Dan Martell - July 29, 2025


How to Grow Your Business SO Fast it Feels Like CHEATING


Episode Stats

Length

16 minutes

Words per Minute

230.2404

Word Count

3,751

Sentence Count

152

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I built and sold three companies in under 10 years
00:00:02.560 for millions of dollars.
00:00:03.860 They scaled so fast, it felt like cheating.
00:00:06.400 One of my latest companies, Martel Media,
00:00:08.320 scaled to $2 million a month in under 18 months.
00:00:11.340 And today I own Martel Ventures,
00:00:13.280 a portfolio of companies that's on track
00:00:15.220 to become worth $1 billion in less than three years.
00:00:18.300 I'm gonna break down the strategies I use
00:00:20.280 to get to this level of speed
00:00:21.560 so you can apply them to your own business,
00:00:24.140 even if you're starting from zero.
00:00:25.780 Number one, focus on cash, not perfection.
00:00:28.540 stop trying to make everything perfect and just start selling everybody wants to start a business
00:00:33.900 but nobody wants to start selling i always say the moment you sell something to a stranger is the
00:00:38.700 moment you become an entrepreneur so the more money you can get in cash up front before you
00:00:43.380 spend a lot of money to deliver what you sold then the easier it is to grow your business because
00:00:47.880 there is a massive difference between receivables or invoices and revenue versus cash because i
00:00:54.140 I can't pay people in invoices.
00:00:56.300 I can't pay people with receivables.
00:00:58.600 But to actually get people to give you their money,
00:01:01.140 you need to present the right offer.
00:01:02.880 Number two, make people feel dumb to say no.
00:01:05.900 First off, you need to build a transformation-focused offer,
00:01:09.420 not a bunch of deliverables.
00:01:10.860 Too often people are like,
00:01:12.000 well, if you buy my thing, you get this, you get this,
00:01:13.940 and you this them to death.
00:01:15.320 People don't want a bunch of features.
00:01:17.060 What they want is their problem solved.
00:01:18.840 They wanna know that you understand them.
00:01:20.520 And then you gotta add urgency, scarcity, and risk reversal
00:01:23.800 If you don't put that into your offer,
00:01:25.720 then people will sit back and wait
00:01:27.600 or talk to their spouse
00:01:28.940 or think about doing it in the future
00:01:31.020 because they don't believe
00:01:32.340 that they'll actually do the work.
00:01:34.140 By telling people you only work
00:01:35.700 with certain types of clients,
00:01:36.800 it creates a scarce resource
00:01:38.240 that only certain people that are approved
00:01:40.000 can actually buy.
00:01:40.980 Or urgency by saying that you are a small team
00:01:44.180 and you like to be very personalized and customized
00:01:46.160 that you can't do it for everybody.
00:01:48.060 So you only take on a handful of clients per month
00:01:50.000 or the risk reversal saying
00:01:51.900 if you don't achieve a certain outcome,
00:01:53.980 then we'll give you a full refund.
00:01:55.520 Now that might sound scary to you,
00:01:56.960 but you can also say it's on the back end
00:01:58.640 of you agreeing to doing all these things
00:02:00.400 that you know it would be ridiculous for them
00:02:02.860 not to get a result if they followed all those things.
00:02:05.760 And the reason why this kind of offer
00:02:07.540 will feel like you're cheating
00:02:08.680 is because better offers equals higher close rates
00:02:11.340 and premium pricing.
00:02:13.160 All right, so you did all that.
00:02:14.300 You've got your offer down.
00:02:15.640 Now let's make sure people actually see it.
00:02:17.880 Number three, build a marketing system,
00:02:20.040 not a marketing plan.
00:02:21.140 You know what I've learned with most entrepreneurs is they feel guilty if the machine is working.
00:02:25.900 To feel less guilty about growth, you need to build a system that creates predictability
00:02:30.440 in the business. And if you do it right, it will feel like cheating. And I need you to stop yourself
00:02:35.380 from throwing a hand grenade in the business and blowing the whole thing up because it's actually
00:02:38.900 working. To build the marketing system, you need to build the system. And most people overcomplicate
00:02:44.420 it. So I'm going to break it down. So first thing, we have to start with the camcorder method. If
00:02:48.640 you're doing something to generate leads, you have to record yourself doing that activity. So that way
00:02:53.740 you have a training video and you can have multiple videos of you doing the activity that generates
00:02:58.260 those leads as an example. Then we want to create the course. We want to document the steps that we
00:03:03.040 outline in those videos so that somebody can come in and follow one, two, three, and create
00:03:07.880 predictability. Next, we want to focus on the cadence. What's the schedule? What do they do on
00:03:12.740 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? If it's marketing, if it's sales, you have to document
00:03:17.440 the cadence and set up the schedule so somebody can create a system of predictability. Finally,
00:03:22.380 we want to generate the checklist, the seven to 10 things in their day that if they do every day,
00:03:27.880 they will generate the result that you want for you in the business. And if you build this out,
00:03:32.320 you'll create a marketing system, not just a marketing plan that generates predictable leads
00:03:36.680 and predictable leads generates predictable cashflow that allows you to scale your business.
00:03:41.260 So now that leads are flowing in, now it's time to make space to close them. Number four, audit your
00:03:46.120 day. It's interesting because people read my book and they still get it wrong. I had a CEO in one of
00:03:50.780 my portfolio companies at Martell Ventures who realized he was spending four hours a day on
00:03:55.440 admin and customer support. And I sat down with him and I was like, okay, you could be doing sales
00:04:00.760 that's going to generate cash. When if I look at your buyback rate, I know what you're taking as a
00:04:05.100 salary. I know the opportunity ahead of you. You're not making efficient trades. If your goal is to
00:04:10.260 make a million dollars a year anything that isn't a 500 an hour activity is costing you the
00:04:16.020 difference because there's 2 000 hours of work an average person does and at 500 an hour of income
00:04:22.320 that's your million dollars a year see most people just spend all their time doing 10 tasks wonder
00:04:26.540 why they haven't built a million dollar business here's how you get ridiculously efficient with
00:04:30.600 trading your time for money first off you need to track your time so i do a two-week audit of
00:04:36.220 everything i've done for the last two weeks going off every 15 minutes there's a timer ding ding
00:04:40.940 ding it goes off you write it down that way there's no bull if you spent three hours scrolling
00:04:45.660 tick tock i want you to write it down then i want you to go through and i want you to highlight in
00:04:50.380 red anything that sucks your energy then we got to figure out what your time is worth because if
00:04:55.020 you're going to trade your time and pay some money for somebody else to help you out it's got to be
00:04:59.980 a good trade so you take the amount of money you make in a year divided by 2 000 take that divided
00:05:05.100 to buy four, that's your buyback rate. If you're not happy with that number because it's less than
00:05:09.320 five bucks, it just is what it is. Charge more for what you sell or figure out a way to become
00:05:14.340 more valuable. The more you buy back your time and reinvest it in things that help you sell more,
00:05:19.320 generate more leads will equal more money in that'll help you scale faster that will feel
00:05:23.440 like cheating. But freeing up your time is only part of it. Next, you got to learn how to schedule
00:05:27.520 it. Number five, rebuild your calendar. Now that you've bought back your time, I need you to
00:05:32.600 reinvest that time in things that are going to make you money. Too often, entrepreneurs wake up
00:05:37.220 at the beginning of the week and they're like, I hope I grow. It's not in your calendar. If you
00:05:42.240 have a problem, put it in there, schedule it, focus on it. Here's what I mean. Block 10 to 15
00:05:48.120 hours a week focusing on high revenue activities, things like sales calls, generating leads.
00:05:53.640 There's probably things in your business that are broken that you don't know are broken
00:05:57.440 because you haven't put the time to actually improve it.
00:06:00.980 To take this to the next level, here's the number one hack.
00:06:03.900 You have to schedule for energy flows.
00:06:06.680 For example, if you know that your best time
00:06:08.980 to do any kind of creative writing
00:06:10.680 is first thing in the morning,
00:06:12.240 do it first thing in the morning.
00:06:13.540 So now that your time is protected,
00:06:15.100 let's make sure that your systems don't break.
00:06:17.420 Number six, delete the fricking bottlenecks.
00:06:19.960 So Elon Musk has this rule.
00:06:21.600 If he's getting a meeting to solve problems,
00:06:23.360 there's 25 people in the meeting
00:06:24.620 and somebody says there's a constraint
00:06:26.520 and that person's not in the meeting, guess what?
00:06:28.700 Somebody call that person.
00:06:30.000 He will fly people in all around to be in one meeting
00:06:33.240 so that if the bottleneck exists
00:06:34.780 and it needs to be solved,
00:06:36.000 the person is in the meeting who can solve the problem.
00:06:38.300 If it's not, everybody get back to work.
00:06:40.280 So for example, if I've got a plant that makes cars
00:06:42.580 and it takes three parts to make a car,
00:06:44.740 the tires, the engine, and the chassis,
00:06:47.020 and I can make four tires per day,
00:06:48.860 which I need for one car,
00:06:50.340 and then I can make 10 engines per day
00:06:52.300 and I can make 100 chassis,
00:06:54.200 how many cars per day can I make in that plant?
00:06:56.520 one because my number one constraint are those four tires so any time energy resources anything
00:07:02.660 other than increasing my ability to make freaking tires is not a good use of the time and that is
00:07:07.960 what you need to focus on so the way i fix constraints in my teams is using a very simple
00:07:13.120 but incredibly powerful tool called 50 to fix it so essentially any person that sees a bottleneck
00:07:19.000 a constraint in the business if they can solve the problem for less than 50 they're allowed to spend
00:07:23.820 that money they can expense it nobody asks questions it only ask is that they tell their
00:07:28.220 leader or manager after the fact i go 50 for individual contributors 500 for leaders 5 000
00:07:34.300 for managers and 50 000 for c-level people that way the throughput is always increasing and
00:07:40.220 bottlenecks are getting unblocked and the business is making more cash that will lead to scaling and
00:07:45.260 make you feel like you're cheating with speed fix now it's time to scale yourself number seven
00:07:51.020 replace yourself. The best way is having an executive assistant. And there's two things
00:07:55.340 they have to focus on, your email and your calendar, because your email is nothing but a
00:08:00.200 public to-do list on your time. And your calendar does not need you to be there if you create a
00:08:05.180 system for them to interact with so that you can focus your actual time on things that make you
00:08:09.700 money to grow. The coolest part about this process is that you start to buy back 10, 15 hours a week
00:08:15.660 to reinvest it in things like sales and growth and partnerships. And that's how you scale the
00:08:21.360 business in a way that's going to leave you feeling like you're freaking cheating. Now,
00:08:24.440 if you want my complete playbook for how I interact with my executive assistant, it's like
00:08:28.360 42 pages. Just go to Instagram, find me Dan Martell, 2Ls and Martell. Follow me and then
00:08:33.340 message me the word EA, YouTube. Then I'll know you came from here and I will send you the direct
00:08:37.720 link, no opt-in for my complete playbook on how I work with my executive assistant to get back 30
00:08:42.780 or 40 hours a week. Now that you're not the bottleneck, it's time to increase your ability
00:08:47.120 to hire better. Number eight, increase talent velocity. Every business comes down to two key
00:08:52.680 funnels. One is the customer funnel. How do I get customers? How do they buy all the things we just
00:08:57.360 talked about? The second part is the talent funnel. How do we attract, retain, and develop top talent?
00:09:03.500 If you have a bunch of customers and you have the right people to deliver for those customers,
00:09:06.900 then the business will easily scale on its own and you'll feel so guilty that it's just working.
00:09:11.900 So the easiest way to do this is in 12 months, as my revenue grows, whatever that target is,
00:09:16.700 I want you to design what the organizational team's going to look like at that size.
00:09:21.240 That's going to give you the gap.
00:09:22.920 Then you create a people plan, which is essentially all the people you get to hire that aren't
00:09:27.020 on the team right now, and sequencing it based on dollar spend that's going to get you your
00:09:31.860 time back the fastest, that's going to allow them to go make money for you to reinvest
00:09:36.300 in things that make you money so you can scale easier.
00:09:39.220 If you do this right, you build the people and the people scale the business.
00:09:43.800 And that's why you'll be able to grow the business in a way that feels like cheating.
00:09:47.520 Now that you've hired help, it's time to focus on building their knowledge.
00:09:51.020 Number nine, pay for the blueprint.
00:09:53.100 You know what money likes?
00:09:54.280 Money likes speed.
00:09:55.300 If you want to generate $83,000 a month in your marketing agency,
00:09:58.680 you better learn from somebody else has done it, or it's just going to take you a decade.
00:10:03.140 How do I know this?
00:10:03.940 I was that guy.
00:10:05.040 I went years trying to figure out because that's what I thought I had to do.
00:10:07.860 learn every part of the business. Instead, I finally hired a coach and that one coach made
00:10:12.800 me $960,000 in the first 12 months. Why did I wait so long? Because I was scared. I was scared
00:10:18.420 that I was going to waste my money paying for somebody who's going to give me a blueprint that
00:10:21.160 wasn't going to work for me. That was the problem for me to solve. And that's what you need to do
00:10:24.680 yourself. When I invest in my people, I focus on three things. One, the coaching. Who is going to
00:10:29.660 be their coach? Well, people say, well, what if I invest in coaching and I train them up and then
00:10:34.300 all of a sudden they leave. What if you don't and they stay? Do you see how silly that is?
00:10:38.760 What are the tools they need? Who are the other people on your team from a talent point of view
00:10:42.520 to support that person? The more you can invest in coaching tools and talent to grow you,
00:10:47.740 you will have more resources to invest in the business. I mean, just ask yourself this simple
00:10:51.500 question. What would the 10X version of you do today? Because if you were already the person
00:10:56.280 you needed to be today to win, you would be winning. If you're not where you want to be,
00:10:59.960 it means there's parts missing that you got to go buy. Paying for the blueprints is the fastest
00:11:04.060 way to scale so now you're moving fast awesome but are your clients sticking around number 10
00:11:09.180 resolve your retention there's nothing worse than building a business that has a bucket where all
00:11:14.140 the customers come in and there's a big hole at the bottom so you spend all this money and time
00:11:18.940 and energy trying to get a bunch of people in your business to just have them slip out the bottom of
00:11:23.340 the funnel because you've not designed a way to keep them around i had a client of mine once where
00:11:27.740 he had this big churn problem he's losing 10 of his customers every month if you're losing 10
00:11:32.380 every month. That means every 10 months, you lose 100% of all your customers. All we did is ask
00:11:37.700 ourselves, how can you get a quick win for your customers as soon as they join? So we created a
00:11:42.880 list of 12 different quick wins that they could do with that client to get them a result that
00:11:47.500 would make them feel silly for quitting because of the results they got in the first seven days.
00:11:51.160 We implemented that. All of a sudden, churn goes down to 3% a month, meaning that the customer is
00:11:56.600 worth four times more to them over the long term, which also meant they could spend more money to
00:12:01.260 acquire them. That is the game changer when we fix retention. To do this for yourself, ask yourself,
00:12:06.260 what's the fast win you can get a client as soon as that joint? I'm talking 48 hours. If you can
00:12:10.960 get them to make their whole investment and working with you in the first 48 hours, they're
00:12:14.940 going to talk about you to every one of their friends. Then you want to add strategic upsells,
00:12:20.180 referrals, or other ways you can create value for your business. Maybe it's case studies,
00:12:24.080 testimonials, have them on your podcast. And then we want to track the churn weekly because we don't
00:12:28.520 to ignore it if we fix it by getting referrals and upsell to get them to buy more things that
00:12:33.000 you have then you got to make sure that you monitor it so that if it goes bad again you
00:12:37.000 can fix it see it's not something you can just set it and forget it you have to monitor it like
00:12:41.000 anything that's important and when you have better retention you'll have higher lifetime value of a
00:12:45.080 customer which means you're going to have better margins which means you have more resources to
00:12:48.840 scale faster in a way that absolutely feels like cheating now that you got results now it's time
00:12:53.480 time to multiply them. Number 11, scale sales without scaling you. I remember the first time
00:12:58.200 I hired this guy named Michael to be my sales guy and he was selling my coaching program. And that
00:13:02.560 was a weird idea to have somebody else sell me on my behalf and me not talk to them. First call he
00:13:08.200 had, Dan, I got somebody to buy. How? He's like, dude, I think they bought because you demonstrated
00:13:14.220 by having me sell you that you can teach them how to do it for them. And it was crazy for me to
00:13:19.900 believe this because up to that point sure I'd built companies that sold products but I hadn't
00:13:24.420 had a sales team that sold me and I had a belief that nobody else could sell like me and it turns
00:13:30.160 out that's not true and if you have that belief it's the reason it's going to hold you back and
00:13:33.920 we need to learn how to multiply you so here's how we do this where you feel like it's going to work
00:13:38.780 and it's not going to go sideways really quickly first thing is we got to scale your sales calls
00:13:42.640 and objections everything that you know people are going to bring up you have to script it they're
00:13:46.380 called talk tracks and you put it in a document and you got to be very detailed if there's six
00:13:51.000 parts of your sales process or nine parts of your sales process write it in add talk tracks and
00:13:55.400 questions to guide the buyer to make the decision to buy your product then we do my favorite thing
00:14:00.060 which is record winning calls winning sales call winning chats it doesn't matter to train the new
00:14:05.700 sales people because if they see what winning looks like and they pattern match that then they're
00:14:10.160 just going to have some good best practices from day one that they just follow to get the same
00:14:14.300 results that the person who won on the call got for themselves. Then we want to hire salespeople
00:14:18.720 that are commission-based. See, if you pay them too much of a base, they're going to stick around
00:14:23.340 even if they're not making any money because they don't need to make money because you're
00:14:26.400 paying them a good base. What I like to do is pay them enough to cover their expenses,
00:14:30.440 but not enough to get rich. And then I pay them a commission based on what they sell
00:14:35.200 so that the more they sell, the more money they make, the more money the business makes,
00:14:39.020 because then I'm not incentivizing somebody who can't sell to stick around. And this is why using
00:14:43.540 this process to scale feels like you're cheating because the more closers means the more sales
00:14:48.780 without you working more. Now that we've got sales off your plate, last but not least, it's time to
00:14:53.140 protect your productivity. Number 12, stay in your zone of genius. I want to be out there spreading
00:14:58.680 the gospel. I want to be talking about my mission, my vision, where I see the world going. And in
00:15:03.460 doing that, I'm going to attract customers. And more importantly, like I said earlier, talent,
00:15:08.160 Your job as a CEO is to stay in your zone of genius,
00:15:11.620 focus on three things.
00:15:13.040 One, the vision.
00:15:14.160 What should exist in your business that doesn't yet?
00:15:16.840 That is vision.
00:15:17.700 Do you see around the corner?
00:15:19.020 The other one is money.
00:15:20.300 Do you have the capital to support the scale,
00:15:23.060 the growth, the investment in the business?
00:15:25.160 And the third are the people, right?
00:15:26.740 When you think about it,
00:15:27.620 do I have the right people to build the business?
00:15:29.740 Because you can't build enough systems and automation
00:15:31.900 and all these wonky things that are gonna make it happen.
00:15:34.300 You have to have the people on your team
00:15:36.160 that are gonna level everybody up.
00:15:38.160 If you do that and you stay in your zone of genius,
00:15:40.760 that will make you the most money,
00:15:42.060 but it'll also make you feel guilty
00:15:43.620 because you're gonna grow and it's not gonna be hard
00:15:45.560 because you're doing the thing that feels easy.
00:15:47.820 When you get to a place in your life
00:15:49.680 that looks like work, but feels like play, you've won.
00:15:53.460 When people say, why don't you retire?
00:15:55.220 You're now making all this money.
00:15:56.880 And you think to yourself,
00:15:57.720 why would I retire from being me?
00:16:00.360 Because what you do every day in your zone of genius
00:16:02.980 is just an expression of who you are
00:16:04.860 and it feels effortless.
00:16:06.920 That's what you wanna get to.
00:16:08.160 And that's how you scale a business so fast,
00:16:11.200 it feels like cheating.
00:16:12.360 Now, if you wanna learn what I learned about culture
00:16:14.440 from a billion dollar company,
00:16:16.080 click the video and I'll see you on the other side.