27 Years of No Bullsh*t Business Advice in 27 Mins

since the age of 17 I've only done one thing build businesses today 27 years later I'm the founder of Martel Ventures portfolio company that makes over 100 million a year in revenue and I get thousands of business owners dming me on Instagram every day for help but I only have time to respond to a few a day so today I want to give you all of my knowledge for free everything you need to start grow and exit your business in a little time as possible the first thing you need to do is start so the

first business I ever started was a vacation rental website think Airbnb but I built it for my dad he was asking me to build a web page for his Cottage and I thought my dad needs a web page for his C maybe there's other people so that's what I did I essentially convinced my dad it was going to cost like 500 bucks to host his web page he's like I thought it was free I'm like trust me took the 500 bucks went and paid for hosting for a server for a year which allowed me to

build this site this app then I had to figure out how do I get more customers to pay me for a web page for their Cottage and my buddy Dave gave me this crazy idea he said there's a tourism guide that's got all the bed and breakfast is you should talk to that so what I did is I had my little brother entering all the contact information from this tourism guide into a Microsoft access database then I opened up Microsoft Word and I did a mail merge printed out all these letters that said something to

the fact that hi we're Maritime vacation we allow you to have a web page for your listing where you can manage the availability and all the rules and people to reach out to you and book if you want a web page then just fill out this form include some photos $30 for the web page $10 if you want your photos back and we sent out I think like 400 pieces of mail manually just folding letters licking stamps put it in the mail and it's funny cuz maybe a week later my dad and I came home

to our apartment he checked the mail and there was like a stack of envelopes and in the envelopes was dollars and that's how Maritime vacation doca was born I remember somebody saying that if you can get a stranger that's not your cousin your uncle Aunt to send you money over the internet then you've gone pro so at 17 18 years old I went pro indirectly by helping my dad deal with all these phone calls that was my first dollar on the [Music] internet most people think that they need more ready to charge somebody money I

always ask myself what's the minimum I have to do to present something to a potential customer to get them to give me money dollar bills exchanging hands it it doesn't matter if it's a product or a service I don't have to have the product to sell it I don't need to deliver the service to sell it I can have the conversation to see if there's a problem that needs to be solv and ask the person to pay me to solve that problem I think that is the biggest thing stopping people is they think I need

the business cards I need the website I need the logo I need the team I need the credentials unless you're doing brain surgery you don't need any of that you just need to go find a customer and get them to pay you I think the best industry to start in is something you're passionate about and the reason why is because and Steve Jobs said this a long time ago any sane person receiving the amount of friction or push back or challenges would give up but because you're passionate about it you keep pushing and that's why

you'll be successful it's almost like you have to be unreasonable about what you want to achieve because you may not see proof that it's working for a long period of time the best case is get into an industry that you love that you're interested in that in many ways you would do for free just so that you can be in it even if you make no money because being in it is the actual reward so kid this morning was talking to me about his business idea he wants to get paid to modify cars truth is

if he never makes a profit for the first 3 years he's pumped because he's talking to people that own these cars that he's involved in modifying and that's his real passion so whatever you have a interest in that's the best place to start my favorite thing to do if I'm starting off is find people that are already selling to the people I need to talk to so if I want to start a business selling uh Harley memorabilia I would find out who sells the Harley Owners obviously the harly dealership but there might be some other

brands some clothing lines online websites some service stations whatever and talking to them and figure out how you can promote what you've got inside their store or online through their channels through their Facebook page through their Instagram account that's the easiest way that's the best way and the cool part is if you do that instead of getting one customer you might get 12 customers instead of spending all time trying to get one new sale you can do the same amount of effort to get in front of that partner that audience and then get a lot

of people to buy from you most people make the mistake they go well if somebody's already selling these customers why would they let me in there to help well the truth is is I need to figure out what are the other problems my customers have and introduce them to people who can solve those problems because then they look at me as somebody helps them solve their problems if I'm a barber shop there's no downside in me promoting a garage shop around the corner that I really like the owner that's where a lot of folks have

these like limiting beliefs around around what other business owners will or won't do when the truth is just start talking to them and ask and see what they are willing to do are they willing to send an email letting people know about your business or at least let you put your business cards on the counter in their store or pin it up on one of their community bulletin boards or whatever it is that's the easi way to find a customer number one skill is the skill of sales nothing happens until somebody sells something and that's

just the truth most people are so scared about being rejected that they will sit at home and play What I Call business theater business theater is doing all the stuff to get ready to actually do business it's the logo design it's the web page it's the letterhead the business cards and it's fascinating just how elaborate people will go to play business to be I'm an entrepreneur it's like you don't have any revenue or your only customer is your dad that's not a business you're essentially a lowp paid employee you just happen to build through a

corporation anything that is not trying to get in front of customers and asking for the order is just distractions it's just procrastination it's literally business theater my whole thing in regards to like the core functions of a business it's awareness also known as marketing it's selling getting somebody to buy and then there's fulfillment how do you deliver what you just sold everything else can kind of fall into operations or Administration the truth is most owners or the CEO or the founder whatever you want to call them they should spend all their time on marketing and

sales then if they get customers obviously fulfill overd deliver to get referrals to help with the marketing and sales the first level of getting things off your plate is Administrative and operational tasks people wear those as Badges of Honor but the truth is is taking time away from doing the other areas is just not time well spent so as soon as you have revenue and you can afford to pay anybody to do any task that's administrative in nature operational in nature it's money well spent because then you're going to take that time and reinvest it

in Marketing sales it's going to generate more resources dollars Revenue that you can then pay other people to help you on the delivery side and then we move into grow so the biggest mistake people make is they don't focus on the biggest lever that they've got which is sell more things to your current customers I can't tell you the amount of entrepreneurs that I work with where they're like hey we need to get more customers more customers I call it the chocolate right where they're like spending all their time on marketing and the real broccoli

the thing that's really going to move the needle is looking at their existing customer and say how do we get them to buy more more frequently bigger packages and usually if they have a hard time doing that is because they don't actually have a great process for delivering what they promise cuz if you call a customer up and they're not willing to buy anymore it's probably because they didn't have a great first experience so we really have to focus on the existing customers to make sure that they're happy they're referring they're buying more you give

them offers you design that conversation and really build a system around monetizing your existing customer base once you have that then you go and try to find [Music] more the most underrated skill is having a level head I can't tell you the amount of entrepreneurs is self-sabotaged by screaming at customers that's not fair when it's their fault they didn't set the expectations they didn't manage the expectations they didn't look and communicate properly and all of a sudden the customers up UPS ET especially if you tried to make it better that's where it's really tough for

entrepreneurs where they showed up and went above and beyond and then the customer still saying things but the funny part is then they overreact they create what I call emotional shrapnel they explode the most underrated skill is somebody that can disconnect the emotion from the action no matter what somebody says to you you can hold your composure those are the CEOs the founders and leaders that end up growing big teams because they don't self-sabotage throw hand grenades in their business like like fire half their team get pissed off at their bank manager I've seen it

all and literally the bigger the business the more composed you'll see the CEO when it comes to heated customers the way I think about learning I call it just in time versus just in case we always want to try to find the information that's going to help us solve the current problems can have the biggest impact on our business just in case learning is what they teach us in University or what I like to call shelf help in the world of personal development some people they just in case consume 14 different podcasts because they don't

want to actually do the business doing the business is Marketing sales and then delivering listening to podcast is not doing the business now if you want to get better figure out what skill you want to learn that's going to have the biggest impact to your business and then go find the resources things like the top five books the top five online programs the other areas that's the fastest is finding a mentor finding somebody that's done it before so that you can not pay the ignorance tax by trying to make the same mistakes they've already made

figured out and give you the blueprint I mean it's crazy to see people feel like what they're doing is this magical unique snowflake when it's no different than anybody's gone before you and a lot of people try to sit there and reinvent the wheel and it's slow finding a mentor a coach that's been there before that can literally take 15 years of learning and compress it into a year it's probably the best trade and then I would say build a peer group sometimes we have to do a friend ventory we need to audit our friend

group and say do these people support my dreams or when I share do they talk it down do they tell me I'm not thinking about stuff even though they've never done the thing that you want to do and then go find other peers other people in business doing similar to you and spend more time with them that is another great way to learn because they're going to be trying different things at the same Pace as you so you'll be able to learn from their trial and error Mr Beast did this great I remember back back

in the day he talked about having like 10 friends and they would get on Skype and stay on Skype all day long for 20 hours straight they would just stay there and every one of them was trying to learn and do new things and then they would share it they're like hey I just tested out these thumbnails check this out or hey I just tried this new storyboard in my videos I found this book and it had all these weird ideas so now I'm using them for title ideas and it's just having a peer group

of people that are passionate about their future and personal development and growth I think is a great way to learn new stuff when you don't know what you're doing so there's only four ways to generate demand in your business I call these a four piece you have partner publish press or PR and paid paid acquisition ads the fastest one is Partners why having somebody that's done all the heavy lifting all the work to build an audience of people that you could sell to it's kind of like you have a train and the person that has

the train going from one city to another city had to build the train tracks They had to clear the land and build the train tracks put down all the Rocks put down all the beams then put down the steel so that the train can roll on it then they had to build the train for the passengers to get inside of it fill it up with cargo and then the train goes over the track what you do with a partner you're starting your new business all you got to build is a hook you got to build

a long Hook when the train comes by that you just latch onto the train and you get to hitch a ride of all the effort building that train that track and getting those people on board just by creating an offer an opportunity for the owner of the track and the train to get you in front of their audience it is the fastest way to go from zero to hero in your business most people are scared of it so that's number one publish is social media it's content it's SEO the problem with publish is that it

can be slow it's great to have it there because people are going to check you out online you don't want to come up empty but spending too much time there and not on the other ones is probably not a good move paid is very fast it's the fastest channel it's just you got to spend money up front to get a customer and most people starting off don't have enough money to be able to invest and spend over a long period of time to learn how to do paid so it's a tougher one to activate PR

is a great one this is the Richard Branson strategy of trying to get people to talk about you but trying to figure out what's already a trend or a topic in the market and how you can introduce your business your personal story what you're doing that's complimentary to that and insert yourself into those stories so that when people write about it they mention you that's a very fast way to get in front of tens of thousands of people but you just got to be super creative and try to understand how what you're doing aligns with

what people want to know about today in the world my favorite way to sell anything is to talk to somebody and I'll tell you why cuz the goal isn't to just sell the goal is to learn I can learn faster by talking to somebody about their interest their challenges their problems their reality to then present them a solution way faster than doing it over email doing it over chat even doing it through a partner sometimes if the partner is promoting you I'm not getting any feedback to know what part of the offer is not working

for the buyer my big thing is get out of your office Do not sit in your office and do this go to the streets show up at somebody else's office go to the mall go into the streets stop people ask them questions try to figure out your talk tracks for your sales process or your sales script but the best way to sell is to get on a phone or in person or a zoom so that you can not only get somebody to buy but learn faster what's working what's not so that you can make every

shot on goal [Music] better in the early days the brand that matters is your personal reputation I think too many people worry about the logo your color palette but that's not what's going to get people to make a decision what they're debating when they're looking at you is your ability to understand their problems and this is where an expert and an amateur are separated an expert asks questions that make them sound like like an expert an amateur can't talk intelligently about the problem and if you can't describe to me as the buyer my problem better

than I can explain it then you're not the expert your ability to ask me questions to communicate my personal challenges and be more descriptive and accurate then I can makes you the expert so if you want to get somebody to buy then I would say the brand is understanding how you present yourself in a way that makes you separated from everybody else out there the brand is a byproduct of how the customer experience is your service not what you tell them it is too many people say well the brand is our tagline no no no

the brand is customer buys has an experience and decides to explain it to their friend what it was like and if that's not a positive experience and you don't have a brand a brand is what people say about you when you're not around most people do a lot of things wrong there's levels 0 to 300,000 in income the problem they're trying to solve is to learn to delegate unfor there's a lot of high paid experts they call themselves entrepreneurs but they're really vsbs very small businesses cuz they don't have a business they're just a high

paid consultant a high paid expert and this is true for doctors lawyers dentists Etc some of them don't have teams because they don't know how to let go so they'd just rather do everything and I'm talking about they're lucky if they even have a front desk person doing the billing and scheduling appointments I've seen a lot of barber shops the barber who owns the shop he's doing everything he's answering the phone he's cutting hair schedule and stuff and that'll keep you stuck at about 300K the next level is to get to 2 million the problem

that people get wrong there is they don't know what to let go in what order they think cuz they're busy putting on roofs on houses they got to go hire more people to put roofs on houses the challenge with that is then you step away from the work and if it doesn't get done right then you're spending so much time fixing problems because you're not there so then people well how do I do that and free out my time to go to marketing and sales it's by not doing any operational work so think non-customer facing

so anything that is marketing customer facing sales customer facing the delivery of it customer facing and then once I get bigger a million plus on my way to 2 million then I hire leaders that can run those areas of the business I can hire a consultant to help me with the marketing I can hire another salesperson to take those calls and do follow-up and I can hire a team lead to manage the projects that I've properly trained to even do that you got to build systems most people do not document the process for how they

do what they do they just think everybody understands it and then they get upset when things go wrong to go from two to let's say 10 million eight figures the real skill is to learn how to work through people it's a different skill delegating to people at scale you can get to 2 million you might run around the day like you're spinning plates and you're worried that one of them's going to drop and smash all over the place but you've got leaders that are managing people to scale the 10 million you got to be good

at communicating through outcomes not tasks because the outcome is is where the person now has a vision for what they got to do and it's up to them to figure out the task the worst thing you can do is hire somebody and tell them what to do you want to hire somebody and have them tell you what to do and that's how you go from 2 to 10 million and that's the biggest thing is hiring driven people learning to work through them and let them figure out how to solve problems at scale cuz the volume

2 to 10 I mean if you're a barber you might have 10 barber shops not one or two managing 10 that's a completely different set of complexity that you got to figure out because if you don't your ceiling of complexity will be where you naturally hit a glass ceiling of growth might be at 300,000 1.5 million even 10 million and then 30 million there's all different levels of these glass ceilings of growth or what I call the complexity ceilings that you have to learn how to deal with and overcome if every time you hire somebody

new you start first with the premise that they have to buy time out of your calendar something you're currently doing then as you grow and you hire new people your calendar should get Freer and Freer and Freer see most people don't do this they hire for capacity I need another logo designer I need another programmer I need another Roofing guy the challenge is if your early days then what happens is you still do the work and then you get stuck with all the other stuff as well and you can burn yourself out where you're literally

working 30 40 hours a week billing or doing customer facing stuff fulfillment delivery and then you spend the other 30 40 hours a week trying to run run the business so the best way is to start with your calendar find out what you're doing that is low cost to pay somebody else to do that you don't enjoy doing in the first place and build the process the standard operating procedure to do that work so that you're not present and give it to somebody else and I'll tell you the first day you don't do all your

invoicing you don't do all your follow-ups you don't do scheduling and somebody else takes those tasks and gets them done for you and they're done as good if not better because they actually have the time to do it right where you were rushing before it is a beautiful moment My Philosophy is 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome cuz I'll tell you the faster you get to a point where you're making money that's not connected to your time that will be the freedom point where business becomes fun and you can get there a

lot faster than you think if you use that process of looking at your calendar and only hiring people that's going to buy time out of your calendar first most people over complicate the training of the new person and I think it's because they want to be seen as like competent you start off and you're like I don't want somebody to think that I'm incompetent but the truth is if all the person does the first day they start is sit there and watch videos of you doing the work that you've been doing that they now have

to take over then you didn't have to train them and then it's up to them to tell you what they learn watching those videos but that might be the first week or two weeks so yes you're thinking oh I can't afford to pay somebody to do that you can't afford not to do it because if it costs you your time when you hire somebody new to get them up to speed where they can actually create value for your business then you will accept yourself to have an underperformer on your team because that underperformer is easier

to deal with than not having them and having to find and train somebody new because it takes your time but I think that part is really where people overco complicated it doesn't have to be a fancy document that's thought through all the different scenarios and can be as simple as just a bunch of record of you doing the work and having them watch you do it and then figure out what makes sense for them and then the last step is to exit Here's My Philosophy if you don't build a business to sell then you'll always

feel like you're a prisoner of your company but a business that you could sell is a great business to operate so in many ways just having the decision that someday I will sell this changes your whole relationship with the energy of building the business it doesn't mean you're less passionate or not committed to the Future what you're doing is saying Hey I want this thing to be bigger than me I don't want to be needed for this thing to add value to people I love in my community online in the world I want it to

continue past my time if something happens to me where I get hit by a bus I don't want the business to not keep going so I think that if you start with the premise that someday somebody's going to buy this it's going to be worth something and realize that for most entrepreneurs the real Payday is by creating a business that is valuable to somebody else then they should want to create it to exit you can sell your business for anything doesn't matter what industry you're in restaurants Home Services tech there is a business out there

in your kind of industry similar to yours that is sold for a billion dollars so the amount you could sell it for is literally whatever you want if you're willing to do the work but it starts with the belief that hey somebody could build it if I learn how to build it in a way that's valuable to somebody else the only reason is valuable is if it makes profit consistently without you needing to be there that's what makes it valid people don't buy businesses as charity projects they buy businesses because whatever amount they gave you

it generates a return on that amount over a period of time and they expect it to grow when you're at a million they're not going to pay you a whole lot if you're 5 million that's the beginning of where it's interesting to other people if you're at 10 million all of a sudden now people are like oh I'd pay you three four five six times on your profit your eida if you're at 50 million that's like real lifechanging dollar amount that's the cool part it's not like one day maybe I'm going to have this big

payday and all a sudden I'm going to live differently is like if you do it right and the business makes profit from the first year second year third year Etc your life changes right away the more the business can one operate without you there 100% if you need to be there every day that's not as valuable two two it doesn't make profit if it makes a lot of profit that's obviously awesome three there's a business operating system a way you do it think about your company way you've documented the process for how you do production

management and planning and accounting and recruiting essentially if somebody bought your business they could go through this manual for how you've been able to create the income and the profit and the whole team structure that's really valuable and then you're in an industry that's growing that's also very valuable ideally if you have some intellectual property or some patents or something that's kind of unique to you guys and how you do it that nobody else has that makes it obviously very attractive to a potential buyer but those are the big things you want to think about

it's stable durable Revenue talent in the business is incentivized to stick around that you're not needed for it to operate and grow and then a manual that defines the process for how you get customers sell those customers and keep those custom customers if you can do those things then you have a business that's valuable and people pay you top dollar to buy you so there's a bunch of different processes but the easiest one is to just reach out to a business broker depending on your industry there's somebody that has a job that his full-time job

is to evaluate your business tell you what you need to fix to make it better and then go find somebody that would strategically or financially buy your business because it makes sense for them to expand their revenue and they will sit down with you for the most part for free to evaluate and assess where you're at and tell you hey go work on these things and then I could probably present you to other businesses and you can do it in a way that's Anonymous so your customers don't find out but there's a whole market for

doing this so the interesting about selling a business is most people don't know what to do with the money and I'll tell you why if you are making 5 million a year in your business and a million in profit that's 20% profit on $5 million so if some some gives you $5 million where are you going to take that 5 million and invest it to get a 20% return so the fascinating part for most entrepreneurs selling the business economically doesn't make a lot of sense because then they don't have a vehicle that going to continue

to pay them that kind of return usually what people do in these long journeys of building the business is they will diversify into other means of businesses you hear people say like multiple streams of income the truth is is the multiple streams are like real estate Consulting passion projects or businesses they co-found with other people but if you have those then you would take the capital that you just got from selling your business and you would reinvest it in those other businesses because again you own a piece of those business or they are your business

and that's going to generate a better return if you don't have that then hopefully you have a wealth manager if you don't you should get one that's a fiduciary CU if not they're just going to sell you stuff cuz they make money off of it not a good look but it's also an opportunity for you to learn the next skill creating wealth is a different skill than me maintaining wealth making money is easy keeping it hard most people that make money lose it very quickly after that was 27 years of business knowledge but if you

want to learn exactly what I would invest in in 2024 starting from scratch click the link and I'll see you on the other side