Dan Martell - April 17, 2023


Starting Your First Business (Watch This)


Episode Stats

Length

9 minutes

Words per Minute

216.2595

Word Count

2,160

Sentence Count

40


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.080 Yeah, you can hustle and you can work 100 hours a week,
00:00:02.840 but you then are potentially feeling burnt out
00:00:05.660 and overwhelmed, and my whole thing,
00:00:07.480 it's kind of like a diet.
00:00:08.580 The right way is to do it in a way
00:00:10.340 that you can sustain it for the rest of your life.
00:00:12.360 The wrong way is to do it in a way
00:00:13.860 that it's not sustainable,
00:00:14.740 and then you just go up and down.
00:00:16.620 The thing I'm trying to design
00:00:18.420 is a life I never have to retire from.
00:00:20.800 What are the activities that give you energy?
00:00:23.200 What are the activities that make you feel
00:00:25.120 recharged, rejuvenated, that it is sustainable?
00:00:27.880 because the most powerful force in the world
00:00:30.700 is compound interest.
00:00:34.780 What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone
00:00:37.000 who's looking to start their own business?
00:00:38.800 There's a lot.
00:00:39.880 Number one is go get paid.
00:00:41.740 So there's kind of like the zero day start.
00:00:44.700 The zero day start means go find three people
00:00:46.940 that have the problem,
00:00:47.860 do the thing that you can do for them for free
00:00:51.060 to get the experience to then get referrals, right?
00:00:54.860 Like most people are like,
00:00:55.960 oh, how do I get people to pay me?
00:00:57.220 You don't.
00:00:57.880 you start off and you say, hey, I'm a wedding photographer. I'm a video editor. I'm a lawn
00:01:05.080 care person. I want to mow your lawn for free. It's almost like, how do you deliver services as
00:01:08.880 good as the paid version of other people? Because I think sometimes people discount their value
00:01:13.660 and they really shouldn't. When I started business, I was all like, I'm going to win
00:01:16.700 because I'm going to be cheaper. My brother started a home building company and he wanted
00:01:20.740 to build the cheapest houses. He was like, well, if I have the cheapest houses, then everybody's
00:01:24.000 gonna buy my house because it's the least expensive turns out that's not true because people are
00:01:28.180 willing to pay a premium for a great product and if you're trying to build the cheapest house and
00:01:32.620 you're always going to be in a race for the bottom versus a race for the top figure out how can i
00:01:36.280 deliver above average value for a fair price how do you deliver high quality service but for a
00:01:46.460 premium price because then you have the margin see most people don't value themselves enough when
00:01:51.700 they're starting off so they're in business but they're not making any money when they start
00:01:54.940 looking at i mean it's like my kids are like oh yeah i'm gonna sell these rocks for a dollar
00:01:58.120 it's like how much did you pay for all the the supplies to paint on the rocks and put their
00:02:03.240 little jewels and stuff on it and they're like i don't know it's like when you start putting your
00:02:07.340 time together and the materials and stuff like you might have to sell that rock for five dollars
00:02:11.540 like you're just not going to make any money otherwise so that's the best advice i would say
00:02:15.760 somebody's starting off because they got to get early traction with the customer so do stuff for
00:02:20.960 free but not for everybody strategically for the first few knock their socks off one of my buddy
00:02:27.240 Matt always says you know my socks are still on which means my socks have not been knocked off
00:02:32.360 so knock their socks off and then um use that momentum to then get some paid clients and try
00:02:39.420 to get you know into the premium pricing world so that you have the margins to be able to build
00:02:44.380 the business so I guess uh a lot of your content recently obviously is buy back your time so
00:02:51.380 someone who has already gotten started off in business someone who's gotten their feet off
00:02:54.780 the ground I guess what would be the most important step for them to start buying back some of their
00:03:00.680 time and not putting all of their time and effort into their work yeah and it's funny because I
00:03:05.900 think buying back your time is an age dependent thing when you're 20 you just have this perception
00:03:11.160 that you have all the time in the world
00:03:12.620 and you're willing to show up and grind it out
00:03:15.200 and work 100-hour weeks.
00:03:16.500 I mean, so many of my 20-year-old followers online,
00:03:20.300 they're like, they don't have a problem.
00:03:22.760 Weekends, nights, they're just like,
00:03:24.480 I'm willing to show up and do the work, which is great.
00:03:27.160 The challenge is that you undervalue
00:03:28.840 what you could be doing with that hour, right?
00:03:31.920 So for me, it's really important
00:03:34.360 to understand your buyback rate.
00:03:36.260 For the amount of hours you're working,
00:03:37.680 what's your income production?
00:03:39.580 because you can feel like you're making forward movement
00:03:43.660 but you're actually going sideways.
00:03:45.280 Oh, this is good, the business is going
00:03:46.880 and you're literally just spinning your wheels in the sand
00:03:48.700 because you're not measuring the right things.
00:03:50.800 Once you measure the right thing,
00:03:52.620 then you can't deny if the activity you're currently doing
00:03:56.080 on a day-to-day basis is moving that forward.
00:03:58.540 So the thing that you should be measuring
00:03:59.960 is literally revenue,
00:04:01.600 and I would say even better than that, gross revenue,
00:04:03.880 which is after you have the cost of delivering the service,
00:04:07.860 how much are you producing after the fact your gross profit once you understand that then you
00:04:12.660 should be buying back your time even if you have all the time in the world to fix the energy flow
00:04:18.860 of your life see a lot of people don't understand is that yeah you can hustle and you can do a lot
00:04:23.860 of stuff and you can work 100 hours a week but you then are potentially feeling burnt out and
00:04:29.480 overwhelmed and my whole thing it's kind of like a diet you know people come to you and they like
00:04:33.900 oh wow you lost all this weight how'd you do it well the right way is to do it in a way that you
00:04:39.160 can sustain it for the rest of your life the wrong way is to do it in a way that it's not sustainable
00:04:43.240 and then you just go up and down it's like you know six weeks before the vacation you lose 20
00:04:48.440 pounds and then you put it on during the vacation you're just like dieting up and down to me it's
00:04:53.100 the same thing about buying back my time the thing i'm trying to design is a life i never have to
00:04:59.360 retire from. So I'm buying back my time, not so I can always work more, although that's incredibly
00:05:05.200 important and you should upgrade your skills and your beliefs and your character traits.
00:05:09.020 But also look at like, what are the activities that give you energy? What are the activities
00:05:14.200 that make you feel recharged, rejuvenated, that it is sustainable? Because the most powerful force
00:05:20.820 in the world, the most powerful force in the world is compound interest, is consistency and
00:05:27.060 momentum. It's waking up every day and being consistent towards an outcome. So yeah, when
00:05:34.520 you're younger, you can grind it out. But the problem is, is it's not sustainable. And it's
00:05:37.640 not sustainable for being in a relationship. So at some point in your late 20s, early 30s,
00:05:42.040 you're going to wake up and go like, wow, I'm not really a great person to be in a relationship with.
00:05:46.240 Right? And you're going to look in a mirror and go, geez, I put on 40 pounds. Like this isn't
00:05:50.500 what success looks like. Like how am I supposed to show up? And so for me, it's always about
00:05:55.420 buying back your time even at the lowest level so that you can reinvest it in creating a calendar
00:06:01.220 and that's the key the perfect calendar that is sustainable and produces outcomes that you never
00:06:07.640 have to retire from my life is literally just doing the things that I love to do as much as
00:06:12.520 I humanly possibly can do in a way that gives me energy and do you have like a specific calendar
00:06:18.440 that you found kind of works best for you or for an entrepreneur or someone who you know is as busy
00:06:23.240 as you are yeah I think everybody should design it based on their energy flows so mine now is I
00:06:29.580 kind of break my life up into like three parts of my day my morning my afternoon and my night
00:06:34.060 and they're kind of like three very unique days and each one can have different components of
00:06:40.100 creating work but that is sustainable so like maybe like my nights are collaborating with
00:06:46.800 friends or going and doing physical activities but all my friends are entrepreneurs so I'll bring
00:06:51.000 problems to those activities to the mountain biking to the wake surfing to the snowboarding
00:06:55.420 to the cat skiing to whatever so that I can work through it and then my mornings are where I create
00:07:00.860 early in the morning it's like I wake up and I want to you know I have a list of things I want
00:07:04.540 to produce I want to work on ideation where it's like my brain is just still connected to flow into
00:07:10.380 energy into the universal consciousness it's just like how can I create something from nothing and
00:07:15.880 then usually my afternoons I like to use that for like conversation with team members clients like
00:07:21.740 trying to inspire them to like consider different options and I mean a lot of times I just joke with
00:07:26.460 people I'm a professional point of view seller I'm like a POV drug dealer it's like what do you
00:07:31.380 want what kind of point of view do you want do you want some of this you want some of that like
00:07:34.600 that's literally what I do all day long I have a point of view that's completely different from
00:07:39.960 the one you have. And I'm hopefully going to try to convince you to, to adopt it because at the end
00:07:45.860 of the day, man, life doesn't get easier. You get better. And the only way you get better is by
00:07:50.440 changing your set of beliefs. So people that don't believe that the rhythm of their day and
00:07:55.120 the energy and how they flow through their day is important. We'll never find that flow, right?
00:08:00.540 They'll never consider a concept like batching or block time or others that are transformational.
00:08:06.820 like once you you do it I don't know you just can't undo it it's like well that's just that
00:08:11.600 just makes a lot of sense if I'm gonna sit down and do podcast interviews I'm gonna do four or
00:08:15.700 five in a row why would I allow somebody to like start my day super early doing a podcast interview
00:08:21.040 when I should have been creating my next big thing right so it's like even that concept is
00:08:25.200 is really important but the big idea for me when designing the perfect week is you start with the
00:08:31.700 ingredients you know you make a list of like what are the elements of a perfect week in a week
00:08:36.160 what would I like to do with my time while I want to go on date night with my wife I want to spend
00:08:40.380 time with my kids I want to go to the gym every day I want to create one meaningful thing you know
00:08:46.200 new in my business an SOP strategy document whatever it is just like what are these elements
00:08:52.300 if you accomplish them that would feel like oh that was a successful week and then once I've got
00:08:57.200 those things then I put them into the calendar kind of like the big rocks and small rocks pebbles
00:09:01.780 and saying it's let me get the big rocks into the calendar first and design it and look at and step
00:09:09.220 back go like if I executed that day how would my energy feel right so like some people they like
00:09:14.120 to work first thing in the morning some people at lunch so they have a second kind of wind in the
00:09:18.660 afternoon but once you take all those ingredients and that becomes the basis of your perfect week
00:09:23.780 and then the sequencing is like the recipe how do I put these ingredients into my week and you may
00:09:28.620 not get it perfect at first but you start playing with it but it's there is no other way to create
00:09:33.900 a life that you never have to retire from than to design your work and your activities through a
00:09:40.480 place of like getting things done and then just even where your head's at when you're doing those
00:09:45.200 kind of activities and then trying to find your flow state like energy management to me is way
00:09:50.320 more important than time management or task management that was a lot of value in 11 minutes
00:09:57.500 oh I don't shut up