Listen to These 25 Minutes if You Want to Grow Your Business in 2023…

Here's what I know. Every entrepreneur will eventually hit what I call the pain line. And write this down. No entrepreneur will grow into pain. The pain line usually shows up in businesses. I call them factors of 3. 300,000 in revenue, 900,000 in revenue. 2.7 million. Why? Because at each level of growth, it requires you to learn a new skill to scale. And you won't have the time in your calendar to develop those skills if you don't learn to buy it back. It's not about working harder. If it was working hard, than a lot of hustlers would have great businesses. When you feel your pain line, there's one of three things you got to do. Welcome to the growth stacking podcast. This is Dan Martell. How many guys want to learn how to buy back your time? Yes or yes? All right, let's get into it, guys. I've got a lot I want to share. Everybody's got notes. Open up your workbooks. Your notepads. Have something to write down. Okay. I'm going to give you guys the keys to the kingdom. Here's what I know. Every entrepreneur will eventually hit what I call the pain line. And write this down. No entrepreneur will grow into pain. No entrepreneur will grow into pain. If Growing your business 10x next month means that you will kill your calendar, you will do one of three things. You'll either stall right some people. You ever grow your business and make some money, and then it got really crazy and you decided, you know what? Maybe I just want to go back to last year where I made more money, worked a little less. Problem is, your team's not going to allow you to stall. Here's my rule. If your vision isn't big enough for every person on your team's dreams and goals to fit inside of, they will leave. Write that down. Your job as an entrepreneur to create wealth is to create a vision that's big enough for everybody around you, dreams and goals to fit inside of. Or they will find somebody who can do that. Stalling is not an option. The other one is sabotage. So many times I'm working with great entrepreneurs and I'm like, why did you decide to take three weeks off and go to Europe and not check your email? Well, I wanted to test my team. No, you threw a hand grenade in your business. You think that's a normal thing to do? To just, like, let everybody drive blind? That's sabotage. So many of you have opportunities sitting in your inbox right now that you've dragged your feet, right? Think about this. Partnerships Speaking opportunities that you've punted to other people, that you think it's because you're too busy or didn't have enough time or weren't good enough. You're sabotaging your own success because you hit the pain line or, you know, you call somebody to ask them how to sell. I'm done. I've heard this opportunity is better. That opportunity is better. This thing is the grass is greener. Here's what I know. When you hit your pain line, it's called a complexity ceiling. And it doesn't matter if you hit it now in the current business or you start a new company, you will eventually hit the exact same complexity ceiling that you're dealing with today. So you can either decide to become the person today who can deal with more or just punt it to the future. How many of you guys would absolutely love to crush your pain line next level? How many of you got a show of hands? Hold them up. Perfect. That's what we're gonna do today. This is the buyback principle. Write this down. You don't hire people to grow your business. You hire people to buy back your time. Okay? I call it calendar over capacity. Most people get this wrong. Why? If you do the second, you'll get the first. If you do the first, you won't always get the second. The pain line usually shows up in businesses. I call them factors of 3. 300,000 in revenue, 900,000 in revenue, 2.7 million. Why? Because at each level of growth, it requires you to learn a new skill to scale. And you won't have the time in your calendar to develop those skills if you don't learn to buy it back. Does that make sense? It's not about working harder. If it was working harder than a lot of hustlers would have great businesses. Kent talked about it. If you want to build an empire, write this down. This is my definition of an empire. A life of unlimited creation we never have to retire from. Clap that up. A life of unlimited creation we never have to retire from. I want you guys to build empires. Every person. Here's how it works. It's called the buyback loop. When you feel your pain line, there's one of three things you got to do. First off, you have to do a time and energy audit. Look at your calendar and figure out where is it. Ask yourself, what am I doing today? I want everybody to think about this. What are you doing today that is sucking your energy that you could pay somebody a little bit amount of money to do for you. Write down the answer. I want everybody to write down that answer. What's one thing that you're doing today that you know? See some of you guys laughing and giggling that you're doing that takes your energy that you could pay somebody a little bit about money to support you do. I got some answers. Everybody write that down. Perfect. Throw some out. I'm curious. Give me some answers. I want to hear them loud. You know what? I'm jumping off stage. Let's do this. All right. You got an answer? Because I know I saw you laugh. Do you have anything? Who's got an answer? Show of hands, right here. I need your name. What would you do? Yeah, Wyatt. Laundry at home. Awesome. Love that. Who else? Yeah, bookkeeping. Your name? Dude. Love that. Bookkeeping. Anybody else? Yes. Name? Danae. Nice to meet you, Danae. Admin stuff. So good. Anybody else? One more over here. Right here. Name? David. Ed. Video editor. How many of you guys are sitting there doing all your social media posts? Johannes, no judgment. I'm curious. Awesome. Cool. Once we do the time and energy audit, then we gotta go look at transfer. How do we take that work, admin, laundry, et cetera, and give it to somebody else? Okay. I have a framework called the camcorder method. We'll dive into this. The third is fill. What do we do with that newfound time? Most of you, if I gave you a full day back on Friday, you wouldn't even know what to do at Friday. Most people that I teach this framework to, I'm gonna share with you guys today. They buy back 30, 35 hours a week. And they sometimes make the mistake of not doing anything productive at that time. You ain't growing your business. We're going to dive in what to do with that. But write these three things down. Your beliefs. How do I develop my beliefs? My skills. What's my next level of skills to grow? And third, my character traits. Who do I need to become confident, resourceful, consistent? What are the character traits? Here's the big idea. Million dollar companies were not built off $10 tasks. There's not enough hours in the week. You can't outwork this problem. The replacement ladder is the framework. I want to ask you a question. You all know when you start a business is we got to build a team. Yes or yes. Perfect. Who's the first hire? Everybody write down your answer. Who would be the first hire for you? Maybe you don't have a team. Maybe you have a team, but you would do it differently. Who would be your first hire on your team? Everybody Got an answer. Cool. Show of hands. I want to hear some over here. What's your answer, guys? I will jump back down and air myself out all day long. Yeah. Bookkeeper. Bookkeeper. Your name? Ivan. Ivan. Awesome. Ivan says bookkeeper. Yeah. Your name? Sales. Awesome. Yes. Your name? Sal. C o O. Mike. Mike says full time assistant. I want to give you guys the keys to the kingdom. Do you guys want this? Yes or yes? All right, let's do this. Awesome answers. Here's what I've learned. Most people hire in the wrong sequence and they spend too much money learning how to lead. Write that down. Most people hire in the wrong sequence and spend too much money learning how to lead. Some people hire COOs but don't have an executive assistant. Which one do you think is more expensive? Think about this. I'm going to show you the pattern. This is Richard Branson's house. About five years ago, I had the privilege of spending a week with him in Switzerland. Trust me, I grew up in east coast Canada, went to prison twice. I thought it was an April Fool's joke. You want to talk about imposter syndrome? I show up at his house, which is essentially a 20 bedroom fricking lodge in the mountains of Verbier, Switzerland. And other people that are there, Tim Ferriss, co founder of Square the payments company. Brian Johnson, who just sold Braintree. You guys all know him maybe on the Internet as the biohacking guy. You know that guy spends millions of dollars, try to look younger. He was there, dude. I was like, I just got to not say anything stupid. Like I can only mess it up somehow. Somebody thought what I was doing with my company at the time was interesting and invited me. And all I wanted to learn is how does the billionaire, who is the billionaire that other billionaires want to be? Like, how does he manage his life? That's it. That's all I wanted to know. I watched, I sat back and I saw a guy operate completely different than the way I was and honestly, different than the way I thought, different than the way my mentors did. He figured it out. I want to show you guys exactly how it works. It's called a replacement ladder. Draw this grid out, take notes. This is where it's at. Okay, Number one is admin. Who said admin in your head? Hands up. If you said admin in your head, you got it right. Why? Least amount of cost, highest opportunity to buy back time. You can't dispute that. This is called a first principle. This is math. You can't hire anybody for cheaper to do Meaningful work to buy time out of your calendar other than administrative assistant. The key is you gotta focus on the outcomes. So if you're feeling stuck, we wanna go level one. The two primary outcomes, inbox and calendar. The inbox isn't having somebody you cc on emails to do work for you. It's somebody you give complete access to to the inbox. They do first filter. Why? Your inbox is nothing more than a public to do list of strangers on the Internet. Your inbox is nothing more than a public to do list on your time from people you don't even know asking you to do stuff. If you had an office on Main street usa, would you allow people to walk off the street into your office and bug you every 15 minutes? But you do it in your inbox. Richard doesn't do email. He has Helen. And what Helen does is every morning they sit down for breakfast and she only brings things to his attention that she doesn't know how to deal with. And that's how he's run his life. Helen's been with her for 13 years. She travels the world with him. It was the most beautifully elegant system ever. How many of you guys want. I get asked this all the time. I'll just give it to you guys. How many of you guys want the sop? The standard operating procedure for how I manage the inbox and my executive assistant show of hands. Not enough people. All right, do this. It's a little give, take, Follow me on Instagram Dan Martell Two Ls and Martell follow me on Instagram message EA and I've told my EA to reply to you. So you get to see how I can be here with all of you and create a ton of value. And even though you'll send hundreds of messages, I get to move on to my next meeting. My next meeting, my next meeting. I never get out of flow because I built a team around me. That's what I want to show you through example Dan Martell. You have to be following me and I'll send you my complete, literally my Google Doc link directly. No opt in. You can just have it. Cool. That's level one. Level two, you feel stalled. What are you gonna do next? This is the most effective way to spend your money to buy back your time. We need to get rid of anything that isn't doing of the work. If you're a designer, design more. If you're a podcaster, podcast more. If you're a coach, coach anything that does not look like that type of work. Hire somebody and Give it to them in pieces. Have somebody support. I call it customer success. Help somebody support the account management side. Some of you guys think you're magical snowflakes. Then only you can do the work. Trust me, there's people that love to do the things you hate to do. And when you bring them on your team, it changes everything. Level three, marketing. Once you build the ability to grow because you're not doing things that take your energy, that cost a little to pay somebody else. Now you have capacity. Go build the marketing system, document it. Build repeatability. Hire somebody to own it. The key is make sure that they monitor all traffic on all sources. And they're creating campaigns. Most of you guys don't do Christmas campaigns, summer campaigns. You're not thinking in marketing, in a campaign strategy. You guys are here because this is a campaign. There was an event, there was a moment, there was a reason for you to stop sitting on your hands and take action. That's level three. That's marketing. This is the most efficient way to deploy capital, to hire labor, to buy back your time, to grow your business. Number four, this is the freedom level. I'll tell you why this is where we introduce a sales team. Prior to this, you're still doing the sales calls. Because you need enough sales calls to be busy. So you hire a salesperson that can make you money. Because if they're not making money, here's what happens. If you hire a salesperson too soon. In three months, they're either gonna quit cause they ain't making money because you haven't built a marketing system, or you're gonna fire them because they're not doing enough swings at bat. And they're not winning, they're not selling, their win rates are too low. And you're gonna go back to selling because you don't wanna lose money. How many of you guys have been there before? I've done it so many times personally. Exactly. So the reason it's called freedom, because for hires, for people, you now have a business that somebody's responsible for getting you new opportunities. Somebody enrolls those people into your business and somebody else takes care of taking payment onboards them to start working with you for hires. It's gonna change your life. Level five, this is where I do most of my coaching. It's all about leadership. And it's about getting into flow. It's about. It's about creating a life of unlimited creation. You never have to retire from that. Is a replacement ladder the big idea? If you don't have an assistant, you are one. And guess what? You kind of suck at it. And you're overpaid. It's just true. Anytime you're doing stuff somebody else could do for you, if you're the CEO of the company, you're working against yourself. You're swimming upstream. Cool. How many would like to learn how to stop working against themselves? Yes or yes? Cool. Let's do it. Number two, transformational leadership. When I moved to San Francisco when I was 28, after I sold my first company, I was a workaholic. It was so bad that I was engaged to a woman. And I came home one day and she was in tears in the kitchen. And when I walked into the house, she just looks at me, can't even speak, pulls a ring off, drops it on the counter and says, I can't do this anymore, and goes and stays with her parents seven weeks before the wedding. I didn't know any other way to be me. I'm a driven dude. A lot of you guys can relate to that. I just want to create. And I was worried for the rest of my life. I was never going to be a good partner to any person because of that drive. I had an edge that I thought gave me the thing that made me successful. And turns out sometimes that edge isn't the thing that makes you successful. You're successful in spite of that. So I moved to San Francisco to see if any of my crazy software ideas would work against some of the smartest software folks in the world. Right? The Googles, the Instagrams. And while I was there, I met a guy named Naval. Naval Ravikant's his name. A lot of people know him today. Angellist was his product. And Naval became an indirect mentor. I'd see him out at events when we were raising money. He'd always help me with our fundraising and. And just being around him like he became a mentor of mine just by his lighthouse, how he was showing up. And Naval taught me that there's only four ways to get leverage. How many ways? Perfect. The first way, write this down through capital. Capital. It's the first C. There's four C's. First C is capital. Money helps you buy leverage. Number two, Code. Code is automation. Code is data. Code is reporting. Code is AI. Okay. Second form is code. Third is content. But what does content mean as it relates to business? It's not just marketing. It's the standard operating procedures. It's the checklist. It is the marketing as well. Huge leverage. Think about this. I do a podcast. Takes me 35, 40 minutes of my time that can be seen by 10 million people, no extra cost to my time. Isn't that fascinating? Huge levers. The fourth one, which I'm going to talk about, is collaboration. Fourth C is collaboration. Collaboration is how do I work with other people? How do I buy back my time using the replacement ladder. And this is why, when in the San Francisco, you hear these people, they raise $100 million, you know what they do with that hundred million? They go and hire 5,000 people. Huge leverage. So Naval teaches me this, but he shared with me the difference not only with leverage, but how you have to show up as a leader. Because most of you guys are doing transactional management. How many of you guys would like to learn transformational leadership? Completely different. You guys ready for this? Yes. Yes. Awesome. Here's what most people do. Hire somebody, tell them what to do. And this is super normal. I'm not judging. When I started off in business, I did this for five or six years. Tell them what to do. What do I do next? I check that they got it done, and once they get it done, I tell them what to do next. It's the tell check, next loop. And it sounds super normal. Like I was like when he. Well, of course this is how you do it. Nope. Why? Because you'll hit a bottleneck. About 12 employees, where you wake up every day. Some of you guys are there, you wake up, you get everybody busy, and then you think you're going to work on your projects. And by the time you actually deal with all the stuff, it's 8 o' clock and you got to sit down to your inbox. And then you only get your work done between midnight and one or two. It's the telcheck next. It's literally the ceiling. That happens. Transformational leadership is totally different. We start with the outcome. You don't delegate tasks, you delegate outcomes. Think about, for you, the last thing you ask somebody else to do for you. Did you ask them to focus on the outcome, the thing that you wanted it to produce? Or did you tell them what to do? What was that for? You think about that. It's subtle. I can see it in language, but some of you guys may not see it. So when I delegate something, I delegate, you know. Instagram. You own Instagram? What does that mean? You tell me. You tell me. What does it mean for you? Well, it means we're growing. It means we're publishing. Perfect. Tell me more. What does it mean for you? I want you to own Instagram. I'm not going to tell you the schedule. I want you to own it. Tell me what it means to you. Boom. We start with the outcome. Number two, we go to measure how do we know we're being successful? What are the numbers? So we define what data point is going to tell me that you're making progress. So if it's Instagram, maybe it's engagement, maybe it's followers. Whatever you decide with the person. One number. Every person needs to know their one number. And three, you got to coach them to success. Meaning that when they fall back, that you show up and you say, hey, what are you struggling with? How can I help? Nobody in my company works for me. Write this down. Nobody in your company works for you. You work for them. Some of you guys got it backwards, and it's why you're frustrated with your team. I show up and I say, I am here to support you. What do you need? And I unblock them. That is how Silicon Valley builds some of the fastest, most important companies of our time. Right now, all the tools on your iPhone and the iPhone, it's run this way. Nobody taught this to me. I was 28. Two failed companies, finally had some success, failed engagement, and finally had a completely different way of doing it. Here's what I believe. You delegate the outcome, not the task. Write that down. Stop telling people what to do. Just tell them what it looks like when it's done. In my book, I call it the definition of done. Tell them what it looks like when it's perfect. Don't tell them. Go post the blog. Say, let's go create a content strategy. Tell me what it looks like. You own the outcome. The third. This one is gonna blow your minds. Okay? This is the thing that could literally unlock 3x growth in your business without doing anything new. Guys, wanna learn how to do that? Yes or yes? Perfect. One, three. One rule. My buddy Adam, he was HR director for me. We just finished quarterly planning, and we had to hire 13 people in the next quarter. And after the meeting, he's like, super stressed out. He comes to me and he goes, dan, I don't know what to do. I said, what's up? He goes, we gotta hire 13 people. I go, cool. Well, it's not cool. Why isn't it cool, Adam? Well, I've never done that before. I know. Well, how do I do it? I don't know. I mean, Adam, I don't want to be rude, but I hired you to be the director of people. Like, if I have to tell you how to do your job, then I'M doing your job. Steve Jobs says it this way. It's easy to hire people and tell them what to do. It's hard to hire people and have them tell you what to do. Big shift. I was like. So I tell Adam, I said, what's your one? Three. One. He smiles. He knows what I'm talking about. He goes, give me a day. 131 is this simple method. Okay? By the next morning, he texts me and he's like, we're good. I don't need to talk to you anymore. I'm like, I knew, dude. You're super smart, man. You don't need me. Here's how it works. Anytime somebody comes to you with a problem, invite them, cajole them, empower them to do this. Number one, let's talk about one specific challenge. A problem well defined is a problem half solved. So sometimes people are freaking out because there's 13 things going on. Tell me, what's the one thing we're talking about right now? Number three is what are the three viable options? Think about it. Even for you entrepreneurs in this room, you do this in your mind. How many times a day do you do this in your mind? You have a problem, you start thinking about this options. Who could I call? Systems, processes, courses, trainers, coaches. And then you decide the one that you want to do. So literally ask them to do the same work. Go do the research. I just told Adam, how much time are you going to need to figure out the three? He's like, give me a day. Perfect. Three viable options. Have them present them to you. And then three. One recommendation. What is the thing that you think we should do out of your three viable options? Here's why that's powerful. You're going to push decision making down to the individual contributors in your company. You're going to push decisions down to the teams who have the most context about the problem to make the decision anyway. And you will guess what? Buy back your time. You're the bottleneck. They call it a bottleneck because it's at the top. It's you, every person in this room. If you're not where you want to be, don't wish it was easier. Wish that you showed up and listen, learn this stuff and become a better leader. That's what I want for everybody in this room more than anything. Here's the big idea. Completely different shift. If you're not spending time every week training, coaching one on ones your team, and instead you just say, I hope you know how to do the thing I told you to do. You told them you're missing the opportunity to unlock all this beautiful power amongst your team. So with that, I want to leave you with this. I know every person in this room, and if you guys don't follow me on social, find me. I will be your biggest fan. I'd be honored to support you in that journey. I know you're going to be successful. My question that I want you to consider is will you matter? Your team is the biggest opportunity for you to matter to a group of people and transform lives, but it's gonna require you to find the space in your calendar to do that work. So this is my book. It's been awesome being here. Appreciate you guys all have an amazing rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you. 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 martell2lsdmartell.com to keep up the hustle, keep stacking your growth, and I'll see you next Monday's episode. Bye. Bye.