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Table of Contents
How to Get Rich in the New Economy
The economy is shifting fast. Markets are inflated, interest rates are climbing, and the bubble will eventually burst.
But here’s the truth. If you want to build real wealth, you don’t need flashy tactics or hype. You need timeless principles that have worked for decades, applied with discipline in today’s world.
The strategies below are the ones I’ve used to protect my businesses, scale faster during downturns, and create more wealth when everyone else was panicking.
1. Build an Emergency Plan
When chaos hits, most entrepreneurs freeze. They wait for the storm to pass, only to get crushed by it. Winners create a recovery plan in advance.
Here’s how to build yours:
Identify thresholds: Decide ahead of time what actions you’ll take if profits drop by 25%, 50%, or more.
List your responses: For each threshold, decide what you’ll cut, restructure, or pivot.
Stay unemotional: The plan should be written in calm moments, not in the middle of panic.
Your business survival depends on avoiding reactive decision-making. Great leaders are steady in a storm, not swept away by it.
The best way to focus on creating a predictable future is to build a disaster recovery plan… decide here's what I will do if this happens.
2. Cut Costs Without Killing Culture
Cutting costs isn’t about slashing blindly. It’s about trimming fat without nicking the bone.
The Expense Audit Framework
| Category | Examples | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Green (Essential) | Rent, payroll, food, debt payments | Keep |
| Yellow (Needs) | Gym membership, clothing, healthcare | Evaluate |
| Red (Nice-to-Have) | Travel, entertainment, gifts | Cut first |
Once sorted:
Eliminate red expenses immediately.
Reassess yellow expenses and renegotiate contracts.
Protect green at all costs.
Leadership isn’t about holding onto inflated expenses. It’s about making hard calls that keep the business alive without destroying team morale.
Remove anything that's unnecessary but not to the point where you demoralize your whole team and cause all of them to start looking for other jobs.
3. Audit Your Financials Daily
Most entrepreneurs only look at numbers when tax season hits. That’s amateur hour.
Here’s the truth:
Bad entrepreneurs look at numbers once a year.
Good entrepreneurs review them monthly.
Great entrepreneurs monitor them daily.
Practical steps:
Get daily cash reports for every company and personal account.
Ask for notes on any change larger than 20%.
Build a scorecard system for leading indicators in your business.
Clarity builds confidence. When you track daily, you catch problems early, make faster pivots, and lead with conviction.
You can't manage what you don't measure, and you have to be on it frequently.
4. Become a Necessity
When companies cut costs, the first question is: Who is essential?
If you want to be untouchable as a founder or a team member, you must create undeniable value. That means:
Tying every activity directly to revenue.
Leading initiatives that drive measurable results.
Becoming the person everyone counts on to solve the toughest problems.
The market rewards necessity. If you’re easily replaced, your career or business is always at risk.
If you're the kind of person that creates massive amounts of value for a team, they're going to want to keep you around.
5. Find the Bright Spots
Downturns aren’t just about survival. They’re about finding the opportunities that expand when others collapse.
Ask yourself:
What’s actually working in your business right now?
Which industries are booming even as others shrink?
Where can you double down on strengths instead of focusing on failures?
In 2020, gyms and restaurants collapsed, but SaaS exploded. The entrepreneurs who pivoted into those bright spots scaled faster than ever.
If you focus on what's working and double down on those things, those will expand.
Build Wealth by Leading with Principles
The economy will always swing between expansion and contraction. You can’t control the storm, but you can control how you set your sails.
Have a plan. Cut costs smart. Audit relentlessly. Become a necessity. Double down on the bright spots.
If you apply these timeless principles, you won’t just survive downturns… you’ll thrive in them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best way for entrepreneurs to prepare for an economic downturn?
The best way for entrepreneurs to prepare for an economic downturn is by creating a clear emergency plan that outlines specific actions when revenue drops or costs increase. Having thresholds for decisions such as cutting expenses, adjusting staffing, or pivoting business models ensures leaders respond proactively instead of emotionally, which is critical for surviving financial instability.
How can entrepreneurs cut business costs without damaging company culture?
Entrepreneurs can cut business costs effectively by auditing all expenses and categorizing them into necessities, needs, and nice-to-haves. The key is to remove nonessential spending without harming team morale or eliminating core functions. Strategic cost-cutting preserves company culture while keeping the business financially lean and resilient.
Why is auditing financials daily important for entrepreneurs?
Auditing financials daily is important because it gives entrepreneurs real-time clarity on cash flow, expenses, and financial health. By tracking daily cash reports and leading indicators, business owners can spot issues before they escalate, adjust quickly to changes, and make data-driven decisions. Consistent financial auditing provides the clarity and confidence needed to manage uncertainty.
How do you become indispensable to your company or business team?
To become indispensable in a company, you must directly connect your work to how it generates revenue or adds measurable value. Employees and entrepreneurs who solve problems quickly, show reliability, and create consistent results become a necessity rather than an expense. This level of value makes individuals far less likely to be cut during downturns.
What are business bright spots and why should entrepreneurs focus on them?
Business bright spots are the areas, products, or services that are already performing well despite challenges. Entrepreneurs should focus on these bright spots because doubling down on proven successes allows growth even during economic downturns. Identifying and expanding on what works increases resilience and helps businesses pivot into new opportunities.
More Resources
Tools Mentioned
-
Daily Cash Reports
A financial tracking system used to monitor cash flow across businesses and personal holdings on a daily basis. -
Expense Highlighting Method (Green, Yellow, Red)
A practical system for auditing personal and business expenses by categorizing essentials, needs, and nonessentials for easier cost-cutting decisions. -
Business Scorecards
A structured tool for tracking KPIs and leading indicators that show progress toward goals, ensuring accountability and clarity across teams.
Full Transcript
Most Entrepreneurs Will Be Broke by 2025… – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1bYPLYEZhk
Transcript:
(00:00) the S&P is hitting all-time highs the housing market is overinflated and interest rates are through the roof and inflation is ramping up we’re in the new economy and the bubble is going to burst eventually I’m going to share with you how to get rich in this new economy with principles as old as a market itself and I’m going to go over everything from how to protect yourself against the downturn to getting ready for the upswing and capture as much money as possible so without further explaining it these are the old principles of the new economy
(00:27) the first principle is to build an emergency plan when the 2020 event hit I had to build a plan for my personal and my business life within 2 days I learned a long time ago that the best way to focus on creating a predictable future is to build a disaster recovery plan to prepare upfront on if this happens then I do that unemotional before the world pushes on you and causes you to overreact you want to just sit there in the calm and just decide here’s what I will do if this happens and I think most people miss this and it’s why they lose
(01:00) when the economy goes into a downturn what I’ve learned over the years is that great leadership isn’t about how you show up when things are good it’s how you show up when things are bad people want to lean on somebody that is calm collected cool even in the face of a storm when things go bad or Worse what are you going to do are you going to overreact are you going to sell everything are you going to run away and hide in the woods are you going to stop and say hey what’s really going on here where’s the wind blowing right now
(01:27) because I learned a long time ago from one of my mentors this guy named Jim Rome who I studied in my car University style it’s not the direction of the storm it’s how you set your sale in the storm everything’s going on around you it’s chaotic I want to set my sale to take advantage of that win so I can create forward movement I had friends in the down turn take their whole business and pivot it into a medical company I had people that took all the resources and the assets and the knowledge they knew and restructured it into something
(01:55) that could take advantage of the way the world was moving so the key is to have a plan for each phases and each threshold for example if all of a sudden your profit goes to half then you lay off 25% of your team if then the next stage is one of your large customers fire you and you lose 30% of your business then you lay off another 25% of your staff you want to decide how you’re going to respond unemotionally when the threshold is met for each phase of reaction because you want to be proactive you don’t want to be reactive which brings
(02:25) us to principle number two which is to cut cost you know several times in my Entre Journey we’ve been on a tear upwards and all of a sudden hit a ceiling or a wall and then we have to readjust it’s almost like the entrepreneurial journey is an expansion contraction expansion contraction it’s two steps forward one step back and layoffs is part of it as an example I remember I was building this company flowtown one day we wake up and there’s a change in an API that had no fault to us that cause our whole product to stop
(02:56) working imagine you build a business on top of all these different data points points and you find out that one of them is no longer going to be provided to you so you can’t actually deliver the thing the customers been paying for we went from doing almost 200,000 a month to zero almost overnight so we had to lay people off but we also knew that we had potential to build something different knowing what we knew now and we didn’t want to tarnish the culture we didn’t want to hurt the culture we didn’t want it to stop us from having the team I
(03:24) mean we spent all this time building this team so what we did is we decided to do a layoff but we were very strategic we wanted to really assess all the people all the roles all of our expenses and cut off any of the fat without nicking the bone see that’s the key when we’re doing layoffs is that you want to remove anything that’s unnecessary but not to the point where you demoralize your whole team and cause all of them to start looking for other jobs because if you want to talk about dealing with an issue losing your
(03:53) customers one losing your team that could give you a fighting chance to rebuild it that’s a completely different game so step one is to print off all of your expenses then I want you to highlight in green everything that is necessary we’re talking like your food your rent your mortgage your transportation your debt but I mean some of the stuff even mortgage you got to ask yourself do I still need that office space or can I let that go so only keep the things that are green that are absolutely necessary then highlight and
(04:20) yellow everything that is a need gym membership is a need I think it’s very important but it may not be necessary medical type stuff clothes shoes like whatever is your expenses that are more needs not necessary to live then highlight in red everything that are nice to have this is everything from entertainment eating out travel expenses gifts for other people and that’ll give you at least the road map for what you need to do next step two is plan the cuts I want you to take all your expenses for the year and then you have
(04:49) total amount of cost then divided by 12 so you know what your monthly costs are per month then you take everything you’ve highlighted all the red and yellow items and that’s when you start planning the cuts you f figure out who you’re going to call in what order you’re going to schedule things you’re going to maybe do some layoffs you’re going to call some vendors you’re going to renegotiate your credit card bills you’re going to do everything but the key is don’t be emotional I know that it sucks and that it’s tough but I want you
(05:13) to know this from somebody who’s done this dozens of times it is required to be successful there’s no pride in holding on to inflated expenses when the business is not able to support it to have your whole life implode on itself because you weren’t able to weather the storm when people are able to make the tough decisions even though it’s not popular that’s when you actually develop your leadership skills which brings us to principle three which is the audit your financials see a lot of people say that they manage their money but they
(05:42) actually don’t know what’s going on with their money I get a daily report every day it’s called daily cash reports for all my companies including my personal including my Holdings including all my active companies that tracks how we’re doing from a cash point of view now anybody that knows finances also can say that’s probably not the best way to manage the success of a business but what it does for me is it creates rhythms it allows me to look at different levels how they fluctuate how they get replenished how they move and I
(06:08) can start to see patterns I can see if all of a sudden a company had a million dollars in cash and all of a sudden drops down to 100,000 you better believe I’m going to be asking questions I mean honestly what I’ve done is I’ve asked my team that if there’s ever a change it’s more than 20% please include notes in the email telling me why that happened you know it’s just like tracking your body weight you know if you don’t track it at all you’ll slowly put on weight until the day you finally realize you’re a little chubby and then you go and you
(06:34) step on a scale and you’re like holy cow I put on 12 lb it doesn’t happen overnight you don’t notice it right away but if you manage it every day it’s almost impossible for you to have these reactions that are massive amounts of change so the key is to measure what matters if we don’t measure how our business is doing how our lives are doing our daily cash position then we’re not going to focus on making it better and sticking your head in the sand and pretending like it’s not there is not going to help you I’ve learned that
(07:00) Clarity is an accelerator Clarity gives you confidence if you just audit your financials figure out exactly where you’re at how much debt you have what your cash flow position is and not pretend like it’s not happening when you know it’s bad then you’ll at least be able to respond amateur entrepreneurs may look at their numbers once a year they literally sit down with their accountant and they get the report and they either drink because they had a great year or they drink because they had a bad year good entrepreneurs look
(07:24) at them maybe once a month you know and it’s funny is that even at that it might be 30 45 days after the month is done that they’re getting a report for something that’s almost 2 months past the best entrepreneurs look at their numbers every day they look at the leading indicators that drive the results and at the end of the month they’re getting their reports within 7 to 10 business days for the previous month’s performance they are maniacal you can’t manage what you don’t measure and you have to be on it frequently the
(07:50) way to make sure that you track those leading indicators is to implement a scorecard So within all my companies there’s a scorecard that every leader has to report into that show the leading indicators into their progress so there’s a plan and there’s an actual there’s this is what I said I would do and this is how we’re showing up so that way there’s a red green yellow for each leader to know if they’re on track to hit their numbers which supports the bigger goal of the business if you do this then it doesn’t matter how big your
(08:18) company is everybody will know where they stand on their ability to perform and it takes all the responsibility off of you to sign if somebody’s doing good or bad because it’s in the scorecard most people mess up their scorecards so if you’re an entrepreneur DM me scorecard is Dam Martell TW Martell on Instagram just send me scorecard and I’ll send you over my template which brings us to principal four which is to become a necessity the other day I had a friend and I hadn’t seen him in a while and asked him how life was doing he said
(08:43) he just gotten laid off and it was interesting cuz he was kind of confused he didn’t know why he got laid off and I was like how are you making the company money he goes what do you mean I said well how did your work make the company money and he couldn’t answer the question see I think a lot of people go to work every day and they don’t correlate their activity to how it makes their business money I think a lot of people have team members working for them and they can’t correlate how that activity makes the
(09:07) money if I can teach somebody how their activity makes the company money then they’ll make better decisions to make the company more money it’s like I had a bookkeeper once that was making 80 grand a year and they wanted to make 300,000 and I said cool I want you to make 300,000 do you know what needs to be true for you to make 300,000 in this company and they’re like I don’t know and I said well if you’re making 300,000 then you’re probably making the company $3 million and they were like oh well how would I do that I said well you tell
(09:32) me well I don’t know and I said well that’s the problem we need to solve for you to make 300,000 a year because I want you to but it also means you got to create value so for example do you think a person that’s creating $3 million a year in value is got a team that they’re leading they go yeah I said cool and I go do you like leading people and they were like not really and I go well that’s going to be a challenge for you so you got to decide where do you want your career to go and once you understand how your work or how people
(09:58) make you money then everything gets a lot easier so whether it’s at your job or at your business the key is is it doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO and it’s your company or you work on a team you want to become a necessity to your team you want to invest in yourself to a level to become so good that people would feel sad if you weren’t on the team it means that you’re the kind of person that solves big problems fast you’re reliable and it doesn’t matter how crazy the world downturns trust me it doesn’t matter how sharp the axe gets
(10:29) for making Cuts if you’re the kind of person that everybody points to as somebody as an example that creates massive amounts of value for a team they’re going to want to keep you around and that’s how you become immune to the external world that’s happening because you become so valuable that people would never consider cutting you versus all these other expenses they would rather get rid of their whole office before they got rid of their team so my question to you if you’re on a team or you’re valuating your expenses have you
(10:55) shown up for your team to teach them how to become value to become necessity and have you become a necess so that when they’re pulling out their highlighters you’re in the green or the yellow you’re not in the red you do what you say you’re going to do you’re a person that has Integrity you’re a person that shows up and does the work even when nobody ever asks you to do the work you’re somebody that goes above and beyond you’re somebody that sees opportunities all around them and you don’t have the Debbie Downer attitude you know you
(11:18) spend more time talking about ideas not talking about constraints which brings us to principle five which is to find the bright spots one of my favorite things to coach people on is to identify what’s going good in their business not necessarily what’s going bad see most people can find the thousand things that are going wrong but they forget to focus on the things that are going awesome and if you focus on it it will expand so during the 2020 event where the whole world just melted the whole economy went to zero there were certain industries
(11:44) that actually were skyrocketing like SAS the housing market the stock market all of these things went on the opposite of where the restaurant the local gyms Etc in regards to their performance and what happens is people that take those moments M to Pivot are looking for the bright spots they’re they’re looking at their business and they’re going okay we can’t do this anymore but what can we do what data do we have access to what capacity do we have what competency do we have like what are we good at and we take what we’re good at and we offer
(12:14) that to the market so one of my clients had this software for restaurants that helped them understand if the customers were happy the problem with that is is all the restaurants shut down so then he took his technology he pivoted it and went after big corporations in America to figure out if the employees were happy same Tech technology essentially same workflow same everything they just pivoted the bright spot which is we have a great product a great technology we were just using it in the wrong way when you identify the opportunities in your
(12:40) business and you focus on what’s working and double down on those things those will expand if you focus on what’s not going good trust me you’re going to bring more of that into your life versus finding those moments that information that’s crushing and putting all your resources into that so that you can get more it’s bananas what can happen you’ve got to find what’s working and double down attention goes where energy flows if you focus your energy on something you bring that attention it’s going to get better and most people don’t invest
(13:09) in the opportunities that have a unique advantage in cuz they just don’t think it’s that impressive they don’t realize that what they do is actually tip of the spear top of the mountain for what they’re doing in their industry and that’s where their biggest opportunity lies to expand that’s how you get rich in the new economy if you want to learn the best investments you can make this year click the link and I’ll see you on the other side