[0:00]Since the age of 17, I've only done one thing: build businesses. Today, 27 years later, I'm the founder of Martell Ventures, a portfolio company that makes over $100 million a year in revenue. And I get thousands of business owners DM'ing me on Instagram every day for help, but I only have time to respond to a few a day. So today, I want to give you all of my knowledge for free. Everything you need to start, grow and exit your business in as little time as possible. The first thing you need to do is start. So the first business I ever started was a vacation rental website. Think Airbnb, but I built it for my dad. He's asking me to build a webpage for his cottage and I thought, my dad needs a webpage for his cottage. Maybe there's other people. So that's what I did. I essentially convinced my dad. It was going to cost like 500 bucks to host his webpage. He's like, I thought it was free. I'm like, trust me. Took the 500 bucks, went and paid for hosting for a server for a year, which allowed me to build this site, this app. Then I had to figure out how do I get more customers to pay me for a webpage for their cottage. And my buddy Dave gave me this crazy idea. He said, there's a tourism guide that's got all the bed and breakfasts. You should talk to that. So what I did is I had my little brother enter in all the contact information from this tourism guide into a Microsoft access database. Then I opened up for Microsoft Word and I did a mail merge, printed out all these letters that said something to the fact that, Hi, we're Maritime Vacation. We allow you to have a webpage for your listing where you can manage the availability and all the rules, and people to reach out to you and book. If you want a webpage, then just fill out this form. Include some photos. $30 for the webpage. $10 if you want your photos back. And we sent out, I think like 400 pieces of mail, manually, just folding letters, licking stamps, put it in the mail. And it's funny because maybe a week later, my dad and I came home to our apartment and he checked the mail, and there was like a stack of envelopes. And in the envelopes was dollars. And that's how maritimevacation.ca was born. I remember somebody saying that if you can get a stranger that's not your cousin, your uncle, your aunt to send you money over the internet, then you've gone pro. So at 17, 18 years old, I went pro indirectly by helping my dad deal with all these phone calls. That was my first dollar on the internet.
[2:14]Most people think that they need more ready to charge somebody money. I always ask myself, what's the minimum I have to do to present something to a potential customer to get them to give me money. Dollar bills exchanging hands. It doesn't matter if it's a product or a service. I don't have to have the product to sell it. I don't need to deliver the service to sell it. I can have the conversation to see if there's a problem that needs to be solved and ask the person to pay me to solve that problem. I think that is the biggest thing stopping people is they think I need the business cards, I need the website, I need the logo, I need the team, I need the credentials. Unless you're doing brain surgery, you don't need any of that. You just need to go find a customer and get them to pay you.
[2:59]I think the best industry to start in is something you're passionate about. And the reason why is because in Steve Jobs said this a long time ago, any sane person receiving the amount of friction or pushback or challenges would give up. But because you're passionate about it, you keep pushing. And that's why you'll be successful. It's almost like you have to be unreasonable about what you want to achieve because you may not see proof that it's working for a long period of time. The best case is get into an industry that you love, that you're interested in, that in many ways you would do for free, just so that you can be in it even if you make no money, because being in it is the actual reward. So kid this morning was talking to me about his business idea. He wants to get paid to modify cars. Truth is, if he never makes a profit for the first three years, he's pumped because he's talking to people that own these cars that he's involved in modifying. And that's his real passion. So, whatever you have an interest in, that's the best place to start.
[3:55]My favorite thing to do when I'm starting off is find people that are already selling to the people I need to talk to. So if I want to start a business selling uh Harley memorabilia, I would find out who sells to Harley owners. Obviously, the Harley dealership, but there might be some other brands, some clothing lines, some online websites, some service stations, whatever. And talking to them and figuring out how you can promote what you've got inside their store or online through their channels, through their Facebook page, through their Instagram account. That's the easiest way. That's the best way. And the cool part is if you do that, instead of getting one customer, you might get 12 customers. Instead of spending all time trying to get one new sale, you can do the same amount of effort to get in front of that partner, that audience, and then get a lot of people to buy from you. Most people make the mistake they go, well, if somebody's already selling these customers, why would they let me in there to help? Well, the truth is is I need to figure out what are the other problems my customers have and introduce them to people who can solve those problems because then they look at me as somebody who helps them solve their problems. If I'm a barber shop, there's no downside in me promoting a garage shop around the corner that I really like the owner. That's where a lot of folks have these like limiting beliefs around what other business owners will or won't do. When the truth is, just start talking to them and ask and see what they are willing to do. Are they willing to send an email letting people know about your business or at least let you put your business cards on the counter in their store or pin it up on one of their community bulletin boards or whatever it is. That's the easiest way to find a customer.
[5:22]Number one skill is the skill of sales. Nothing happens until somebody sells something and that's just the truth. Most people are so scared about being rejected that they will sit at home and play what I call business theater. Business theater is doing all the stuff to get ready to actually do business. It's the logo design, it's the webpage, it's the letterhead, the business cards. And it's fascinating just how elaborate people will go to play business to be, I'm an entrepreneur. It's like, you don't have any revenue, or your only customer is your dad. That's not a business. You're essentially, you're a low paid employee, you just happen to build through a corporation. Anything that is not trying to get in front of customers and asking for the order is just distractions, it's just procrastination, it's literally business theater.
[6:16]My whole thing in regards to like the core functions of a business, it's awareness, also known as marketing. It's selling, getting somebody to buy, and then there's fulfillment. How do you deliver what you just sold? Everything else can kind of fall into operations or administration. The truth is, most owners or the CEO or the founder, whatever you want to call them, they should spend all their time on marketing and sales. Then if they get customers, obviously, fulfill, over deliver to get referrals to help with the marketing and sales. The first level of getting things off your plate is administrative and operational tasks. People wear those as badges of honor, but the truth is, taking time away from doing the other areas is just not time well spent. So as soon as you have revenue and you can afford to pay anybody to do any task that's administrative in nature, operational in nature, it's money well spent because then you're going to take that time and reinvest it in marketing sales, that's going to generate more resources, dollars, revenue, that you can then pay other people to help you on the delivery side. And then we move into grow.
[7:18]So the biggest mistake people make is they don't focus on the biggest lever that they've got, which is sell more things to your current customers. I can't tell you the amount of entrepreneurs that I work with where they're like, hey, we need to get more customers, more customers. I call it the chocolate, right? Where they're like spending all their time on marketing and the real broccoli, the thing that's really going to move the needle, is looking at their existing customer and say, how do we get them to buy more stuff, buy more often, buy bigger packages? And usually, if they have a hard time doing that, is because they don't actually have a great process for delivering what they promised. Because if you call a customer up and they're not willing to buy anymore, it's probably because they didn't have a great first experience. So we really have to focus on the existing customers to make sure that they're happy, they're referring, they're buying more, you give them offers, you design that conversation, and really build a system around monetizing your existing customer base. Once you have that, then you go and try to find more.
[8:15]The most underrated skill is having a level head. I can't tell you the amount of entrepreneurs that self-sabotage by screaming at customers, That's not fair. When it's their fault, they didn't set the expectations, they didn't manage the expectations, they didn't look and communicate properly and all of a sudden the customer's upset. Especially if you tried to make it better, that's where it's really tough for entrepreneurs, where they showed up and went above and beyond and the customer still saying things. But the funny part is, then they overreact. They create what I call emotional shrapnel. They explode. The most underrated skill is somebody that can disconnect the emotion from the action. No matter what somebody says to you, you can hold your composure. Those are the CEO's, the founders, and leaders that end up growing big teams because they don't self-sabotage, throw hand grenades in their business. Like fire half their team, get pissed off at their bank manager. I've seen it all, and literally, the bigger the business, the more composed you'll see the CEO when it comes to heated customers.
[9:19]The way I think about learning, I call it just in time versus just in case. We always want to try to find the information that's going to help us solve the current problem that's going to have the biggest impact on our business. Just in case learning is what they teach us in university, or what I like to call shelf help in the world of personal development. Some people they just in case consume 14 different podcasts because they don't want to actually do the business. Doing the business is marketing, sales, and then delivering. Listening to podcasts is not doing the business. Now, if you want to get better, figure out what skill do I want to learn that would have the biggest impact on my business? And then go find the resources. Things like the top five books, the top five online programs. The other areas is the fastest is finding a mentor. Finding somebody that's done it before so that you can not pay the ignorance tax by trying to make the same mistakes they've already made, figured out and give you the blueprint. I mean, it's crazy to see people feel like what they're doing is this magical unique snowflake when it's no different than anybody that's gone before you. And a lot of people try to sit there and reinvent the wheel, and it's slow. Finding a mentor, a coach that's been there before that can literally take 15 years of learning and compress it into a year. It's probably the best trade. And then I would say, build a peer group. Sometimes we have to do a frienditory. We need to audit our friend group and say, do these people support my dreams? Or when I share, do they talk it down? Do they tell me I'm not thinking about stuff, even though they've never done the thing that you want to do? And then go find other peers, other people in business doing similar to you and spend more time with them. That is another great way to learn because they're going to be trying different things at the same pace as you, so you'll be able to learn from their trial and error. Mr. Beast did this great. I remember back in the day, he talked about having like 10 friends and they would get on Skype and stay on Skype all day long. For 20 hours straight, they would just stay there, and every one of them was trying to learn and do new things, and then they would share it. They're like, hey, I just tested out these thumbnails. Check this out. Or hey, I just tried this new storyboard in my videos. I found this book and it had all these weird ideas, so now I'm using them for title ideas. And it's just having a peer group of people that are passionate about their future and personal development and growth. I think is a great way to learn new stuff when you don't know what you're doing.
[11:33]So there's only four ways to generate demand in your business. I call these the four P's. You have partner, publish, press or PR, and paid, paid acquisition ads. The fastest one is partners. Why? Having somebody that's done all the heavy lifting, all the work to build an audience of people that you could sell to. It's kind of like you have a train, and the person that has the train going from one city to another city, had to build the train tracks. They had to clear the land, build the train tracks, put down all the rocks, put down all the beams, then put down the steel, so that the train can roll on it. Then they had to build the train for the passengers to get inside of it. Fill it up with cargo and then the train goes over the track. What you do with a partner, you're starting a new business. All you've got to build is a hook. You got to build a long hook when the train comes by, that you just latch onto the train, and you've get to hitch a ride of all the effort building that train, that track, and getting those people on board, just by creating an offer, an opportunity for the owner of the track and the train to get you in front of their audience. It is the fastest way to go from zero to hero in your business. Most people are scared of it. So that's number one. Publish is social media, it's content, it's SEO. The problem with publish is that it can be slow. It's great to have it there because people are going to check you out online. You don't want to come up empty. But spending too much time there and not on the other ones is probably not a good move. Paid is very fast. It's the fastest channel. It's just you got to spend money up front to get a customer, and most people starting off don't have enough money to be able to invest and spend over a long period of time to learn how to do paid. So it's a tougher one to activate. PR is a great one. This is the Richard Branson strategy of trying to get people to talk about you. But trying to figure out what's already a trend or a topic in the market and how you can introduce your business, your personal story, what you're doing that's complimentary to that and insert yourself into those stories so that when people write about it, they mention you. That's a very fast way to get in front of tens of thousands of people, but you just got to be super creative and try to understand how what you're doing aligns with what people want to know about today in the world. My favorite way to sell anything is to talk to somebody. And I'll tell you why, because the goal isn't to just sell. The goal is to learn. I can learn faster by talking to somebody about their interest, their challenges, their problems, their reality, to then present them a solution, way faster than doing it over email, doing it over chat, even doing it through a partner. Sometimes if the partner's promoting you, I'm not getting any feedback to know what part of the offer's not working for the buyer. My big thing is get out of your office. Do not sit in your office and do this. Go to the streets. Show up at somebody else's office. Go to the mall. Go into the streets, stop people. Ask them questions. Try to figure your talk tracks for your sales process or your sales script. But the best way to sell is to get on a phone or in person or a Zoom so that you can not only get somebody to buy, but learn faster what's working, what's not, so that you can make every shot on goal better.
[14:36]In the early days, the brand that matters is your personal reputation. I think too many people worry about the logo, your color palette. But that's not what's going to get people to make a decision. What they're debating when they're looking at you is your ability to understand their problems. And this is where an expert and an amateur are separated. An expert ask questions that make them sound like an expert. An amateur can't talk intelligently about the problem. And if you can't describe to me as the buyer, my problem better than I can explain it, then you are not the expert. Your ability to ask me questions to communicate my personal challenges and be more descriptive and accurate than I can, makes you the expert. So if you want to get somebody to buy, then I would say the brand is understanding how do you present yourself in a way that makes you separated from everybody else out there. The brand is a byproduct of how the customer experiences your service, not what you tell them it is. Too many people say, well, the brand is our tagline. No, no. The brand is customer buys, has an experience and decides to explain it to their friend what it was like. And if that's not a positive experience and you don't have a brand. A brand is what people say about you when you're not around.
[15:49]Most people do a lot of things wrong. There's levels. The zero to 300,000 in income, the problem they're trying to solve is to learn to delegate. Unfortunately, there's a lot of high-paid experts, they call themselves entrepreneurs, but they're really VSBs, very small businesses, because they don't have a business. They're just a high-paid consultant, a high-paid expert. And this is true for doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. Some of them don't have teams because they don't know how to let go, so they just rather do everything. And I've seen a lot of barber shops. The barber who owns the shop, he's doing everything. He's answering the phone, he's cutting hair, he's scheduling stuff. And that'll keep you stuck at about 300k. The next level is to get to 2 million. The problem that people get wrong there is they don't know what to let go and what order. They think because they're busy putting on roofs on houses, they got to go hire more people to put roofs on houses. The challenge with that is then you step away from the work, and if it doesn't get done right, then you're spending so much time fixing problems because you're not there. So then people, well, how do I do that and free up my time to go do marketing and sales? It's by not doing any operational work. So think non-customer facing. So anything that is marketing, customer facing, sales, customer facing, the delivery of it, customer facing. And then once I get bigger, a million plus, on my way to 2 million, then I hire leaders that can run those areas of the business. I can hire a consultant to help me with the marketing, I can hire another sales person to take those calls and do follow-up, and I can hire a team lead to manage the projects that I've properly trained. To even do that, you got to build systems. Most people do not document the process for how they do what they do. They just think everybody understands it, and then they get upset when things go wrong. To go from two to let's say 10 million, eight figures, the real skill is to learn how to work through people. It's a different skill. Delegating to people at scale, you can get to 2 million. You might run around the day like you're spinning plates and you're worried that one of them's going to drop and smash all over the place. But you've got leaders that are managing people. To scale to 10 million, you got to be good at communicating through outcomes, not tasks, because the outcome is where the person now has a vision for what they got to do. And it's up to them to figure out the tasks. The worst thing you can do is hire somebody and tell them what to do. You want to hire somebody and have them tell you what to do. And that's how you go from two to 10 million. And that's the biggest thing is hiring driven people, learning to work through them, and let them figure out how to solve problems at scale. Because the volume 2 to 10. I mean, if you're a barber, you might have 10 barber shops, not one or two. Managing 10, that's a completely different set of complexity that you got to figure out because, if you don't, your ceiling of complexity will be where you naturally hit a glass ceiling of growth. Might be at 300,000, 1.5 million, even 10 million. And then 30 million. There's all different levels of these glass ceilings of growth, or what I call the complexity ceilings, that you have to learn how to deal with and overcome.
[18:49]If every time you hire somebody new, you start first with the premise that they have to buy time out of your calendar, something you're currently doing. Then as you grow and you hire new people, your calendar should get freer, and freer, and freer. See, most people don't do this. They hire for capacity. I need another logo designer. I need another programmer. I need another roofing guy. The challenge is if you're early days, then what happens is you still do the work, and then you get stuck with all the other stuff as well. And you can burn yourself out, where you're literally working 30, 40 hours a week billing or doing customer facing stuff, fulfillment, delivery. And then you spend the other 30, 40 hours a week trying to run the business. So the best way is to start with your calendar. Find out what you're doing that is low cost to pay somebody else to do, that you don't enjoy doing in the first place. And build the process, the standard operating procedure, to do that work so that you're not present and give it to somebody else. And I'll tell you, the first day you don't do all your invoicing, you don't do all your follow-ups, you don't do scheduling, and somebody else takes those tasks and gets them done for you. And they're done as good if not better, because they actually have the time to do it right where you're rushing before. It is a beautiful moment. My philosophy is 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome. Because I'll tell you, the faster you get to a point where you're making money that's not connected to your time, that will be the freedom point where business becomes fun. And you can get there a lot faster than you think, if you use that process of looking at your calendar and only hiring people that's going to buy time out of your calendar first.
[25:44]The interesting about selling a business is most people don't know what to do with the money. And I'll tell you why. If you are making 5 million a year in your business and a million in profit, that's 20% profit on $5 million. So if somebody gives you $5 million, where are you going to take that $5 million and invest it to get a 20% return? The fascinating part for most entrepreneurs, selling the business economically doesn't make a lot of sense because then they don't have a vehicle that's going to continue to pay them that kind of return. Usually, what people do in these long journeys of building a business is they will diversify into other means of businesses. We hear people say like multiple streams of income. The truth is, the multiple streams are like real estate, consulting, passion projects, or businesses they co-found with other people. But if you have those, then you would take the capital that you just got from selling your business and you would reinvest in those other businesses because again, you own a piece of those business or they are your business and that's going to generate a better return. If you don't have that, then hopefully you have a wealth manager. If you don't, you should get one that's a fiduciary because if not, they're just going to sell you stuff because they make money off of it, not a good look. But it's also an opportunity for you to learn the next skill. Creating wealth is a different skill than maintaining wealth. Making money is easy. Keeping it hard. Most people that make money lose it very quickly after. That was 27 years of business knowledge, but if you want to learn exactly what I would invest in in 2024, starting from scratch, click the link and I'll see you on the other side.
