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Buy Back Your Time – A Game Changer for Entrepreneurs

After listening to an hour-long video of Dan Martell, I had to buy his book Buy Back Your Time. The core idea of the book aligns perfectly with my obsession—Team Building. I’m always thinking about how to bring the right people together, delegate effectively, and influence teams to perform at their best.

Naturally, I grabbed the book. The Audible version runs 6 hours and 44 minutes, and the whole thing revolves around one crucial concept: Time.

The Big Problem: Limited Time vs. Unlimited Goals

Time is a finite resource, yet entrepreneurs are always trying to do more. On one hand, they struggle with not having enough hours in the day. On the other, they’re obsessed with increasing productivity and adding value. These two forces often clash, leading to burnout and inefficiency.

That’s where Martell’s core philosophy hits hard:

“Do not hire to grow your business, hire to buy back your time.”

Why? Because as an entrepreneur, you are the value creator. If you’re drowning in tasks, your productivity suffers. But if you delegate wisely and free up your time, you can focus on skill acquisition and high-value tasks that drive real growth.

The How-To: Three Simple Steps

So, how do you actually buy back your time? Martell offers a simple three-step process:

1. Audit: Track where your time goes. Keep a record.
2. Transfer: Identify low-value tasks that can be outsourced.
3. Fill: Replace those tasks with high-value, strategic work.

And here’s a mindset shift you must embrace:

80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome.

The Buyback Rate: A Game-Changer

One of the book’s most eye-opening concepts is calculating your Buyback Rate.

Here’s how it works:

• First, determine how much your time is worth:
  Worth of your time = (Annual business salary) ÷ 2000
• Your Buyback Rate is one-fourth of that number.
  Buyback Rate = (Worth of your time) ÷ 4

For me:

• Hourly rate: ₹630
• Buyback Rate: ₹157

That means if I can outsource a task for ₹157/hour or less, I absolutely should!

Time Audit in Action

Once you have your Buyback Rate, follow these steps:
✔ Audit every 15 minutes of your workday.
✔ Assign a dollar sign value ($-$$$$) to each task.
✔ Highlight energy-giving tasks in GREEN and draining tasks in RED.

Then, take action:
✅ Delete unnecessary tasks.
✅ Delegate to your team.
✅ Outsource using your Buyback Rate.

The Power of Playbooks

A Playbook = Predictability, and predictability is more valuable than intermittent quality.

Martell recommends using the 4 C’s to build Playbooks:

1. Camcorder Method: Record yourself doing the task.
2. Course: Document high-level steps.
3. Cadence: Define task frequency (daily, weekly, etc.).
4. Checklist: Create a step-by-step guide.

Bonus tip? Let others create Playbooks! Why?

• It ensures they understand the process.
• Third-party documentation exposes missing steps.

I personally record everything—financial audits, YouTube videos, coaching calls. Then, my assistant uploads them to a Playbook. When I hire someone new, I simply have them watch the videos and create the Playbook. Once done, I review it to ensure accuracy and proper training. – Dan Martel, Author

The Definition of Done (DOD)

A task isn’t truly done unless it meets these three criteria:

1. Facts: What measurable outcomes must be achieved?
2. Feelings: How should you (or others) feel when it’s complete?
3. Functionality: What must this task enable others to do?

The 1-3-1 Rule for Delegation

Ever had a team member come to you with a problem just to offload it? Yeah, me too. If you have four employees doing this, suddenly you are the bottleneck, solving all their issues.

Enter the 1-3-1 Rule:
1️⃣ Define the one problem that needs solving.
3️⃣ Offer three viable solutions.
1️⃣ Make one recommendation.

This forces team members to think critically and take ownership. No more monkey-on-your-back situations!

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Final Thoughts

Buy Back Your Time is a blueprint for reclaiming your schedule, maximizing impact, and living with less stress. If you’re an entrepreneur feeling overwhelmed, this book might just change the way you work forever.

So… are you ready to stop being busy and start being productive?

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This is what Top Leaders Know About Training Teams (And Now you Can Too!)

I’m a banker, and nine months ago, I became the head of an SME-intensive branch.

By then, I had already read multiple books on leadership and team building. They all made perfect sense—on paper. But when you’re new and trying to put theory into practice, things feel very different. All that wisdom you read about? It’s hard to recall when you’re in the thick of it. Theory quickly fades, and reality takes over.

There’s so much to do. Your team has a wide range of skills (and gaps), and trying to make everything fit together feels like working on a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box. The pieces are all there… but you’re not sure how they fit.

You think you know what to do. But suddenly, it feels like you’re the only one who knows. There’s too much to handle alone, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t fight the chaos by yourself. If something goes right, you get the credit. But when things go wrong—and they often do—you’re the one left holding the bag.

The customers aren’t happy. Your team isn’t happy. Your controllers aren’t happy. And you? You’re struggling to find your footing while everything seems to spiral downward. It feels like there’s no way back. Like someone drowning, you thrash around trying to stay afloat. Sometimes you manage a breath; most times, it feels like you’re breathing water.

This image is omnipresent at the backdrop of my efforts.

In the quest of developing skills to address this issue, I came across, below video by Dan Martell.

Dan Martell is no stranger to me. His videos are regular guests in my YouTube feed—always popping up, waving, and saying, “Hey, you need this!”

I downloaded his video.

The title is super clickbaity (guilty pleasure), and it was long-form content—which I actually love because it means real depth. So, I downloaded it and dove in.

Dan kicked things off with a killer value proposition: “Buy back your time.” That immediately got my attention. And from there, he segued into one of my favorite topics—how to build a goal-oriented team.

Let’s start with his simple premise:
The #1 hurdle to achieving your goals, scaling your business, and—if that’s your vibe—getting obscenely rich… is TIME.

And that’s where the Buyback Principle comes in:
👉 Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.

Dan breaks it down into five types of work you need to delegate if you ever want to free yourself from the daily grind.

He calls it the Replacement Ladder, and here’s the deal:
As leaders, we need to focus on handing off these five categories of tasks:

1. Admin
2. Delivery
3. Marketing
4. Sales
5. Leadership

And here’s where it gets really interesting—especially with leadership.
Dan says your team members should own the tasks. They should be telling you what they’re going to do… not waiting around for you to tell them.
And when they come to you with their plan? That’s when you step in—not to author, but to edit.

This concept really stuck with me:
👉 Edit, don’t author.
You’re not writing the playbook from scratch. They are. You’re just making tweaks, guiding, fine-tuning.

And why does this work? Because if you tell them exactly what to do and it doesn’t work, guess who gets blamed? Yep. You.
But if they build the plan, they own it. They’re accountable. And that’s exactly how it should be.

Then Dan shifts gears and dives into Transformational Leadership, dropping a reference that instantly got my attention:
👉 Naval Ravikant.

Naval Ravikant!
If you know, you know.

I read The Almanack of Naval Ravikant a while back, and it’s the only book I’ve ever highlighted to the point where the pages look like a neon sign. My notes on it? Honestly, they’re about as long as the book itself. Worth every scribble.

Here’s the core wisdom I took away (and still come back to all the time):
👉 Making money isn’t something you do; it’s a skill you learn.
Read that again.

Naval keeps it simple (and powerful):
👉 Learn to sell. Learn to build.
If you can do both, you’ll be unstoppable. Period.

And to level up, Naval says you need to arm yourself with these four things:

1. Specific Knowledge

This isn’t the stuff you learn in school. It’s the unique knowledge you pick up through experience, curiosity, and obsession. You can’t be trained for it. And the best part?
👉 It can’t be outsourced. It can’t be automated.
It’s your secret sauce.

2. Accountability

Put your name on the line. Take business risks and own them. Why? Because when you’re accountable, the rewards get bigger. As Naval says,
👉 “Earn with your name.”

3. Leverage

If you want to build wealth, you need leverage.
Naval breaks it down into three kinds:

• Code (write software that works while you sleep)
• Content (create stuff that spreads without you)
• Capital (money working for you)

4. Collaboration

No one makes it alone. Build your team. Surround yourself with people who elevate you and share the mission.
👉 “Play long-term games with long-term people.”

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership is all about letting go of the need to micromanage (yep, that old habit!) and shifting your focus to what really matters.

Here’s the new game plan:

1. Outcome

Instead of telling your team how to do things, talk about what results you’re aiming for. Focus on the destination, not the GPS instructions.

2. Measure

Set clear parameters so everyone knows what success looks like—and you can actually track progress. No more guessing games.

3. Coach

Guide them. Teach them. Build systems that help them figure things out and get better over time. You’re not just managing tasks; you’re building builders.

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Dan also drops a simple but powerful problem-solving framework called 1-3-1. It works like this:

✅ 1 specific challenge
✅ 3 viable options or solutions
✅ 1 solid recommendation

So when someone brings you a problem, they’re also bringing options and a plan—not just dumping the issue in your lap and walking away.
(Imagine how much time that saves!)

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One of my favorite takeaways:
👉 “The quality of your life and business depends on the quality of your problems.”
If you’re still dealing with low-level, $10 tasks, you’ll stay stuck there.
But…
👉 “Million-dollar companies aren’t built on $10 tasks.”

The more you delegate and shift accountability to your team, the more you free yourself up to focus on million-dollar problems—the kind of thinking and strategy that actually moves the needle.

I am stealing this playbook.

I just had to get my hands on this book.

I mean, look at the title! The author and publisher totally played into my greed.

Who wouldn’t want to make a few billion dollars? Heck yeah!

I also caught the author’s interview on the ‘Invest like the best’ podcast. Plus, I listened to the book review episode on the Founders Podcast. So buying the book was a no-brainer.

I quickly snagged it on Kindle and finished it in a couple of days. It’s 141 pages long, excluding the annexures, which bring it up to 206 pages. Short and sweet.

My reason for diving into this book was simple: Brad Jacobs, the guy behind it, has a net worth of $3.8 billion. Check out the link to Forbes magazine here. He’s been raking in money for 45 years, and if he can pack all that knowledge into 140 pages and serve it up to me, you bet I’m going to dive right in.

Just think about it: 140 pages packed with the wisdom of a $3.8 billion net worth. So I ordered the book, read it, and started connecting the dots.

From now on, I’m drawing inspiration from various sources:

• The author’s interview on the ‘Invest like the best’ podcast
• Book reviews on the Founders Podcast
• Interview with Mr. Kevin Ryan from AlleyCorp on the My First Million Podcast.

Why Kevin Ryan?

Because despite being in different fields, both men share similar insights and operating styles. It’s fascinating to hear from them both. They’ve each launched multiple successful companies in completely different industries and came out on top.

First insight from the book is this:

A lot of extremely successful people… they all have one thing in common. They think differently than most people. All of them have rearranged their brains to prevail at achieving big goals in turbulent environments where conventional thinking often fails.

Now, this insight may seem obvious, but it’s also highly subjective. Personally, I’m not big on motivational stuff, so I’ve been diving deeper into the idea of uncommon thinking. While I’m still exploring the topic, I’ve stumbled upon some valuable nuggets that I’d like to share:

1. Uncommon thinking involves being rational and setting emotions aside. Entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed, tend to be more emotional and driven, their energy infectious. On the other hand, investors are more rational and detached. However, both groups share traits of opportunism, ambition, and a focus on mastering their craft.
2. They seek out ideas with high potential upside and minimal downside. What’s known as asymmetric results. They assess risks and work to minimize them, leveraging their skills, mindset, team, and other factors to gain uncommon advantages.
3. Successful individuals are perpetual learners. Their motivation stems from results rather than ego, and they’re quick to adapt based on new information. It’s all about iterative learning.
4. There’s a strong bias for action among the successful. Nassim Taleb, in ‘Fooled by Randomness,’ argues that knowledge is often overrated; it’s only valuable when it prompts behavioral change. Successful people are eager to act. In fact, I’m currently delving into ‘The Toyota Way,’ which emphasizes the principle of ‘Do Something’ as a starting point for progress.

Embrace the problem

Another common sense insight discussed here. Any business is a problem solving mechanism. So while the common man gets discouraged by the problem, entrepreneurs get excited by it.

Lesson about focus

If I had tried to do everything I wanted to, I never would have accomplished anything big. Narrow your focus to your most important dreams and tune out everything else.

This important lesson keeps popping up everywhere: to make big money, you need to use automation and delegation.

In life, you need four things to succeed:

1. Mindset
2. Skillset
3. Toolset
4. Luck

Out of these, you can always hire someone for skill and tools. You cannot control Luck. But your mindset is non-negotiable. This is where the wisdom of Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger really shines.

You are paid to make small number of high value decisions.

Being busy does not help. You must be able to think.

Business Lesson

“You can mess up a lot of things in business and still do well as long as you get the big trend right… One of the first things I look for in an industry is scalability…

Now, let’s dive into the actual playbook.

Kevin Ryan also touched on this key concept in his interview on the My First Million Podcast.

The idea is simple: study the industry and find the gaps where you can create value for customers.

But how do you study the industry?

Brad’s book lays out a three-part playbook:

1. Dive into industry resources like journals, newspapers, and seminars.
2. Make a list of important questions.
3. Connect with experts like CEOs, investment bankers, and venture firms, and listen to their insights.

This playbook is echoed by Kevin Ryan on MFM and Donald Trump in “The Art of the Deal.”

So, how do you create value?

The author offers a two-part answer:

1. Take advantage of the difference between our cost of capital and the multiple at which we can buy companies.
2. Improve the business’s profitability.

To simplify: Buy low, then make the business better.

About Responsibility:

My strong preference is to assign tasks to individuals, not working groups. If we have one person owning each task and being accountable for achieving it on time, we’re more likely to succeed than if the task is owned by a group.

Through my exploration, I’ve discovered three essential factors for success:

1. Learning
2. Recruitment
3. Management

You can’t build a valuable business all by yourself. Your team is crucial.

“And if it can’t be fun, what’s the point?” — Donald J Trump, Trump: The Art of The Deal

Whether you hate him, love him, laugh at him, gossip about him, or make him a joke, one thing is clear: you can’t ignore Donald Trump.

I picked up “The Art of the Deal” because I wanted to figure out what makes him tick.

My goal is to be memorable and skilled at communication, without any apologies.

I want to command attention with impactful ideas that shape the people and world around me. “The Art of Dealmaking” is full of words, but here are the 9 key lessons I found worth remembering. Here are my notes:

Think Big: You are going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.

Insights:

• Most people are also afraid of failure. Especially large public failure.
• If you can learn to position your failure, it will be easier to think big and act big.
• While ‘Think Big’ mindset is common — ‘Act Big’ mindset is uncommon strictly due to fear of failure.

Protect the Downside and the Upside Will take care of itself: People think I am a gambler. But I’ve never gambled in my life. To me, a gambler is someone who plays slot machines. I prefer to own slot machines. It’s very good business being the house.

In fact, I believe in power of negative thinking. I happen to be very conservative in business. I always go into the deal anticipating the worst. If you plan for the worst, if you can live with the worst-the good will always take care of itself. The point is that, if you go for a home run on every pitch, you are also going to strike out a lot. I try never to leave myself too exposed, even if it means sometimes settling for a triple, a double, or even on rare occasions, a single.

Insights:

• This is a hard lesson. When we say somebody is entrepreneur — we always think of risk.
• Nicholas Taleb says, “You should study risk taking, not risk management”
• This lesson is all about attitude.
• When you only focus on the upside, “psychological — anchoring” kicks in and you gamble away lot of resources, increasing the cost.
• But attitude of always protecting the downside helps you keep things in perspective and remove speculation out of risk taking.

Maximize your options: I never get attached to one deal or one approach. For starters, I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first.

Insights:

• I read this idea with Warren Buffet’s concept of — ‘What do you do at the top? You make small number of high value decisions’. While two ideas seem contradictory, they are same. To maximise your option, you need to work your psychology.
• Getting too attached to one thing, gets you emotional. Instead of taking optimised decision, you end up making emotional deal.
• Very few deals pan out, so it is important to keep an open mind and look at the options.
• Also Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger constantly hammer importance of reading and thinking. Few number of high value decisions stem from reading, thinking and risk taking.

Know Your Market: Some people have a sense of the market and some people don’t. I ask and I ask and I ask, until I begin to get gut feeling about something. And that’s when I make a decision.

Insights:

• Knowing your market means spending substantial time with the right kinda people. Constant interaction leads to building mental image of what is really going on under the hood.

Use Your Leverage: The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. The best thing you can do is deal from strength and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, which is why leverage often requires imagination, and salesmanship. In other words, you have to convince the other guy it’s in his interest to make the deal.

Enhance You Location: In real estate, you don’t necessarily need the best location. What you need is the best deal. Just as you can create leverage, you can enhance a location, through promotion and through psychology.

Insights:

• Let’s repeat essential point — “as you can create leverage, you can enhance a location, through promotion and through psychology. “

Play with people’s fantasies: People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. It is an innocent form of exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion.

Insights:

4 ‘P’ strategy of influencing people:

• Profiling
• Presentation
• Persuasion
• Personality

Contain the cost: I never threw money around. I learned from my father that every penny counts, because before too long your pennies turn into dollars. To this day, if I feel a contractor is overcharging me, I’ll pick up the phone, even if it’s only for 5,000$ and I will complain. People say, why bother. My answer is that the day I can’t pick up the telephone and make a twenty five cent call to save 10000$ is the day I’m going to close up shop. The point is that you can dream great dreams, but they will never amount to much if you can’t turn them into reality at a reasonable cost.

Insights:

• I read and listened to several biographies — and this one Key Lesson stayed constant. If you want to, forget everything, but not this lesson.
• I have burned my hand — ignoring this lesson.

Have Fun: Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what I should have done differently, or what’s going to happen next.

Insights:

• This last line seems simple and product of common sense.
• I read this line with wisdom from ‘Almanack of Naval Ravikant’
• Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake.
• When you do things for its own sake and have fun, you get better at it. Iterative improvement can give you compounding results — if:
• you have natural inclination towards what you are doing
• You are doing it for its own sake and you are having fun
• You are getting feedback immediately
• You are improving iteratively
• You repeat the process

Throw me to the wolves and I will return leading the pack — unknown

I’ve always been really into sales. Even back in college, my main goal was to earn money through commission. Why? Well, I was a firm believer in the idea that hard work pays off (though I’ve become a bit less hardcore about it lately). I also liked the idea that the more sales I made, the more commission I’d earn, which felt like a direct validation of all my effort.

But here’s the thing: even though I was all about commission-based sales, I have to admit, I didn’t actually have much skill in sales at the time. That all changed when I read “Way of the Wolf.” Seriously, it was like my life was split into two parts: before I read that book and after. It taught me everything I needed to know about sales skills.

Key Insight:

In most cases, you’ll need to ask for the order a few times before your prospect says yes.

Looping is a simple yet powerful strategy for handling objections in sales. It lets you take each objection and turn it into an opportunity to build your prospect’s confidence without losing rapport, and then smoothly move into closing the deal.

What are two types of certainty:

1. Logical Certainty: Leads to responses like “Sounds good, let me think about it” or “Let me do some research and get back to you.”
2. Emotional Certainty: This is what really drives people to buy. They make decisions based on emotions and then justify them with logic.

2 core elements of Straight Line System:

1. Lower the barrier to taking action.
2. Increase the sense of urgency or pain associated with not taking action.

Key concepts from ‘Way of the Wolf’:

Your product or idea must be seen as incredibly valuable. Building trust and connection with the prospect is essential. The prospect must also trust and connect with your company.

4 Second rule:

You have just four seconds to make a good impression.

So what do you do in those 4 seconds:

You have to get three things right in 4 seconds:

1. Present yourself as a problem solver who can help achieve their goals.
2. Be enthusiastic to show you have something great to offer.
3. Establish yourself as an expert in your field right away.

The 4 ‘P’ Strategy:

I consolidated the sales skill into below 4 ‘P’s:

Profiling: Understand what the customer wants.

Presentation: Show how your product meets their needs.

Persuasion: Convince them of the value and benefits.

Personality: Show yourself as the solution.

How to deal with objections?

Step 1: ASK: “I hear what you’re saying, Bill, but let me ask you a question: Does the idea make sense to you? Do you like the idea?”

Step 2: Wait for the answer. Usually answer is ‘Yeah I like this idea.’ with hesitation.

Step 3: Reply with “Exactly — it really is a great buy down here! In fact, one of the true beauties here is …” And then quickly move into presentation again with introduction of feature of the product