Micheal Pacheco 0:00
Hey everybody, welcome once again to another episode of the remarkable coach podcast as always, I’m your host, Michael Pacheco. Here with me today I have Bradley Hamner. Bradley is the founder of Business Growth curator, a small business coaching company that specializes in working with service based business owners to help them go from being the Rainmaker to becoming the architect of their business, help them so they can gain clarity on where they want to go build a plan to get there and develop the habits that they need to grow their business. Bradley, welcome to the remarkable coach.
Bradley Hamner 0:36
Michael, great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Micheal Pacheco 0:39
Yeah, buddy, I appreciate you making time. I always like to open up the podcast by inviting our guests to just tell us a little bit more about yourself, in your own words, and kind of why you do what you do and
Bradley Hamner 0:52
love small business and entrepreneurship. And I hope that that comes across as in our conversation, I could talk about business all day long. As matter of fact, that’s kind of really what I do all day long, and just talk about business. And I love I feel very mission driven, I feel like my purpose on the on the earth is to be able to help small business owners, particularly ones that do less than $2 million in top line revenue. There’s a lot of great consultants, a lot of great coaches out there that help businesses, you know, that do five $10 million in top line. That’s not the world that I know, that’s not the world that I spin in, grew up in with my, my parents, my father, being a small business owner, and then ultimately, maybe in a small business owner. And so I still own businesses outside of my coaching company to this day, I feel like it helps me to make sure that I r&d, a lot of things that we ultimately share with our coaching clients, and so test him out and kind of eat our own cooking. So to so to speak, and yeah, keeps me honest, I love to I like to tell a lot of people on patient zero, you know, so a lot of the tools and frameworks and concepts that we use, and they originated with me trying to solve a problem for myself.
Micheal Pacheco 2:07
Nice. I love it. I love it. So, so 2 million and under is kind of your your your sweet spot, then is your goal. As a as a small business coach, are you trying to get people above that? Or just help them level up? Kind of where’s your what’s what’s your big goal when you’re working with your companies, your business’s SEER your clients? Yeah, ultimately, our
Bradley Hamner 2:28
big goal is to be able to help them to really be able to fulfill the dream that they have when they first started the company. And so look, we’ve got a number of clients that have been able to scale past seven figures. There’s a lot of noise out in the marketplace about, you know, scale to seven figures scale to seven figures. Yeah, well, I’ve got some businesses that we’ve worked with, that have scale past seven figures, but yet the owners working 80 hours a week doesn’t have that’s not transferred over to their personal income, their personal bank balance is not is not growing. So it’s not really always about just getting to a revenue target number. You know, one of my clients that just started his business, gosh, just a few months ago, they did $70,000 in top line revenue, while everybody else will look at that and say, doing great. Well, you don’t know the full story behind all of that, how much of that was gross profit? How much of that made it to his personal income? How many hours do you have to work to be able to get there. And so there’s just so much more to it than that. So really, you know, we’ve got a client that started working with us did last year about this time $4,000 in top line revenue, they’ll do 12,000 In the month of January, February, and they’re thrilled to death, right? They just are like, Man, I can’t believe that this business has been able to grow to that. And so really, you know, we thought for a long time about optimizing to an outcome of, you know, a certain revenue target. But man, there’s so much more to business than just hitting the revenue number. What’s the profit number look like? How many hours a week are you? Are you working? What is your, you know, personal, you know, just your, your family, like, you know, how many how many hours are you spending? Are you tied to the desk all the time? Are you working every Saturday and Sunday morning because you don’t have enough time? There’s just so much more to it than than just a revenue number.
Micheal Pacheco 4:11
It’s a great point, man because there’s yeah, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of coaches and consultants out there who really do focus on that revenue number with their clients and there’s so you’re there’s so much happening beneath the sheets or under the hood, if you will, that it’s just the revenue doesn’t really mean anything if if what’s happening to get you there doesn’t right and that’s like you said in terms of personal life, you know, the the profit margin for the actual company itself. So I love I like that, that kind of focus on more than just that top line revenue, just that one number. Like, are you are you hitting the goals that you’ve set for yourself? as well?
Bradley Hamner 4:59
Yeah, I mean An example we had a, an agency that was doing about this was a few years ago, about $500,000. In top line revenue, they grew it to a million within maybe 12 months or so. And, you know, we were having a conversation and kind of walking through all the winds and like, man, that’s so great. This is where you were last year, etc. And he shared something with me said, Yeah, but you know, what, our family, our family incomes not going up. And it was because we had not really installed a mechanism that as the business was growing, so what his personal income, right? And so one of our key concepts is to lead yourself first. Well, you know, if you go to Dave Ramsey, what did they say pay yourself first, right. And so he wasn’t doing that. And so he wasn’t seeing or feeling in his bank account. He wasn’t feeling any of the increase in revenue from the business. So the business is doing better, everybody else is making more money. And they were the last ones to get what was leftover, and they were just not making any more money from the business. And so he had to put some things in there to be able to make that happen. So that as the business grew, made more money on a monthly basis. So was he and his family as just kind of an example.
Micheal Pacheco 6:12
Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. I know, it reminds me of you mentioned Dave Ramsey, it reminds me of the richest man in Babylon, which is, the similar thing is pay yourself first, always give yourself 10%. And then you can use the rest of the money to pay bills and your mortgage and whatever else you got to do. But always, always take care of yourself first and make sure you’re planning for your future and hitting your goals.
Bradley Hamner 6:36
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we, you know, obviously, our kind of stick is to, that you go from being the rainmaker of your business to becoming the architect of your business. And I believe that oftentimes your greatest strength as an entrepreneur can really become a debilitating weakness in your business. And I think that the thing that and why I love that area of like 2 million or less, is because the generally they have somewhere between one and 12 team members in there. And so the business owner is still like, highly involved in the day to day, things of the business, right. They’re just heavily involved. And so their charisma, their grittiness, their determination, they’re just stick to itiveness. They’re just, I’m gonna get this crap done. I just love right. That’s why I love being with founders, business owners, entrepreneurs, because they are just gonna get it done. But the skill set that they needed to get the business off is not the thing that’s ultimately going to allow them to be able to really scale and so they a lot of times really struggle with making that transition. So some people will call it as working, working. Oh, you’re saying you need to work less in, in the business and more on the business? Well, look, Michael Gerber shared that with us in his book, The E Myth. I think the difference is, is nobody tells us what that actually is. Okay, well, what does that actually look like in practice, right? How do I get the skill set the mindset, the tools to begin to kind of make that shift, and that’s the kind of things that we try to give a lot of our business owners because that’s what I needed in myself. And so ultimately, I thought that the answered all my problems was just gas pedal down, and I was already going 85 I love it.
Micheal Pacheco 8:43
I love it. It’s, oh, gosh. Oh, shoot, what was I gonna say? I just lost it. It’s alright, we’ll move on. It’ll come back to me. What does what does being an architect mean for you and your clients in terms of business? How do you? How do you help people become that and what exactly does that mean? And to your point, what does that look like?
Bradley Hamner 9:06
I think it’s, I think it’s about installing an operating system and installing a structure into the business. Okay. So again, kind of catch buzz word phrases, people use systems and processes. Yes, it is systems and processes. It’s a structured way of being able to do things so that you take chaos in the organization and you actually burning organization, right? You bring some an organized way to be able to do things from the way that you show up every day, what your ideal day looks like your perfect repeatable week. How do you set targets, objectives, key results, how do you keep score in the business? How do you attract, develop and retain a players in a very systematic way? How do you create a marketing plan that actually works. What is our sales process and system? And is that documented? How do we manage the cash in the business? And so it’s really all of those things, I kind of covered our five key principles, which is lead yourself first, clarity, alignment team and execution. Those are our five key principles that we go over with our business owners. That’s what we mean by actually becoming the architect of your business. Okay,
Micheal Pacheco 10:27
yeah. I like that. Yeah, it makes sense. Do you implement any any any stuff from like, I’m trying to think like, there’s entrepreneur operating system that kind of helps people with that there’s clockwork by Michael McCalla wits helps with that kind of the systems and processes part of it, do you? Do you use any of that kind of stuff? Or do you have your own systems?
Bradley Hamner 10:50
So I used to be an EOS implementer. So I know EOS really, really well. Okay, I was, I was a, I was a professional EOS implementer. When I first started to get into coaching, ultimately, kudos to them. They really wanted. They really wanted you to coach EOS pure meaning they wanted it coached kind of a certain way. Well, for the people that I was working with some of the things did not necessarily make sense. Give you a few examples. The L 10. Meetings, that is a great framework to begin with. But what if you don’t have an executive team, the people I’m dealing with are not $10 million companies that have an executive team, it’s them and their team. So their executive team, their leadership team is one person. Not four or five people sitting around the table. And only that four or five people make 150 200 or $250,000. Those are smart people. That’s where EOS is perfect for a company doing say 5 million to 100 million. Yeah. And then you’ve got scaling up framework. Okay, well, let’s go back on some of those things. I love scaling up. I love EOS. I’ve read all the books. So obviously, it wasn’t an EOS implementer. Well, Vern Harnish, who was birthing with giants, he started scaling up, he learned a lot of his things from Jim Collins, who obviously wrote the book, Good to Great and delta laughed, etc. You know, Whitman, who was he an understudy of Vern Harnish. So Gino learned a lot of his things. So if you look at a vision traction organizer on the USPTO, you look at a one page strategic plan from from scaling up, they look very similar. Very, very similar. Okay. Well, when I was in the US, again, most of my clients doing 1.5 2 million or less don’t have leadership teams. I was like this. Eos, this doesn’t work. I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Right? Okay, great system, not perfect. And then I started to say, Well, I really want to pull this in. And I really want to pull this in. I really love this. This has been super impactful to me. And actually, some of the things I don’t necessarily know if I agree with that. Okay. And so therefore, I started and that’s why the name of my company’s business growth curator, is because I feel like we’ve curated the best of the best stuff. So is our our things always I can get Tabak we’ve got a thing called a call blueprint, then my program is called blueprints. Because what architects use, they use blueprints. And so our Blueprints, I can talk back to and say, yes, the, the genesis of that is from a VTR vision traction organizer for Eos, but it’s better for our clients, and here’s why it’s better. If you’re, if you’re if you’re a business doing $10 million, top our top line as an example. EOS is an awesome, awesome framework. I really do. had tried to get Gina to come on the podcast, I’m very familiar with it. And obviously, if you’re a big, big, big, big company, they’re they’re usually running off of a scaling up, etc. So that’s kind of an idea. I’m very familiar with a lot of those coaching frameworks out there. Mike has come on my podcast. Gosh, three times. I think there’s a lot of similarities to kind of how he recommends things where we obviously differ a little bit in some some areas. But yeah,
Micheal Pacheco 14:12
right on, right on. Yeah, we, at boxer, we, we run kind of a hybrid EOS system, we actually use the we’ve got a small team, I’ve got I’ve got three full time employees besides myself. And, and we do kind of a bastardized LTN every Monday, and one thing that I know doesn’t doesn’t really fit for us is you were talking about the vision traction organizer, the V to we’ve tried, you know, going over that and using that and in quarterly meetings and such and it just doesn’t make sense for us where we’re at where we’re just a little too small, you know, going through some stuff. We’re kind of looking around the table at each other. Like, let’s let’s just move on, skip this part.
Bradley Hamner 14:59
That’s kind of that It’s kind of a good, that’s kind of a good example of that, of really kind of what I’m saying is that it’s like conceptually makes a lot of sense. Okay, get it. Okay. So for instance, like core values, we are absolutely big on core values, we call it, we get our, our clients to, to work on a core four. So we think you should have four of them. There’s some reasons behind that. That makes sense. Okay. Here’s one thing I don’t agree with with ALS. I don’t agree with the 10 year target. I am a huge believer of a three year vision. Yeah. So if you read Cameron Harold’s book, vivid vision, if you read Michael Hyatt book, Vision driven leader, we it is one of the Paramount things that we believe is to get it out of the head of the business owner, down on paper, communicate it to the team, where are you trying to be in three years, as matter of fact, as we record this, I mean, we were one month away from being in a global pandemic three years ago, I think how fast that has gone. And so therefore, you can see where the value of setting three years is like that is long enough to get something meaningful done. But it is short enough that you know, we’re not I’m like 10 years, gone. Oh, my gosh, I have no idea where I want the business to be in 10 years like that is just so far off. And so that’s an example of where I kind of disagree with some of the stuff that’s on the VTF.
Micheal Pacheco 16:27
Yeah, yeah, I think I agree completely. I just for for small businesses, some of it is too. So it’s just too big, right? It’s too it’s too grand. Because not, you know, I mean, I know for us, we were a small agency, we do well, revenue wise, but I have no intentions of moving to Madison Avenue. You know what I mean? Like, that’s just not what we’re getting. That’s not an in the in the book. So yeah, doing things like a 10 year plan, even a five year plan. There’s just it’s, there’s, there’s so many variables between now. And 2028. I have to note.
Bradley Hamner 17:09
Now, I will give an example. Like one thing I really do like about the way that this was kind of a, this is kind of a blend, they blend the BTO and they blend their Elton meetings with the idea that in there you do an IDS, right issued solve. And one thing I really love about that framework, is that the concept if you really actually read that book, and of course, we got kind of training on the backside, was to take an issue and take it all the way. Versus even when I’m working with a client, it’s easy to kind of go like, alright, well halfway is like is that good enough? It’s like good enough. When we move on. It’s like, whoa, wait a minute. Now, let’s close the loop on all of that, let’s get all of that done. Everybody knows exactly who’s going to be doing what when they’re going to be reporting it by it’s going to go into into the project, you know, organize or whatever, we’re using Asana or Trello, or whatever thing we’re doing. And now we can move on to the next issue versus we have so many things we got to cover, let’s just go BOO, BOO, BOO, BOO, BOO, BOO, BOO, BOO BOO as fast as we can. And I think it’s those type of little things. Where if you can pull some of the nuances from some of these other programs, EOS as a methodology, etc. That’s really where the meat is, is decide, no, we are going to follow IDs, in our meetings fully, we’re going to take an issue, we’re going to discuss it, we’re going to solve it. And then we move to the next thing. And if that means we get through one thing, then we get through one thing, and that’s all we get to.
Micheal Pacheco 18:43
Yeah. Do you for your clients. So are you are you implementing ideas like that with like the IDs for your current clients?
Bradley Hamner 18:52
Yeah, so are we have really four main pillars that we absolutely so implement with our clients. And I tell all of our clients if there if somebody were to ask you, okay, what are some of the outcomes? What are some of the deliverables that you actually get in working with the business growth curator, team and blueprint, there’s four things. One is that you’re going to have a blueprint. Two is that you’re going to have a plan. Three, you’re going to have a scoreboard to keep track of how you’re doing. And then number four, you’re going to know what your own leadership habits are, that you need to have in place structured into your day and your week to make all of that happen. So again, I’ll go over those. Again, you’re going to have a blueprint, which I’ll tell you what a blueprint is to you’re going to have a plan. Three, you’re going to have a scoreboard to keep track of it. And then number four, your personal habits. Okay, so with all of that, let me tell you what a blooper. Ready as we think of a blueprint is really three things. It’s your three year vision. It’s your one year OKRs objectives and key results. And I can dive into why why I love OKRs. Okay, if you want to scoreboard, oh, excuse my blue blueprint is a three year vision. Yep. Your one year, okay ours, and then your quarterly targets, those three things that’s a blueprint. So you want to be able to say this is our blueprint, this is what the finished product looks like, I’ll actually give you a visual, I don’t know if this is going on YouTube. Well.
Micheal Pacheco 20:36
Let me enable screen sharing if you want.
Bradley Hamner 20:41
This may, this may help some people. So what I’m showing on the screen is a is a blueprint. It’s kind of a sketch, right? Like you get an idea of what that house is going to look like. So if you took this drawing to a general contractor and said, Build me that house, they would say, Well, I can’t build that house off of that. He said, Well, that’s what it’s gonna look like. Okay. Well, conversely, if you got the plans, okay. And we use this kind of the metaphor loosely, but it’s enough for people to kind of get oh, that’s a difference between a blueprint plan. The plan says, here’s the plan for the electrical. Here’s the plan for the HVAC, here’s the plan for the plumbing, etc, right? When now that general contractor could take that plan, and go build the house, but one without the other is incomplete. So if I only had the plan, and then somebody says, Oh, I don’t know, do you like that house? I have no idea. What does that house gonna look like? That’s why you need the blueprint. Okay, I need to know what the finished product is going to be. I need to know what this where this business is going, what are we trying to do this quarter? What are we trying to do this year? What are we trying to do over the next three years? And can we get that out of your head, the founder, business owner entrepreneurs head and get it down on paper, so we can communicate it to the team regularly? Those three things. But we also then have to have a plan of how we’re going to accomplish that because it was not enough to just say, here’s our goals, aren’t everybody, everybody? This makes sense. Everybody? Oh, and I’ll tell you what we’ll do? Well, I’ll throw some money at it to see if we achieve these goals. We’re good. That’s not enough. That was what Bradley used to do. So I got really big into sports, you know, so I got really big into goal setting. And I don’t use the term goals often. But people kind of resonate with that. But I could set this was where we’re trying to go, I enjoyed the vision planning process. But what I didn’t do a good job of is like, Okay, what’s the plan to make that happen? What’s the strategy? How are we going to allocate resources have to matam, the team’s time, money, all of those kinds of things to make that happen? And then how are we going to keep track of it, those scoreboard? And then what’s my personal habits? And so those are what we call the four pillars? Like,
Micheal Pacheco 23:00
okay, yeah, I think that, that all tracks, how do you? How do you get from blueprint to plan are you you’re basically reverse engineering, the vision and breaking it down into, you know, here’s, here’s your three, here’s your two, here’s year one, you know, here’s quarter, four, quarter, three quarter to quarter one like that.
Bradley Hamner 23:24
Yeah, obviously, when you’ve got a three year vision, you’ve got 12 quarters, we’re not going to try to go ahead and map out all 12 quarters, of course. So the further out you go, you know, this obviously, the further out you go, the fuzzier it is right, that’s less specific, but it’s least directionally correct. So if I told you, Michael, hey, so my three year vision is December 31 2024. We’re going to be at $100,000. In top line revenue, I’m going to have 100 clients, you immediately would go. Okay. Well, the next question would be, well, where are you today? Then I’d say Well, I’m at I’m at I’m at 50. I’m just making up numbers. $50,000. How you can bridge that gap? All right. Well, what do you where do you think you would try to try to be by the end of this year? I’d really love for us to be at at about 75,000. Okay, okay, that sounds good. So we start to get some ideas. What are you going to do this quarter? What really, I really want a shot to onboard. 10 clients this quarter, so roughly, maybe about three clients a month? Okay, great. Got it. All right, good. Now, what’s the plan to make that happen? What What do you mean? What’s the plan to make that happen? What’s your acquisition channel to do that? We’re going to run paid ads. We’re going to nurture our Facebook group, we’re going to make cold call out downs, we’re going to I mean, you could start to name it through all the different ways to actually get customers. But that is the specific plan. How are you going to allocate time, money and that your team to make all of that happens, that makes sense. Like we get, we try to get very specific, because you can measure that. So it’s really those two things together.
Micheal Pacheco 25:00
I like it. I like it. You mentioned I want to circle back, you mentioned OKRs. And you’ve mentioned that you would explain it why OKRs and not KPIs are one of the other CLAS. That’s three letters.
Bradley Hamner 25:14
Alright, so this is good. So this, this was, this was ultimo attorney. So I was, I had used, you know, obviously studied as many different like goal setting frameworks as I possibly can. And I had really bought into the idea that you need to have no more than three to five annual woolsafe goals. Okay. Well, here’s a very standard thing that people would nod their head to and go, Oh, that’s a good idea. And that is, oh, you need to make your goals smarter. So what does that stand for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time bound? So business owner says, I’m going to bind to that philosophy, I’m gonna have three to five annual goals, and they all have to be smarter goals. Okay. So I’m not going to say who talks about this concept. But the business owner, then when I was doing this, but especially my clients, they would say things to me, like, we would be in December, January. And I would say, What do you want to do this year? I really just want to tighten up our customer experience, like I really want to tighten that up. Well, if you use the smarter framework, not a goal, I say it’s not a goal, can’t set that as a goal. Business owners, but that’s really what I want to do that. And then they would also say, Well, I really want us to nail down our sales process, I really want to nail down our sales process, and have it documented, etc. Well, can’t really set that as a goal, because that doesn’t fall under the smarter framework. And so what would happen is, is the business owners coming from a place of this is truly what I want to have happen. But it was getting pigeon holed into we can’t do that. Because that’s, that’s not using the smarter framework.
Micheal Pacheco 27:01
So can I play devil’s advocate here for a second? Doesn’t that SMART framework, though force, the business owner or anyone who’s doing quote unquote, SMART goals doesn’t just force them to better define the goal?
Bradley Hamner 27:15
It does? It does. This is where, though I love the OKR framework, okay? Because it’s not letting somebody off the hook from the fact that you can’t measure it. OKR says, what are the objectives you’re wanting to accomplish? And then a key result is not a key result unless it has a number or something you can measure. So every objective must have key results that says, If we hit these key results, we achieve the objective. So what it does is it allows you to be able to say, we really want to tighten up our sales process, you could set that as an objective, then you have to come back on the backside and say, now give me some key results that actually would show that you’ve tightened up your sales process, or we’ve improved our customer experience, how will you know that you’ve improved your customer experience? Well, because we get X number of Google reviews as an example. Or, you know, maybe we make X number of sales from new clients with just onboarding, I mean, different businesses or different things. So it does the OKR framework does do exactly what you’re saying it doesn’t let you off the hook from not being able to be specific, you do have to be very specific. Okay. You can’t just say, well, we want to do this. And did we or did we not? We have no idea. It’s the breaking up of those two that I think is really helpful. So all of our clients now follow the OKR framework, they set somewhere between three to five objectives. And then we measure those key results on the scoreboard, which is why obviously, if you saw earlier, that’s where the scoreboard comes in, well, what’s measured on the scoreboard, your key results from your objectives. That’s how we tie all of that together. Okay. So what do you say that you want to do? I have five key objectives that I want to accomplish this year. What are all of the key results? Here’s the other thing about the three to five goals thing is a lot of times there’s a lot of stuff to measure. But then we’ve got to keep them within five that’s in there. Like, wow, I really want to measure this. And I really want to measure this. You can have you can have that measured a lot better in Okay, our framework. There’s a great book, great book that obviously impacted me a lot was John doors book, measure what matters?
Micheal Pacheco 29:34
Yep. Yeah. And he’s the guy. He came into Google and kind of built all of this in the in the, in the Google space, right?
Bradley Hamner 29:44
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So like, you know, I’ve got a client here I’m looking at he wants to sell $5 million worth of securities. He wants to achieve an X amount of the bonus by the end of the year, and he wants to grow his business by $500,000. In premium, okay, so those are his three main objectives. But he has seven different key results. So one key result may impact two or three or four objectives. One key result one number impacts, impacts, one number may impact all of the objectives you may have. So that’s one thing I really like about the OKR framework is that one number that you’re tracking impacts multiple different objectives. And you’re able to keep track of that.
Micheal Pacheco 30:30
Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. So for example, off the top of my head, customer retention, right, keeping your customer retention high is going to impact a whole bunch of stuff, because you’re gonna be spending less money on marketing, you’re gonna be spending less time on sales calls, and you’re gonna maintain that, you know, monthly recurring revenue, for example.
Bradley Hamner 30:49
Exactly, yep. So let’s just say that you were like, I want to increase profitability, 10%? Well, one of the key results would be your churn number, right? Keeping the number of customers well, that may impact that objective that you have. And then there’s other things you may have regarding other key results, you may say, I want to reduce our marketing spend by 3%. That also impacts your profitability objective that you ultimately said at the beginning of the year. So those two key results go in to the objective. So it was a big, you know, big move for me, it made a lot of sense I started sharing it with. So what I would usually do, like I said, with everything is I will start it with me, right? And I’ll say, okay, instead of setting goals, this year, we’re gonna set three to five goals. Let’s, let’s do that. Okay, our framework, worked great for us. Team loved it, shared it with a client, they loved it, she could have another client. And so then it was like this, this is the thing, this is the thing we’re going to do. And so we really love the the objective and key result framework, interestingly. So oh, what’s the guy’s name that was the Intel CEO? Sure, somebody’s listening to this. And they can tell. He passed away now. But he was a famous, the famous Intel CEO for a long time. So okay, ours used to be called management MPOs. Manage management by objectives. And then he, he added to it to be kind of changed it in the early 90s. To OKRs. Andy Grove, Andy Grove. Thank you, Eric, before. Well, Google, Apple, and a lot of big companies still run their businesses off the OKR. Framework today. Yep. I don’t think there’s a lot of things that Apple and Google do that are going to impact my small businesses and my small business owners. But this framework, I think, is one of them. I think this is one where you can adopt kind of how they think about it. And you can do it in your small business to
Micheal Pacheco 32:55
know for sure, and I like it, it is an interesting difference in approach from smart goals to OKRs, where you’re kind of splitting up the process into two steps, where where with OKRs, you’ve got just like, What do you want to get done this year? That’s right. And then you kind of circle back to that. And you say, Okay, what is the you know, what’s your, what’s your outcome here? What’s your result that you’re going for, in wanting to do this? And then you can kind of fill in that gap in terms of what exactly it is you’re gonna measure?
Bradley Hamner 33:27
Absolutely, yeah. And you know, the other thing if you if you get a business to where, you know, say they are doing million, half 2 million, and you start to have different teams. So let’s say you have a sales team, you have an account manager team, you have a marketing team as an example. So there’s a couple businesses that we have, that will have different teams. And so each one of those teams may set their own OKRs. Right, they may say, hey, this team has three objectives it’s trying to accomplish this year. And so all of those together can use that framework to bubble up into ultimately, what the companies that the company OKRs they’re trying to do. That’s another reason I really like versus company goals, company goals and key results. And then you have team goals, and it just ends up being too many goals. Versus here’s their objectives, here’s their objectives, here’s their objectives. Here’s the key results they’re measuring, here’s the key results they’re measuring, here’s the ones that they’re measuring. Really helps like I was trying to we use notion so a lot of our clients, all of our clients are really using the notion template. And so I’ve got one client that you know, his target is to hit a revenue of, of 1.1 point 2 million. Well, he’s got three different departments that had different key results of the revenue that they’re trying to hit all Three of those they’re tracking as key results that ultimately bubble up to that objective of hitting 1.2 million this year.
Micheal Pacheco 35:09
Yeah, okay. Nice. I like it. Let’s, let’s shift gears a little bit Bradley, where do you where do you get your clients? Where? How do you market yourself and your services?
Bradley Hamner 35:20
So my podcast, we’ve gotten people, obviously, that we’ve had the podcast three and a half years or so that’s one. Two is referrals. So we definitely get referrals from our current clients who, you know, they’re around other business owners. And then three is we are running a paid ad strategy. We’ve got them turned off at this exact moment, but running a paid ad strategy into booked call. So that is, that’s one of the three main ways that we do we also run a once a month to our email list, we run a once a month webinar called the rednecks dilemma, route dive a little bit deeper into that concept. And so people obviously join that webinar and then book a call with us after that. So that would probably be our fourth strategy.
Micheal Pacheco 36:15
Like, what’s the what’s the name of your podcast, if you want to drop that in here and promote it a little bit?
Bradley Hamner 36:21
Club capital leadership, podcast, leadership’s podcasts. It’s a partnership with club capital. They do bookkeeping and financials for insurance agency owners, and I was director of coaching with him for a period of time before I started business growth cure writer, and we started the podcast on a whim and it’s been pretty cool to see how it’s how it’s grown.
Micheal Pacheco 36:48
There can be the podcasts are difficult to start, but once you get into a groove, it’s, it’s 99%. enjoyable.
Bradley Hamner 36:57
I never knew what this thing was called podcast. Podcast fading is, but you know, I, there’s actually been two different people I know that started a podcast and they got about 15 to 20 episodes in and they were like, nevermind, forget about doing this. I get really excited about it. They thought they thought it’s super easy just to go into zoom, hit record, and then thrown on a podcast. And they’re like, No, there’s a lot more to it than that.
Micheal Pacheco 37:25
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Tell us about you mentioned a webinar. You’ve got a website for it as well. Tell us about the rainmakers dilemma.
Bradley Hamner 37:34
Yeah, so remixer dilemma is how your greatest strength as an entrepreneur can become a debilitating weakness in the business, you know, just basically what what got you to where you are is not going to get you to where you want to go. And so, you know, the acquisition of skills, skill sets mindset in certain tools. And, you know, obviously, that’s why we call going from being the Rainmaker to being the architect of your business and my programs called blueprint. I’ve had had it for a couple years now. I had just previously done one to one coaching, I didn’t have some desire to get into business coaching it, it kind of fell on me on a whim, in 2017. I mean, it wasn’t something I was like, oh, business coaching, that sounds good, I’ll do that. And I’ll make some money on the side. I was just doing it with a friend and, and I just fell in love with coaching. The model we had when we first started was not was not scalable at all, in any way. I had no idea what I was doing. But you know, your cut your teeth, and you start to begin to kind of get an idea of like, well, what, what do I believe about business, you know, you you, you start to formulate your own philosophy about how you think things should be done. And you know, ultimately, you’re a product of your own experiences and the books that you read and the people that like you, you get to meet. And so I started to come up with my own philosophy. And so I didn’t have the language back then. This really stemmed from I had, in 2015, I was really overwhelmed. I hit a brick wall myself. And I was burning the midnight, morning, noon and night working in my own business. And I was like, this sucks. I mean, this sucks. And I really gave it a consideration of like, I’m not so sure I want to do this anymore. I knew I could go work for a company and make a couple $100,000 a year as a W two salary employee. And I thought, Well, I mean, I’m either going to figure this out, or I’m gonna go get a job. And luckily, I got around some really awesome people who poured into me. And I started learning about business and I just really fell in love with the business end of business. And the answer I’d always had was just go sell more. And I realized that I was just running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I had no structure. I had no systems, even though I’d heard about systems, right? It’s like, Oh, you gotta have systems. I thought I had systems. I didn’t have systems. I thought I had documented processes. I didn’t have that. I mean, I just was wake up every morning, and go call people and try and make some sales. There was no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever. And so ultimately, with a doctor, I thought I was having a heart attack. I mean, I was having a panic attack. And I mean, you know, that was a pivotal moment in my life. And I wish I could tell you that it turned around quickly. I mean, it took me a period of time. I mean, it took, you know, 18 months of like, okay, well, what am I going to do? How am I got to do this. And so, that was one of the worst days, really, because when I went to the doctor, they put me an EKG machine. And then ultimately, they said, hey, you need to go and see a cardiologist today. It’s I did, and I was, you know, I was freaking out more, when I was there thinking that there’s something wrong with me at 34 years old, and I’m gonna have a heart attack. But luckily, God said, Hey, you might want to come back on the caffeine. And you might want to really think about, you know, what you’re doing day to day, working so much. And that was, that was a big moment. And so I didn’t have the language around, you know, going from rain backward architect had no idea. I mean, we just brought that in, you know, a couple of years ago, but that’s ultimately what it was, it was like, Okay, I’ve really got to do this a different way. I got to get all this stuff out of my head, and get it down into an actual system and into a process. And so there’s more in the array macro architect.
Micheal Pacheco 41:33
Yeah. That’s a great story, man, I appreciate you being vulnerable with with me and our and our listeners, you know, I don’t think I don’t think you get to call yourself an entrepreneur, unless you’ve, you know, had some kind of experience like that, where you’ve, you’ve, you’ve had to take a good hard look in the mirror and be like, what? What’s going on? Like, am I going to do this or not? Like, I got a, I think, I don’t know, I think it’s part of the journey. Perhaps an unfortunate one, but, you know, it’s separates the grownups from the kids, I guess. I’m sure.
Bradley Hamner 42:14
Well, I mean, I think the best learner, the best way to learn is through experience, but it doesn’t always have to be your experience. And so if you’re able to share with other people, your own journey, the things that you’ve been able to learn, I mean, I just think it’s, it’s why I love to read, I think, Gosh, you’ve got somebody that’s put 567 1020 30 years of their life, to learn what they’ve learned, and you can buy that for $20 Book, $25 Book,
Micheal Pacheco 42:46
and you can learn that in 300 pages.
Bradley Hamner 42:49
That’s pretty amazing. Now, a lot of the books, you know, a lot of the books could be 25 page, white paper, you know, and then everything else is, but But even so, though, even so, I mean, okay, measure, measure what matters is like that. I say this, respectfully to him. I mean, it he tells a lot of stories, you could read the first couple chapters and go, I got it, I got it, understand this, this makes sense. You either bind to that, okay, or framework or you don’t as an example, everything else is I don’t wanna call it fluff. But it’s just kind of anecdotal to the real core message that’s in the book,
Micheal Pacheco 43:26
what and it’s communicate. I mean, it’s very, it’s a very human way to communicate, right, we communicate with stories. And so you’ve got, you’ve got like, one idea that you want to communicate. And part of kind of drilling that idea in is to use story, right, and maybe multiple anecdotes, multiple stories, to kind of drill in that idea and show, you know how that idea applies in multiple various situations, that sort of thing. But yeah, I mean, and then sometimes there’s just, I suppose, pressure from the publisher to make the book a little longer.
Bradley Hamner 44:06
For sure, for sure. They’re like, come on, Michael, we gotta we gotta get we gotta get this. We gotta get this book up a little bit more. We need, we need some more content from you, you know? And I get that. I mean, I do get that, you know, there’s a lot of books where it’s like, we’re kind of saying the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, you know what I mean? So but, yeah, yeah, I mean, I wish that I had had, I wish that I had had, there’s so many things now. I had three coaching sessions today with clients, and I was sharing with them stuff. I thought, Man, if I I’ll give you an example of one of the men that if you want me to, but like, Man, I wish I had this 10 years ago, I would be so much further along than I am today. So like one of my coaching clients, we were asked how much money on a monthly basis Hit your personal bank account last year. And he and he told me and what is what to say it’s 10,000. And I said, Okay, how much? What do you want that number to be this year? Your personal bank account? Every month, not the business. And I’m not talking about setting business revenue targets, I’m talking about your personal. He’s like, I have no idea. And I said, Okay, 50,000 a month. He’s like, Well, yeah, that’d be great. But I said, Alright, so probably not 50. And I said, How about five? He goes, Well, no, I don’t want to go backwards. So okay, great. So we’re between somewhere between 50,005. And so we whittled it down. And he was like, you know, if I got to 12, five, this year, that I would, I would consider that as success. And I thought, Now what if you every single year could then say, alright, when I bumped my pay up, is gone, and bump it up every year. Because he like just that mindset, if you want to call it a little bit of skill set of realizing that the business is there, to be able to feel the things that you want to do in your personal life and to and to support your family. I never did those kinds of things, ever. If we had a good month, I took more money out of the business. If we had a bad month, I didn’t pay myself anything. Into the credit, this business owner shared with me, he was like, man, you know what, automating my distributions has been a game changer. Because I would pay everybody else. And then I would be like, oh, there’s nothing left over. And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t put any money into my personal bank account. So it’s a little bit of Mike McCalla wits, you know, obviously Profit First thing about like he, he’s putting money into his own bank account first, kind of, like we talked about. So that’s just like one thing of for the business owners to be willing to say, Okay, how much money if you’re listening to this now? How much money did you make last year, on average, that went into your personal account from the business? And if that was five, what do you want it to be this year? 7500. If it was 20, what do you want it to be? You know, whatever that number is, if it was 50, you know, like, Okay, what do you do you want to be 60? There’s something in that what you do with that money where you invest it? That’s for some other people to you know, to do. But I think you can use that and reverse engineer all the way back up to then what does the business need to do in order for Miko to make an extra $5,000 a month?
Micheal Pacheco 47:36
Yeah, I love that. I think there’s a lot of a lot of business owners out there. You know, myself included in the in the recent past, who spend a lot of time on the business, and just don’t take home enough to really live on necessarily, you know, nope. And you own
Bradley Hamner 48:03
a job. You own a job at that point. And you’re a terrible you have a terrible boss. Yeah.
Micheal Pacheco 48:11
Yeah, interesting. Bradley, what is, uh, I want to be I want to be cognizant of your time and respectful of your time here. I know we’re coming up on the edge of the hour. What does a typical engagement with you look like?
Bradley Hamner 48:23
So our blueprint program, are we really kind of all three C’s coaching content community. So we have a coaching program that we meet every Tuesday morning. And we have an awesome community of business owners. I think that’s that is that’s the thing. That is the key. It’s not the it’s not even the content, we hope is good and serves them. But we meet Tuesday morning for an hour and a half hour and 45 minutes, nine to 1030 1045 Central Time. We do that almost every week, 30 weeks out of the year. So we do 310 weeks sprints throughout the year. And we spend two weeks on a on a topic. So we alternate between a masterclass and a blockbuster. We like to say we don’t give you homework because the last thing you need is a bunch of extra to dues. And so in our blockbuster sessions, we take the concept we learned about last week in the masterclass and we actually implement it into the business. And so that looks like 3045 minutes of thinking time carved out thinking time where everybody together is working on the same thing. We go into breakout sessions, discuss it together as a group, and then and then come back out and have some shares and so that way you feel like you’re actually making some tangible progress in your business. And so we call that program blueprint. And so, if somebody wants to learn more about that they can, you know, go to our website, business growth curator.com We’ve got a assessment on there that they can take and they can get an idea of their score of going from the rain Mecca to the to the ark Fact of their business?
Micheal Pacheco 50:01
Well, I love it. Is there anything that you would like to touch upon that we haven’t had a chance to discuss at this point.
Bradley Hamner 50:10
Business is really, really hard and it gets harder. Businesses really, really hard and it gets harder. I think there’s a reason why 96% of small businesses never say their 10th birthday. And 96% of those never crossed million dollars in top line revenue. Businesses really, really hard. And that’s not to be discouraging. It’s just facts. And so there’s things that you can do, to be able to build the odds in your favor. And so we think that our framework gives business owners a lot of clarity, a lot of clarity. It gives them a tangible plan, we make sure that they have a scoreboard to keep track of it. And then we do as much as we can to help you with your own individual habits. Which is why our first principle is lead yourself first. Because when you get better, everybody gets better. And so there’s things you can do to be able to beat the odds.
Micheal Pacheco 51:05
A little bit Bradley, where can our listeners and viewers connect with you online?
Bradley Hamner 51:09
Yeah. So probably the two places on social that’s best for me is on LinkedIn and Twitter, so that it can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And then again, they can go to our website business growth curator.com If they wanted to learn a little bit more about us and the team and how we support business owners.
Micheal Pacheco 51:30
Awesome, Bradley Hamner. Thank you so much for making time to chat with me today. I appreciate it.
Bradley Hamner 51:35
Well, I appreciate your you have me on and hopefully I was able to provide some value to your listening audience.
Micheal Pacheco 51:41
It was a great conversation, man. Thank you to our listeners and viewers check out Bradley Hamner business growth curator.com And the rainmakers dilemma.com. We’ll have links to everything of course on the show notes, so be sure to check them out. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you guys in the next episode.
