had to do it again and go from broke to millionaire business owner in the next 12 months, this is exactly what I do. If at any point during this video you think, I can't do this, you might not be cut out to become a millionaire, and that's okay. But if you're part of the select few who are willing to do the work, then this video is for you. Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best selling authority. 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@martell method.com so your first month of your millionaire journey is going to be all about learning a high income skill. So these are the five most in demand high income skills today. First one is coding software. You're hearing it all the time. SaaS, you know, SaaS Preneur. The second one is content creation. You know, everything around video editing, graphic design, essentially helping people, their stories, their message out to the world. The third is copywriting. Learning how to craft words in a structure that gets somebody to take action is a very high paying skill. The fourth is project management. Understanding how to take an idea all the way across to execution and implementation is very valuable. The fifth is sales, even chat sales. Most people don't realize that nothing happens until somebody sells something to another person. And there are companies with products and inventory that they would pay top dollar to have somebody else help sell and communicate to the market and it can pay handsomely. So I learned my first high income skill of all places in rehab. I got lucky. Honestly. I ended up getting in trouble with the law as a teenager, got released into a rehab center that literally saved my life. And I spent 11 months not only getting sober, but trying to build the trust I had lost with my parents and really just build myself back up to being a normal person. At the end of that program, I was helping the maintenance guy clean out one of these cabins. And in one of the rooms was this old computer and a book on Java programming sitting next to it. I became obsessed with writing code. Through that process, I learned that that is actually a very high paying, highly valuable skill. And it was the first of several that allowed me to build the career and the entrepreneurial journey that I've been on. When you start, you have to spend all Your time learning the new skill, the high income skill. Even if you have a job, you might be working 9 to 5. Start learning between 5 to 9. 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, 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. The whole point is increase the value you bring to the marketplace. It doesn't matter how much you think people should pay you, it's the kind of value that you bring. So if you're doing something that is low paying, like restocking shelves, like don't be upset if you're not making the big buc. The whole point is to figure out how can you increase the value you provide to the market. If you figure out what the market wants, what it finds valuable and you learn that skill, you will be rewarded accordingly. Which brings us to month two, which is learn, don't earn. I believe that you have to be obsessed with your high income skill. You know, for me it was writing code. I would do everything from build apps for my friends, to share photos online, to build an application for people to download and create burnt CDs of all their top MP3s. Yes, I'm dating myself to build websites for my dad so that he could share his cottage. I just used the skill as often as possible. It was just something I offered for free so that I could learn. It wasn't about making money. So if I was starting over again, knowing what I know today, here's exactly how I would do it. The first thing is I would get somebody a result as fast as possible. Whatever skill you want to develop, find somebody that's got the problem that you can provide a solution and get them a result as fast as possible. Do the work ahead of time. Every day I get people messaging me, hey, I could edit your videos or hey, I could sell for you, or hey, I can write COD for one of your businesses. And I'm like, just do it. Show me you can do the thing ahead of time. Don't ask me to pay you to show me you can do it. It's the folks that show up and just do it that are going to get the opportunity. Then once you actually get them a result, ask them for the testimonial. That's how we start to build your portfolio. Once you have two or three or four of these, then I can ask for one or two referrals from those people to recommend my work to somebody else that they might know that they appreciate or trust. And then I would continue to learn and collect feedback on how I can become better. If I do that right, then I'm going to increase my pace of learning, not necessarily earning, but it's going to create a flywheel to catapult me forward. Which brings us to month three, which is to get your first client. So the first thing that ever got paid for that wasn't a family member that gave me money to help solve a problem was literally these burnt CDs that would have all the person's favorite MP3 songs on. I built this app where they could create their playlist and then request that CD be burnt so they could have it and put it in their cars. Again. You may not be aware, but there used to be physical devices that people put songs on to play in their car. I did the first one for free to give them a test to say, hey, here's how it works. And then they loved it. And then after that, then I would charge them for ongoing CDs. If they wanted to build a new playlist, they wanted to create something for the girlfriend or their boyfriend. And that to me is one of the best ways to get your first client is demonstrate the value ahead of time. And then once they're in, then ask them to pay you for follow on work. Ask them to pay you to do more. When you charge for your work, the whole relationship changes. I mean their expectations are higher, which isn't a bad thing. You actually get paid so you can invest in yourself and buy tools to make yourself even better. The other thing you'll learn real quick is that if people don't pay, they don't pay attention. Meaning that if what you do as a service requires them to give you feedback, if they're not paying, don't be upset if their emails don't get responded very quickly. The more they pay, the more they pay attention. So you'll be able to do better and better work. The more you can charge somebody because the client will will want the result even more. Which brings us to month four, which is to build your marketing pipeline, which are the four Ps of demand generation. Don't be the world's best kept secret. Your goal is to get as many people as possible to know about you, what you do and how you can help them see Back in the day, it used to be about going and speaking at events or getting covered in the local newspaper, maybe getting covered by the local blog. Today you want to get your reach out there to the world. Go on podcasts, do collaborations with other influencers, go and create webinars or joint webinars so that you can take advantage of other people's audiences. Top of Funnel is more important than anything else. You can't sell to an empty room. So ask yourself who's got your perfect fit customers. When you think about the person that you know you can create the most value for as fast as possible, that is most likely to easily pay. That is the person that you want to talk to, who's got a room full of those people that have a need to solve the problem that you can solve for them, reach out to them, go on their podcast, ask to contribute a blog post, article, do a joint webinar. If you do those things, you will build the top of funnel. So there's only four P's to create demand in the market. The first P is publishing. Think social media content. We want to use education based marketing to inform our customers how they can solve the problems themselves. But if we do a good job showing them how to do that, they're going to go well, this person's clearly an expert. SEO, blog posts, those are all in the publishing realm. The second P is paid. Facebook, I love paid because it's fast. Paid allows you to literally create a target audience on these platforms to get an ad placed in front of them so that people respond that are perfect fit for your product. The third P is partners. These are people that have an audience, a built in room where you can get in front of. Sometimes they're called affiliates, sometimes they're called strategic partners, sometimes they're called value added resellers. The end of the day, they're people that you partner with to get in front of their audience. The fourth is pr. This is public relations. This is getting interviewed on a podcast. Anytime that somebody reaches out to you and they have a platform, they interview you around your story, how you help people, what makes you different. That is pr. Those four P's are the top of Funnel of creating awareness so that everybody knows about what you do and how you do it and who you do it for so they can refer a lot of people to you. 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 month five, which is to hire an assistant and the ATF framework to make it work. See, back in the day when I started my first company, I used to spend all my time doing all the work, even to the point that every Sunday I would go into my office just to sort the physical mail that would come into the P.O. box. And I would spend hours just looking at every envelope and letter and sorting them between things. Had to go to my lawyer, things have to go, my accountant, things that got to get processed later. And I realized that I was spending all this time doing something that any other person could do. And I found a woman named Lisa and I just taught her in person how to process my mail. And all of a sudden I had hours back on a Sunday. So instead of processing mail, I doing lead generation, I was doing follow up on my sales funnel. I was preparing for the week, I was reviewing applications and references and job postings. Like I was doing things that were actually growing my business. So if you spend all of your time doing things that somebody else could do instead of working on the thing that makes you the most money, you're essentially working against yourself. This is the first hire in what I call the replacement ladder. See, most entrepreneurs end up building a business they grow to hate. So we use the ATF framework, which stands for audit, transfer, navigation, fill, to make sure that we look at our calendar for where we're spending our time, take the things that cost very little that we hate doing for me, anything financial or not, very fun, process oriented. And then t is transfer, transferring that to somebody else that literally plays at the thing you work at that you could pay little money. And then you take that newfound time and you fill. That's the F. Learning new skills, character traits, belief systems, or just doing more of the work work that you're getting paid to do. If you can follow the ATF framework and get your assistant to take over most of the stuff in your calendar that isn't working with clients directly, you will end up making more money as fast as possible. If you want my internal playbook for how I work with my assistant and see the 47 pages of my SOP standard operating procedure, just find me on Instagram @Dan Martell 2000 Martell and message me YouTube EA for executive assistant and I will send you my direct link to my Google. Google Doc. No, gated. You don't have to give me your email or your cell phone number. And it walks you through exactly how. I work with my executive assistants to buy back literally 40 plus hours a week, which brings us to month six and we're halfway there, which is to master sales. See, in the early days of building my first company that finally made money, called Sphere Technologies, I realized that I wasn't very good at selling. World class at writing code, really good at hiring other engineers. But when it came to talking to know normal people and trying to get them to buy from me, I used to get nervous. I didn't know what to say. They would ask for things, I would just say yes. And I would get dragged along on this long sales process of people that were never intending to buy in the first place. But learning the mastery of sales became my new passion. So learning how to code was my first high income skill. But then realizing that if I really wanted to grow, I had to get really good at communicating in sales. That's when I started investing in learning that new skill set. I learned a long time ago that a business is started, it's birthed only when money exchanges hands. So if you think about it, nothing really happens unless somebody sells something. And I think about it less about selling, trying to get somebody to make a decision they don't want to make, and more about enrolling them into my world, my service, my product. I want to teach you a powerful framework called the Buying Pocket. See, what I've learned over the years is sometimes you're talking to somebody and they just don't even believe it's possible. You know, they have no confidence in their ability, the opportunity. They're just on this side of the spectrum and they're wondering like, can I even do this? I've heard people do it and I don't know if I can do it. The other side is, you know, people that are overconfident where they think that they don't need your help, that they, you know, they're listening to what you got to say, but they're like, yeah, these are all things I know and I can do it myself. The challenge is most salespeople are never taught the questions to reframe the situation to get person to buy. So for example, if somebody's underconfident, I might say, well, how much revenue would you need to be making to feel really proud of yourself? And they said, well, honestly, maybe 10k a month. And you're like, oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, we have 700 clients that do 10k a month learning our strategies. And then somebody else that might be really confident, you might ask them, well, how much are you currently making now? And they're like, oh, I'm making 100,000 a year. And you might say, oh, wow, that's it. Depending on the conversation, you have to bring the buyer into the pocket where they're able to make a decision because they're not underconfident, they're not overconfident in their abilities. They're right in the perfect pocket. Which brings us to month seven, which is a hire somebody to help you deliver your product or service to your customer. A lot of people get busy doing the thing that they sold. So the more they sell, the more they got to do. And if they have the opportunity to double, maybe triple the business over the next few months, it means their calendar is going to get double or triple more. And then when they have these opportunities, instead of pushing on the gas, they push on the brakes because they don't want to end up creating all this emotional shrapnel around them from their team, their family, or their friends that never see them anymore. So I want to teach you how to hire somebody to offload that work and support you in delivering for the customer. So this is the second hire in my framework, the replacement ladder. Essentially, everything from customer support to customer success, to support tickets to product support, setting up a customer intake. After the sales conversation happens and you get a credit card, the person shows up and you have them deal with every aspect of the customer experience. You might still be involved in doing the work, but you have this person help you in delivering that value. So you're not the one trying to coordinate in your calendar. They are. They're the ones pulling the reports together so that when you have your weekly meeting with your customers, you can show them how you're doing. Having somebody else that's responsible for everything that's involved in delivering your product or service so that you can buy back that time is huge leverage that you can then reinvest. And you're either doing more work to make more money or increasing your skills so that you become more valuable. Which brings us to month eight, which is to hire somebody to help you with marketing. One time I had this friend named Rachel, and she had a marketing agency, and she would do everything she had to to get customers. She'd get busy marketing, posting on social media, asking for referrals. Then she would get all these clients. She would get busy. She'd probably do the Work for three or four or five months and then she wouldn't do any marketing. All the revenue would go away. And one day she came to me and she said, what do I do to grow my business? And I go, well, you have to be consistent in marketing. If you're inconsistent, then you're always trying to fill up your calendar instead of adding to it. So that's why it's the third line in the replacement ladders to have somebody that wakes up every day dedicated to generating leads for your business. So you want to have somebody else that looks at the campaigns, that looks at the traffic sources, that looks at the conversions to make sure that you're getting new leads every single day. Now, you might still be involved in the marketing, meaning that they're going to ask you to post on social media or shoot videos that they post on your YouTube or maybe even write the newsletter that you're sending out to all of your prospects. But they're responsible for ensuring that whole machine continues to happen every day, every week so that on a monthly basis, you're consistent in your ability to generate leads. Which brings us to month nine, which is to join a coaching program. Now, I know for a lot of people, they're like, oh, another coach. I can't believe you're talking about this. Here's the deal. The fastest way for you to get to a destination is to ask somebody that's been there before. And I put this off for years. I was 23 years old, two failed companies, until finally, out of desperation, I read a book and realize I need to hire a coach that teaches me the frameworks that I just read in this book. So I hired my first coach named Bob, and he was not cheap. 1500 bucks a month for two phone calls. American dollars. I'm Canadian, that's like real money. But in the next year, I went from barely making payroll, not knowing what I was doing, to making almost a million in my first year as an entrepreneur. So my whole philosophy is, if you want to learn the fastest and grow the fastest, then get into a coaching program with somebody for your specific high income skill that's going to allow you to grow as fast as possible. 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 get a new episode so you'll never Miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode. There are people out there that are already making a million dollars a month in the thing you're doing. If you pay to be in their community, learn their frameworks, or process their strategies, you'll be able to shortcut your success and literally compress decades into days. Go search on YouTube the specific problems you're having in your business and add your industry as a term to that search. And those videos are typically from people that have other ways they can help. It might be one on one private coaching, it might be semi private with small group coaching, it might be a big group coaching, it might even be an online course. But at the end of the day, having somebody who's been there, that gives you the blueprints and the steps to get there faster. This is the fastest way for you to go from broke to millionaire business owner. Which brings us to month 10, which is to hire sales. I have had to learn the skill of selling early in my career and move on to hiring other salespeople. But the funniest person I ever hired, this guy named Michael. When I started coaching other people, I wanted somebody else to help me buy back my time because my wife was like, yo, why are you on phone calls all the time? The referrals were crazy. And I was like, well, I'm, you know, try to talk to the people, they want to work with me. So I figure it's a good opportunity for me to see if there's a fit. But she's like, shouldn't you take your own advice? And I'm like, okay. So I went and I hired a guy, his name was Michael. And he came in and I didn't know how to sell coaching. I just said, hey man, you should talk to these people. I've got a calendar full of people that want to work with me. Just listen to my previous calls and sell. But the truth is, is I didn't have high hopes. I mean, this person was selling swords on the Internet. He would never sold coaching before. And all he did was listen to my calls. And within the first day, he had somebody pull out his credit card and buy on the call within 30 minutes. And I freaked out. I was like, dude, dude, what did you say? Is this person expecting to come to my house for dinner tonight or that I've gotta, you know, spend the next six weeks with them? How did you get the person to purchase in 30 minutes? He said, I just followed your process. And I was like, what process? He's like, I listened to Your calls. I mapped out exactly kind of what I was seeing you doing, and I just walked them through it. And here's the crazy part. Most people don't understand this as entrepreneurs is that when you actually have somebody else selling for you, it makes you look better as the owner. Because the person buying goes, oh, well, if they have a system for this, they probably have a system for delivering the thing I need, which means I have a higher likelihood of a guaranteed outcome than if I'm talking to the CEO of the business that's also going to be doing the work. Like, when do they have time to actually take care of the projects that they're going to be doing? For me, this is the fourth hire in the replacement ladder is sales. And I want you to train this person to enroll people into your product or service. And the best way to do that is to record yourself doing the call calls, doing the sales, even the emails, the follow up, like document all of it. And then when you hire the person, give them those leads and say, just follow this process. The key is, is they need to own 100% of the initial conversations and 100% of the follow ups. If you have somebody else taking the calls, the sales opportunities, the leads, the referrals that come into you, even if it's a best friend, it's like, hey, I've got this opportunity. I want you to talk to my friend John. You say, yeah, no problem, I'll connect him with, with Mike. Mike does all the initial calls with our new clients. He's been with me for a while. He's incredible. He'd love to talk with your friend. That way you're not the bottleneck. And here's the crazy cool part about this. If you look at the replacement ladder now with only four hires, okay, somebody to help you on the administrative stuff, to the, you know, delivery of the thing you sell, to the marketing of what you're selling, to the sales of what you're selling. You can now go on vacation. You could be satisfied sleeping and your business will still make money. It might not continue to function without you because you're still involved in the doing of the work. But while you're on vacation, somebody else is making sure your name's getting out there in the market. They're having the conversation with those people interested, and then they're onboarding those customers into your product or service while you are away, which is the holy grail of entrepreneurship and getting to a million dollars that nobody talks about. That is very simple. If you focus on those four hires, which brings us to month 11, which is to hire leadership. This is where you want to start hiring people to actually run the operations of the business. You still might be involved in writing the copy or doing sales for different businesses, but you want to hire somebody that can look at the overall system and continue to run things as fast as possible. So for example, when I started my new media company, Martel Media, one of the first hires I made was a guy named Todd. And Todd came in as my general manager. And as we started to put the pieces in place and things had to get done, it got routed to Todd. Now, Todd is somebody who's done this for decades and he knows how the playbooks work. So it was really easy for me to just give it to them. And a lot of you have some of those people in your life, but you're scared to let go. The reality is if you don't learn to let go, then you'll always be a prisoner to your business. And if you want to get to a million as fast as possible, you need to learn how to work through people to get projects completed where you're not involved. They focus on hiring and training and retaining your top talent so that you get to focus on what's next. You get to focus on your creative juices and trying to like, figure out, how do I get in front of more people? How do we scale our sales process? How do we make sure that the delivery of what we do is so world class that every one of our customers is referring other people to our business? That is how you build the replacement ladder so that you can get to a million in the first year. Which brings us to month 12, which is to build your personal brand. Every one of your dreams, your goals, your vision for your life gets easier, will come to life on the back end of people knowing who you are and how you can help them. I've been online creating content for 15 years. I have millions of followers across different platforms, but I started with with zero. And it doesn't matter where you're at today, you're gonna have to start at the exact same place I did. What benefit you have is you have folks like me and many others literally unpacking the blueprint for you to follow to build your audience as fast as humanly possible. And the key is, is you wanna focus on channels where you would love to express yourself through. So if you are more of a video person, create video. If you like to write, go blog. If you want to teach, maybe it's joint webinars with other people, people's audiences so you can build your personal brand. And then what you do is you capture all that and you just slice it up and repurpose in all these different channels. I know for me, when I was building out SaaS Academy, the ad cost cut in half when we started doubling down on our video production. The more people that could search and get results in advance because we created educational based content that helped us prove that we were a trusted advisor in our market. And the same thing works for you. Education based marketing is the best way for you to build your personal brand and also help a lot of people. My philosophy is this, if you do it right, your marketing will help more people than your product or service ever will. And your personal brand allows you to demonstrate who you are, your personality, as well as your skill set and your expertise so people can trust you before they ever buy from you. So it even makes the engagement of working with them way easier. See, most people, people mess this up because they try to do all platforms at once. Just pick one. If it's Instagram, if it's LinkedIn, if it's Twitter, just do something and be consistent. Because consistency compounds. And what matters more is that you show up every day adding value to the market than anybody else in their world to demonstrate that you're the kind of person that can be trusted with their project or to help them solve that problem. That's what I do if I wanted to go from from broke to millionaire business owner. But if you want to learn my 17 rules of success, click the link and I'll see you on the other side. Thanks for listening to Martell Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? 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