Meet my Brother - Pierre Martell @ MartellCustomHomes.com

About this video

Dan Martell interviews his brother Pierre Martell, founder of Martell Custom Homes, started, Pierre says, 12 years earlier. Pierre traces their entrepreneurial upbringing to their father’s fish-and-chip wagon at markets: at about seven or eight he sold ice-cold pop beside it, making, as he recalls, about $300 in a day, and resold Coca-Cola Olympic pin sets for, he says, another $400-$500 in a weekend; at 12 he began buying and flipping cars, doing 13 or 14 before turning 16. Early in the business he competed on price for three to four years, building volume and reputation at low margin before raising margins and affording a team. He says the company is a customer-experience company that happens to build homes, relying on word of mouth, running a small remote team of nine across five cities with hundreds of subcontracted workers, and paying top hires 30-50% more with flexibility. His hardest period came in 2012, when unsold spec homes built before winter met a market that stopped overnight; he rebranded from Martell Homebuilders to Martell Custom Homes and pivoted to professionals and custom homes. Other themes include trading value rather than time for money, win-win deal-making on price versus terms, integrity — including ripping out a wrongly oriented foundation at a cost he puts at $50,000-$60,000 — and his closing advice to find a mentor early, because, he says, waiting eight years cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in mistakes.

Key takeaways

• Find a mentor in your field as early as possible, ideally the best operator in a non-competing market, and close the loop by reporting back what their advice produced.
• Fix customer experience and operations before spending on marketing; word of mouth from a world-class delivery reinforces paid marketing.
• Hire the absolute best people, pay above market, and give them flexibility — a small top team outperforms a larger mediocre one.
• When a market dries up, pivot one foot at a time: keep your earned brand and experience but rebrand and refocus on the segment still moving.
• Sell and deal-make for a win-win: go in to help, and trade price against terms so both sides leave happy.

Episode details: published October 24, 2019 · 42:51 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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