In Search Of Excellence - Dan Martell: How To Work 100-Hour Weeks & Win | E118

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Dan Martell is a renowned entrepreneur, investor, mentor, and speaker. He is the founder of five tech companies, three of which he has successfully exited, and he has invested in over 65 startups. Dan is also the author of the bestselling book Buy Back Your Time, which has climbed into the top 20 nonfiction books worldwide. He hosts the acclaimed The Growth Stacking Show podcast. Dan's personal story is incredibly inspiring—having triumphed over a challenging youth marked by ADHD and addiction, he has emerged as a formidable figure in business. His insights on navigating both personal and professional hurdles are among the most impactful I’ve encountered on the show.Timestamps:0:00 - Introduction and Dan Martell's daily routine1:23 - The power of belief in coaching and parenting2:08 - Dan Martell shares a transformative moment from his youth2:53 - The importance of giving back and mentoring3:43 - Rehab experiences and early influences6:15 - Overcoming addiction and embracing new challenges9:51 - Learning from business failures and the importance of resilience12:28 - Early entrepreneurial ventures and lessons learned15:00 - Discovering the E-Myth and its impact on business thinking17:33 - The relentless work ethic and its personal costs20:09 - Turning a personal breakdown into a breakthrough22:59 - The harsh realities of entrepreneurial workloads25:00 - Balancing life's demands with business ambitions28:40 - The emotional aftermath of selling a business31:37 - Personal transformation and family impact34:12 - An influential trip with Richard Branson39:19 - The Buyback Principle: Hiring to free up time43:08 - Money's role in happiness and personal fulfillment45:39 - The importance of extreme preparation in achieving success46:53 - Criteria for investing in startups and entrepreneursSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

I see people every day today that have no work ethic. Like even today, I wake up at four in the morning and I work pretty much till 5 p.m. every day because the definition of what I do is creation. It's kind of like if I wanted to be an Olympic athlete and I was training, you wouldn't be like, yo, Randy, calm down. Why are you training so hard?

But I think some people don't realize that what they're trying to do is the equivalent of trying to go for gold as an Olympic athlete. Like if you want to bring a company public or you want to exit your company for a hundred million, that's rare air. And if you think that you can show up as an amateur, you know, equivalent in sports and train and try to be successful, like you ain't doing that on any balanced lifestyle. It's impossible. 35 hour a week. Cause you just won't even be in the head space to see the opportunities. Cause that's where the real shifts of step functions of growth come in business is is connecting these dots at

at the right time like it was sometimes those wee hours of the night where the innovation came from like what if i did man and i don't know if it's the the tiredness or the the quietness like for me in the mornings where i create now because it's so quiet, right? There's this energetic feeling where I feel connected to source. You're listening to part two of my amazing interview with Dan Martell. If you haven't checked out part one yet, be sure to do that one first. Now without further ado, here's part two with amazing Dan Martell. Someone once told me that the four most powerful words in the English language are, I believe in you. And I think that's so true. And I think as a coach, as a parent, I've got five kids. I tell my kids this all the time. I'm three in college. Well, one actually graduated last

weekend. I got one graduated the following weekend. They're twins. And I just think as a parent and as a friend and as a mentor, you mentor. I know a lot of kids at Portage today, and I mentor tons of people, and I love doing it. It's very important to me, as I know it is to you. But to people who really need it, it just lights a fire in them, and you can just see their eyes expand. It really is a beautiful thing. It's lights a fire in them and you can just see their eyes expand. It's really is a beautiful thing. It's everything. Brian did something for me that day that I didn't understand the impact it would have on my life until many years later. That's just the truth.

But he planted a seed of belief that started a process of me being open to the idea that he was right. And then eventually going to rehab and finding other folks that poured into that belief, right? Watered that seed. And in many ways, it's kind of what I do today, to your point. My job is to believe in people when they have no belief in themselves, to borrow my belief, to borrow my, you know, confidence in what they're capable of, right? Even when they have no proof. And I think that's one of the coolest gifts

we can give somebody, and it's in us all. Million percent. Yeah. People ask me all the time, oh, you've had all the success, you've made money, and you do this, you do that, and what's your biggest accomplishment that you're most proud of? And it's no doubt giving back.

And a lot of that is, I'm not talking about the money, by the way, because you can easily give away the money. Oh, writing a check's easy. Showing up with your time. Yeah, showing up. Yeah. Showing up, coaching. So you go into the rehab center for 11 months, Portage. Tell us about Rick and cleaning out his room and what happened next.

I was literally just talking to them. This is the start of it all. This is 27 years ago. This is where it starts. And they're still part of my life. Yeah. Rick is still a part of your life? For sure.

I love this. Yeah. Rick introduced me to Dixie Chicks. Rick was a very quiet man. He was a maintenance guy. So it was cool because this rehab center was built on an old church camp and they donated it to this new project, this therapeutic community, they called it, essentially an addiction center for youth, specifically for youth, like 12 to 18 years old, which is very hard in canada there's not a lot of them actually staffed by ex-addicts yes all the all the staff that work there are ex-drug addicts from the adult

program in montreal of all places and um so but rick's wife um is i don't even know her what's her real name because we always called her mom that's hilarious i literally could not tell you her name because we always called her mom she was the the cook roberta roberta her last name was actually cook which is hilarious so roberta cook the cook rick cook yeah and uh yeah we always called her mom and man she got us fat she would feed us so like she would just we'd come in malnourished. You got to understand like all the kids that would show up, not of them, a lot of them came from prison. Most of them came from the streets and they were skinny. And Roberta, mom took it upon herself to nourish us. You want seconds? You want seconds on the spaghetti? You want some extra bread?

Did you have one of my cookies I made you? These massive, beautiful. I mean, it was, I felt sometimes I remember one guy, man, he put on 40 pounds in five months and I thought, man, what are they doing with us? Like, this is hilarious. He came in here looking like, you know, like he was dying to something to, to having stretch marks all the way. I mean, that was kind of the thing. If you didn't watch yourself, you got stretch marks as a six, 17 year old. But anyway, so I ended up doing 11 months of therapy. I had a lot of stuff to work in. The average kid today does three months. Okay. When I was there, the average was five months. I ended up staying for 11 months because I, I just, I was also really good at acting as if. I would act as if everything was good and do the therapy.

But I wasn't doing it. I was acting as if I was doing it, but I wasn't really doing it. And that's the beauty of staff that were all drug addicts. Because they're watching and they're like, oh, Dan's not doing it. And they got me. They pushed me. I thought I was moving up. They're like, no, you're not.

Do the work. And then I'd freak out. And they They're like, no, you're not do the work. And then I'd freak out and they say, told you you're not doing the work. So they re they really, that place forced me to work on my values. Um, obviously learn how to stay clean and replace my negative habits and, and my emotions and rebuild the trust I'd lost with my, my parents and my brothers and sisters. And yeah, towards the end I got put on transition, but I wanted to stick around for a little bit longer. And Rick had just gotten a project from the government to, to build these new, um, kind of a new school area with these trailers. So he said, he asked me if I would want to stay on to help out that summer. And so I was around and that's what that Rick would play Dixie chicks,

nonstop wide open spaces, like on repeat on a ghetto blaster while we were doing construction stuff. So anytime I hear that music, it was like a trigger. I come back to that 16, 17 year old version of damn, but the place was built in old church camp and there was this cabin. I was helping Rick one day clean out. And in one of the rooms, cause there's just a bunch of storage, you know, they just put everything in there, old gym equipment and dressers and stuff. So we had to take everything out

and dump stuff and sort things. And then one of the rooms I was cleaning out, there was this old 486 computer and a book on Java programming sitting next to it. And I kind of opened up the book thinking it was going to be like hieroglyphics, computer code. I mean, I don't know. It says Java programming and it actually reads like English. They kind of opened up the book thinking it was going to be like, you know, hieroglyphics, computer. Like, I mean, I don't know.

It says Java programming. And it actually reads like English. Anybody that's ever seen JavaScript or a programming language, it's if this, then that, and select case. And I'm like, kind of makes sense. Like, it's not complicated. It didn't do anything fancy. But I just literally just booted up the computer and followed the first chapter in this book. And 20 minutes later, I got the computer to spit out hello world. And that was your world.

Dude, I was like, what is that? Like, that's cool. In many ways, I had this like unfounded confidence that maybe I was a computer genius. At 17, I thought maybe my brain worked. How could I not ever touch a computer and got the thing to say, hello world? Turns out any kid could do this. I didn't know any better. I thought maybe that's why I always got in trouble because my brain was built different and I should be into computers because I just kept following the chapters and kept getting better at it, better at it. And that became my new obsession. That's how I got into software was in rehab. That's my whole world. Everything I've built since then was building technology companies because I found this yellow book on Java programming,

you know, straight out of prison, you know, addicted to drugs. That became my new addiction. You're also into botany for a little while. What was that about? Well, I grew, I grew weed. Gotcha. I love plants. Yeah. I grew weed. I love plants. I used to, one of the things my mom actually let me do, which is fascinating. She was upset with the guns, but what she did let me do is build a whole grow up in my basement hydroponics yeah i went nuts i had i had full three different cycles of lighting systems from germination to kind of growth to flowering and a lot of electricity that's how they found a lot of a lot of electricity the smell the smell if you came in our house you knew something was weird going on i even tried to

like ozone cleanse it and spit it out through the there was a chimney in our house to try to let it vent off the top but i was surprised i didn't you know she didn't but that was okay and well i did lie to her and tell him it was tomatoes but so you So you're out. You've now got the bug. You start two companies, Maritime Vacations and MB Host. Yeah. Seven years of that, and it failed.

What'd you learn from the failures and how important were those lessons to your ultimate success? Well, I just believe that, you know, life gives you lessons or blessings. And if you're lucky, there's blessings in the lessons, right? So, so people often get upset because they fail, but I don't get better when things are going good. There's I've never ever. That's why I feel so

blessed. I've gone through what I did as a teenager. Cause I had a, I was given a masterclass in living. When I got out of rehab, 11 months of personal development, literally it's personal development. They didn't call it that, but it was 11 months of hardcore personal development. I could run, when I got into the business world, I would run circles around most adults. My EQ is off the charts. Why? Every day, every cleanup, you would partner with another resident and they would have to share their life story or you shared your life story with them to learn how to process this. So I had like, not 10,000 hours, but I had some serious time hearing what people say and what they do and

watch them. So like, I could almost thin slice when I'm talking to somebody in a business deal, like if they actually believed what they were saying and it became a superpower, I didn't even know I had until I was in my mid twenties. But the first two failure companies, I just, one of them I learned, you know, plan for success. It sounds crazy, but like, what if you win, what could that look like? Make sure you build the foundation to be successful. Cause I was so not expecting for it to become a thing that I, you know, I gave it a wrong name,

bad domain. And name is not great. No, the name wasn't good. It was a dot CA. It was, it was the East coast of Canada. It was called maritime vacation.

It, it wasn't at the cottage.com. And that guy came in and grabbed all my customers. So, you know, I learned about positioning and like plan for success and then be host that one biggest lesson i learned is never sell a commodity i'll never do that like what were you selling web hosting okay like woohoo and none of that was i was paying one in one one in one server whatever one one.com they were the web hosting i was paying

them for a server and then trying to sell hosting on top of their hosting. You know, I wasn't smart enough to come up with an Amazon web service. Like some people are like, well, Amazon web service is the most valued SaaS in the world right now. It's like, yeah, I wasn't that. Yeah, but when they started, by the way,

just to be very clear, Andy Jassy, I met when he was at Harvard. We were in the same wedding party. Weirdly, Sheryl Sandberg was in the same wedding party as well. Andy was first cousin with one of my best friends, and Sheryl was best friends with his wife. Okay.

So, and he was employee number 40, and I remember when he came up with the idea, everyone made fun of that. No one's ever going to out-store their server needs. Ever. I mean, we had two people in my office. We had a server in the office. Totally. It was a joke had two people in my office. We had a server in the office. Totally.

It was a joke. Yep. But crazy idea. But back to the web hosting idea, there were some huge companies, public companies doing that. Yeah. And building the websites too,

which was a very commoditized business. Yeah, I just learned, we ended up getting a bank as a customer and that was just way too above my skill set in a server room blah blah blah so i just but again they were just opportunities to learn what not to do to get in the training the dojo to build some skill sets and then it was my third company and i went i went and consulted for a while because i i'd like obviously it hurt.

Like these are real, like this is a side hustle. Like Dan really wanted to be successful. And I remember my dad, you know, at one point going like, maybe we should get a normal job. And I laughed.

I go, I can't work for somebody else. Like I'm way too opinionated. And the truth is, in one of the gifts I had was as long as I was sober, my parents were happy. Right. So like a lot of kids grow up with expectations for what they think their parents want them to do.

My parents wanted one simple thing. Stay sober. Don't get in jail. Don't get caught in jail or do something wrong. And you could, we don't care. So like they were actually pretty easy on me. So I just, I started consulting for a a couple years, tried to make some money. And then I hired a business coach.

Right. So this was Dan. Bob was his name. Bob, the business coach. Bob, the business coach. I never thought of that. Bob, the business coach. So tell us about Bob and then the book E-Myth.

Yeah. Because I think right at the same time, those were urgent. Well, this is what happened. I wasn't even reading books. I might have read a book called Love is a Killer App, maybe another book, but I was new to reading. My buddy Corey, he called me at one time. He's like, dude, I just read this book.

I think you'll love it. And I was like, I don't even know, I didn't even know he read books, okay? So I didn't take his suggestion too strong, but it's like, yeah, it's called The E-Myth. I think you'll really like it. Like, I you're building companies. Cause you know, those people are always entrepreneurial. That was me. I just sucked at it. Corey never even pulled the trigger. So he was inspired by the fact that I was starting companies. He read a book about entrepreneurship.

So he's like, you got to read it. So I remember I was driving to, um, I was in, where was I? I was in,ber City, Akron, Ohio, heading to Greenbelt, Maryland to meet with a potential business partner. We're gonna start a new company. And because the drive was like eight hours, 10 hours, I decided to stop at the bookstore and buy the audio version, the CDs of this book,

the EMAF by Michael Gerber. So I buy the CDs and I'm listening to it the whole time. The cool part is Gerber. So by the, the CDs and the, I'm, I'm listening to the whole time. The cool part is Gerber is a storyteller and the CDs is re is read by him. And it's a story about Sarah's pies. And it's an, it's a, it's a, uh, essentially a story of explaining how systems work in businesses and franchise prototypes on this stuff. So what happened by the time I got to greenbelt, I tell my potential business partner, Carl said, dude, I think I figured out the missing key of why we suck at business. And he wasn't too excited about sucking at business. He, he, he didn't think he sucked at business, but I was like, you're no better than I am.

And I'm telling you, this is the key. I was so adamant that I said, if you don't read this book, I'm not going to even get into business with you because this is the key. This is the thing we don't do. We need to do. We're both tech guys. And he never read the book. So I never started the business with Carl. And instead I'm 23. I have very little money saved up and I hire Bob, the business coach. I found, I found, I went on the website website emith.com or whatever and i found out in canada they had like certified coaches and i hired hired this guy bob and i ended up eventually starting a company and within the first year bob helped me do 960 000 in revenue after having two failed companies so we're talking about sphere technologies Technologies. And it grew, as you said, very quickly.

So you had a million in nine months, and then I think you did two million, and then three million very quickly. Oh, more than two the second year. Yeah, it pretty much doubled and changed for four years. So tell us about what happened on that Sunday. You were going to go to your parents' house, and what happened, what what your fiance did when you walked in the door? Well, this is what's crazy, right? So I finally find success and I'm trying to keep all the plates spinning and I don't even know what's working. It's just working. And I just want it to not fall apart. So I had one, one move, which was work. And I was 100 hours a week.

People were like, how do you work 100 hours a week? Wake up, breathe, work. Like there was, it wasn't even like, it's impossible. I remember my wife, my current wife saying that to me. I don't even understand how you could do it. I was like, you just, you sleep six hours. I don't know, like do the math. Yeah, 15 hours a day, seven days a week.

I would just, yeah, I would sleep five, six hours. I'd wake up, I do the math. Yeah. 15 hours a day, seven days a week for. I would just, yeah, I would sleep five, six hours. I'd wake up, I'd work. I'd, I'd go until I pass out.

I'd wake up, I'd do it again. And it was normal. Like I was an addict. So like, I get what it means to be obsessed about getting high. And that would be 16 hours of my day. So it wasn't actually even hard for me.

So I did that because I was, you know, I ended up meeting this girl. We did long distance. I was traveling, installing software, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, building this company. We met right at the beginning of building this company. So she kind of got used to me and she was in university.

I was young. I was 24 when I started it. She was, you know, 22, still working on her degree. So it wasn't a big deal. Right. And then we ended up, I think I was 27. So three years together, you know, we're together two, three years. It's time to get engaged.

So we got engaged and we ended up buying a house together. And one day, it was a Sunday afternoon. And I was supposed to be home by five. I remember because we were supposed to be at our parents' house for six. And I look up and I'm at my office and it's like 630. Yeah, that. And this was not the first time. So I jump in the car, race to our place,

run up the stairs, open the door. And I find her in tears in the kitchen. Her name was Amy. And she is so beside herself, she can't even breathe. And I said, sorry, and are you okay? Like, are you ready to go? And eventually she just takes her ring off and drops it on the counter and says,

I can't do this anymore. And walks right past me, jumps in her car and goes to her parents' house. And that was the last they were together. Seven weeks before the wedding. You went to a strip club. No, I didn't go to a strip club, dude. No. Where's that out there? Some guy. No, I didn't go to a strip club, dude. No? No.

Where's that out there? Some guy. No, no, no. Some guy. It's funny. I'm like, dude, what's going on with that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Some guy was interviewing me, and his co-host said, and then you went to a strip club.

Okay. And it was just so funny that I think we actually created a reel about it. So we created something out of nothing. It was just so funny the way he said it. Sam's going to get people thinking. But here's the big idea that I want people to hear. When I eventually got to talk to her about what happened, because I needed to learn.

I didn't want to replicate this. I felt horrible. I obviously, I knew kind of what I was doing wrong. But the big, big lesson was when I told her everything I was doing was for her. And she looks at me and she goes, I never asked you for any of it. When she said that to me, it was like somebody jabbed me in the heart. Like it was so obvious and so careless on my,

she's like, I never asked you for any of that. Cause I was like, you know, I was doing this for this and we were gonna build there and have kids and this future and i was setting things up and she's like those were your dreams never asked for any of it that that messed me up that messed me up for a while because i realized i've been lying to myself i had a girlfriend in law school, Tracy Glassman, phenomenal human being, one of those people who's always happy, born happy, came from a very privileged background. So she didn't have necessarily the same drive I had and certainly didn't go to graduate school. Study wasn't her thing, but it was my thing because I needed to study and graduate top of my class to get a really good job. And she used to say to me all the time, you're going to be very rich, but you're going to

be alone and miserable. And I was kind of studying my way through getting to the top of my class. It was lonely. People were going out. I was studying. And then when I was working so hard, putting in the hundred hour weeks, and I do want to talk about that in a minute, I did think about it and said, you know, at some point, I hope I can enjoy the fruits of my labor, but I wasn't engaged. I mean, we were in law school, so this is after I graduated. We broke up before I graduated, but it was never going to be a problem for me at that point in my life. But in the back of my head, I was thinking about as I was making my way down, you know, I had a horrible career start. And as I was making my way up and just saying, hey, there's

more to life than working 100 hour weeks. And you got to find some balance there. Let's talk about what it means to work that amount of time because I've had a bunch of people on my show, very successful people, Mark Cuban. 100 hours a week is 15 hours a day, roughly seven days a week, and so many entrepreneurs I know work that amount of time. When people talk about hard work these days,

people say, yeah, I'm willing to work hard. I don't think they understand what a hundred hours a week is. So what's your, tell everybody out there what the difference is between 60, 70, 80, 90, then you're in really thin air at a hundred. So what, this is why like most people are not able to suffer long enough to actually succeed. Cause it does require that, you know, like Eric Thomas has this great talk where he's,

you know, he talks to a lot of urban, you know, youth and he says, you know, when you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful. And that's kind of what it,

what it came down to. Right. I, I was, you know, or, or there's that, I don's that, is it 50? It says, you know, or maybe the game or somebody's like die rich, you know, get rich or die trying. Like I just had to be successful and I would have sacrificed anything to figure it out. So I didn't know what my timeline was going to look like, but there was no doubt that I knew someday I was going to be, and like a millionaire was like the thing. I see people every day today that have no work ethic. Like even today, I wake up at four in the morning and I work pretty much till 5 PM every day. That's 13 hours every day. No problem. now i have my workouts i have family time you know in the mornings i work up i wake up early work spend time with my kids then create then work with my teams within that i'll run my errands if i have to but i got you know i'm lucky i have team to support me but even today

like let's call it 10 hours i I'm a 50 hour a week. No problem. That's not considering I also wake up at four in the morning on Saturday and Sunday and I work. I work on vacation. I don't, because the definition of what I do is creation. It's kind of like if I wanted to be an Olympic athlete and I was training, you wouldn't be like, yo, Randy, calm down. Why are you training so hard? But I think some people don't realize that what they're trying to do is the equivalent

of trying to go for gold as an Olympic athlete. If you want to bring a company public or you want to exit your company for $100 million, that's rare air. And if you think that you can show up as an amateur, equivalent in sports, and train and try to be successful, you ain't doing that on any balanced lifestyle. It's impossible. 35 hour a week, no thing. Like, cause you just won't even be in the headspace to see the opportunities.

Cause like that's where the real shifts of step functions of growth come in business is connecting these dots at the right time. Like I used to stay up till two, three in the morning. I used to be the opposite of where I'm at today, but because I had human alarm clocks, right? I had these little kids. So all of a sudden they staying up

till two or three in the morning didn't work because they were up at five 30. So I had to shift everything. But it was sometimes those wee hours of the night where the innovation came from. Like, what if I did, man, and I don't know if it's the, the, the tiredness or the, the quietness, like for me in the mornings where I create now, because it's so quiet, right? There's this energetic feeling where I feel connected to source. Most people just don't want to put in that amount of time. And I think today I found a completely different way of doing it. Like the cool part is, is I can choose at any point to stop the output and it, and because I built the machine that builds the machine, it'll continue to roll. It just rolls faster and bigger if I'm active. But if I'm not, at least I figured out how to keep it going.

But yeah, I just think I'm grateful in many ways for learning how to do that because it did make me wealthy like that 100%. And that wealth gave me leverage and then leverage I could hire. Like my next company, I had a CEO, Ethan. He ran the company. I was his fancy title was non-employee co-founder. That was his way to get me involved. But yeah, I just think that work ethic, again, my work ethics are a reflection of my gratitude.

I'm just grateful that my creator decided to have bigger plans for my life and put the right people in my world that allowed me to, to do that stuff. So after your fiance leaves, you sell Spheric for $8 million. Yeah. Something like that. It wasn't really public, but enough to not have to work for a while. Enough to not have to work. So you're now a multimillionaire. You've achieved your first million dollars. Yeah, I own 100% of the company. First million dollars. Yeah, paid my taxes in Canada.

And. No, I actually made my first million at 27 which is kind of cool the business was crazy profitable okay so but it's your first big sale and now it's it's yeah you've got some real money in your pocket and you have to work again oh i thought i thought i i was fucking rich i was i was nothing but and most people would be like oh sweet man sweet, man. This is fucking greatest thing ever in the world. But you're depressed. You have anxiety. And you start seeing a therapist. So tell us about squeezing a rock in your pocket and why, after achieving such amazing financial success at a young age, you were depressed and had anxiety. So what happened is my fiance leaves me probably six to seven months before we get acquired. And when she left, it was early conversations. I didn't think it

would come to anything. You know, everybody always gets approached. And so she leaves me and I go into a tailspin of anxiety. In many ways, I think that's why I was even open to the option of exiting because I was just not, not functioning well. And, and it was just because my whole identity at that point was my, my business and my relationship. And then it got actually worse after I exited because I negotiated essentially a zero day or not. I had a year of advisory I had to stay on, but I remember there was a day I woke up and nobody, nobody actually would know if I didn't get up today. It's kind of a weird idea. I hadn't talked to my family in a while.

She was out of my life. I was working all the time, exit the company. The team took over. So I wasn't needed in any meetings. And I remember waking up, just laying there going, if I wasn't alive right now,

nobody would know. I wonder how long before somebody would actually come knocking that was a weird that was like a moment for me here i was with millions of dollars in my bank account feeling absolutely empty the dream is not the dream and and people hear it and not understand it until they get it. And then they get it. And I explain it to people this way. The things people want, the million dollars, the stuff, whatever it is,

it's because they want those things to make themselves feel a certain way. What they don't realize is that those things will not make them feel a certain way. It might be for a minute. They'll feel good for a day, but they won't feel good. Like it doesn't change who they are, right? It's the whole be, do, have, right? They think once they have something, then they'll do something and then they could be somebody, right? And it's just not the way it works. And the cool part is if you actually open to the idea is you can actually be happy today with nothing. It's hard for people though, to really understand this. I always easy for you Dan, you're rich. No, no, no. You can literally decide if you took everything away tomorrow,

I would smile. I'd be full of gratitude. I would pray. I would work. I would show up. I'd create. Nothing would change. After Spheric, you started Flowtown and that was going well. You eventually sold it, but you met your wife, Renee. Yeah. She Twittered you, essentially. She tweeted. She tweeted you. I should say tweeted and was wearing a Flowtown T-shirt, I guess, at a conference you were at in Toronto.

You dated for three years. You went on this trip. What happened on the Bahamas trip, and how was that a momentous? The Cinnabon story? No, you were drinking and came home. Oh, that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the Bahamas.

You're right. I started drinking again when I was 22 after rehab. And I knew better. But I made up for it. I made excuses. And I drank the whole time. And I would drink. Sometimes I wouldn't drink till Thursday or Friday.

But when I drank, I drank. And my wife drank quite a bit with me. That's kind of how we met, right? At a party. It's kind of our thing. But then she got pregnant and she wasn't drinking, obviously. And we were on a vacation. And I remember the first day we stopped at a liquor store.

And when I came out, she goes, are we having a party? Like, what is all this? It's like oh you know if we don't drink at all we'll just leave it for the staff or something like that and um the first night i got absolutely plastered and she was upset with me i told you blah blah blah and there's just something in that moment you know she had her belly i I just, I kind of flashed back to my childhood and it occurred to me that I was repeating the same pattern that I had experienced. You know, I, my mom would drink all the time. My dad would drink with her and I just knew better. And I just decided I'm done. And I said that to

her, my, my drunken stupor, I said, I'm done. And I started pouring everything out into the sink. And I remember her looking at me going, sure, you've said this before. We'll see how long that lasts. And I just decided I was done. And the next day she woke up kind of waiting for me to go to the pool bar and order something. And I didn't. Next day, same thing. She didn't. It took probably three years before she actually believed I was done done. And it's been 13 years. And the

cool part is I didn't know this at the time, but essentially there's a thing called a transcendent character. And every family that's ever won in life had a transcendent character show up in the lineage of that family to to do the work that was required for everybody else so i became that transcendent character by being successful in business and eventually in my personal, my physical, the no drinking, 13 years sober. So that's why when I said at the beginning of this conversation, if you came and you saw the way our family is today, in many ways, it's because we healed ourselves. I had to go first. I had to get sober as a teenager. My two brothers were into trouble with the law too. My sister got in trouble with the law too.

Once I got clean, I never said a word to them. But I think they realized that, hey, there's got to be a different way to do this. And they just over time kind of cleaned up their act. And when even my brother decided he wanted to start a business, he called me up and I helped him. And I wrote him a check for $173,000.

Man, that's all the money I had in my bank account at 26 years old. First home building business. Yeah. And my dad says, the dumbest thing you've ever done. I said, dad, you don't know the day that my brother gave me the last $53 so that I can go on the run. I stole that car. I called my brother and he showed up, gave me his last $53 so I could put gas in this car. You have a friend who one day invites you to somebody's house in Verbeer, Switzerland. Tell us about that trip, Richard's assistant, and how that changed your life

and really set your life on a completely different path. Yeah, I think I was 29, and my buddy Dan, he had a startup called Zozy, asked me, emailed me this random email, do you want to come to Switzerland to hang out at Richard Branson's house with about 10 other entrepreneurs? I was like,

yeah, let me check my schedule. Clear. And I got this. And I remember until I saw Richard Branson sitting there, I thought maybe this was I was being punked or something. And I showed up at the airport. Tim Ferriss is there, I thought maybe this was, I was being punked or something. And I showed up at the airport.

Tim Ferriss is there. I was like, okay, that's a good sign. So I was like, Tim, did, yeah, we're going to hang out with Richard. You had the same email. Yep. All right, cool. So the guy who was a co-founder, Randy, he was a co-founder of Square with Jack from Twitter. So I ended up spending a week in Verbier, Switzerland, at Richard Branson's lodge.

It's 18 bedroom, 22 staff, awesome spot in the hill. And that's where I understood why Richard was the billionaire everybody else, every other billionaire wanted to be like. Because he truly lives an integrated lifestyle like the whole time we were there he was hosting dinners inviting other local entrepreneurs he had his ceo of one of his companies flying on a helicopter to have breakfast with him to talk about some board issues they were having in one of his companies he was skiing with us every day we're we rented go-karts uh went parasailing. I mean, it was literally like Disneyland for

entrepreneurs. And the thing that I admired him the most that he did that I didn't understand when I saw it was how he managed the demand on his time. And the way he does is every morning, he has breakfast with Helen, his assistant, which I think today still 15 years later, she's still with him. She travels with him because he has several homes. And it's during those conversations where she brings to him only things that she doesn't know how to respond to, but she owns a hundred percent of all inbound, all his teams, all the CEOs, all this stuff goes through Helen. He doesn't even do emails. He might today, but back then didn't even, didn't even have a phone, I don't think. And he would just talk to her and she would say, well, we have this thing, there's this and

this, and I know you wanted to do this, but do you want to do this instead? And he'd be like, no, let's keep this. Perfect. So like after their breakfast, he would come with us skiing and she would move all the stuff forward. And that shifted everything for me because I had an assistant at the time, but I was giving her stuff to do. What he showed me was route everything through her and let tell people what to do. I work through people to generate outcomes by giving them ownership of stuff. Like just even now, I don't manage my calendar. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing next, but I know it's design. We talked about it on Monday and it's just like having other people own even this the studio you're in the martel media that's owned by todd todd runs the whole thing i'm talent it's kind of awesome but i learned that watching

richard he doesn't sit on boards he calls them boring he's got 400 companies in the virgin group of businesses two ceos that run the holding company and a ceo for every one of the companies it's awesome so how did that lead to the buyback principle so what is the buy Tell everybody what it is. Yeah, the buyback principle states that you don't hire people to grow your business. You hire people to buy back your time. Because if you do the second, you'll get the first. But if you do the first, you definitely don't get the second. Most people look at their growing as a capacity problem. And I look at it as a calendar problem. The job of an owner, a CEO, the person who created the business is to grow the business to get more freedom as they grow. If you are a logo designer

and you get busy and you hire another logo designer, that might give you more capacity. The problem is then you're stuck doing all this stuff that the logo designer is not going to do or can't do, which is administrative stuff, running errands, cleaning out the garbage, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. That doesn't create a business. So most people end up building businesses they grow to hate. So I learned a completely different way to scale companies through Richard for sure, but I've been doing versions of this, just understanding the value of my time. But that was just a big unlock in regards to how to work with an executive assistant. And what's the buyback loop? The buyback

loop is this concept that when you hit the pain line, so as you grow and you can grow, so most people have opportunities all the time to 10X their business, but they drag their feet because growing would mean pain in their calendar, right? It'd create chaos. When they hit the pain line, then they should go to their calendar and they audit. They audit the calendar for time and energy. What are the things that they're spending time on that they could pay somebody else little amount to do that they don't want to do in the first place. Like I've never created an invoice in my life ever. I have no interest in understanding how to create an invoice. Then we transfer all that stuff to somebody else. That's the T in the buyback loop, audit, transfer, fill. And then fill is work and invest on your skillset, your character traits, your beliefs to become the

person who can then grow. So that's why it's a loop. If you don't do the fill properly, if you just buy back your time to go hang out on a beach or watch Netflix, then your business is going to stall out because you haven't grown who you are and you haven't become better so that you can go tackle bigger problems. The bigger the problem, the bigger the life. And most people don't realize that. They try to shy away from problems. And it's like, no, no, you want to go create massive problems and work really quick to develop the skills to overcome them. And what are the three areas to invest in to complete a buyback loop? So I always look first at what skills, what are the skills I need to invest in? So, you know, if you're starting off and you have an assistant, but you don't really know how to work with that assistant, that could be the

skill. Or you're about to hire your first employee and you're worried you're going to hire the wrong person. That's a skill. Or you don't have enough leads. That's a skill. So you invest in skills. The other area is your belief system. See, a lot of people have beliefs about how the world is. The most expensive thing is to believe something that simply isn't true, right? So some people have beliefs that nobody can do as good as me. If you hold on to that one, I'll tell you what your business will look like. Small. Like it's just impossible, right? I have a belief that 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome. That belief creates scale in my world. So really challenging your worldviews and your beliefs is kind of the second area.

And the third is character traits, right? Courage, consistency, confidence. Those are character traits that in many ways lock in the skills and the beliefs into your identity. And that's why I call this kind of the ladder of skills or the ladder of success because you over time build an identity of what's possible or who you are and then that person gets to go tackle bigger challenges. I think a lot of people listening to your show and my show want to be rich, right? People work hard, they want to have

money, you have a job, you know, I have a nice home, et cetera, et cetera. Are rich people happier than people who aren't rich? No, no. So money doesn't make anybody happier. And not money doesn't make you any happier. If people understood that pretty much, and the statistics are out there, I don't know what the number is today with inflation, but let's call it 75 grand.

Kind of once you get all your basic needs met, the thing that makes you happier is your own psychology. It's why they say the most valuable real estate in the world is a six inches between your ears. Understanding your own mindset, the conversations you have with yourself. Check this out. Your first thought isn't your thought. People are going to be like, what are you talking about? When you're driving down the street and you have an idea, did you think to have that idea or did it just come to you? It just came to you. That's actually how your brain works. How you respond to that, that you control. And that's your psychology. So you can have a positive thought, a negative thought. You

can focus on opportunity. You can focus on scarcity. And my philosophy is the world isn't as it is. It's as you are. And your energy, your frequency, what you put out to the world is what you will frequently see. So the external world of happiness is a byproduct of your internal world. Money is a tool.

It's just like saying, do forks make me happy? I don't know. You can use a fork to kill somebody. You can use a fork to nourish yourself. But a fork doesnks make me happy? I don't know. You can use a fork to kill somebody. You can use a fork to nourish yourself, but a fork doesn't make me happy. It's a fork. Money will not make you happy. It's money. It's a, a ability to store energy that you can then deploy to other things. And you can use it to ruin your life and you can use it to amplify your life. But I've never had money make me happy. I decided based on the meaning I associated to an event or an object, if I was happy, and it turns out I had that power since I was born. I just needed me to get to a certain

place for me to realize it. People have asked me frequently, how did you become so successful? And I think there's a lot of traits and work ethic I think is up there, but I talk about something called extreme preparation. I'm writing a book called Extreme Preparation. It's a different way to prepare. When someone prepares one hour for a meeting, I've gone sometimes 40 hours for a meeting. Can you give some specific examples of how extreme preparation has led to some of your success? I mean, I think in decades. So my brain strategically is preparing in a decade. Because I learned a long time ago, we have to be ready to receive the things we're asking for. For example, if I knew I was having a baby in nine months, let's say seven, eight months, right?

Would I prepare for such a baby? Of course I would. I would figure out where they were going to sleep, where the crib were going to be, the clothes they're going to wear, talk to some people that have babies and probably read a book maybe, or hit some YouTube videos. You would prepare to have the baby. Most people, as you know, it's probably why you're writing this book. It's beautiful. I love the idea is they don't prepare to receive the success. If you knew a hundred percent, you're going to be

successful. You'd probably start figuring out your, your finance team. Like, like who's going to manage the money once I get rich, I don't even have any friends to teach me or help me or go who who's coming on vacation with me. So I don't have to pay all the time like it's all these like most people don't prepare at all for their life but for me i think strategically in decades i plan my life out like i'm scheduling stuff into three years into the future i'm very intentional and all those things that make me intentional uh generate opportunities i mean for example i spoke at tony robbins event a few months ago. You better believe I put some preparation into that talk.

I bet. By the time I gave that talk, I'd already given probably 25 times. Scripted, outlined stories, emotions. And because of that, when I thought I had 45 minutes and they told me I had 90, I was prepared.

Didn't even flinch. No problem. I found out before I hit the stairs going on stage, oh no, you've got 90 minutes. That's double the time I had allocated. I got slides. Luckily I had prepared. So I know which stories I could add to which slides to extend it. So I just think like preparation for meetings so that you get key investors, key employees, you know, key customers, right? Those lighthouse customers, those cornerstone customers, those tenants that just like make everything else easier.

That preparation costs very little and separates you from everybody. Everybody. Every, it's, I literally, last Monday, I do leadership training every Monday here. And it was the first thing I taught everybody. These are the five things you can do in life that costs very little. They will separate you from everybody else.

And one of them was preparing Sunday for the week, the night before for the next day. Simple idea. We've known, we've heard this for years. All successful people will agree. This, there's one thing they all did.

They prepared. Cause they're not going to like wing it. I like, I hope today's a good day. That's silly. But most people do that. What are the five things you look for in entrepreneurs when you're funding a company? I mean, first off, I want to, I want to, I can't invest.

I look for problems that I have. That's one. Two, I invest in people that are going to teach me things. Three, I got to feel like I can be helpful. If I don't feel like it's a problem I've had, I can't be helpful. I don't want to invest. Four, I got to feel like they've got the grit,

the staying power, because I've just learned, as you probably have learned the same thing, like the idea I'm investing is not the issue. It's the people that are going to execute. So can they, do they have staying power? Do they have grit? If there was a fifth, will it be fun? That to me, it's like, I don't invest for money. All those things have to be present. But at the end of the day, will I enjoy myself? Because

unfortunately, most people don't tell you this about angel investing is that you end up spending most time with the worst companies. People are doing well, don't need you, right? Like nobody ever told me that. Like when I was investing, it's like, oh yeah, by the way, you know, those people you really like hanging out with, you'll end up spending time with these other people. And if they're not fun, if you don't want to spend time with them, you're probably going to really not enjoy your life. So that, those are the five things I look for. Dan, this has been awesome. Really appreciate you have me in your studio. Your questions were so on point.

Like literally the research you put into the conversation, I just want to acknowledge you for that. I do a lot of these and it was really cool. I appreciate that. You're an amazing guy. I've learned a lot from doing the research on you and look forward to getting to know you better. Appreciate it, Randy.