I moved to San Francisco because I wanted to understand how these 20 year olds built $1,000,000,000 companies. And I meet a guy named Naval Ravikant. I remember I was talking to him once about leverage. The best entrepreneurs have the biggest output for unit of time. Time multiplied by leverage equals output. And this is what I learned. Naval taught me this. There's only 4 master skills to creating leverage.

Once I understood this, I understood I only had 4 things to go become world class at. And I could have anything I want in my life. Most entrepreneurs, when they're growing their business, it doesn't matter if it's their first 100 k or 300 k or 1000000, they get to a place where growing is painful. And in that spot, they usually do 1 to 3 things. They either stall. K? They say to themselves, this year, I made more money last year than this year. I'd rather slow down. Right? And, and and just not grow.

The problem with that is that the market's growing. Right? Gross domestic product grows. Your customers will demand more from you this year than last year. And the the worst part is your top people, if you don't create a future that's big enough for them, then they will go find somebody else who can do that. Does that make sense? Your dreams, write this down, your dreams have to be bigger than everybody else on your team's dreams and goals. Write it down. So that's stall. Number 2.

Sabotage. This one's fascinating. Some of you guys don't even know you're doing this. I have a friend of mine, Tracy. Business was going through some challenges. 6 months of hell. We've all been there. It's tough.

And in that storm, Tracy tells herself, I need to give myself a break. And she decides to take a 4 week sabbatical. Do you think a company that's struggling, the CEO of the company should take a 4 week sabbatical? Yes or yes? No. Perfect. You guys are on the same page. This is great. But she didn't realize she was sabotaging her success. She had an opportunity to keep growing because when we're going through the worst Just so you know this.

When we go through the worst, we're actually developing our skills to get to the next level. Huge. K? So understand when you're challenged, you should say thank you. We're the opponent. This is gonna shape me to become the person I need to become to get to the next level. Instead, Tracy went on to sabbatical. She missed the opportunity to grow. The third is sell.

My buddy Jason called me one day and he's like, hey, man. I think I'm gonna sell my company. He has an agency. 2,000,000 in revenue. Been doing it for about or 8 years and it just became really tough. And I said, Jason, write down all the stuff that you don't like about your business today. Made me a list. And I said, if those things weren't true, would you sell the business? He's like, no.

I said, well, let me invite you to consider a different perspective. I know you wanna go do something else. You think the grass is greener. Here's what I know. You've just hit your new complexity ceiling. We all have them. Write down complexity ceiling. Complexity ceiling.

Anytime it gets hard, I want you to look at that term. I said, it doesn't matter if you solve it now or you leave and start something else. You will hit this same level of complexity where you decide, I don't wanna grow anymore. It's your pain line. So what I wanna share with you today are 3 strategies that overcome that pain line. The first principle that I wanna share with you, and it's a universal principle. It's the buyback principle. We don't hire people to grow our business.

We hire people to buy back our time. It's a calendar over a capacity strategy. See, most entrepreneurs, when they're growing, they go, well, now I need to hire another logo designer. I need to hire another real estate agent. I need to hire another, you know, electrician. And I would say no. You start with your calendar first because here's the deal. If you do the second, you get the first.

But if you do the first, you definitely don't get the second. Most entrepreneurs get to about 1,200,000, about 12 employees where their life starts to get really painful. That pain line is screaming at them every day because they violated this rule. This is the framework. Draw this loop. K? It's a loop. You need to go through these 3 steps to move forward. So every time I hit a pain line k? Today I own dozens of companies and my calendar completely shifts 2 or 3 times a year.

So I'm gonna teach you the exact same thoughts of how I look at my calendar every time I hit my pay line. 1st step is we gotta audit. We gotta audit our calendar for time and energy. It's not enough to just look at what we're doing that we can pay somebody else to do. It's what are we doing that sucks our energy. What I call green or red stuff. If we get to replace that with green, we will transform our lives. Then transfer is the ability to give what we're doing today, the work, to somebody else, but check this out, without taking any extra time using the camcorder method.

And then the third, the problem with Phil is most people get to the first and second step and then they decide to do a 4 hour work week. I ain't here to do a 4 hour work week. K? I'm here to teach you guys all how to create an empire. And that word might scare some of you but let me share you my definition of empire. You'll wanna write this down. A life of unlimited creation you never have to retire from. A life of unlimited creation you never have to retire from. That is an empire.

If we fill properly that new found time, then we continue upward. If we don't know what to focus on when we find that extra time, then we will just repeat that cycle. And some of you guys have been in that spot. You grow, you go down. You grow, you go down. Maybe not you. Maybe the people out there. Maybe somebody you know out there.

Right? Up, down, up, down. They oscillate. If you follow the buyback loop, you'll continue to grow. And that's what we're here for today. $1,000,000 companies were not built off $10 tasks. Write it down. This is math 101. There's not enough hours in the week for you to grow if you're doing $10 tasks.

And we have a lot of mindset monsters and beliefs that just won't support us to actually scale. The first key strategy I wanna teach you about is the replacement ladder. So I wanna ask everybody to write down. If you were starting from scratch today and you had the ability to hire your first employee, who would they be? Write down the answer. Who would you hire first? I want everybody to write it down. Who would you hire first? Yeah. That lawyer. That was quite a goal.

Yep. Alright. We're gonna start over here. I wanna hear some answers. What you guys got? Sales. Anybody else? What do we got? Copywriting? Cool. Sheet metal roofing. So somebody can do sheet metal roofing.

Perfect. Anybody else? VA. Anybody else? Assistant. Cold callers? Assistant. Assistant. Anybody? Secretary? Recruiter? I love those. Here's here's the fun part is, I can tell the maturity of your business acumen by the hire. Yeah.

They're versatile. And it's because I've been doing this for for 25 years. There is a strategy that I learned from this guy, Richard Branson. K? Now here's the cool thing about Richard. Richard's the billionaire every billionaire wants to be like. And it's just true. He Whatever you think he is, how he is, is exactly who he is. In 2016 or 15, I got a I got a cold email from my buddy out of the blue.

Hey, Dan. I'm getting together with Richard Blanson or Branson in Verbier, Switzerland. Do you want to join? Let me look at my schedule. Yeah. Clear? Of course I want to join. Like, I grew up reading his books. It was so funny because it was I got the email in May and I thought it was an April fools joke. But I'm like, it's May.

It's not April. Like It's like And it honestly, it wasn't till I was in Switzerland at his house AKA lodge, 16 bedrooms, 20 staff, massive. In that living room sitting in that couch and Richard comes out from the back and actually comes in and says hi to everybody blah, blah, blah that I actually believed he was showing up. Well, you guys gotta understand. You wanna talk about imposter syndrome? In that group of people was Tim Ferris, the the founder of Square. You guys know Brian Johnson, the blueprint guy right now? He's doing all those like weird, life hacking stuff. He was there. He just sold Braintree for 600,000,000 and there was this Canadian kid that I got invited because some guy that I invited to a dinner liked what I was building at the time and said, do you wanna join? And I was just like, Dan, just don't say anything stupid.

It's you can only go downhill from here. You made it in the house. Don't get kicked out. So I just Really? I just shut up and paid attention. And I'll be honest with you. All I was looking for I wanted to understand how does a guy Some of you may not realize this. Richard Branson has 400 companies in the Virgin Group of Businesses. That Virgin Group of Business, is that holdco has 2 CEOs.

I wanted to understand how he thought about scale and leverage. And I just watched. I watched how he interacted with his staff. I watched how he manages time. And this is what I saw that I didn't expect. At the time, I had a virtual assistant. I had assistants over the years. Right? We've all had them.

What was different was watching Richard. Essentially, anything that came into his life went through his assistant, Helen. And every morning for breakfast, they would sit there for 60 to 90 minutes depending on what was on Helen's list. She would review only the things that she didn't know how to deal with. She knew how to route. She thought Richard would wanna know about. And they just had breakfast. They talked.

And the rest of the day he came skiing with us. That's how he ran 400 companies. Do you guys wanna learn the other stuff that I from Richard? Yes or yes? Yeah. Perfect. This is the replacement ladder. We start at the bottom. We work our way up. Why? Let me tell you 2 different things.

1, it's the lowest cost to pay somebody to do the work for the biggest time purchase back in your life if you do it right. So that's why there's the outcomes. So level 1, you might be feeling stuck in your business. It's because you don't have somebody to support you on your account and your your in your admin work. But the key is to do like Richard did and give your inbox and calendar to your assistant. Some of you guys are getting a little You guys Does that make you nervous a little bit? Anybody? No? You guys are all good? Just giving up your inbox and your calendar to somebody else and letting them figure it out and hopefully you show up at the right meeting at the right time. Is else and letting them figure it out and hopefully you show up at the right meeting at the right time. Does that make you nervous? Anybody? Trust me.

My assistant laughs all the time. She's like, Dan. I could tell you to show up at the edge of a cliff and write in the description jump and you would do it. I go, well, don't do that but, I mean, I trust you. And it's because I realized that if I can give up the the inbound Your inbox is nothing more than a public to do list of other people's goals on your time. Write that down. Your inbox, your email, is nothing more than a public to do list of other people, strangers' requests on your time. And you allow yourself to be addicted to that.

So step 1 is admin. Number 2 is your customer success, your fulfillment. This is where you have somebody that helps you. But the key is you gotta give away your support and onboarding. So when I enroll somebody in any of my companies, k, now I have CEOs that run them, but when I was doing it, the first hire after admin would be somebody to help me take the deal that I just closed and move it forward. And real estate is transaction coordinator. Right? Like, you need somebody that'll that'll work with the customer and do all this stuff. You can still be the specialist but give that to somebody else.

Level 3 is marketing. Right? Now you wanna start building and designing a playbook to generate leads. K? Because if you don't do this, I'll tell you what happens. Sales is poor because you as a CEO will always be able to sell better than anybody else you hire. And you know it. You know it. Some of you guys are world class salespeople. 70 to 80 percent win rates.

Nobody's gonna ever be able to to sell like that. And I'm challenged if you hire too quick and you don't have the systems underneath. What happens in 6 months is you either fire them because they're not performing because they don't have enough reps and they don't have enough deals or they quit because they're not making any money. Anybody resonate with that? Anybody up Yeah. Exactly. It's literally the 6 month mark. Depending how much they like you. 4 months.

If they they like you, 6 months. And the highest level is the ELT. Write this down. Executive leadership team. Some of you guys call call them leaders and managers. Here's my rule. Do they come with playbooks? Do they come with process? If you hire people or or, you know, promote people up that has no experience, then you're just creating more work for yourself. So when I say at that level, everybody else, the first hire in marketing, and then those are all people you can hire, train, etcetera because you're gonna give them a playbook.

But when you start hiring leadership, they should come into the company with knowledge. K? That's the replacement ladder. And if you follow these 5 steps, some of my clients that I coach, they'll get there in 45 days. They see this. They go, got it. And they execute. Admin free up their time to sell. Make revenue.

Next hire, success. Business is starting to grow. They hire somebody to support the success. Buy back that time out of their calendar. Reinvest that now into marketing. They build a marketing strategy. They hire somebody to execute the strategy. Generates leads every day consistently.

Then they hire They do the sales. Then they hire a salesperson. That person comes in, goes through the scripts that they've built or the calls that they've already done, they've recorded. Give it to the sales person. Now they're coaching the team. So you can do this in 45 days or some people are a bit slower and they'll take years. Right? Because they try to skip levels. You know what happens if you go straight to the top? How many people have you heard say, I need to hire a COO? You don't even have an executive admin.

That's the silliest COO. You need to start at the bottom and build the capacity and to know how to move up. Here's my philosophy. If you don't have an assistant, you're not gonna work with the COO. You need to start at the bottom and build the capacity and to know how to move up. Here's my philosophy. If you don't have an assistant, you are one. I know it stinks.

Right? I'm gonna I'm gonna take the dagger and just a little bit more. The other parts of this is you're overpaid and you kinda suck. Okay? A great executive admin, they're worth their weight in gold. K? So if you don't have one, you are the person and you're overpaid and you're not very good at your job. So what do we do with that? I wanna talk about leadership and I'll tell you why. I know CEOs and entrepreneurs are crazy. You guys agree? Yes or yes? We're nuts. Think about it.

The reason why we're in business in the first place is because we're able to deal with the level of risk that most people would puke on themselves and pass out. Like, you do understand this. So just admit to it and then try to develop the leadership skills that protects your team from you. Some of you guys expect your team to show up like you and that's just silly. They aren't you and if they were, guess what? They'd be building their own company. So what happens is the way we lead our teams have to shift. K? So I moved to San Francisco in 2008. This was after selling my first company and became a multimillionaire at 27.

And I It crushed me. Like I I worked easily a 100 hours a week for 4 years. First two companies failed. When I got out of rehab, tried my first company, failed after 2 years. Did another one. I was 21. Failed after that. It wasn't until I was 24 that I gave it another shot.

And my dad would beg me. Even though I grew up and had a very colorful childhood, he would just beg me to get a normal job. It's like, dad. I can't do it. I'd rather You know, as long as I'm not in prison and I didn't relapse, like, you should be really proud of me. Like I'm doing something. I know I'm not making any money but I think I'll figure it out. And it wasn't until I was, you know, almost in my early thirties that I figured it out.

So I moved to San Francisco because I wanted to understand how these 20 year olds built $1,000,000,000 companies. Does that ever make you wonder? These tech entrepreneurs, you read about them on the news. Like, how do they do this? How do they convince these old white guys to give them 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars to build these tech platforms to, you know And they're, like barely old enough to drive. Like, it fascinated me. Just real talk. Right? I grew up in the east coast of Canada so that world was foreign to me. Even though I was in software and I built a big company, that world was fascinating as an outsider. And I get there.

And in the 1st few days I get invited to a party and I meet a guy named Naval Ravikant. This is 2,008. Naval Today has been on Joe Rogan. He's an incredible, like, just philosopher, honestly. But I met him earlier on and he kinda became a mentor of mine. I I call him 1. He would never say that. But I share that because I remember I was talking to him once about leverage.

So you gotta understand. In business, the best entrepreneurs have the biggest output for unit of time. So if you think of the question. K. Write this down. K. Time multiplied by leverage equals output. And output could be money, resources, etcetera.

But time multiplied by leverage equals output. So I wanna ask you guys all a question. What are ways that we can create leverage? Write it down. If I say, what are the tools to creating leverage? Write it down. I want you guys to to answer that. Just one idea. The number one tool for creating leverage is write down the answer. I wanna hear from everybody.

Alright. Let's hear from over here. What do you guys got? Raising money. 8020. 8020. I like that. Anybody else? What else? What? I can't hear you. Systems.

Oh. I love systems. Do you know what a system stands for? Save yourself time, energy, and money. Write that down. Systems equals 67. Save yourself time, energy, and money. Here's a fun fact. Everybody's answer was relatively correct.

And this is what I learned. Duval taught me this. There's only 4, I call them master skills to creating leverage. K? Write these down. The 4 system The 4 master skills are Number 1. Capital. If I have money I have incredible leverage. Information money.

K. It takes money to make money. Money. It really doesn't but it takes resourcefulness. All of you guys in this room have to be more resourceful. K. What do you guys need to be? More resourceful. Doesn't take money but money creates opportunity.

K? So capital is 1. Number 2 is code. Some of you guys said automation and AI? That fits in that bucket. Code. Software. 3 is content. Somebody's talked about, I think, podcasts and social media. Content.

I can create a system, an SOP, and it takes me an hour to create. And if I have a 100 employees, that one system can train a 100 people without extra effort from me. Does that make sense? Yes or yes? Yes. The 4th is collaboration. It's people. Okay. So the 4 C's. Write them down.

Once I understood this, I understood I only had 4 things to go become world class at, and I could have anything I want in my life. Code, capital, content, collaboration. So specifically, I wanna talk to you about how to lead people to collaboration side. Most entrepreneurs go on the left side. Pretty straightforward. Yes or yes? Yeah. Everybody does I did that for 15 years. 15 years of starting companies at 17 till I finally made some money at 28.

I mean, not 15, but a lot of time. I just thought that's how you did it. The problem with that is around 10 to 12 direct reports, you wake up in the morning with all the piss and vinegar in the world. I'm gonna dominate the day. I've got my list of projects and we're gonna have a productive day. Anybody ever wake up that way? You're like, I'm gonna kill it today. Yes. K.

Then the first thing you do is you check your email and there's fire fire fire fire. Crap. Then you think, oh, I wonder if Bob, Jane, Mary is is working on that right thing. So you start calling people on your team. You tell them, hey, are you doing this? Are you doing that? Did you think of this? And da da da da da. And then there's like fires and issues and all that stuff. And it's not till 7 at night that you finally sit down to start doing the work. Anybody relate with that? Yeah.

That's how it works. If you have a half dozen people that work for you, anybody, and you tell them what to do, check whether they got done, you tell them what to do next, this will become your reality. That's why I call it the pain line. The opposite of that is transformational leadership. K? So I'm gonna explain it to you, but I want you to think of an example in your life that's tough for you right now and apply this principle to that situation, that person. So the first thing, when I hire somebody Let's say my assistant. K? The first day, I had talked to her about a few principles. But the first one is you are the CEO of my inbox and calendar.

Who's the CEO of my inbox and calendar? You are. My assistant. Exactly. And I I don't mean to be an ingong, but I will actually ask her to repeat it back. Who's the CEO? I'm the CEO. Who's the CEO? I'm the CEO. Who's the CEO? I'm the CEO CEO. Who's the CEO? I'm the CEO.

You're the CEO. Yay. Yay. What does that mean? And I asked them to describe to me what does it mean to be the CEO of my inbox and calendar. Is it my responsibility to put stuff in my calendar or yours? Mine. Yay. We're waiting. You know, like it sounds foolish, but I'm trying to make it a little entertaining for all of you guys, keep you awake and focused.

But I'm not It's not that far off. When I hire people, I look them in the eyes and I said, I hired you to create this outcome. I don't tell them what to do. I hired you to create this outcome and then I describe the outcome. So I gotta tell them, what does a 10 out of 10 look like? My calendar has everything in there. It's structured and the description is this. Everybody's confirmed. It Like, my This is what a 10 out of 10 look like.

My calendar has everything in there. It's structured and the description is this. Everybody's confirmed. It Like, my This is what a this. Everybody's confirmed. It the it like, my this is what a 10 out of 10. Like, my travel schedule's figured out. All my flights are booked.

International, 6 weeks. Domestic, 2 weeks. Whatever it is. Right? And I get really clear at describing the mountaintop. That's the way I think about it. Some of us hire people and we don't think about telling them what it's gonna look like at the mountaintop. Right? We just say, hey. Can you start climbing this mountain? They're like, okay.

Where's where's the path? You're like, I don't know. It's over there. It's in the corner. And they go over this way. They call you the next morning. They're like, I couldn't find that path yesterday. I'm like, what are you doing? No. You say, that's the mountaintop.

See right there? That's the mountaintop. You figure out how to get there. What resources would you need? So then we measure. K? So then I explained to the person that I hired. I gave them the outcome. I said, here's how we're gonna measure your progress. Every person in all my companies have a number. My social media person has a number.

CFO has a number. My COOs have a number. My CEOs have a number. They have one number. How many numbers? 1. One number. Now, do they use other numbers to understand if they're making good decisions? Yes. But there's one number that we've all agreed on.

If you're in the automotive space, the number's called the absorption absorption rate. I'm a software guy and I know this stuff because I love I love nerding out on business. Absorption rate. It's the number that tells you the ratio of of the service department and parts covering the overhead of the the car dealership. And that number tells you how efficient it is. K? So there's different aspects into it. If I'm in the hotel space, it's the, the average night of a room, you know, booking. Right? That tells me how efficient the hotel is.

So once I tell my assistant the the way I'm gonna measure them, k, which is response time. That's the number. How quick do you respond to people? K? And it's a simple tool. You put it in your email and they respond. Then when I have issues Somebody asked me this today. What do you do when you have issues with people on your team? Anybody else run into that issues with people on your team? They're humans. They're supposed to have issues. Some of you guys expect people to be robots.

Like I just Can we k. Some entrepreneurs, our expectations for their people are up here. Can we just pull it down a little bit? Can we all realize that they have lives that don't revolve around us? And that's okay and awesome? Can we show up with a little bit more empathy? 100%. So what happens is anytime I see something that isn't great, I ask I write it down. K? On my phone, all my direct reports, I have a Google Doc. K? And it says at agenda. It's got all their names, and I just write down a bullet. Once a week for most of my direct reports, every 2 weeks at minimum, I sit down with them.

Guess what's the first agenda item in that meeting? Yes. Review my list. Literally, the other person's meeting or one on ones is review Dan's list. So I pull up my phone, because I forget what I wrote in there and I pull it out. Literally every meeting. I have a daily meeting with my assistant, Anne. Guess what? She's like, Hey Dan. What's on your list? And I open it up, because I forget.

I forget. I like to just write stuff down. Let me pull it up here. Discuss podcasts when traveling to optimize flights. Example, a The way you coach somebody isn't to tell them what they did wrong and tell them how to do it right, which is what most of us do. The way I coach is number 1, I ask myself, what is the principle that was violating? What expectation do I have? And what I want to teach you the process of, creating other leaders. K? And the way we create other leaders is by coaching them up. But most of us have never trained other people or known what a coach does.

I'm gonna give you the 3 steps. 1st step. Write this down. We go to principle. What is the principle they violated? K. So in that situation for Anne, one of the one of the, there's 5 core s o maybe my SOPs are just saying it's called North Stars. Actually, do you guys just want the Google Doc that I work with for my assistant? Would that be helpful? Alright. Here's the deal.

Just because you guys are friends of Carlos, follow me on Instagram. Dan Martel. 2 l's in Martell. Write it down. At Dan Martell. Or you can pull out your phone. Do it now. And then message me freedom e a and that'll tell me to give you that document.

K? Because I'm not giving it to anybody else. And if you're watching the recording, it's not for you. Just for you guys in this room. Cool? Yes or yes? Yes. Awesome. In there, you'll see I have North Star Principles. Dan Martell is my name, in case you guys are. The North Star Principle, one of them is that the calendar is a work of art incomplete and always, optimizing for revenue.

That's my calendar. K? And that is one of the things that was violated. She may not have known. I gotta coach her up. So the first thing I said, the thing I wanna talk about is the fact that my calendar wasn't at a 100%. The second part to that is a story. That's why I always write down examples. K? Give them a story of when you learned that principle.

K. So if you Let's take something simple. People have to show up on time. Does that bug anybody else when people show up late for meetings? Perfect. K. Principle. If you're on time, you're late. Does that make sense? That's my principle.

You may not even know you have these un unexpressed expectations, so we gotta document them. We gotta codify them. If you're on time, you're late. So if you're late, you're super late. That's the principle. I learned this the hard way. I had a client. I was supposed to meet them.

I didn't show up on time. And as soon as I showed up, they said, you missed the deal. I'm going with your vendor. Nobody's late for meetings ever again. And I embarrassed myself. You tell your personal story. K? You can do a 2 minute story. You can do a 10 minute story.

So depending on the executive, I might tell a 10 minute story to really make it land. And at the end, this is the 3rd part. So first is principle. 2nd part is story. 3rd part is takeaway. I'll ask them, what did you take away from that story? What did you learn? And they'll say to me in that example, if I'm not 3 minutes early, I'm late. That's awesome. Then commitment.

Will you make a commitment that in the future you'll always be on time? Time? Yes. If I did that with somebody, what's the probability that you think they're gonna be late in the future? Low. Because they understand comes from my heart and that I learned this the hard way and I don't wanna have you learn this. Right now it's low stakes. We just started working together. I need you to know. Most people don't follow this process for coaching. K? So this is the transformational leadership.

We start with the outcome. Where are we going? Then we go to measure. What is the one number? And then we coach them whenever we see them violate anything. And we teach them our thoughts and our stories, our experience. Anybody's had a great leader in their life, a great boss. Anybody have a great boss? I have this guy Darcy who's just awesome. Exactly. They probably did this to you and you didn't even realize they were doing this.

That's what made them great. Here's my big belief. Delegate the outcome, not the task. Write it down. Delegate the outcome, not the along the process. And that's how we build people. It's how we coach out. The third and final hot principle is the 131 rule.

This will absolutely transform your life. Anybody that has a team of people and you're frustrated that your phone is always blown up and they're always calling you and they're always emailing you and they don't seem to know how to figure anything out. I'm gonna solve this for the rest of your life. Do you wanna learn how to do that? Yes or yes? Yes. Awesome. Here's how it works. You know why they call it a bottleneck? Because it's at the top. So you think the problem is your person on your team.

I'm telling you it's the person you're looking at when you look in the mirror. So you've taught people this and I'm gonna teach you how to unteach them this. K? So few years ago, I The 131 rule, and I'll tell you how it works, is culture in all my companies. Like, you won't meet anybody at any area of the business that doesn't understand what it is because we use it as language. And I remember I had this, director of HR, this recruiter on the team and he he messaged me. He's like, hey. We got a problem. I was like, what's going on, dude? He goes, we need to hire, 12 people in the next 30 days.

I go, yeah? He goes, well, I don't know how to do that. Wow. Well, what do you think I should do? Oh, I don't know. Well, I've never done it. I said, Adam, I mean, I hired you the director of HR. I hired you to do that job. I I don't know how to do that job. Out of both of us, who do you think should learn how to do that job? And he's like, well, I mean, do you have any ideas? I said, what's your 131? And he goes, oh, man.

I don't know. Like, I don't have time for this. And I said, I I don't I don't know how to help you. K? Write this down. If you wanna be rich, be lazy. If you wanna be wealthy, be incompetent. K? If you wanna be rich, be lazy. If you wanna be wealthy, be incompetent.

I said, Adam, I didn't hire you to tell you how to do your job. I hired you to tell me what to do. Does that make sense? Steve Jobs said this. He said it's easy to hire other people and tell them what to do. It's hard to hire people and have them tell you what to do. So I said, what's your 131? He said, I don't know. I said, how long will it take to figure out? He goes, give me give me a day. I said, how about the same time tomorrow we meet up and we review? He goes, that sounds great.

It was like 4 o'clock that day. Next morning 10 AM he texts me. I'm good. Duh. Like, and I'll I'll share with you why. Here's how the framework works. One specific challenge. When somebody comes to you with problems k? And I love you women but you're the worst.

You guys, I love okay. I love you. Most of my team who are executive are women, but you guys come to me with a hurricane of stuff. It's like a tornado. I love it. It's creative and then But I'm like, what are we talking about? And they're like, this is wrong and this is wrong. I'm like, one thing at a time. So one specific problem.

What are your 3 viable options that you've considered? I wanna hear them. Tell me how you research them and then give me your one specific recommendation. If you teach everybody in your team the 1 three one rules, I'll tell you what'll happen. 1, you'll start having your front, front line people solve problems that never make it up to your attention. K? You will teach people This is another big idea. That we teach people how to treat us. K. We teach people how to treat us.

So if we teach people every time they have a problem they come to us, guess what they're gonna do when they have a problem? Come to us. That's why it's a bottleneck because it's at the top because you taught them how to do this and this is how we fix it. So, 98% of the time somebody comes to me as a 131, their recommendation is what we should do. And over time they build their confidence. And I push down all the big decision making to the front line. K? And I've got time I'm gonna give you guys You guys wanna know the ultimate hack? This is this is like the I don't share this often. Front line workers, I give them a $50 budget to fix any problem they see and all they have to do is tell me about it after. It's called 50 to fix it.

So anybody in my company at the front line, they can solve any problem. They see if it's less than $50 without getting anybody permission. The only rule is they have to tell their leader within the next 7 days. K. So they can spend their credit card, expense it. It's always approved. They get to tell their leader the next 7 days so they can coach against it. Leaders, managers, it's $500.

Directors, it's $5,000. And for my executive leadership team, my CEOs, my CRO, my CEOs, it's $50,000. What did I just do? I just created a framework to push decisions and issue problem solving down to the front line so we can move faster. I'm all about leverage. All about speed. All about growth. Most of you guys are walking over dollars to save pennies. It's hilarious.

Let your people solve the problem and then coach them up. That's how we unlock the 131 rule in a more tactical level. So here's my philosophy. This is how we scale companies. Doesn't matter if you're company of 1 or 2. We build the people. The people build the business. We build the person.

The person builds the business. We build a team. The team builds the business. When you shift your lens on your role in the company as a people builder, it will unlock massive growth. K? This is how I do it. So with that, this is my book. Buy Back Your Time. Best selling book.

Continue to sell more copies every week. Here's the movement I'm trying to create. I wanna rid the world of companies failing failing because the CEO builds a business they grow to hate. Does that make sense? I think most businesses get built to a place where the entrepreneur grows to hate it and then they wanna do something else. I wanna get rid of that as being the reason the companies fail. Mhmm. And I wanna end with this big idea. For every person in the world, for humanity, for entrepreneurs, for sure, but everybody.

I think we're all here to not only buy back our time to grow our business and we do that through the strategies I taught you with the buyback loop and the 131 and the transformational leadership. That's all awesome. That will create resources and wealth for you. Fun. I think we're here to do 2 things. 1, become the person we needed most in our darkest days. Become the person you needed most in your darkest days. Every day you wake up and try to create that person that would've had the opportunity to speak to that kid.

For me to have the character and the resourcefulness to talk to the 15 year old version of Dan. And then while while you're doing that every day, this is the second part, is share that person with the world. Give that person to the world. And your world may be your kids. Your world may be your community, your church, your CrossFit gym. I don't care. It may be social media. And I think that would be the best place.

Because I think that if you wake up every day to become that person and share that person, that you will create a life of fulfillment that you can't even imagine to feel. So with that everybody, thanks for having me. You guys are awesome. Welcome. Hey.