Dan Martell - February 11, 2025


How to ACTUALLY Build a $1M Business in 90 Days

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Mentioned
Most important lesson in business "We aren't closing enough sales"

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

220.6

Word count

3,750

Sentence count

218

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about how to manage your time, energy, and productivity so that you don t burn out, but instead, you can grow your business even faster. I also talk about a simple hack that I use to keep my business on track and stay in flow.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I'm gonna share with you the 90-day blueprint
00:00:02.120 that will unlock massive growth in your business,
00:00:04.580 even if you're burning out or just getting started.
00:00:06.900 Follow this blueprint over the next 90 days
00:00:09.220 and you'll transform your business.
00:00:10.820 Starting with day one to seven, do a time and energy audit.
00:00:14.620 First off, you don't manage time, you manage energy.
00:00:17.800 So here's the way I do it.
00:00:18.940 I set a timer up that goes off every 15 minutes
00:00:21.960 and I write in my journal
00:00:23.240 exactly what I'm doing with my time.
00:00:25.700 If I was scrolling on Instagram or TikTok,
00:00:27.780 I write that in there.
00:00:28.740 If I was talking to a friend and catching up,
00:00:30.580 I write it in there.
00:00:31.420 I'm very specific because there's what I thought
00:00:33.720 I did with my time in my calendar
00:00:35.220 versus what actually happened.
00:00:37.000 Then what I do is I write a line down
00:00:38.540 on the right side of this list
00:00:39.780 and it creates two columns.
00:00:41.120 On the left column is energy.
00:00:43.040 For each one of those items, I ask myself,
00:00:45.320 did this give me energy or did this drain my energy?
00:00:48.780 Or was it neutral?
00:00:50.140 And I highlight it with either green, red,
00:00:52.680 if it sucks my energy, or yellow, if it's neutral.
00:00:55.180 The right side, that is value.
00:00:56.880 And I use a simple one out of $4 sign rating
00:01:00.380 to understand where I'm spending the valuable time.
00:01:03.420 So if it's a $1 sign, it's not very valuable.
00:01:05.580 That's an administrative task.
00:01:07.000 If it's leading my team and creating a strategy document,
00:01:09.800 that's a $4 sign, high value.
00:01:12.020 And everything in between doing the work
00:01:13.660 might be $3 to $2 signs,
00:01:15.540 but that way I can visually see the amount of value
00:01:17.980 that works bringing into my business. 0.78
00:01:19.980 The hack is to actually pull out all the green stuff
00:01:23.260 that I wanna do with the $4 signs
00:01:25.360 and make sure I only do those kinds of things
00:01:27.540 that generate a lot of value for my business
00:01:29.420 that I enjoy doing.
00:01:30.960 All the low value stuff that's $1 sign
00:01:33.140 or that's highlighted in red that suck my energy,
00:01:35.980 those are the things that have to get off my plate
00:01:37.520 as soon as possible.
00:01:38.600 Now that you know what to prioritize,
00:01:40.060 this is how you put it into practice.
00:01:41.740 Day eight to 14 is all about creating your perfect week.
00:01:45.340 In my 20s and 30s, I was a reactive person.
00:01:48.320 I went into work,
00:01:49.360 I didn't really know what I was gonna work on
00:01:50.760 and I just looked at things and bottlenecks and issues
00:01:53.520 and just inserted myself.
00:01:55.140 And I'll tell you, it frustrated my fricking team. 0.69
00:01:57.520 It wasn't in my calendar.
00:01:58.540 It wasn't scheduled.
00:01:59.420 And honestly, I didn't even know
00:02:00.540 if this was the right thing I should be doing right now.
00:02:03.200 Right time, right action is how you succeed.
00:02:05.860 And I was just shooting from the hip.
00:02:07.400 I learned a long time ago
00:02:08.320 that our calendar express our priorities.
00:02:11.120 If you show me your calendar,
00:02:12.740 I'll show you what's really important.
00:02:14.440 So don't tell me what's important.
00:02:15.760 Show me what you've put in your calendar.
00:02:17.820 So to create a perfect week, you need to follow these steps.
00:02:20.340 First off, you need to understand
00:02:21.700 that your day isn't complete until it's planned on paper.
00:02:24.860 It needs to be written down or the day is not completed.
00:02:28.400 Then you've got to follow a calendar blocking batching of processes.
00:02:31.460 If you take all the things that make you the most money that light you up,
00:02:34.700 then you want to put them in your calendar and you want to put them together.
00:02:37.720 I'm always batching or blocking things out
00:02:40.160 so that I focus on similar type tasks so I'm in that energy
00:02:43.920 and I'm not being distracted.
00:02:45.400 And then you want to look for opportunities to stay in flow.
00:02:48.580 So for example, a couple months ago,
00:02:50.400 I noticed in my calendar it said go to the gym and then shoot some videos
00:02:53.300 and there was this time to go back home to get ready.
00:02:55.840 But I just asked myself,
00:02:56.960 is there a way for me to shower at the building?
00:02:59.600 And it turns out there's this secret shower
00:03:01.440 that nobody talks about, nobody's asked about.
00:03:03.400 And I asked the building manager, Dave,
00:03:04.480 if he could show me.
00:03:05.260 And I could use that to get ready,
00:03:07.280 shower in the building so I could stay in flow
00:03:09.380 without wasting 35 minutes driving home
00:03:11.560 to get ready for the day because it was already there.
00:03:13.640 Most people don't think that way.
00:03:15.380 So I'm always organizing my life around energy.
00:03:18.620 If in the afternoon my energy drops,
00:03:20.340 that's when I'm scheduling meetings.
00:03:21.560 If my morning is where my energy is high for creative,
00:03:24.380 that's where I'm putting my big project tasks,
00:03:26.320 my big deep work.
00:03:27.460 I don't wanna be disrupted
00:03:28.680 and I don't wanna break it up
00:03:29.780 by taking some kind of 15 minute interview call at 9 a.m.
00:03:33.240 and it breaks up my whole morning.
00:03:34.520 The big idea is to put the important items first.
00:03:37.600 Fill your calendar with the things
00:03:38.880 that are gonna move your life forward
00:03:40.180 and then you can add everything else afterwards.
00:03:42.740 Once you design your perfect week,
00:03:44.460 then you wanna iterate constantly.
00:03:46.620 If going to the gym at 8 a.m. feels better
00:03:48.660 than going at noon, then swap it around.
00:03:50.440 If you wanna have your team meetings all on Monday
00:03:52.580 versus sporadically throughout the week, then do that.
00:03:55.120 The big idea is you manage your calendar.
00:03:57.840 You manage how you structure your time
00:03:59.840 so that you can show up and give the most to the world,
00:04:02.320 to your team, to the people, to your customers,
00:04:04.140 and you don't let people push your calendar around.
00:04:06.700 But you won't fix your business
00:04:08.000 unless you can turn your time into profit.
00:04:10.380 Which brings us to day 15 to 21, raise your prices.
00:04:14.300 The big idea is this.
00:04:15.580 If you wanna turn around your business,
00:04:17.360 you have to iterate constantly on what works for you
00:04:20.140 and stop having other people push you around
00:04:22.820 when it comes to your calendar.
00:04:24.000 So people read my book and then say,
00:04:25.680 well, Dan, that's great,
00:04:26.440 but how do I afford to hire other people to buy back my time?
00:04:29.200 The truth is, if you can't right now,
00:04:31.180 it's probably because you're not charging enough.
00:04:32.800 If you can't afford to invest in marketing,
00:04:35.160 to generate more leads, in sales, to make more revenue,
00:04:38.200 it's because your business model is broken.
00:04:40.160 A long time ago, one of my mentors told me,
00:04:42.280 profit solve all problems.
00:04:44.160 So this is how we fix the pricing problem.
00:04:46.820 First off, raise your prices.
00:04:48.480 If you're not changing your pricing every six months,
00:04:51.880 some aspect of it, increasing it, adding packages,
00:04:54.980 changing your plans, adding a way to upsell,
00:04:57.440 then you're really missing a huge opportunity
00:04:59.460 to get leverage in your business.
00:05:01.120 Now, when I share this with people, they say,
00:05:02.560 well, Dan, when I lose customers, no, you won't.
00:05:05.180 Most people could increase their prices by 30, 40%
00:05:08.660 before any one customer decides to quit.
00:05:11.160 And then the truth is, is that clients that pay more
00:05:13.700 are actually easier to work with.
00:05:15.360 I don't know if you've ever experienced this,
00:05:16.620 But when you solve rich people problems,
00:05:19.180 they're actually better customers.
00:05:20.660 They appreciate what you want
00:05:21.740 and then you get paid enough to have the money
00:05:23.660 to actually grow the business.
00:05:24.980 This to me is the big idea when it comes to pricing.
00:05:27.120 Ask yourself this question.
00:05:28.620 What would you need to charge to pay somebody else
00:05:31.140 to do the work and still make a profit?
00:05:33.360 That's actually what you should be charging for people.
00:05:35.360 And even if you think, well, I'm not worth it yet,
00:05:37.640 let me ask you this question.
00:05:38.800 If you took everything you know and put it into a big pile
00:05:41.900 and you now no longer knew that information,
00:05:44.380 you didn't have access to those resources,
00:05:45.880 You didn't have those relationships.
00:05:47.180 It was now outside of you.
00:05:48.780 What would you pay to have that information relationships
00:05:51.280 back into your life?
00:05:52.340 That's actually what you're worth.
00:05:53.860 And it's a lot more than what you're charging.
00:05:55.560 But if you're serious about getting unstuck,
00:05:57.560 you need more opportunities,
00:05:59.140 which brings us to day 22 to 30,
00:06:01.800 where you need to start chatting.
00:06:03.540 This one blows my mind.
00:06:05.180 I literally have friends
00:06:06.440 that have tens of thousands of followers on Instagram.
00:06:09.080 And instead of talking to them,
00:06:10.940 they say, well, I'm just waiting for them
00:06:12.480 to put their hand up or to reach out to me.
00:06:14.160 and they consider it like nurturing
00:06:16.240 instead of just reaching out.
00:06:18.120 These are people that follow you
00:06:19.620 and it's not just Instagram.
00:06:20.940 I'm talking Twitter, I'm talking TikTok.
00:06:22.960 Any platform that has followers that you can message
00:06:25.700 is an opportunity for you to just talk to them,
00:06:28.680 to chat with them, to find opportunities to help them
00:06:31.060 to sell more of what you've got.
00:06:32.580 I believe everyone is one conversation away
00:06:34.820 from achieving their dreams.
00:06:36.280 You have opportunities sitting in your inbox
00:06:38.760 that could transform your life,
00:06:40.280 turn your whole business around,
00:06:41.500 but you're not even talking to them.
00:06:42.860 There's this old adage that says something like the more hands you shake, the more money you make,
00:06:47.540 even on the internet in a virtual world. Here's the way I think about it. There's only two ways
00:06:52.260 to make money. You either raise your prices, which you should, or you sell more to the people
00:06:56.780 that are in your audience. The way you do that is to open on social, have more chats. Every one
00:07:02.220 of your followers, I want you to sit down and message them. If you do this to 500, 600 people
00:07:08.400 will respond. Now, create a genuine conversation with them. Look at their profile, understand their
00:07:13.260 situation, ask questions about their life. Don't forget, people on chat are real people, real
00:07:18.740 lives, real problems. And if you're great at what you do, you can help them. You can even consider
00:07:23.640 inviting them to do something in the real world. Maybe you host an event, a dinner. I do founders
00:07:27.880 hikes every Tuesday, and it's my place to bring anybody local to connect. I'm always looking to
00:07:33.300 shake hands in person and see if there's ways I can help them. When I do an open, it's very simple.
00:07:38.220 I always thank them for the action they did.
00:07:40.300 If it's a follow, a mention, they tweeted at me,
00:07:43.040 whatever it is, I always thank them for it.
00:07:44.460 And then I ask them, is it this or that?
00:07:46.560 Are you here for the content?
00:07:47.680 Are you looking to grow your business?
00:07:48.900 Are you here for the videos?
00:07:50.140 Are you looking for help with your agency?
00:07:51.800 Always end with the second one
00:07:53.220 being the thing you can help them with,
00:07:55.180 and that'll create opportunity for you to engage.
00:07:57.360 But now that you're building your revenue engine,
00:07:59.160 your biggest bottleneck is still your time,
00:08:01.240 which brings us to your priority on day 31 to 45,
00:08:05.040 hire an executive assistant.
00:08:06.320 You know, what's interesting is that even really high level people on my team delay this decision.
00:08:11.380 I know Sam who helps me with my videos, my creative director and my partner, he delayed
00:08:14.900 hiring an executive assistant because he didn't feel worthy. He didn't feel like it was worth his
00:08:19.460 time to spend having somebody else to help him because he's a young person, had a lot of time
00:08:23.360 and he could do a lot. The problem is that he's not effective when he doesn't have somebody
00:08:27.120 support him. And it's not just about that. It's also the accountability. Having somebody else
00:08:31.320 you're accountable to just makes you that much more productive. Here's a funny thing to consider.
00:08:35.760 If you don't have an assistant, you actually do.
00:08:39.100 It's you.
00:08:40.280 And the crazy part is you're overpaid 1.00
00:08:42.200 and you probably suck at your job. 0.97
00:08:43.880 So how do you bring somebody into your world 1.00
00:08:45.840 to support you as an executive assistant
00:08:47.660 and get the most out of that relationship?
00:08:49.700 The first thing is you gotta delegate 100%
00:08:52.360 of your calendar in your inbox.
00:08:54.260 That means every message that comes into your world
00:08:56.620 is filtered through them before they come to you.
00:08:59.580 Why?
00:08:59.980 Your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list
00:09:02.700 on your time from strangers that you don't even know,
00:09:05.680 having somebody else process that
00:09:07.400 actually creates their to-do list to keep them busy,
00:09:10.720 to block people from your time
00:09:12.420 so you could focus on the right things.
00:09:14.220 Your calendar sets your priority.
00:09:16.060 So having them own those items that come in
00:09:18.440 and put them in your calendar
00:09:19.440 and you just follow that process
00:09:20.840 will make you so productive.
00:09:22.580 The other part, as I mentioned,
00:09:24.000 having somebody else that asks you to do things
00:09:26.300 on a daily basis keeps you very accountable.
00:09:29.000 So having an executive assistant in your inbox and calendar
00:09:31.860 is the best productivity hack.
00:09:33.900 Most people think being busy means being productive.
00:09:37.280 It's not true.
00:09:38.120 You can be very busy and be poor.
00:09:40.180 If you focus on the few things that drive revenue,
00:09:42.800 marketing, sales, delivering for customers,
00:09:45.060 prospecting, partnerships,
00:09:46.980 that's gonna increase your business.
00:09:48.440 Not being busy in the mundane.
00:09:50.700 If you're still struggling
00:09:51.580 on what you could give your executive assistant,
00:09:53.460 I want to give you my internal SOP,
00:09:56.360 my standard operating procedure for my executive assistant.
00:09:58.900 So just find me on Instagram and send me the message,
00:10:01.080 YouTube EA, and I will send you a direct link to my Google doc. It's got my Northstar principles.
00:10:06.400 It's got my whole meeting agenda. It's got canned templates. It's got preference files. It is the
00:10:11.180 master document to have an EA come in, use my standard processes to train them and really get
00:10:17.280 them to be effective day one. But now that you have your time back, you have to use it to fuel
00:10:21.780 your marketing, which brings us to day 46 to 60, create content daily. What's kind of funny is I
00:10:27.980 used to brag about how little time I put into my marketing content. I used to spend two days,
00:10:33.280 once a quarter to produce a weekly YouTube video. And I went and did this for eight years straight.
00:10:38.500 And I never missed a week, but I barely grew. And then last year, about 18 months ago, I decided to
00:10:43.380 go pro and I went to daily content creation. And I grew to 3 million subscribers across platforms
00:10:48.640 in 18 months. The truth is in today's world, it's not who you know, it's who knows you. And you have
00:10:54.640 opportunity to get access to the same people I do for the same piece of content. Here's how to
00:10:59.400 create content. It's really simple. Ask yourself, what do you want to be known for? Every piece of
00:11:03.820 content you put out there should reinforce the thing you want to be known for. If you want to
00:11:08.100 be an expert in people to pay you for why, let them know that you know about that. If you want
00:11:11.820 to sell a certain product, tell people how the product works. Too often people create social
00:11:16.660 media content that's just information their family would want to know, but it actually doesn't drive
00:11:21.420 of revenue for your business.
00:11:22.600 What's also new and only true over the last few years
00:11:25.420 is that you have the same opportunity as I do,
00:11:28.220 regardless of the amount of followers you have,
00:11:29.840 to go viral and get in front of millions of people
00:11:32.800 with your content.
00:11:33.820 The algorithm cares more about the quality of the content
00:11:37.040 than the number of followers you have.
00:11:38.620 So the key is to post a reel every day,
00:11:41.920 a reel on your page showcasing what you wanna be known for
00:11:45.980 and actually looking at other people
00:11:47.740 that are creating similar content that has virality,
00:11:50.660 that have a lot of views disproportionate
00:11:52.640 to their other videos and ask yourself,
00:11:54.380 do you have a unique perspective
00:11:56.220 that's similar to that creator
00:11:57.980 that you could create on your page?
00:11:59.780 This small lift, this small daily process
00:12:02.740 can add hundreds of thousands of new followers every year,
00:12:05.780 which are leads for your business.
00:12:08.060 The more followers you get, the more chats you have,
00:12:11.340 the more opportunities you have to get customers,
00:12:13.900 the more your business will grow
00:12:15.200 and you can turn around your business very fast.
00:12:17.500 But random content won't transform your business.
00:12:20.140 you need to follow what works.
00:12:21.660 Which brings us to your focus for day 61 to 75,
00:12:25.560 model then modify.
00:12:27.100 When I was 28, I decided to uplift my whole life
00:12:30.400 and move from the East Coast of Canada
00:12:32.220 down to San Francisco to learn what the best of the best
00:12:36.160 in the world of technology knew
00:12:37.840 about building billion-dollar companies.
00:12:39.840 And that's where I discovered these 20-some-year-olds
00:12:42.360 raising hundreds of millions of dollars,
00:12:44.040 building these billion-dollar businesses.
00:12:46.140 And what I discovered is there was a blueprint, a process.
00:12:49.220 There's a reason why they raise so much money,
00:12:51.640 how they build their companies,
00:12:52.840 how they build the product, the technology.
00:12:54.900 And that's when I realized to be successful,
00:12:56.740 the fastest way is to model other people.
00:12:59.340 You know, Tony Robbins says this all the time,
00:13:00.960 but success leaves clues.
00:13:02.540 Your job is to follow them.
00:13:04.120 Now, this applies to content,
00:13:06.040 but it also applies to product, what you're selling,
00:13:09.160 sales, how you sell, and to people,
00:13:11.620 what sequence you should hire people.
00:13:13.400 The best way to figure this out
00:13:14.740 is to do a thing called funnel hacking. 0.70
00:13:16.700 What I encourage you to do is actually sign up
00:13:19.800 or reach out to your competitors
00:13:21.200 to understand how are they currently selling,
00:13:23.400 especially if they're much bigger than you.
00:13:24.980 If there's a $100 million business in your category,
00:13:28.000 you should know everything about their business,
00:13:30.280 how they run their ads, how they sell,
00:13:32.600 the offer they make people, the pricing structure.
00:13:35.280 Go be a secret shopper to go figure out the whole thing.
00:13:38.460 Now, I'm not saying copy word for word what they do,
00:13:41.040 but be inspired by it, tweak it, make it your own
00:13:44.180 so that you can take what they're doing
00:13:45.860 that works and copy it for yourself. The other way is to hire a coach and use their blueprint.
00:13:51.440 Anybody that's had success that is a coach is showing you a blueprint that's going to compress
00:13:57.000 decades into days so that you can move incredibly fast. The biggest mistake most people do is they
00:14:02.100 modify what they're taught. And that's why I say model a hundred percent, copy paste what your
00:14:07.200 coach gives you to get the results they got only once you've gotten their similar results. Should
00:14:11.680 you even consider doing something different from what they taught you, but you'll never transform
00:14:15.720 your business unless you make all these new steps simple and repeatable. Which brings us to your
00:14:20.400 last days, 76 to 90, build your systems. My $100 million business runs on systems I built when I
00:14:28.200 was small. So you have to start now. So systems is actually an acronym, which stands for save
00:14:33.080 yourself time, energy, and money. The reason they save you time, energy, and money is because
00:14:37.360 somebody else can follow a process to get the result for you without you having to be involved.
00:14:42.080 So if you need to scale something up to get some time back,
00:14:45.100 writing a checklist, a system for somebody else to follow
00:14:48.020 so that they always deliver the thing you sold
00:14:50.380 the way you expected them to is high leverage.
00:14:53.800 So there's four key areas I think about
00:14:55.860 when I'm talking about systems.
00:14:57.440 The first one is playbook.
00:14:58.800 The playbook is all the steps,
00:15:00.800 all the processes brought together
00:15:02.500 for doing something within your business.
00:15:04.340 You might have a playbook for marketing
00:15:06.000 and in there you've documented your philosophy on marketing.
00:15:09.320 You talked about your ideal customer profile.
00:15:11.140 You've talked about the different marketing channels
00:15:13.100 that you use to get attention for your offer,
00:15:16.180 but it's in one document.
00:15:17.940 The second part of the checklist.
00:15:19.560 So checklists are essentially the steps
00:15:21.240 somebody should follow to get the exact same result
00:15:23.920 that you've gotten to do marketing.
00:15:26.240 If you're doing email marketing,
00:15:27.980 what's the checklist and steps that people should follow
00:15:30.700 to do the email marketing to get the exact same results
00:15:33.620 that you've been getting, sending those messages
00:15:35.380 and getting replies to do business with you.
00:15:37.380 The third area are stencils.
00:15:38.940 And this is kind of like templates,
00:15:40.580 But if I think about it, if I have cold calling in my playbook, I'm going to have a stencil or
00:15:46.100 a script on how to do those calls. That way, somebody else that's not as good at selling as
00:15:50.720 me follows the script and should get 80% of the result because I created a stencil. It allows you
00:15:56.560 to multiply and copy your effort quickly. The fourth area is sensors. And sensors are essentially
00:16:02.380 reports that I might ask for different departments, marketing reports, sales reports. And they're
00:16:06.780 essentially ways I can monitor the quality of the work being done. If I don't have a report on the
00:16:11.680 efficiency of my ad spend, then I might spend a bunch of money on things that aren't generating
00:16:15.920 quality leads. If I'm not getting a report on how happy my customers are, I might sell a bunch of
00:16:20.340 things to people that aren't happy, and then I'm going to get a bunch of returns. Here's the big
00:16:24.140 idea. If you're doing something more than twice a week and it's not documented, you're doing it
00:16:28.600 completely wrong. That's why systems are the last step in the 90 days. It's because once you fix the
00:16:33.180 different areas of your business, you want to lock in those learnings and not repeat the same
00:16:37.140 mistakes and create the process so that you can keep building from that foundation. But here's
00:16:41.020 the deal. If you want to transform your business in 90 days, you're going to have to lock in. You're
00:16:45.960 going to have to focus. And that stands for follow one course until successful. If you do that, if
00:16:50.840 you dig in and you give all of yourself, I have no doubt you'll transform your business. Now,
00:16:55.740 if you want to learn how I built my business that runs itself, click here and I'll see you on the
00:16:59.580 the side.