The Martell Method w/ Dan Martell
These 10 Simple Laws Took Me From Broke to Millionaire
Fri, 24 Jan 2025
Get The Book (Buy Back Your Time): https://bit.ly/3pCTG78 Subscribe to My Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3W2tjp2 Broke entrepreneurs actually end up being the most successful. Because it turns out, starting from zero means you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. If that’s you, you’ve got an advantage. And in this episode I share the 10 Laws of Making Money that took me from a broke 23 year old to a multi-millionaire today. And anyone can start using them today to get rich fast, even if you’re broke. IG: @danmartell X: @danmartell
Chapter 1: What are the 10 laws of making money?
I'm gonna share with you the 10 laws of making money that took me from a broke 23-year-old to a multimillionaire. And anyone can start using them today to get rich fast, even if you're broke. 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.
Chapter 2: Why is selling before building important?
In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. My bestselling book, Buy Back Your Time is out now. Grab a copy at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers. Law number one, sell before you build. I've seen it a thousand times.
I even had a buddy recently that made the same mistake where he had a software idea, went into his basement, wrote a bunch of code, spent months on this software, finally launched, nobody bought. The key is try to sell it before you build it. If you sell before you build, your future is filled. Meaning that all the hard part that you need to figure out, you start with that.
You don't wait till the end. Building something is actually not hard. The hard part is actually finding out if anybody wants to buy what you've already built. It's actually exactly how crowdfunding has been doing it for Kickstarter does this, Indiegogo does this. I'm actually involved in a company where they pre-sold $20 million of a physical hardware before they ever shipped their first unit.
Why is that important? It proved that there was customers that wanted to buy the product before they ever spent any engineering time on building it. Tesla did it too. They pre-sold the Roadster. Back in the day, it was $100,000 deposit to say, I'd buy the rest of the car once it gets built. And they proved that people wanted to buy that Roadster before they ever built one.
This can be applied to literally anything. I've seen it with consumer goods. I've seen this with coaching. I've even seen it with a car parts company. You might have heard the shoe company Zappos. They're a billion dollar company got bought by Amazon. Before the founder ever bought a pair of shoes, they sold them on the internet first to prove that people would buy shoes over the internet.
And when they got their first order, you know what they did? They ran down the street, they bought it and they shipped it. Did they make any money? No. Did they prove that the customer was willing to buy that way without trying them on first? Yes. And that's why selling before you build is the only way to build your business. If they don't pay, then they won't pay attention anyways.
It's like my book. If I just give my book away thinking people are going to read it and get value from it, they won't. It's a bad strategy. A better strategy is to make them pay anything because when they do, they'll pay attention with their time to get the value from the book. But what if you don't have a product or service to sell? That's where law number two of making money comes in.
Make someone else rich. My top salesperson cold emailed me. A long time ago, he ended up in my inbox with a proposition that said, you pay me nothing, let me send an email. And if I sell anything, you give me a percentage of that. Now he works with me and he makes over seven figures a year in commissions alone. Why? He helped me make more money. I gave him a piece of that.
It doesn't require a product or service to sell. It requires that you're good enough to make that proposition. The way it works is you connect someone else's product to a buyer and then you get paid. This is how real estate works for a lot of people that do wholesaling. They find a property or project, they lock it up and they sell it to somebody else that's looking for projects.
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Chapter 3: How can you make someone else rich?
If you took everything you know up to this point about the thing you do and it got taken away from you and you had to pay to get it all back, how much would you pay for that experience? How much would you pay for that knowledge? How much would you pay for all of those little hacks? You take all this stuff for granted. Whatever you would pay for that is what your value is.
And for a lot of you, it's a lot of money and you don't charge enough. You have to value yourself. There's only three levels of trading money. The first level is employee and the employee trades time for money. That's essentially your income, your salary. And most people start out here. It's where I started because it's the easiest.
And you just find somebody that's willing to pay you to do a job and you trade your time doing the job and you get paid. Now, it's the easiest place to upgrade because you're pricing yourself on time. And if you learn to be more valuable, then you can start figuring out how to charge for your value, not your time. Level two is entrepreneur, which is where you start trading money for time.
This is leverage. If you think about every business owner, if they have an employee, what they're doing is they're taking dollars, they're hiring somebody to do something for them, buying time so that they can take that time and go invest it somewhere else that might make them more money than what they paid.
But if you get really good at becoming more valuable and creating more value for other people, then you keep trading money for more time and that's how you scale your business. The third level is investor, and that's about trading money for money. And that is truly freedom.
The day that you're able to live off of the income that your money generates, not your time, not the business because you have leverage with people, but actually the capital and cash you've saved up and invested, that's when you finally can look around and say, what do I really want to create with my life? What impact do I want to have? How do I want to show up?
What are the opportunities in front of me? Where do I want to spend my time? And that makes you dangerous because now you don't do anything for anybody that you don't want to do. And I believe the person that needs nothing can't be controlled. So you want to move as fast as you can from time for money for money for time to money for money as you improve your ability to trade up.
Before we get back to the episode, if you wanna jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it at martellmethod.com. But if you are trading your time for money, law number four is how to leverage your time to get rich.
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Chapter 4: What is the value of your time?
Find rich customers. I coach a lot of entrepreneurs and one of the things I always get pushed back on is when I tell them to raise their prices. They always say, my customers will leave me. They'll find somebody that's cheaper. They'll be upset with me. I've been working with this person for 12 years.
that and the reality of it is if you keep working with people that don't pay you what you need to be paid to invest in your business and you'll always have a small business and you'll be more worried about your customers being upset with you than actually having a team that you love to work with because you can't afford to pay for great people you should always be looking for better customers because people that pay more are just easier to work with they ask less questions they always pay their bills on time they're usually a lot more emotionally stable
and they're more likely to refer you to their friends because they're happier, which means they're gonna tell people about you, which makes the whole thing better. You should always be raising your prices. A good rule of thumb is every six months, you wanna change some aspect of your product pricing.
It could be individual products, it could be the overall setup pricing, whatever it is, some aspect of what you charge should go up so that you're always able to invest in the business to be able to grow. So if you're struggling with the idea of raising your prices, let me ask you a few questions. Did your company get bigger in the last few years? Because my gut tells me you're probably better.
Did the world get more expensive? Yup. Which means everything you pay for got more expensive. Did you add more value to your product or service? Did you give your team any raises? I'm hoping you did. Did you increase your prices? No, you got better for your customers, for your team, for everybody around you, except for you. And the customer hasn't been paying that. And guess what?
Everything else in their life got more expensive except for your service because of your fear of raising your prices. But you can't just magically get rich customers. You need a strategy. Which brings us to law number five of making money, find bigger rooms. When I was 28, I moved from my hometown where I grew up my whole life to San Francisco where I didn't know a soul.
The main reason, I wanted to get around better people. I realized the better people I got around, the better it would force me to be. And if you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. If you're the smartest person on your street, move streets. You can't grow if you don't have people around you that are growing way past where you're at and they help pull you forward.
Once you expand, you can't contract. You just need to be around people that make you feel expansive. They'll show you by their actions how they've grown. It might even mean moving cities. Pretty much every seven years, I've moved the city I've lived in because I'm always trying to expand. I'm always trying to learn. I'm trying to be around people that inspire me.
And oftentimes, after a few years, I might make some good friends, but I know I've gotten what I needed out of a certain area, and I move to go find and experience new things. You need to get comfortable being the smallest person in the biggest room. And I understand imposter syndrome is a real thing. I've been there where I got invited to things.
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Chapter 5: How to find rich customers?
These are all skills that you could build. These are all skills you could acquire. They're all skills that you can get better at. And what's crazy is some people think, well, I need equipment to do the thing, like shoot videos. I need to buy all this gear. No, you don't. You just need to pull out your phone and talk to your camera. Post it on social media. Just do the reps.
So many people think that to get a skill, they have to spend money. And the truth is they just have to spend time. Broke people have TVs. Rich people have libraries. Learning how to solve problems for other rich people is a great way to add value to their lives. And those solutions to the problems are in books.
Chapter 6: Why should you always raise your prices?
So even if you don't have a business that you're building for yourself, think of some people you want to network with and add value to. Reading books to help them to provide perspective or teach them things about their industry that they may not know because you went down the rabbit hole and studied it is a really great way to become more valuable.
But here's the deal, don't just read the books, study the books. One of the things that I do every day is I read and I study. Study means underlying, cataloging, writing things down in my phone that I'm gonna teach other people, referencing it, trying to rewrite certain passages in a way that I understand for my brain. That way I integrate it into my life and my being.
So it's not just getting the task of reading a book done, it's integrating the lessons into my life. The number one investment you can make is in yourself. I have young entrepreneurs coming to me every day asking me, hey, I got an extra 500 bucks. What should I spend it on?
And I always say in yourself, in you, the course, the material, the knowledge, the experience to fly somewhere is to go to an event because you will take you with you for the rest of your life. every business, every interaction, every communication with another person, whether it's this business or the next business, you will always be there.
Make more bets on you because your personal income is tied to your personal development. The more you grow, the more you'll earn. But even with all of this, I see some broke entrepreneurs making a huge mistake. They think they have to build everything themselves from scratch. Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube.
I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube. Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell, because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you. I've got a new episode, so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to law number seven of making money, model then modify.
When I was 28, I decided to move my life to San Francisco. The only reason I moved is I wanted to learn what the best of the best did to build their software companies, to raise $100 million, to exit for a billion dollars. I wanted to see how the best did what they did. Here's why. And Tony Robbins says it best. He says, success leaves clues.
You want to study what successful people do and do exactly what they do. I like to think about is like copy the container, not the content. If you see somebody winning that competes against you, just look at the container they've built for how they've won. Don't copy exactly how they're doing it. Put your own content inside of it. Make it your own. But why would you reinvent the wheel?
Somebody else has shown you the pattern to be successful. I think about this all the time, make it your own. Maybe you choose a different market to be in. Maybe the way the product's built is your own product. Maybe the stories are the personalities. You can take the blueprint, make it your own and customize it so that everybody sees it as a unique idea, but you're following best practices.
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Chapter 7: What does it mean to become more valuable?
I go, you have three businesses. Yeah, I know, but all three businesses support the same customer and they're super integrated and it makes a lot of sense. And I'm like, no. It doesn't because anybody that's built a business knows that every product has to be written up and supported, marketed, sold.
And each one of those things provides overhead that is three times bigger than the initial decision to do the thing. That one little side business is not one little side business. It's a new business that's gonna distract you from your primary business because you're not focused. The whole idea is single focus, single file.
And if I tried to get you to count one to 26, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, you'd do it really fast. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, all the way to Z, really fast. If I made you go one, A, two, B, three, C, it would be 10 times slower. So you might think you're focused, but you keep context switching, which is gonna slow you down. And it's proof, the math maths.
This is how I know what your priorities are. First off, you need to invest. And there's two places that you need to invest, in your bank account and your calendar.
If I can't see by the transactions that you spend every day, every month on what you say is a priority, because I can see by the investment of dollars, or I look at your calendar and see where you've allocated your time to that project, to that initiative, to a loved one, then don't tell me what your priorities are. I can decipher it by what you spend time and money on.
If you want to demonstrate focus and priorities, start your day with what's a big rock. I call it the five to nine strategy. If something is new and it's a side hustle, show me five to nine, 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Don't tell me you don't have time. You have the time. Just make it a priority. Start your day with that initiative.
Work your rest of the day doing whatever your other thing is and then come back at it. But there's one part that might be missing, a rich mindset that hasn't shifted yet, which brings us to the last law of making money, the law of 300%. Growing up, I loved to skateboard. As a teenager, that's what I spent most of my time doing. And there was this big set of stairs called the Big Five.
And the vision I had was to backside heel flip this thing. And it was crazy. I remember I tried it a hundred times. I just wasn't able to do it. And I remember there was this older skateboarder that always hung around. His name was Morris. And he was sitting there one time watching me. He goes, Dan, do you know why you're not able to land that trick? And I said, no.
He goes, because you don't believe. I watch you approach it and you hesitate as if you have no confidence in actually landing the trick. What you need to do is visualize and believe that you can do it. A week later, I pull up by myself, charge it, backside heel flip. catch it, stomp it right away. Freaked out.
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