Dan Martell - January 05, 2015


Why You Should Bet Against Entrepreneurs And Hope To Lose


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

227.88461

Word Count

1,659

Sentence Count

108


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.800 The other day I had an entrepreneur come to my house with $2,000 in cash to give me.
00:00:07.860 The reason why is a few months earlier I was at an event and every time I go to an event I always try to do this.
00:00:13.380 I try to collect about four or five entrepreneurs that I met.
00:00:16.280 Either they asked me questions after I gave a talk or they came up to me in the alleyway or in the conference in the hallway
00:00:22.340 and wanted to ask me a question and if I feel like they have good energy and they're just good people in general,
00:00:26.840 I always invite them to lunch.
00:00:27.880 And I was having lunch with five entrepreneurs and we were talking about different parts
00:00:32.120 of their business, what they were passionate about, and how they were doing in general.
00:00:35.640 And this one entrepreneur, David, was telling me about his business.
00:00:38.480 He had an online toothbrush subscription company.
00:00:41.120 Now, I had invested in a company called ManPax, so he was all interested in, you know, ManPax
00:00:45.720 is this company where you can auto order your underwear, your shaving gear, everything.
00:00:50.220 I mean, it's really cool.
00:00:51.220 Check it out, ManPax.com.
00:00:52.220 Obviously, that's a plug.
00:00:53.220 I'm an investor.
00:00:54.220 Whatever.
00:00:55.220 Anyways, David's asking me about it because he had a business that was similar for toothbrushes.
00:01:00.060 And, you know, he's telling me about the challenges and asking me about my feedback.
00:01:02.920 And I said, you know, David, there's probably one reason you haven't achieved this yet.
00:01:07.700 And he's like, oh, and he's all ears.
00:01:09.520 He's like listening.
00:01:11.000 I said, the number one is you haven't decided.
00:01:13.720 You haven't decided what your goal is for this month, this quarter, this year.
00:01:17.820 And from that point of view is you work backwards.
00:01:21.000 You haven't decided.
00:01:22.320 And he's like, oh, yeah, well, I do have goals.
00:01:24.980 I'm like, you might have a yearly goal,
00:01:26.480 but you don't have a monthly goal,
00:01:27.540 and you haven't broken that monthly goal
00:01:28.780 down into weekly goals, right?
00:01:31.180 And I don't mean to say that to be confrontational,
00:01:34.120 but that would change it all.
00:01:35.280 And I said, why don't we do this thing?
00:01:36.620 You know, for years I've been doing this thing
00:01:38.340 called the Martell bet.
00:01:40.880 If you haven't heard it, I wrote about it on my blog,
00:01:43.340 but the Martell bet is where when I meet entrepreneurs
00:01:46.180 at an event or a conference,
00:01:47.420 and they're excited about their business,
00:01:48.780 and they're telling me about what they're gonna achieve,
00:01:50.480 et cetera, and I just feel like they just need
00:01:53.080 need a little bit more guidance, I'll make a bet with them.
00:01:55.960 And every time I bet, I hope to lose.
00:01:58.600 So don't get me wrong.
00:01:59.760 So I made a bet with David.
00:02:00.760 I said, hey, let's pick a number in three months.
00:02:02.820 What do you think you could achieve from a monthly, you know, his business was a SaaS
00:02:05.800 business subscription.
00:02:06.800 I said, what could you achieve?
00:02:08.260 How many subscribers do you think you could achieve?
00:02:10.140 And he gave me a number.
00:02:11.260 I said, perfect.
00:02:12.260 How much do you want to bet?
00:02:13.260 You know, you want to bet 100 bucks, 500 bucks, whatever.
00:02:16.120 He's like, $5,000.
00:02:18.200 I was like, whoa, dude, like, I mean, you're not making any money.
00:02:22.280 I don't even know like you're like 19, 20 years old.
00:02:25.080 I don't want to take your money.
00:02:26.540 He's like, I was like, okay, how about $1,000, right?
00:02:30.040 Are you cool?
00:02:30.880 And he's like, yes, $1,000.
00:02:31.880 I'm like, all right, because if you lose,
00:02:33.520 that means, you know, that's a lot of money.
00:02:35.380 He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, $1,000.
00:02:36.660 I said, you can't put it on your line of credit.
00:02:38.200 Yes, yes, no problem, $1,000, perfect.
00:02:40.980 So I opened up my calendar,
00:02:42.840 I set the terms of the deal there,
00:02:44.780 I invite him to the calendar,
00:02:46.320 and then I, expecting to lose,
00:02:48.640 actually transfer via PayPal, my $1,000 loss.
00:02:51.660 I said, look, I'm going to give you the money now.
00:02:54.200 Do what you want with it.
00:02:55.080 You can put it in your bank and hold on to it.
00:02:56.980 You can spend it, whatever.
00:02:58.600 But I want you to know that I hope to lose this bet.
00:03:02.920 So here's my money.
00:03:03.960 Hope to lose a bet.
00:03:05.040 And in three months, we're going to get a reminder,
00:03:07.020 and I expect to get an email from you.
00:03:08.440 And if they lose, here's the deal.
00:03:10.020 They have to pay me.
00:03:10.980 I always take the money.
00:03:13.020 Two, I get to write a blog post about it or a video
00:03:16.060 and tell the whole world about it.
00:03:18.440 And then three, I always say, look, if you lose, I'm going to be helpful, whatever it is.
00:03:24.260 And I do these things, I do these bets for three main reasons.
00:03:27.560 One, I feel like it holds people accountable.
00:03:30.140 You know, if you think about in your business, you know, people joke that you have your customers that hold you accountable.
00:03:34.320 You have your, you know, your team or whatever.
00:03:36.480 But the truth is, is you don't, right?
00:03:38.200 There's nobody that's saying, okay, what are your goals for the week, the quarter, the month, et cetera.
00:03:42.360 That doesn't usually happen.
00:03:44.200 And I do these things to just get people excited.
00:03:47.200 sometimes people are just excited to have me involved in their business. So we set a goal
00:03:52.980 to hold them accountable. The second thing is actually teaches them how to set goals. It still
00:03:58.180 blows my mind. In 2014, that people in business still haven't said, okay, what is a goal? It's
00:04:04.280 not about having more subscribers. It's saying, I'm going to have X amount of subscribers. And
00:04:08.300 it's more than that. It's saying by this date. And then even further than that, it's with these
00:04:13.060 profit margins because if you have to spend ten dollars to get a dollar you're not building a
00:04:17.600 business so you know helping people define what's called smart goals is another thing that they
00:04:22.780 achieve they hold the accountability they got the smart goals and the third thing is I feel like it
00:04:27.540 gives them a sense of stretching themselves of learning how to decide to do things that are
00:04:34.220 exciting that are kind of crazy I don't know if I could accomplish it but if I did wow that would
00:04:38.960 be amazing, right? So it's kind of like, it's not a layup. It's not like knock it out of the park
00:04:44.380 goal. It's kind of a stretch goal. And I feel like people don't kind of ask themselves, is there more
00:04:49.480 I could be doing? Could I grow further? Could I push further? Could my goals be, you know, Apple's
00:04:54.460 known for this where they set their goals and then they have stretch goals. And the stretch goals is
00:04:57.760 where they're, I believe their managers get compensated on it. You know, so I made this bet
00:05:01.500 with Dave. And unfortunately, three months later, he shows up to my door with $2,000 in cold hard
00:05:08.040 cash. Cash, dollar bills, money. And I invited him over to my house for lunch because obviously
00:05:14.720 I was a little disappointed that I won the bet, which sounds nuts, but I wanted to make sure I
00:05:19.620 was helpful as I committed to him earlier. And here's what the neat part was, is he wanted to
00:05:24.940 come and give me the money. Even though he lived three hours away from where I live, he wanted to
00:05:28.760 drive, have lunch with me, give me the money in person because it turns out that in going through
00:05:34.280 this process and really working hard to hit this goal, he realized that his business wasn't that
00:05:40.000 exciting, that the numbers would never really work the way he envisioned it. And a lot of other
00:05:45.140 challenges with the business, not that it was a bad business, it just was challenging. And he wasn't
00:05:49.460 really something he wanted to do. But in going through that process in the previous three months,
00:05:54.180 he ended up finding an acquirer in Silicon Valley. And that company ended up buying his company,
00:06:00.200 and he's now moved from Eastern Canada to Silicon Valley
00:06:04.220 to join a startup.
00:06:05.680 And he was excited, elated,
00:06:08.160 like it was just the most amazing thing
00:06:09.540 that he was excited to come in person to tell me that story.
00:06:13.020 You know, I can't tell you the amount of people,
00:06:14.700 I've made probably 20 of these bets over the years.
00:06:17.160 Guides have either knocked it out of the park
00:06:19.220 and told me it was the best thing they'd ever done.
00:06:21.380 Another friend of mine, Sam,
00:06:22.640 he ended up shutting down the business.
00:06:24.060 It didn't work, but he quickly moved on to his next one.
00:06:26.600 It's called Make Space.
00:06:27.600 It is an amazing idea.
00:06:29.020 Sam, you, dude, are an amazing entrepreneur and I hate winning, but I'm so pumped to see what you're working on now.
00:06:36.060 And that is, you know, that many other stories are the outputs of why I bet on entrepreneurs and I hope to lose.
00:06:42.100 It's just an idea.
00:06:43.020 Maybe when you're meeting with somebody in the future, you can decide to make a bet with them.
00:06:46.920 And it's not in a, it's just saying, hey, do you want to make a bet?
00:06:49.100 It's not about like, I think you're overinflating your ideas or whatever.
00:06:53.140 I don't know.
00:06:53.620 I thought it was a neat idea and I'll continue to do it.
00:06:55.960 You'd usually do one per event that I'm speaking at.
00:06:58.740 And I just thought it was a neat idea.
00:07:00.600 I'm obviously super passionate in other people's success as a business.
00:07:04.180 And I want to challenge you to really stack up your game for your business growth
00:07:07.720 and think about how can you set goals that stretch and really move things forward.
00:07:12.460 So with that, I hope you have an amazing day and you live an extraordinary life.
00:07:16.240 All the best.