Dan Martell | Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire

Srini Rao:

Welcome back to the Unmistakable Creative

Dan Martell: oh, my pleasure, man. Super honored. It's been a pleasure, Dan. My goal is to make this and I know you've had incredible guests, but why not call her shots? One of the best podcast interviews I've ever done.

That's the goal. Then no pressure at all, but we had you here. I was looking back at the archives trying to figure out when we last had you here. And it was about eight years ago. And since then you have written a new book called Buy Back Your Time, which recently became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, all of which we will get into.

Srini Rao: But before we get into the book, I wanted to start by asking you, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping what you've ended up doing with your own life and career?

Dan Martell: Yeah, it's a fun question. My mom, we had four kids in our family. So she was a dedicated mom maker of just family and stuff.

She actually ran a fish and chip wagon when I was in my kind of early teenage years. Because her and my dad just always found that a fascinating idea of just like fish and chips isn't a we would call it food truck, but back in the day she was mrs Chips, so she ran that probably for four years when I was like 9 10 11 12.

And my dad was started off as an electrical engineer electric engine maintenance guy and eventually worked his way up to shop foreman and then eventually taking over the the whole plant that did electric engine repair and maintenance and stuff. And what, how that shaped me was a hundred percent being in a car with somebody that was high level sales selling to.

Fortune 2000 companies eventually the company was Westinghouse and then eventually they got bought by Siemens, which is a large company of Germany. And yeah, I pretty much got an MBA sitting next to my dad on early days of car phones and whatnot, driving around the province. I grew up in Canada and just listening to him put deals together and he'd hang up the phone and then he'd be all excited and tell me what he did.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was learning quite a bit about negotiation and business and sequencing and had a big impact. Yeah I know from our previous

Srini Rao: conversation, you got into quite a bit of trouble when you were younger you were arrested. What I'm curious about is how somebody like you that comes from the background that you did ended up on that trajectory because it just doesn't seem like the kind of environment that would lead to that outcome based on what you're telling me

Dan Martell: about your parents.

Yeah it's one of those situations I get the call often from last we got a woman reach out her husband, her son's 28 and within the last year went from normal 28 year old to raging cocaine addict and what happened for me is just, I got diagnosed with ADHD when I was 11 and started to have some.

kind of personality issues around like personal self worth and just value and had anger issues and I learned later on in therapy that A lot of it came down to just my dad being away from the home traveling so much and then I just became unmanageable at home my parents eventually just asked our social worker that we were working with as a family to place me in foster care, like essentially just I, they couldn't handle me.

I was just hyperactive, angry. And what happened was is I got put in foster care for a little bit. I didn't last too long because again I acted out there in the, my foster dad, Dave just couldn't deal with me. I, it's a funny story today, absolutely not at the time, but essentially I lit off about 12 Roman candles in his living room by accident and almost burned down his house.

So yeah, he had every right to not want me in his home anymore. But... I ended up in a group home with people that were a lot older than me at 12, 13 years of age and learning stuff I shouldn't have been learning. That's why I introduced the drugs and my life was spiraled out of control and just ended up I'd say the most like closely an an analogy would be like a Sons of Anarchy type environment where I was hanging out with people in motorcycle gangs selling and trafficking large amounts of.

and seeing and hearing and doing stuff that I definitely should have been doing as a 14, 15 year old. And that's what happened. I just, life's brought out of control and ended up in prison. First time I was 15, second time when I was 16, and luckily I ended up in a rehab center that saved my life. And put me on a completely different path.

Yeah. Like

Srini Rao: parents putting a kid who's causing them trouble in foster care, like that's... A whole level of like dynamics that I'm sure probably would require an hour conversation just on that alone. But what was the impact of that on your relationship with your

Dan Martell: parents? When I was younger it was pretty traumatic.

It was this weird dynamic where when my parents got divorced when I was 13, I definitely played them against each other. So my mom was super lenient, like almost as if she wasn't around, let us do whatever we wanted with. Even go to the, when we were 15, 16, we'd go to the liquor store for us, that kind of thing.

So there was that, and then there was my dad in his home, which was the opposite structure wise, but not as home as often. So it gave us a lot more time to get in trouble in a just completely different set of ways. And I would go back and forth between them. So yeah, it was I like every kid, I think I always as a boy want crave my dad's affection and.

Acceptance and that on that side of the level. And then on my mom's, there was a part of me that was like, I knew that what she was doing wasn't really being a strong mom. So I was upset with her, but also didn't complain because obviously enjoyed the freedom, but yeah, it was, there was a lot of stuff we had to work through as a family.

It's crazy today because fast forward to I'm 43 now. So this has been 25 years ago. Not only have I had an incredible career in entrepreneurship building and exiting companies, becoming a multimillionaire at 28, but my brother, Pierre, the second oldest, he's also become an incredibly successful entrepreneur.

We both won entrepreneur of our province awards in different years. And then my, they told my dad not really knowing our upbringing and what we went through as a family, but joked with him if my other brother won it, I have a little brother Mo that they would give him an award as a dad.

So it's funny, man. It's like incredible, crazy conflict growing up to a life that anybody from the outside looking at how we interact. Like my dad's my best friend. We text every day, talk every other day. My mom and I talk every other day. So like it's, we went through a lot as a family and grew a lot.

And to say, what was it like for me personally? Different stages, different levels. I just. I got to a place where I appreciated everything I went through because it's made me who I am today. So I had the best mom and dad any kid could ask for. I just didn't know it at the time. How did your siblings

Srini Rao: end up in this kind of trouble too?

Or were their paths more less

Dan Martell: checker than yours? I would say similar behaviors, more lucky. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, definitely in trouble with the law. different levels of trouble and I think because I ended up in such serious trouble, it scared them a little bit. You'd have to ask them.

I've never really talked to them a hundred percent on that there's an element of me getting clean and sober at 17 that I think affected them and caused them to go think through their decisions. And yeah they just got through it a little less scathed than I did.

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Srini Rao: Speaking of getting through this less scale you go from one jail to another, then to a rehab facility that turns around your life. And Two questions come from that. In the U. S. We effectively have what they call the school to prison pipeline. I remember talking to a guy who had spent something like 25 plus years in prison here on the podcast.

He was telling me that the way that they actually planned for beds in prison is based on the kids of current inmates. And he said if you were there for that long, he said, yeah. You'd see son come in and his father would be in the jail with him. And so I wonder about two things you had this opportunity to turn your life around.

What role do you think that one living in Canada and to the fact that you're white played in your ability to turn that because I think that the story could have turned out so differently and it does for so many people as you and I spoke about last time.

Dan Martell: Yeah. Yeah. It's tough to understand because I still can't, when people ask me all the time, they're like what did you figure out that, cause like even in the rehab center I went to there's a lot of relapsing and not every I'm, I may be the only multimillionaire that came out of the program.

So I don't know, but I, cause I still I literally go back and I speak to the kids every four months. It's been a big part of my life and many other things since then. But I don't know. I always think about this idea of PTSD and PTGD post traumatic stress disorder, which is sometimes how people respond to traumatic moments.

And in those same traumatic moments, those same scenarios, somebody else responds with post traumatic gross disorder, which is my path and journey and truth. It's one of those binary things, like same thing happens to two people. One person decides to go left. The other person decides to go right.

What? What did they, what was it that they understood I think for me I definitely had a belief that I didn't die when I was a teenager. And there was a moment where I almost took my life and somebody God showed up in my life to save me. And I've just always felt like it was my responsibility to take advantage of that second chance.

And because of that, I just don't waste a day. So maybe that's the meaning and the story that supported my journey. That's the message I try to share with people anyways, but I don't know. It's a crazy scenario, but you're right, like there is definitely a correlation of like even the fact that I went to jail twice, like I had a 98% chance of coming back and staying in the system for the rest of my life.

Like it's, I definitely beat the odds, but I still can't. I tried as best I can try to figure out like what belief, what is the core belief? What is the primary belief that I had that allowed me to snowball into a different journey? Yeah,

Srini Rao: I guess the reason I asked that question is because I feel like context matters so much here.

When it comes to the background that you're from like it or not, race plays a role in all of this, particularly in the United States, like we can't argue that it doesn't.

Dan Martell: Yeah. No race plays a part for sure. I seen it personally some. Some white Caucasian kids in jail for two weeks when the same activity was done by somebody of color and they had three months, right?

Like, why? I see it all the time. Yeah I think, I'm a data guy. I'm a software guy. I think the data proves it as well. Just geography, background, skin color. There's clear data. You can't deny that there's biases in the system. But... At the same time I'm also friends with a ton of people that have gone through and done worse than me and they have completely different backgrounds ethnic backgrounds and religious backgrounds, et cetera, and they've created incredible lives.

So I think no matter who you are, there's definitely a story of somebody like you that has created something special that if you choose to give yourself permission to, you

It's available to everybody. Speaking of the potential of being available to everybody, you had this moment where you started to learn about JavaScript programming. I remember reading about that in the book where you just were absorbed. And what we might nowadays called flow.

Srini Rao: Talk to me about that moment and why so many people miss that moment in their lives? Cause I feel like I missed it for the longest time until I got a lot

Dan Martell: older. Yeah. What happened for me was I was, it was towards the end of my program and. Rehab, it was this place called Portage and it was built on an old church camp.

And I was there for about 11 months at that point. And I was helping Rick, the maintenance guy, clean out one of the cabins. And we that we, it was just full of stuff. And in one of the rooms, there was this old 486 computer with a yellow book on Java programming sitting next to it. And I never touched a computer in my life, but I just opened up the book and it spoke to me because it was in English.

I just thought it would be in like. Hexadecimal

,

numbers, zeros and one, like it's computer coding. I didn't know what it looked like, but I had some assumptions. And the fact that it read like English, I was like, Oh, that's interesting. It's if this, then that. And so I I started up the computer and just followed chapter one of this book and the instructions were fairly clear and then 20 minutes I got the computer to say, hello world.

And. I don't know. It was nuts because I was like, holy cow, like I got this thing to do what it said, maybe, and it was unfounded because I thought the thought that crossed my mind, which is irrational, was maybe I'm a potentially a computer genius, like not a genius, but like my brain works in a way that's different than others because I thought it was abnormal that I got the thing to do what I expected it to.

Now, in hindsight, knowing what I know now any eight year old kid could do what I did. It's not that impressive, but it didn't matter. It just, the meaning I associate was like, Oh, this is a thing. And I and also there's something that spoke to me of just like writing instructions and having it just execute a hundred percent of the time.

It was I think growing up in such chaos that. Predictability of writing software became my true addiction. If that makes sense. Like I just, there was something that just felt comforting and rewarding and exciting to build something that. Didn't, it wasn't I just could count on it.

It's really weird. But that's, that, that's what happened is I came out and I became obsessed with writing code. This is 1997 98 and I discovered this small thing called the internet and it couldn't have been better timing. I like went from writing programs on my computer to building web applications and That was really the thing that drove me forward in my career, but also entrepreneurship, because for me, entrepreneurship became this like ultimate personal development program, which I didn't even know what that meant.

I never even heard the term until I was like probably in my mid twenties. Really, I look back and I go Oh, writing code was my new addiction and entrepreneurship the path towards betterment, like a forcing function for me to become better. Cause. I kept wanting to succeed more and to do that, you got to become more.

It sounds

Srini Rao: like the way that was for you is what writing and producing media is for

Dan Martell: me. I think that's the everybody I think has a external expression. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about it in, in big magic or it could be whatever it could be people. It could be some level of manufacturing or my, my oldest son right now, he's all into tech deck.

So he's doing finger board tricks and he's built this like crazy city landscape out of cardboard I, I think we all have it. It's just sometimes as young adults or adults, we get on this path of trying to do things for external validation that isn't really aligned with our heart and we forget to keep searching.

So it sounds like your media stuff. It was like. You're lucky you found it later in life. Cause there's probably a scenario or world where that doesn't happen. And you can be successful relatively to your career, but it may not be the thing that lights your soul on fire. And speaking

Srini Rao: of which let's get into the book.

What was the impetus for writing this book? Why this book? And then why

Dan Martell: now? Yeah I am a huge pro entrepreneur fan. I think it's so cool that business owners wake up every day to make the world a better place for everybody else to live in. I know that sounds self serving as an entrepreneur, but this for even the person that starts the lawn mowing company to the plumbing company, to the home building company, to the marketing agency, to the church, CrossFit gym, you name it.

I'm just like, I just find that so cool that people dedicate themselves to solving problems for others. And what happened was is just because all of my friends are predominantly business owners, I just started seeing a lot of challenges come up in their lives that. I obviously had gone through because I was a lot further along in my journey, but I had a completely different perspective on how to solve these problems, right?

And the book is really designed to help entrepreneurs build businesses they don't grow to hate. And that was the problem I wanted to solve because I had a very unique perspective on it. And it's called the buyback principle, but Essentially, the philosophy I have around the way I look at my calendar, my time, and my resources is just 100% different than I think what creative specifically.

I really wrote a book. It's crazy because I had to write a book that was going to work for my coaching clients who are like nine figure CEOs of software companies. As well as my friends that are artists my friend Jessa, who is an incredible artist, but she feels constrained because every time she says yes to a project, she just, it eats up a lot of her time and it stresses her out, but I was just trying to explain this.

So I wrote a book by answering the questions that I kept getting asked by the people I cared about the most that I knew I wasn't doing them service or justice by not giving them the complete solution. And that's what this book's become is essentially my answer to how do I scale a company as well as a life that I will never have to retire from.

Srini Rao: One of the things you say in the opening of the book is that the little known secret to reaching the next stage of your business is spending your time on only the tasks that you excel at, you truly enjoy, and Add the highest value, usually in the form of revenue to your business, likely two to three tasks fit that description.

Every other task you're handling is slowing your growth and sucking the life from you and you should clear it from your calendar. You pack this book with so many different frameworks and reference points. So I since I have you here, I figure I would be selfish. Let's actually use me as the case study and walk me through the combination of the buyback principle the pain line, and then how to start basically implementing all this in the quadrants that

Dan Martell: you talk about.

Yeah. So I think the first thing we have to figure out is your buyback rate. So Srini, if I was coaching on like scaling your life and your business, I would first, we try to figure out what is that number? And the buyback rate is a simple formula. And I know as soon as I do math, I'm going to lose half the audience, but bear with me.

I'll make it fun. Essentially you take your income, what do you make, right? And for entrepreneurs, it's what they pay themselves as a salary. It's what they take as distributions or profit per year. And it's also all this discretionary expenses, right? If you think of I get people don't want to pay taxes.

But those are real benefits that your business provides to you. You're just spending them on things, right? So then you have your income. So that amount of money, let's just keep it simple numbers call it a hundred thousand dollars, right? You might pay yourself 70, you get 20 in profit, and then you get another 10 K a year in discretionary expenses, like your cell phone bills and stuff that maybe your cell phone bill you need for your business, but let's talk about there's other stuff, right?

Discretionary travel and meals. So at a hundred K of income, you divide that by 2000, because that's the average amount of hours that. a normal person works in a year when you take holidays and vacations into consideration and weekends. And then, so that number at 100k works out to about 50 an hour. Now, the buyback rate is actually that number divided by four because I want somebody to get a four times ROI on their investment in buying back their time, right?

Because it's not a one to one trade. If you're billing out 50 an hour, designing logos, you don't want to hire another designer to design logos because you're not actually winning, right? You should do the logos and then look at anything you could have paid someone 12 and 50 cents, which is a quarter of that 50.

to free up your time to do more of the 50 an hour type tasks, right? And that's the core premise because I just, I learned a long time ago you can't build a million dollar company off of 10 tasks, right? There's just not enough hours in the day. So you got to hire people. So the buyback principle states, we don't hire people to grow our business.

We hire people to buy back our time because the number one killer of a business is not the market or the opportunities in the business. It's typically the CEO, not. Loving what they're doing anymore and just deciding to do something else, right? Or sabotaging themselves or deciding to sell or whatever it is.

It's essentially the thing I thought I was creating is not what I've created. So I don't want to do this or I want to like, just sabotage is another area. So once you understand that, then you've got to use the buyback loop and the buyback loop is a three step process. First, you got to do a time and energy audit, right?

So Shreeni I would ask you to log everything you do in your calendar for two weeks in 15 minute increments. It sounds like a big effort and it could be the short version of this. I don't recommend it if you're serious about it, but short version could be just looking at your calendar and looking at the things you do, right?

And then for everything that you log. Over a two week period, I want you to highlight in green things that you enjoy doing that light you up and in red, anything that takes energy from you. And then for those same tasks, I want you to put a dollar sign next to it, either 1 sign for it would cost very little to pay somebody else to do this relatively to your buyback or your income, or it would cost a lot to pay somebody to do this, usually 4 sign.

So that's like the re the ratings. It's like one, it's like a meal, right? Or a restaurant rating, like how expensive is the meal. So 1 to 4. And then what's cool is once you do that exercise, you've got a big bucket of red things and 1 sign, meaning low cost to pay somebody else to do that you put into a bucket.

And that's the only work you should be hiring people to do, which is not how most business owners run things, right? They hire people to do stuff because they're busy and they say, Oh, I need somebody to edit my podcast. I need somebody to publish on social media. I need somebody to. Write my copy or I need somebody to book guess it and those could all be true.

But until you look at your calendar and go Oh, I'm spending 20 hours a week on email. I can pay somebody a lot less to process my inbox and respond to people for scheduling than I, I can to, to book guests and do a higher value task. I'm not saying you don't ever. I'm just saying the sequencing matters what I call the replacement ladder in the book.

So that's the big premise is like, how do we audit our time for energy and costs and then how do we transfer those things to other people, which I share a strategy called the camcorder method in the book, which is very unique. And then how do I fill that up with? Things that are going to increase my buyback rate either doing more work, that's 50 an hour or whatever that dollar amount is for you all the time, or at least 30 hours a week.

Cause that'll increase your buyback rate or invest in skills or beliefs or character traits. It's going to allow me to create more value in the market, right? So that you don't go from a a 30 an hour logo designer to a hundred or 150 or 250 an hour logo designer. What needs to be true for you to be able to command those kinds of rates or.

As a leader, like how do you create more value in the market than anybody else in the world through your marketing, through your sales, through your delivery, through whatever, that's what you should be spending your time on. Not running around doing errands. I was talking to a friend of mine he's a mechanic and he's I don't get how I would use this.

I go, do you clean your own shop? He's yeah, don't. He's like, why? I go, cause you make more per hour doing mechanic work than cleaning your shop. And he's yeah. So I'm like, then do that. He's I don't have that much work. Oh, got it. So you need to learn how to market your mechanic shop. So why don't you buy back your time to not clean it so that you can then spend that time to learn how to be a better marketer for your shop.

Oh, see, that's the difference between my principle. This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000, the number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system, NetSuite by Oracle, 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs.

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This is Possibility, powered by Shopify. Sign up for a 1 per month trial at shopify. com slash unmistakable, all lowercase. Go to shopify. com slash unmistakable to take your business to the next level. That's shopify. com slash unmistakable. I've seen this firsthand in my life. And it's funny you mentioned hiring somebody to outsource podcast guests.

And I, I would never do that for one reason because that honestly is what I think sets us apart is the fact that I go out of my way to find people that aren't on other shows. And so that is one thing I would never outsource specifically because I enjoy it. And I think it's one of those things that sets me apart.

I was like, Nobody's going to have my filter. Yeah. We get podcast guests, booking agencies. And I'm like, yeah, I won't hire you guys. You can pitch us all day long, but I don't want you to source my guests for

Dan Martell: me. But you could, Trini I would push back a little bit. You could give a assistant.

Yeah. Criteria. To go in source for you to do a final edit and then have them reach out on your behalf, potentially. And I call it in the book, I call it the 10 80, 10 rule. So there's ways to still get leverage even in highly creative endeavors. I, and I break them down into Tom Clancy, the author to Andy Warhol, the painter to obviously Oprah, the the media mogul there's actually ways that buying companies with Buffett, if you actually see how the highest level people out there do it, you would see these patterns naturally immerse and then you can just be inspired by Steve Jobs did this at Apple, that's a 10 80, 10 rule. I got it from watching Steve interact with Johnny Ives in the design studio. Like he wasn't the one sitting there running the CNC machine to do prototypes, but he was definitely involved in the creative inputs that would push the boundaries of the products they would make.

But then they had a team that would prototype and. Try stuff and source stuff and all that stuff. So he bought back a Yeah. Ton of time. And then would just come back at the end for the integration part where his genius would have the biggest impact anyway. And I think that's true for most creatives.

I I'd mentioned to you earlier that we'd started this consulting business where we're driving YouTube ads to my YouTube channel. And I realized, I was like, you know what? I'm not an expert in YouTube ads. I'm an expert in. This note taking app and the video tutorials I create.

Srini Rao: So I finally hired somebody to manage all of it. And I saw the sales basically triple after I hired them, even though it was costing me 800 bucks a month, I was like, okay, that was a no brainer.

Dan Martell: Easy peasy. This, but again, all of that without using the lens of your calendar, to me, I don't know if that was the right move.

So that's what's interesting. People are like who should I hire next? I go, it's literally a principle in a process. So if you've done the time and energy audit and then showed me what it is, then I can help you be creative about how to find that individual. Cause even that idea, right?

Like some people are like, okay, so I've got. Bookkeeping that's 10 hours a week and I could pay somebody a low dollar. I have my email and calendar stuff. I have this, like how do I hire somebody to do all of it? That's actually interesting because my first assistant had a background in finance.

Why? Because that I made that a prerequisite because it was a big part of what I was doing as a solopreneur. So you can hire somebody that's got a bookkeeping background that can also process your emails in your inbox and publish on social media for you. That is one person, right? Because guess what?

Every person listening to this that doesn't have that has those functions in their business is one person currently doing that. So there's proof in just people's lives that. They can be done. You just got to make sure that you hire somebody that can take up all three. And for a lot of people, it's a belief thing, not a reality or a fact.

Srini Rao: Talk to me about the four quadrants that you talk about, which are the investment quadrant, the production quadrant and the other two somehow didn't make it into my notes, but I know there are four quadrants that we put all

Dan Martell: of our tasks into. Yeah. Delegate and invest or production.

It's called the drip matrix. So the drip matrix essentially is. An XY quadrant a two by two matrix for things that light you up and then things that make you a lot of money. So in the, and it's in chapter two of the book, page 21. And what happens is when you start off you want to, like you said, like that 95 5 thing, like 95% of the stuff you're doing doesn't really.

add that much value. In the bottom left corner, you have this quadrant called delegation, right? And delegation is stuff that immediately you should stop doing, right? So these are the 1 sign red things in your life. And the way we look at it, sometimes it's called the 3Ds, right? So what are the 3Ds is delegate, delete, or defer.

So I just walked people through that concept really quick, just to make sure that as fast as possible, they just free up their calendar. And I think sometimes. Even the delete side, they're doing things that they should just stop doing, but they've never actually put in front of them to ask themselves the question, like, why do I even do this?

And sometimes it's just things you do because you made a commitment to somebody and just haven't renegotiated that commitment. And then the defer is just deciding you know what, if I just put all of my focus into one thing this quarter for the next three months, I'm actually going to get a better.

aspect of momentum going in my life. So I'm going to defer any of these other projects that I said yes to and put them off to, to, until I get things in a better spot. So that's the three D's and I just walked through that, but that's usually things like suck your energy and don't make you a lot of money anyway.

Then you move up to the replacement ladder or the replace quadrant in the the drip matrix, which is the R and this is when it. I create this framework to help every entrepreneur understand if you had to hire four people in the certain sequence that from my perspective is the lowest cost to the biggest ROI for your time and energy, it's these three, these four hires, right?

The first one is an executive assistant. The key is. Most people make the mistake of having executive assistant and the person does not manage their inbox at a hundred percent. Like every email that comes in, they process or their calendar at a hundred percent. And if you don't do that, you're getting a probably 30% efficiency out of your executive assistant.

It is literally that meaningful to just delegate those two things to somebody else so that you can be a hundred percent focus on. Doing other stuff. So that's the level one of the replacement ladder. And I won't go through them all, but at a high level, each one has a nuance that I talk about in the book that makes it different than what everybody else has heard in the past, but level two, so level one is executive assistant.

Level two is fulfillment. Level three is marketing, level four is sales, and then level five is leadership. And so that's the kind of the replacement quadrant. That's the top left of makes you money, but still may not light you up. And then on the right side, you have investment and then produce, which is, investment is investing in relationships, in yourself, in your skills, in your beliefs, in your character traits.

Because those are the things that will actually move the needle for you and your business and it's, so I'm not a fan. That's why the subtitle of the book is get unstuck, reclaim your freedom and build your empire. I just, I'm not a four hour work week kind of guy. Like I actually want people to feel fulfilled.

I want people to feel useful. I want people to create. I want artists to do more art. So it's not about buying back your time to just go roll tickets. Yeah. That's the challenge I have. And an empire in my definition is creating a life of unlimited creation that you never have to retire from.

So until you feel like you can go from speed of thought to creating in the world, because you've built an incredible team around you that support you, then that should be your desires to build an empire and whatever that means for you. So that's where the investment quadrant really matters is because again, I see people either hire in the wrong sequence or.

When they iron the right sequence, they don't know how to fill or invest that time to move their dreams forward. Yeah. And then produce in the top right quadrant. That's pretty much where I live my life. I do the buyback loop every four months, probably at this stage of my life. And I'm on the CEO of two, eight figure companies that I actively manage.

I, I also do Ironmans. I did three last year. I'm doing a Spartan like physically, I just got back from heli skiing for three days. I take two and a half months of vacation a year or so. I squeeze as much life in all aspects as you can out of my life. And I'm also incredibly productive financially and spiritual in other areas of my marriage and my kids, but it's because I'm willing to buy back my time.

So my neighbors, I live in a very affluent neighborhood and we probably are the only family that has a house manager, runs and manages all of our personal assets and. Coordination and all that stuff right now, my neighbor could afford it, but instead maybe he decided to upgrade to the latest Mercedes or BMW.

I don't know. Like I just assume everybody in my neighborhood absolutely could afford it. They just don't even give themselves permission to think about it. And then they don't understand, like, how do you get so much done? I'm like, I'm not putting together furniture that I bought off the internet. I'm not, yeah, I'm not managing my locker room of toys and moving stuff around from spring to fall to winter.

And dealing with the maintenance. I have a team or a person that deals with that and they have a team. And so it's I don't run errands. I don't go to grocery store. I haven't put gas in my car in three years. Now I don't share that to brag. Cause some people hear that and go that's lazy.

It's you know what? Call me lazy. I will tell you, I'm one of the most intentional, hardworking people you'll ever meet. I wake up at four in the morning. I do not waste a second of my life. And I am very intentional about how I show up as a father and a husband and a friend. And if that means I deploy capital to buy back my time so I don't do things that don't light me up and aren't very unique to my skill set.

Then call me what you want. I'm cool with it. In the interest

Srini Rao: of time, I want to go through two things. One is the email GPS. As I read this book, I realized I have a virtual assistant. I realized I'm not utilizing her to the extent that I could, and calendar and email were one of those things that I was just like, yeah, I do end up spending too much time here, and it's actually not that much.

It's 10 minutes a day, but even that, I'm just like, okay, why am I doing this? So talk to me about this email GPS idea, because when I saw this, I was like, perfect, this is great. It's all written down clearly and I can basically convert it into a template for my VA

Dan Martell: now. Best thing you should do, Srini, is just give her a copy of my book and tell her to read the chapter.

That's what everybody's doing right now, which is awesome. They're like, yeah it's, yeah it's just fun. And then they'll have more context for finding opportunities to actually support you, which I think is the big idea with a great executive assistant is they're proactively telling you what they could take over, ways they can support you, which is cool.

But yeah, email GPS is the idea is that like everything in that comes into my world is processed by somebody else first. And only the things I need to review and respond to are brought into my life. And I even at that I don't actually do them. I just talk with the person to get them done. So Transcribed And I learned this watching Richard Branson, like I was fortunate and I think it was 2016.

I got invited to his home in Switzerland and I spent a week with him and Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin a group of companies, he's the CEO of 400. He's the owner of the Virgin group of companies. They have 400 companies. Each one has a CEO and that group of companies has two CEOs that run it.

They're co CEOs. And I watch this billionaire who is literally the billionaire every other billionaire wants to be like live his life. And one of the core tenants is everything goes through Helen. Helen is his executive assistant. He does not

,

do email. He like sits down and has breakfast with Helen every day.

And for 60 to 90 minutes, they review only the things. That Helen can't respond to a route, and then ask Richard about it, and then he gives his two cents, and as they do that, she learns, and more and more things get taken care of on. Now, he still has meetings with people he just works with Helen to figure out which meetings does he need to be there at, which ones can he defer to somebody on his team.

So the email GPS works similarly where because your inbox is nothing more than a public to do list of a stranger on your time. Think about that. That's all it is. It's requests of you from people you may or may not know on your time. And for most people, they just allow anybody to add a line item on that to do list, which is bananas.

So for me, I have my assistant respond. And then there's different folders that. She'll put things in there is the primary folder and you can do this as a label in Gmail or folder in Outlook or whatever email tool you use, but my quote unquote inbox is a subfolder of everything that's just my name, right?

And that's what my phone points to in my laptop and that's just the one place and I may get five emails a day in there and they're usually from family members or whatnot. The other folder is to respond, which is a label that my assistant applies to every email she replied to. So if I ever want to see how she's replying to people, I can just go look at that.

The review folder is anything that she has that she would like my perspective on, right? Or if something ends up in my inbox and I really thought we should have reviewed it together for her to process, I'll just put a label at review. Then there's responded. Sorry, the responded is what I said earlier.

It's the folder that anything she responds to is labeled responded. The to respond is a neat way for me to take something in my inbox and give it to her to respond to. So maybe she puts it like, as I invest in a bunch of companies. So I might have a term sheet in my inbox. I review the term sheet or I send it to my lawyer.

He replies and he gives me some notes. I consider those notes. And then I'll label it to respond. And then my assistant knows that means to get it signed and sent back, right? There's a folder called waiting on, which is things that she has replied to, and she's waiting on somebody so that in case she needs to escalate it to me to do a text message, to follow up with somebody, she can do that.

There's a financials folder for anything financially related that she forwards on her own finance team, but I can always go check in there to see receipts and all that stuff that's in my inbox, which is cool because if I'm ever traveling, I need, I can't find something. I can just search my emails and it's there.

And then newsletters anything that has an unsubscribe link in there, that's where it goes. And I choose maybe on Friday afternoon to spend an hour or two just reviewing newsletter emails and opening up stuff for my friends or things I want, but. It's not stuff that clouds my day to day, right?

It's more of a pull versus a being pushed on me approach. And that's how I manage the email. And it is a beautiful way of doing it. All my companies I'm involved in go to one inbox. She manages and she processes 95% of the stuff. And if 1% gets in my inbox, 4% gets put in a review. And we just keep getting better and better as we work together.

Srini Rao: In the interest of time, I can just give us an overview of playbooks and then I have two things that

Dan Martell: I want to wrap up with. Yeah. The the playbooks, the big idea is the camcorder method. Most people sit down, they read the E Myth or Sam Carpenter's work, the system, and they're like, I'm going to create SOPs, standard operating procedures.

Most SOPs go stale within a month, meaning that you write them and nobody updates them, nobody uses them, and then they're not even accurate because systems and software changes so often that if you made them too detailed, it wouldn't work. The way I do is I just record everything I do. So anytime I'm about to like outtask or buy back my time around, I just record myself doing the task.

As simple as like when I was doing my YouTube videos, I would record myself publishing. The videos and uploading the scripts and sending the emails and adding the blog posts and setting up to publish Twitter and LinkedIn and all this stuff. And I did that for probably six weeks until I eventually just transferred it over to my executive assistant and she watched the recordings.

I had probably four or five recordings of me doing it because I used to do it every Monday and it would take me like three or four hours. And then eventually she watched it and she created the playbook and then she owned it. And that's the whole key in the book. I talk about transactional versus transformational leadership.

She owned the outcome and was responsible for the playbook. And one of my rules as a company is we don't, any playbook that we have for a task has to be open when you're doing it, right? Because if you notice that it's stale or out of it's out of whack or whatever, you can fix it cause you have it open, right?

So that's the big idea behind playbooks that I have a unique perspective on because. I think a lot of people just overcomplicate it and it can be that simple. Let's

Srini Rao: wrap this up by talking about this idea of a 10x vision. And I want to bring back a clip from an episode where I had a conversation with Greg Hartle, which I thought would make an interesting contrast to talking about this idea of 10x.

Dan Martell: Take a listen. They were born in a way that they are just going to win no matter what. And so those people are not good models to follow for the rest of us. What we should be doing is we should be creating a safe. Environment in which we can be as vulnerable as we need to be to not only hold on to the possible, but to actually increase our chances of the probable.

And we don't create those environments for ourselves as a society, as a government, as businesses. As a culture in America, we tend not to create vulnerable environments that allow us to be safe enough to be exposed enough to actually increase our probabilities. So what we do is we, one, look at all these examples of people that don't need that, and we try to live like them.

And then we fail. And then we experience unnecessary suffering. And then two, we hold on, we can't find the safe places to explore our vulnerabilities and our flaws. And the fact that it's not probable for us to be like

Srini Rao: them. So given this idea of 10X vision and what Greg said in that clip, how do you basically couple those two things

Dan Martell: together?

It's beautiful. I, what I loved that Greg said is finding a safe place to explore flaws. I don't know. There's just something that really resonated with that, with me just coming back from essentially a ski trip of 48 incredible entrepreneurs and realizing that I have that safe place with many of the people in the conversation I had to me that the 10 X vision is.

Essentially, this philosophy that it's easier to do 10x than 2x. Like a lot of people they get like super anxious when they think of their life. So like doubling their business, right? Because immediately they go to Oh my God, it's gonna be double the pain and double this. And it's scary. 10, 10x is great because 10x forces you to go, Oh, I couldn't even do that without fundamentally changing the paradigm of how I approach my business, which is actually what I'm hoping to shake loose with that.

Framework because that's really the big ideas is just focus on things that scare you. And then use that as a kind of either an aspirational or inspirational kind of like outcome to push you forward to do the things that will scare you. That'll. Force you to question your what I call outsized fears to basic things, like having somebody else respond to your emails.

Like some people are like, I could never do that. It's just try it. Like you, I think people have I could never have somebody in my house cleaning my house. It's try it I don't know what belief you have around it, but I'm I've seen it happen over and over, I think maybe it's.

Outsize or irrational in response to the outcome. So that's whole thing. I really like what he had to say about the fears and stuff, but yeah, that's the reason I wrote the Tenex vision is I think that people are without something to pull them forward. They're just going to look at the pain of their current existence and rationalize that it's okay.

And it's just not because I think their giftedness needs to be expressed more in the world. And that's what I want for every entrepreneur out there. I

Srini Rao: appreciate that because I think what you're not saying is be unrealistic and have delusional dreams of what you're going to accomplish.

Dan Martell: I'm saying allow yourself to dream.

And in that act, even if you didn't ever come close to it. It's just a, it's a forcing function or a pull mechanism, right? Like the reason why I learned this just on people. Most people quit companies because they haven't given them a future that they see themselves in, right? When they run out of runway, they just run out of you.

So if I'm working like a lot of my clients that I coach, when they have like key people that quit, I'm like, they didn't quit because they didn't like the work. They just didn't see how their personal goals and their future alignment that they had, We're going to be supported by your vision because you never communicated it to them.

So even just forcing yourself to ask yourself what am I doing this for? Climbing the ladder of success. Like what is at the top of that ladder? What are you trying to do? Because if you don't have that, how are you supposed to create alignment? And what if you have that ladder leaned against the wall?

And when you get at the top, you're like, Oh crap, I leaned it against the wrong wall. It's supposed to be against this other wall. I just created this. crazy world that I don't want to live in. This is literally the conversation I have with my coaching clients as it pertains to the buyback principle in this book is before we even talk about what you want to accomplish.

First, we've got to make sure we have a clear understanding of what do you want your life to look like? If you don't know what you want your life to look like, and to the same degree of specificity that you can describe your current life, then how are we supposed to make any decisions to move anything forward in our lives?

Without worrying that it's out of alignment. Yeah. It's funny when you're talking about this 10 X idea Julian Smith has been mentoring me and I remember one of our last calls, he had given me this way to think about things. He said when you think about these metrics, he said run your plans for the day through.

Srini Rao: How could I add a zero to the

Dan Martell: Smith? It's just a fun forcing function for you to like, because you mentioned it, I got to shift the paradigm, right? Like how do I shift my paradigm around marketing and sales and leadership and growth and Because if it's just more of the same thing you're doing, that actually is not the answer.

It never is because if you could just do more of what you're doing, you'd already have the results you're after and you don't, so how you're approaching it is completely non supportive. That's why I think there's been a groundswell around, around the book. And the ideas in the book is because it is.

Counter to how everybody's thought about hiring and growing in their business. Amazing. I know

Srini Rao: you got to get going. I want to finish with one final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews here at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something

Dan Martell: unmistakable?

That they are a hundred thousand percent themselves. So the way I explain it is. If the person that you show up in the world as is the same person I would see if I was recording you 24 7 physically, externally recording you and recording your thoughts in your mind, if what I would record and how you show up in the world, if that's 100% the same, that is what makes somebody unmistakable and it's why we admire those kind of peoples in the world.

Srini Rao: Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your wisdom and insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you your work, the book and

Dan Martell: everything that you're up to? Yeah. I'm Dan Martell, 2000martell. com and Dan Martell on all social platforms, YouTube, Tik Tok, LinkedIn Instagram stories is my jam.

It's my favorite. Output for social, and then the book is@buybackyourtime.com. It is available in all retail stores, so go get your copy in person, or better yet, send your assistant to go get it or get it on Amazon wherever you want. But I do have a free workbook that you can download that supports a lot of the exercises in the book to make it even more impactful on the website.

Buy backer time.com. Shreeni, it's been an honor, man. I really appreciate you. Yeah, absolutely.

Srini Rao: And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Dan Martell: This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000, the number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system. NetSuite by Oracle. 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution.

And that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular Key Performance Indicators Checklist. Absolutely free at netsuite. com slash optimize. That's netsuite. com slash optimize.