Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Bradley Hamner Creator & Founder of BlueprintOS

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

Bradley is a Business Growth Coach. certified Value Builder, creator of The Rainmaker to Architect Assessment, and host of the Above The Business Podcast. Each week, he shows other entrepreneurs & business owners how to install the systems, processes, and routines their business needs to grow and scale. The ultimate outcome? Business owners have a successful business that creates the freedom and flexibility they desired from the start.Bradley started his first business in 2009 with no customers, no leads and very little cash but he did have a desire to win and succeed. After being successful early in his career in sales, Bradley believed that his ability to be the Rainmaker for the business would be enough to grow and scale. That however, proved not to be the case.From 2009 – 2014 after seemingly working around the clock. With young children at home, endless rescheduled appointments and tee-offs, and hitting an invisible barrier to personal and business growth, Bradley knew something had to change.After a stress-related health scare at the age of 34, this change finally happened. Bradley began to build himself first as a leader, and then he focused on restructuring his business. He learned how to “architect” the business to work for him, not the other way around. This led him to design the ultimate operating system for business owners – BlueprintOS. This framework has empowered business owners to move successfully from rainmaker to architect in their business.Learn more: https://www.blueprintos.com/assetsInfluential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-bradley-hamner-creator-founder-of-blueprintos

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with this Bradley, who's the creator and founder of LeafrinOS. Bradley, welcome to the program. Mike, it's pleasure to be with.

you. You know, I love, I always love to comment on like, oh, look, the name of your company is this or you created this product called that. And it's just really neat to kind of get those first impressions. And I love the word blueprint because I am not an engineer, but I love to follow the process. It's like, if you want me to do something, give me a checklist. I can check off one, two, three. So I'm excited to hear about, you know, the blueprint operating system that you've created. But before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your background and your story and how did you come to? And how did you come to? You know, the blueprint operating system that you've created. But before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your background and your story. And how did you come to you come to. create your firm. Well, I knew when I was in college. I wanted to get into management consulting, but I had this dreamt it that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, a business owner briefly, but I just didn't know what that was going to look like. My dad's a small business owner in agriculture and ultimately I found my way into my first business. And I really had two skills. I knew how to work hard because I really picked up from my dad what it actually means to work I mean, when you're in agriculture, you know, you're planting and harvesting into the middle of the night, certainly into the weekends.

And so I really didn't. My dad didn't teach me that, but I picked it up from him of what it actually takes to work hard. So I had that one. So I knew how to work hard. And I knew how to sell. At least I knew how to sell one to one because previously my jobs before I started my business was in sales. And so I had those two things. And it worked, like, beautifully, up into the point.

It didn't. And I really simply ran out of time. And so a lot of my story is not because things were not working. It's actually because things were working. Well, then when you're starting to pull the lever and the only lever you have to pull on is to work more hours. And then when that blends into seven days a week all the time, you're eventually going to burn out. And that is exactly simply what happened to me. Fortunately, I mean, you know, I could say, oh, the light bulb went off.

But it did take some time and I really didn't know what the other options were. As a matter of fact, I ended up, I even explored going back into the corporate world. I did not have an offer, but I had, I knew that I could step back into specifically pharmaceuticals, go be a manager. I have five years of business experience at that point and could make a couple hundred thousand dollar base salary, 401K, company car, and just be fine. So I knew I could go back to that. but I knew I needed to do something different. I just honestly did not know what the different was. I mean, again, if you just know how to sell, you know how to make everything dependent

upon you and you just know how to work hard, you don't really have any other levers to pull until I went away into Toronto, met an entrepreneur, and we're doing, we're actually, to be honest with you, at Strategic Coach, doing the 10x exercise. Dan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy have actually come out of with a book about this now. which is a fantastic book, 10x is easier than 2x. And he said something to me that day that changed my life. He said, look, Bradley, we did 40 million in revenue. Last year, I made 5 million personally.

First of all, nobody had ever shared those types of numbers with me that openly. And he said, look, it's just systems and processes. And I probably said something I shouldn't have said at the time. Like, man, I am so sick and tired of hearing people. People say that and nobody ever shows me what that actually looks like. He said, you know what? I'll show you at lunch. And he did.

And that is the moment everything changed. You know, and I think you're exactly right that it sounds so, you know, you hear people in the marketing space and you're like, oh, I sent out one email and I made a gazillion trillion dollars. And it's like, yeah, but you spent 20 years cultivating that email list and providing high value. And then when you do send out that one email, they're ready for it. And it's like what you just experienced is like, oh, look at operations and systems. But what is it? What does that look like? And when someone pulls back the curtain and you're like, okay, I see what that is now.

I see the framework for your business. I'll bet you you can apply that same framework to this industry, that industry. And then that comes to be the playbooks that you work in, right? Is that kind of how that started off? Yeah, 100%. I mean, obviously didn't have any of the language around that. It was just, I saw for the first time what it actually looked like. It was almost like in The Wizard of Oz, they pull back the curtain.

And I was like, yo, I see. But in this case, instead of it being the Wizard of Oz and it's something small, I actually saw, number one, I saw how beautiful the documents were. Number two, I saw how easy they were to understand. And he said, Bradley, I got my business out of my head. See, up to that point, I mean, look, I'd been in business for a few years. You can't be in business very long without hearing people say, lucky, you got to have systems and processes and you've got to have a good team. But it was like, okay, great, I understand that.

That makes sense. But like, how do you do that? And Mike, this is important. See, I got into business. And the reason I didn't want to stay in the corporate world is because I just didn't want to be told what to do. Meaning what I'm in is freedom and flexibility. That's what I wanted.

I wanted freedom and flexibility and income potential. Yet, as an entrepreneur, I would hear things, systems, process, structure, routine, and I would subconsciously push against that. So I started to realize, wait a minute, there's a, there's a dilemma that's happening here. I don't want these things. Yet the business in my team, especially, was basically silently screaming for it, right? They got to have this.

And I really started to kind of recognize. I was like, oh, everything I want is on the other side of structure and process and routine. So I want to go back to actually your opening statement is that I back then and even today, people think that I'm, you know, very process oriented, et cetera. Well, I have learned to be that way. But naturally, I'm an ADD all over the board entrepreneur. And so I'm not naturally that way, but I recognize everything I want is on the other side of that. You know, you mentioned a few things that made me think of SOPs standard operating procedures.

And I think that that's a part of what you talk about, of course. But it's almost like that's the tactical side of a playbook and a blueprint because it's like, okay, once you have the 30,000 foot strategy, the blueprint or the playbook, then what do you do? Oh, well, that's the SOPs. The first thing you do is this. than the second thing. So compare a playbook to an SOP. Yeah, great. They're the exact same thing. We do not use SOP language. In fact, this brings up a really, really great point is that in my journey, my own journey that was on, I started to get confused. So again, I'm coming off of being, meeting this guy in Toronto. I start to actually say, okay, now I can't just hear this stuff. I got to

start doing it. Well, okay, well, I start, do a quick Google search today. One thing that somebody calls a process, somebody else calls a system. And then somebody else calls it an SOP and somebody calls it a playbook and they're like, oh my gosh, do I need, is it one playbook? Is it 25? How many systems is it, et cetera? So in our world, we use naming conventions very seriously.

Like, meaning if one thing is a school board, that is a school board, this is a dashboard. these are school cards. Very distinct differences as an example. So in our world, we have five principals. Every principal has three playbooks. That means your entire business runs off 15 playbooks, not 72, not 420, not not one. There's 15 playbucks. And what is a playbook in our world? it is a collection of your systems and your process. Let me give you an example of a system and a process. What you call your entire recruiting, your recruiting system. An example of a process would be your 15 minute phone interview process, then your in-person interview process, etc.

Does that make sense, Mike? Yeah. And I think that that simplifies things. and I think, I'm sure you've read the book by Donald Miller. Oh, boy, the name just left me, but he says, when you confuse, you lose. Yeah. You know, building a story brand, building the story brand. But one of the takeaways that I've always remembered from that is when you confuse, you lose.

And Albert Einstein is one of the quotes that he's known for saying is if you can't explain your thing, your business, your whatever, to a 10-year-old that you don't understand it well enough because if you blabber on for an hour and a half, then you're just kind of talking in circles. So I think that makes a whole lot of sense. That's huge. So when that aha happened for you, and then you started implementing it to create, you know, clarity and things moving forward for you. You started coming up with the concept of a playbook. Talk a little bit about how to create a winning playbook,

and then where do you insert them in your business? Okay, great. Yep. So in first I'm very familiar with Donald Miller's work. One of my really good friends, Chad, is actually CEO of a story. brand. So I know kind of work that they do. And he's been a huge influence on me for sure. So now we know that the business really runs on 15 playbooks. I'll even tell you that three of those

playbooks are really for the entrepreneur themselves, him or herself. And so those are all under the principle of lead yourself first. And there are three main principles or three main playbooks with that. So just 12 of them is what the business actually runs on. And so what we like to say, Mike, is all of those 15 playbooks make up your operating system. And so here's the thing. This is really important. The idea of an operating system is not a concept. It's a think.

It's an actual thing. See, people initially get this idea of like having an OS is this just conceptual idea? No, no, no. It's a thing. You can point to it and you can say, this is my OS. if somebody is whether you're looking one day to sell your company, you want to raise capital or don't want to raise capital, at the end of the day, what they are looking for, and the same thing that would be true of an acquirer looking to buy your business is the same thing that's true

that helps you to be able to have a business that really runs like a well-old machine. And that's really what I wanted. I really wanted a business that gave me. what I got into the whole thing to do in the first place. I wanted to be able to work hard, make the money I wanted to be able to make. But also, I wanted to go play golf. I wanted to be with my family. I wanted to take vacations.

I wanted to go fishing. I wanted to travel and do other things outside of just working all of the time. And so when you start to see that, just for people to understand is that an operating system is not a concept. It is a thing. your OS, that's kind of some of the vernacular that our clients use, your OS can be in your Google Drive, it can be in Dropbox, we love Notion. We are OS specifically exist in Notion. That's where ours is.

But we're agnostic to where you put it. At the end of the day, it needs to be somewhere. Mike, does that help? Yep, exactly. And it's something you can point to. and here's one thing that I've said for years and years and years about a marketing plan. You spend six months building it. Everyone high fives.

This is awesome. And then it collects digital dust. So that OS, that blueprint, that playbook needs to be somewhere. It's a thing. But then it needs to have a action plan to review it. However, you know, often, monthly, quarterly update. It needs to be something where it's actually implemented because it reminds me of the old saying knowledge is power. And people like, yeah, yeah.

No, it's not. Knowledge is potential power and it's only power when you put it into action. So I'm, I'm confident that you would agree with that statement as well. Oh, without question. In fact, one of our maxims that we repeat seemingly weakly to that very point is ideas are everywhere. Implementation is everything. I mean, your business and subsequently your life won't change until you actually begin to do the thing. I mean, I had, again, I'll go back to I had heard the value of documenting what we do in the business over and over and over again. Yeah, I knew that. I didn't know really exactly how to do it, but my business and then ultimately my life didn't change until I actually sat down and started to do the actual thing.

So I completely agree with that statement. You know, I love on your website when you're talking about your five key principles. I'm sure that you guys sat down and came up with the five and then just threw them into any order that you felt like it. You know, ha, ha, not really. But I love how that was ordered because the very last one is execution. And I feel like most people are like ready, aim fire, but really people are like fire, fire, fire, and then maybe you aim. But that execution, people want to jump to that first, right? But you're saying lead yourself first.

It's like the old Jim Rohn concept or quote where it's like, hey, work on your own personal development so that then your business, your finance, your spiritual, your fitness can improve. So talk a little bit about why you say, let's start with leading yourself first. There's a couple of things with that. So it's interesting, we can go back to how the principles even came to be, because as I was kind of beginning to pull all of these things together that I had read in books and listening to podcast and going to conferences, etc. All of these things and assets that I had were kind of all over the place.

And so I didn't have a way to kind of begin to organize all of these things. But lead yourself first. I really think that, you know, people say, hey, the most important asset in your business is your team. I think the most finite asset in any business is the owner or the entrepreneur. nervous time. Everything really, like as I look at my desk and iPads and, you know, just stream decks and mousees, everything that I'm looking at first started as a vision from somebody.

Sticky notes. Everything. This camera, this microphone, ultimately was kind of downhill from somebody had a vision. And I really do believe that our businesses are no different. And so at the end of the day, look, you said you were recently flying. And, you know, whenever you get on a plane, they say, you know, in the event of reduced oxygen in the cabin, put your mask on first. And so we really apply that to business to really the most selfless thing that you can do for your team, your customers, your potential customers, on down is to take care of you first so that you can give more. to other people.

And look, that does look like certain health things, but that's obviously not what we talk about. We talk about things like having a perfect repeatable week that allows you to show up with the best energy that you can as the leader for your team. So there's a lot of different things within that. That's one of them perfect repeatable week. But I really do believe that everything is downhill from that is that if you can lead your, first. You can have clarity of vision. You can have a plan to make it happen. And you can build the team. Come up with a marketing strategy that obviously you're an incredible gift to people to be able to help them with that. And you can build and have the sales velocity that you need to

grow your company. And so that's why everything is really downhill from lead yourself first. And what I would say is when you have that playbook slash operating system and you're working on the lead yourself first and clarity and all of those ones. It's probably never a check the box done, never reassess it. How often do you say those categories or playbooks need to be revisited, not just to remind you, but to potentially polish up an ad or tweak or reassess from current things that you're experiencing positive or negative? So here's the question. Here's the answer that probably nobody really wants to hear, but it's the actual answer. We're tweaking and iterating and improving all of them every day.

Maybe not all of them every day, but we're improving something in our playbooks every single day. Everything that we do, we are making tweaks and improvements to it. We just had a situation yesterday. I'll give you a very specific example is that so when a new member joins our, program, we have, of course, an onboarding system. Well, one of the things, and a part of that, is to send Mike them a physical gift box. And so we have a house manager that has all of the swag and the boxes and all of those kind of things stored. And so in the process, our client success manager, Courtney, will send, put it on a spreadsheet, we'll tag that person, send out the

message in Slack, you know, it's kind of paint by numbers, basically. Do this. This is Mike. He's our new member. Here's his address. Get it out. Guess what? We got an acknowledgement that, yes, got it.

We'll have those done. We did not have in that process a wrap back around to make sure did they get it. And so we just had a couple new members go about 30 days, which is not what I want. we want them to get that box within like five days, three to, you know, depending on where they are, three to five days.

And so I said, okay, let's go right now to our onboarding system document, our template. Let's look at where would that go. We need to put it right here. So now we have a forcing function to make sure, not only do we get an acknowledgement,

but we also know that it's actually been put in the mail. At the end of the day, she ended up getting, had surgery. And so that's what put it off. But we could have caught that to make sure that we got that box out a lot sooner. So that's just one specific example, because I want to make sure that people get that,

hey, we're not perfect, right? We are always making improvements along the way as well. Now, to these new members, did they know whether or not they were getting the box 30 days? And like, no, but we did. We did. And so that was something we improved just yesterday. And so why I think that does is that you're never done. I mean, the short answer is you're never done, actually.

It's a constantly evolving process, of course, and it gets better over time and it gets a little bit better over time. Otherwise, you end up with binders on bookshelves. And what you just described is one of Tony Robbins' teachings on Kani, constant and never-ending improvement. And you are never done, but guess what? If you were done, wouldn't you get bored? So it's kind of exciting to go, ooh, how can I tweak this and polish that and approve this? And, you know, with that box that we send out, why don't we revisit quarter? and make sure maybe we sit out a different box sometimes to get a better, you know,

knows what's in the box, but maybe you're always, always, always improving. I think that is spectacular. And then when you, when you want to make a change, it's as easy as going into that, you know, sequence of steps and going, oh, right here is when we need to add the tracking number. Or maybe we're going to reach out to the person and go, hey, take a picture of you in the box and post it up to social media. Then we know they got it. And then it also gives you some social media proof.

So all of that is just spectacular. I just love it. Great. Yep. Bradley, this has been super, super fun and exciting to talk about. So I think this is just really powerful. If you had someone listening to this going, tell me more about this process and the blueprint, the playbooks. How can they learn more?

And then also reach out to connect with you. Yeah, I appreciate that, Mike. So the best place to go is we've got a number of free tools and even some trainings that I've done on those tools. if they just go to BlueprintOS.com forward slash assets, blueprintOS.com forward slash assets. We've got a number of free things that they can opt into, get some trainings, do some web classes and some events that are totally free for them to attend, and everything is there on that page.

Excellent. Well, Bradley, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. I appreciate the opportunity, Mike. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.

www. influential entrepreneursradio.com.