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On today’s episode of To The Point Podcast, we bring you an incredible segment from Dan Martell. Dan built and sold three companies for millions of dollars in under ten years, and now owns a venture company called Martell Ventures that is on track to be over a billion dollars in under three years.
Dan breaks down the strategies that got him growing his business so fast that it felt like cheating. Listen now!
1. Focus On Cash, Not Perfection
Stop trying to make everything perfect and just start selling. Everyone wants to start a business, but not actually do the work of selling. The moment you sell something to a stranger is the moment you become an entrepreneur. The more money you can get upfront before you spend a lot to deliver what you sold, the easier it is to grow your business.
2. Make People Feel Dumb To Say No
You need to make a transformation-focused offer, not a list of deliverables. Too many people say well if you buy you get this, this, this, and this…you’ll “and this” them to death. People don’t want a bunch of features. They want their problem solved and to know that you understand them. Then you have to add urgency, scarcity, and risk reversal. If you don’t put that into your offer, people will sit back and wait.
Better offers = better close rates and premium pricing.
3. Build A Marketing System, Not A Marketing Plan
Dan has learned that most entrepreneurs feel guilty if the “machine” is working. To feel less guilty about growth, you need to build a system that creates predictability in the business. If you do it right, it will feel like cheating.
Don’t overcomplicate the system. First, you have to use the camcorder method. If you’re doing something that generates leads, you have to record that activity so you have that training material. Then, you want to create a course that documents the steps laid out in those videos so someone can follow each step and create that predictability. Then focus on cadence. What’s the schedule? You have to document the cadence and set up a schedule so someone can create a system of predictability. Finally, generate a checklist. Those 7-10 things they have to do every day that if they do they will generate the result you want for your business.
If you build this out, you’ll have predictable leads and that means predictable cash flow that you can use to grow your business.
4. Audit Your Day
If your goal is to make a million dollars a year, anything that isn’t $500/hour is costing you the difference. There are 2,000 hours of work an average person does in a year, and at $500/hour, that’s your million. Too many people are spending time on $10/hour tasks and wondering why they haven’t built a million dollar business.
You have to track your time. Dan does a two-week audit of everything down to 15 minute intervals. If you spent 3 hours scrolling tiktok, write it down. Then, go through and analyze what you spent your time on. Take what you make in a year, divide it by 2,000, and then divide that number by four, and that’s your buyback rate. If you’re not happy with that number, charge more for what you sell or make what you sell more valuable. Reinvest your time into things that help you sell more or generate leads, and that will mean more money that will scale your business faster and feel like cheating.
5. Rebuild Your Calendar
Now that you’ve freed up your time, put the things that make you money into your calendar. High-revenue activities. You have to schedule for energy flows, too. If you know your best time of day for something is the morning, schedule it then.
6. Delete The Bottlenecks
Dan uses a tool called “50 to fix it”. If anyone in the company can fix a problem for less than $50, they can expense it with no questions asked. That number is $500 for leaders, $5,000 for managers, and $50,000 for C-Suite.
7. Replace Yourself
The best way to do this is an executive assistant, and the two things they have to focus on are your email and your calendar. Your email is nothing but a public to-do list, and your calendar doesn’t need you if you build a system for them to interact with. This way, you can spend your time on things that make you money to grow.
8. Increase Talent Velocity
Every business comes down to two key funnels. One is the customer funnel. The second is the talent funnel. How do we attract, retain, and develop top talent? Build out what your organizational team will look like at the size of your revenue goals. Then, create a people plan of all the people you need to hire that you don’t have right now, and sequence it based on dollar spend that gets you your time back the fastest.
9. Pay For The Blueprint
Money likes speed. If you were already the 10x version of yourself, you wouldn’t be where you are. Learn from someone else that’s done it. Go out and buy the blueprint to fill the gaps.
10. Resolve Your Retention
Nothing’s worse than spending all that time and energy and money to lose a bunch of customers every month. What’s the fast win you can get your client in the first 48 hours of them joining? Also, track your churn rate weekly so you can fix it if it goes wrong. When you have better retention, you have higher lifetime value for each customer.
11. Scale Sales Without Scaling You
Hire people that are commission based. Pay them enough to cover their expenses, but not enough to get rich. Then, pay them in a way that rewards them for selling.
12. Stay In Your Zone Of Genius
Your job as a CEO is to stay in your zone of genius and focus on three things. Your vision. Money. And people. Do you know where you’re going, do you have the capital to support that vision, and do you have the people to get you there?
Do Something About It
As we always say, you don’t have to everything, but you have to do something. If you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to Dan Martell on YouTube!
