I didn't want to just do
like a lot of people do, just like,
Hey, I got it. But here it is.
I didn't really write it.
I just gave it to somebody else.
They wrote it and put my name on.
Like, that's not what I, I did.
I wanted to really, like, add
the stories.
Hired a researcher,
highly
quotable, like,
just put the time and energy
to create this piece of art
that.
Hey there.
I'm Dan Martel,
serial entrepreneur, investor
and creator SAS Academy.
In this episode,
I'm going to share with you
how I use the buyback principle
to write the book buyback your time.
I literally am going to deconstruct
exactly how I applied the methodology
I teach in my new book,
Buyback Your Time
to writing the book, buyback your time.
It's like super meta
and circular references,
but I'm going to unpack it,
hopefully make it clear.
But I got to tell you the story
because a lot of people don't know this.
Five years ago,
I was asked to speak at an event. Right.
And do a workshop.
A lot of people knew that, like,
you know,
I'm a guy
that likes to get a lot of stuff done
and they and they'd
heard about some of the playbooks
I designed for my life.
And I manage my
my assistants and my time
in other things, house manager, etc.
and they were like,
Hey, can you do a presentation?
And it ended up being,
I think it was called
something like Fire Yourself or,
you know, something like that.
And there was like
50 people that came to that session
and I just shared my philosophy
at the time of like
just how to get freedom
from your business.
You know,
the biggest
concern I have with entrepreneurship
is great artists
that hit what I call the pain line
and decide not to keep building
because growing means pain
and they stop
and then the world doesn't
get all this art,
their creation, the business value,
because they didn't know
how to scale themselves.
So I shared this
this strategy
and the feedback overwhelmed me.
And I was like, Oh,
maybe there's something here.
So it was funny.
I started,
you know, SAS Academy
about five years ago
and I was teaching this framework around
like how to, you know,
document, delegate and disconnect.
And I was teaching all this stuff.
And it was a few years later
that became the buyback principle.
And eventually
I had a good friend of mine
reach out to me and says, like,
you need to write a book.
I want to help you write the book.
And I was like,
you know, my philosophy is, who not?
How so?
I know how I could get it done,
but I need the who.
And here is this person.
He wanted to to support me on it.
So I thought maybe now's the time.
We didn't know what book to write.
But when he looked at all
the different things
that I've been talking about,
he's like this.
This concept,
the idea that we don't hire
people to add capacity to our business,
we hire people to buy
back time out of our calendar
so that if that generates more capacity,
at minimum, it creates
more joy and ability
to keep playing what I call
the infinite entrepreneurial game.
And that's how the book came to be.
But I want to share with you
these strategies.
The thinking, and then also like
how I leverage
my executive assistant
and my house manager to be able
to find the time to do all of that.
So let's get into it.
Number one is the buyback rate.
So in my new book,
I talk about the buyback rate,
which is then
the monetary amount
that you can afford to pay
somebody to take something off
your plate. Right.
Most people don't understand that.
So the simple math,
the philosophy is that
if you're generating profit
and you're taking an income
from your business, then you have income.
So I usually say,
how much are you paying yourself?
How much profit do you do
you make in your business? Yeah.
And maybe those are separate me
those the same
and then also discretionary expenses
like things that you put through
your business
that are probably
not really business expenses but whatever
because that's really
your economic engine,
that dollar amount could be $100,000,
could be $50,000, can be $1,000,000.
It's,
you know the number
I don't divided by 2000 because that's
the amount of hours there are in a year.
That gives you a number,
let's call it $50, $100, $1,000.
Okay.
Now, I want you to have a four times
our Y on hiring somebody to do stuff
and then you taking that time
and go doing higher value
leverage things.
You already know what your hours
worth $1,000, $500 with that $100
based on the buyback rate.
So if you want to do a4x, r,
y, then divide that number by four.
And that's
where you get the four times
r y in that dollar amount
per hour is what you should be
looking at, things
to hire people to do for you.
That's the way I look at my life.
Where did I find time to write my book?
I just looked at
I made a list of all the stuff
I spent my time on
and anything that fit below
the buyback rate.
In my world.
I'm super lucky and blessed that
that's a big number.
That's where I started
looking at building out
more infrastructure around
my companies, building
more people around me to help support
my family, support my
my training,
the Ironman stuff, the literally
all the things I write about in the book.
If anything, writing the book
increase my output,
increase my capacity to produce
because I was kind of like stress
testing some of these methodologies
to the next level, right?
So that's number one is the buyback rate.
What can you spend to delegate
to somebody else?
Number two is the book CEO.
So this is you know,
the big one for me
is I'm a who not how guys.
So I always ask myself,
who can I hire to solve this problem?
Not How do I solve this problem?
And at the time that individual
that reached out was my buddy Ron.
And Ron is a very successful author
and he wanted to
to work with me to produce this book.
It wasn't like a,
you know, some of these services
that you just pay to hire ghostwriter
and they get you a ghostwriter.
This was a collaboration
with Ron, with his agent and his team
and the people he'd worked with
and his researches and everything.
And then that way
I was accountable to somebody else.
And I'm a big fan of doing this.
In the book I talk about,
you know, hacks for getting work done.
And one of my favorite strategies,
scheduling time
with somebody else
to show up and do the work
I want to be the talent.
I don't want to be the driver
the moment
somebody else is being paid to drive
and push forward
so that you can just show up
and do your genius,
beautiful, beautiful scenario. Right.
So number two is a book CEO
and that was my buddy Ron number three
because that was part
of the replacement in my book.
I have this thing
called the replacement ladder,
but I talk about, you know,
getting the who not have.
So the book CEO number three is the drip
matrix k d r i p matrix
four squares, four quadrants
and the x y axis is lights
you up, gives you energy,
and the bottom one is makes you money.
Okay?
So what you want to do
is the bottom left
quadrant is delegate
k, you want to get really good
at delegating.
That's the D the top above that.
K So these are things
that don't make you a lot of money
and you hate to do
the things that you like to do,
but make you a lot of money.
That's the replace k,
that's the R replace.
The bottom right corner is invest things
that you may not make a lot of money
with right now, but light you up.
That's that's invest
you becoming better
skill sets, mindset, etc.
And then the top right
is where you want to spend
most of your time, which is produce.
That's the P, right?
So delegate, replace,
invest and produce
so that you can become more.
So the more I worked on my book,
the more I could produce,
the more
I could collaborate with my team.
I actually had my videographer Sam
again, buy back my time.
They went through all of my video
catalogs.
Once I did the
kind of the outline of the book
to then insert videos that had me talking
about the frameworks
that I wanted to teach.
Then we transcribed it
and I worked with my editor
to fill in the blank,
so I didn't have to sit there
and write from scratch.
I could edit, not author,
I mean, just so many.
Again, maybe you don't have videos,
but I'm just sharing you my journey.
I'm always looking for
where can I get leverage?
Do I have a team member
that has experience
and knowledge around
something that I can trade
time for money?
That's the drip matrix.
So you always want to work your way up
into the right corner
of production produce
because in that spot,
things that create a lot of value
and make you a lot of money.
That's where I think
playing this
infinite entrepreneurial game
where you don't have to retire from it,
you don't have to stop it.
It doesn't hurt.
The more you do it, the better
your life gets. Can be incredible.
Number four is the fully loaded year.
It's actually a framework I learned from
my coach is a guy named Taki Moore.
Again, full credit
for the fully loaded year,
but it's a one page diagram
that shows every month
and every day on the month
as a linear representations
of January, February, March, April, May.
So you have a one page
essentially diagram or grid of your year.
And what that allows you to do
is plan strategically.
So I always put my most important things
in my fully loaded year
birthdays, vacation,
quarterly retreats with my wife,
all the things that add to the rhythms
that make me feel
like I'm winning at life.
And then we put all the other stuff,
the external needs.
But the book was a big project,
so I had to look at my fully loaded year
and figure out
what are the big milestones
I got to get the first draft done here
and there was like the marketing plan.
And then we signed the deal
with our publisher, you know,
Random House portfolio. Penguin, right.
To, to, to, to get the deal done.
So there's a marketing book proposal
and there's all these things.
And I had to put the time
I was going to need to allocate
so that I could be present for it.
And because I pre-planned it
in the fully loaded year,
then there wasn't friction.
See, a lot of you are dealing
with making decisions
to move your life forward,
but you didn't talk to anybody about it,
you didn't negotiate it.
I sit down
every quarter, review
my fully loaded year
with my wife at the end of the year.
We plan the full next year
and I'm already planning
six months into the future
so that when I make decisions
to write a book, start
a company, invest in a company,
do an Ironman, whatever it is
that there's there's visibility,
it's like, well,
what does that mean for your life?
What does that mean for my life?
What are the sacrifices?
What are the things I'm going to shift?
Where else will
I need to buy back some time
to unlock
that time required
to execute on that project?
And that would never work
without implementation.
The fully loaded year
number five is the buyback lifestyle.
A lot of people
have executive assistants.
Many of them don't work with them.
The way I describe in my book,
where I talk about email and calendar
and having a 100% accountability
to your admin team,
I'll just leave that like that.
But most people don't do that.
The buyback lifestyle is asking
yourself, How do I take that leverage
that I get in the business?
Having executive assistant
and bring it into my home, into my life?
You know, in the last
12 months, 16 months, I've moved cities.
I've bought real estate,
I've completed five almonds,
I've started a new venture firm.
Like, there's
so many things that I've done
that none of that
would have been possible
if I didn't have certain people
in my life
like my house manager
or hiring contractors to execute projects
because I need to be able to wake
up, produce, train,
jump on,
do things like this
that only I can do, shoot videos.
But then when that's done,
move on and go for date night
with my wife.
I literally today,
if you looked at my calendar,
it was pretty much like Start Create.
I finished up the training,
delivered the training team
meetings, shoot I think nine videos, then
go on a date night with my wife
because the kids are gone, right.
Like that's
that's the buyback light
and one of my buddies Garrett
he jokes he goes
so dad wants to teach you
how to buyback your time
so you can go do almonds.
Screw that.
Why would I want to do that?
But look, you can do
whatever you want with your time.
I'm just telling you that, like,
there's no way
I could have done all those things.
Oh, and by the way,
write a book
that's going to be a bestseller,
because I really, truly do
believe it took me three iterations,
three years to write this thing,
and it's because I didn't compromise.
It took way more time
than I ever thought.
But it's what it's the output
that I want. It's the quality of it.
I didn't want to just do
like a lot of people do, just like,
hey, I've got a book. Here it is.
I didn't really write it.
I just gave it to somebody else.
They wrote it and put my name on it.
No, no, no, no, no.
Like, that's not what I. I did.
I wanted to really, like,
add the stories.
Hired a researcher,
highly quotable, like,
just put the time and energy
to create this piece of art.
Honestly, I'm going to call it that,
because I really put
my soul into this book.
But I wanted to share with you
the principles in the math
and the thinking
that I use
to write the book,
because maybe you're inspired
to do it in your own way.
But when you look at your life
and your calendar,
you just can't see
where you would find the time.
The answer is
you got to buy back your time.
So if you're interested in
what I shared, I'm
want to encourage you to click the link
below to preorder my book.
It's called Buy Back Your Time.
It is My Life's work.
I've put my soul into this
and I would love your support.
So click the link
to preorder your copy today.
And as per usual, I want to challenge you
to live a bigger life
by buyback
life and get more out of your life
and build a bigger business.
So with that, the spines are incredible.
We'll see you next Monday. Please.