Dan Martell - June 24, 2025


How to Make So Much Money it Feels Like CHEATING


Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

216.71918

Word count

3,416

Sentence count

144

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about how to make money by not chasing it, but by creating skills that attract it. I go over how I went from being a 17-year-old addict straight out of prison to selling 3 software companies in 10 years and building my net worth to over $100 million today.

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 .
00:00:00.000 Do you wanna hear something crazy?
00:00:01.660 I went from 17-year-old addict straight out of prison
00:00:05.120 to selling three software companies in 10 years
00:00:08.100 and building my net worth to over $100 million today. 0.96
00:00:11.480 What some people would call f*** you money.
00:00:13.620 Trust me, no one was more surprised than me. 0.82
00:00:16.340 So I'm gonna share with you how to make so much money
00:00:18.840 that if life was a video game,
00:00:20.400 it'd kind of feel like cheating.
00:00:21.640 The first way to make so much money,
00:00:23.560 it feels like cheating the game of life,
00:00:25.620 is to not chase money, but to build skills that attract it.
00:00:28.900 When I built my first company, Spheric Technologies,
00:00:31.740 I was working 100 hours a week.
00:00:33.900 I was spinning plates,
00:00:35.240 wearing things that were gonna blow up,
00:00:36.580 and then I sold it for millions of dollars.
00:00:38.640 I did it the hard way because I didn't know any better.
00:00:41.480 Today, I make 100 times more money working half the time.
00:00:45.780 How?
00:00:46.360 I built the skills to unlock revenue.
00:00:48.700 See, you don't create success by chasing it.
00:00:51.860 You attract it by becoming an attractive character.
00:00:55.540 You bring opportunities and money into your life
00:00:58.560 by being the kind of person
00:01:00.080 that easily brings those things into your life.
00:01:02.920 So here's how you build a skill.
00:01:04.600 First off, you gotta be specific.
00:01:07.260 I mean, most people value others that can save them money,
00:01:10.360 make them money, or save them time.
00:01:11.880 Those are the skills.
00:01:12.780 So it doesn't matter if it's marketing, sales,
00:01:15.460 tax preparation, become world-class at it.
00:01:18.940 Ask yourself, who can you help?
00:01:20.580 Who has this problem?
00:01:21.820 What can you help them do?
00:01:23.340 A lot of people right now are struggling
00:01:24.780 to understand this crazy world of AI,
00:01:26.440 and all the young cats out there
00:01:28.000 probably talk and act this way naturally.
00:01:31.260 You're growing up with it
00:01:32.620 and people are struggling with it.
00:01:34.240 That's valuable.
00:01:35.360 That's a skill.
00:01:36.300 Number two is you gotta design the path.
00:01:38.100 How do you learn a new skill?
00:01:40.060 I like to ask you at GPT,
00:01:41.420 but the key is in how you ask it.
00:01:43.400 You gotta be specific.
00:01:44.500 Ask it to create you a 12-week course
00:01:46.840 on building the skill you wanna learn,
00:01:48.760 including links to YouTube videos,
00:01:50.740 one hour a day,
00:01:52.000 maybe more if you wanna be an overachiever,
00:01:54.000 but have it tell you what to focus study
00:01:56.600 and how to learn this skill.
00:01:57.700 Let me just show you how I do it.
00:01:59.980 Create me a very detailed course
00:02:02.460 on how to learn AI automation, 12 week course.
00:02:06.000 I want you to find the best YouTube videos I should study,
00:02:09.020 put the curriculum together, link up those videos
00:02:11.200 and make sure you keep it to one hour of day
00:02:13.420 because I'm gonna do it at lunch
00:02:14.400 because I still work a full-time job
00:02:15.860 and maybe some extra stuff that I could do
00:02:17.900 if I find some extra time at night.
00:02:19.460 But I want you to make it the least amount of effort
00:02:21.580 to become most proficient around the skill of AI automation.
00:02:24.980 Boom, watch this.
00:02:26.160 takes my voice prompt transcribes it starts building out the course it's researching because
00:02:31.240 i said some youtube videos it's like oh i gotta go find some youtube videos it literally says
00:02:34.280 here's a 12-week ai automation course week one introduction week two links to all the different
00:02:40.260 videos it built out the whole thing the full detail do you know how many people are running
00:02:44.400 around the world going like oh i don't know how to do that no it's been solved by thousands of
00:02:49.700 people documented crystallized and presented to you in a simple format and guess what if it's not
00:02:54.160 simple enough, make it simpler. That's how easy it can be. Then the key is to execute. Learn that
00:02:59.280 skill. The third thing is to master your craft. The top people that you want to collaborate with,
00:03:04.460 that you want as clients, they want to be around the folks that have decided to become the best
00:03:09.020 in the world at what they do. They don't want a dabbler. They don't want some people that are
00:03:12.740 kind of interested. They want folks that can demonstrate to them that that is their mastery,
00:03:18.480 their area of perfection. It doesn't matter what you decide. It's more important that you decide
00:03:23.740 and go deep. And what's crazy is when I say that, I know that for a lot of people, they don't want
00:03:28.280 to hear that because it sounds like work. It sounds hard. It sounds like it's going to take
00:03:32.380 a lot of time. And the answer is yes. That's the point. You have to build the skill that other
00:03:38.220 people find valuable. Nothing valuable has ever come easy. That's what makes it valuable. If I
00:03:45.320 could buy any watch, any purse, any car, then it's not valuable because it's not hard to get.
00:03:51.080 If anything, when I look at new skills
00:03:52.660 I gotta develop to get to my new level,
00:03:54.580 because new levels, new devils,
00:03:55.980 the harder it is, the more excited I get
00:03:57.840 because it tells me how few people
00:03:59.460 are actually gonna do the work to learn that thing.
00:04:01.520 If you wanna make so much money that it feels like cheating,
00:04:04.320 you're gonna have to put a lot of time
00:04:06.100 into the skill to master your craft.
00:04:08.160 Which brings us to the second way to make so much money,
00:04:11.300 it feels like cheating the game of life.
00:04:13.180 Never charge for your time, always charge for the result.
00:04:16.480 It's interesting to me because people may pay me
00:04:18.780 six figures for one hour of my time,
00:04:21.080 They're not paying for the message I'm delivering.
00:04:23.900 They're paying for the value that they'll get.
00:04:26.000 They're paying for the brand association.
00:04:27.620 They're paying to sell tickets for people in the room.
00:04:29.340 They're paying for building a relationship with me,
00:04:31.580 getting advice on their business.
00:04:33.060 It's my 28 years of entrepreneurial experience
00:04:36.080 condensed not only into the one hour keynote,
00:04:38.400 it's the time we get to spend together
00:04:40.560 working on their event.
00:04:42.500 That's what I get paid for.
00:04:44.020 Imagine you're a factory owner.
00:04:45.680 A machine breaks down.
00:04:46.860 You call an electrician to fix it.
00:04:48.460 The electrician walks in, inspects the machine,
00:04:51.080 for five minutes, takes out a small hammer and taps a very specific spot, fixes the machine.
00:04:57.680 He hands you an invoice for $10,000. And the owner, your boss is surprised. $10,000 for five
00:05:03.920 minutes of work. That's insane. The electrician goes, it's a hundred dollars for the time in the
00:05:08.460 tap. It's $9,900 for knowing where to tap. See, the mistake is to have people pay you for your
00:05:14.140 time. You want them to pay you for the outcome, the result, the impact of your work. If you're
00:05:19.380 not getting paid what you feel you deserve you gotta go become more valuable you're not solving
00:05:23.980 big enough problems if you charge for time you punish your own efficiency because there's no
00:05:29.080 incentive to get better or be more effective in that time frame because that's what i get paid
00:05:33.740 so if anything being slower means i make more money that's a bad place to get to because i want
00:05:38.960 you to consider hey how do i use ai to automate this how do i hire better team members how do i
00:05:43.540 become a better leader so that i can get everybody producing more in a shorter amount of time because
00:05:48.640 I'm getting paid the same thing and still get results from my clients. But how do you get people
00:05:52.620 to pay for the outcome? First off, define a clear and specific problem. Ideally helping them with
00:05:57.940 one thing, not 10. Some people are like, I can do everything. I can be everything to everybody.
00:06:02.740 The problem is if you're everything to everybody, you're nothing great to any one person. Pick one
00:06:07.120 specific thing that you can do and knock their socks off. The second is design a process that
00:06:12.000 guarantees an outcome. For example, when I coach people, I sat down and created a system where I
00:06:17.040 ask myself, if they only follow certain pieces, will they get results? And the answer is yes.
00:06:22.560 I have this thing called the five daily non-negotiables. These five steps that if you
00:06:25.580 follow, you guarantee to grow your business. Think of it this way. Ask yourself the question,
00:06:30.380 if you only got paid, if your client got the result, how would you design the process?
00:06:35.400 Number three is you got to sell value, not the price. Value isn't always the cost, okay? Value
00:06:41.700 is the time invested from their end,
00:06:44.380 how fast you can get it to them,
00:06:46.020 how big of an impact you can have,
00:06:47.820 the experience that they're gonna have working with you,
00:06:50.860 what it tells them about themselves hiring you
00:06:53.680 if you've got a brand and a reputation.
00:06:55.320 It's interesting how value is very subjective to the buyer,
00:06:58.520 but you as the seller can position yourself
00:07:01.480 to actually increase the perceived value.
00:07:04.020 Which brings us to the third way to make so much money,
00:07:06.460 it feels like cheating the game of life.
00:07:08.560 Cashflow is more important than cash piles.
00:07:11.060 you know what's crazy is i know a lot of crypto millionaires that made a lot of money back in the
00:07:16.580 day when they bought cheap and the price has gone up and it comes down and they're sad and they make
00:07:20.180 more money because it goes back up again but what happens is they created this cash pile that they
00:07:25.220 think is going to make them happy but now they are a prisoner of their own creation because not only
00:07:30.100 do they not want to spend it because they're worried about what that's going to really be
00:07:33.300 worth in the future they haven't figured out how to develop the skill to become rich this is not
00:07:39.940 a moment in time where you just get an influx of money making money is actually quite easy it's
00:07:44.820 keeping it that's hard and trusting yourself that you've become the person who can easily attract
00:07:49.860 that kind of money it's not about how much you made it's about how consistently you can make it
00:07:56.340 if i've developed the skills to make money and you take everything away from me i can get right back
00:08:02.100 to where i was i don't have to worry or be dependent on anybody else that's why it's so
00:08:06.340 important to focus on value creation over time, not these points in time. A lot of folks that can
00:08:13.220 sell a thing once for a lot of money, they run to that. And I get it. Sometimes you need to do that
00:08:18.140 to fund your business. What's more valuable when you think of business models is getting paid every
00:08:23.440 month for long periods of time. Why? It creates predictability. I can predictably hire, predictably
00:08:28.820 invest, predictably plan, predictably save my money if there's a subscription component. That's
00:08:34.760 my background in software taught me that at 17 years old. It taught me how to build businesses
00:08:39.740 that I didn't know at the time that allowed me to create real value in the world, not just get
00:08:44.140 one time rich. And that was the reason why I was able to sell those three companies in 10 years for
00:08:49.140 so much money is because I understood how to create long-term cashflow. It's so crazy, but
00:08:53.620 a business doesn't fail because of low profits. It fails because it runs out of cash. I can't
00:08:59.340 pay people with profits people talk about ebitda ebitda ebitda ebit like literally those are the
00:09:04.540 private equity folks that's their favorite language in the world why because they use
00:09:08.300 that to fund debt and that's where the cash flow needs to be and i'm telling you you don't fail in
00:09:13.580 business when you run out of profits if you can't make your payments then you're out of the game
00:09:18.300 what i found interesting about my billionaire mentors is that they think in flows not totals
00:09:23.340 They could care less about total assets.
00:09:25.640 They care about how much that asset produces in cash flow
00:09:29.320 that they then can use and do other things with it.
00:09:32.280 See, 100K per month is more impressive than a millionaire.
00:09:35.360 Some people that made a million
00:09:36.540 and just sitting on a million,
00:09:37.840 they don't know how to spend a million.
00:09:39.060 If you make 100,000 per month,
00:09:41.140 you're making a million every 10 months.
00:09:43.320 And if you know how to repeat that and create that,
00:09:45.820 that's what made you a millionaire,
00:09:47.320 not the money in the bank.
00:09:49.000 Which brings us to the fourth way to make so much money.
00:09:52.060 it feels like cheating the game of life stop counting other people's money the kids these
00:09:56.600 days call it counting people's pockets let's stop that i remember one time i went to my buddy's event
00:10:01.380 and i met a guy named rob and it was like within 36 seconds he wanted to tell me about how much
00:10:06.720 money that guy was making and that guy was making and oh did you hear about this person online i
00:10:11.120 heard he did this much in his launch and this person's making this much money per month he
00:10:14.760 knew more about how much money everybody else is making than his own freaking business he couldn't
00:10:19.880 tell me how much money he made that day, that week, that month. He wouldn't even be able to tell me 0.79
00:10:23.600 what his trends line are for the year. Isn't it fascinating? Looking around, counting everybody's
00:10:28.460 success instead of asking, how much did I make today? How much am I making this month? What do
00:10:34.480 I need to do to increase my profit? The focus on your own financials is how you get rich. What's
00:10:41.180 interesting to me is the people that you're jealous of, that you're counting their money,
00:10:45.000 used to be just as broke as you, what changed?
00:10:47.840 They decided to put their understanding
00:10:49.860 of financials first.
00:10:50.980 See, you don't win by wishing or hoping,
00:10:53.620 you win by working,
00:10:55.280 you win by doing the rhythm of success,
00:10:57.960 specifically when it comes to money.
00:10:59.700 And the key is, is don't compare your chapter three
00:11:02.720 to somebody else's chapter 13.
00:11:05.000 It doesn't matter if they're 20,
00:11:06.280 they could have started when they were 10
00:11:08.320 and they got 10 years, chapter 10
00:11:11.420 in their entrepreneurial journey.
00:11:12.620 and you're starting at 45 and you're three years in
00:11:15.700 and you think that they're doing better than you,
00:11:17.640 you're only three in, they're into 10.
00:11:19.860 You can't, it doesn't work like that.
00:11:21.920 So if you wanna make so much money,
00:11:23.660 it actually feels like cheating, check your own money.
00:11:26.220 It's one, check your bank account daily.
00:11:28.640 I get a daily cash email for every one of my companies
00:11:31.760 into my inbox with the subject line
00:11:33.880 telling me the cash position of where it's at,
00:11:36.260 even my personal.
00:11:37.160 I literally have somebody that manages,
00:11:38.860 I'm talking my home assets and revenue and income.
00:11:41.600 I mean, it works just like a business and I track all of that. So I know where every penny is now.
00:11:45.920 I don't have to do it because I pay somebody to do it, but you want to make sure that you
00:11:49.440 personally log into your bank account and look at the numbers, look at the credit card statements,
00:11:53.380 look at your cash position, look at your savings and make sure that you can keep a pulse on what's
00:11:57.540 happening. The second thing is you have to have weekly pillars. I measure myself every Friday on
00:12:02.220 seven key pillars. One of them is money. What does money mean for me? I asked myself the question,
00:12:06.920 one out of 10, how did I do on the money side? Did I make some money? Did I save some money?
00:12:11.320 Did I do some strategic planning around my investments?
00:12:13.640 Did I look at a bunch of deals?
00:12:14.800 Like I just asked myself,
00:12:16.000 am I at a nine or a 10 or am I at a four or five?
00:12:18.600 And if I have a low score,
00:12:19.840 I do one thing to increase my money score for the next week.
00:12:23.240 And if you wanna learn the other six pillars,
00:12:25.120 it's at the end of my book,
00:12:26.480 Buy Back Your Time in the bonus section.
00:12:28.360 It's a weekly process that I've been doing for decades
00:12:30.660 that helps me stay focused
00:12:31.880 on the most important parts of my life.
00:12:33.540 Number three is monthly P&L.
00:12:35.320 Like actually sit down and do a profit and loss statement
00:12:38.240 for your own personal account.
00:12:39.720 It's not hard.
00:12:40.360 you can google a simple template but putting everything in there and honoring that process
00:12:45.240 of counting your own money which sounds super not fun is how you're going to get rich which brings
00:12:49.800 us to the fifth and last way to make so much money it feels like cheating use money as a tool not the
00:12:55.320 goal this one's fascinating i grew up with a kid and his dad had a food truck and he did everything
00:13:01.640 in cash now he came from another country and he didn't trust the banks but essentially he worked
00:13:06.680 every saturday and all week long for this food truck to make all the money to support his family
00:13:11.640 but he did this for decades i think he's still doing it now 42 years later he worked all week
00:13:19.080 prepping driving selling he hardly saw his family he would drive two hours away four hours away to
00:13:25.560 special events just to sell his food and i remember my friend telling me that all the cash because
00:13:30.360 the cash business he saved in the house and he hid it all over the place and he thought his dad
00:13:35.000 was so rich and i was like oh no the key that he didn't understand is you got to use money as the
00:13:40.440 tool not the point it's not about saving a bunch of money it's about improving your life and your
00:13:45.880 life situation it's understanding how to use it as a tool for leverage see he could have took that
00:13:51.400 money and hired somebody to buy back some time so that he could start being more efficient and
00:13:56.040 thinking through how he works instead of just creating himself a low-paying job if you actually
00:14:01.160 look at the total hours he worked per week and what he generated sure he provided for his family
00:14:06.380 but he could have been so much further ahead if he understood how to use it not just hoard it in
00:14:10.860 his house you see money doesn't change you it just amplifies who you are and the truth is if you're
00:14:16.420 looking for freedom freedom isn't found in your bank account it's found in your calendar the goal
00:14:22.040 of money is to buy back your time so you can spend more time doing the things you love that's why i
00:14:27.060 spend so much money hiring people to support my life i want to do two things i either want to spend
00:14:33.160 time with the people i love or create in a way that's unique to who i am anything else i would
00:14:38.380 rather deploy money to get leverage so that i can be more me and that's why i have people like ann 0.96
00:14:44.760 and betty and sam and todd it's essentially team martel that give me back literally 40 50 60 hours
00:14:52.440 a week each so I can be here helping you. It honestly breaks my heart when I see really
00:14:57.120 well-meaning entrepreneurs working themselves literally to death because they don't know
00:15:01.740 how to have people support them, especially the assistant role. They're like, if I hired somebody,
00:15:06.480 what would they do? If you want my internal document on all the things, it's 42 pages of
00:15:11.620 tasks and projects and templates and best practices for my executive assistant, just find me on
00:15:16.540 Instagram, message me the word YouTube EA, and I will send you the direct link to that document.
00:15:21.240 The only way you'll end up making so much money
00:15:24.040 that it feels like cheating
00:15:25.260 is by making the process fun and exciting.
00:15:28.620 You have to do what feels like play
00:15:30.900 that other people see as work.
00:15:34.200 Feels like play, looks like work.
00:15:36.500 Feels like play, looks like work.
00:15:38.940 Do that and it'll change your life.
00:15:40.860 Now, if you wanna learn how to build a business
00:15:43.040 that runs itself, click the video
00:15:44.720 and I'll see you on the other side.