The Martell Method w/ Dan Martell
The only 5 skills you need to build a $1B company
Sat, 01 Feb 2025
Get The Book (Buy Back Your Time): https://bit.ly/3pCTG78 Subscribe to My Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3W2tjp2 Ever wonder how these 20 year olds can build billion dollar companies? After selling my first company for millions in 2008 I moved to San Francisco to find out. And I met a guy named Naval Ravikant who introduced me to the 4 C’s of leverage. And since then I’ve added a 5th C from what I learned watching these billionaires, do more in less time without going crazy. Because here’s how it works. Time, multiplied by leverage, equals output. And the 5 C’s is how people are able to build billion dollar companies.
Chapter 1: How can young entrepreneurs build billion-dollar companies?
Ever wonder how these 20-year-old tech CEOs can build billion-dollar companies? After selling my first company for millions in 2008, I moved to San Francisco to find out. And I met a guy named Naval Ravikant, who introduced me to the four Cs of leverage. And since then, I've added a fifth C. See, time multiplied by leverage equals output.
So without more explanation, these are the five Cs to get more leverage. Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.
And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martellmethod.com. Starting with the first C, content. Content is systems. Content is process. It's checklist. And systems in a business stand for save yourself time, energy, and money. Think about it. I can spend 20 minutes creating a training video that could be seen by millions of people that I've trained up.
Even my best-selling book, Buy Back Your Time, took me two years to write. Now it gets read by thousands of people and it takes me no extra time. Every billion dollar company has the way document. They have a way of operating their business that they've written down, they've documented, they create content around it. And that is how they're able to grow and scale.
That's how they create massive amounts of leverage. So to build a billion dollar business, you need playbooks. So this breaks down my camcorder method for you to create playbooks very easily. Step one is create an outline. Ask yourself, what would a 10 out of 10 outcome be for this piece of work I want somebody else to follow? What's the criteria? Collect all the information you have.
Decide what would be good and bad examples of that work being done. Write down the five principles that you believe you've adopted to create this work. Put that in one outline to help you navigate yourself to creating the playbook. Number two is record. And I use everything to record. I record on my iPad using the screen record. I use Zoom all the time by myself on a call.
You can literally just use your iPhone camera and record yourself. But the idea is to record yourself following the outline and talk out loud what you're doing. You have to say to the camera, to the person that might be watching the recording, why you're doing what you're doing and why you do it in that order. so that they can learn from your example. Number three is you got to create it.
Now you take the training, the recording, the outline, and you can sit down and you can write out the playbook. You can transcribe it and actually take the transcription, give it to AI and AI will write it for you step by step. It is beautiful and it creates a piece of content that is now repeatable that you can get massive leverage from. Number four is testing.
This is where you give your playbook to somebody else to follow to see if it makes sense, if they get tripped up, if they actually complete all the tasks. If you don't test it first and you give it out to the wild, then you will have inconsistent outcomes from that playbook. Number five is feedback.
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Chapter 2: What are the five Cs of leverage for building a business?
Billion dollar companies have sensors in place to allow the CEO to pull themselves out of being involved in every department, but still feel confident that it's running right. So here's the thing, now that you understand content, this next seat could transform your business.
Before we get back to the episode, if you actually wanna know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work, go follow me on Instagram, Dan Martell, 2LZMartell on Instagram. It's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time. I'd love to see you there. Have an amazing day.
Which brings us to the second C, code. Code is software. Code is AI. Code is automation. So yeah, Martell Media, we believe that having tooling to help our different departments is the only way to scale. I don't wanna have hundreds of people that do the work that 12 could do with the right software.
So we leverage software and AI custom built for our different departments to allow them to be more productive. And if you're scared of AI, just understand this, AI won't replace you, but someone using it will. So at all billion dollar companies, they've built on the backend of automation. They've built on the processes of workflow. They've looked at opportunities to increase their throughput
by using technology or code if you don't it's impossible for you to be able to scale with today's information systems and best practice software you can hit the ground running and build a massive business naval used to say this back in the day he sees a hundred person company generating a billion dollars in profit the only way to do that is have massive amounts of leverage using software
The most powerful software that you could adopt is AI. And that's why I created this thing called the AI amplifier for you to understand how to integrate it into your life. Number one is you got to connect to a trigger. See, most people know that there's AI out there, but they don't use it. So how do we connect that to a trigger of something you already do right now?
I would encourage you to replace your default browser to open up to an AI app, not to Google or whatever you use for search. The other thing you can do is connect your morning routine to a trigger to force yourself to use the AI app. So for me, every time I sit in my chair, I open it up and I try to do three prompts. That way it gets built into my muscle memory of using it on a daily basis.
Number two is you wanna integrate it to workflow. Think about the things you're currently doing. You can automate that, integrate it to your email, integrate it to your marketing system, integrate it to your billing system. With Zapier and other automation tools and the AI APIs, the way they're connected, you can automate those workflows. So it's just happening behind the scenes all the time.
Number three is you want to make it your own. You want to understand the language that AI talks. So it talks in prompts, it talks in libraries, it talks in projects, but you got to make it your own. You got to integrate it into your life and be able to use it in a way that nobody else even understands.
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Chapter 3: How does content creation lead to business leverage?
The coolest part about this is you don't have to give up any piece of your business to grow and if you do it right the more customers you get the more cash flow you'll have to be able to invest in growth.
But all of these frameworks don't mean anything without the next C. Before we get back to the episode, if you're enjoying it so far, could you go ahead and do me a huge favor and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify? Reviews help us get up in the rankings, which gives us credibility to reach out to bigger and bigger guests so we can bring them to you. It would mean so much.
Let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to the fourth C, collaboration. Business would be easy if it wasn't for people. And I love saying that because it reminds me that the better I get at the fourth C, collaboration, collaborating with other people, the more the opportunities come to me.
If I want to build a billion dollar business, I need to learn how to attract, develop, retain top talent. Every specialist out there, doctors, lawyers, social media experts, real estate agents, if they don't learn to play nice with other people, they usually get stuck at about 300,000 per year because they don't learn to delegate.
And if I've learned anything, your company will only scale to the level of your ability to work through people. Billion dollar companies were not built off $10 tasks. They weren't even built off $100 tasks and honestly, not even $1,000 tasks. When you scale, you have to be willing to trade money or capital to hire talent. You need to be able to pay to have people find that talent.
Your job is to get on a phone call with somebody that's capable, that's already working somewhere else and convince them to give that up
to come join you the thing about these 20 year old tech CEOs in Silicon Valley what they understand that most people don't is they understand how to buy back their time how to get leverage with the money they've raised to be able to do more they know that anything that isn't talking to customers getting them to buy Innovation working with the product team all the other stuff is just distractions as keeping them from doing the thing that only they can do learning to work with people
The way I think about it is we build the people and the people build the business. The CEO needs to be focused on doing that.
If you want to be a billionaire or build a billion dollar company, then you got to learn to let go and give up things that you actually might enjoy to create the space to go learn to solve the bigger problem that needs to be solved for the business and for you to get to that next level. That's why I created the replacement ladder.
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