Dan Martell - How To Grow Your Business Without Money

00:00:00.080 A lot of you that don't have an assistant,

00:00:02.320 I always say you do have an assistant, it's you.

00:00:04.680 You are the administrative assistant

00:00:06.120 if you don't have one, right?

00:00:07.440 And the other thing you gotta believe

00:00:08.480 is that 80% done by somebody else

00:00:10.080 is 100% freaking awesome.

00:00:24.600 Hey there, I'm Darren Martell,

00:00:25.920 serial entrepreneur, investor, creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:28.200 In this episode, I'm gonna share with you

00:00:30.220 how to use the replacement ladder to buy back your time.

00:00:34.240 If you've had an aspiration, a desire

00:00:37.160 to scale your business,

00:00:38.940 maybe you're only making a couple hundred thousand,

00:00:40.960 but you're like, hey, why am I not making more?

00:00:43.660 What am I missing to be able to build this business

00:00:47.360 without feeling overwhelmed or going bust?

00:00:49.980 That's what I'm gonna share with you

00:00:51.320 because I truly believe that great entrepreneurs are artists

00:00:55.880 and what I wanna see is more art in the world.

00:00:58.800 So if you feel called to have your product or service

00:01:02.180 be reaching more people and have a bigger impact

00:01:05.360 and obviously a bigger income to support you and your family,

00:01:08.740 that's what I'm gonna dive into.

00:01:10.260 You know, recently I was at an event

00:01:13.260 and I was talking to my buddy, Chris.

00:01:15.480 Chris is an amazing entrepreneur,

00:01:17.120 creates a ton of value in the world

00:01:19.840 and he's absolutely creative, like just a true master.

00:01:23.400 You know, a lot of entrepreneurs that I coach,

00:01:25.400 they are fundamentally artists, right?

00:01:28.480 They're visionaries, they're creators.

00:01:30.780 Yet he always felt like he was hitting the ceiling,

00:01:34.220 this kind of, you know, like individual artist business.

00:01:38.460 He never, you know, he had himself

00:01:40.840 and a few other people, contractors,

00:01:42.720 but he never grew anything.

00:01:44.760 At the end of the day, if he didn't wake up to deliver,

00:01:47.900 the business didn't make any money.

00:01:49.180 If he didn't wake up to have conversations,

00:01:50.920 there was no sales made.

00:01:51.860 If he didn't wake up to create something,

00:01:54.580 there was no marketing, right?

00:01:56.180 And because he was so talented,

00:01:57.700 the business just came to him,

00:01:59.500 but he reached out to me.

00:02:00.340 He's like, hey, like, I think I'm ready to scale this.

00:02:02.980 This business has got SOPs and processes.

00:02:06.360 What am I missing?

00:02:07.660 What don't I get?

00:02:09.080 Cause like, I know I should, I'm friends with you, Dan.

00:02:12.300 I have friends that are incredibly successful.

00:02:14.220 I see them.

00:02:15.260 Like, why do I feel like I'm driving with the handbrake on?

00:02:18.680 And I get this question often.

00:02:19.840 It's why I wrote about this in Buy Back Your Time,

00:02:21.940 in my new book, is some entrepreneurs have beliefs

00:02:25.320 about scale that just are simply not true,

00:02:28.320 but it's because they've never seen the alternative

00:02:31.000 that they just assume the bigger I get,

00:02:33.040 the more complexity there is in the business,

00:02:35.460 the more frustration, pain, opportunities for failures,

00:02:39.720 opportunities for customers to be disappointed

00:02:42.180 will materialize.

00:02:43.780 And those things are true if you just hire people

00:02:47.080 and just hire people for capacity.

00:02:49.920 What I teach, and it's completely different,

00:02:52.640 is we don't hire people to add capacity to your business.

00:02:55.220 You hire people to buy back time out of your calendar.

00:02:58.320 I was like, Chris, you need to look at your calendar

00:03:01.840 and figure out where you're spending your time

00:03:04.060 and then pull things out of your calendar,

00:03:06.640 which I'll share with you guys how to do,

00:03:08.440 so that other people can do that activity, those tasks,

00:03:12.180 so you have more time to produce results for your customers

00:03:15.540 so you can make more income,

00:03:16.920 And then you get to keep leveling up the game, okay?

00:03:21.620 Using the replacement ladder.

00:03:23.660 And when I explained it to him, he was like,

00:03:25.760 that makes sense.

00:03:28.160 See, if you do it the other way,

00:03:29.380 you're just gonna grow until about 12 people,

00:03:32.080 1.5 million in revenue, and it's gonna be painful.

00:03:35.320 You're gonna wake up every day

00:03:36.360 trying to keep everybody busy.

00:03:38.000 You're gonna be frustrated at the end of the day.

00:03:39.760 Customers are gonna be emailing you upset. 0.99

00:03:41.740 And you're gonna be like, this sucks.

00:03:42.920 I made more money a year ago with less headaches 0.90

00:03:45.380 and I was way more profitable,

00:03:47.060 I'm gonna go back to do that.

00:03:48.200 And you fire half your team and you go back to that.

00:03:50.000 And I've seen entrepreneurs,

00:03:51.220 literally I was hanging out with one this weekend

00:03:52.700 and her business went like this.

00:03:55.000 It literally grew and then she got that pain line

00:03:57.580 and then scaled down.

00:03:59.040 Fired everybody, grew, fired everybody up and down.

00:04:01.800 And she'd done it three times over the last 12 years.

00:04:04.820 Maybe that's resonating with you

00:04:06.080 because you've experienced this for yourself.

00:04:08.660 Here's the lessons, okay?

00:04:10.200 These are the strategies that I shared with Chris

00:04:12.620 that I wanna share with you guys.

00:04:14.160 Number one is your buyback rate.

00:04:16.920 The buyback rate is the amount of money

00:04:19.080 that is just logical for you to invest

00:04:22.200 to buy back your time,

00:04:24.420 to buy back time out of the calendar, okay?

00:04:27.200 Where you are spending time on your business,

00:04:29.860 there are things you shouldn't be doing

00:04:31.180 that's eating up large chunks of your week

00:04:34.180 that you can buy back.

00:04:35.500 Here's how the math works.

00:04:36.680 I want you to take your income, okay?

00:04:39.860 So what you pay yourself, your profit,

00:04:42.240 what your business profits,

00:04:43.620 and maybe those are the same thing,

00:04:44.720 and discretionary expenses,

00:04:46.640 things that really shouldn't go through the business,

00:04:48.520 but between you and I,

00:04:50.280 we'll leave the IRS and CRA out of this,

00:04:52.840 probably is like, it's like income,

00:04:55.980 you just do it on pre-tax dollars.

00:04:57.340 So if you take that amount of money

00:04:58.860 and you divide it by 2,000,

00:05:00.780 because that's the amount of hours in a year,

00:05:02.460 that's essentially your hourly profit earning potential.

00:05:08.300 Now, I want you to get a 4X return

00:05:10.620 on buying back your time.

00:05:12.560 So if you take that number and divide it by a quarter,

00:05:16.240 right, so one quarter, it could be $100

00:05:18.260 and you're like, hey, a quarter, that's $25, right?

00:05:20.640 Because you want a 4X return on that dollar amount.

00:05:23.640 Then you start looking at all the things

00:05:25.500 in your calendar you're currently doing.

00:05:27.380 Things like traveling, scheduling, and replying to people

00:05:30.680 and creating reports and research and all this stuff

00:05:34.060 that you're currently doing yourself

00:05:35.760 and I want you to give it to somebody else, okay?

00:05:38.600 That's the buyback rate.

00:05:40.080 That's the number one thing.

00:05:41.480 If you don't understand the buyback rate,

00:05:42.860 then you won't have a fundamental belief

00:05:44.860 that your time is worth something

00:05:46.480 and give it a dollar amount

00:05:47.940 and then start looking for activities

00:05:49.780 to pay somebody else to do for you.

00:05:53.040 Number two is as we move into the replacement ladder

00:05:56.500 is administrative tasks, okay?

00:05:58.360 So the second strategy,

00:06:00.240 which is the first rung on the five stages

00:06:03.120 of the replacement ladder is administrative tasks.

00:06:05.780 these are things like travel scheduling email etc you know recently uh well not recently about a

00:06:14.740 year ago i told my brother you know like you're a super busy successful entrepreneur you really

00:06:18.420 should have a dedicated administrator or an executive admin he's like well i have somebody

00:06:22.160 that takes care of blah blah blah blah and i go yeah but they're not dedicated to you they're

00:06:26.600 they're kind of like an office manager right you're not giving them all of your kind of like

00:06:31.960 management, administrative stuff.

00:06:34.000 He's like, that's fair.

00:06:34.780 So he hired a dedicated person.

00:06:36.400 A few months later, I asked him, I said,

00:06:38.440 hey man, how's your exec assistant going?

00:06:40.320 He's like, eh.

00:06:41.780 And I'm like, that's a weird response.

00:06:43.720 Usually it's like, oh my gosh, why did I wait this long?

00:06:46.400 It's probably the best use of my money and time and resources.

00:06:50.900 And I knew what the problem was.

00:06:53.860 I say, well, what's the issue?

00:06:55.580 Well, I don't see what the big deal is.

00:06:56.680 I say, two questions.

00:06:58.460 One, are they managed 100% of the emails

00:07:01.440 coming into your inbox 100 first pass no two do they manage 100 of your calendar where you should

00:07:09.040 be with who and all the details around those meetings and appointments and scheduling no

00:07:16.160 perfect that's why your inbox is a public to-do list of other people's needs on you their goals

00:07:25.040 and desires are in your inbox and if you don't create some separation from that it can feel

00:07:30.560 overwhelming, right? Where you work all day and you don't have time to process your inbox and you do

00:07:34.080 the same thing the next day and you don't have time and just becomes this cycle, right? And the

00:07:37.800 other thing is your calendar is you want to be waking up and executing. You want to be producing.

00:07:43.220 You don't want to be wondering, you know, going back and did that person follow up and did I get

00:07:47.260 this schedule and I need to meet with this person. It's way easier to have somebody else support you

00:07:51.420 on this. So the administrative level is the first level in the replacement ladder. And it's about

00:07:56.600 the inbox and the calendar and a lot of you that don't have an assistant i always say you do have

00:08:01.880 an assistant it's you you are the administrative assistant if you don't have one right and the

00:08:06.360 other thing you got to believe is that 80 done by somebody else is 100 freaking awesome so just

00:08:10.760 because you're like well every time i get somebody do something it doesn't get done the same level

00:08:14.920 who cares you didn't do it while they were doing that you were doing something else you're playing

00:08:19.960 with your family going to the gym working on your business strategy those are things that you should

00:08:24.200 be doing not doing research for what hotel you should stay at some conference or booking the

00:08:28.840 conference or getting your flights booked or whatever it is let somebody else support you

00:08:32.680 in doing that even if it's not perfect it is done okay so that's number two number three is delivery

00:08:40.440 so what typically happens is when you're growing your business you know i always ask people if

00:08:46.760 your business tripled in size next month what would break usually it's some kind of delivery

00:08:52.840 component. You have three times as much customers come in, right? My brother sells houses. You know,

00:08:57.720 I have a few different companies, but one of them is SaaS Academy. So coaching company,

00:09:00.500 if three times as many customers come in tomorrow, what breaks? That's your opportunity to buy back

00:09:06.200 time from a delivery point of view. Where are you the bottleneck for delivering value for the

00:09:11.920 customer? Because if there's this one part that's like 90 minutes per customer, that's like uniquely

00:09:17.500 you have to do this there is probably four or five hours for every customer that you could have

00:09:23.380 somebody else do for you scheduling following up filling out surveys making sure the billing and

00:09:28.780 the payments onboarding all these things that's the delivery side and if you can outsource the

00:09:33.360 whole thing maybe your buyback rates 100 bucks an hour you can pay somebody 25 to do it game on

00:09:38.760 get it off your plate to me that's the challenge for you is where from an onboarding and support

00:09:44.880 level can you pay somebody to buy back time out of your calendar to help you grow your business

00:09:49.480 that is number three number four idea which is the third rung in the replacement ladder

00:09:56.540 is marketing okay so what i always see is entrepreneurs that when business is slow

00:10:02.940 they do a bunch of marketing and they get busy again and then once they're good again right they

00:10:07.800 push on the gas they like speed up the car and then once they're like going really fast they

00:10:11.560 like take the foot off the marketing engine,

00:10:13.060 they do a bunch of work,

00:10:14.080 and then eventually they run out of customers

00:10:17.140 and then they have to do a bunch of marketing

00:10:18.360 and it's like this up and down, up and down,

00:10:20.080 stop and go motion.

00:10:22.140 And what I wanna recommend is you hire somebody

00:10:24.840 at that stage.

00:10:25.680 Once you have your executive admin stuff

00:10:27.240 bought back all that time,

00:10:28.600 then you have the delivery, right?

00:10:30.000 Support and onboarding.

00:10:31.620 And then now you're into marketing, right?

00:10:33.260 You build a good playbook for some content marketing stuff

00:10:35.620 and you only do the things that you can do.

00:10:37.400 Like me, shooting videos.

00:10:39.340 That's something only I can do.

00:10:40.960 But every other part of it,

00:10:42.300 from the email to the publishing,

00:10:43.860 to social media, all that stuff,

00:10:44.900 to clipping it up, to editing, all that stuff,

00:10:46.960 don't need to be me.

00:10:48.020 I do the part that only I need to do, right?

00:10:50.200 And that's the same thing for marketing.

00:10:51.820 Have hire somebody, part-time, full-time,

00:10:54.120 doesn't really matter,

00:10:55.380 that wakes up every day dedicated to producing traffic

00:10:59.420 and executing campaigns.

00:11:00.920 Those are the two big parts.

00:11:02.080 Are they generating traffic to your landing pages,

00:11:05.760 to your website, to your offers, to get you new business?

00:11:09.020 And are they focusing the content strategy,

00:11:12.620 the marketing calendar on a campaign function, right?

00:11:16.100 They're doing those two things

00:11:17.160 and you have somebody wakes up every day

00:11:18.360 to drive the business forward, to help you grow.

00:11:21.060 Those are only the first three levels

00:11:23.460 to the replacement ladder,

00:11:24.560 but those will get you the biggest bang for your buck.

00:11:27.060 So the bottom level is administrative, inbox and calendar.

00:11:30.400 Number two is delivery, onboarding and support.

00:11:33.260 And number three is marketing, traffic and campaigns.

00:11:37.700 So that is the beginning of the replacement ladder.

00:11:40.700 I wanted to give you that as a way to grow the business

00:11:44.180 without burning yourself out.

00:11:45.360 And it's all part of my new book, Buy Back Your Time.

00:11:48.820 So obviously if you enjoyed the beginning strategy,

00:11:52.440 I cover the whole thing in my new book.

00:11:53.980 You can click the link below to pre-order your copy today.

00:11:57.760 It's been my life's mission.

00:11:59.200 I've literally been working on this for three years

00:12:01.380 and it's finally going to be released to the world

00:12:04.160 where I've taken everything I've known,

00:12:05.660 helping my clients scale up to seven,

00:12:07.780 eight figure businesses from $150,000

00:12:11.340 in a way that lights them up,

00:12:12.920 that makes them more money possible,

00:12:14.420 that allows them to build an empire.

00:12:16.460 They don't have to feel like they got to retire.

00:12:17.900 There's no exit strategy.

00:12:19.400 Although you can have those, and a lot of my clients do.

00:12:21.920 I wanna encourage you to learn how to build a company

00:12:24.960 in a way that you don't have to escape from it

00:12:27.680 because in building it,

00:12:29.000 it makes you more money and lights you up.

00:12:31.660 So click the link to pre-order your copy

00:12:34.140 of Buy Back Your Time.

00:12:35.580 my new book and I appreciate you being here, being engaged.

00:12:39.120 And I'd love to hear from you below in the comments,

00:12:40.700 let me know what was the biggest takeaway for you.

00:12:42.720 And as per usual, I wanna encourage you to live a bigger

00:12:44.860 life and a bigger business and I'll see you next week.

Dan Martell - October 31, 2022

How To Grow Your Business Without Money

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