How Dan Martell Helps SaaS Founders Grow By 216% on Average

You've done a lot of different things, and I'm curious, maybe just a little bit about your background first, and then I wanna talk about kind of the long-term vision too. So go for it, however you wanna take it.

What's, I think, important for people to know is I grew up in a really challenging environment, in and out of jail in my teenage years, ended up in rehab at 17, spent 11 months there rebuilding my self-confidence, working through emotional challenges, trauma, that kind of stuff. And at the end of that, I discovered programming, helping Rick the maintenance guy out one of the old— it was a church camp, this rehab centre, and there was an old book on Java programming, and I just took to it. And essentially software became my new addiction at 17. Entrepreneurship had always been a passion of mine. I just wasn't doing anything legal prior to that. So I started a bunch of companies, and what's cool is it just— it's become the ultimate personal development program for me. That's my feedback loop, is my businesses. Since then, I've started 5 companies. The first 2 were complete failures. Things shifted for me when I started reading books. So I read— Love Is a Killer App is the first book I ever read at 23. But then I read a bunch of the top, you know, 100. E-Myth resonated with me from Michael Gerber. I hired an E-Myth business coach before I even had my third company because I was just so fed up failing. That's the one that, you know, made me a millionaire at 27. And then I took all my money and reinvested it in software companies as an angel investor. I think I've got 3 IPOs about to happen this year, so that's turned out to be pretty awesome. And then, as you mentioned, with SaaS Academy, we're rebranding to sascoach.com, and it is the largest training coaching company in the world at this point for SaaS founders. And then I have my other venture thing that I talk a lot about called High Speed Ventures, which is where I buy companies. 100% with my own capital and do what I teach my clients to do over here with the high-speed team and having a lot of fun there. So just keeping busy, man. I just love life and I know what I'm good at and I stick to my lane.

I love that. And so I wanna dive into each and every one of these, time permitting. You did actually share something to Instagram a while back where, you know, kind of talking about the struggles, right? And this is a picture where you were not— this is before you became the strongest man in SaaS. So this is where you were huge, right? And so I don't know if you wanna talk about that portion, kind of what you were going through there. You kind of alluded to it, but you were so vulnerable with that post and you didn't do stuff like that before. You didn't post stuff like that before, so.

Nah, you know, so my journey, like you gotta understand, I grew up in like, there's like bad and then there's like shit. Like I was in a hole, okay? just no other way to explain it. Like, I experienced stuff I probably should never experience and had no positive. So like, it wasn't even just starting off in life to try to, to, to be better. I was just trying not to end up dead, right? And a lot of those mindsets, like, I just didn't have. So like, I struggled with my weight, my health, right? So I used to— I'm 6'3 and I weighed 265 pounds. I was a fat dude. And, you know, so, so at 21, to go from 265 to this journey of trying to be healthy— like, I love the Strongest Man in SaaS, it's hilarious, so I appreciate, um, there's some really strong people in the software space— um, to the, the world where I live today, where I, you know, run Ironmans and, you know, work out twice a day and, you know, have more energy than I know what to do with, like It's just, I wasn't even gonna share that photo. I finished a programme called 75 Hard, which is a mental toughness programme, but it also has a physical component to it. And I was showing my friend, Matt Tam, my before and after pictures of just 75 Hard. And then he finds an old photo of when we were 21 and says, remember this, Dan? And I, it blew my mind 'cause I was like, I don't remember being that. Like, my identity has just kind of shifted since then. And he goes, you gotta post that. And I was like, I'm not posting that, man. Like, am I gonna post? No, I don't share. I'm a business guy. Like, I post strategies and growth and leadership and that kind of stuff. He goes, dude, this might be more important and more impactful than anything else you've ever shared. Just saying. So it took a lot of courage, I guess, to just sit there and write the post and just be vulnerable and say This is my struggle and these are real and it's been a journey. It's been 20-some years of dealing with emotional eating and like just a lot of bad habits, man, just like everybody else and just working through that process. So if anything I'm most proud of is just, you know, if I wish you could go back and meet the 16-year-old version of Dan, you would— there would be nothing that you see that would tell you there's any hint of potential. Okay, so it's the possibility that every person in the world, doesn't matter if you're 50 or 21 or 17, if you start today and you apply 1% better every day, your life can look magically different in a short amount of time.

And I will say that picture was probably the most impactful thing because I, I didn't realize before, I didn't know that you were this big guy before. And you're trying, like everyone's trying to figure things out, right? They're going through a journey. You just mentioned it, trying to compound 1% better every single day. You start reading, you start building habits, you might have some failures in the beginning, but you figure it out, right? So this is really for anybody that's listening right now that's just starting out. Like, it takes time to build up, right? So—

Well, dude, I had 10 years-ish. So I started at 17. I didn't become a millionaire until I was 27. 10 years. And I'm talking like 100-hour weeks. Like, the amount of time I wasted doing shit that didn't matter, that I didn't know any better, Like, it's embarrassing, dude. It's embarrassing. The relationship stuff I had to learn, right? I used to be engaged and then I wasn't, right? Like, I mean, there's— that's why when people tell me about their struggles, it's like, I'm not sure I've been through that specific situation, but I just know that no pressure, no diamonds. I'm here because I decided to continuously audit and investigate and ask myself what the next level is. I've designed my life so that I can play the game and never have to stop playing. And I know there's always another level and it doesn't matter where you're at, there is always another level for you. And who you can be is who you must be, right? Like if you have the potential, you have to express that. I believe that at my core. And everybody listening has way more potential. And if you choose to just sit on the couch and watch Netflix, that's your thing, but just know, That you can't ask to live an extraordinary life and act ordinary. It doesn't work. Those two things are opposed, right? You know, somebody said once, like, you know, do what others won't so you can live a life others can't. And that's, and and and that's the biggest thing that over the years I've gotten better at is the more successful I am, the harder I work, the more I show up, the more disciplined I am, the more I'm willing to grind. And I didn't have that in my mid-twenties. That I have now in my early 40s, that I'm absolutely going to be doing this when I'm 100. Like, people think I work out and work hard now? Wait.

I mean, you're just starting. That's what it is.

Just starting.

Yeah. So I mean, you know, all of our founder buddies, right, we have mutual friends, and all the founder buddies I talk to, we're doing great, right? They might have 8 or 9-figure businesses, and it's just like, you know, why do you do it? To your point, I just want to keep playing the game. I'm just having fun. Right. There's also, when I look at your workouts, right, when I'm like, part of it is like he enjoys the pain because he knows it's going to bring him long-term greatness, right? And that part of it, do you think it's that? Do you agree or disagree with that?

I like— it's kind of like writing, right? Like, I like to have written. I like to have run. I like to have done the competition. In the moment, I don't like it. But to me, it's in that moment of conversation with yourself. Right? Like, do I slow down? Do I stop? Do I fake an injury? Like, trust me, every thought that people— like, people think— like, I've had friends, they're like, yeah, I couldn't do it because I hurt myself. Nah, you didn't fucking hurt yourself. Like, you just— let's be honest. Like, whatever. I'll call people out when I think that they're not being honest with themselves. Um, but those are like— the truth is, those are the moments when you actually get to grow. Like, you don't grow when things are good. You grow when you inflict pain or there's a challenge or there's frustration, right? Like the no pressure, no diamonds, you know, like you, you, you are. So it's kind of like you have to do the thing first to become the person who can have the thing. So that's like the do, uh, you know, or sorry, be, do, have. Some people think you need to have the thing to become the person, right? And that's just not the way it is. So, I don't know. I'm just— I just know that I've got way more to give and I'm willing to do the work. And my true north is just people. I just love people. I love to build teams. I love to build companies. That's the game I play.

Okay.

Like, can I get better at communicating? Can I get better at inspiring? Can I get better at giving clear direction? Can I get better at making better decisions strategically, sequencing? That's the game that I play.

Love it. Yeah, and Naval Ravikant says that your resume is just a catalog of suffering. So it's how much suffering have you been through, right? So anyway, I want to talk about SaaS. So it's no longer SaaS Academy, it's going to be called SaaS Coach. Is that what it is?

Yep.

Okay, so let's talk about that because I know you— I think you started this business, what, 5, 6 years ago? And I know, I think I was talking to Syed and you actually brought the idea to him. So he was talking about it. So what— can you talk a little more about the business and then how you make money? And then I guess for people that are interested, what level of SaaS people do you work with?

Yeah, so I mean, I've known Syed for a while. He became a client probably 2 years ago. I love Syed and his team, always built that awesome motive.

We—

so in regards to what we do, we have 3 distinct programs. And they're designed for people that are revenue generating. So I've got my accelerator level for people that are trying to get to that kind of $10K, $15K a month in recurring revenue, but you have to have a product. Like, I don't help people start businesses and build software. There's a ton of great people out there. Dane Maxwell had the foundation, et cetera, et cetera. Eric, maybe you know some people. So like, I don't help people start anymore because I don't— it just wasn't my passion. My passion is helping driven, ambitious, motivated founders do great. So that's Accelerator Program. Then I have my SaaS Academy, the academy side, which I help people kind of go from that $20K MRR to about $300K a month in recurring revenue. And then I have my Boardroom Program, which is for the higher-end clients that are at like $3 to $4 million ARR or $300,000 MRR to scale up to $10 and beyond. But I also coach You know, the founders of ClickFunnels and AgoraPulse, so like a bunch of companies that are in the 50— achievers.com, I mean, they're $160 million a year in revenue. So my— I'm just all B2B SaaS. It's what I do, it's what I love, and those are the programmes that help people get results really fast.

Got it, makes sense. And so the thing I love about your programme is that when I think about coaching in the traditional internet marketing world, which is why I don't have a lot of coaches on this podcast, I think like scammy, right? And then when I look at your stuff, it doesn't feel that way. And everyone that says they've been through it, it's like, it's amazing, right? And so you've done a good job of not being this biz op guy. To your point, you don't work with people that are just starting. And so that's huge, right? So I mean, I feel like you've consciously done something to kind of separate yourself. Can you speak to what you did to do that?

Yeah, I don't lead with shit. Like, I don't lead with the car, even though I drive a McLaren. I don't lead—

I don't—

that's not in my advertising. I don't— I'm not trying to sell people a dream. You know, I think in business, and something I teach and what I've done in every one of my software companies, is you have to decide who is your perfect customer. And one of the core things about SaaS is that the business only works if you retain customers. So we have an 82% annual retention rate. In a SaaS programme or in a coaching programme, which is unheard of. Most people can't even get people to stick around for the first year, right?

I think 50% churn rate, yeah.

Yeah, I'm like, I want people to be around for 5 or 6 or 7 years. Like, there's no reason. And now our coaches, that's why the programme's being evolved. I'm not coaching in those programmes is 'cause our clients who have exited, the perfect exit, are now coming back and they're coaching. Like Matt from Uplaunch and Kyle from Proposify is actually coaching our clients. Adi from Convergio, you know, he exited to Campaign Monitor, he's a coach. And our coaches that we have are what we call our tactical coaches. I mean, they're ex-Vista Private Equity, Gainsight, PatientPop, like they are practitioners of their art, okay? It's not, there's no, you know, hype, you know, like I'm a meat and potatoes kind of guy. If you're saying, hey, you wanna revamp your sales comp structure, I will give you the template, the training, the model, like— We've built over 350 growth playbooks. So to me, that's why it's more than just coaching, it's training. We allow you to invite team members. At different levels, there's different kind of things we solve. I think in the early stages, we focus on traction. Like do nothing else other than get revenue traction, okay? So let's build that revenue engine. And so that's in the accelerator. In academy, we teach you how to scale the team, okay? Based on this principle called the buyback principle. Okay, and then in— or sorry, we help you scale the organisational design, but then in Boardroom, that's where we start focusing on you, the individual, and how you show up for your team, okay? And that's leadership development. And there are specific different problems that I know show up at each level of revenue, okay? Like when you're above $3 million in revenue, Your days are gonna— if you don't do it right, it'll be full with managing people who've never managed people and dealing with HR issues. Like, that's just what happens if you don't do it right. If you do it great, you actually have less time. You don't have to deal with the people because you've delegated outcomes to people to develop the people. So it's like, I just have a blast, but I'm a systems thinker. I'm a— my background's in software programming, so I always look at it like, how do I design the system to create predictable results? And that's what we've done better than anybody else in the world, because I took a first principles approach to it, just like I would build software. It's what is the outcome they want? How do I design up front the success path? How do we coach them to it? How do we hold them accountable to it? And dude, we kick people out all the time. I kicked out a guy last week because 3 clients reported that he had done something nefarious to their business. Okay, created an account, stole their code. Ripped off one of their team people or whatever, whatever. And it's like you got to go. I don't know a lot of coaching programs that like kick their clients out of their programs. Like me, we have values, we have structures because I'm also trying like we're 660 clients today. I want to be 3,000. I want to be 5,000. I want to be 10,000. You can't do that if you don't build the business, and the business has to get people results. And that's true for everybody. Like, start at that place and then work your way back to the whiz-bang marketing stuff.

Yep. No, I love it. I mean, look, at the end of the day, when you look at Dan's ads, right, and I see your ads sometimes, it's straight up like, here are the templates, right? Here's the shortcuts, right? You get the value right there. It's not— look, to your point, it's not look at my McLaren, look at my Lambo, look at my big house, right? Because that's not what matters. It's when you're working with people that have already started, They don't really care about that stuff. They just want to focus on the business, right? They don't want to focus on the Lambo and all that. So—

I call them the frustrated builders. Like Alex Becker is one of my clients and like, you know, he studied a lot of those guys, the same Sam Ovens, Russell Brunson, et cetera. And like, I, you know, so I, what a lot of the people that work really well in my world are the frustrated builders. They're people that are bootstrapped, technical backgrounds typically, or marketing backgrounds. And they just want to be shown how to do it. They don't need to be convinced. They don't need, The weird motivations, like they're looking to build real value and they're just sick of like, okay, we have a churn problem or we have a pricing problem or we have a, you know, a team issue. Just show me how to solve the problem. And that's— I literally ask myself every day, how do I create more value for my customers than anybody else in the world?

I love that. And by the way, I do want to just let everyone know too, the number I was referring to earlier, that the 35 to 50% churn, that's monthly, right? Dan was talking about an annual churn, right? Which means Way lower, obviously.

2% per month?

2%-ish, right? Yeah. So I guess, you know—

Oh, and a lot of that is because they exit their company. So just so people understand, like we had 24 private equity exits amongst our client base in the last 12 months.

Can you speak to maybe your biggest success story? Like this company went from $0 to $100 million ARR?

Like a client of mine?

Yeah.

I mean the bigger numbers are harder to achieve at scale, right? So they call them triple doubles. So I would say my favourite more recently that I'm intimate with, because again, I'm not coaching, I have my coaches that coach, I'm not aware, even though we share customer wins, etc. My favourite is Jo from a company called Gorilla. Jo was probably $30K in MRR when she worked, she joined about 14 months ago, and I think she just reported $140K in MRR. But the thing that I'm most proud of Jo is that she also bought back her time and she's only— because this is a big principle, right? I believe that you have a calendar and you have things in your calendar that either give you energy or take energy from you. And some things are tactical, some are strategic. What I love about Jo is not only did she grow her business executing her growth playbooks, but she's created a life where she's a new mother. She had a 6-month-old, like she— so she had a baby in the middle of all this. Okay, so that's the reason why I'm most impressed with Joe is because of that stuff that anybody else would have gave themselves a reason to take their foot off the gas and she doubled down and she executed and she did that. But dude, if you go on my well the new website we're going to be launching soon, we have hundreds of testimonials of people. Our average client client grows about 270% a year, right? So that's average. And honestly, if people are not doing the work, we just ask them to go find another group. We don't do well with people that think they're gonna just buy some like fairy magic hustle dust or something. Like you gotta do the work. If you do the work, it'll work.

I love that. How much time do you have left? 'Cause that will decide what questions I ask next.

Um, I'm just looking at my calendar. I, whatever we had is what I have 'cause I do have a hard stop. Okay. Yeah. Oh, you know what though? I have a break and a stretch and I'll give that one out.

Okay.

So, I got 15.

Okay. Well, we'll go fast. I don't want you to give up all of your stretch and your break. So, I did speak with— I spoke with Dev a little bit. And so, I feel like there's a structure for putting together your entire coaching program, right? So, if someone wants to do a coaching program, what— I guess, where would they go for that? Did you go through like a program?

Hire Taki Moore. Guy named Taki Moore. I wouldn't be coaching if I didn't meet Taki. And I just got lucky. I sat in front of him at a mastermind Talk event, MMT event, and he was the first guy. And look, people are like, you know what? I saw somebody have a meme. It's like, you know, coaching coaches coaching or coaching coaches coaching coaching. Look, like everything, like real estate agents and social media experts and M&A bankers, there's there's there's a bunch of boners, and then there's some great people. So you got to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Taki is one of those incredible people. And the model that I follow, because I teach model then modify, is 100% borrowed from Taki. Okay? And I don't mind telling anybody that because I know that the people hearing this that have aspirations, most of them won't do shit with it. They won't even— they won't pay the money that Taki's going to charge them, and it's not nothing. It's meaningful. They won't do the work. Like, that's what's funny. I have—

I give—

I've talked to— man, Eric, I've talked to probably— because you know I know a lot of these people. And I've shared with them this and they still don't do it, right? Like one of my best buds who has a top podcast in the world and has a mastermind, he's like, how did you do it? How did you grow it so fast? Right? Like we're an 8-figure— well, A, I don't know how not to grow stuff. So that's my problem is I gotta be careful what I choose to do because I'm gonna go 100%. And then working with Taki, he just gave me like the implementation aspects of it, right? So that I could just swipe and deploy. But then, and then, I took that same model and created it for my software entrepreneurs, and it works. But for me, it's coaching, content, and community, right? People win because of your content and your growth playbooks. They'll stay because of your coaching and accountability, but they'll truly grow because of the community itself. Like the, as you know, last time I think we saw each other was at SaaS Stock. Like getting around people. If you're the smartest person in the room, get another room. Like too many of you guys are the smartest person on your street. Move, like move, get out of the building. I don't know what else to say. Like some people think they're the fucking baller because they're in a mediocre room. Dude, there's another level, Eric, as you know, there is another level for every person. And if you're still hanging out with the same people you hung out with 2 years ago and your business is growing, you're in the wrong freaking group of friends. You need to go to the next level to be inspired, to be exposed to things, to share. And that's always what— and that's what I did in the coaching space. I decided to study certain people that had built $25 million plus coaching businesses. And it turned out even those people, they were way too much sizzle, not enough steak.

Hmm.

Right? They were very good at the marketing, shit on the delivery and the fulfilment. I applied what I know about software to the delivery fulfillment side of the client experience and took everything that they could teach me on the marketing side and do it the way I would like to do it, which is what the ads you're seeing. Like, at the end of the day, I'm not selling the opportunity of doing software. I'm trying to approach people that are in software that want to do it better, faster, quicker. And that I just lead with everything. One of our core values, our flywheel, we have a flywheel for our business, I do that for every one of my companies, is we literally have, we teach everything we know. Everything inside our clients, we will give it away. Now I might only run it for an ad for 6 months, but it's there, right? I'll give away this template, the Rocket Demo Builder, a lot of people downloaded that. That probably generated like $2 or $3 million in revenue for us, gave it away for a little bit, and then other ones, and we just keep cycling through. So it's fun for me because the better I can deliver for my clients, that all becomes content.

Yeah.

And it's just super fun, man, to build a business where I get paid to study, learn, and teach, and then that content becomes ways that I can serve and help people I'll never work with for the rest of my life. Like, 90% of the people that consume my YouTube videos are not in software and will never work with me, maybe even more, right? But we get, I don't know, like 10 million views since we started the YouTube channel. It's awesome.

It's a lot. You know what I say in the internet marketing world, right? That the best thing you can do is merge with the world of tech, right? Then you have— you understand kind of how to retain people, but you also understand acquisition.

Product.

Yeah.

Product-market fit. Most people in other industries, doesn't matter what industry, they don't understand the concept of product.

Yeah.

PM fit and retention. And that, you know, what happens, you create this— there's this thing called the growth ceiling where Even if you're growing, and that's why I like those awards for like fastest companies to grow. I mean, they just started from a small base, so it's like 10x and 15x. Yeah, but it's a small number. What happens is that if you're growing at a certain pace, you'll eventually get to a place where you're losing more clients every month than your ability to attract customers, and that's your growth ceiling. So if you spend most of your time on the top of the funnel growth stuff, you don't build the better retention side, that natural ceiling sits low. If you work on the retention side up front, it might be slower growth, but what you don't see is the trend line of lost revenue. So if you actually mapped the revenue gain versus revenue loss, most founders inherently would see this loss curve go like, what the hell? And they would fix it. But most people just keep looking at the top line, so they don't even know it's a problem. But if you're losing more money than you've ever made, and that's what sometimes happens, is this top line curve is half the size as their loss curve, Man, that's just, that's money you could have kept if you work on the delivery and the retention side.

Yep. It's insanity. All right. A couple more questions from my side so we can get to your stretch break. So, it seems, I mean, you talk about building, you talk about being a systems thinker, right? So, right now, the way I see it is the coaching business is kind of a, it's a vessel. You get great cash flows, great relationships from that, and maybe you get some good deals you can invest in, right? And then now you have an It's called, what's it called? High Speed what?

Ventures.

High Speed Ventures. And so long-term, it sounds like you just continue that flywheel, right? And then you're just gonna maybe look for other deals, plug it in and just keep going.

It literally is this infinity loop. I've got SaaS Coach, which is training and coaching that allows us to have the lab to test and perfect and build frameworks. And then on High Speed Ventures is we take those frameworks and actually deploy them in companies I own, right? You know, eat my own dog food, and and both networks support each other, right? Like some of my leaders over here can go do sessions over there on certain topics, right? And it's just now sounds really cool. Eric was not part of the plan when I started. Like it it it's kind of one of it's a hundred percent like looking back. It's easy to connect the dots. Was not part of it.

I mean.

I have probably the most incredible pipeline of SaaS acquisitions than anybody in the world right now. Like we add 3,000 to 4,000 emails of SaaS founders to our list every month from SaaS Coach that if they're on the list, they either wanna grow the business or maybe they wanna exit the business.

Hmm.

So that was just like during COVID I just decided to accelerate what I was gonna do anyways earlier by 3 years probably. And that's where High Speed came from. But when I started coaching, I thought I'll just have a handful of clients and I'll go to another company at some point and I'll just keep them. Like, I have enough time in the day. I'm willing to work my ass off. I don't care. I'll keep coaching because I drive an incredible amount of value from that and I will operate my own company. But now I technically have 2 companies I operate. I have SaaS Coach, which I'll probably hire a CEO next year, and High Speed Ventures. And that's just, again, it sounds Logical, but it wasn't designed from the beginning. It was just I wanted to create. I wanted to learn new skills, man. Like I wanted to learn how to communicate. I want to learn how to tell stories. I wanted to learn how to take all the things I knew how to do for myself and teach it to other people because those are two different things. Can you take something that you're good at and communicate clearly enough and simple enough and understand the the beginner's mind so that they can consume it? And then what's cool now with high speed is can you do that and work through a group of people to then influence the outcome to get the results, right? 'Cause that's what my clients are dealing with. They're learning all this stuff, but now they gotta work with their teams to try to get them to take action. So that feedback loop over here is informing how I design and structure my content with my curriculum designer on the coaching and training side. So it's fascinating, but Um, wasn't by design from the beginning.

I love it. So it kind of serves as, uh, call it a micro PE firm almost, right? So—

It would be if I took other people's money. It's just my own capital.

Got it. So let's call it a holding company.

Yeah, that's why I call it like my family office or my holdings company.

Okay. And how is that team— how's the team structured for, for High Speed Ventures right now?

Uh, I mean, I've got 3 people over there, and then I, I've bought some companies and they kind of help They're kind of cross-functional right now, right? Yeah, so I've got kind of like my acquisitions guy, my first 100 days guy, and then we're bringing in somebody on kind of like revenue operations, but it's gonna be super fluid, right? I mean, I coach Syed on this at Awesome Motive, I coach Kevin at SureSwift Capital on this, I coach Adam Krushoff from We Assemble, Or assemble. So like I've already worked with other people on it. It's just I don't really know the way I'm going to do it. One of the fundamental principles that is different about how I grow companies is this concept called the buyback principle, which is I look at my calendar and I hire to buy back time out of my calendar. So where most people make the mistake of like designing the org chart and designing what it needs to look like and then hiring people to fill roles, I always start from a first principle approach of buying back my time to make my life less chaotic as I grow so that I'm always pushing on the gas and I don't inadvertently drive with the handbrake on. Does that make sense, Eric?

Totally. Yeah.

I mean, it seems so obvious, but I sometimes wonder if it's— I'm not explaining myself right.

By the way, it's super clear. But even going beyond is you start looking at your direct reports' calendars, your top managers, and how do you buy back their time, right? So that's what the game is.

So that's where the— it continues being played, is if you can show up that way for yourself, you will teach your leadership team to do that for themselves, which will allow you to build an organisation that can scale. And I call that transformational leadership. Most people are running the transactional leadership, which is tell them what to do, check that it got done, and tell them what to do next, which can get you to 12 people. That's about the number where it just gets ridiculously painful, and it's usually about $2 million in revenue. And so if somebody is not there yet and they're at 1 and they're gonna get to 2, trust me, you will go from 2 to 3, back down to 2 because it's gonna be painful 'cause you didn't build it right. Whereas this model is built to scale and is pretty much when I study all the top, you know, the real CEOs of publicly traded companies, that was the pattern they were executing and they didn't even know they were executing that created that management bandwidth, right? That bench strength, that leadership team, I love that.

So 2 rapid-fire things. I'm just writing it down. The buyback concept, we'll just call it that, right? Is that what you call it?

Buyback principle.

Buyback principle. We'll put that in the show notes. So Dan, 2 rapid-fire questions here. What's your favorite business book?

I'm going to say, dude, you're making me pick one book. I would say Seeking Wisdom: From Munger to Darwin. It's a good book.

I mean, you can throw another one if you want. It seems like you want to.

No, I was trying to pick out of the 100 that I would say are my favorite, but I would say that's the— if you had to pick one that I think learning how to look at the world, I think is probably a first principles approach that'll help people.

Got it. I love that. And guys, watch The Psychology of Human Misjudgment as well with Charlie Munger. It's a good one. Um, and then your favorite business tool?

I would say Front right now, frontapp.com. It's really allowed me to kind of like, again, that whole like buyback time, it's just a great leverage tool.

Got it, I love that. Well, Dan, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you online?

Dan Martell, 2 L's, martell.com. If you wanna subscribe to my newsletter and get all my content, I publish a lot of it, but like just super tactical and valuable. And then Instagram Stories if you wanna see the behind the scenes. Um, kind of what I'm reading, what I'm thinking about, et cetera. I share my whole life publicly.

All right. Check out the Instagram, guys. He's the behind the scenes of the strongest man in SaaS. Dan, thanks so much for doing this.

Thanks so much, Eric. It's good to see you, man. Talk soon.

Don't forget to check out the next video over there. Okay. Over there. And before we go, open a new tab, levelingup.com to learn more about the book. We may or may not have other goodies tied to to this book. All right, levelingup.com in a new tab. You can check out the next video first in a new tab, and we'll see you later.