How To Stop Wasting Your Time & Money On Things That Don’t Matter - Dan Martell - #831

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's happening people, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dan Martell. He's an entrepreneur, investor and an author. The saying money can't buy time is often used to emphasize the importance of not wasting your days. But what if there was actually a way to buy back your time? What if using your money well can actually liberate your life? Expect to learn what the bigger it gets, the harder it gets means in business, why so many successful people suffer with more chaos rather than less as they grow, Dan's framework for outsourcing all the stuff you don't want to do in life, what the buy back principle is, what it means to run your family like a business, how to work out things that you need to let go of, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dan Martell. The bigger it gets, the harder it gets. Is that a rule of business?

**Dan Martell** (1:13)
Most people would think so. I think that the truth is if you do it right, that as you grow, the bigger it is, the more resource you have and it should get easier. My, the way I think about it is, I'm kind of on a mission to help entrepreneurs build companies they don't grow to hate.
Because I have so many friends, people I've seen around that they're great creators, they're artists, they're, they got a passion to solve the problem, that's for sure. But their own craziness, it's almost like the entrepreneurial craze, like it takes a certain level of like kind of being crazy. I mean, that's why people call them crazy. Because you're willing to do things that very few people are willing to do. You can hold a vision that most people can't see. The problem is, is that if you don't adjust, that version of you will be the Achilles heel to actually growing a business. You know, and oftentimes, your Achilles heel to growing a business is the thing you're best at. Because it's the thing that you're gonna be most maniacal at. You won't allow anybody else to do, you don't know how to work through people. So it'll get you some level of success, but yeah, most people believe the bigger it gets, the harder it'll get. And because of that, they sell sabotage to play small, because it feels safe.

**Chris Williamson** (2:33)
Your superpower becoming your Achilles heel is something that I've felt basically throughout my entire career in business. To give you my most obvious ridiculous example of this, I ran one of the biggest events companies in the UK for about 15 years. And our first big weekly that we ran was a Saturday at a club called Riverside. Anyone that watched Geordie Shore, which was the UK equivalent of Jersey Shore, that was where they went every Saturday. And we were absolutely crushing. This was the hottest event in town between 1,000 and 1,500 kids every weekend. And it was just churning out cash, not insane money. You know, we maybe make five grand a week or something like that. Bottom line would be sort of two and a half to three, something really, really great money. And I'm 24, 23, 24, 25, phenomenal money between me and the other guys that ran the company. And we would need to set the club up. We'd need to hang inflatables from the ceiling, the smoke machine, the haze machine, the banners that go over the barriers outside. You just sort of getting the club built ready for this. Every Saturday for four years, without missing a single Saturday for four years, 210, 208 Saturdays in a row, I built the club with my business partner.
We could have paid any of the 400 students that worked for us, 400 of them. And they would have happily done it for five or six pounds an hour. But I was adamant that nobody else could hang the inflatable in quite the right place than it needed to go. That what if this thing was missed off? This would be the beginning of the downfall of the business because if the smoke machine's five inches to the left, then Asian society is gonna stop coming to room two to watch R&B. And that's gonna be the beginning of the end. I'm gonna be homeless under a bridge. So for four years and the first weekend, I'll never forget the first weekend when I missed it was because I had such a bad stomach infection thing that it just ripped me out of it and I couldn't. And then sort of the veils fell from my eyes and I realized why have I spent four years of Saturdays from 11 a.m. until two, sometimes three in the afternoon when I could have been having fun, could have been working on the business, could have been doing anything as opposed to just spending a bit of time training somebody up and 60 pounds a week to get someone else to do it.