$100M CEO Explains How to Build a Personal Brand in 2026

That was the most value-added podcast I've ever done.

My guest today is Dan Martell, a bestselling author and investor with 3 successful software exits and a $100 million holding company.

Every outcome you want has a blueprint.

He's built a system that starts with auditing his time, applying what he calls his buyback loop.

I've never taught this before. You get an exclusive.

And thinking in terms of capturing content instead of creating it.

As a creator, Your job is to get better at trading your time. Audit, figure out what we need to come off my plate. Transfer, get great people, give it to them. And then if you just do this in your life, you will be like so happy.

This is a 1-hour masterclass on content, systems, and leverage.

I'll walk you through what I think is the framework that every person can use. That's called the replacement ladder. There's 5 rungs to this ladder. The 4th level is my favorite level, and that's So you've technically started making money while you're not there. That is called business. I love that.

Yeah, we've known each other for 10, 12 years now. You've been making content the entire time, but it's like the last— from at least from the outside, I'd say the last 2 years that things have really taken off. And what was it, a couple of months ago that you hit 2— I hit a million.

We're like 4 million across all platforms now. Yeah, yeah. Million on Instagram, million on YouTube, million on TikTok, million and I think we're on pace to Facebook. Yeah.

So like I've come on your show when you've talking, as we've been talking about SaaS or all of those things, I don't know, probably 7 years ago, 8 years ago, like you're doing the thing like everybody else making content and it's worked for you. It's gotten connections, all of that. And then there's just, there's a different Dan that's shown up the last 100%. What happened?

Well, I mean, the short version of the story is my book came out and you and I know a lot of author friends. And, you know, I think when you, when you have any kind of success in life, you hope your life has impact for other people more so than your own life. And a book is usually that format. And there was a part of me that I kept hearing from people saying, hey, most people make the mistake of like the book comes out and then they never talk about the book after the launch. And I knew that intellectually, but I'm also a busy person running company. So it was like, I remember this moment where I was hiking and I had this like epiphany where I kind of felt like, you've been asking to have impact. I gave you the book. The feedback is positive. If you go back to building another software company, you missed the whole point. And that was the, the moment where I'm on this hike going like, but I don't I know what that meant because I've been in, you know, I know how to do stuff. Yep. But I kind of rejected it for a while, and just because I had a lot of commitments to other people. It's not like my life wasn't busy. And eventually I called a lot of my business partners and I said, hey, I'm thinking of going all in on media and it's going to require me to restructure my whole calendar. Talk to my wife Renee. She was like, what? And what does that mean? And like, the first thing she said is, not my house. Which I've always had distributed teams and worked in my home office. And I knew I was going to have people with video cameras there. And she's like, not here. So then I have to go get a space. And but the way I explain it to people is I decided to go from having a marketing department to building a media company. And those are completely two different things. And I think, you know, it's the difference between dabbling or going pro. And I was dabbling for ever. I mean, I was doing it, but I was doing like the checklist version. I was doing the YouTube. I never missed a week. Every Monday I publish, right? Did the show with you. Yep. But it was always just a checklist. It was never a, oh, this should get better and you should look at the analytics. Like all the stuff I do in business wasn't applied to media. No, zero. It was, again, it was just like a thing to be done. It's not broken. But I'm not gonna like— I'm not gonna dedicate a ton of time and resources to it. But the moment the book came out and I realized like this thing could have the biggest opportunity for me to serve and help the most people and push me outside of my comfort zone, because I didn't want to do it. Like, I have no— I don't— I have zero need for anybody to know my name or to recognize me. I call it the facial recognition. I don't need facial recognition. But, um, people need to know who you are and understand what your values are for them to trust you to make the decision to buy a book or do the stuff in the book. So that, that was a big thing. It was going from amateur to pro.

And so, like, if you had 2 or 3 changes that you made, that was that, that juxtaposition between amateur and pro, what were they?

Well, these are just the things that I do in my life that I know work. So the first one was environment, okay, or the container. Okay. Most people don't realize that your container tells me about your identity. Okay, think about it. You walk into somebody's office, like, then, you know, we talked about when I walked into this studio, there are people that have studios and their container for their studio is, is relegated to the back corner of an industrial park, right? For whatever their reasons are for that. Versus other people say, no, like this place, I want it to be in a beautiful building, like street level sunlight. It's a vibe. There's a difference between amateur and pro. So it's like, first, your environment, like, If I'm a professional athlete, am I training by myself in a farmer's field or am I going to the number one facility? A pro does number one facility. So first was the environment, like, and, and anybody can do this. It doesn't matter if it's like, man, why am I— I had a coaching client, she was literally recording her videos with a, like, uh, four generations ago iPhone. And it was, and she's trying to teach people how to be successful in business. And I'm like, there's a, there's a cognitive disconnect between The quality of your video trying to teach, which is great content, but visually it was off. So that was the first thing, container. Second one was, um, people. Like having part-time contractors doing stuff to try to keep your costs down is not telling the universe, I want to be serious about this. So the first thing I did was, was call my creative director, Sam, and say, hey, I'm gonna go build this. I would love to build this with you, but I need you to move. Okay. And at the time he lived 4,000 miles away. But to his credit, man, 10 days later, knock, knock, knock, door opens and Sam's there. But there was also his best friend, Matisse. It turned out it was a two-for-one deal. My wife were like, how long are they staying in our house? I was like, a week, a month later they were still there. But that was the people side. So, right.

So like the container, then the people was a really quick on the people side. This is something that I've encountered as well. Where I tried to do a lot with contractors early on when building Kit.

Yeah.

And then it was my friend Danny Inney, like we were having breakfast and he said—

Great Canadian, by the way.

Exactly. And he goes, if you pay for half of someone's time, you get a quarter of their attention.

Yep.

And I was like, no, no, no, because then you get the most vote. Oh, you're right. You're 100% right. And when I shifted to like full-time core team members who are thinking about how do we solve these problems, you know, all day and all night, like we just had a huge difference. And sounds like you did the same thing.

Yeah, and I think it's the concept of hearts versus hands. Like if you're just paying people for tasks, that's their hands.

Yeah.

I want their heart. I want their thinking. I want them to be at dinner with a friend and talk about their work in a way that might get that friend to introduce them to somebody that we, you know what I mean? Like that's a completely different level of culture and team buy-in. So the people side was the second, and then the third was just strategy. Like, when I go to solve a problem, the first thing I do is ask myself, who in the world is doing this at the highest level? And then I personally will pay to learn as fast as I can because that's the, the speed of learning. And a lot of people are like, I mean, uh, what books should I read? And then they're like, I'll go read those books. I was like, you could read those books, or you could just call the author, pay him for his time, and get the answer you need. It all depends. Some people don't have the financial resources, but for me, I'm— and I don't care even if I had no money. When I started off, I had no money and it was scary, but I like cold emailed 30 people to hopefully get 5 replies to get on a phone call with 2 of them. Right. And a lot of people don't think about that. So the third part was strategy of understanding every outcome you want has a blueprint. And if you don't pay for the blueprint, then you have to go on the journey to figure it out. And if you want to change, that's what I was before. I was just doing it right, right. But I wasn't— I didn't have like a process of refinement. See, I remember reading a long time ago this concept of like 10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell talks about like becoming an expert takes 10,000 hours. What he should have said was it's not just 10,000 hours because there's a lot of people you hire that have like 25 years of experience. Now you have 1 year of experience repeated 25 times. That's the idea of like repetition versus iteration. Repetition is just doing 10,000 hours of something. Iteration is 10,000 learnings. And the people that have been doing it for a while that are world-class have done those iterations. If you want to start and move quick, you got to go learn from them. And that was the first thing we did when Sam came in. I said, hey man, who are the people you admire? They're creating content. Ali Abdaal, many others that we've talked about.

Yeah.

Okay, let's figure out like who, who'd they work with? What was their team structure? And some of them were kind enough to get on phone calls. Other ones we paid for consulting. And that, those 3 things were like the container or the environment, the people investing in that team, and then also the strategy is what people see today. But that's what going pro means, right? What's his name? Pressfield wrote a book. Steven Pressfield wrote the book Going Pro. That's all I did was made that decision to stop playing amateur hour and go all in.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you had your group of people that you went to, many of whom are friends or, you know, in this community and all of that. When I look at it of like, okay, what does it look like to go pro? You're the person that I'm like, you know, want to sit down and unpack it conveniently. We, uh, have the camera, we've got the board, we got all that. So let's jump up on the board. And if you wouldn't mind teaching a couple of the frameworks. That you think are most important and we'll start to break this down.

Let's start for like, let's focus on a creator that's doing like half a million in revenue.

Okay.

Does that make sense? Is that the right? So first thing we need to understand is where they're spending their time to be able to get more leverage. Okay. So we'll just write buyback loop. So the buyback loop is the process of figuring out how do we get more done. So My idea is capacity. Okay, we only have the same amount of hours in a day. We need to increase our capacity because if we want to go to a new level to attack a new devil, then we have to have the space to go do the development to learn how to play that next level. So the first thing is, is it's a 3-step loop. The first part is to audit. So I just write audit. It's ATF. We'll get through the— yeah, audit. And audit is to look at what we're currently doing. Okay, because people always go like, Dan, who do I hire first? I get it. We'll get to that. But auditing is, you know, every person's unique because I don't know what your team looks like. I don't know what you focus on. Right. For a lot of creators, they get really romantic about the creative process of what they're doing, which stops them from learning to let go. So we're just going to start by— we're going to start with the easy stuff. So when I've done this process, which is you take the last 2 weeks of your life, Okay, and if it's in your calendar, that's easier. If not, you have to audit it. You gotta like log it. So every 30 minutes you write down what you did for the past 30 minutes. And if it's surfing TikTok or, you know, messing around, calling a friend, write it down. Okay? Because then what you have is you have a log of all the things that you've done. And then what I do is I highlight in green things that give me energy that I love to do, and then red things that suck my energy. Because especially for creators, The thing that stops them from creating the best art is the dealing with the stuff that sucks their energy.

Right.

Dude, like imagine trying to shoot a really good YouTube video after coming out of meeting to found out that you have to pay taxes.

Yeah.

See what I'm saying? Like it's just not gonna be a great piece of content. So then once you have the stuff that's green and red, the next thing is to write down what do you think it would cost you to pay somebody else to do that work, right? The value of that work. So I always think of like $1 sign is very low cost to $4 signs is very high cost, which is like paying somebody to do what you do as a job. It's kind of like a restaurant, like how expensive is the restaurant? Yeah. And it works for anybody, 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, $4 signs. And then I just go through each task and I just write that down. The cool part is, is once I do the time and energy audit, the only thing I gotta do next is hire somebody that I can grab all the red stuff that has $1 or $2 signs. And this is the rhythm of scaling that I've used in all my companies, specifically for the creative. So like the first thing I realized, not very efficient for me to hold a camera and edit. First call I made was to Sam, the video capture and editor. Right. Okay. And Matisse that came with them just happened to be his buddy that he edits with. So then we just had a two for one. Right. But that was right off the bat when I look at my time and energy audit. Well, clearly I'm not gonna hold the camera or set up the camera or edit the footage. So, and I don't wanna do that or learn that skill. So I audited that and found that person. Now the step, the second part of this is the transfer. 'Cause once you've got only that, okay, that list of stuff, is there another marker? Yeah. Here, do this. Okay, so once we've got this list, These are the things that are bad, okay, that cost very little money, not, not expensive. Okay. Now the crazy part is that might be even scheduling my posts on social media and editing videos and replying to comments. So that's a bucket. So once I've got that bucket of stuff and some people make the mistake of like, okay, I got to hire a contractor for this and a contractor for that. No, I hire somebody that can do all of them. Okay.

Because then you're not having to talk to—

Conversational overhead. You know that every new person to your team is not an extra person. It's exponential to the person and the size of your team. It's a pain in the butt. So I'd rather one face, smiley face, happy face person. Now the hard part though is how do I take what I know how to do and transfer it to that person in a way that they're still happy?

One really quick thing I'm realizing just as you're talking, I'm pretty good at pulling out my phone, recording some quick content or making that, or like doing a fun trip, like flying my plane from California back up here and make a bunch of content. This feels like a dumb thing, but that content doesn't leave my phone because I'm broke.

Like this part is fine with you. Yeah, you captured it.

Is there like a very simple— because I see you, you know, before we started recording, right? You did a really quick Instagram story, that kind of thing. What's your process for getting—

That's a great question. So I— what I do is I get prompted. So I'm a big fan of like, first For example, I don't run any meetings. I want to participate, not be accountable for. So I can capture like I did before we started recording, but then I'm prompted by my creative director to like, hey, go through your phone, click, click, click, and save it in a shared folder. That shared folder then notifies the whole media team of what's in there.

That makes sense.

Because that's where the B-roll comes from. That's where the Instagram stories come from. So I still capture because I don't need a person laying next to me in bed when I'm talking to my wife. But if I need it out there in the world, somebody else prompts and pulls off my phone. We just use a shared iCloud folder.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm realizing you could even do something of like you get in the car to drive to your next podcast and it's like Sam's like, hey, gimme your phone.

And you're like, oh yeah, he lit. Oh, here's a trick. He has fingerprint access to all my devices.

Nice.

Yeah. Yeah. Like if so, nobody knows you can add a separate fingerprint to like your laptop and your thing because he's always like, hey, log into your thing. Log. And I'm like, I don't wanna do this anymore. How about you just scan your finger, dude? That was like the biggest unlock for our relationship. That's amazing. Yeah, because then he just moves.

There's one other thing that you said of not having, not running the meetings, but it makes me think of Andrew Wilkinson has this line where he says, I'm Teflon for tasks. Meaning if you try to have me do something, he's like, oh, whoops, that slipped right off.

Yeah.

You know, leaving a meeting, like action items is like nothing can be assigned to him.

Yeah, I call them work products. Yeah. I don't do work products. And the other thing is the frame that I use in all my companies is I'm the talent.

Yeah.

So you're the person that produces and orchestrates and I'm the talent. So you just— as long as you let me know where I need to be. And the reason why is when I used to do my time and energy audit, which I do this probably twice, 3 times a year right now, because the more change and growth you have in your life, the more frequently you have to do it, is I noticed that a lot of the energy sucking for me was worrying about the next thing or getting back to people. And once I got to a place where the businesses were working, I had the time to have somebody else worry about that stuff. It allowed me to, to step back and just be present with you, not wondering, is the next thing going to work out, etc., etc. Like you— that's where we'll talk about the people side. Such an important framework.

I like it. All right, let's dive into the transfer.

So transfer is getting the stuff that you need done off of your plate to them in a way where you don't feel like you're training because like most people want to hire somebody, have the budget to hire somebody, but then think about, I don't even have time to do my work, let alone now train somebody new. So what I do is this framework called the camcorder method. So I got camcorder method. And what's cool, draw a little camera, brrp brrp brrp, is I record everything. So at my desk on my computer, I have screen recording software, which today I just use Zoom by myself and share my screen. I have cameras recording me in meetings and I capture the process of what I'm doing, knowing that someday I'm going to have to get it off my plate. Now, if you didn't do that and you're starting here and you audited your time, then you have to use— you got to, as you do it the next time, give it to somebody else. So for example, one of my buddies, Mark, he's a professional speaker and he was freaking out because he loves to speak. He doesn't like any other aspect of speaking. Right. The admin, the scheduling, the travel, the invoices, the receivables. Right. So what I told him, I said, well, next time you do all your financial stuff, take the time to like record yourself doing it and but talk out loud. So like what happens is the nuance gets missed. So as you're writing an email for a late receivable and you write it, yes, copy paste it as a potential template, but also talk about the philosophy. So I'm I am using this information from here and I'm writing the email like this. And you're talking out loud. Now what that does is it creates these videos for all these different areas that you're gonna give to somebody else. And when I hire the person, this smiley face, happy, great culture fit person, and I give them their first day, they pretty much spend the first 3, 4, 5 days just watching videos. And the first time I hire somebody to do this, they're the ones that create the SOPs. Standard operating procedures. See, most people won't hire the person until they have the time to document the thing. Don't do that. Record yourself doing the work, which is net time, no extra time. I get to do the work, record it while I'm doing the work, and create the onboarding for the next person I hire. So it doesn't take me any time to sit down and do this. This, like, if you just do this in your life, you will be like so happy.

So a practical example, I hired a new executive assistant. She's been with me for 2 weeks now. And so she's working on a presentation that I'm giving Tuesday morning. And so she put the presentation together based on what we talked about.

But this is just that sentence freaks people. You realize she's putting together a presentation for me like that. Like some people, especially the creators, they're like, how could you ever let somebody else do that?

Well, and so what I did is on a call that we recorded, I knew the presentation was going to be, you know, things that I've talked about before. So I pulled up the keynote given at Cody Sanchez's conference a few years ago. It's like, I think I'm going to use these parts of this. And we like talk through it. She's like, all right, good to go. She comes back with a presentation and I jump in. I care a lot about design. My whole career was in design before all of this. And so she's done a good job, but I dive in and I, I record a Loom video of me improving the design in little areas and exactly what you're saying, talking through why I made certain decisions.

Philosophy. And notice the white space here because I know it transitions to this. That's, that is what people forget to do. And you'll never be able to document an SOP to detail to capture that. And that's, that's, I call those North Star principles. Like there's these, these philosophies when I do my work that I ask people when they watch the videos to pull those out. Yeah, that's cool. I love that.

Okay, so then we've transferred actually another point. I hate creating SOPs. And what you just said is I never create SOPs.

Literally, people like, who created your SOP? I'm like, I didn't. My assistant, which is— this is the first time I hired them. I just gave them the videos and then they put it out. Yeah. Was it accurate? No, it was good enough. And then we just kept refining it.

Yeah, that sounds good.

So once we transfer, the challenge that most people have is now you start getting a lot of time back and most people don't do good with a lot of time. They go, they keep busy with little stuff. Now we go to fill. And that's the third step to the buyback loop. And the whole point of fill is to fill your time back up with things that light you up, that make you the most money. See, as a creator, your job is to get better at trading your time, becoming a better time trader. So why would I buy back my time to go do low-value things that don't increase the ability? So for me, the fill is all about focusing. I call it like a ladder. There's kind of 3 things that we focus on. First off, there are the habit side of things. Okay.

Okay.

So most people don't realize that you can't grow yourself out of bad habits. Okay.

Like, talk about that more.

Well, you know, this is like, they're like, I want to be a top content creator. It's like, okay, well, step 1, you have to be consistent. Some people are not consistent. Then it's like, you have to have discipline. They're like, oh, you know, like, so I always say like the ladder of success is filling your calendar back up with acquiring, you know, these new kind of skills, right? So the second one is actually skills. So each level, yeah, second is skills. So one is to get the habits dialed in so that you become the person who can climb that ladder. Okay, that's the fill part. The next one is skills. What's the next level skill you need to acquire to go be world class at the thing you want to accomplish? So the next level skill I had to acquire, if I'm the talent and Sam's the capturing it on the content side, is I got to go learn how to talk. And it sounds funny because people see me today, but that's why I leave my old videos up. Go watch them. I was very clinical. I was very informational, but I wasn't entertaining. I didn't use metaphors. I didn't understand how to pause. I didn't diagram. I didn't visualize what I was saying. I didn't tell stories. If I told stories, maybe they were too long, right? There's a difference between like an anecdote versus an origin story. So I made a list of the skills I had to go acquire to be great at creating content because there's no amount of editing that will fix bad talent. Your media team is just like, oh my gosh, please fix this. It's so— they're like, oh, Dan, you were totally not on today. And I'm like, I'm so sorry because it's a vibe. You feel it. It's like You're talking and you're not there. The person— and that's the difference maker, especially on a YouTube where the person's listening and watching and they're looking at your eyes. And if they see you flinch and you're not confident what you're saying or you're not into what you're saying, they're like, I'm not watching this. He's not in. I don't believe he believes what he's saying. That's a huge one.

So on those skills, I'm always thinking in terms of flywheels and so— or like a feedback loop in this case. Did you have to do anything to get your media team or show up in a certain way so your media team and Sam and others are saying like, all right, Dan, here are the 3 skills that I need you to learn or to give you that feedback?

There is a feedback loop. So what in the early days, okay, 'cause I'm gonna go back to the early, not what we do today 'cause it's more advanced. In the early days, it was literally we do 10 shots on goal, figure out what worked, sat down as a small team of 1 or 2, 3 of us, and look and then talk about, here's what I think worked in that video. And that gave me my personal, okay, I gotta go run skills and drills around this.

Right. And you're looking at the Instagram Reel, you know, we're 10,000 views, 10,000 views. Oh, this did 500,000 views.

Yeah.

What's the difference?

Why do we think that?

Yeah.

Is it the hook? Okay, if it's the hook, what hook worked? Dan, can you go? 'Cause this is the other thing about me is, I don't like to create. I like to capture. I want to live my life because when I look at like time and energy, the idea of like the pressure of having to create and be on is tough. Whereas if I can become the person that can just naturally do that, I remember like 2009, I'm at South by Southwest with Gary Vaynerchuk and we're walking. I go, dude, I love the fact that you've taught yourself to talk in tweets. And he goes, he looks at me confused. He's like, that's just how I talk. I go, dude, nobody talks like that. He goes, turns out I do. And to his credit, because I've seen him now do it for 17 years. Yeah, he talks that way where that platform was perfect. Now, I knew that I didn't talk the right way to generate really powerful hooks, so I had to start studying the hooks and then learning how to integrate them. So like I've learned now that if I feel like, oh, I'm teaching something but doesn't have a good hook, I'll literally insert the hook for the team to edit and then put the content. Yeah, because they need— because we also split test hooks. Right, right. So that's an example of like the feedback loop. So we do that for every part of our media pipeline. There's a meeting where I sit down with my team and they review the thing that they think, hey, next time we need this, we need this, we need this. And the key is with this, one at a time, skills and drills. Like, you know, the golfer.

Yeah.

You don't go up to a golfer and say, okay, there's 17 things wrong with what you're doing. You say, hey, the way you're holding your club, you need to do this, right? That grip, we're just going to— okay, that's all we're going to go.

It's 18 holes. That's all we care about.

Go hit with the new grip and like adjust, right? And they also don't practice while they play, right? That's amateur hour.

Okay.

Oh, amateurs practice while they play. A professional practices outside of the play. And that's also a thing that I had to do. So like in the early days when you're trying to learn these skills, you might create a lot of moments where the content is never gonna be used, but the whole point was to practice, right? On purpose, like intentional practice. The third one is mindset. We already touched upon it. I can't help you create great content if you don't believe you're great. That's a hook. See how I did that? No, I'm just kidding. Maybe, maybe it never shows up on the internet and I'm not that good, but we're working on it. Horrible hook. Like, give me something better. But the idea of beliefs shape our worldviews to even give us the chance to, to improve it, right? You've talked to people who are like, if you truly believe you're only like your goal is $1 million and you're at $700,000, like you're not going to show up every day to really do this work because you feel like you're close to your potential. But that mindset of not realizing that you'll never get a penny more than you think you're worth. And if you don't fight for it, you'll never audit your time to believe that you're worth hiring a great person to take this stuff on. Most people can't do this, not because they don't know, they don't have the money, or they don't know what to give. They don't believe they deserve it. And this is for your home. This is professional. This is— but the creators, especially because a lot of them are creative as a byproduct of dealing with lack of resources growing up. So they sometimes have the scarcity mindset around, around investing in like great environments and great people because they feel like, no, I, you know, I got to do it all. So to me, the mindset is like one of the biggest ones that kind of wrapped the whole thing. So The ladder, the rungs are the skills, and then the habits are on the left side and the mindsets on the right side. Because if your worldview is small, you'll never play a big game. Another hook. I just, I'm doing it in real time, just letting you guys know, 'cause that's what Nathan asked me for. Exactly.

Cool.

This is, but I gotta finish this thing about the loop. Okay. So visually it goes like this. And in life, and I've never taught this before, you get an exclusive. It's always this. And most people that don't fill, they never get the forward momentum. Most people do this and they have a bunch of people and they go chill out in Thailand or Bali and they're on the beach and they never focus on their habits or skills and mindset for more, for what's going to be next. New levels, new devils. You know, they're comfortable playing level 5. They don't realize their potential is 22 levels.

So what you're saying is the— as these loops, each each loop, we've got this graph going up and to the right of it could be revenue, it could be reach, impact. And every time. And so people just stay at the same level for the most part.

Feels comfortable. Yeah.

Oh man, I know a lot of people who—

and it's literally this last step of fill. So audit, figure out what we need to come off my plate, transfer, get great people, give it to them even part-time, but ideally full-time, and then fill your calendar back up with the things that make you money, that light you up. Yeah. To keep that upward spiral right.

What's an example of something that you did maybe in, let's say, 18 months ago, early iterations of this, and that now you don't even do at all as you've taken on new things?

Oh, I mean, just everything from like even the research is probably the big one. Most people would be surprised to find out that 50% of the effort is on the research of what we work on content-wise, not on the capture or the editing. Break it down a little bit.

What's the research process look like?

I don't know. I knew what it looked like when I did it. And trust me, it is way more sophisticated now. Like, I see the teams have their meetings, but I mean, the big idea is in any market there's an essence for what the market wants and research has it. So like, you can go to my channel and say, what's Dan's most popular videos? And go, oh, I'm going to do my version of that. The problem is, is you don't look at the timeline. If it was the most popular 7 years ago, probably not a good decision, right? You want to also filter, say, like in the last 6 months. And not only that, what's an outlier for that channel? Yeah, right. So like that and a bunch of like ideation. I would say like the team that works on ideation is like, it is a process and a system. It's just like innovation within a big company. The, the innovation part is hard. Once it's innovated and then we operationalize it and manufacture it, then it's like, okay, there's a separate set of problems. And I didn't realize the level of focus that needed to go in to the positioning of the content, the packaging. I mean, you know, this thumbnail, just thumbnail design. I was walking around in Utah at my buddy Sean's company Space Station and he opens, he was showing us, doing a tour. He goes, yeah, so this is our thumbnail designer. And we kept going. I said, one second, that guy just designs thumbnails. He's like, yeah. And I'm like, You have a full-time dedicated person on just making thumbnails? He goes, oh yeah. I said, can I see it? And he pulls up his— he has two monitors, his graphic designer, and he shows me, dude, the variations was wild. Like, I think for each show he published, there was like 75, and then whittle down and whittle down, and then split test it with 3. Dude, the level of opportunity for people once they go pro is there. It's just, it looks like work.

Okay, this is fantastic. But in this, who do I hire first?

It's always a favorite question people like to ask me. So this will give you a sense of where you're at. I'll walk you through what I think is the framework that every person can use as like an audit to figure out if they even have the right team. Because if I tell you and I don't tell you how it works, you might think you already got that person, but you're not using them the way you're supposed to. So that's called the replacement ladder. And the whole idea after, you know, you do the audit, transfer, fill is like replacing yourself out of things that don't cost a lot of money to pay somebody else but make the most value for your business.

Right?

And there's 5 rungs to this ladder. So we'll just do like a ladder with 5. I always feel the pressure when I have to draw a ladder, especially if there's like a lot of levels. How's that? Pretty good. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Perfect. All right. This is the one thing I remember when I was studying kind of like my wealthy mentors. The one thing that you will find is they all have somebody that supports them on the administrative level. So the first level is admin. Okay. Now a lot of people say, well, I have a VA, I have a virtual assistant, I have an admin. Yes, you may, but you may not be using them right to actually buy back the most time. And the reason why they're number one is not only are they the least expensive person typically as we go up and the opportunity to get the most time back so that you can do this.

Right.

But the most important is the training ground for you to learn how to lead people. Okay. It's the place where you can walk that tightrope and it's not going to kill you, right? You're in the park on a slackline, a foot off the ground, not 50 stories on top of a building going between buildings. Most people make the mistake of going too high, too quick, and they haven't learned that skill, right? So for me, admin, the two areas is inbox and calendar.

Okay.

And the reason why is if I'm a creator, I want to spend my time doing creative work. I don't want to be routing and I don't want to be slowing things down. So while I'm here with you, I'm getting emails that are coming in for opportunities, changes, scheduling, logistics, and nothing slows down. It gets reviewed, audited, replied to, routed. And that velocity, if you just think about the amount of value you can create in a calendar year by not doing that and sticking to the thing that makes you the most money, that lights you up, how much opportunity or dollars do you think you're pulling into the year because of that velocity, that like cycle time? For me, I think for minimum, most people would be 2 months. So you think about what you make per month, you'd be able to just pull in because it doesn't sit there for 6 days. The other thing about my assistant is that they don't have an emotional attachment to my inbox. And most people do. They open up an email, it hurts their feelings. They know they gotta reply. They start, they mark it unread. They go, I'll reply on Saturday.

Well, even that little thing, I'll pull up my inbox. This is something that I, maybe 3 or 4 years ago, started to get much better at is noticing my own emotions. Because often it's like I'll pull my inbox, check some things, move on, jump on a call, do this, and then be like, man, I'm off today. And I have to rewind the tape and figure out what was it that upset me.

That email.

50% of the time it was a message. You know, the tax bill is going to be $100 grand higher than I thought it'd be.

Or somebody resigned, or the press release went out and it was wrong, or And the thing is, is like when you design your life, you want to execute on the thing that you know is going to make you happy. And if you don't audit, then you're going to start inserting. The challenge with admin, just like on the inbox and the calendar, is most people don't know what to give them. My brother ran into this like he's like, I hired an assistant, but I don't see the big— like, you're like, it's a game changer. And it's like, it's not changing my life. The reason why is they don't understand how much they can give up. So if anybody listening wants to get my internal SOP, So I have my own standard operating procedure. It's like 42 pages. Okay. That Anne helped me extract and sanitize because obviously there's personal stuff. I don't need people to know all that. Just follow me on Instagram and message me @adminnathanbarry for you. If you don't, I'm not sending it, but you got to follow me on Instagram. I'm trying to grow my audience and I'll send them the direct link to that Google Doc. But that'll give them visually— I even have my 5 North Star principles of like what I expect my assistants to do and like my— Anne now has an assistant. I mean, It's kind of crazy when you, when you scale this up, that will happen. But if you ask me, you know, Dan, do you want to keep one of your cool cars or do you want to keep your assistant? I will sell my cars any day of the week, period. I would sell everything before this person goes out of my life.

Right.

That's the admin. What next level up is delivery or fulfillment. You can just write fulfillment or— yeah, yeah. But it's essentially doing the work, right? And this is like if you're a creator, It's everything that's not the creative part. So I don't mind you writing the email if that's what your business is, but scheduling it and testing it and doing all the other stuff, that's delivery. If you are somebody that creates informational products, that's the support email. And trust me, I had a client once, she's like, yeah, I know I've got a great team. I think they were doing like $2 million in revenue. They have a whole team, but like, I still like to go on my support email. I'm like, you're wild. No, stop it. And I'll tell you why. Because if you jump in and do this, you're telling the person that owns that you don't trust them. See, a lot of times our behavior communicates things to our team. We don't need to. Way more than the words do. You teach people how to treat you. So when you're upset that your support person left an email and didn't reply right away to it, well, she probably did that because she knew you were going to come in and do it. And if I'm on your team and I know that you're going to do all the stuff I don't want to do, guess what I'm going to do? Leave it there for you to do for me. That's just natural human behavior. So delivery for me is all about onboarding and support. Okay. This is— I got a new customer and now somebody else is going to talk to that person, set the expectations, take payment, bring them into your world, like support them after the case. I might still be the creative woodworker that does the building, but I'm not the one, you know, scheduling delivery, working on shipping, that kind of stuff. That's level 2. Level 3 next is marketing, right? Because essentially what we're trying to do is build the business. You know, even at, you know, creators out there, they're like, I just like doing my art. It's like you have to build the business because art needs to be paid for. Pretty sure that all your supplies, people want to get paid for it. So the next level for marketing for me is really understanding like the systems and routine for generating leads.

Okay.

And most people, what happens— I remember my friend Rachel, she had a creative agency and she asked me to look at her business and what I saw. And for those listening, it was like zigzags. I'm just going to do this. Like, this was her revenue for like 5 years, just up and down all over the place.

Yes.

And I go, let me, let me take a guess what's happening. You have no customers. You do a lot of marketing, you get customers, you get money, and then you get busy delivering on those customers and you come down here and then you stop doing the marketing, then you realize I don't have enough customers. Right.

It's the—

Feast or famine.

The teeter-totter.

Yeah.

It's like, are we doing fulfillment or are we doing new customer growth?

Yeah.

Right. Like, and you do one or the other and it's not good.

No. And the problem is, is that it— the reason why a lot of people struggle with hiring is because their business isn't predictable enough for them to feel confident and comfortable.

Right.

Making a commitment.

You have a chicken and egg problem.

Yeah. And they do it to themselves. So for me, marketing is all about the system for generating leads. And that's why the Camcorder Method is so powerful because there's probably things you're doing that is marketing. You just gotta document that you do it, right? Like if one of the things you do to generate leads is go through your private Facebook group and message people in the group that have joined privately and say, are you here for this? Are you looking for that? Document it and have somebody else do that. You don't have to do it. If it's, you know, going to an event and talking to people, send somebody on your team and give them a question to prompt the people to generate the opportunity. To grab the business cards and then have follow-up. There's so much systems that need to be documented and then somebody else needs to own it. Because I can't tell you, and we've been doing this for long enough, Nathan, you've probably experienced this where something stops working and when you look through it, it's like the color of the button is white, the background color is white, and that's why the funnel broke because—

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Happens all the time. So having somebody wake up, I say the campaigns and the traffic, traffic. Those are the two things that we need to make sure that they wake up and they focus on, because then they're always looking like, where's the traffic coming from? Did something change? How do we fix the funnel? How do we improve it? And then the campaigns, what's going out throughout the year? Like, we have Christmas around the corner, I have my birthday, I want to do the birthday post. Having somebody manage the content calendar, the schedule, so you can really take a step back as the talent, right, is the next level. Now, this is cool, but I'll tell you why the fourth level is my favorite level, and that's sales, okay? I'm in already. Oh my gosh, this is my favorite. And I call this the freedom stage because if you truly allow yourself, and sales could be partnerships, could be brand deals, could be affiliates, could be obviously sales to enroll into your world. The— if you can step back and let's say you're like, hey man, I know somebody should be working with you, and give that lead to somebody else and have them follow up, have the conversation, right? Have them either make a decision or not, but then continue to follow up and manage that pipeline. The reason why— and I always say it's, it's the, um, it's the sales calls. So the calls plus the follow-up are the two things you want to focus on. Are you still doing sales calls? And are you still managing follow-up? You need to give that to somebody else.

So in this case, I mean, it's a huge unlock, especially 'cause most creators are not good at follow-up.

No, dude, we're running companies. Like, this is what's funny. The fortunes are made in the follow-up.

Right.

70% of your revenue could come from that and you don't do it 'cause it's not as fun either. It's like, I like the chase of the deal.

So one thing that I think about in this, because for Kit, as we're onboarding new creators, especially as we have the Creator Network, so basically a new creator joining our platform is worth a huge amount. And so I'm doing things like I'm looking at, are the New York Times bestseller list this week. All right. I got 4 out of the top 10 as customers. Who else? All right. Number 5. All right. How do we get him on a call? And so we're doing that. I'm involved in that process. Now, I used to then be responsible for the follow-up. Now I have the first call and I bring in someone on my team. But what I'm trying to figure out is if there's a way that I can even get out of the first call, or if it's such a high-value thing that I need to stay involved in that.

Yeah, I mean, there's a strong argument if the value of your business is like the highest value of your time, which in that scenario it would be pretty high. Yeah, then you stay in it until again, you go to your calendar and you go, what am I not doing? Because I'm doing that and is my hour worth it? The big idea of, you know, what I teach in my book, Buy Back Your Time, is trying to increase the value production of your time. So it's always assessing new opportunities versus current and just being more diligent about like, hey, I spent 70% of my time doing internal operational stuff. My next hire is somebody to take all that. So I take that 70% and I redeploy it for things that make me more money. You took a process and said, look, there's a— there's 10 steps to this process. Step 3, I'm still going to do, right? That's beautiful. That's like Steve Jobs going in with, you know, back in the day with Jony Ive and saying, look, I'm still the CEO. My job is innovation. My partner is Jony. I come into the design studio, he presents me options, we collaborate, we talk. But then once we make a decision, everything else is Johnny, then Tim, and then my next only job is the event. And that's where I add my value. So I don't like— you'd have to look at what you're not doing because you're doing that and the volume. But at a certain point, you might actually find somebody that can, you know, that they would also admire.

Right.

Right. One example is like empowering one of your customers to potentially be that person. And incentivizing them financially so they have a huge brand and people want to talk to them and they're a partner of yours. There's different ways to solve the problem.

But even that example of saying, hey, there's 10 steps here, right? In the Apple example, and Steve is going to be involved in steps 3 and 10.

Yeah.

And that's it.

That's it. And because those are the highest leverage things of his time, he's like picking the right innovation, showing that to the world. Those are the areas I'm— it makes me happy to. The other thing is you got to be careful not to give up things that you enjoy doing. Oh, that's a tough one. Enjoy doing plus make you money.

Is there, is there something that you gave up that then you're like, oh wait, no, actually I want that back? So much, dude.

I remember one time team member Vanessa, so I had a very— you've spoken at that group, my very high-end mastermind, right? These are like, you know, 8-figure software CEOs, etc. And obviously it's my group, my community. I want to do final interviews. So like the rest of the process, the marketing is other people, the sales comes to other people. but then I do the 15-minute final check. Yeah. And we're on a call. I'm doing my one-on-one with Vanessa because she reported to me and she goes, hey, I got something on my list I want to talk to you about. I said, what's that? She goes, I really think you need to step back from the final call. And like, I could feel my chest get warm because I was immediately wanting to be confident. I was like, no, this is— it's my curation and my community. And she's really good. She goes, first off, I want to know we appreciate it. And obviously we know you're doing it for a reason. You are a bottleneck in the sales process, so you're slowing the team down because of it. And then she said, I reviewed the last 60 people I sent your way and you didn't say no to anybody. And I was like, she hit you with data as well. Oh yeah. Come with data. They know my love language. And I said, I acknowledge that and I'm just letting you know I'm going to make a decision, but just let me sit with it. And I said, of course, take it over. Right. And then it was— but it was so funny because then it became beautiful. Every time I had an event, I got to meet new friends.

Right.

It was like, it was like so fun. It actually added a lot of fun to it. And I think a lot of people admired the fact that, hey, Dan built a system that's so dialed in that he wasn't even involved in the process. That's kind of cool. I mean, at the end of the day, like, you want to make sure the customer experience is the best experience, and you— them waiting on you to get back to them, not always the best experience. No, they want people like, can I join the program or not?

It's like, well, we got to get to Dan, and he's actually on a plane, you know.

That's all happened. He's on vacation for 2 weeks. It's like, so now you got to wait. It's like, well, the event is in 3 weeks, and if I'm not accepted in, how am I supposed to schedule my time, blah, blah, blah. The reason this is the best level, my favorite level, is because with 4 hires. This is 4 hires, 4 people. You can go on vacation and have somebody else build awareness of your product or service, have a conversation with that person, enroll them into your life and take care of it until you get back. So you've technically started making money while you're not there. That is called business. Most people don't have a business, they have a job, right? Okay, level 5, and it's one of my favorites, leadership. Leadership is understanding once you have these 4 people, who's the next hire of, of a person that's going to manage this. Because when you can, this is where you get to step back as the talent if you hire the right person and they run the operations. Some people call this the integrator, an implementer, whatever it is. I just think of 2 things. They own the outcome 100% and they own the strategy. Most people hire people to do this and then tell them how to do it. It's 'cause you didn't hire the right person. Right. The outcome and strategy. Which means you hire somebody that comes with playbooks, meaning that they have the strategy and they're willing to own the outcome. And if you have to, you have to be like, hey, where's the revenue? Where's the thing? Where's the thing? Like then that's not the right leader. A leader is somebody who can do that. Yeah. I love that.

Okay, so how do you afford to pay for this team? I love 5 people here.

Yeah, yeah. The easiest way for everybody listening, go back here and realize you're not charging enough for what you're doing.

Back to the audit.

You have to go and increase your price. Some people are like, well, I did the audit and then I understand what you're saying, but I can't afford to hire the person.

I can only go $2 signs, not 3 or 4.

Increase your price or change your model. That's one of two options. You're either not charging enough or your business model isn't a good model. And that's where you got to go find people that have a blueprint. And pay them for the blueprint to fix your business.

Okay. So what I want to know is I've seen this because you showed me behind the scenes, but the business that runs like the business model that runs this whole thing, right? And that pays for the cars and the plane. I'm a big plane nerd, so I'm always like, which, which plane did Dan fly today?

You know, like, it's all the 2000 LX. It's pretty cool.

It's a great plane. So in that you've got— do you have 2 or 3 group coaching programs?

So I have SaaS Academy, which is a coaching program for software CEOs. Johnny's the CEO of that company. He runs that. And then within Martell Media, we are a media company that just happens to have education, which because people that bought the book wanted to learn how to implement the book.

And I have one program and that's okay because I know how those programs work. You're making a significant amount of money off of that.

Yeah.

Like your revenue per follower, per subscriber is probably 10 or 100 times someone who's making money off of influencer deals, brand deals?

Oh, 100%. I think, you know, because I understand business, we have the highest revenue media company out there, period. Like multiple 8 figures a year. Wow.

Okay. And so when you have those programs, people are paying, it's in the $5,000 to $8,000 a year range to join the program. Is that right?

Yeah, it's in that bucket. And the reason they're investing that is because they want the accountability, they want the strategy. See, most people that create content I think like, you know, I was just talking to my buddy John about this. He does woodworking and all of his revenue right now is tied to brand deals or revenue from YouTube. And the problem is, is that YouTube's unpredictable and the brand deals are cool, but it just feels like he's capped. Right. Where I'm like—

You're doing that work for the brand deal every time.

Yeah. And it just feels like I'm selling my soul and trying to do the integrated content. Whereas I think if you have an audience and there's a way for you to support them through education, through information and create either a course, which is a lot, a lot of the YouTubers do this, or a group coaching program, or even some people do agency done for you, which is fine, is a way more lucrative business model than being dependent on advertising and brand deals.

One thing that you do all the time that I see is flying down for a specific podcast interview or all of that, right? You're here in Boise, you're going on doing these other, other podcasts. What makes it so worthwhile to go fly out for, you know, one podcast or three podcasts?

The biggest thing, if you— and again, there's a whole strategy behind this called the media tour, okay— is it always is anchored with the keynote. So I always get paid to do the keynote. Once I have that, that funds the rest of it. Then I do the media stuff for content. But the reason why it's valuable is because the whole point of trying to build your audience is to figure out who has pools or pockets or ponds of other audiences that you can get in front of. Right. Right. So I always say, first off, get your social figured out. Like, figure out— like, some people don't even tell people what they do on their social media. So, like, make it clear. Here's what I do, how I do it, and message me if you want help or whatever, whatever the funnel is. Dial that in. And then the second part is stages. Stages are virtual or in person. On this trip, I'm doing all of them. I mean, I'll probably combine, get in front of a couple million new people that didn't know who I was. Before in literally 36 hours.

So you've got the keynote that you're getting paid for.

Yep. And then that funds the reason to take the time. Right. But then as I travel, I reached out to a bunch of people for media stuff. We capture content, we create the vlog. We're literally creating a content piece from the 2 days for YouTube. Again, it's capture, not create. I don't— I just want to live my life.

Right.

But I'm always looking. At where's the biggest leverage. And I also have 7 CEOs on the plane with me that I'm pouring into, right? Because that's a good use of my time. So I'm always trying to say like, how can I get the most capacity out of my day?

And then one thing that I see you doing a lot is it almost feels like you care about the audience of the podcast, but you care more or as much about the content that you're able to create on it, where you're like, hey, give me the footage, give my team the footage.

I travel with my team to capture the footage, even if you have clearly 17 cameras in this room. It's a little intimidating, but it's because it's— that is where the best content's created, right? See, when you talk to somebody like your video person in a room that knows you really well, you don't explain things the way you would with somebody they don't know well, right? Right. It's that beginner's mind. A lot of us, once we've been doing something for a long time, it's hard to go back to remembering. And that's what you did so well in this, this conversation was like, yeah, but when you started, what was it? Right, right. So I think that it's really important to figure out the containers that you can create your best work and make sure that you capture it in those moments and then just do more of that. So it's both stages and then also more content for the social. Yeah.

Speaking of social, what platforms are you going all in on and why?

I would say the two that are top right now that we're dialing in continuously because it's, it's really still so much opportunity is YouTube. YouTube, because that's where people that invest have the most trust built. They get to know you. It becomes a routine. They expect the publishing time. They watch the videos. And a lot of times it's entertainment. They'll put it on the background. They'll put it on repeat. They'll get YouTube subscription and download it for a flight. Instagram, because Instagram has the best messaging platform to build audience and have conversations with them.

Right.

And for us, that's the way I like to talk to people.

Well, and that's also your whole sales conversion process. Like something that you do remarkably well is have people DM you, reach out.

You have this conversation like I did right here, right? Like, and do it in a way that's value added, that's organic. Like, and even that word sales, like it's not sales. It's like, do you have a problem? Yes or no? No. Cool. Yes. Let's talk.

So when we were hanging out in Charleston, it was probably a year, a little over a year ago. You were showing me, I think you had 200,000 followers on Instagram at the time, so we've probably 5x since then. You were showing me the conversations that you were having, just DMing either people who responded to your Reels, comms that try, any way to start a conversation. And then I think you were even DMing maybe every new follower.

I was DMing every new follower, people that viewed my stories and people that liked or commented on my posts.

And just starting conversations. And that I believe is how you kickstarted the entire, the whole thing, the whole flywheel and everything.

Yeah, it blew my mind that people would reply and that I could help them and then they would show up in my program. It was the coolest thing ever. I think people don't do social. They do social, but they're not social.

They're just broadcasting.

The whole point is to be social. It's called social media. Like when I grab their phone and I go on their Instagram and I just keep— I literally do this. I did it, I think at that event. I was like, give me your phone. And I went through and I just started chatting with people and like the people replied and they're like, oh my God, is it really you? Yeah, it's me. Let's talk. And they're like, This is so crazy, but that's the whole reason. And most people don't understand that Instagram has decided to compete against Snapchat to make their messaging platform one of the most powerful platforms out there. So as of today, YouTube, Instagram, can't go wrong. Yeah.

All right. Last question. We've known each other for a decade. You've watched me build a SaaS company to $45 million in revenue. I feel like I am right on the edge between the old you of creating content for a long time, being consistent, all of that, learning and iterating, and the like fully going pro. What are the things, like the specific advice you would give me for stepping over into that world and be like, all right, it's time to go pro?

Well, there is the strategic and tactical stuff, which would, you know, I'd have to look at the videos to see where the opportunity is. But for everybody listening and for you, it's two things. And this is what I looked at for myself. How much of my calendar was I committing to this and what percentage of my bank account was I committing to this? Because I can't say it's important and then deploy 2% of my income to it or 5% of my calendar. If it truly is something you want to be pro, you're going to have to figure out how to buy back your time from other areas and then deploy that capital into that thing. And that's always how it's been. Everybody that's ever won and been massively successful It's literally what do they spend time on? You show me your bank account and your calendar and I'll tell you what's important to you. Yeah, I love that.

Okay, so everyone should go read Buy Back Your Time. It's a fantastic book. I've bought literally hundreds of copies of this book.

I know you have, and I super appreciate it.

And so read that. But also, where should people go to follow you?

Instagram. Find me on Instagram. But the truth is, is every platform is different. So if you're, if you're a LinkedIn person, go on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn, I think, is pretty awesome. TikTok. I love TikTok, completely different content. Um, but the big thing is that if you feel called to want to get support on what I'm teaching, just find me on Instagram.

Sounds good. Thanks for coming on.

Awesome. Thanks, Nathan. That was the most value-added podcast I've ever done.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show, then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.