00:45 Hey, and welcome back to the show. I am so stoked today to have Brad with us. He's gonna tell us why he matters. Just kidding. Brad is gonna tell us who he is and what he does, and I'm 100 % sure our audience is gonna love what he does. Brad, who are you and what do you do?

01:01 Todd, thanks so much. really appreciate that. I'm excited to be able to be here and serve your audience for the time that we have. So what we do is we help people to become business owners, business owners and founders become the architect of their business. And so we'll discuss specifically what that actually looks like. And my whole journey is kind of the problems that I needed to solve in my own journey are the things that we share with our business owners. Ultimately, I transitioned from being the rainmaker of my business where everything was dependent upon me. To I became the architect of my business or typical audience, founder owners are doing 300,000 in annual revenue up to 3 million. We really know that space. Well, the size that the teams are, and that's what we help them to do is become the architect of their business.

01:52 I love it. This is such a valuable proposition because you're taking people who have launched or are still kind of in a launch mode, trying to figure out how do I climb out of this thing? And this is a really great resting point for you to start with people on. Tell us about it though. It sounds like you had a problem in this stage as you were growing and developing some prior businesses or walk us through the, why did you see the need? What are you doing here?

02:18 I'm going to take you back briefly to my upbringing around my father. My dad is a small business owner. He's a farmer. I'm in Northern Alabama. He's in the Florence area. My entire life, I saw what hard work actually means. I mean, when you're in the farming business, he farmed 10 ,000 acres annually for a really long time. And so whenever you're in the spring and you're in planting season, you're in harvesting season, you do whatever it takes. I didn't need to be taught hard work from my dad. I just watched him to be able to do it. Now that came at a sacrifice from missing ball games and all of those kinds of things. But I'm so grateful for that lesson from my dad in my early careers. After I graduated from Auburn, I had a couple of positions. And so those are the two things I took into starting my first business. I knew how to sell and I knew how to work my tail off. And that's exactly what I needed to do to get the business off the ground. But the problem is it worked up until the point it didn't in 2015. I ended up having what I thought was a health scare. had, was experiencing panic attacks. I didn't realize that at the time, but you know, went to a physician, went to a cardiologist and cardiologist said, look, you, you, you're going to have to change something. You know, you're everything's fine with your heart, but I know what you got going on. He just walked out the door, but I didn't know, I didn't know what that was. mean, when the only thing that you are doing has worked and now it's no longer working. You don't know what lever to pull on. And so fortunately, fast forward a few months, I found myself in Toronto. I was actually a strategic coach. And I was sitting next to a guy who was a financial advisor and we're doing the exercise 10 X is easier than two X, which is now popularized in the book that recently came out last year. But we're doing that exercise. And he said, well, last year we did 40 million top line. made 5 million personally. And here's what 400 million and 50 would look like. And my jaw was on the floor. was like, wait, what? How much do you do? And so I'd never really been around somebody to talk about it at that level. And just so casually, honestly. And he said something that I'd heard for years and I'm going to say it in your reaction for people listening to is probably the same reaction that mine was. said, look, man, it's just systems and processes and you gotta have a good team. And I said something smart back to him and said, man, I'm so sick and tired of hearing that. And everybody talks about it and nobody ever shows me what it's actually like. And he did. And that's the, finally the thing that ultimately changed. I started to see myself now. I didn't have the language around it that we do now. Let's be real, but I started to see myself as the person, instead of the person that's doing all the things, I started to see myself of like, I got to go build this. I got to go build this this way. And ultimately I transitioned first. I became the architect. And then I began to document what we did and we built an operating system for that business. And that's, that's what we help people to do today.

05:12 I love it. mean, what you just said is so true and it is so relevant at the very beginning of a business. I would say the vast majority of those people who start a business or attempt to start a business run into the same problem of I got it to this point through just brute force. But then I kind of get stuck and it's usually them being the bottleneck, which gets them stuck. And you mentioned that Avatar, the 300 to 3 million. That's a great avatar to identify this problem with. And as they continue to grow, I will venture to say that there's also thresholds at the 10 million mark, the $30 million mark, where it is still themselves being the bottleneck of limiting that growth just by, you know, by lack of the right systems and lack of processes. And after having done over 500 of these interviews, I'll tell you for sure, the most common problems I hear our lack of the right people in the right places, processes and tools. Those three things are the key killers of everyone's growth. So I appreciate you. I appreciate you like validating that because it is 100% accurate. So what did you do about it, Brad? What was the, he showed you some things and you just decided, okay, I got it figured out. I mean, walk us through your progression through this. How did you develop this into the product?

06:38 Yeah. So yeah, you're so right. think that the, I think you can get the business to maybe a half a million off brute force, roughly. mean, part of this is depending on the industry that you're in. I've maybe seen it to be brute force to a million, but I mean, let's just say you do get it to a million. You're not getting it to three that way. Like something has to change. you know, you can't.

07:02 Not to mention and your time.

07:03 in your time and in your health and is it really worth it and all that kind of stuff. But anyway, so I totally agree. So for me, I had put up to that point, of course, clearly I don't even know other than we did that. Actually, I don't even know what it we learned at strategic coach that day, but I remember that. And I remember specifically the documents that he went through and he was just clicking through them. Look, I didn't learn the things of how to structure it. I just saw the documents and it was somethingthat really stood out to me. Maybe it was because the pain I was feeling. I'd honestly tied at that point. was so frustrated with entrepreneurship that I almost left. I almost went back into corporate America and said, you know what? I can make more money and I can just get a paycheck and 401k and do, you know, a company car. And I could just go do all of that stuff. But I said, 

07:50 Most people do.

07:53 Yeah, for sure. I mean, I was really close at that point. The pain threshold was high enough for me to say, you know, forget this. not doing this. I needed to make more money for the family. Right. And so again, to do that, my feeling was I need to work harder, but that wasn't working. So what I specifically did is I went back and it took me a while. I want to be very clear. took a year to kind of work through this. The difference is, is instead of me putting on my Friday afternoon to document processes and it would get to be Friday afternoon. I'd say, I don't really want to do that. Or I'd do something else. I kept kicking it off. This time I finally, because I had a vision or an image in my mind of what he shared with me specifically, I then was like, no, I'm going to do this. so instead of, know, that, that we use Google docs now, but that instead of that word document, that flashing cursor just sitting there and I don't know what to type. actually started to put things down. I actually started to say, like, what is our sales process? How do we onboard customers? What is my recruiting system? I mean, I could. Go on, right? Like, what do we do? And then I was faced with, do I organize all this stuff? Nobody has actually shared with me where to put all of it. So we've got scavenger hunts happening all over the time, all over the place. Like, we don't know where things are. Where's that asset? This person's desktop. It was a mess. So I had to do, you know, effectively some spring cleaning. had to start organizing some things and, and that's what we, that's what we built. And it took some time, but ultimately. you know, and that's why I say that ultimately I became the architect of my business. That business finally started to be able to grow and scale without my constant involvement. and I've been able to do that across some of my own other companies. And that's what we share with people to be able to do.

09:42 Thank you. Honestly, for those of you listening, I know this is not a foreign topic for you because this is something that everyone deals with. It is, I don't care how many times you've started a business, I don't care how many times you've exited a business, this little transition point, these transition points from kind of a soft launch into a full sprint into a holy crap, what do I do now? These are the points you're really talking about, right Brad? I feel like there's not a person who started a business out there or even someone who's taken over a business out there who doesn't feel this overwhelm of like, how do I set this up so that it's not all me? Because you always gotta figure out what the system is before you can teach it, so how do you figure out the system and teach it and move on to the next problem, right? So walk us through that. You got five key things you do, as far as I can tell, that help us do that. What is that?

10:40 Yeah, absolutely. So let's go over basically, I'm going to just validate what you just mentioned right there is that the pulling of how do I do it? Like, I don't know where I'm going to find the time basically to do it. So what I want to do is I want to go over with your audience. I want to go over the five things of what it means, the five milestones of what it means to become the architect of their business. And then I would love to give them a couple of tangible specific steps. And so we want to try to take it from high level to eye level. so in other words, what it can someone do while they're listening to this podcast or when they get done listening to this podcast and they're in front of their computer, what is specifically something that they can do and take away from it? Okay. So the five things of what it means to become the architect. And so in other words, Bradley, I get that, but is it conceptual? Is it a concept or is it an actual thing? Like how do I know when I've become the architect of my business? All right, so here's the five. Number one, you're doing over a million dollars in top line revenue. And so for a lot of people listening to this, they may be able to cross that off, right? Your audience is very advanced, incredibly smart, very successful entrepreneurs. They may be able to already cross that off, but for a lot of people, as a matter of fact, 91% a small business has never crossed a million dollars in top line revenue. Okay. It's hard. It is hard to just get to that level, let alone to get to 10. Okay. So for, for some people, the vast majority of the stats say, man, to get to a million, if you're doing 300, 400 ,000 changes your life to get that business to a million bucks. Okay. But it's not enough just to get to a million. We need to also, we want that thing to be growing and profitable. And so we call that rule of 40 that was first initialized or initially popularized in SAS businesses. And so we've pulled that in and we love that fraction of your year over year revenue growth plus your profitability. So if you've got a business doing over a million dollars in top line revenue and it is growing and profitable, and you've got a really solid business, but that leads us to the third milestone. If the business doing over a million, it's growing and profitable, but you are burning it 2,500 hours a year and you're doing what I was doing is working all the time. What is it worth? And so we specifically tell people take 12 weeks off, build the business to where you actually working and you architect your year based off 40 weeks. Now some people say 12 weeks off. seems, that seems impossible. I would share with you unless you've actually looked at how to be able to do that, that's actually more doable than what you realize. 

13:38 Interesting, interesting.

13:39 Okay. Do it over a million is growing a profitable. We're taking enough time off. Number four, this is very much on my own journey. got to have an EA to help buy back your time. I love Dan Martell's book, “Buy Back Your Time”. 

13:54 I love that book too. Yep.

13:55 So I want to encourage people to check that out. Love Dan. He's been, he's been my coach. Sohave an EA, have an EA. If you're a business owner, it is not a luxury to have an executive assistant. I love what he says. If you don't have an EA, you are one and you're not a good one. All right. So have an EA. It is incredibly valuable. That allows you to do the things that you love, allows you to do the things that really accelerate the growth of the business. So number one is doing over a million. It's growing the profitable you're taking enough time off, you have an EA to help buy back your time so you can do the things that really grow the business. And then number five, you've actually installed an operating system. So that sucker's not dependent upon you. And so that's the thing that's ultimately going to help you to be able to scale the business. And so those are the five milestones of what it means to become the architect of your business. And then where we'll go from here, I'll get you to ask me some questions off that if you would like. And then we can get into some things of what a business owner can do.

16:39 So you mentioned that your operating system really does dial into those people who are generating revenue. They've got a good idea of the product that they solve. They kind of hone into that. And going from 300 to a million, and then from a million to three million, those are significant steps. What are some of the most common things you see? Like where are they stuck in that sub million, trying to get to that point where they reach that first threshold you talked about?  What's typically the most common problem they're after? What's the biggest solution they need to find?

17:13 Yeah. Okay. The biggest issue, especially at that level is the business is not out of their head at all. They don't have anything documented. Okay. And so they can hire people and they do hire people. And they try to find a players on their team. They've tried to find people that fit their culture and all of those kinds of things. And they try to develop themselves into being a better leader. And what happens is they train somebody and then that person leaves and then all that IP walks out the door with them. Right. And then they realized, crap. Now I got to train somebody else and I don't have anything documented. So I got to do it again. So it ends up becoming this rat race all the time that they're just, they feel like they're repeating themselves over and over and over again. That's, that's really the thing that happens. That sub million dollar range. And the other thing is just by the nature of you think revenue per person. Like their team is probably two to five, roughly maybe six or seven, depending on what they do. They've maybe got some contractors, et cetera, or support fractional people on the team to go from one to three. You start looking at, they have their first level of management. And so now they're leading other leaders and that's a skillset that the business owner is like, wait a minute. I've actually never taught how I lead people. So it's going from teaching how to do the thing to teaching how to have my first level of leadership. And now, now everybody in the team doesn't report to me. They report to someone else and that's a transition period for a business owner. Does that make sense? Yep. So those are a couple of, could go into a lot more of those, but those are a couple of the biggest pain points I see to get it to that first million. And then if they want to go from one to even one to 2 million is obviously doubling the business that you started getting your first level of management or other levels of leadership. And that's a transition point, a new skillset and even mindset that the business owner has got to be able to acquire.

19:22 I definitely agree with you. It's definitely a skill set and definitely, it's something that is not taught anywhere. As a business owner, my first business I started, legitimate business I started was in college. And in college, I took business school, I did all those things. They never taught me how to do any of these things. What are the resources that you'd suggest people use and learn from to help them identify the layer of management you're talking about, the skill sets of training on protocol and things like that? Where do they learn this stuff from and what does it mean to you? How do people engage with you to kind of get that understanding?

20:11 Yeah, that's such a great question. I think it's such a good point too, that you make is, look, I got my degree in finance from Auburn. And so, you know, I didn't go to school with entrepreneurship. I don't even know if that was a curriculum I could have taken when I was there. I don't think so. don't think so. 

20:34 It wasn't a thing back when we were in college. tell you that much. Yeah.

20:36 Well, the number one answer, mean, probably where people are going to think is, for me to say, you know, like books and podcasts and YouTube and those are fine. But the problem is when you miss in that, you miss depth and nuance. And so then that begs the next question was, well, where do get that from? And I think honestly, it's community. I think it's honestly community. And I'll add one other one, a coach. Now this is going to, that's going to sound self -serving for me. And I don't mean it to be that way at all. Mean, I have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in my own development of people who have gone in front of me and have done the thing that I'm trying to do. So that makes sense. want to be very transparent. have never built a company if I passed $5 million. So while in the world, what I try to serve an audience that is already a 5 million plus, like that would be disingenuous for me to be able to do that. Okay. But I have been able to scale the companies to the level that we share with other people. So we share the things that work with us. My coaches have scaled multiple millions, multiple companies past 5 million, $10 million. So I'm learning what does it take to get to $10 million as an example, if I want to be able to do that. And so I think when you get yourself around someone who is not, let's use an extreme example, Ed Mylatt. Like even if I had the money to work with Ed Mylatt, would that make any sense? No, it wouldn't. Like there's, it's so far out there that, that, that it's like, I don't need to do that. Like if I spent time with Warren Buffett, is that really going to help me? Elon? Not, probably not. I wouldn't even know what questions to ask. Okay. So someone who's one, two, three steps ahead. I think it's fantastic for a coach. That's number one. Number two is if you get yourself an environment of other people that are trying to do the same thing, it matters, which is why we have that, that window of, you know, if you're, if you're a business owner doing 2 million and you're in one of our calls and you go in, we do like zoom room breakouts. And so we'll go into zoom room breakout and you're in there with someone who's trying to learn how to get to their first $10,000 a month valuable for the person that's doing the 10 to learn it from the 2 million, but what's a 2 million dollar person? It's, you know, like the reality is it matters what the community actually is. So those are my thoughts.

23:15 Right, right, I love that. And I'm a huge advocate for peer groups and communities and reaching out to other founders. I would dare say this podcast for me has been a community of sorts where I have been able to balance my knowledge and experience with a lot of other people in similar revenue ranges. It makes a difference, it makes a huge difference. And for those listening, if you aren't part of a peer community or have a coach or mentor that you work with, absolutely. I mean, Michael Jordan had a coach, Tiger Woods still has a coach, swing coaches, like all sorts of coaches. And so you're not, you should not be embarrassed to go and talk to somebody who has been there and done that. And who better to go to, in my opinion, than someone who's actively currently operating in levels where you're at or slightly above, that you can provide value to and they can provide value to you. It is just a fun, fun way to learn and grow as a business leader. Thank you for sharing that.

24:17 Yeah, so true. And, you know, one other just comment is almost double tapping on that is that if someone is so far ahead, they have a hard time of remembering what it was like when they were at your level. I mean, they, they, they, they, they, they struggle with that of like, man, what was that first hundred thousand like? I don't really know as an example, you know? And so, I mean, that to me is, is important of like, you know, do you remember what it's like whenever it you and an EA and a couple of VAs and one full -time person, or do you remember what it was like when you hired your first full -time person? I'll give you like, I love his stuff. I don't love all of it, but I love a lot of his stuff. Alex Hormozi. Okay. Okay. Like he is like so far out there. But one thing he does do a really good job with, will say, is he, he, he does remember in because the time Delta from where he was at that lower end with his gems to where he is now is not that long. So he had a really fast rise. So literally it's not 20 years ago. It was like five or six, seven, eight years ago, right from him. But, but there's these little things that you hear and you're like, wait a minute. One of his people on his executive team at acquisition .com makes a million a year. I don't have perspective of that, right? You know, and so for a lot of people listening to this, they're like, man, it's a big deal for me to hire somebody at $50 ,000, let alone $500 ,000. Like that's a level of scale and scope that is a different, like that, man, okay. I don't even know what, that looks like. How do I even find somebody at that level as an example? Does that make sense?

25:56 100%, 100%. No, listen, I'm with you all the way on this. And that's why I love the niche that you're working with. I love that you're so targeted and you really do identify your avatar in a way that's relatable to you, relatable to them. I'm guessing you have community that goes along with this. And again, you don't need to feel like you're being self -serving. This is a resource and this is a resource for people listening that they should know about. How does your community work? How are you helping people right now? And what is kind of a way they can tap into that?

26:31 So what we do is we are together 38 out of 52 weeks with our community. 38 out of 52 weeks, we're doing something. Twice a year we get together, I kind of alluded to this earlier, we're together in person. Now we love Zoom, but there's never any substitute for being in person with our community. We've been to Scottsdale, Keough, Destin, Florida. My lake house, we're going to big Cedar Lodge in Missouri in October of this year. So we've been to some great places, great destinations to be able to connect with one another. Six times a year, we do what we call spotlight events. So we'll run either a one day event or a two day event. One of those examples is we'll run quarterlies. We run everybody's quarterly for our community. And so we invite some guests to be able to come and check those out. Those are totally free to be able to attend so we run the quarterlies and then we'll have You know, we do two -day events. We just we just did back in August of 24 We did the two -day NBA Dan Martell actually spoke at our event back in August So we do a couple two -day events in December of this year. We're running a The two -day annual planning workshop and so we run events for our members and we have guests to be able to come to that as well So that takes care of eight of the weeks the other 30 weeks. What we do, we call those implementation sessions. So one of the things we fundamentally believe in is ideas are everywhere, but implementation is everything. Like I, I will say, I always go as far as to say, I think ideas and of themselves are worthless. They're worthless. But when you do something with an idea, then honestly, you can change your life and change your business, right? by, by an idea that you have. So those implementation sessions are where we go over our playbooks within our community. And so what people a lot of times want, they want access to the playbooks that we've already built. And so what we do, they obviously have all of the templates access in our digital learning management system, but then we spend two weeks on each one of the playbooks. There's 15 playbooks that a business runs on. And so we spend two weeks on every one of those. And what that does, It gives us enough time to go deep on it versus every week being a new idea, a new concept. It's just too much. There's too much to take on. So we really care about how do we help you to become the architect? Well, we need that business to run on an OS. And so that's what we do.

29:12 Love it, love it. Fantastic, I truly feel like this is a great message for our community. It's a great message for those who are in that sub three million. I would even dare say up to five million. If you're struggling to identify how your business functions and operates without you, I love some of the concepts you've talked about. This is something you should be very interested in and you should be checking out. We've got links to all of his programs that we're putting in the show notes here, so do check it out. Brad, I wanna know, before, kind of as a last note here, because this is an intrigue, it's been in the back of my head since you mentioned it, the 40 weeks a year as opposed to 52, how are you suggesting people actually implement that as opposed to just saying, I'm taking three months off? That doesn't happen very often, but how are they able to deploy that strategy of taking the personal time and implementing that into an effective growth stage business.

30:11 Okay. I'm going to give you the real like how we help people to be able to do it. So kind of ungated. All right. So I'm going to go over a few things pretty quickly of how someone can get to those, that was 12 weeks off. First of all, take 12 weeks, multiply it times seven. You end up with 84 days. 

Number 1 -  we advocate take every Saturday off. We call them free day Saturdays. Okay. And that will make sense in a minute because what you, what people think I'm going to say is take the weekends off. No, no. And the reason is, is because as a business owner, we get it. You can't, you're not going to, you're not going to shut it off on a Friday. No, there needs to be at least one day a week that you do shut it off. Okay. I'm a college football fan, so I don't want to be working this Saturday of this recording is kickoff season, right? But, but no, I mean, I happen to have school -aged kids, but truly I do think you need one day that is truly a free day. You're not listening to a business podcast. You're not listening to, you're not reading a business book. You actually do need a little bit of time, but on Sundays, a lot of times people are going to be planning the week ahead. You're actually doing, you know, you got a lazy Sunday afternoon watching NFL or something like that. so first of all, take every Saturday off. 

Number 2 - you're probably going to shut it down at least the week between Christmas and New Year's. Most of the business owners want that time, right? Okay. And then go and just add in some of the obvious ones, Labor Day, Memorial Day, 4th of July. it, and depending on where you are in your life with kids, ages and all that sort of thing, you know, we start adding in, all right, what about spring break? Okay. What about fall break? And if you're not, do you take a guys or girls trip every year that you go to Sedona or you go to band and dunes or you, I'm a big golfer. So, you know, do something like that. Really and truly Todd, when you do it that way, people go, that's a lot more doable than I thought. And then what's happening is they architect the week. We call it the preloaded year. So they look at the year and they're like, okay. I'm going to take those, take these weeks off in the biggest unlock the biggest unlock, which is the simplest. But it's yet the hardest thing to do and business owners don't do it because nobody's asking them to do it is track it, track it, just track it. Like just tracking it. I've got with a fitness guy, literally, I pay him like $300 a month just to look at my macros, you know, just to look at my calories. That's it. So just by tracking it and putting it in my fitness palettes helped. And so with Tom off, it literally has been the thing that they say. Yeah, Bradley gave us an idea of like what it needed to be, but honestly, like all I do is just make sure I try. Did I take that Saturday off? Yes or no? No, I didn't. Okay. Well then you didn't. And so how many did you actually take off in 2023? And most business owners are like, I have no clue how much I took off. No clue. And so that's the biggest, biggest thing there.

33:11 Bradley, I love it. For those listening, execute, implement this strategy and I do feel like you will feel a lot more comfortable with your balance. Because if you're not balanced with your family, with yourself, it does make it very hard to continue to execute on a high level. And everyone I know that executes on a very high level does take time for themselves and does take these breaks because without the energy, you can't execute the right way. Bradley. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with our community and I love, love, love the content you helped produce with me on this thing. I do think it's a huge value to those listening and so thanks again, appreciate it.

33:51 Todd, thank you so much for the opportunity. Great questions. You're a pro.

33:55 Thanks so much, and we'll catch up with the rest of you on the next episode. Thank you Bradley.