Dan Martell - Copy This Strategy to 10X Your Business

00:00:00.000 There will be a point where your business feels completely stuck. It doesn't matter what you do,

00:00:04.760 how much you change, the business doesn't seem to grow. Even a couple months ago in one of my

00:00:09.780 companies, the business hit a wall, slowly declining. And then we implemented exactly

00:00:14.440 what I'm going to share with you today, and we just finished having a record month.

00:00:17.980 Every business I've worked with hits a wall at some point. Even the biggest entrepreneurs face

00:00:22.960 this exact issue. And what I found is there's only one way to unblock your business, and it starts

00:00:27.840 with finding the one thing that's holding the business back.

00:00:30.560 Today, I'm gonna show you how to find that one thing

00:00:33.700 and fix it so that you can get your business

00:00:35.840 moving forward again and build a machine

00:00:38.200 that works even when you're not there.

00:00:39.980 Step one, we need to figure out why growth is stalling.

00:00:43.540 If you don't have a process for fixing things,

00:00:46.180 you will feel like a chicken with his head cut off.

00:00:49.000 I felt like I was working.

00:00:50.660 It just didn't change anything.

00:00:52.440 Then I realized being busy doesn't solve the problem.

00:00:55.800 So I want to draw a picture that's going to make this clear as day. You have a lot of things in

00:01:01.060 your business you could be doing. You could be doing marketing, you could be doing operations,

00:01:04.460 you can do even sales. The challenge is that your business is like a pipeline. It flows.

00:01:10.200 You have ideas, you turn them into products, people buy the products. It's like a flow of

00:01:13.780 traffic. But what if all of that ends up in a constraint? If you have all these ideas producing,

00:01:23.160 but there's this one point in the middle

00:01:25.800 that is a constraint.

00:01:28.340 Think of it like water.

00:01:30.260 If the water flows in the left,

00:01:31.760 this is your team working really hard,

00:01:33.140 but then it gets pinched in the middle,

00:01:35.300 then the backside will be limited.

00:01:38.440 See, you can't have it flow because of the constraint.

00:01:43.000 And what people do is they keep saying,

00:01:45.040 hey, Dan, I gotta do more stuff here.

00:01:46.800 I gotta do more stuff there.

00:01:47.740 And I'm like, but you don't even know what this is.

00:01:50.040 And throughput is the narrowest point of any workflow.

00:01:53.720 The mistake is making the other steps faster.

00:01:57.760 You're like, oh, we need to do more marketing.

00:01:59.620 We need to do more sales.

00:02:01.020 We need to do more automation.

00:02:03.100 We need some AI.

00:02:05.060 But what if the delivery team is the bottleneck

00:02:08.240 and they can't onboard clients?

00:02:09.900 So everybody else gets faster, faster, faster,

00:02:12.340 and then it just stalls.

00:02:13.960 That becomes the bottleneck.

00:02:15.560 That is the focus.

00:02:16.780 When I was starting to write software

00:02:18.080 and I realized that, hey, I can write all the software I want,

00:02:21.020 but if I can't get people to buy,

00:02:22.680 the business doesn't have any money.

00:02:24.740 Writing more code didn't make me more money,

00:02:26.760 but as a software developer, it felt safe.

00:02:28.900 And that's usually what happens

00:02:29.960 is your team will do the thing they know how to do,

00:02:32.460 but that's not necessarily the right thing to do

00:02:35.200 to increase the output.

00:02:36.600 If there is a workflow,

00:02:38.440 I wanna figure out where the work is piling up.

00:02:42.440 Usually wherever inventory or work is piling up,

00:02:46.040 usually the step after it is your constraint.

00:02:49.060 If you don't know where to look,

00:02:50.520 just walk down the process.

00:02:52.260 It could be that you're involved

00:02:54.340 in having to approve every invoice.

00:02:56.320 It could be that somebody else on your team

00:02:58.240 is waiting for another person to do something.

00:03:00.160 It could be that decisions or approvals

00:03:02.640 or processes are just not automated.

00:03:04.660 I've seen it where customers are upset

00:03:07.000 because they only wanna deal with you

00:03:08.580 and that's the constraint because of a sales script

00:03:10.600 that doesn't communicate that they're gonna work

00:03:12.160 with somebody on their team.

00:03:13.120 So there's a little bait and switch.

00:03:14.160 It can happen all over the place.

00:03:15.980 I just need you to understand there's only one problem right now in your business that needs

00:03:20.500 to be solved. Running a business really comes down to one job. We got to find the bottleneck.

00:03:25.020 We have to solve it and we got to repeat that process. Solving the right thing in the wrong

00:03:30.140 order is still a loss. Like we don't polish a car if the engine is on fire. So we do have to fix

00:03:36.360 what's stopping it from moving forward. So how do you find the thing that's limiting your growth

00:03:40.060 right now? Step two, this is how we find your bottleneck. And the best way to do that is we

00:03:44.940 got to check the numbers before deciding what to fix. For example, one of my buddies came to me a

00:03:50.160 few years ago and he's like, hey man, I need to redesign my whole program. I said, why? He goes,

00:03:55.060 we lost some customers. How many customers did you lose last month? I lost three. How many customers

00:03:59.860 you have total in your business? 300. Hmm. Let's look at the percent of total customers that left

00:04:07.200 in regards to the ones you have. Three out of 300 is 1% on a monthly basis. You could have up to two

00:04:13.560 3% and still have an incredible business. Let me ask you a question. How many people on your

00:04:18.920 marketing team? I got to be honest with you, Dan, nobody. Yeah, not surprised. What I knew in his

00:04:24.520 question and the assessment of the data is that he didn't have a product adoption problem. He

00:04:30.040 didn't have a product quality problem. He didn't have a retention problem. He had a marketing

00:04:34.660 problem. He misdiagnosed it. He was about to go down the path of spending the next three to six

00:04:40.340 months, redesigning a program to reintroduce new things that could have cost them way more people

00:04:45.980 canceling than the ones that left because he didn't know they had a marketing problem. This might

00:04:50.800 sound simple to you. I will tell you every day entrepreneurs are making decisions around the

00:04:55.300 bottleneck they need to fix. And most of them are wrong because they don't understand this process.

00:04:59.280 One of my beliefs around this is that every bottleneck is just a hidden KPI, meaning that

00:05:04.200 if we measure the right things in the business, then we know exactly what we need to fix. If we

00:05:09.400 don't have the right measurement then we don't know what to fix then we just start guessing and

00:05:14.220 that's what unfortunately business owners do every day. If you want to go deeper on this it's called

00:05:18.960 The Theory of Constraints. It's an incredible book that was written for manufacturing that I learned

00:05:26.380 through my dad because my dad worked at a big company called Siemens and they brought in experts

00:05:31.060 to talk about black belts and Six Sigma and lean manufacturing and it was just something that I saw

00:05:36.100 on the shop floor that they talked about all the time the way i look at it is that a process not

00:05:40.740 well defined is a process i can't solve in the process of theory of constraints the first step

00:05:45.700 we have to do is we have to map the steps so for example maybe you've got leads that's your first

00:05:51.860 step then it goes to qualify are these people the right people then you've got book this is getting

00:05:58.820 them on a call then you have show did they show and then you have clothes did the person enroll

00:06:05.460 them into your life. That gives us the simple mapping. If you have a team member, ask them to

00:06:10.840 go to a whiteboard and draw something that looks like this. But you want to have the distinct steps

00:06:15.840 in the business outlined. Then we ask the magic question. This is my favorite question to ask

00:06:21.020 because it usually gets to the point of the problem incredibly quick. I ask the question

00:06:25.660 in any workflow, if I 10x the volume leads in this example, what breaks? Because when you do that,

00:06:33.100 all of a sudden I'm pushing water through the system and it becomes very evident that the issue

00:06:38.520 to solve as an example in this step is book. It wasn't the show rate. It wasn't the close. Those

00:06:46.300 are relatively good for the industry, but the amount of qualified people that we got to actually

00:06:51.300 book a call isn't high. And that's where we have to get the data. That's where the numbers don't

00:06:56.220 lie. If you don't have a spreadsheet that outlines the steps and the conversions in each step,

00:07:00.520 then how are you gonna know?

00:07:01.720 Yesterday, I walked into one of my offices

00:07:03.300 and there was one, two, three, four, five,

00:07:07.440 six dashboards in that one room.

00:07:10.060 That's the level of measurement that I like to see.

00:07:12.540 Now, do you need it to be on a TV, on a dashboard?

00:07:14.600 No.

00:07:15.220 Should it be in a spreadsheet?

00:07:16.600 Mm-hmm.

00:07:17.220 Can I ask my AI to help me design that?

00:07:19.540 You sure can.

00:07:20.400 A lot of people used to ask me,

00:07:21.380 they'd be like, yeah, but Dan,

00:07:22.240 how do I know what is normal and what's abnormal?

00:07:24.540 Ask it what the industry norm is,

00:07:26.220 but just ensure that you're measuring it

00:07:27.720 the same way that the industry's measuring it.

00:07:29.480 so here's a pro tip i have what's called a grok bot it's an ai agent and it's called business

00:07:35.240 constraint and the only thing this agent does is he monitors every company that i own he looks at

00:07:41.400 the data how did he get that i told him to slurp in slack and then twice a week he analyzes on

00:07:47.560 sunday and on thursday the data the process even the meeting recordings of those teams to figure

00:07:54.600 out what is the number one business constraint in the business it posts it on slack tags the people

00:08:00.520 involved in that business ask them to reply if they agree on the constraint and then if there's

00:08:05.400 a disconnect that's where we have a conversation so even in the process i'm sharing with you today

00:08:10.520 you can set it up i use grokbot and a few other ai's but you can use claude or chat gpt once you

00:08:16.920 understand the philosophy and you can't do any of that if you don't map out the workflow and collect

00:08:21.560 the data to know it's broken and by the way if you're a business owner and you want to walk

00:08:25.240 through all of this and implement it into your own business i have a free scale your business

00:08:29.800 workbook that has in there the whole philosophy of theory constraints how i implement it to my

00:08:34.520 business how i use it in all my different departments and all you got to do is scan

00:08:37.880 the qr code or click the link in the description to download it it's yours for free so now we know

00:08:42.200 where the bottleneck is the next step is to attack it and solve it as fast as humanly possible but

00:08:47.640 but how do we actually do that?

00:08:49.520 Step number three, we have to surge on the bottleneck.

00:08:52.900 One of the challenges when we do this

00:08:54.540 is some people make assumptions about what's possible.

00:08:57.280 Couple of weeks ago, I was speaking at the Vault Conference

00:08:59.600 and I was listening to Steven Bartlett

00:09:01.360 and he told an incredible story about this,

00:09:03.580 how he had an editor on his team

00:09:05.320 that was editing animations

00:09:06.800 and he'd been doing it for five years

00:09:08.260 and somebody out of the blue asked them,

00:09:10.400 hey, what would it take to get you

00:09:12.400 to double your output per week?

00:09:14.260 And they were thinking that it was this big,

00:09:16.240 elaborate process and change. And his response was simple. Oh, I would just need a new laptop.

00:09:22.360 Nobody had ever asked him this question. He didn't even consider it for himself. He just assumed

00:09:27.300 that's my laptop. They're not going to buy me a new one. Here's a solution that might have cost

00:09:32.100 two or $3,000 that would have doubled his output. That story for me exemplifies why it's important

00:09:38.700 that when we identify the bottleneck, we have to challenge every assumption. And sometimes solving

00:09:43.820 the bottleneck is a lot easier than you think but you've never thought to ask for example last year

00:09:49.660 as we're scaling my venture studio where we're launching a new ai company every month it got

00:09:55.420 crazy and it became very evident that the bottleneck was on recruiting was on talent so

00:10:00.940 i decided to surge on it it turned out in my instagram dms there was over 2 000 people who

00:10:07.020 had reached out to me saying they wanted to work with me and my team or myself just didn't see it

00:10:13.820 on my team incentive to go through their emails, through their chats, through whatever system they

00:10:18.360 have to identify top candidates and reward them for moving that pipeline forward. No different

00:10:24.120 than I would do in a sales process. We even gave each person a $5,000 referral bonus. If it came

00:10:29.820 from my existing audience, I didn't care. I needed the talent. What did that do? It allowed everybody

00:10:35.440 to feel empowered to come together and surge on the problem. And within six weeks, we solved that

00:10:40.320 bottleneck. That's why we call it a surge. It's one bottleneck, one area of focus, and we fix it

00:10:45.540 fast. I think the biggest challenge that you might be doing to yourself and your team is that you

00:10:50.360 don't focus. Most owners, unfortunately, are spread way too thin across 10 problems. If you actually

00:10:56.280 got rid of the other nine and went all in on the one, it would actually get solved today. Most

00:11:01.820 entrepreneurs are incredible problem solvers if they know what problem to solve. We've already

00:11:06.000 done that part, now we got a surge on the problem. Here's how we run a surge. The first thing we got

00:11:13.100 to do is we got to give it a name. Names matter, language matters. We give it a good label that

00:11:18.220 helps define and identify it for everybody involved. Not bad with a broken hand. For example,

00:11:24.020 in the talent one, the problem was I didn't have enough people to hire, but the actual bottleneck

00:11:28.260 was is I didn't have high quality applicants. Just like on the sales example I gave earlier,

00:11:32.580 It wasn't actually the qualified leads.

00:11:34.740 It was getting them to book a call.

00:11:37.100 Once we name the bottleneck, because we have the data,

00:11:39.600 we have to find ways to capacity.

00:11:41.540 This is all about focus.

00:11:43.580 If not enough people are booking,

00:11:45.000 maybe we need to start making phone calls.

00:11:46.660 If there's people doing marketing,

00:11:48.080 but the sales team can't get enough people on the calls,

00:11:50.140 maybe the marketing people should stop marketing a little bit

00:11:52.280 and get on phones and get the people to show up for the calls.

00:11:55.020 It sounds crazy, but that's the whole point.

00:11:57.380 Remember when I drew the diagram for the constraints

00:11:59.120 and there's all these people in your business that are busy,

00:12:00.820 but the thing that is the constraint isn't getting enough resources to actually solve it.

00:12:04.820 If you've got everybody to do a little bit less work to focus on the constraint,

00:12:08.460 then the thing gets solved. Step three, get other teams to swarm on the problem. To me,

00:12:14.320 it's a swarm. Think about getting attacked by a bunch of killer bees. You are probably not happy

00:12:19.240 about it. Imagine if your problem in your business is getting attacked with the same level of

00:12:23.520 ferociousness. One of the most powerful things that one of my mentors taught me in San Francisco,

00:12:27.340 which is the four C's of leverage,

00:12:29.540 that when we solve problems,

00:12:30.940 there's only four major ways we can solve it

00:12:33.580 to create leverage.

00:12:34.820 The first C is capital.

00:12:37.180 Do we have the problem well capitalized?

00:12:39.720 The example with the laptop, for a couple thousand bucks,

00:12:42.320 we could have bought them a laptop, problem solved.

00:12:44.220 Some people just don't think they have a budget

00:12:45.820 to solve problems.

00:12:46.860 The second C is content.

00:12:49.460 Are the systems dialed?

00:12:51.000 Is everybody following the same process?

00:12:52.840 If I'm trying to get people to call,

00:12:54.720 to get somebody to book a call,

00:12:56.120 and there's no step or process outlined,

00:12:58.500 then the system is broken.

00:13:00.200 I need to outline the content strategy.

00:13:02.320 Maybe it's a training video for everybody involved.

00:13:04.660 This is all part of content.

00:13:06.060 Huge leverage once you do it once.

00:13:07.380 The third is collaboration, which is essentially people.

00:13:11.440 There is a whole world of people in your life

00:13:14.480 that can help you solve problems.

00:13:16.280 It could be your friends, it could be your partners,

00:13:18.900 it could be other people in business that you know.

00:13:21.420 Don't limit it just to the three or four or five

00:13:24.160 or 10 people on your team.

00:13:25.400 And then the fourth C, which is my favorite

00:13:27.260 because I'm a bit of a tech nerd, is code.

00:13:29.600 What is the software or automation or AI we could leverage?

00:13:34.020 This is the last one, not the first one,

00:13:36.220 to swarm on the problem.

00:13:37.840 I think right now, too many people are using AI

00:13:39.780 to solve problems that aren't actually

00:13:41.100 the right problem to solve or to solve it in the wrong order

00:13:43.560 or to avoid this process to only spend a bunch of tokens,

00:13:48.160 token maxing, to not make any progress.

00:13:50.260 And the last one is attack until it's done.

00:13:54.640 When I say done, I mean obliterated.

00:13:58.020 I mean that you know that that will never be a problem

00:14:00.880 for a while because businesses is always broken.

00:14:03.880 No matter what you do, there's gonna be a bottleneck.

00:14:05.880 Once I solve a bottleneck, then we assign it to somebody

00:14:08.400 and that person becomes the DRI,

00:14:10.700 the direct responsible individual

00:14:12.140 to monitor the measurement,

00:14:14.500 to ensure everything stays up to code

00:14:16.400 and to make sure that what we call

00:14:17.920 service level agreements

00:14:19.060 or what's your commitment to that problem

00:14:21.240 never reintroduces itself.

00:14:23.100 There's nothing worse than like,

00:14:24.640 having a problem solving it go over here solve the next bottleneck only to have that fall apart

00:14:29.580 because nobody owned it after you solved it and if you want a little bit of dan pro tip one of my

00:14:34.120 favorite things to do is asking somebody how long will it take you to do that step or solve that

00:14:38.460 problem usually the answer is like two or three hours and then i say well what are you doing for

00:14:43.080 the next two or three hours because if it is not more important than what we just talked about how

00:14:47.340 about you go do that and then come back in three hours and we can review to see if it actually made

00:14:51.840 any change. That is how you attack the problem and you stay on it until it's done. So now we did all

00:14:58.320 this work, we attacked it, we swarmed on it, but how do we know it actually worked? Step four, we

00:15:03.860 got to check the results, then repeat. Fixing the bottleneck is only the beginning. Checking whether

00:15:09.040 the business got better, that's the whole point. The bottleneck is just a part of an outcome we're

00:15:13.960 trying to achieve, but if it gets cleared and it kind of like creates other problems, then it

00:15:17.960 actually didn't solve the problem.

00:15:19.360 So we have to stay on it until the bottleneck moves.

00:15:22.740 You could do all of this and honestly still,

00:15:26.740 after weeks of surging, not actually solve the problem

00:15:31.040 because of the way you're doing the measurement.

00:15:33.940 Most teams will say language like, I tested.

00:15:37.580 And what I hear is, I guessed, or I tried.

00:15:41.180 It's not a test, it's a try

00:15:42.980 because they don't have a place where they've written down

00:15:45.520 the one variable that they changed.

00:15:47.180 why it's really important that when we surge we understand how to do the changes or you'll have

00:15:52.220 seven people make changes and all of a sudden not know what specific change actually improve thing

00:15:57.500 but that's why when you solve a bottleneck then you move to the next thing that's broken and then

00:16:01.100 it breaks again is because you didn't actually learn how to solve those problems in the future

00:16:06.300 it might have generated more money it might have solved the problem in the short term but

00:16:09.660 it will slowly slide backwards because you didn't use this method for testing and you've probably

00:16:14.460 felt this, right? Lots of change, lots of moves. I thought we surged. I thought we fixed the

00:16:18.760 bottleneck and then somehow it's happening again. You could do the test and it actually worked,

00:16:24.020 but did it improve the business? Did it make you more money? Did it increase your gross margin?

00:16:29.460 Did it allow you to recruit better? Did it get more people to show up for a call? The test doesn't

00:16:34.700 necessarily mean that the outcome you're after got solved. That's why we have to use this approach

00:16:39.660 to make sure it's aligned.

00:16:40.940 This is the testing method.

00:16:43.580 Very simple, very powerful.

00:16:46.480 Number one is we gotta make an observation.

00:16:48.940 For example, if I double the amount of leads,

00:16:51.540 will I get more revenue?

00:16:53.060 That's a great question.

00:16:54.260 And this is where it becomes really fun with the team

00:16:56.360 because everybody can throw out ideas.

00:16:59.220 Now, once I have an observation,

00:17:00.700 I gotta create a hypothesis,

00:17:02.780 also known in my world as a guess.

00:17:04.660 The third part is we now have to run a controlled experiment.

00:17:08.080 An experiment does follow a very structured process

00:17:11.180 because if not, it's not a test, it is a try.

00:17:14.640 The key is, is we want to isolate what we're measuring

00:17:17.640 and change one variable at a time.

00:17:20.380 And we have to run enough information through it

00:17:23.340 to see if it has statistical significance.

00:17:25.840 I hope I didn't lose you.

00:17:27.140 Stay with me here.

00:17:28.060 Meaning that there was enough attempts

00:17:30.060 at the information that you're monitoring

00:17:32.280 to tell you if it's statistically accurate.

00:17:34.520 For example, if I take a coin

00:17:36.100 and I flip it three times, one, two, three,

00:17:39.120 and it's all heads,

00:17:40.180 does that mean that it's always gonna be heads?

00:17:42.760 No, because if I flipped it 50 times,

00:17:45.140 I would get a 50-50 calibration of the coin.

00:17:48.560 I just didn't have enough information

00:17:50.460 that went through flips

00:17:52.140 to be able to get statistical significance.

00:17:54.800 That alone is probably a lot of the reasons

00:17:57.600 you're dealing with people saying,

00:17:58.980 I tried this, it didn't work.

00:18:00.420 Did you really?

00:18:01.660 How many times?

00:18:03.040 Number four is we gotta analyze the data.

00:18:05.700 And for me, I wanna capture it in real time

00:18:08.520 and I wanna review it every day.

00:18:10.220 So when I'm surging on a problem,

00:18:12.040 everybody comes around the table first day in the morning

00:18:14.320 and we're looking at data to see if we have enough data

00:18:16.800 to make decisions based on the test.

00:18:19.620 And it becomes a daily rhythm.

00:18:21.180 Sometimes I'll go twice a day.

00:18:22.620 Depending on how big the problem is,

00:18:23.900 we might do morning and right after lunch.

00:18:25.800 And number five is we gotta decide.

00:18:28.080 Is there enough data?

00:18:29.260 Do we all agree?

00:18:30.400 And if so, let's deploy.

00:18:32.220 If it didn't improve anything, this is the key.

00:18:34.540 we reverse it back because if I made a change based on a hypothesis and it didn't change

00:18:40.000 anything we have to reverse it back so that we know that adding a new change is an isolated change

00:18:45.340 so that we're evaluating the right thing because I'll tell you if you start making a bunch of

00:18:50.260 changes and you leave them in the system you will wake up to a ball of complexity and that is not a

00:18:55.440 fun business to run that is the game of business lock it in and then rinse and repeat in marketing

00:19:00.820 We usually call it like the control versus a test,

00:19:03.760 meaning that the control is the best performing funnel

00:19:06.580 that's working.

00:19:07.380 We introduce a new one.

00:19:08.720 If the new one beats it, make sure we have enough data,

00:19:11.140 then we switch the control.

00:19:12.620 The new one that beat it becomes the control.

00:19:15.080 Everybody's playing the game of trying to beat the control.

00:19:17.500 If you're doing this process, you already do it.

00:19:19.700 It's like, Dan, I'm already doing this in my business.

00:19:21.360 And every time you do it, you're the one that comes in,

00:19:23.520 you find the bottleneck that I'm going to invite you

00:19:25.680 to consider, you may be the bottleneck.

00:19:28.000 so how do you actually get your team to get involved to do this for you step five build a

00:19:33.840 team that find and solves problems using the theory of constraint you might have the best people but

00:19:39.840 if your best people don't know how to solve problems and make decisions and you'll always be

00:19:44.240 stuck being the person that can and this is where most owners get stuck it's why i wrote a whole

00:19:49.280 book that's focused on the philosophy of learning to let go but empowering people to make decisions

00:19:55.040 on their own. For example, in all of my media, I have an incredible team that supports me in doing

00:20:00.440 this because I've taught them this process. They can go in and evaluate where they have

00:20:05.620 opportunities to increase their throughput. Last year, when they were looking at our production

00:20:10.040 timelines and we're looking at increasing the volume of content we put out to the world to

00:20:14.320 getting to four or 500 pieces a week, they realized one of the bottlenecks in that process

00:20:19.280 was finding the right B-roll to add to the footage. That's why if you've watched these

00:20:22.980 videos and you just see like boom awesome b-roll boom boom boom you see all that that's the team

00:20:27.860 that easily found it because they realized there was a problem so they solved it how did they do

00:20:32.320 it they created custom software it was called turbo b-roll that analyzes a few hundred terabytes

00:20:38.500 of footage and allows the team to search anything dan with wife on beach and allowed the team to

00:20:45.000 double their throughput in production so think about it same team double the output i don't have

00:20:51.360 to hire more people because the current team can do twice the work because they weren't spending

00:20:54.560 all their time on something that software could do. Again, the four C's. And I was zero involved.

00:21:00.840 I only found out after they did it and they wanted to show it to me. And I was like, yes,

00:21:05.200 thank you. More of that. In our organization, we've created a culture of doing this, of solving

00:21:09.900 problems, using constraints and learning how to surge on them until they're solved as a team.

00:21:14.620 Your real job is actually not the business you're in. Your real job is building the people.

00:21:19.620 because when we build the people,

00:21:21.200 the people build the business.

00:21:22.600 People solve the bottlenecks without you.

00:21:25.120 And I've shared this so many times,

00:21:26.440 but when I first started as an entrepreneur,

00:21:27.840 I didn't know any better.

00:21:28.720 Maybe you can relate to this.

00:21:29.960 I used to tell people what to do.

00:21:31.200 I checked that they got done

00:21:32.160 and then I came back and I told them what to do next.

00:21:34.080 And then I learned from one of my mentors,

00:21:35.880 very smart guys, built 5,000 person organization.

00:21:38.520 He said, oh, that's the bottleneck.

00:21:39.980 You need to learn how to define an outcome,

00:21:42.540 but you gotta give them the resources to do it.

00:21:45.220 For example, you might have to delegate their ability

00:21:48.040 to make spending decisions.

00:21:49.220 When you do that, then they can make decisions faster

00:21:51.720 and then you stop being the bottleneck as a leader.

00:21:54.260 We have to define the outcome.

00:21:56.380 I consider it the heat-seeking missile.

00:21:58.860 That's what I need the person to do.

00:22:00.320 In many ways, it's asking ourself the question,

00:22:02.600 what does Dunn look like?

00:22:04.080 And describing it visually, emotionally, experience it.

00:22:07.480 Sometimes if I'm doing a big event,

00:22:08.900 I'll explain to the team,

00:22:09.940 here's how it's gonna feel to be an attendee at this event.

00:22:12.120 Here's what they're gonna learn.

00:22:13.120 Here's what they're gonna say to their team

00:22:14.700 after the event.

00:22:15.640 i'm very clear at creating a picture of that outcome so that it becomes the north star and

00:22:21.960 then the next level as i mentioned financial decisions this is all about budgets because

00:22:26.520 most business owners everything goes through them so what i do is a very simple thing called the

00:22:30.840 financial trust ladder depending on the role of the business they can there spend fifty dollars

00:22:34.920 to fix it they can spend five hundred dollars so this would be like team leads they at director

00:22:39.400 level, they can spend $5,000. I know that's a scary one. Or my executives, C-levels, they can

00:22:45.720 spend up to $50,000 without my approval. The only thing I ask them is that they let me know they did

00:22:52.460 it afterwards and every leader has their team tell them. So if there's a problem at the 50 level,

00:22:57.340 anybody can spend 50 to fix it. They can expense it. I just ask them to tell their leader so that

00:23:01.960 they know because usually whatever somebody spends money on, it's actually the bottleneck

00:23:06.420 needs to be fixed that's the crazy part your frontline workers know exactly what problems

00:23:11.140 need to be fixed if you empower them to just solve them themselves you will get a data point to then

00:23:15.940 go what's that smell what's going on over there for example one of my editors didn't want to wait

00:23:21.540 for the designer so he went and spent 50 bucks to get the design done himself well turns out

00:23:26.020 bottleneck the designer didn't have enough capacity because he only had 10 hours a week he was on

00:23:30.580 contract leader hey how about we give them 20 hours a week perfect bottleneck solved and then

00:23:35.860 third this is measure this is where we create a scorecard or a metric on what we're going to

00:23:41.780 measure to ensure that we know what is the problem i do this all day long one of my favorite things

00:23:47.540 to do is i walk around i look at a dashboard and it tells me exactly in all my companies where

00:23:52.820 i should be asking better questions every one of my dashboards has a name next to the metric of

00:23:57.140 the person who owns it DRI as well as their cell number i know next level but once i have that

00:24:04.020 then we go to the last level which is my favorite which goes around all of this which is to coach

00:24:10.100 coach to success we have to remind ourselves that there was some moment in our lives where we didn't

00:24:16.260 know how to do the thing that we do that we're pretty good at today and somebody taught it to

00:24:19.940 us we either read a book or we went to a seminar we hired a mentor we hired a coach and i think

00:24:24.900 it is the coolest thing to remind ourselves that when we work with people on our team our job is to

00:24:30.180 develop them our job is to empower them our job is to show up and let them know like hey this thing

00:24:35.780 i saw you do i used to do that here's what happened to me somebody pulled me aside shared this with me

00:24:41.860 does that resonate with you yes what did you take from that this perfect can you make a commitment

00:24:47.300 in the future you'll do that yes do that okay i will that is coaching and i get it it can feel

00:24:53.860 slow. But what'll happen when you start building your people, you'll wake up one day and you'll

00:24:58.320 realize that they started coaching your other team members and they start saying the same thing that

00:25:03.860 you said to them and you don't have to repeat yourself. And at some point you'll wake up and

00:25:08.300 you'll have a team of badass people building problems, solving bottlenecks for you and you're

00:25:13.360 not there. And that is how you get unstuck in your business by you stop being the bottleneck

00:25:19.300 in implementing this process and i just want to share this i understand that entrepreneurship is

00:25:25.060 hard things will always be broken they're never fixed by definition of being in business and being

00:25:30.020 an entrepreneur to go on a journey of preneuring which means to create that we're always solving

00:25:35.140 problems what i want to invite you to consider is maybe the process of how you solve problems

00:25:40.100 in the past has been flawed this hopefully introduces you a different approach but i

00:25:45.380 need you to make one commitment and just let me know out of everything i shared with you was it

00:25:49.540 the testing was it the coaching was it the process for finding constraints was it the measurement

00:25:54.260 whatever resonated with you leave me a comment below and let me know and for those that are

00:25:58.740 looking for my support and helping them grow their business i do have that free scale your business

00:26:02.980 workbook you can just click the link or the qr code to download it for free and the coolest part

00:26:07.460 is that whole workbook i created a whole video walking through the entire thing step by step

00:26:12.980 and it's one of my favorite videos and I want you to watch it.

00:26:15.660 So just click here and I'll see you on the other side.

Dan Martell - October 21, 2026

Copy This Strategy to 10X Your Business

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