With Brad Martineau, the Co-Founder and CEO of SixthDivision. He was the 6th employee at Keap (initially called Infusionsoft), and was a part of the key leadership team that grew it to over 150 employees. He has started two multi-7 figure companies, and has spoken on stages all over the world. He has also worked with famous people like Dave Ramsey, Amy Porterfield, Daymond John, JJ Virgin, Frank Kern, Digital Marketer, Joe Polish, and the others.  

Join us for this conversation to hear more of Brad’s advice on how you can leverage marketing automation tools to manage all the aspects of your business easily so you can feel in control of your business and produce better results. 

>Subscribe to Guts, Grit & Great Business on Apple Podcasts

Biggest takeaways (or quotes) you don’t want to miss:

• “Entrepreneurs are the people that go out and solve problems instead of sitting around and waiting for somebody to do it for them.”
• “You don’t go get automation because you want to automate something. You have a system, and then automation can help you execute the system.
• “System equals freedom.”
• “Vision has to do two things. One, it has to be inspiring for everyone that’s involved in the business. Second, it has to be tactical, and actually define where and how you’re going to run in your business.”
• “Most entrepreneurial businesses are not good at hiring. They’re afraid of it. But they have all the tools to be great at it. They just need a simple system and understand a couple of different policies to ensure that you get people that can be players or at least funny, because you don’t always have to hire a player.”
• “You can’t have a vision greater than the capacity to delete it. You can’t build a team better than the vision that you created. You will not attract the people if your vision is weak. You’ll run out of money and you’ll have the wrong team if your vision isn’t accurate.”

Check out these highlights:

• 08:26 Clients had really a powerful tool but nobody had ever taught them and there was no class around how to think in terms of systems… if you can’t think in systems and create a plan and systems, the software does nothing.
• 15:24 You can’t survive without the systems. We happen to help with the systems, and you might need to go to somebody if your brain doesn’t work that way.
• 15:59 Big businesses are a billion dollars plus in annual revenue. A medium-sized business is generally a $100,000,000 to a billion dollars. A small business is a startup to $100,000,000. Entrepreneurial business applies to three, four, or five million dollars and below.
• 17:39 The key distinguishing factor between an entrepreneurial business and a small business is that a small business has one asset that we don’t have, which is money.
• 30:33 We created a system called “Smooth Scaling system” wherein it’s a five part framework to organize everything that you’ll interact within your business.
• 36:33 Inside strength is what you’re trying to develop and install in your business. Inside strength in the leader who can then create inside strength in the team.
• 53:48 Client journey is everything you do to get clients, convert clients, all the automation, the technology, the strategies, and all those sorts of things.
• 1:06:15 A “return” is a document where you define what you want to get first. It’s a document that everybody should fill out. Because then, every decision you ever make about the vision, or your team, or your ops, or your clients, any of those has to align to your return.

How to get in touch with Brad:

Learn more about Brad, by visiting his website here: https://www.sixthdivision.com/ or you may visit any of his following social media platforms:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iambardley

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bradmartineau/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradmartineau

You may also email him at brad@sixthdivision.com.

Imperfect Show Notes

We are happy to offer these imperfect show notes to make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who prefer reading over listening. While we would love to offer more polished show notes, we are currently offering an automated transcription (which likely includes errors, but hopefully will still deliver great value), below.

GGGB Intro  00:00

Here’s what to expect today…

Brad Martineau  00:02

Your thing, by the way might not be in your business. It might be that you’ve created a business that runs so that you can create the income that you need so that you can go do like I could just as easily be like, yeah, like, Look, maybe maybe my gift is basketball and coaching. Right? Great. Then I built this business that runs it takes care of the people that are here so that I have the freedom to go spend my time in that gift like Wow, no matter how you slice or dice whether your gift is your business, or your gift to some this is out of your business, you have to tame your business in order to actually be able to live in your gifts.

GGGB Intro  00:33

The adventure of entrepreneurship and building a life and business you love, preferably at the same time is not for the faint of heart. That’s why Heather Pearce Campbell is bringing you a dose of Guts, Grit & Great Business™ stories that will inspire and motivate you to create what you want in your business and life. Welcome to the Guts, Grit & Great Business™ podcast where endurance is required. Now, here’s your host, The Legal Website Warrior®, Heather Pearce Campbell.

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:06

Alrighty, welcome! I am Heather Pearce Campbell, The Legal Website Warrior®. I’m an attorney and legal coach based here in Seattle, Washington, serving entrepreneurs throughout the US and the world. Today. I am so excited for this guest. It’s actually taken what over a year Brad? I’m going to say to get you on the podcast. So oh, by the way, talking about guts and grit and right, so I’m just gonna put a plug. I am persistent. So I was not gonna let Brad off the hook very easily. So I kept with yet now here you are. No, but seriously, super glad to have you here. For those that don’t know, Brad, this is gonna be such a fun conversation. Brad and I crossed paths Who do I say that last six, seven years ago. Now. It was pretty early in the launch of my second business. And so it’s been really, really fun to be in touch with Brad over the years. For those of you that don’t know, Brad, Brad Martineau, is the co founder and CEO of Six Division. He is amazing. And here’s why he was the sixth employee at keep this is back when it was called Infusionsoft. I still, by the way called Infusionsoft. I’m just gonna catch myself every time. I can’t stop, can’t stop won’t stop. So he was one of the original Infusionsoft team members. He was a part of the key leadership team that grew it to over 150 employees.

Brad Martineau  02:35

I’m gonna interrupt you, how long is that intro that they sent you? Do? We have like two more paragraphs?

Heather Pearce Campbell  02:40

A couple paragraphs?

Brad Martineau  02:42

Yeah, no, no. Those highlights look good. I’m married. I have five kids, I play and coach basketball, I got a couple of businesses and I’m a nerd with systems and how to organize and build a business that serves your life. That’s about all you need to know. And we do not need to read. I told him to do the simple version, not copy and paste the one that we wrote way too long ago. That’s way too long. So we’re gonna, you’re welcome. By the way, everybody that we cut that intro off, because it would have been like 20 minutes later, like, hey, well, let’s hear what he has to say. Anyway …

Heather Pearce Campbell  03:11

Brad, I love that. That’s that you actually just received the perfect introduction from Brad. So, Brad, you’re awesome. I’m so happy to have you here I can attest to you know, first of all, having watched part of your journey, but Ben a part of it at a time where I was trying to figure out automation and this piece where it’s like, and that was early for me like I needed your support. And the thing that sticks with me from that time that I spent with you because for those of you that don’t know, Brad and I crossed paths at an Infusionsoft conference, I heard you speak and I was like, Oh, I had already owned owned, I had already had an account with Infusionsoft for like a year really was making my way around the basics, but not doing much with it. Right. So I signed up for your services and then a few months later was down at your headquarters going through a full week long boot camp or something? I can’t remember what you called it at the time.

Brad Martineau  04:06

Yeah, I think it was Launchpad or something no foundation launch and you I don’t know anyway, it was a thing …

Heather Pearce Campbell  04:13

It was like a full two or three days like pretty intense and and it was awesome. The the benefit of that experience was first of all, seeing you walk the talk right actually implement automation and a lot of what you taught that weekend in the way that you welcomed people into your services, both digitally and in real life, right, because I got to see both go through the experience the follow up like there’s just there’s so much that people could benefit from by having an experience with a business like yours. So you’ve all I’ve always been a super fan and now here you are, and I’m so glad to be reconnecting

Brad Martineau  04:52

Thank you I am very excited to be here and I love that you love the little details around legal stuff that I I don’t have the brain or any of the other stuff for because you have helped us a ton of that. So excited to be here. And I’m glad that we find. I’m glad that we finally made it. Anyway, we’re here so.

Heather Pearce Campbell  05:09

We’re here. So let’s backtrack a little bit. I always like to hear kind of people’s origin stories. How did you get into business? I mean, I know some at some point, you landed at Infusionsoft. Right? So take us back a little bit in your journey. 

Brad Martineau  05:23

Alright, so I graduate high school, went on a mission for my church, came home, got married a couple months later to my wife will be will be 21 as a married couple in the next week. Well, next week as of the recording of this, which means probably a while ago, by the time you heard this, but yeah, I got married, I was doing some stuff with my dad that was there was like this little side business. But it was really more my dad’s aspirations are working with his kids until he realized that we hadn’t learned enough to know how to go make money. And he was just basically had us on payroll. So had our first kid. And then I ended up working for two and a half years at the University of Phoenix as an admissions counselor, which is just code for a sales rep. It was two and a half years too long. And then I was talking with my brothers, and they’re like, Yeah, we started the software company, our support reps leaving, we need somebody. So I walked away from full benefits and like $35,000 a year to no benefits in like 2008, maybe it might have even been 22. It’s like, made no sense already had a couple of kids at that point. But I jumped over, I had no idea what like CRM was, I have no idea what marketing I know a small business was I was just like, getting me out of here. So that was Infusionsoft early early on back in the day back when it wasn’t called in the company was called Infusionsoft. But the product was called Manage pro CRM and mortgage pro CRM. Anyway, for any old time users, they’ll get a crack out of that. That’s like, way back in the day,

Heather Pearce Campbell  06:39

I’m gonna say, I don’t think I even ever heard that.

Brad Martineau  06:42

So I was there. I hadn’t been there for probably eight years, I think I was the sixth employee there. I got to see it grow to like, 150 or so. And I did a lot of work with, with clients. And while I was there, what I discovered a couple of things about myself, believe it or not, I didn’t have everything figured out when I was 21. So we’re no I’m not even when I was 23. But so I figured out, I figured out a couple of things about myself. One, I fell in love with entrepreneurship and small business. There is like the My favorite quote, about entrepreneurship, my favorite definition, was trying to remember the guy’s name, and I’m gonna get it wrong. Anyway, he started like a ride sharing type thing. But he said, entrepreneurs are the people that go out and solve problems instead of sitting around and waiting for somebody to do it for them. And I’m like, yes. So that’s why like I love to, I fell in love with entrepreneurs. And I sort of uncovered and I knew this because I’m like a systematic thinker in terms of how I think about stuff. But when I got introduced to software, I started to realize like, it really pulled out this like, oh, software, systems, and entrepreneurs. And like, if I could triangulate, like with a Venn diagram, if I could just say like, where’s the biggest overlap in my life, it would be those things like, I love software, I got a software company, I love systems, which is primarily what we’re doing at Sixth Division. And then I love entrepreneurs. And that’s the lives right at the end. Now, there’s like this basketball thing over here. That’s not really related to that. But, but that’s it. So I realized about myself like, Man, I love this. And what I saw while I was there, is you got lots of entrepreneurs that are very similar to yours, believe it or not, you’re not the only person that had it for a while and didn’t use it very much, just in case you had any head trash around that year, okay. So when I saw because I was in the frontlines with clients trying to help them get the software up and going. And what I realized is, they had a really powerful tool, but nobody had ever taught them and there wasn’t ever there’s no class around how to think in terms of systems. And so they get into a software tool that’s designed to help you execute systems. But if you can’t think in systems and create a plan and systems, the software does nothing like if you don’t know, Matt, the calculator is useless, right? Ultimately, I think was April of 2000. Nose March 2010. Infusionsoft at the time hit a rough patch, they laid off 10% of the company, I was included in that I had no idea what I was going to do. But I knew Infusionsoft better than anybody in the world. So I’m like, Alright, I’m gonna go do this thing. So we started a company is six division. At that point, I had a different name for it, it was just me. And then I met with my partner, we credit Sixth Division A couple years later, but the whole purpose was to and I still have the initial vision document that we put together in 2000, late 2011, was to demystify what it takes to Leverage Marketing Automation, which were the terms at the time, right? So like, how do we make it simpler, anybody can come through and there’s just a step by step checklist process of, here’s how we use this. So, I mean, there are so many stories from the start of that company, like it sounds great. Here’s the great version. We started April of 2012 is when we Well, we started actually December of 2011 made no money for the first three or four months. And then in April, we went to infusion con, we had an offer there, we sold a ton of stuff. And then from there, April to the end of the year, we did a million dollars in our first year. Three or four years later, we had grown it to $3 million. And everyone’s like, Oh, that’s amazing. So interesting story about that when you’re selling services and you go to a million dollars is really fast, you don’t see your family very much until you figure out some systems about how to run it. So we get to the end of the first year. And of course, we’re doing annual planning, and what’s the goal? We got a double. And I was like, hold on a second. Cuz I don’t want to double that. So we actually, like literally, we said, double it. And then we stopped there. Wait a minute, what if? What if this is a really good question, by the way? What if we didn’t? What if instead of that we made a penny more, but we cut our time in half? And so we shifted those 2013 or 2013 objective, there was a distinct pivot, like, No, we need to decrease our time. So we went back to the drawing board, we had to continue to sell, right, you always sell and you can never stop selling. But we weren’t trying to grow, we were just trying to maintain that rate, while getting some structure and make this thing more viable. And then we methodically grew, and then we hit 3 million. And then we ran into some roadblocks that we talked about why there’s one of the pieces of small business that we hadn’t figured out yet rennet some roadblocks. That bumped us back down. And then you know, fast forward and COVID hit, and we intentionally downsized. And we’re like in a very methodical thing that works perfectly. We can talk about that later. But even that leads just leads us to today is, it was all one time services that we were selling for the first four or five or six years. And now the entire business runs based on recurring revenue. And it’s a services business. So it’s like the thing just plugs away. Everybody’s life can work and can happen the way that they want it to. Our team members can take vacations when they want, like just handle your work. So like, usually once a quarter, somebody is out for like a week, and it didn’t really matter. It’s like it’s it was a a morphing of not this thing where I’m on a treadmill all the time, I want this thing that actually is more like a scooter for me than a treadmill like or like, like a motorized bike or I don’t know, I’m making up analogies, and I don’t know if they work. But anyway, that’s the that’s the story. And like I said, lots of really funny and painful stories in between, but we will …

Heather Pearce Campbell  11:49

And maybe we can dig into some of those examples. But I mean, there’s a couple things I love from your journey. One I read, when you talk about how much you love small businesses and entrepreneurs, I relate very much to that. It’s like, I just feel so strongly in the path of entrepreneurship. And, you know, for a lot of different reasons, I think one is I was raised by an entrepreneur too. It’s like, I see just so many good people in the world working so hard, because they are committed to an idea that they can do a certain thing and serve people in a certain way. And then this other piece that you raise about blending software, and systems right with with the other pieces of your vision. So interesting, because one of my earliest projects in law, I got put on a piece of litigation that was a major doozy like, oh, it was so bad. And There ended up being 200,000 pages of documentation. This is physical documentation, right? This is papers that I had to look at, and somehow catalog and track and I was in charge of discovery and had to be responsive to all this stuff and actually went to law school with the guy that wrote Excel. Like he was Microsoft’s you know, when …

Brad Martineau  13:09

He was he was actually our client. For quite a while. Yeah.

Heather Pearce Campbell  13:12

So he was going to law school just so that he could donate the rest of his career to the ACLU. Right. We, the rest of us were so jealous of him. We he was the he was the kid, the guy in law school who had two sets of books.

Brad Martineau  13:26

And I should I should clarify, I don’t know if we’re talking about the same guy, but the guy that wrote the initial spreadsheet. Yeah, we’re like from like, Apple, Steve Jobs. No, he’s got like, thin hair that kind of curls over there. I can’t remember his name off the top of my head because it’s been a long time. Like, super, we’re talking like, Next Level intelligent. Like, I like to think I’m kind of smart. And then there’s like, Okay, you are on a totally different level than me.

Heather Pearce Campbell  13:48

This sounds like the same guy may or may not be but he quit twice. And they kept hiring him back because they needed him to finish Excel. So he went to law school and we were all so jealous that he like this is the the biggest highlight for us. He had two sets of books. So he did not have to carry his books from home to school, because they weighed like 200 pounds, right? Anyway. So that was our buddy and I used Excel I was like, great, I got to know it. I you know, before then really did it. I used it almost exclusively in those first few years of my legal practice, as a way to track all this documentation, do the bait stamping setup, certain like methods for what what data got entered how we would label things. Anyways, it was phenomenal and set me on a journey really early in my career to appreciate systems automation and the overlap of like, look if we can do this in law. And then that was a really cumbersome example. But it ended up having phenomenal results for me. If we can do this in lock as I got after that project that we turned right around and I got assigned to a project that had 400,000 pages and instead of years of going through it we had six weeks Right. So the joy now is that I have been able to build a business and a career that allows me to love automation and systems. And I just think it’s, it’s the only way and especially for small businesses, like I just don’t see how you can survive without the help of somebody like yourself and their business.

Brad Martineau  15:23

Well, so you can’t survive without systems. Yeah, we happen to help with systems. And you might need to go to somebody if your brain doesn’t think that way. But there, you can figure them out. So that there’s a couple of things that are really interesting one, well, maybe they’re not really interesting, I shouldn’t preface that with that came to mind. One is, so when we, when we talk about small businesses, we actually came up with a term internally. And we call it the entrepreneurial business. Because if you look at like how they people organize businesses, you have big businesses, which it’s not like an exact science. But if you do your research and look online, for the most part, big businesses are a billion dollars plus in annual revenue, a medium sized business they say, is 100 million to a billion, generally speaking, and then a small business. This is what I love is a startup to $100 million. And if you do enough research, they’ll actually say that a small business starts at like 7.5 to $10 million. I’m like, Okay, let me raise my hand real quick. Just have a question. Yeah. Like 98% of business or whatever is 95% of businesses never do a million dollars. So it’s what are we? So we came up with this term, it’s entrepreneurial business, and it really applies to, I think it’s like, three, four $5 million, and below your an entrepreneurial business. And the way that you run that business, or any of those businesses from 10 figures to six figures to early seven figures is so different than how you run an $80 million company. But if you look at it, all the resources that have been created, they’ve all been created for who and big business businesses 10 to 100 million. So you go read. I mean, the bigger businesses just go hire the corporate consulting people. But if you go look for books, or look for websites, you have I mean, we can go down the list, you’ve got a What’s the book, you got Crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey Moore, you have what’s the one by cameras name? Now? It’s like the most classic? Good to great,

Heather Pearce Campbell  17:16

That’s the one I was gonna say, 

Brad Martineau  17:17

Got the you got EOS, the entrepreneur operating system, you got traction, all these, when you start to read those books, what you start to read in the beginning, just look at their examples. And none of their examples. Are businesses doing less than $10 million a year in revenue, not not a single one. And we’re talking like multiple 10s of millions of dollars in revenue a turn, it’s like, well, I don’t think that what I should be doing right now is what they’re doing. And here’s why this is like the key distinguishing factor between an entrepreneurial business in a small business is that a small business has one asset, one resource that we don’t have, and it’s called Stupid money. Which means I can just go hire somebody and I can throw bodies at the problem. Yeah, we don’t have that, which means we have to play a different game. And that game really lives in system. So that which leads to leads to the next the next point, which I think is a really, really important takeaway. And there’s kind of I guess, there’s two parts to this, I got like some some bullet points here going on. It’s not automation and systems, its systems. And automation is one way you can execute systems. This is a really important distinction. You don’t go get automation, because you want to automate something, you have a system, and then automation can help you execute the system. And systems equal freedom. If I can say this, this is not just for your business. This is what like, landed for me. Growing up that like this is probably the first like, as far back as I can remember, this is a thought that has always rang in my head. You know, when people like yeah, when I was growing up, here’s what I thought this is the only real one that I can think of that like stands out really big. I always thought people always like, well, that’s we just that’s the way it’s always been done. I’m like, I don’t care if it’s always been done that way. If it’s stupid, it’s stupid. So my brain was always looking at well, there’s probably a better way. My guess is at this point in time, we probably figured out the best way to do that particular thing. So I’m really interested in how something gets done. If I find myself doing something three times, I’m turning it into a system we call it the rule of three, if I do it three times that these got to turn into a system and I got to start to make it methodical and make it a repeatable system. And then if I can automate it, I automate it but if people could understand and believe I think people understand but like if you could just believe and fall in love with this idea that systems equal freedom, they’ll change your life. We had that when you came out that I talked to you about the checklist that I put up for my kids.

Heather Pearce Campbell  19:33

Probably I remember being super impressed thinking this guy has got it together like family life structure business like I just remember really appreciating watching you again, like I said, walk the talk, right?

Brad Martineau  19:47

Yeah. So here’s the key with that it’s not family life, etc, etc. And structures. Its structure and systems applied across all of those. Yes. So I’ll give just as an example because Like, we could be done after this point, if if everybody would just fall in love with this idea of you figure out systems do you might be like, Well, I’m not a systematic thinker, then you go hire somebody. Yeah. Because systems are freedom if you want freedom, and I don’t nest and I’m not going all the way to the edge, just like and sit on a beach and drink my mind, boy, whatever it is. It’s not what I’m talking about. Although that might be it. I’m not excluding that either. But if you want freedom, so here’s what my freedom, here’s what my freedom looks like, I coach a high school basketball team. I’m up every morning, I go play basketball, not every morning, but I’m up, I’ll go play basketball. Then I go coach basketball, and I coach for seven to nine. And then I go home and like and I’m taking my kids to school, go home shower, whatever I started about 10 or 10:30. I go till about three, they live five minutes from here. So I go pick them up from school, I do training with my son, it lets me go to like kids at wrestle football. I can go to their games, take my son to his basketball practice. But I can be around for that. I have two businesses that I run. I’m also in charge of the entire Sunday school organization in our church. And and then we have games at night. Right? And I can go on on them. I got five kids, I got some things going on.

Heather Pearce Campbell  21:03

You have a wife, let’s not leave her.

Brad Martineau  21:05

Yes, I did. Yes. She can’t see this. Because so that’s assumption is that that was there anyway, summary. So a lot of people if I listed out what my schedule looked like, or just a list of things that I have on my plate, a lot of people like, man, that’s overwhelming. It’s not. It’s not? And the answer is system. So here’s this specific example. I’m really trying to say I’ve kept telling if you buy if you buy in this idea. So we have the traditional typical problem with young kids when they were growing up in our house, which is in the morning, they don’t want to do what you want them to do. They want to watch a show …

Heather Pearce Campbell  21:36

Is it was it only in the morning at your house, we haven’t …

Brad Martineau  21:40

Focused on that I’m just focused on the morning right now I’m just focused on the morning. So that the morning was particularly rough, because like I’m trying to get out the door to work. And and my wife is trying to like she’s like trying to manage everybody and the kids, right, those were some go to elementary school, we were just starting to get into like approaching junior high. But it’s like you got people have to go to school, some don’t have to go to school, and the ones that don’t have to go to school want to do you know, they want to watch shows or whatever the other kids don’t. And we had slipped into like we eat breakfast and you can watch like one show. And then it became on watch two, and I want to watch three and I’m like, Okay, this has got to change. So system, the system is well, the first thing is I need a system for the morning. And the second piece that came out of it is everybody has to do the same things at the same time. It’s too hard, like with kids that young, cuz we’re talking five kids, and they were like, eight or nine and younger. So I can’t have one person like eating breakfast while the other person is cleaning up their room like, cuz we want to eat breakfast together. Like we got everything together. So I made a checklist. And this is where we talked about this pre Free call. You’re not a parent if you have not accepted bribery as an acceptable form of parenting. Okay, that’s a whole separate conversation. But so we brought in bribery, I made a checklist for every kid, and we have a hallway in our house that has pictures of each kid down the hallway. So the checklist got taped below it. And it was all right at 645. I think it was 645. I could dig it up in Google Drive. But it was like 645, you’re awake, your bed is made and your room is cleaned between 645 and seven …

Heather Pearce Campbell  23:11

This, by the way, are like scrambling and taking down notes.

Brad Martineau  23:15

However, however, we want to get a copy of it, I’ll give you a copy of the I can go find it. It’s in Google Drive somewhere. This friggin transformed our household. So a 645 to seven o’clock, you do this seven to 715. It’s like brush teeth get dressed whatever 715 to 730, we are eating breakfast. And ours was eat breakfast and conversion, I don’t know, it’s like that means you have to talk. And then 730 to 745 or whatever. And it did not take very long for so and then it was like at the end of the week, you brought your checklist. So it was like the week and the things you got to do and you check them off. And if they came like hey, can I watch a show there’s like, is your checklist done. And then at the end of the week, there was a certain amount of money I want to say it was they were younger was like five bucks a week or whatever. And so it’s like, depending on the ratio of how many of those things you did, then that’s how much money you would get. And then you could go spend your money on whatever you want it and there was an override factor there was like if I have to tell you to fill out this checklist, you don’t get paid money. But that checklist in the morning, we ran out for probably two or three years. And I’m telling you if you saw, you know, when I get frustrated in the morning, or if my wife gets frustrated the morning, you would laugh at the things that we get frustrated at it’s like one of those like like most you’d be like are you kidding me? I can’t even get them to do this. And it was not it’s not because I’m an amazing parent. It’s because we just set a system in place. Like no, you just do this and there’s no questions about it, run the system, and then you’re going to get this predictable outcome. So if you take like that one example. And then you extrapolate it across the rest of life and in particular the business just makes life so much easier. Freedom systems equal freedom. There is no other way to freedom than systems unless you happen to get lucky and throw a Hail Mary which I am not living my life based on the promise of maybe throwing a Hail Mary I want to be able to produce it. So anyway, I don’t know how we got off on that.

Heather Pearce Campbell  25:00

No, it’s actually a really powerful example. Because like in our own life and parenting, my goodness, right, we all, whatever think we’re gonna do something a certain way. And then we have kids, and it’s like, oh, but our we’ve got a child who’s neurodiverse, right? And we had to go get very specific help from a parenting coach who understands how to map, essentially, the neurology of your child based on their behaviors, and then help you as a parent go, Okay, here’s how you should deal with that. Guess what she put in place for us? A system? Yeah, literally a map, Do this, do this, like number one, number two, number three. Number four, this is how you deal with this behavior. And it was a system and it was the same every time. And my husband does not listen to the podcast. So I’m going to share this. But there was a long time where my husband couldn’t follow the system, right? It was like working against your own neurology just wanting things to be a certain way. But guess what would happen? If we did follow the system? Just works like a charm. But the problem is, you had to follow the system. And I you know, I just love it.

Brad Martineau  26:12

Yeah, and, and the so my brain goes to like, well, what are all the naysayers gonna say as they listen to this? So um, can I just talk to a couple of those things real quick? The first overarching principle is this. You could come up with things that would be like, Yeah, but that’s not going to work. I call them Yeah, but But yeah, the more because of this, so because of this. So because of this, because of this, here’s the deal. Okay. If you and I were trying to accomplish something in our business, and we raised, I would kick your butt. I am supremely confident that and if we took impartial observers, and we looked at how efficient our household runs, like, on Saturday morning, when you’re doing Saturday chores, or whatever, I’m really confident that we would probably like, I don’t want to say my kids are better, I’d be really competent, the system has produced a certain amount of repetitive behavior. So you can’t ignore the fact that when you have people that follow systems, they get better results, period. So there may be a lot of nuances to to figure out. And the answer is, there are a lot like I say it like oh, yeah, I just taped it up. And all of a sudden, the kids online, no, there was some bribery. And there was some coaching that went along with it. But once we got him enrolled, it worked. And it worked really, really, really well. So and then the other piece on this, this is important. Some people like well, it’s just sounds so robotic, and I want to live free. Great. Let me show you how you live free, because my guess is you don’t want to live free. And it’s not like you’re like, Okay, look, I want to read brush my teeth a different way every morning, that’s where I gained my freedom. No, you brush your teeth a certain way. It’s a habit. Same way, every single morning, whatever, wherever you put your clothes. So what you do is you you heavily heavily invest in systems in the things that bring no extra value for you to actually think about and be free. So that you can be free in those things. And if we apply that to business, you invest in systems in the business and all the mundane, repetitive things, so that when you’re dealing with somebody in person, you can fully show up as a human being. So it’s not that it’s like, no, everything’s got to be systematic. And I just walk around, I’m a robot and I check off my list like no, I don’t want to have to rethink of what the Saturday chores or the need to be done. I want a checklist so I can go check it off. And I can get it done in half the time or a fourth of the time. And then I can go hang out with my son, we can talk trash about a basketball game or about a football game. And I can be a human in that situation so anyway.

Heather Pearce Campbell  28:21

Well, it’s you know, this idea that that systems and structure gives us freedom. I mean, the trade off or like the whole, I want to be free, I don’t really want to think about systems. So you’re also inviting tremendous chaos, right? If that’s free, I mean, if that’s freedom to you, but for me, it’s like any time I call them red flag scenarios in my business, like you get feedback from a client like, oh, this didn’t really work. I was frustrated by this. I got an email from a client yesterday saying this process is taking too long. It’s the trademark registration process, by the way, right. But there was a certain piece of it that he just didn’t understand. And I realized like, Okay, I have an opportunity to go revisit my FAQs, right, and improve that particular piece so that the next person that comes through, we don’t have this problem anymore. And literally, I got off the phone with him. Five minutes later, my system was changed to reflect the fact that I needed to build in better support. Right, and prove the framework for the next client that comes through so that I can breathe easier, like okay, that little problem has been handled, we won’t repeat that scenario.

Brad Martineau  29:29

Yeah. And if you don’t have like, the list of systems to know that go update, then it’s like a problem comes over like, oh, wait a minute now. Now I gotta go. Like everybody’s got a swarm this problem and then another one pops up. Another one pops up. But when it’s like, Oh, that’s right here. Oh, that’s I guess that makes sense. I wrote that. Like they knew everything about my business and they don’t so I just changed that one thing could not solve not have to worry about it again. Exactly. Then the next one comes up and say like, I we went through lots of iterations of the checklist. And basically it’s the same thing. It’s like, Hey, this is not working. Okay, we need to change it. There’s too much on or there’s not enough or the way it’s organized or whatever, right? It’s just see iteration. But when I do that work, I don’t want that work to just be a one time work. I want it to be upgrading a thing that I’m using to create stability in my life so that I can go do the things that I want.

Heather Pearce Campbell  30:14

Right? Yeah, it’s huge. So I know, before we went live, you talked a little bit about there being a conversation or a particular, like five point framework, right, that you walk clients through? Do you want to share that with us? I think it’s really powerful.

Brad Martineau  30:31

Yeah, for sure. So we created this thing called the smooth scaling system. It’s a I mean, it has several things that it does. But the first piece is, it’s a five part framework to organize everything that you’ll interact with in your business. So the first key to being able to build a business that’s sustainable, that serves your life that you’re not overwhelmed by that actually serves you is you have to be able to look at all the different moving pieces and not get overwhelmed. And the key to that is going to be in how you organize. So here’s the analogy to tee this up. And then I’ll actually roll through and I’ll just roll out what the five categories are and kind of talk to them. We won’t really obviously go through everything like I mean, if I could explain everything about business in the next five minutes. It’d be hard to get …

Heather Pearce Campbell  31:13

Right. You you would be worth more than the time you’re spending on my podcast.

Brad Martineau  31:18

Yeah. And it wouldn’t be the same because then it wouldn’t be business, it would not even be nearly as fun. So. So here’s the analogy. Lego sets, right? So if you go buy a Lego set, and you open up the box, and you dump out the contents, what comes out?

Heather Pearce Campbell  31:32

Overwhelm, I’m kidding, instructions.

Brad Martineau  31:35

No. So what most people say is Lego like pieces, like oh, yeah, hold on to Lagos, totally. Which is not true. What comes out our backs.

Heather Pearce Campbell  31:41

That’s right and then you have to open the bags. 

Brad Martineau  31:44

Yeah, but here’s why the bags, this is a really, really important concept. Especially we start talking about systems and it will tee up what we’re talking about this new scaling system. So the reason why backs come out is because Lego is not stupid. So that’s what we’re gonna play this scenario. I, we have so many Legos that our house, but I take my son down to the Lego store, and we buy 1000 people a 500 piece Lego set, okay, and the …

Heather Pearce Campbell  32:05

My kids are still in the smaller LEGO sets, right? So we’re not yet to the big boy.

Brad Martineau  32:10

So what so you get to 500 pieces, or 250, or whatever, but just think 500,000 It helps really, really drove this point home. When we get home. There are only two possible scenarios about how that Lego set gets put together. Either my son does it. And if I’m buying LEGO sets for my son, we’re talking like, bright 12 or under 10 or under if they’re like really Interlagos. Otherwise, you’re talking seven or under, okay, 500 pieces. If I drop well, so Scenario One is that they put it together. Scenario two is that it gets now given to me and delegated to me to put together right, those are the two options. Otherwise, it’s not getting put together.

Heather Pearce Campbell  32:41

See I’m going to is not a thing in my house.

Brad Martineau  32:45

It’s not in my house, either. I’ve never put a Lego set together. So you bought it, you put it together. So just think if you dropped 500 pieces, or 1000 pieces onto the ground, and then you stick a seven year old on weeding through and finding every single individual piece, the next time you go down to the mall, you think the kids may be like, Hey, let’s go back in the Lego store. No. And if they give it to me, and I got to look at that pile, and like my son’s or, Hey, let’s go back to the Lego store. It’s like, No, we are going over here to the buy a block of wood store that only has one piece or whatever, right? So what what they realized was that there’s this concept of you have to be able to call it modular thinking. And we refer to as the Lego principle, but you have to be able to look at your business, and then break it down into the bags that make it up. And then if we get into business, then it’s like, oh, and then these bags live inside of that bag. But you have to be able to go from I’ve got all these things like oh no, there’s actually five of which I’m going to propose there are five on the way to four. But there are five conversations, every topic, challenge issue opportunity, your business falls into one of these five conversations. And then from there, you can drill down into some sub pieces. But now I have the ability to organize it and not be overwhelmed. So you said I got an email from a client email came in the client like this is taking too long. Your solution happened to be in one of the conversations around clients, it happened to be in the journey that you had created and you had an opportunity to make an update, you might have also found that it had something to do with your team, which is a different back. And they’re not like while they work together totally separate. And there’s a whole series of things that have to be addressed and discussed and handled and decided in team that have nothing to do with again related but not like overlapping with clients. So the first thing is I gotta look at my business. And I gotta be able to have things fly at me and not be like, Oh my gosh, I’m drowning, right? That’s the very first thing. So here’s the highest level. I’m going to turn this thing on here. So you draw a picture and you’re going to deal with my chicken scratchy handwriting. So five conversations and then we have names for them. So I’ll draw sort of this will just go like this and I’ll draw with the five are and then I’ll give you the names over on this side. So you’ve got there we go. So the very foundation I like to think like brick wall. So we’re building a brick wall. These are layers and they’re layered on purpose. The very bottom is leadership was called leader. This is you bye The way, right, you’re the entrepreneur, that’s right, the leader, no business is going to get bigger than or grow more than the capacity of the leader to lead it. Right? Period Did you all hear that? I am living proof of it, if I showed you like, this is the trajectory of my businesses. Boop boop. And if I smart, if I chart my leadership, guess what it’s like this.

Heather Pearce Campbell  35:24

People are listening to podcasts and don’t see the video, you’re watching like a squiggle line of like, looks like Mountain …

Brad Martineau  35:31

Drive, going up with lots of down dips, and then a little bit of up and then up again. And it is the charge for the growth of the business is exactly the same as the charge for my ability and willingness to lead my capability, and my willingness to lead. So leadership is the foundational conversation, you get in here, you get into self leadership first, and then second is being able to lead other people. Third, would be being able to lead other people so that they can lead other people. So you’ve got some subtopics that we shoot off of leadership that you can dive into, okay. All right. Now, once you have that, that, well, you don’t really have that down there. But the thing that you stack on top of that what comes out of leadership is vision. And I don’t mean vision in like the generic sort of theoretical sense that most people talk about it. Vision has to do two things. It has to be inspiring for anyone that’s involved in the business. So it has to like have like the goosebumps component. But it also has to be tactical, and actually define where and how you’re going to run in your business. So if I can just come back down here our term for leadership, we call this inside strength, that’s what you’re trying to develop and install in your in the business. And inside strength in the leader who can then create inside strength in the team. The Vision we’re trying to install is a tactical vision. So tactical vision and tactical vision runs the gamut of it’s exciting and inspiring for the people involved. All the way up to this is like, is it financially viable? And or when is it financially viable? Is it humanly viable? Meaning when I bring team members on, are they going to last? And then is this role going to work? Or are they going am I going to have like this revolving door, all the way down to like a very tactical, here’s where we’re going next. So the vision has to incorporate all those, most of the time where people fall apart, is they fall, or they fall short. Their vision is it’s either just inspiring. That’s like a cotton candy vision. There’s no meat to it. But it’s like super inspired. I don’t know why I use that example. I hate cotton candy now, but I loved it when I was a kid, right? Then the other side of the equation is there’s no, there’s really three scenarios, it’s either a cotton candy, all all big picture. The other side is it’s all tactical. So like, we’re like, we’re gonna go do this, we’re gonna do this, but there’s nothing inspiring about it. It’s like this doesn’t even really have anything, I don’t even know what we’re doing here. The middle scenario is you can be tactical, you can have this inspiring piece. But it’s not actually practical, because you haven’t done the work to confirm that the finances work. And that the that like it works from a time standpoint for the people that you’re including. So there’s some very specific tools we cover in the tactical vision to make sure you hit on all those you’re like, No, not only is this exciting, but I’m confident that this can work. And I know exactly where we’re going next. And I can use it to run the entire business. Alright, you can interject whenever you want, it’s gonna go through. So …

Heather Pearce Campbell  38:13

You’re, you’re fine. And I’m going to say on this point in the vision, I think a lot of people get this wrong. Right. And especially in the the the bucket of what you call entrepreneurial businesses. Yeah. Do you have thoughts on why that this piece is so hard for people to get right?

Brad Martineau  38:33

Well, yeah, let’s go back to what we talked about. We’ll get back to where he talked about at the beginning, just briefly, look at the resources that are available for entrepreneurial businesses. Can you think of a single resource like a book or like a training program or whatever that was specifically designed for somebody doing less than $3 million? Less than a million dollars?

Heather Pearce Campbell  38:53

Yeah, yeah. So I know exactly why and it’s it’s the same reason I built what I’m doing now, right is because there’s this gap in the marketplace that doesn’t serve people that are building legitimate businesses. They’re just not the ones that the marketplace talks about.

Brad Martineau  39:09

They’re not so I want to create shirts, I just didn’t want to Christians like we are not small businesses. We’re not we are entrepreneurial businesses, and it’s very, very different. So what happens is, this is why this ends up happening. If you go do research right now on what you need to put into a vision. What you’re gonna get is you’re gonna get you need a dream you need a mission you need a vision, you need a purpose. Let’s see what else to do. You need to define your values. You need to do your quarterly planning and your annual planning to make sure you got this vision you have a three year plan and a five year plan and a 10 year plan.

Heather Pearce Campbell  39:40

And you need to put your leadership team in place first right leadership

Brad Martineau  39:43

Team in place you have all this stuff and you’re supposed to have this book for your vision like look, I don’t know if you know what it’s like to run a six figure company but it changes way too fast. It’s got to be way more practical so there’s no there’s no resource for it. So it’s our job to do is we go try we go to one vision workshop we try that and we get actually about it, because people are really good at teaching things that sound great. But when you implement them, they actually suck. Yeah, right. So then we go to the next one, and we get this other piece. And then eventually, if you stick around long enough, and if you’re really, really attuned to systems, you’ll create one that is really practical and works for you. Most entrepreneurs aren’t really attuned to systems, they’re just like, look, I got this drive, I’m gonna go figure it out. I am hyper, hyper, hyper, hyper attuned to systems. Like I’m weird when it comes to systems. And it took a while to figure that out, but I am. So I’m way like, I blow up the grading curve, when it comes to being attention systems. It took me like 15 years to get to the one that I have now. And I can still see where there’s opportunities to improve it. So it’s one of those like, it’s not there. It’s why we created this mu scaling system is like the entrepreneurial business app is such there’s such better people, there’s such that helps, it’s so much better, they need something there so that that’s why is we’re going off of things that huge companies are doing, they can spend stupid money to do them when we can’t, and we’re left to try and filter out the stuff that doesn’t actually apply to us.

Heather Pearce Campbell  40:59

Yep. And we’ve got to do it faster, right, we have to do it …

Brad Martineau  41:03

Be faster. It’s got to be able to iterate faster, it’s got to be nimble. It’s got to help me figure out what the answer is. And I don’t have you know, a lot of these things like, let’s go try this. Oh, they lost a quarter billion dollars that quarter. Oh, I don’t have the ability to lose $2,500 this quarter. So I need something a little bit more sure.

Heather Pearce Campbell  41:20

That’s right. Yeah. So okay, so the third one.

Brad Martineau  41:24

Okay, third one. So on top of vision now that we have a vision, which, again, will define when it’s financially viable, and then if it’s humanly viable, now, we can go build a team, I’m gonna be really clear. There are some nuances between like, what goes into each one of these buckets and the nuances matter? A lot of the phrase the devils in the details 1,000%. True. So when I talk about teams team is not deciding what the roles are going to be on the team. It is building the team. Okay. So out of vision, we have team and what we call this as you want to install an A player factory. And I use the word factory on purpose. It’s not a flea market. It’s not, you know, people say, Oh, you only want to hire a players. Not true. You want to know why you got a business because it costs a lot of money. You want a factory that produces a players, and then keeps people at an A player level. Right? That means hiring. So like in here, we get into stuff like culture. Yeah. What do you want it to be like in your business? And are you clear on that? And just if I can, because this drives me nuts, culture, part of defining your culture is defining your values. Not the way that everybody that you’re the books you read, teach how to define values, that is such fluff, bullcrap that drives me freaking insane. When I listen to the people’s values exercise, and they come up with these things that sound great, but don’t do jack squat for their business anyway, I get a hot button point, I could derail us, I’m gonna go back into team. So culture is one. Another piece is how you hire. Most entrepreneurial businesses are not good at hiring, they’re afraid of it. But they have all the tools to be great at it, they just need a simple system and understand a couple of different policies to ensure that you get people that can be a player’s or at least can be the funny because you don’t even always have to hire a players. You can hire some B players, they work really, really, really well you have certain roles that need a players and you have certain roles that need B players. And it’s totally fine. But the hiring process is how do I make sure that I’m getting somebody? My My favorite quote is I was at a conference we were talking about, like our hiring process. And the stuff that goes into a player factor in this guy’s like, oh, yeah, like I hired 40 people to keep four. And I was like, oh, like, row, it seems like if you said a better hiring practice, you could have hired four to keep for that to save you a lot of money. Right? That’s the idea is something you’re confident in that by the time you go to make an offer and somebody comes on, you know that they’re the right person, then then we get into like, on the other side, you start to get into like leadership type stuff. How do you manage performance manage? How do you keep them at that, at that top level. So team is I know the rules based on my vision, I know what I can pay them, I know when I can hire them. The Vision outlines all of that. This is just it’s about who, hmm, so culture to find who’s coming on board the hiring process. That’s what I’m saying I want from culture and what I need based on my vision, and then leadership and Performance Management, make sure that they actually show up and they perform. So those are all teams. So you start to see how they relate. But vision and team are totally different. And when you go to most most people as they start talking about business, they’ll be like, oh, yeah, it’s people products, and whatever the fees are they come up with I’m like, Yes, sort of, but not really not practically, not when I turn around and go to work only when we’re sitting in this conference. And it sounds really, really clear. But it’s not because down here is where I define the roles I need, which would technically go under people up here is where I define who the people are like, it’s not the same. Mm hmm. So okay, all right. Leader, leadership vision team. And then we’ve got those any other things there and we keep going.

Heather Pearce Campbell  44:41

Pause for just one moment on team because you mentioned something that I think really rings true for a lot of small businesses, they get afraid of hiring right it feels scary. They don’t have money to burn, they don’t they don’t have time or money to do it wrong. Right. And yet, they’ve probably either already experienced doing it wrong or they’re peers have and their dinner. Totally how to give us just a tip or two about how people can start to think about it the right way so that they can do it. Right.

Brad Martineau  45:11

So I think too, I have this habit for whatever reason, I’m like, Okay, I got two tips. And I’m guessing what they’re going to be. And that ends up being three shot? Well, yeah. I have here that comes to mind that come to mind immediately. So number one has to do with understanding the difference. So because what you just said, you said, people, they don’t have a lot of money to burn, and they’re afraid of like, am I can I afford to hire this person? And, like, I don’t want to get the wrong person. And then the way you sort of rolled them off is the way most people talk about them as if they’re the same thing, like they’re in the same conversation. So I’m gonna go back to why these things are so different, because those are not the same question at all. And this is the first tip is recognizing, recognizing the difference between like, what falls in a team and what falls in division? So the first question of, can I hire them? That is not a team question. That is the vision question. If you don’t know, if you can hire somebody, your vision is broken. Or not clear. I just like to be little more dramatic if you picked up on that yet. So your vision is broken, if you don’t know definitively, that you can hire them, and then what they have to perform in order for you to be able to afford them, then your vision, it’s a vision problem, it is not a team problem. It’s not even a leadership problem. It is a vision problem that can be hammered out in an Excel spreadsheet. So that’s the first piece is that if you don’t know, it is a mathematical problem. That’s a part of vision. Now once you know and, and here’s the key. The key is, this is for the dramatic effect as we go to the camera here.

Heather Pearce Campbell  46:49

There’s something really good for the for the folks on

Brad Martineau  46:52

Video, I just flipped from like showing a paper I’m drawing on back to like close up to my face. And now for that joke I camera. I was gonna say hold on a second. Yeah. We’re talking about vision.

Heather Pearce Campbell  47:03

Yep, a mathematical problem.

Brad Martineau  47:08

Oh, okay. Here, here’s the here’s the kicker. The confidence to go higher. The confidence in where you’re taking your business? Is it like it’s a mathematical component of your vision? I remember going through this exercise with one of my buddies. Chris Smith, campark. Back, you may you may know, have you met him? So we were going through this? He’s like, Well, how do I know if I can hire him like it’s a vision. And I didn’t have it organized like this to the point because this is like before I met us way back in the day. I was like the last time the Cardinals went to the Super Bowl, which I think was like 400 years ago. So the but but when I was talking with him was like, Well, how do I know I’m like, well, we create this vision that says if I hire this sales rep, there’s an assumption about what that sales rep is going to produce. If they produce that, and I have this vision that is this, the part of the vision is this mathematical equation called math. But if I have that team member, then they’re going to produce this new revenue. And when I run that down my expenses, even with that team member, I now have extra prop. Like that’s how you create the conference like okay, well, here’s what, here’s what it’s going to take if they come on, and they’re producing this. And then you have to decide, am I going to pay for this out of savings? Am I going to roll the dice? Well, if you roll the dice, you’re paying for data savings, or am I going to run my business where I go get the extra revenue up front. And then I hire somebody. So I’ve been down all the rows, my personal preference for peace and calm, is the way we’re doing it right now is we have everybody flexes a little bit takes on a couple of extra clients that creates the extra revenue, we go hire somebody, and then they pick up their own slack. And then everybody flexes again, that way we have the recurring revenue before we have the recurring revenue to pay for an entire employee before we ever hire them. Yeah, and then we just shift the workload over. That’s not the only way.

Heather Pearce Campbell  48:49

But I’ve heard I’ve heard this before. And I like the idea of, you know, kind of this flex and build as you go, when you have the revenue to hire somebody is that you have their their annual salary in the bank, or is that three months until they …

Brad Martineau  49:02

Okay, so it depends on your business model, your business model is either recurring, or it’s one time and it can be a split. Ours is recurring by choice on purpose, very intentional. So for us, it’s we’re adding recurring revenue. And for us, the recurring revenue has to be at a certain point, we look at the recurring revenue that’s hitting next month, a month after the month after so three months out all the time, those three have to hit certain benchmarks. And when they do, then we go hire somebody. And if while we’re hiring, they dip back down below. We stopped hiring until we push them back up. If I’m running a one time business, like a one time sales business, and I would do it differently, what I would do is I would make a conservative guess about how long it will take for that person to be up and running and performing. And by conservative I mean whatever first come into your mind double it. Yeah, yep, that’s your guest. And then what you do is you do your selling whatever until you have that much money set aside in savings, not earmarked or allocated for anything else. And then you go hire them and you’re very clear when you hire them. Hey, this is what we have for you. You have to be performing at this This level by this time that gets back into team and management and performance, right? But that would be, that’s how you create that. That’s the part of the vision that says, hey, I can go hire this person, once I have $50,000 in the bank, because it’s going to take six months, and they’re $100,000 a year employee, I get 50,000 in the bank sitting there, I don’t need anything else. I’ll go hire them. And be very clear, this is going to take six months. And in my mind, what I’m thinking is 90 days. Yeah. That’s the approach that you would take. And then it’s like, Oh, I know. Like, I have no question. I will never again, almost ran our businesses literally, almost put ourselves out of business like three or four years ago. There’s more like four years ago, but because I didn’t do that. That was one of the last pieces that clicked in, like, Oh, that’s not that’s the piece that I’m missing. And so what what happened is like, Well, no, we’re gonna hire the people. And then they’re gonna go produce the revenue, but we didn’t plan out the time, nor did we have any money set aside in savings. And then when it started, zip, we didn’t lead it. So like that one was a vision problem. And it was also that we weren’t managing the team to perform it anyway. There’s, again, like, it’s a sad, painful stories in the history of this one right here. Okay, so we’ll go back to this picture. And I’ll, I’ll describe it for those of you that are just listening. Although you need to click on that link and watch this video. It’s way more fun. All right. Oh, totally. Alright, so leadership, which is about you, you’ve got a vision, getting a document. And now we’ve got team, we can build a team, because the vision tells us which roles to build team is about how you make it be a team that, like, I did a presentation a while back. And it’s called, it was called How to build a team of people that kick butt and you love to be around without the higher than fire carousel. And that’s basically what this idea of this is a player factory. This is what we’re talking about. So team, now you have a team. Okay, so the next one is ops. And the way I think of this is like, cool, hire this team. And I call these people that they’re like, we’re here. If they’re just like, walking around, bumping into each other, we’re not getting anything done. Right. So now we’ve got to be super systematic, about how we get stuff done. So we call this implementing a clockwork cadence. And this is like, I want my business to hum like a well oiled machine, right? So clockwork cadence has to do with, it has to do with, do you have a picture, you actually take the very this last piece of this roadmap out of vision actually governs clockwork teams. It’s the piece that blends your vision with your ops. And it basically says, Here is the phase of business that we’re in, here are our priorities, here are the active projects and the ondeck projects in the most simple, most simple format possible. I can show you right now at six division, every single project that our entire company is working on, I can show you what’s coming next. And it forces clarity and focus for the entrepreneur. It’s like it’s my favorite tool out of any tool that we use, and this entire thing is the it’s called the roadmap. So you’ve got that, then you have, how does communication flow? Which is a combination of like, do you use Slack? Do you have meetings? What goes into Slack? What happens in meetings? When are your meetings? Who comes? What’s the agenda? How do you document it? So you don’t show up at the meeting be like, Hey, what are we talking about last time? How do you not have a bunch of like orphaned messages go out and slack was like, Oh, I asked you about that last week that I assumed you had. It’s like, well, why did you assume that I had it, right. So there’s communication flow. There’s how you get work done. So all work in a business is either like it’s your job. So business as usual, or you have a project? How do you delineate what your job is for all the different roles? And then how do you categorize and organize the project? And then how do you actually get the projects done? And how do you meet? How do you talk about them. So all the elements that go into offs, that’s what lives right here. So you’ve got, again, leader, leadership and vision, then team then offs. And if we were doing the like, above ground, like below ground foundation, this line right above offices where the earth line meets, and then what you actually see in a business is the last one, which is clients. Yep. This is the client journey. It’s everything that you do to get clients everything you do to convert clients. It’s all the automation, the technology, the strategies, it’s all those sorts of things. And we say what you want here is this thing called an automatic client journey … Which is a client journey that has amazing experiences that runs like clockwork, because you put systems in place and in the appropriate places, you use automation to execute those systems. So your ops, your team, your vision, your leadership, is the foundation that’s underground. That’s going to dictate how well you can go get and keep clients happy, which is that top piece and like we talked about, none of this you can’t have a vision greater than your capacity to delete it. You are literally not capable of doing that. You can’t build a team better than the vision that you created. You will not attract the people if your vision is weak, you’ll get you’ll run out of money and you’ll have the wrong team if your vision isn’t accurate. Your ops you cannot have amazing ops if you have crappy people can do it and there’s no way you can consistently get and keep clients if all of this is a shambles. And for the naysayers I like skeptical people but for the skeptical people they’re like Yeah, but what about the business that is like crappy and it still works like great. Are you gonna like say yeah, but about this, this whole framework because we’re talking about the business that you don’t want to be a part of, so we’re talking about, you cannot have a business where everybody can show up, be excited about what you’re doing, and have a, a meaningful role to contribute in the business where the business can create a meaningful outcome. And all of the people involved have enough time and energy and can focus on then living the rest of their lives. You cannot do it, period. So, anyway, so that’s the that’s the, that’s the smooth scaling system.

Heather Pearce Campbell  55:29

I love the the piece that you describe about here’s what people see. And here’s what’s below ground, right? It’s an interesting way to think about it. Cuz I think a lot of us don’t think of it that way. For the folks because I want to focus on the operations, right? Is that where you do a lot of work is the operations the right here’s how the machinery fits together, spend some time, right, cuz you want things to work like clockwork, when I think about your business, how you you know, support your clients, etc? I picture you in that box, but it sounds like you probably help them across.

Brad Martineau  56:05

Yeah, so okay, so the, the nuance and all of this. And then before we’re done, make sure I show you how this this simple five, these five conversations, I want to make sure we just hit on how you use another diagnostic tool to figure out where the actual problem is.

Heather Pearce Campbell  56:17

Hmm, excellent. Some of those Yep, are intertwined. Yeah.

Brad Martineau  56:20

So the first that like the key and here I’m gonna introduce, I realized I’ve introduced some different terms at the at the risk of overusing terms that I like to use. I call it the stream sheet principle. And here’s why. So excluding the weird people that just take a bite of strange cheese off the end, which is weird. Like, I don’t, you can debate it if you want, but it’s just weird. So you look at a piece of like a string of cheese, this whole thing? It’s like, I got one thing right here, right? But it’s not actually it’s not actually one thing. You got to peel it apart. So identify what the different things are. That principle is so important when we look at this what you were saying was gonna go back to the picture and then overlay describe it for those listening on audio. You have client and then you have Office and when you said offices clockwork he like yeah, that that running like a well oiled machine. What you were saying is I imagine that’s where Brad is, is I there’s a brad lives in that to make sure things run like oiled machines, we take care of our clients. Clockwork cadence has nothing to do with what the clients see. It’s underground. It’s another one, it’s front stage backstage. So the client journey, the experience that the clients have the technology, you use, the CRM that you use the the webinars that you do the lead magnets, the follow up the client, all that stuff, is client journey. So when you went, and you said, Hey, a client responded and said, I got questions, or this is taking too long. What you fixed was actually what you tell me a journey, you fixed out your automatic, you didn’t upgrade to your automatic client journey, it was not a clockwork cadence, the process by which you made that change falls under clockwork aids. This is an internal operations thing. So now imagine if your team is bigger, and that wasn’t a five minute fix, it was a week and a half fix, or your team is the same size and it’s a week and a half fix. The question is, is I get some information that this needs to be upgraded. Now I’ve got to capture it, I’ve got to communicate it. So where do I go? Does that go into Slack? Or is that going to go into a black hole in Slack? Does it go on to a meeting agenda where I make sure that it gets covered? And then once it gets covered? Who decides? And when do they decide how does it turn into a project? And then who owns it? How does that get broken down? When does work get done? When do we report on it to make sure that it got done a week and a half later, right? Like all of those things? So clockwork cadence is the internal piece. Hmm, excellent. And then automatic client journey just has to do or the client pays. And automatically Andre just has to do with the steps that your clients will go to, as they go from eyeballs to leads to clients to really, really happy clients, and then everything you do to try and facilitate that or increase that.

Heather Pearce Campbell  58:44

Yep. So when you’re working with your clients, like doing the work that you do, where are you spending time with them?

Brad Martineau  58:53

What are you asking me? Exactly? And the reason why I say that is do you mean were like currently in the evolution of six division? What is my role? Or do you mean as six division as a whole? Where are we spending our time with clients?

Heather Pearce Campbell  59:03

Yeah. So let’s talk about your business six division as a whole right? Now what what pieces is six division helping their clients with out of that map?

Brad Martineau  59:14

Perfect question. So we’ll go back to a just for those that are watching. So we are exclusively right now, if I pulled up our roadmap document, the one that I said that I loved. Yep. It’s like, hey, here are the phases. Yep. Current phase is 100% Automatic client journey. That’s everything we’re doing is focused on that. So if you combine things for us right now, it will be all about how do I get and keep clients? How do I deliver an amazing experience from eyeball to lead to client all the way throughout the entire process? How do I get that dialed in? It’s 100% Automatic client journey. That’s the current face. Yep. Yeah, at some point, middle of the year and I’m kind of because if we get to me, I’m a little bit less involved a lot less involved in the standard day to day operations of what is kind of core six division right now. What I’m starting to work with On is the trainings that are the rest of this. So over time, what will happen is, it will be all of this. And we’ll probably take the team that does automatic client journey and we’ll spin them out and have them branded as a team probably like client journey engineers is one we’re playing with. And then depending on where we decide to go with these other layers, there’ll be teams that specialize in the services or the coaching around each one of these layers. And that’s sort of like, and literally, if you looked at my roadmap, it’s like we do this. And then next, we offer all this and then maybe like, the further out, you go on your roadmap, the less detail you have. So it’s just like, I just put as much detail as I have, and then I can, and then I can move on. So it’s all automatic client journey, the only time where the rest of this comes into play, is as part of the delivery, I get on calls with clients once or twice a week. And when they get on with me, everybody knows, everybody knows that we’re creating this. And I’ve told them, Look, at some point, I will charge people for this, but because you’re in this program, and you’re able to get on these calls, you ask me any question, and I will give you whatever tool I have. And I will walk through anything I have through the entire framework until such time that I’ve turned it into an actual product. And then I can justifiably charge you more money for it. So I’m doing I’m creating it, and I’m using it, and I’m doing all that right now. But if you like officially come to Sixth Division, Mm hmm. It’s 100% Automatic line journey. And that’s, that’s a focus, like everybody on the team knows exactly what we’re up to. And it’s all around that.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:01:18

Totally well. And I mean, it’s a massively like, each of these are, you know, chunked out like conceptually in the way that you’ve just shown, but the client journey is huge. I mean, the level of thought I even going through the experience with your business, you know, six or seven years ago that I did, the way that you think about an execute on like creating a client journey. I just think most people don’t think about in the level of detail that you demonstrate.

Brad Martineau  1:01:49

Yeah, and this, this is one of those like, the the biggest roadblock right now to sort of take smooth scaling out. And this may be helpful for someone listening, who has like the big thing that has lots of different pieces. Mm hmm. Is I’m resigning myself to the fact that in order for me to maintain and create the life that I want, she’s not on a beach, but it’s coaching more bass, like it’s just in order to maintain the stability that I’ve created with all the things I have going on. I can’t be the face of this. Yeah. Which is like this internal struggle, because I don’t know if you can tell, but I kind of liked like, I like the the teaching. I like the coaching, I like sort of the entertainment sort of emcee thing. And I’m realizing I can’t because there’s so many details, the devil literally is in the details. And as an entrepreneur, you either can understand and manage the details, or you will loose and you don’t get to be like oh, well, that’s just, that’s just too much. I can just I can’t handle all that.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:02:46

Let’s just, yeah, let’s see how it goes.

Brad Martineau  1:02:50

You’re going to lose and so you have to be able to manage all of it. And as an entrepreneur with the system, you can manage all of it. But as the person trying to create the system and dive into the nuances, like no, like we got Jake tower, he is the basically the GM of automatic client journeys, like you, I’m going to transfer that to you. And I’m just sort of the overseer, my job is to make sure that all the pieces as we grow this, that they all continue to connect and relate. It’s like Nope, that is not an automatic client journey. That’s in clockwork cadence. So you don’t get to claim that that’s got to live over here. That’ll be my job. But then I’ve got to go, you know, it’s the next layer of leadership. So I’ve got up leadership to other bring people in that can be the faces of that. It also is an upgrade division. And then you gotta upgrade team like all the way all the way up and down. So that that’s an interesting, it’s an interesting challenge that I have not ever faced. Yep. And I’ve never had something that’s like, this is bigger than I can keep track of all of the individual details, and then continue to iterate and innovate on the details to make it better and better. I mean, it’s in an automatic client journey with six division, when I say we grew to a $3 million business, we grew to a $3 million business with a single service that we offered. And it was a one on one, it was a one on one service. And that’s not to be like, Oh, look how cool we are. My point in saying that is we never even scratched the surface of anything group coaching, or any online courses, or any sort of physical or like software related products. So you think about it’s a $3 million business. And if we had got our model, right, we could have kept scaling it to go higher. And but that’s only one. That’s one piece, one type of offering out of one piece of these five, I fully believe that I could go replicate and create back to a $3 million business across every one of these because every single entrepreneur, not every single entrepreneur or business, they all have to deal with them. But there are so many that are struggling with each individual thing. And really, if you start to look at the faces of business, it’s really clear like I got to do this first and then this, like there’s an order that you have to run through so it’s just anyway you asked you asked a question on that but it’s really interesting. There’s so many things that now it’s like the next leg I get somebody else to start to handle some of this they can think innovate and create and I got to figure out how to manage it all.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:04:56

Well, yeah. And I I suspected based on everything that you just walked through I was like, this is really interesting is Brad’s company on the eve of like evolving into a whole new area of offers or products or whatever? Because I could, I could imagine that in the delivery of your services, which are helping people at that client journey phase, you are seeing what happens when there’s breakdown points and all of those other.

Brad Martineau  1:05:24

It’s like, hey, this funnel is not working. That’s called a vision problem. That is not a client. Alert, alert. We are wrong conversation. Yeah. And and, and one of the biggest challenges is we have no idea how many conversation we had about how to slice and dice and roll this out. Because one of the challenges is you can’t, people or people are not buying this, right, all of it, right? They’re looking for specific pieces. So now it’s like, well, how do I package it, but also still have to be a part of a framework. So that’s what we’re working through. And we’re in being intentional and methodical. Because of what I’m committed to creating for my own personal I didn’t, I didn’t mention this part of vision, because it sort of fits into that. But like the very foundational piece by industrialists, it lives right between leadership and vision. There’s a document right here, that I wish I would have had when you came out, because it’s the most important my favorite is roadmap to run the business, but it’s called the return. And the return is a document where you define what you want to get. First, it’s the first document that everybody should fill out. Because then every decision you ever make about your vision, or your team, or your ops, or your clients, any of those has to align to your return. So like, there’s no I wake up, at least, it’s probably once every two days, I wake up, or there’s some point in the day where I’m like, I can see exactly what this is, I can see the impact that it’ll make. And I could see how we can make it amazing, we can do it better than anybody else has ever done it specific for this audience. And I’m like, we got, we got to go, then I’m like, okay, hold on. If I do that, then I’m not around for my kids. I’m not around for this. So I have to like step back and be like, No, there’s a vision in place. And here’s how we make it happen. And actually, the vision already states that as soon as I get X number of people into our lab program at this price point, it means I can go hire this person do this thing. And then I like I already know how to get there. I just got to call myself back down. The return is what keeps me anchored. Because if I didn’t have that, then I would be having entrepreneurial seizures all day long within my entrepreneurial business, about the different things that would go and then it would be for everyone on our team. It’d be like writing a friggin Bronco, or a bowl and likeable Writing Contest, which I’ve done that before to I’ve made them all it’s It wasn’t pretty. So anyway.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:07:27

Well, and I think honestly, that analogy of writing a Bronco or a bull is how some people feel about their businesses all the time, right, is that they are just on this ride that they don’t have control over in some ways. And but that piece, I mean, I love actually that you brought that up at the end about the return. Like there’s …

Brad Martineau  1:07:47

None, it is a non starter for me to me to have to wake up two hours before my kids stay up late after my kids and be stressing all the time. And that’s not to diminish some business that you have to go through that face. That’s not what I’m saying. So what I mean, when I say a non starter is if that’s the way it’s going to be forever. No, yeah. I’ve got to be able to see it’s okay, if I can see the path of how I climb out of it. And then I make progress. And even if I adjust in the middle of it. But if I don’t, you know, going back to the vision, so once I know what my outcome is, then I create a vision of how I’m going to get there. And the vision captures Who am I going to serve in house so that I can get there. But now I have to create the path of where am I now to the place that I want to be and then I can upgrade my return. And I can go to the next part. But if I can’t create that vision, and be working towards it, then I My personality is like literally I can’t make myself do work. And this No exaggeration, I cannot make myself do work towards something where I’m like, that’s not going to give me what I want. There has to be some connection, I do not possess the ability to do it. It’s like I got no drive, no motivation. So I have to build a know what I’m trying to do. And then be able to create the at least the stuff that rarely ends up being those steps. But I can adjust and pivot but I’ve got to be like, Yeah, I can work that way. Okay, now we can go there’s a chance that I could be successful. I can’t see that. Man, that is a dark place to be in all the time.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:09:05

Yeah, well, and I do think people get stuck there. They get into a place of like, this is just how it has to be for now without actually looking at what are the next steps to get out of this.

Brad Martineau  1:09:15

I’ve been there a couple of times. But really, the reality is this entire thing was built for me. 100% and like no joke. It was like, This is what I needed this to build to run the business. Otherwise there’s no there’s no way I got five kids and I want to I want to do I’m like there’s no way I’ve got to be able to do this in a way that’s more systematic. And, you know, people come out like you came out we’re talking about stuff and like I talk I don’t how many people I told about like the checklist to home and then we start to show these little pieces here and they’re like, whoa, hold on, wait, what? There might there might be something here and the gift that I’ve been given to manifest into the world is this idea of systems. So I like I look at it I’m like, Well, duh, that’s obviously what you would do and it’s because again, that’s like, I love music. And this will tie back to what you said at the beginning around like a meaningful contribution, something that people want to do. I love music. I can kind of play the piano cuz my parents made me when I was growing up. I can kind of sing but like literally start to try and sing too much. Like, I’ll get lightheaded. I got like, my throat, it doesn’t really work. But I love music and I love listening to it loud. I believe music was designed to be felt more than heard. I love it.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:10:27

Yeah. Which I will reflect back to you is one of the core components of your in person experience, right? I remember like your martial speaker or whatever. And like …

Brad Martineau  1:10:37

No, it was Mr. Speaker.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:10:38

Totally, you know, and so I lived that as part of the experience that you create for your clients probably still do. And it’s, you know, it’s awesome.

Brad Martineau  1:10:47

Yeah. And I was driving home, and I’m listening to whatever it was. And this thought just popped into my head. That was like, cuz like, every once in a while, when I’m listening to music, I’m like, This is so freaking amazing. Like the thought pops in my head, I am so grateful that music was created like that. It’s the thing. And I know that if it never was, I wouldn’t even know the difference. But man, I am so glad that it was created. And then the thought like from there, the next thought that evolved was, and I’m really really glad that there are people that recognize that the gift that they were given was music, and that they did something with it. And what I and then the flip them into third thought like the evolution right, it’s like the grandchild thought I think is what we’re on. The grandchild thought was, okay, what’s my Oh, my gift as systems, organized thinking and how to get stuff done faster in a more organized way. So I can create the same excitement that I get, when I listened to really, really good music, they just put together really well. I can create for the people that appreciate systems organization, they’re needing that so and it’s the same thing that everybody else, there’s a gift that you have one of my favorite videos about. If you look it up on YouTube, it’s a Steve Harvey, he talks about stop chasing your passion, and start chasing your gifts. It is the most phenomenal video about like discovering what you’re really meant to do. It’s so good that he makes a clear distinction between passions and gifts. He’s like the Bible. The Bible talks all the time about gifts, guess what it doesn’t say one time, doesn’t say anything about your passions. Stop chasing your passions and stop being jealous of other people’s gifts. Figure out the thing that you just do. And in summary says gifts are the thing that you do the best with the least amount of effort. And then you go anywhere. So like so that, again, systems, I want this to be systematic, so that I can go spend time doing the thing that I love. So right now I got a business that runs, I don’t have to I mean, I meet with Jake and Ron. And what I do literally is I come in here and I do group calls with clients, that helps me serve them. And it helps give me more fodder and better learning for what I’m creating here. And then I create this stuff all day long. That’s it, that’s what I should be doing. I don’t need to be doing anything else. Right? So and that’s ultimately the idea, like you’re running the business, that’s what you want to get to is there’s a thing, your thing, by the way might not be in your business. It might be that you’ve created a business that runs so that you can create the income that you need, so that you can go do like I could just as easily be like yeah, like, look, it’s maybe maybe my gift is basketball and coaching. Right? Great. And I built this business that runs it takes care of the people that are here so that I have the freedom to go spend my time in that gift, like no matter how you slice or dice or whether your gift is your business, or your gift to some this is out of your business, you have to tame your business in order to actually be able to live in your gifts.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:13:23

Well, and this whole thing about passions gifts. The The reality is what you’ve just described is there is a way to recognize and utilize your gifts so that you can whether it’s in your business or out of your business, go do your purpose go work on your passions, right? If they’re related, they don’t have to be the same thing. And that I really love what you said about that your appreciation for music. And aren’t you so glad that there are people in the world and you think of even just for a moment, the artists journey or the musician’s journey like that is a freaking phenomenal mountain to climb, especially in face of cultural messages, right? What they hear about early on about it’s not worth it, and it doesn’t pay well and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, for them to stay committed and get to a point of mastery and you know, creating something in the world that the rest of us are like, Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you created that. Yeah. The parallel to entrepreneurship. And each of us like creating a thing that people reflect back to us like, I’m so glad you created that in the world. Yeah, I was like, what bigger reward or joy can you get right? It’s just phenomenal. I love that as an illustration. Yeah, Brad, you’re awesome. You have given us so much to think about today. So my I have just two questions left for you. One. Where do you like for people to find you for those that are listening? They’re like, Oh my gosh, I’ve got to check out Brad I need to know what six division is doing. I need to follow their journey. Where should they go find you.

Brad Martineau  1:14:56

Okay, so if you want to If so if client journey is the thing you like, oh, that automatic client journey and that what they do there, go to sixthdivision.com. I’m sure there’ll be a link somewhere, you can click on to get there. Yep. If you want to get on the waiting list and start to get some things, we drip out around smooth scaling the entire framework. And one of those would be if you want to get access to that video, I mentioned around the hiring thing. I’m just now remembering that. Yeah, if you go to smoothscaling.co,

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:15:29

Okay, and I will share these links.

Brad Martineau  1:15:32

Yeah, smoothscaling.co, there’s a page there that kind of talks about what we’re doing here. And then there’s a form you can fill out on the thank you page, there’s three different videos I put on there that cover different topics, one of those topics. So there’s two videos at the bottom of the main page two, and then there’s, I think, three different videos on the thank you page. I don’t think we copy them. But maybe we did. I don’t remember …

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:15:48

Delivering all over the place. Brad

Brad Martineau  1:15:51

Team one. And then there’s another one called Why I scaled back to scale up, which basically talks about why I sucked and what I tried to do to fix this. So you’re gonna hear the story. And I’m not, that’s not like false, you’re like I just flat out sucked in. Anyway. So anyway, I’ll talk about that story. And I don’t know what the third one is. But there’s some stuff there. So smoothscaling.co. Okay, if you want to get some resources on that. As far as me personally, I’m a little bit of a digital hermit.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:16:16

So this good.

Brad Martineau  1:16:19

The best place would either be the best place to be Instagram and the reason or Facebook, if you want to follow me, occasionally, I’ll be like, I’m gonna post something, you can go there and check out all the dumb crap that I do with my kids. Sometimes. I mean, I laugh at it, but I was also there. So that’s more like, I’ll post some thoughts and ideas periodically, that kind of ends up being more about documenting stuff we do with my family. But so outside of that, so six division for automatic client journey, specifically, smooth scaling is the waitlist for the entire summer scaling thing. And then Facebook or, or Instagram, I have a Twitter account, I follow nobody, nobody follows me because I deleted it and restarted it. I have no tweets. I’m on LinkedIn, and I don’t do anything. So that’s not a good place to reach out to me. If you’re like dying for like a specific request, or whatever, you can email me brad@sixthdivision.com. And it will go to Aaron on my team who will be like this will be where she’ll say, Hey, I’m helping Brad with his emails. I’m gonna go on Monday. Yeah, so anyway, so you can you can also drop an email and, and as long as you’re not crazy, right, then we’ll see what we can do within, within reason.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:17:19

So crazy. Just don’t do any of this.

Brad Martineau  1:17:22

I’ll just tell you that I’m not going to do it. But you can ask like, I always tell people try me. I can’t guarantee anything. But I can guarantee you that if you don’t try me again and get jackpot.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:17:31

There’s that there’s that I personally love hearing about the digital nomad piece. My dream is that I, you know, create a business where I never have to spend any time on social media. Yep. So the one last question, and then we’ll let you go. We’ve covered a lot. Obviously, you have a body of knowledge that you’ve developed over many years of, you know, working in businesses and creating your own. What’s one thing that somebody listening today like one thing that you wish you knew earlier in your journey that somebody could be doing something about right now?

Brad Martineau  1:18:04

That’s a great question. And there’s so many different ways to go. So I said it before and I’ll say it again, because this is where I would start. I don’t care who it is. Anybody that comes in asked me a question about like, hey, this in my wherever it is tactical vision, a player factory, clockwork Hans automatic client journey? Oh, my first question is, what’s on your return document? Now? I don’t say that. I don’t know what the return document is. But the very first question is, well, I don’t know, what are you trying to do? Because every one of those questions is that it depends. The answer is actually dictated a good decision in any of those areas is determined by what you’ve written down on your return document.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:18:39

I love that I love even the name return document.

Brad Martineau  1:18:43

Yeah, so we’ll do this. I have a little training video, and I’ll give you the return document. But I don’t have any set up. So here’s what you have to do. If you want it listeners smooth killing co get on the waitlist. Yes, I know that I realized that that’s a little bit self serving. It was my my plan from the beginning. You have to fill that out and then hit reply, and be like, Yo, I heard you on Heather’s podcast, you said you’d give me the return document. And then you got to be patient with me, and I’ll get it to you. But I can get it to you. But that would be that is the very first thing. And then there’s one other piece I would add to it. So it would be that there’s that like, how to define that. Yep. And then the second piece is that I could create whatever I want on my return document. And it’s not that far away. Now, it would be the other thing if I, if I could remember, like, it’s not we’re like, Oh, I got to build this $3 million business. No, you don’t. My business serves me better as a one to $1.2 million business than it did as a $3 million business. Most people once they get the return dialed in and we actually do some work on the vision realized it’s like, no, you’re not seven years away. You’re like six months away. If you just do this and do this and do this. Oh, having the return to anchor me and then realizing two things. One, I can create it like a belief that was just like injected into my soul. And second, realizing it doesn’t have to be that far away. Now depending on your return, it might be further away, but they’re usually significantly closer than we think they are.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:20:07

Hmm. I love that. I just want to stay with that for a minute. I’m, first of all, if you’re listening and you can get access to Brad’s return document by just doing those couple things, go do we will share the links in the show notes along with anything else Brad wants us to share. Brad, thank you so much. You showed up and you stayed over time and we had lots of fun and people are gonna love this. Really appreciate you.

Brad Martineau  1:20:32

Yeah, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:20:34

Absolutely.

GGGB Outro  1:20:38

Thank you for joining us today on the Guts, Grit & Great Business™ podcast. We hope that we’ve added a little fuel to your tank, some coffee to your cup, and pep in your step to keep you moving forward in your own great adventures. For key takeaways, links to any resources mentioned in today’s show and more, see the show notes which can be found at legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and if you enjoyed today’s conversation, please give us some stars and a review on Apple podcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast so others will find us too. Keep up the great work you’re doing in the world and we’ll see you next week.