Shadowing Practice: How to Grow Your Business SO Fast it Feels Like CHEATING - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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I built and sold three companies in under 10 years for millions of dollars.
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I built and sold three companies in under 10 years for millions of dollars.
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They scaled so fast, it felt like cheating.
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One of my latest companies, Martel Media, scaled to $2 million a month in under 18 months.
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And today I own Martel Ventures, a portfolio of companies that's on track to become worth $1 billion in less than three years.
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I'm going to break down the strategies I use to get to this level of speed so you can apply them to your own business, even if you're starting from zero.
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Number one, focus on cash, not perfection.
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stop trying to make everything perfect and just start selling everybody wants to start a business but nobody wants to start selling I always say the moment
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you sell something to a stranger is the moment you become an entrepreneur so the more money you can get in cash up front before you spend
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a lot of money to deliver what you sold then the easier it is to grow your business because there is a massive difference between receivables or invoices and revenue versus cash because I I can't pay people in invoices.
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I can't pay people with receivables.
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But to actually get people to give you their money, you need to present the right offer.
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Number two, make people feel dumb to say no. First off, you need to build a transformation-focused offer, not a bunch of deliverables.
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Too often people are like, well, if you buy my thing, you get this, you get this.
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And you this them to death.
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People don't want a bunch of features.
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What they want is their problem solved.
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They wanna know that you understand them.
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And then you gotta add urgency, scarcity, and risk reversal If you don't put that into your offer, then people will sit back and wait or talk to their spouse or think about doing it in the future because they don't believe that they'll actually do the work.
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By telling people you only work with certain types of clients, it creates a scarce resource that only certain people that are approved can actually buy.
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Or urgency, by saying that you are a small team and you like to be very personalized and customized, that you can't do it for everybody, so you only take on a handful of clients per month.
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Or the risk reversal, saying if you don't achieve a certain outcome, then we'll give you a full refund.
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Now that might sound scary to you, but you can also say it's on the back end of you agreeing to doing all these things that you know it would be ridiculous for them not to get a result if they followed all those things.
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And the reason why this kind of offer will feel like you're cheating is because better offers equals higher close rates in premium pricing.
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All right, so you did all that.
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You've got your offer down.
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Now let's make sure people actually see it.
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Number three, build a marketing system, not a marketing plan.
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You know what I've learned with most entrepreneurs is they feel guilty if the machine is working.
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To feel less guilty about growth, you need to build a system that creates predictability in the business.
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And if you do it right, it will feel like cheating.
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And I need you to stop yourself from throwing a hand grenade in the business and blowing the whole thing up because it's actually working.
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To build the marketing system, you need to build a system and most people overcomplicate it.
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So I'm going to break it down.
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So first thing, we have to start with the camcorder method.
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If you're doing something to generate leads, you have to record yourself doing that activity.
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So that way you have a training video and you can have multiple videos of you doing the activity that generates those leads as an example.
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Then we want to create the course.
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We want to document the steps that we outline in those videos so that somebody can come in and follow one, two, three, and create predictability.
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Next, we want to focus on the cadence.
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What's the schedule?
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What do they do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday?
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If it's marketing, if it's sales, you have to document the cadence and set up the schedule so somebody can create a system of predictability.
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Finally, we want to generate the checklist, the seven to 10 things in their day that if they do every day, they will generate the result that you want for you in the business.
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And if you build this out, you'll create a marketing system, not just a marketing plan that generates predictable leads and predictable leads generates predictable cashflow that allows you to scale your business.
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So now that leads are flowing in, now it's time to make space to close them.
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Number four,
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audit your day it's interesting because people read my book and they still get it wrong i had a ceo in one of my portfolio companies and martel ventures
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who realized he was spending four hours a day on admin and customer support and i sat down with him and i was like okay you could be doing sales
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that's going to generate cash when if i look at your buyback rate i know what you're taking as a salary i know the opportunity ahead of
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you you're not making efficient trades if your goal is to make a million dollars a year anything that isn't a 500 an
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hour activity is costing you the difference because there's 2 000 hours of work an average person does and at 500 an hour of income that's your million
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dollars a year see most people just spend all their time doing 10 dollar task wonder why they haven't built a million dollar business here's how you get ridiculously
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efficient with trading your time for money first off you need to track your time so i do a two-week audit of everything i've done for the last
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two weeks going off every 15 minutes there's a timer ding ding ding it goes off you write it down that way there's no bull if you spent three hours
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scrolling tick tock i want you to write it down then i want you to go through and i want you to highlight in red anything that sucks your energy
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then we got to figure out what your time is worth because if you're going to trade your time and pay some money for somebody else to help you out it's got
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to be a good trade so you take the amount of money you make in a year divided by two thousand take that divided by four that's your buyback rate if you're
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not happy with that number because it's less than five bucks it just is what it is charge more for what you sell or figure out a way to become more
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valuable the more you buy back your time and reinvest it in things that help you sell more generate more leads will equal more money in that'll help you scale faster that that will feel like cheating.
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But freeing up your time is only part of it.
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Next, you gotta learn how to schedule it.
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Number five, rebuild your calendar.
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Now that you've bought back your time, I need you to reinvest that time in things that are gonna make you money.
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Too often, entrepreneurs wake up at the beginning of the week and they're like, I hope I grow.
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It's not in your calendar.
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If you have a problem, put it in there, schedule it, focus on it.
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Here's what I mean.
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Block 10 to 15 hours a week, focusing on high revenue activities, things like sales calls, generating leads.
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There's probably things in your business that are broken that you don't know are broken because you haven't put the time to actually improve it.
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To take this to the next level, here's the number one hack.
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You have to schedule for energy flows.
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For example, if you know that your best time to do any kind of creative writing is first thing in the morning, do it first thing in the morning.
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So now that your time is protected, let's make sure that your systems don't break.
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Number six, delete the fricking bottlenecks.
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So Elon Musk has this rule.
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If he's getting a meeting to solve problems, there's 25 people in the meeting and somebody says there's a constraint and that person's not in the meeting, guess what?
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Somebody call that person.
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He will fly people in all around to be in one meeting so that if the bottleneck exists and it needs to be solved, the person is in the meeting who can solve the problem.
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If it's not, everybody get back to work.
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So for example, if I've got a plant that makes cars and it takes three parts to make a car, the tires, the engine, and the chassis, and I can make four tires per day, which I need for one car, and then I can make 10 engines per day and I can make 100 chassis.
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How many cars per day can I make in that plant?
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One, because my number one constraint are those four tires.
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So any time, energy, resources, anything other than increasing my ability to make freaking tires is not a good use of the time.
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And that is what you need to focus on.
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So the way I fix constraints in my teams is using a very simple but incredibly powerful tool called 50 to fix it so essentially any
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person that sees a bottleneck a constraint in the business if they can solve the problem for less than 50 they're allowed to spend that money they
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can expense it nobody asks questions it only ask is that they tell their leader or manager after the fact i go 50
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for individual contributors 500 for leaders 5 000 for managers and 50 000 for c-level people that way the throughput is always
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increasing and bottlenecks are getting unblocked and the business is making more cash that will lead to scaling and make you feel like you're cheating.
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With Speed Fix, now it's time to scale yourself.
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Number seven, replace yourself.
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The best way is having an executive assistant.
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And there's two things they have to focus on, your email and your calendar.
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Because your email is nothing but a public to-do list on your time.
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And your calendar does not need you to be there if you create a system for them to interact with so that you can focus your actual time on
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things that make you money to grow the coolest part about this process is that you start to buy back 10 15 hours a week to reinvest it
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in things like sales and growth and partnerships and that's how you scale the business in a way that's going to leave you feeling like you're freaking cheating
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now if you want my complete playbook for how i interact with my executive assistant it's like 42 pages just go to instagram find me dan martel 2l's and martel follow me and and then message me the word EA, YouTube.
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Then I'll know you came from here and I will send you the direct link, no opt-in for my complete playbook on how I work with my executive assistant to get back 30 or 40 hours a week.
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Now that you're not the bottleneck, it's time to increase your ability to hire better.
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Number eight, increase talent velocity.
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Every business comes down to two key funnels.
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One is the customer funnel.
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How do I get customers?
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How do they buy all the things we just talked about?
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The second part is the talent funnel.
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How do we attract, retain, and develop top talent?
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If you have a bunch of customers and you have the right people to deliver for those customers, then the business will easily scale on its own and you'll feel so guilty that it's just working.
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So the easiest way to do this is in 12 months, as my revenue grows, whatever that target is, I want you to design what the organizational team is gonna look like at that size.
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That's gonna give you the gap.
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Then you create a people plan, which is essentially all the people you gotta hire that aren't on the team right now,
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and sequencing it based on dollar spent that's gonna get you your time back the fastest, that's gonna allow them to go make money for you to reinvest in things that make you money so you can scale easier.
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If you do this right, you build the people and the people scale the business.
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And that's why you'll be able to grow the business in a way that feels like cheating.
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Now that you've hired help, it's time to focus on building their knowledge.
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Number nine, pay for the blueprint.
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You know what money likes?
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Money likes speed.
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If you wanna generate $83,000 a month in your marketing agency, you better learn from somebody else has done it, or it's just going to take you a decade.
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How do I know this?
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I was that guy.
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I went years trying to figure out because that's what I thought I had to do.
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Learn every part of the business.
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Instead, I finally hired a coach and that one coach made me $960,000 in the first 12 months.
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Why did I wait so long?
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Because I was scared.
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I was scared that I was going to waste my money paying for somebody who's going to give me a blueprint that wasn't going to work for me.
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That was the problem for me to solve.
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and that's what you need to do yourself.
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When I invest in my people, I focus on three things.
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One, the coaching, who is gonna be their coach?
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Well, people say, well, what if I invest in coaching and I train them up and then all of a sudden they leave?
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What if you don't and they stay?
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Like, do you see how silly that is?
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What are the tools they need?
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Who are the other people on your team from a talent point of view to support that person?
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The more you can invest in coaching tools and talent to grow you, you will have more resources to invest in the business.
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I mean, just ask yourself this simple question.
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What would the 10X version of you do today?
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Because if you were already the person you needed to be today to win, you would be winning.
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If you're not where you wanna be, it means there's parts missing that you gotta go buy.
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Paying for the blueprints is the fastest way to scale.
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So now you're moving fast, awesome, but are your clients sticking around?
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Number 10, resolve your retention.
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There's nothing worse than building a business that has a bucket where all the customers come in and there's a big hole at the bottom.
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So you spend all this money and time and energy trying to get a bunch of people in your business to just have them slip out the bottom of the funnel because you've not designed a way to keep them around.
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I had a client of mine once where he had this big churn problem.
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He's losing 10% of his customers every month.
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If you're losing 10% every month, that means every 10 months, you lose 100% of all your customers.
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All we did is ask ourself, how can you get a quick win for your customers as soon as they join?
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So we created a list of 12 different quick wins that they could do with that client to get them a result that would make them feel silly for quitting because of the results they got in the first seven days.
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We implemented that all of a sudden churn goes down to 3% a month, meaning that the customer is worth four times more to them over the long term, which also meant they could spend more money to acquire them.
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That is the game changer when we fix retention.
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To do this for yourself, ask yourself, what's the fast win you can get a client as soon as that joint?
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I'm talking 48 hours.
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If you can get them to make their whole investment in working with you in the first 48 hours, they're gonna talk about you to every one of their friends.
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Then you wanna add strategic upsells, referrals, or other ways you can create value for your business.
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Maybe it's case studies, testimonials, have them on your podcast.
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And then we wanna track the churn weekly because we don't wanna ignore it.
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If we fix it by getting referrals and upsell to get them to buy more things that you have, then you gotta make sure that you monitor it so that if it goes bad again, you can fix it.
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See, it's not something you can just set it and forget it.
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You have to monitor it like anything that's important.
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And when you have better retention, you'll have higher lifetime value of a customer, which means you're gonna have better margins, which means you have more resources to scale faster in a way that absolutely feels like cheating.
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Now that you got results, now it's time to multiply them.
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Number 11, scale sales without scaling you.
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I remember the first time I hired this guy named Michael to be my sales guy and he was selling my coaching program.
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And that was a weird idea to have somebody else sell me on my behalf and me not talk to them.
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First call he had, Dan, I got somebody to buy.
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How?
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He's like, dude, I think they bought because you demonstrated by having me sell you that you can teach them how to do it for them.
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And it was crazy for me to believe this because up to that point, sure, I'd built companies that sold products, but I hadn't had a sales team that sold me.
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And I had a belief that nobody else could sell like me.
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And it turns out that's not true.
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And if you have that belief, it's the reason it's going to hold you back.
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And we need to learn how to multiply.
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light.
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So here's how we do this, where you feel like it's going to work and it's not going to go sideways really quickly.
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First thing is we got to scale your sales calls and objections.
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Everything that you know people are going to bring up, you have to script it.
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They're called talk tracks and you put it in a document and you got to be very detailed.
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If there's six parts of your sales process or nine parts of your sales process, write it in, add talk tracks and questions to guide the buyer to make the decision to buy your product.
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Then we do my favorite thing, which is record winning calls, winning sales call, winning chats, it doesn't matter, to train the new salespeople.
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Because if they see what winning looks like and they pattern match that, then they're just going to have some good best practices from day one that they just follow to get the same results that the person who won on the call got for themselves.
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Then we want to hire salespeople that are commission-based.
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See, if you pay them too much of a base, they're going to stick around even if they're not making any money because they don't need to make money because you're paying them a good base.
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What I like to do is pay them enough to cover their expenses.
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but not enough to get rich.
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And then I pay them a commission based on what they sell so that the more they sell, the more money they make, the more money the business makes because then I'm not incentivizing somebody who can't sell to stick around.
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And this is why using this process to scale feels like you're cheating because the more closers means the more sales without you working more.
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Now that we got sales off your plate, last but not least, it's time to protect your productivity.
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Number 12, stay in your zone of genius.
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I wanna be out there spreading the gospel.
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I wanna be talking about my mission, my vision, where I see the world going.
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And in doing that, I'm gonna attract customers.
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And more importantly, like I said earlier, talent.
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Your job as a CEO is to stay in your zone of genius, focus on three things.
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One, the vision.
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What should exist in your business that doesn't yet?
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That is vision.
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Do you see around the corner?
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The other one is money.
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Do you have the capital to support the scale, the growth, the investment in the business?
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And the third are the people, right?
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When you think about it, do I have the right people to build the business?
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Because you can't build enough systems and automation and all these wonky things that are gonna make it happen.
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You have to have the people on your team that are gonna level everybody up.
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If you do that and you stay in your zone of genius, that will make you the most money, but it'll also make you feel guilty because you're gonna grow and it's not gonna be hard because you're doing the thing that feels easy.
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When you get to a place in your life that looks like work, but feels like play, you've won.
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When people say, why don't you retire?
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You're now making all this money.
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and you think to yourself, why would I retire from being me?
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Because what you do every day in your zone of genius is just an expression of who you are and it feels effortless.
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That's what you wanna get to.
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And that's how you scale a business so fast.
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It feels like cheating.
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Now, if you wanna learn what I learned about culture from a billion dollar company, click the video and I'll see you on the other side.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
This video provides a unique opportunity for english speaking practice as it incorporates real-life business scenarios. The speaker shares his personal experiences in entrepreneurship, making the content relatable and engaging. By practicing with this video, learners can immerse themselves in the language used in a professional context, which enhances vocabulary and listening skills. Moreover, the strategies outlined for rapid business growth offer practical insights that can inspire discussions about entrepreneurship, allowing learners to practice articulating their thoughts in English.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
Throughout the video, several key structures and expressions can enhance your English skills:
- "stop trying to make everything perfect and just start selling": This imperative structure emphasizes the importance of action over perfection. It’s a useful phrase when encouraging someone to take risks in English-speaking contexts.
- "make people feel dumb to say no": Here, the use of colloquial language illustrates a persuasive technique in business. Such expressions can help learners understand the subtleties of influencing others in conversation.
- "build a marketing system, not a marketing plan": This contrasts different approaches and allows learners to practice using comparative structures in English, which is essential for IELTS speaking practice.
- "you can generate predictable leads and predictable cash flow": The repetition of "predictable" reinforces the concept of consistency in marketing strategies, guiding learners to use repetition effectively in their own speaking.
Common Pronunciation Traps
English learners may encounter certain pronunciation challenges in this video:
- "entrepreneur": This French-derived term can be tricky. Practice emphasizing each syllable: on-tre-pre-neur.
- "cash flow": The word "flow" can be pronounced too quickly; practice saying it slowly to ensure clarity.
- "document the cadence": The word "cadence" might be difficult. Focus on the 'ca' sound and end with a soft 'dance'.
By engaging in shadow speech exercises utilizing this video, you can refine your pronunciation and improve your overall speaking confidence. Consider repeating after the speaker to master the rhythm and intonation used in professional dialogues. This will not only bolster your speaking skills but also prepare you for real-life conversations and tests like IELTS.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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