The key ideas

Buy Back Your Time

Dan Martell, 2023

Your business is growing, and you are sinking ever deeper into emails, invoices and other people's questions? Dan Martell has built and sold several technology companies and now teaches founders to buy the most important thing with money: their own time. The book gives simple tools: how to work out the price of your hour, what to hand off first and how to pass on work so it gets done without you.

Who it is for

For business owners and the self-employed who work more and more, yet the business still rests on them alone. And for anyone who is afraid to put work in someone else's hands.

Don't hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.

A ring on the kitchen counter

Four months before the wedding, Dan Martell came home late in the evening as usual. His fiancée put her engagement ring on the counter and said: “I can't do this anymore.” He was working 15 to 18 hours a day, and his software company was growing fast. There was just no time left for his fiancée.

Back then Martell lived by a rule he called GSD, short for Get Shit Done: just keep grinding. His first two companies had already failed. Later he realized that all three failures, the two companies and the engagement, had one cause: the belief that the more you work, the better things go.

Since then Martell has built and sold several companies. His main idea: the scarcest resource in a business is the owner's time, and money is worth spending on buying that time back.

Ahead: how to work out the price of your hour, what to hand off first and how to train someone else while spending almost no hours on it. Let's start with a man whom work nearly broke.

A panic attack by Sleeping Beauty's castle

Stuart, the 34-year-old founder of a company that made apps, worked 14-hour days without a day off for several months. Having finished a project by Christmas, he took his family to Disneyland, and ten minutes into the walk his chest tightened. His heart turned out to be fine: it was anxiety. Soon panic attacks were coming twice a week, and he spent most days in bed. All the while Stuart was his own bookkeeper, chief engineer, support team and secretary: it seemed safer to him that way.

Martell names the point where growth brings nothing but pain the Pain Line. From what he has seen, people often reach it at about twelve direct reports and just over a million dollars in revenue. Past it, the owner, without noticing, sells the business, sabotages it or stops growing.

The way out is the book's main principle, the Buyback Principle: don't hire to grow your business, hire to buy back your time. It comes with the three-step Buyback Loop. Audit where your hours go. Transfer to someone else what is cheap and drains your energy. Fill the freed time with tasks that energize you and bring in money.

Stuart saw that his hour was worth about a hundred dollars, while almost his whole day went to ten-dollar tasks. In two months he freed up more than thirty hours a week.

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About the author

Dan Martell is a Canadian entrepreneur and business coach, the founder of SaaS Academy, where he teaches owners of software companies. As a teenager he served time in prison, and later he founded and sold several technology companies.

All books by this author: Dan Martell

Terms from the book

  • Peter
  • Matt
  • Carl
  • GSD: Short for Get Shit Done. The author's name for the habit of solving everything through hard work, which at some point starts to harm both the business and your life.
  • Stuart: A client of the author, founder of a company that makes online sales apps for small businesses. Martell opens the book with his story.
  • Pain Line: An image from the book, not a scientific term: the point where every step of growth brings the owner more torment than joy. In the author's view, past it the owner sells the business, sabotages it or stops growing.
  • Buyback Principle: The book's main principle: hire people not for the sake of growth as such but to buy back your time and invest it in what is most valuable.
  • Buyback Loop: The author's three-step cycle: audit where your time goes, transfer cheap and draining tasks to someone else, fill the freed hours with what is most valuable. Then it all repeats.
  • Pierre: Pierre Martell, the author's brother, founder of the Canadian home-building company Martell Custom Homes.
  • DRIP Matrix: The author's four-quadrant chart: Delegation, Replacement, Investment, Production. A task's quadrant depends on how much money it brings in and whether it drains or gives energy.
  • Andre: The owner of a manufacturing company in the book; the author changed his name.
  • Bowen: Simon Bowen, the author's friend, who helps leaders turn their expertise into a curriculum.
  • Buyback Rate: The author's formula: everything the business pays you in a year divided by 2,000 hours, then by four. The author advises handing off work that costs less than this amount per hour. It is his rule, not financial advice.
  • Time and Energy Audit: The author's method: for two weeks, record every fifteen minutes of your workday, then rate each task by money and by whether it energizes you or drains you.
  • Lionel: The author's friend, owner of a forestry company.
  • Branson: Richard Branson, British entrepreneur, founder of the Virgin group of companies.
  • Hannah: Richard Branson's assistant, whom the author met on a ski trip.
  • Replacement Ladder: The author's five-rung scheme: Administration, Delivery, Marketing, Sales, Leadership. It sets the order in which the owner hands work over to others.
  • 10-80-10 rule: A technique from the book: the owner does the first 10 percent of the work, someone else the middle part, and the owner finishes the last 10 percent himself.
  • Spheric: Spheric Technologies, a software company Martell founded in 2004 and sold in 2008.
  • Bangor: A city in the U.S. state of Maine where the author's company had an office.
  • Camcorder Method: The author's technique: record a video of yourself doing a task, talking through the steps out loud, and train new people with these recordings.
  • Playbook: The author's name for a work manual, what companies often call a standard operating procedure. In his version it consists of a video, a list of steps, a cadence and a checklist.
  • Definition of Done: A description of when an assignment counts as finished: what numbers must be reached, how the people involved feel and what the result allows others to do.
  • Pedersen: Brad Pedersen, an entrepreneur, cofounder of Pela, a company that makes products without needless waste.
  • 1:3:1 Rule: A rule from the book for an employee with a problem: name one problem, offer three solutions and recommend one of them.
  • Chaos addiction: The author's image, not a diagnosis: the habit of someone who grew up in disorder of seeking out or creating a crisis when things are calm.
  • Time Assassins: Five types of behavior in the author's model through which the pull toward chaos shows itself: the Staller, the Speed Demon, the Supervisor, the Saver and the Self-Medicator.
  • Kyle: The author's friend, who runs a paid mastermind for entrepreneurs and investors.
  • 10X Vision: The author's term: a huge dream turned into a clear picture with dates, numbers, people and places.
  • Denise: The head of a nonprofit that runs shelters for women who have suffered abuse.
  • Preloaded Year: A technique from the book: in December, put the most important dates and events of the coming year into your calendar first, and only then everything else.

All terms

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