From Rainmaker to Architect of Your Business, with Bradley Hamner

[00:00:03] [SPEAKER_01] Welcome to the HCI family of podcasts. We're your source for personal, professional, and organizational growth and development. We share our own original research, explore industry trends, and interview executives and thought leaders from across the globe. Join us for practitioner-oriented content around all things leadership, HR, talent management, organizational development, and change management. Maximize your personal and organizational potential with the HCI family of podcasts.

[00:00:36] [SPEAKER_01] Bradley Hamner, welcome to the conversation today. John, it's great to be with you. It is a pleasure to be with you. You're joining us from Alabama. I'm south of Salt Lake City in Utah. Today we're going to be talking a lot about one of the things you explore a lot, the Rainmaker's dilemma from Rainmaker to Architect of Your Business, and really just how to systematize what you do in your business, the blueprint for really how to get there.

[00:01:01] [SPEAKER_01] I really appreciate you taking the time. It's taken a while for us to sit down and get together. We've had to postpone this, and we've had it on the schedule for a long time. And then just even today, we're having this massive storm where I'm at, and the power went out, and it's going to be out all day. And so I had to hop on late as I was trying to figure out how to make this work.

[00:01:25] [SPEAKER_01] And the universe is conspiring against us to try to make this conversation not happen. But here we are. We're able to sit down. We're going to have this conversation. I'm so thrilled to be able to sit down with you. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the conversation. It's just a pleasure to have you.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_02] Well, it's good to be with you. And I think that that's actually probably an example of what business owners and leaders and organizations face all the time. It just seems like there's actually a never-ending amount of challenges and setbacks. And the moment that you feel like that you actually have gotten things and you're on top of it, you know, a team member resigns, right? One of your key team members resigns. One of your largest accounts actually, you know,

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_02] says that they're going to scale back or they're going to, you know, leave and go with someone else. And I just think that that's – we actually have a maxim that says business is hard and it gets harder. And so for business owners that are trying to get their business to a million dollars in top-line revenue, as an example, it is really hard to get it to that point. And then to be able to get it to three million dollars and they think, if I can just get on this – the other side of this hill, things are going to get easier.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_02] But the reality is the challenges and the things that you, you know, deal with on a day-to-day basis, they just get larger. You just have more team members and there's more issues that come up within that. And so I think that's just kind of a microcosm of kind of what leaders and business owners deal with.

[00:02:57] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, yeah. Well said. Well, Bradley, as we get started, I just wanted to share your bio with the audience today. Bradley is the founder and CEO of Blueprint OS, creator of the Scale Assessment, author of Scale, and host of the Above the Business podcast. He guides small business owners doing between $300K to $3 million in annual revenue to transition from being the rainmaker, where everything depends on them,

[00:03:27] [SPEAKER_01] to becoming the architect of a scalable, self-sustaining, and profitable business. The ultimate outcome? A business where the owners have successfully – have a successful business that creates the freedom and flexibility they desired from the start. I think that is awesome. And I think that's something that everyone ultimately desires. I mean, there are definitely people that just love the startup space and they just love the energy of it. They love kind of the frantic nature of it.

[00:03:55] [SPEAKER_01] And I know people that go from startup to startup to startup, and that's just the space in the world that they live in. But a lot of people, they start a business because that's their dream. They want to start the business. They want to develop the business. They want to grow the business. And eventually, they want to have that – what you just described in your bio. Like what – that's their end goal, right? And they want to have that freedom. They want to have that lifestyle.

[00:04:23] [SPEAKER_01] And it's a very different thing to start a business and to be scrappy and to just work your butt off, to make things happen at the beginning stages, to then grow and scale and make it sustainable in the long run. Two very different types of things, right? And that's something that I think so many early-stage businesses and founders just really, really struggle with.

[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, they do. And I want to give credit to Michael Gerber who wrote the book The E-Myth, which probably should be almost required reading before you start a business. And I think he was able to articulate that challenge and that paradox really well where someone is really good – like he portrays in the book, someone's really good at baking pies or somebody who's a really good plumber. And they say, you know what? I don't really want to do this. I don't want to report to somebody anymore. I think I'm going to go out and kind of start my own thing.

[00:05:20] [SPEAKER_02] And so he refers to that as the technician. And so how do you actually step in and become the architect of the business? And he's the one that really kind of introduced us to the idea that, hey, you've got to work on the business and not in the business. And I totally agree with him. Just think that there's also indeed a third dimension that we have to kind of get to, and that is called Getting Above the Business.

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_02] And that's why my podcast is actually called Above the Business. And so I think people listening to this, even if they're driving home from work, the idea, my hope is, is that people kind of – they're able to not just – you're not working on the business listening to this podcast. You're kind of getting above the business whenever you do that. And there's other avenues to be able to do it. And I think as business owners, we kind of – you know, we don't just always stay above the business and we don't just always stay on it.

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_02] We're in it at times for sure. But I think it's do you – can you allocate some of your time to be on it? Can you allocate some of your time to be above it? And can you allocate some of your time to be in it? And if you're in the business, we would consider that to be kind of operating as the rainmaker of the business. You know, that includes not just being the chief sales officer, but the fact that just really everything depends upon you.

[00:06:45] [SPEAKER_02] And then the transition you have to make is what we call becoming the architect of the business. And so at the end of the day, I'll give – really give credit a lot to Gerber and his book because I think he really gave some language and some vernacular around something that business owners for years were really struggling with and they didn't know necessarily how to, you know, not completely remove themselves. I think that there is some people that maybe desire that.

[00:07:13] [SPEAKER_02] We actually do not talk about or pretend to present that you're going to build this in a way. You're going to systemize it in a way that you completely remove yourself. I mean, for goodness sakes.

[00:07:25] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

[00:07:26] [SPEAKER_02] You've got a $1 to $3 million business, okay? This – you can get to if you get to $10 million and $20 million, $30 million, maybe even beyond that. Yeah, you can get to a place, I guess, to where you sit in a board seat, okay? You're not in it, on it. You've hired a CEO. You don't – you're able to take a six-month vacation. And there's a lot of other people in programs that talk about that to do it. That is not what we do.

[00:07:51] [SPEAKER_02] We just want to be able to take a four-day weekend when it's Labor Day, as an example. Right, right, right. Okay? Can I take off on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and not feel like I actually have to take my computer all the time? That I have to be responding to Slack messages, text, emails from clients, et cetera. Can I just take a doggone break? Can I take a week-long vacation in the summertime? Can I not miss my kids' football and dance recitals, et cetera? I think that's what we end up talking about a lot with business owners.

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_01] Well, right. And let's talk about that for a minute because that's the hard thing when you're in the startup space, early stage. I mean, you're working crazy hours, right? You're in that Rainmaker space. Yep. Yeah, not only just crazy hours, but weekends, holidays. Yep. You know, are you taking vacations truly without checking your messages, constantly taking calls?

[00:08:51] [SPEAKER_01] That's just the reality. So as much as you might try to have some form of work-life integration, work-life balance, you know, whatever framing you want to use, it's just a really hard thing when you're starting a business, right? Yeah. And when you are in the startup space. And so one of the things as you develop and you make a business more sustainable and you start to move along that path,

[00:09:16] [SPEAKER_01] as you were describing, is you start to create the opportunity for you to just have a little bit more balance, you know? Like for you to be able to take a vacation, like truly, for you to be able to have a long weekend, for you to be able to like actually hand off the baton so you can go home at six o'clock, you know? And you don't have to like worry about everything all the time, right? Yeah, that's exactly right.

[00:09:39] [SPEAKER_02] And I think that's an important distinction that we actually in, you know, one of our programs, but just in general believe is that you are the Rainmaker up until about a half a million dollars in annual revenue. That's the number where it needs to start shifting. The pain point that we typically see where business owners hit the ceiling, and it is a glass ceiling to be fair, it is not a permanent ceiling, is somewhere in that $500,000 to about a million dollar range, okay?

[00:10:09] [SPEAKER_02] I've seen, you know, one or two people be able to really rain make that thing through their willpower just north of seven figures. But at some point, that stops working. The levers that you pull to get the thing to first $10,000 a month, then $25,000 a month, and then $40,000 a month, they stop working. And see, the problem is, is that they did work to get the business off the ground initially.

[00:10:39] [SPEAKER_02] But as Goldsmith says, what got you to this point is not going to get you here. And that fundamentally is the case. So we do not believe, now, if you're an experienced entrepreneur, you've done this before, you have multiple businesses, then you can start off and get a business off the ground with systems and with a team and with AI leverage now these days. You can do that, and you're really the architect of the business from the jump. Yes, that absolutely is the case.

[00:11:07] [SPEAKER_02] But if this is your first rodeo, you are. It's a ragtag group of people, okay? You know, you're figuring it out along the way. You're figuring out your offers. You're figuring out how marketing works. You're figuring out how to sell and position yourself. You're figuring out how to actually deliver and fulfill on what you do. You're figuring out financials, you know, for the first time. You're figuring out you've hired your first people, people who start asking for time off. You don't know how to do handbooks. You don't know how to do policies.

[00:11:36] [SPEAKER_02] All of these things are trying to figure it out. And so where that typically the thing is, hey, let's just go. We'll market. We'll throw some, you know, marketing on the wall. See what sticks. We'll sell what we can sell. I'll kind of halfway train some people, you know, and we can get, we can kind of get the thing to about $500, $750 million. But at some point that stops working. It stops working.

[00:11:58] [SPEAKER_02] And so the idea of creating systems and developing people is not some like earth, you know, shattering idea. Business owners get that. If you've been in business for any amount of time, you've heard people talk about that before. That was my story, Jonathan. John, sorry, excuse me. That was my story. I heard that for years. I'd been in business for five years.

[00:12:25] [SPEAKER_02] You know, you need to have systems and I would go to meetings and I would talk to somebody about like, oh man, he keeps talking about a system. He's got a sales system. I need to get my hands on his sales system. And then I would, I'd finally get him to send it to me. And I'm like, there's no way this is what he's talking about. Like, this is like a half a page thing. I was looking for something, something a lot more. And so, you know, I finally, I burned out. 34 years old, 2015. In 15, I had to go see a cardiologist. Like I was having panic attacks.

[00:12:53] [SPEAKER_02] I had one business doing between $500,000 and $600,000 a year. And I hit the ceiling, okay, at that point. And I was completely burnt out. The whole thing was dependent upon me. The entire business was in my head or maybe in the head of a handful of a couple key team members, okay? And then I'd have turnover and I'd watch that intellectual property walk out the door.

[00:13:15] [SPEAKER_02] And it wasn't until I was in strategic coach in Toronto, sitting next to a financial advisor who had, he said, we were actually doing the exercise. 10X is easier than 2X. And he said, well, last year I did 40 million and I made 5 million personally. I was like, wait, how much? You did how much? That's not what I expected. And he said, look, man, it's just systems and processes and you got to have a good team.

[00:13:42] [SPEAKER_02] And at that point, because I had been really frustrated and was considering going back to corporate America, I kind of smarted off to him and said, man, I'm so sick and tired of people saying that. And nobody ever shows me what it actually looks like. And he says, well, hey, at lunch, I'll show you. And that changed my life forever. I tell people I flew up the Rainmaker. I flew back the architect. Now, it wasn't that he gave me templates. Okay.

[00:14:08] [SPEAKER_02] But what he did do, he pulled up, he pulled up his Word documents and he said, well, you know, this is, this is what we do. This is kind of who we are. This is how we market. This is how we sell. This is how we deliver. And it just comes going through. And I was like, oh, that's actually what it looks like. And so, yes, I did get back on the plane. And on the way home, I saw the, you know, blank, you know, blinking cursor on a blank Word document.

[00:14:34] [SPEAKER_02] And I was like, I don't even know where to begin, you know, but I tried and it took me a long time. I mean, now with AI, it's obviously is a lot better, but a lot faster to be able to do it. But that was really uniquely, you know, my story. And it took me a long time to really actually try to figure out, okay, how do you actually create systems? How do you actually document what we do? What do I actually do? I have no idea how I actually sell. We don't have a sales process in place. We don't have scripts in place.

[00:15:04] [SPEAKER_02] So, I mean, it took a really long time to be able to do that. But after that, we had some, obviously had some really, really good years. And I've been able to, you know, be a part of several businesses since then.

[00:15:13] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, yeah. So, I'm glad you shared that story. Well, both stories. The half-pager, you know, system story that was, you know, kind of bunk. And then the kind of the real story. Because, yeah, everyone is out there selling, you know, their system, right? And go to my workshop, take my master class on my system, whatever. And a lot of those, you know, aren't anything, right? And that's what you had experienced.

[00:15:42] [SPEAKER_01] And that's why you were so frustrated. And so, for anyone in the audience who's like hearing this and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. System, system, system. Everyone has their sales system. Everyone has their coaching system. Everyone has their whatever, whatever, whatever. Sure. That's not what we're talking about. Like, we're talking about like actual real systems, systematizing processes. And it starts with like really understanding how the work is designed, right? Yep.

[00:16:10] [SPEAKER_01] And actually really understanding how the processes are designed so that you can replicate them and you can scale them, right? Yep. And there's no like, one of the things that's really important to understand is like there's no, every organization's different. Even if you're in the same industry, even if you're in the same kind of type of business, like I can't off the shelf give you your system, right?

[00:16:36] [SPEAKER_01] You have to be able to sit down and do the work of like trying to figure out what is your system? What are your processes? What, like what actually, how do you actually get stuff done in your organization so you can systematize it and then you can scale it, right? There's no magic half pager or page thing that you can do. There's no magic off the shelf thing that can be applied uniformly across all businesses to all of a sudden help you, you know, 10X your sales or whatever. Like those, those things are like magic beans.

[00:17:06] [SPEAKER_01] They don't like really work or do anything. Um, yet people will be happy to sell you their, their magic system, uh, you know, all, all you're willing to pay for it. But, um, yeah, what you're talking about is, is different and, and it's, it's doing the work of actually like thinking through systematically, like what your business is actually all about. So you can, you can actually, uh, understand how it works and actually start to replicate it. Right.

[00:17:32] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, that's exactly right. So one of our other maxims is show me, don't tell me. Okay. And so we call out our business owners on this all the time. I think we've done a decent job, you know, when people come in like, Hey, we're going to hold you accountable to some of these things. Okay. This is important to us. It is not enough for the idea of this stuff to get transferred over. We want to see assets in the business. Okay. Show me, share your screen. Let me see the Google doc.

[00:18:03] [SPEAKER_02] I mean, let, let us actually see it. Okay. What, what's your sales process? What, walk me through that. And then they start walking me through and I'm like, great. Email it to me. Let me see it. Well, I don't really, I don't have that. You know, it's like, you don't have it. You, you, you don't have it. And people again, want to transfer knowledge over. And this, by the way, is not to say that you have to McDonald's. I want to, I want to make sure that we go and we thread the needle between these two things. Okay. Two things can be true at the same time.

[00:18:33] [SPEAKER_02] You need documentation, a Google doc, a word document, Google sheet, you know, Excel spreadsheets. You need assets. Okay. Period. Income follows assets in the business. But that being said, we do not have to go as far in McDonald's the business. Okay. That concept is cute. They are McDonald's. You're a one to $3 million business. You have somewhere between five and 12 team members. You do not need to McDonald's the entire thing.

[00:19:02] [SPEAKER_02] Let's start with what, what is our marketing messaging? Let's start with how we sell. And let's start, uh, start with how we actually fulfill on what we do. And then we can get in to all the other things beyond all of that. But let's start with the major big things. And that's where, you know, typically like a sales document sales process is going to be, you know, three to four to pages long. Some, some framework that you sell off of.

[00:19:32] [SPEAKER_02] It doesn't have to even be a sales script per se. You know, a lot of business owners reject against that. Totally fine. But it's gotta be some sales framework that you offer, operate off of. Okay. Some sales methodology that you subscribe to because otherwise, how are you going to scale beyond one or two sales reps? If you really want to grow the business to four to five to six, you know, sales reps to actually really be able to get the freedom and flexibility that you, that you ultimately want.

[00:20:00] [SPEAKER_02] And so there's this big middle ground where we don't have to go and McDonald's into a 72 page or 150 page three ring binder. Okay. That nobody looks at. That's not what we're talking about either. And then on the other side, you cannot wing it forever. It's not going to work. Now, here's what is really key about this. And I haven't actually talked about this on the podcast very much. I think I probably should.

[00:20:27] [SPEAKER_02] But when people maybe listen to me on this, and I don't know, are you familiar with Colby, the Colby personality test?

[00:20:35] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:36] [SPEAKER_02] Okay. So when people listen to my podcast or come to some of our stuff or hear me talk about these things and they see some of our documentation, they get this impression that I personally am some systemized, organized, structured, disciplined person. Okay. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am as classic entrepreneurial ADD as there is out there.

[00:21:07] [SPEAKER_02] As evidenced by my Colby score, I'm a 4-2-10-2. My quick start is a 10. You cannot get higher than a 10. Okay. So I am like all over the board. As I've been talking to you, I've been like, would type something down. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's a good. I need to actually do a podcast on that. You know, like I'm over here multitasking, you know, thinking about like my own podcast while I'm talking to you, not out of disrespect, but like that's just my ADD brain. Right. Right.

[00:21:33] [SPEAKER_02] And so I want to say that everything, what I had to come to this like realization is that everything I wanted in the business, fun, freedom, flexibility, and let me get very blunt, financial success, a certain level of financial success. Okay. Everything I wanted was on the other side of me developing the skills and the understanding

[00:21:59] [SPEAKER_02] of actually how to create documentation into the business, how to actually create structure, how to create routine, how to actually do this instead of me just winging it all the time. Okay. I had to face that this is a weakness. I do not know how to do this, but I need to overcome this. Okay. I've got it to a certain point. Great. That's willpower, determination, ambition, et cetera. That has a ceiling. I do not know how to actually do some of these things.

[00:22:28] [SPEAKER_02] Let me actually figure out how to do it. And so, uh, I've built this entire system. I built the blueprint methodology really to solve my own problem, to be fair. And initially. Okay. It was like, I don't, I read all these books. I've got hundreds of books on the other side here. Uh, I read all these books. I don't know where to put this stuff. I get these ideas. Where do I put this? I don't even know what to do with this. I created this document. Where does that go? How does my team find it? These are all things that I was really struggling with, John, that I needed to figure out.

[00:22:58] [SPEAKER_02] And it's because I'm not this disciplined, structured person that I needed to create it. Not because I am.

[00:23:08] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's also probably pretty typical for entrepreneurs and for founders, right? It is. Very much so. What you're describing. Like just the type of person who will tend to kind of take these risks and who will tend to kind of shun like the safety of corporate America, you know, of like established jobs with an established organization and like all that kind of stuff.

[00:23:32] [SPEAKER_01] So you think about, yeah, the typology and like the characteristics of those types of people. And I think you disproportionately are probably going to have, you know, like that personality type and those types of characteristics in founders and in, you know, uh, you know, people who are in start in the startup space generally, but also those who are scaling businesses and whatnot. So I don't think what you're describing is atypical at all, which probably is all the

[00:23:59] [SPEAKER_01] reason why, you know, systematizing is even more important because we tend to get scattered, you know, cause we're, we're chasing ideas and you were like squirrels, you know, like, like chasing, chasing ideas all over the place.

[00:24:11] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, that's very true. You know, there was a, this, this was a few years ago. Um, we, we, we actually never had this as an offer, um, admittedly, and I'm glad, glad we didn't, but there's a reason beyond the complexity of it, that reason we didn't do this, but I had, had a client. It was actually a private client. And, uh, we were talking about his, his blueprint. We were talking about his operating system. We can get into in a minute, by the way, what I'm specifically mean by blueprint.

[00:24:39] [SPEAKER_02] It's actually three specific things or three components. So we can talk about that in a second. So I, uh, I don't know. I kind of felt compelled to help this guy. I mean, he was one of my private clients. I, I worked with about five or six private clients at a time. And, and, uh, I was like, you know what? I think, I think we could do this. I think it would be a good case study. And so I kind of took on, which this bad idea, um, this was not a good, good idea on

[00:25:05] [SPEAKER_02] our own, on my end took on this idea of like basically systemizing the business for him. Okay. And so, uh, he doesn't live too far away. And so I had him send, you know, all of his actual literal paper documentation, which he had a ton of any, any, any brought it and it was like multiple three ring binders. He'll plopped it on the, on the kitchen table. And I was like, wow, this is, this is a lot in that moment. I was like, this is a bad idea. I shouldn't have done this.

[00:25:36] [SPEAKER_02] And then I had him send all of this digital documentation, which, you know, to be honest with you, wasn't as much as I thought it was going to be. It was a lot more paper. And so, uh, we started down the process. I got my team involved and we basically scanned in all of that, what he, what he currently had. And then of course, you know, luckily we're able to use some AI. We started to kind of put it all together, right? Things he'd already had. So, uh, we call those Rembrandts in the attic. Basically he had some decent stuff.

[00:26:06] [SPEAKER_02] He just had it all over the place. I mean, he had sales assets over here. He had some marketing stuff over there, et cetera. So anyway, this, this takes like three months to do this basically. Okay. And so we're putting it all together and we finally kind of get it into this one master, you know, a file effectively. And then we get it printed off. We get it, uh, three ring bound and we deliver over to him this business blueprint, three ring

[00:26:33] [SPEAKER_02] binder, and then this digital, you know, basically word document version of it as well. Okay. It looks good. It all has got the same font. It's got the right things into it. It's organized into our methodology. It's great. He was blown away. He was blown away. The problem with that, the problem with pushing that easy button, John, is that it was our

[00:27:02] [SPEAKER_02] interpretation of a lot of things. And he needed to go through, not necessarily the sitting in front of the word document, but he really needed to understand it because now he doesn't really own it. Right. And that's the part of the whole deal that I look back on and was like, yeah, we could easily. In fact, I've seen people on meta and other things talk about this. Hey, give us two weeks and we'll systemize your entire business. We could do that.

[00:27:31] [SPEAKER_02] I don't want to do it because I don't think that the business owner owns the methodology. They don't own like, that makes sense. This is our marketing playbook. This is our sales playbook. They don't own it. And so they, it goes back to the same thing. They can't transfer it to other people in the organization. And so we never ended up offering that. So I just want to give that as an extreme example of like why you as the architect of the business need to have some involvement.

[00:28:00] [SPEAKER_02] It does not mean that you're sitting in front of your computer at 2 a.m. Pulling up Word documents, okay? And typing into them. So I hope that that nuance and that specific example is helpful for you and your audience about kind of what your role in this actually needs to be.

[00:28:17] [SPEAKER_01] No, that makes perfect sense to me. I've seen similar types of things play out with clients and with organizations in the past. And in fact, one of the things that came to my mind as you were describing that was also how we can fall into that same trap as we use AI as well. Yeah. So AI is a fantastic tool to help us with all of this.

[00:28:43] [SPEAKER_01] You know, we can set up like a cloud project and we can start to put in documents and it can help us so much. So I'm not trying to say don't use it. I'm just saying if we completely – if it's like this client who gives you all of their stuff and just says take it, do it, give me back a system and they're not involved and they just want you to give it back to them and then they just take it and they're not involved in the process. Yeah. Yeah. They don't know what's there. They don't own it. They're not part of it.

[00:29:12] [SPEAKER_01] They have no shared ownership over it. And it can be the same thing as we work with AI sometimes. So that would be a caveat and a caution, you know, that I would give to people. Absolutely use AI. It's a great tool. It can really help you to go about doing this with your business. But you got to be engaged in that process. I totally agree with that. With the AI. Otherwise, you're going to end up with something that looks really great. And perhaps it is great.

[00:29:39] [SPEAKER_01] And perhaps it is, you know, just in perfect alignment with your business and what you need to be doing. But you're not actually going to fully understand it. You're not going to fully, like, align with it. You're not going to fully buy into it or feel like you own it. And it's just going to be something that's going to look really nice and polished that's going to end up sitting somewhere in a folder on your computer. And you're not going to use it, right?

[00:30:02] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I think I really like the concept of the 1080-10 rule when it comes to business in general. But I think it's super applicable with AI for sure. Because, like, if you, you know, let's say, you know, I probably would say more realistically, I probably spend more like 20% to 25% on the front side on AI with a lot of prompts.

[00:30:27] [SPEAKER_02] Like, I personally like to whisper flow into whatever AI tool. You know, Claude is predominantly the LLM I use. But I'll whisper flow. I'll go on a walk. And I'll just whisper flow that for probably an hour, my thoughts on whatever concept or thing that we're working on. And then, boom, AI just has so much of my context, my way of thinking, my experiences, et cetera.

[00:30:57] [SPEAKER_02] So I'm really trying to give it as much context about this particular topic, what's worked, what hasn't worked, et cetera. So it probably operates a lot more like 20% or 25% on the front side. Then the AI is going to go do the bulk, right? It's going to organize. It's going to kind of pull. And maybe it can, you know, go do some research for you and kind of pull in examples, anecdotes, maybe articles, et cetera. So I think that's where AI is good.

[00:31:20] [SPEAKER_02] The problem has been on the backside where I initially would see the output and be like, wow, this is great. And then just hit the copy button and you throw it over into a document. And then what happens is the AI just adds so much often fluff, okay, to it where now I will really spend a lot more time on the editing, cutting. That's unnecessary. Okay. That's not how I would say that.

[00:31:47] [SPEAKER_02] Cut it, cut it, cut it, cut it, cut it to where then when I deliver it, it's like, yeah, this is actually how I would actually say this. Okay. How I would actually say this. You know, we had a, I had somebody that was, would take my podcast episodes and we would repurpose them to a lot of different areas. But one of the ones that we would do is write emails, right? Okay. And so she would take my transcript from Riverside, throw it into Claude. Yeah, she had trained it, et cetera.

[00:32:16] [SPEAKER_02] And then Claude was producing the email. I'll be honest with you. It wasn't very good. I mean, it was fine, but it wasn't great. And the person that does that now for my team, she has, I didn't know this for a long time, but I finally talked to her and I was like, you know, Jen, your email's really good. Like, these are really good emails. Matter of fact, I think your email's better than what I said, actually. Like you, you, you did a really great job.

[00:32:44] [SPEAKER_02] And, you know, she said, I said, are you using AI for that? She goes, well, yeah, sorta. But I am leveraging it a little bit because it helps me to kind of interpret the big idea you're trying to get across. But she said, you know, I'm actually really writing it. And man, our open rates, our read rates, our click-through rates, everything is so much better because there's a human involved. And I like this idea of AI squared. Like actual intelligence plus artificial intelligence.

[00:33:10] [SPEAKER_02] Like that's, and in particular for business owners, super valuable because what they're doing, and I've been guilty of this is what we're talking about, just outsourcing the whole thinking to the AI. And that just does not, does not work. Have you seen that?

[00:33:26] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I completely agree. So, yeah, taking it, using it, having it help you, you know, categorize, sift through, even do some research thematically, you know, all that kind of stuff. But then you're doing the thinking, you're doing the writing, you're doing the evaluating, you're using your judgment, you know, and human in the loop. It's human, it's augmentation around your human creativity and judgment. That's where the magic can happen with it.

[00:33:56] [SPEAKER_01] Um, so your assistant or colleague, you know, who is doing that, uh, absolutely. You know, chef's kiss. That's, that's, that's the best way to do it.

[00:34:05] [SPEAKER_02] No doubt about it. No doubt about it.

[00:34:07] [SPEAKER_01] Well, this has just been a fascinating conversation, Bradley. Um, I know we could go on and on. Uh, I know at the time I probably need to let you go here in a minute, but before we wrap things up, I just wanted to give you a chance to, to share with the audience how they can connect with you, how they can, uh, find out more about your work, your team, where they can find your book. Your podcast, uh, and then give us the final word for today.

[00:34:30] [SPEAKER_02] Okay. Yep. A couple of things. I appreciate that. It's great being with you, uh, John. Uh, so a few things that you can, uh, find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, of course, just search Bradley Hamner, uh, or the above the business podcast, um, on all of those platforms. I've had the podcast since late 2019. So I think we're up to probably 600 episodes or so at this point. So a lot on there, a lot of context for them to be able to kind of go in. We'll do some interviews from time to time.

[00:35:00] [SPEAKER_02] Other times I just do, uh, some solo episodes about helping business owners that, uh, you know, are wanting to get to a million to 3 million, uh, to be able to kind of transition from being that rainmaker to become the architect and, and installing a blueprint. Um, I'm on Instagram. We started posting on Instagram not long ago, probably way behind on that than what we should have. So Bradley G Hamner on Instagram. So they can certainly follow me on there. Um, but look, if they would like to, we found this interesting.

[00:35:29] [SPEAKER_02] The best place for us to start is, is, uh, go to, go to the website. A couple of things. Uh, one, they can book in a game plan call on that, um, 45 minute game plan call. We, we really do a diagnostic. We really try to find out a lot about where the business is today. We call that point a, and, uh, we find out a lot about where the business owner really wants to go. We call that point B and we kind of give them a, you know, effectively a game plan of, uh, exactly what we think that that would actually look like.

[00:35:56] [SPEAKER_02] And if they are interested in, you know, actually implementing that plan, then we can, um, talk to them about, uh, uh, uh, number of our programs. We really have three main programs. We've got a path to 1 million, a blueprint and a boardroom program, but, uh, we can get into all of those different things and, and recommendations on, on programs. And offers if, uh, if that's something interesting. And after they get kind of access to their, uh, to their game plan, uh, through one of our calls.

[00:36:21] [SPEAKER_02] Um, also, uh, some of the assets that we have, if they, uh, you know, want to actually kind of see what does the overall operating system? Um, you know, structure look like what's the blueprint structure look like. If they go to blueprintOS, uh, dot com forward slash assets, uh, they can go and get access to my Rainmaker to Architect toolkit. It's in our circle community. We've got some videos, we've got some, um, assets in there that they can take a peek at. And I think it'd be helpful, uh, to them. So, um, like I said, look, uh, earlier business is hard and it gets harder.

[00:36:51] [SPEAKER_02] As a matter of fact, 96% of small businesses never see their 10th birthday and 91% of businesses never cross a million dollars in, in top line revenue. And, uh, w w what we do and helping them to go from a record architect and installing a blueprint is effectively trying to beat those odds. And, uh, that's actually what we call our in-person retreats. We'll call them beat the odds retreats.

[00:37:16] [SPEAKER_02] And so, uh, we'd love to sit down and chat with, uh, some of your listening audience has been great being with you.

[00:37:22] [SPEAKER_01] Awesome. Awesome. Bradley, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I encourage the audience to reach out, get connected, find out more about what Bradley and his team can do for you. Check out all the resources. And as always, I hope everyone can stay healthy and safe that you can find meaning and purpose at work each and every day. And I hope you all have a great week. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the podcast. We hope you stay healthy and safe and please join us again soon.