Whenever I hang out with other successful entrepreneurs, they always ask me, how do you have such a great team? Or they'll say, I need this person for my business, or how do you find such talented people? And I realize, I never sat down and explained my process. It's a very simple way to get people on board with your vision and push your business forward without you being involved.
So I'm going to take you on the journey of how I went from hating the business I had built and feeling like no one was on my side, to today building a business where I'm pumped to hang out with my team and love every second of my day. And it all comes down to this one skill... leadership. Welcome to The Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best-selling author.
In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. My best-selling book, Buy Back Your Time, is out now. Grab a copy at BuyBackYourTime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers. The first part of leadership that you need to understand, it's this. Your team doesn't work for you. You work for your team. So I moved to Silicon Valley and I got exposed to a completely different way people led.
I had these 26-year-old kids running around raising hundreds of millions of dollars, leading these companies of 1,000 employees. The way I thought you managed people was a certain way. And I was exposed to a completely different style. That's when I learned the three levels of leadership. The first leader is the title leader. This is maybe the person you've worked with when you worked at like an entry-level job or just starting your career.
This person pretty much says the words, I'm your boss, do what I tell you to do. Because they have a title, they think everybody's got to listen to them. So most people get it wrong and then they have people that are leaving them all the time because they're paying them a little bit more an hour, an extra 50 cents an hour person leaves. They don't quit the company, they quit their boss, usually a title leader, worst way to lead people. The second level is the trader.
This is a person that says, if you do this for me, I will trade you for these things. The challenge with that style is that the moment somebody else will trade them for more, they're gonna bounce. They're gonna leave you. The highest level of leadership, the third level is the servant leader. When you show up as a servant leader, every meeting isn't about, let's get done. It's literally starting with the intention of how do I help these people? How do I show up for this team?
It's, I'm not here to get them to produce for me. I'm here to support them in their production. It's a different intention, but it changes the whole frame, the whole conversation, and it builds trust. No leader will be able to affect massive change if their team doesn't trust them. When all you're doing is trading with other people or telling people, do this because I'm the boss, then it doesn't create trust. The servant comes in and says, hey, I just want you to win.
And if we all win, we all get to succeed together. How can I help? That is a person that's being of service. Most people start off and they're just like, I pay you, do what I told you to do. That's the title leader. The trader's like, okay, how do I get them motivated? All right, I'll give them an incentive program. The problem is that if all you're doing is an incentive program, there's no commitment to the mission. They're literally just there because it's transactional.
The servant leader has stickiness because they're there to serve the individual and the person respects the leader that says, hey, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm here to support you. Where are you stuck? Where are your challenges? My job is to unblock you. That team member will be loyal to the leader, which brings us to the second part of leadership, which is leading without doing their job. Most people, the way they lead, it's not their fault. They were never taught any other way.
They hire people and then as they hire people, they tell them what to do. They go off, they try to get busy with their own projects, and they come back, they check in on people and make sure they're moving forward and they do what they do. The challenge with that is that there's only so many people you can do that with, until you wake up in the morning and you spend your whole eight hour, maybe 10 hour day, just telling people what to do and check in on people and it feels heavy.
The different styles, what I call transformational leadership. In that style, we focus on a completely different set of objectives and by our example, we unblock people so they can do more without needing us. And that way the bigger the business gets, the less time it needs from the leader so you don't end up building a business you grow to hate. Here's exactly how it works. Transactional leaders do this. They tell people what to do.
They check that they got it done and they tell them what to do next. I call it the tell, check, next, loop. And it sounds great. This is what I've been taught. This is how my first boss delegated to me. They told them what to do. They checked that they got it done. They told them what to do next. Of course, very productive. Until you get to about 10 or 12 employees and the whole thing breaks apart and you feel overwhelmed. Transformation leadership is completely different.
Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube. I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube. Just subscribe to the channel. Turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you you got a new episode so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode. Number one is we want to start with an outcome. Let's say the goal was to climb Mount Rainier.
We're not going to tell them how to climb them out. We're going to tell them what the outcome is, which is we're going to get to the top. It's 14,000 some feet. At the top, you're going to be healthy. You're going to feel vibrant. You're going to be with this crew of people. You're going to look around. It's going to feel amazing. You're going to be in great shape. You're going to post the flag down there. You're going to take a picture.
And you're going to let everybody know you made it to the top of Rainier. It's going to feel great. We really want to define the definition of done. This is what completion looks like. Then we use measurement. That's number two. We got a measure. Measure exactly what progress looks like. So we can use a simple thing like elevation gain per day. So you just ask, at the end of every day, text me the elevation gain per day. That way we can start figuring out is the person on the right track?
And are they making enough progress each day? Step three is coach. At the coach level, now what we do is any time there's a measurement that's off. Let's say that one day they made a thousand feet of gain. The next day they report back and they only make 10 feet. Well, on the coaching step you say, hey, I noticed you went from a thousand feet one day to 10 feet and the next day, what happened? Well, I got lost. Interesting. Well, what happened?
I didn't know and I went down this path and ended up in a ravine. So I had to circle back so I didn't make a lot of progress that day. What are some options that you could have evaluated to help you avoid doing that in the future? Hmm. Well, I could have bought that map from the guy at the beginning of the trail. Yep, that sounds like a great idea. You coach the person up on the strategy to avoid making the same mistake or make better decisions.
And that's the difference is when you follow the transformational leadership approach, you're transforming the way somebody works so that that way you don't always have to be the smartest person in the room. Most people get stuck at a level because their team can't grow with them. Transformation leadership is all about developing your people so that they can give you more so that you can go further. Which brings us to the third part of leadership which is to build your talent engine.
I have a ton of friends that have businesses and they end up in a position where there's key people. That aren't performing. But they can't fire them because they would cause so much pain in their life. They keep them around. In many ways they feel hostage to an individual. They know they're not great, but they're not that bad. But they're definitely the reason they're not able to grow. And that becomes really tough.
And what I've discovered is that if we don't build a process for identifying great people and bring them onto our team and developing them and keeping them around, then we'll always be at the mercy of the worst performing person in our company and for many businesses, that person's holding back all the potential growth in profit. So to do this at the high level, there's three things you gotta get great at. You have to acquire talent, you have to train talent, and you have to retain talent.
So the skill we need to develop is acquiring talent. Every business has two engines. They have the engine that gets the customers and they have the engine that gets the talent or the team. And if all you do is spend 99% of your time building the customer engine to get new customers, but you don't build the engine to identify and bring in great talent into your business, then you won't be able to synchronize with the demand.
Maybe you've experienced this where you feel like you've grown a lot and your calendar just explodes and you're overwhelmed and you just want things to slow down because you can't hire fast enough. Not being able to hire fast enough is just as bad as not building a marketing engine to get customers. Those are two things that have to happen in parallel so they come together at the exact same moment. You add 10 new clients, you get that new hire. You add 10 new clients, you add that new hire.
You add 10 more clients, you add another hire. And because you know how long it takes you to hire them, you never feel like you're behind because both of them are coming together at the exact same time. That is building a talent acquisition engine. Number two is you got to train your talent. You have to develop your people. I remember one time a person at event said, what if I hire somebody and I train them all up and then they leave? And my response was, what if you don't and they stay?
What I've discovered is training your talent provides a huge ROI on you saving your time. My philosophy is very simple. We build the people, the people build the business. So you have to invest in not only hiring talent in the right time, but also developing them so they can give you more inside the business. So this is my process to train my team in a way that doesn't take any extra time for me and gets the work done at the same time. I call it the camcorder method.
So I always ask myself, what does a 10 out of 10 look like? If somebody's going to do something for me, what is that criteria I would use to evaluate a 10 out of 10? And then I list what questions I might ask the recipient of that work if it's delivering something for a customer or having somebody build something for another person on the team. We define the criteria of what 10 out of 10 looks like. Then using that criteria, we create training around doing that work.
Typically it's just recording yourself doing the work. So if you're doing marketing right now and you're creating Facebook ads, what does a 10 out of 10 ad look like? Well, it's got a good hook. It's got great copy. It's got a clear called action. So you can kind of write out the criteria of a great Facebook ad. Then next time you're creating one, just record yourself and talk out loud while you're doing it.
Creating the Facebook ad, for example, you can record yourself creating the training to teach somebody else. Why would you do it this way? Because when I hire somebody, I want to be able to go from zero to hero as fast as possible. Which means if I can hire somebody today, sit them in front of the laptop and have them go through all the training links of me doing the work or somebody else on my team that's recorded themselves doing the work.
And at the end of the week, 40 hours of recording and watching and taking notes, I give them a little assessment to see if they picked up what we were thrown down. I can see if the person picked it up without having to do all the training. Literally 40 hours of my time, bought back.
While I was doing the work that need to get done, using the criteria of already defined of what 10 out of 10 looks like, this strategy will transform the game for you as you build and grow your business, especially around roles that are repeated, administrative roles, people that do the work that you sell. So get your team to start recording these and put them all in a Google doc or whatever system you use for your standard operating procedures. And that's called training.
The hack here is to train your team on principles, not tasks. Talk about the right way to do things don't tell people exactly how to do them because the principles are universal and evergreen, meaning that regardless if the system changes behind the scenes, the principles will always hold true. Telling somebody how to click a button and go and create an email, that will become stale very quickly.
Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness, and business, and less than five minutes a week. Find it at MartellMethod.com. Number three is to retain the talent. One of my favorite ways to do this is use the five-year goals. See, I learned a long time ago.
If my vision is big enough for everybody in my team, goals and dreams to sit inside of, it makes their selfishness and their drive aligned with mine. So in the first interview that I do, which is usually the last interview amongst my team, I always ask them, five years from now, I want you to paint me a picture, professional, personal, what does that look like? And I write them down. I really want to know.
Because then I use that to peg the work we're doing to their own goals to share with them how what we're trying to accomplish now is align with their goal so we can do something bigger together. It allows me to push them to become better, but it's self-invested. They want to do it so that they get to develop into the person that achieves the goals they set out for themselves. My whole philosophy is I want to invest in their development. I want to build the people.
One time I was hiring an individual to join my marketing team, and that team was going to grow. And honestly, what I really need is a higher somebody that has experience building a marketing team. I remember this person I was interviewing said to me, my five-year goals is to have my own marketing agency, which is awesome because I need somebody to come in and learn how to develop the team to essentially act like an agency for the rest of the business. That's an aligned goal.
Once I knew that, then I could map all the training, all the projects, all of their desires to developing themselves in understanding the skills. I taught them how the business worked, all with the mission that someday they could be ready to go start their own agency. Now, some people would say that's crazy. Why would you do that? And then they leave. The truth is, if you do that, they'll probably stay because they continue to grow and develop.
People want to stay in an environment where they get to become more, where they get to become better, where they get to sharpen steel by working with other people they respect and admire. And usually, by the time they want to go do their own thing, they've been with you for four or five or six years. Honestly, that's a long time.
And if they've shown up every day, driven to learn how to do that for themselves, to support you, that's better than the person not having that desire, not investing themselves, not wanting to become that person. And you always have to push them forward, which brings us to the fourth part of leadership, which is simple. Become the person. The big idea is that leadership is about becoming the person. The person who can recruit, develop, and retain top talent.
The person who can show up, powerfully, all the time, not just sometimes, all the time. And at the end of the day, that's really what leadership is. It's, in many ways, becoming the person you needed in your darkest days. Because that person, that shows up with kindness, directness, have achieved these levels of success that you admire, that's really what we're striving for. And that's what your team's going to see.
I remember one time I was coaching with my fitness coach, Alan, and I asked him, why don't you post on social media? I mean, you're 250 pounds of lean muscle. You're incredibly inspiring, you're physique, you're commitment, all these things. And he's like, man, I just don't want to be one of those guys. And I'm like, what's one of those guys? He's like, you know, just person's always post in their photos and make it all about social media and this and that. And I go, interesting.
And as we were working out, I looked around the room and he had Swartz and Higger, he had C-Bub, he had Ronnie Coleman. And I said, to those people, inspire you, he said, well, hell yeah, they're the people that made me want to become the person I am today. And I said, interesting. Imagine if those people never posted a photo. I want to encourage you to consider maybe you're being a little selfish.
Because I know that there is a kid that falls you and because you don't post, he's not being inspired. And it was crazy because when I asked him that, he then told me he's like, it's kind of nuts. Because I used to weigh 320 pounds. I'm like, what? It's like, yeah, man, I lost 100 pounds in like six months. And I decided to get into fitness. That story, those photos, that journey, that's inspiring. He became the person he needed most in his darkest days, but he didn't tell anybody.
So at the end of the day, leadership is not only about developing yourself, but it's sharing your transformation with the world. That is the big idea. The more you become, the more you can give. The better you get, the better your team will get. The bigger your team is, the bigger you will be. It's a forcing function. Most people don't want to share online because they're worried that people that fall them are going to judge them. Because they judge other people.
It's kind of funny because how you judge other people is the fears you create for yourself. It's like my father-in-law, where he's always leaving reviews on other people's site and then he won't post his artwork on the internet because he's worried people are going to judge his artwork. Well, of course, because you're the person judging everybody else's service, leaving reviews everywhere.
You can't be a pro-rated level reviewer and not have a fear that people are going to judge and review your artwork when you post it. So a lot of people, they fear the judgment, but it's self-inflicted because of the way they see the world. The world isn't as it is, the world is as you are. So the way to overcome that fear is make it about serving people. Make it about the other person. Don't make it about you. Don't make it about, I'm worried what other people are going to think.
Make it about, I wonder how many people I could inspire. That shifts everything and it makes it about others, not about themselves. Leadership. That's where I spend 99% of my time. But if you want to learn the only four skills you need to build a billion-dollar company, click the link and I'll see on the other side. Thanks for listening to Martell Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review?
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