Brad tells his story on the Financial Guy Podcast If you could have a meal with anyone famous alive or dead, who would you want to have a meal with? What is the #1 place you have always wanted to visit, but haven’t gotten the chance to go? What's your favorite podcast? These were the hard hitting questions Brian Haney asked me when we sat down to record an episode of The Haney Company's Financial Guy Podcast. (Spoiler Alert: The answers are Julia Child, the Great Barrier Reef, and How I Built This with Guy Raz) But the conversation soon turned to my absolute favorite topic, scalability. And bo ..read more

How a Liz Whitehead used scalability to see the future Do you ever wish you had the power to see the future? ? Having a scalable business gives you that power. Why? Because when your business is scalable, it has the flexibility and adaptability to respond to future possibilities that you can't see today, but you very much expect to happen. Case and point, Liz Whitehead and her "follow up like a machine" subscription service, TouchPoint. Two years ago, Liz came to me with a bold idea. After seeing her clients struggle to consistently follow up with their prospects, she thought, "I can coac ..read more

How to use abstraction to scale your business Complexity is easy. Simple is hard. This hit home for me recently when a client said something that I thought was really insightful. "Brad, we need our systems to be as simple as our business is complex." But why is simple so hard? It's because every single thing you do has the potential to add complexity to your business. Every decision you make. Every new person you hire. Every new strategy you implement. Every new system you put into place. How those elements get added to the whole determines if you're building an infrastructure as strong ..read more

What are the most important metrics if you want your business to be scalable? ? I get this question a lot. I guess people think I'm a data nerd (and they're not wrong. ?) While of course there's not a one-size-fits-all answer, the key metrics you want to pay attention to very much depend on what stage of growth your company is in and what you’re focusing on. Here are the 4 key metrics that I focus on with my clients as they scale their business: ? Sales Conversion There's probably no better metric to measure whether your customers actually care about the things you sell. If you want more ..read more

Think you want your business to grow? You might want to think again... I recently conducted a poll on LinkedIn where I asked people if they wanted their business to grow or to scale. Here were the results: I wasn't surprised. See, a lot of people confuse growth with scaling. And I don't want you to be one of those people. Here's the difference between growth and scaling and why that difference is important. Growth means increasing revenue while also increasing costs and resources. If I gave you a million dollars to spend, could you grow your business? You most certainly could. You could hire ..read more

A Hindu priest and a philosopher dismount their asses and walk into a bar... At least that's how I'd like to imagine the story starts. In any case, the two were having a dispute about the path to enlightenment in which the philosopher argued the following... The ass that you mount and that you use to get to a house is not the means by which you enter the house. You have to dismount. His point was that while you can use a 'concept' to get somewhere, you have to dismount to get beyond it. In business, it's often said that what got to you where you are today isn't necessarily what will take yo ..read more

Have you every felt like you just wanted to throw your hands up and start all over again? Maybe you've been grinding and grinding and nothing seems to be working? Or you've been growing so quickly that everything around you feels like a hot mess? A few weeks ago, I wrote about a book I was reading called The Creative Act by Rick Rubin and the parallels between creating art and creating a business. In the book, Rick talks about that feeling that artists describe when they become disconnected from their art. When that initial burst of inspiration fizzles out and it just feels like they're slappi ..read more

What most of us get wrong about AI, and what it can teach us about scaling a business     The future of your business has never existed before. Think about that. That vision you have in your head about what you want your business to become has never existed before in the history of humanity. Some of you might read that and think, “there’s plenty of businesses out there that are doing just what we do and kicking ass at it. I want to be like them.” This message is not for you. But for those of you who are carving your own path and creating something different, you’re not trying to be ..read more

The past few months have been an absolute whirlwind. From some absolutely huge client wins to some exciting leaps forward with BE Lean’s capabilities and offerings, I’ve hardly had time to catch my breath. Your support has meant the world to me through it all, so I wanted to give you a little taste of what’s been going on as I’ve been working to expand the impact of this little business I call BE Lean. When small steps become giant leaps Building a business is all about putting one foot in front of the other. Taking those small incremental steps can sometimes feel like a slog, but they’re what ..read more

“When you have one foot in the past and the other in the future, you’re just pissing on the present.” I can still picture our instructor Michelle standing with her legs spread wide as she imparted this lesson upon our cohort of the Possibilities Seminar, a personal development program focusing on emotional intelligence. As life-changing as that workshop was for me (and I don’t say that lightly), this particular lesson didn’t really land for me at the time. Sure I got the point - don’t live in the past or the future. Be present. But how do we move forward in life or in business with two feet fi ..read more