Episode 148: The Bottom Line - 350 lbs
In this Club Capital Leadership Podcast episode, host Bradley Hamner (Speaker A) opens with the core question of how small‑business owners can grow leadership, scale operations, and stay profitable. The episode features a guest (Speaker B) who shares his career journey from pharmaceuticals to co‑founding an aesthetics and weight‑loss practice that uses a recurring‑revenue model. He introduces a "350 lbs" analogy: by asking a client how much they weighed a year ago, the practitioner gains perspective on whether a current weight of 350 lbs represents a dramatic loss (e.g., from 700 lbs) or a concerning gain (e.g., from 175 lbs). This story illustrates the importance of understanding past context before judging present performance. The guest expands the lesson into a three‑question framework for business owners: (1) Where have I been? (2) Where am I now? (3) Where do I want to be? He recommends writing these answers down to guide revenue, culture, and growth planning. Throughout the episode, multiple sponsors—Club Capital, DirectClicks, Coach P Consulting, and RockSolid Assistance—are promoted, emphasizing financial advisory, digital‑marketing, sales coaching, and virtual‑assistant hiring services. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to apply the perspective exercise and continue leading well.
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So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.
Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it. Just get what you need and go. So with that, let's get into today's episode.
Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee, or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm. Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create and measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee. Or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm. Hey everyone.
So in one of the businesses that I was a part of, and actually I'll tell you what, I'll even go back before that. In my prior career, before becoming a business owner myself, I was in pharmaceuticals. And I know many of you have either been in pharmaceuticals or you certainly know somebody that was in there. And I developed some great relationships at the time, uh, with physicians, but ultimately I knew that I wanted to do something else. And I was so grateful for that. I did that for about 4 and a half years or so. Well, through that, I developed a relationship with, um, with a, uh, a client, a friend, a physician. And, uh, then whenever I started, uh, doing coaching, uh, he was one of the very first clients. And so over time, we developed a pretty close relationship and ended up becoming partners for a period of time. And he is an internal medicine physician and wanted to begin to get into aesthetics. Um, had been doing some weight loss things at the time, but knew that there was a market to be doing not just Botox, but just other more high-ticket type aesthetics things. And that's certainly where a lot of physicians are getting out of that space because of the, uh, out of the traditional medicine, because it's just so much paperwork and dealing with government bureaucracy, et cetera. So I think all of you can relate to that. So wanted to move more into a cash base. Well, we began to wrap this model of their business with, um, recurring revenue model, uh, for weight loss. And this gets to the message for today. And so when we were beginning to kind of architect, okay, what's the experience going to be like when someone comes in? Knew about the weight loss program in the office, etc. And so as we were kind of beginning to say, well, have you done things in the past, and, and what can we do to make it a really great experience and make it worthwhile for people to pay— at the time it was about $119 a month for this specific weight loss program, and it actually got up to where there was quite a few people, um, on the program. Anyway, to the point is when we began to kind of go through exactly what the onboarding process looked like, people would fill out a form and they get through all the traditional, you know, signing waivers and things of that nature. There was a question on there that asked, how much do you weigh? And I felt like that once the physician went in and then they had the information of currently, what is his experience going to be? What are the questions he's going to ask now that he has this intake form? And one of the things that I— we actually implemented, which was so important, is the question which was, how much did you weigh a year ago? And so let me give you this analogy. Let's say that you are that physician, okay? You're a physician and you began a weight loss practice yourself. Okay. And let's say that somebody walks in and you're going to walk into the room and you're looking at their, you're looking at their sheet and it says current weight, 350 pounds. All of you right now have some level of image in your mind or thoughts in your mind that's going through. So the physician walks in and exchanges pleasantries, as all of you would do. One of the key questions that I just mentioned would be, "What did you weigh a year ago?" Because if that answer to that person says, "Well, a year ago I weighed 700 pounds," it's celebration time. We should be celebrating, pull out the balloons, and, you know, obviously posted on social media, etc. But if the same person was asked that question, so, would you weigh a year ago, and they say, well, weighed 175 pounds, then that may give us some pause and to say, hmm, has something changed in your diet? Have we been put on another medication that has caused you to go from 175 to 350? There's something we might need to take a look at there, obviously need to take a look at there, and this extremely hypothetical scenario, I know some of you may say you can't lose 350 pounds, um, or 250 pounds in, uh, uh, no, 350, um, in a year, or you can't gain that much weight in a year. I get that. Just go with the analogy. And but really, it's so important to get an idea of where someone has been. So what's the moral to the story? It really comes down to perspective. So when I shared this story with some other business owners that I work with a couple of weeks ago, and they felt it was really profound, because if you just said somebody's 350 pounds and you left it at that, okay, everybody has their own conceptions of what that is. But the reality is you don't know where someone has been. And if someone's at 175 and they're now 350, that would probably cause one sort of diagnosis, things that we would do. But if somebody was 700 pounds and now they're 350, totally different. They may continue on doing what it is they're doing. And then the last thing I'll add is Where do they want to go? And so then I would say, where do you want to be a year from now? And so if you are driving, obviously don't do this. But this is a great thinking time exercise, is to be able to begin to write down in your business, where am I today? Where was I a year ago? And then where do I want to be a year from today? Those 3 things. Where have I been? Where am I at? Where am I going? Now, look, that could go a lot of different places, whether you want to think about revenue numbers, sales targets, incentives, team culture, programs. I mean, there's so many different things with that. But simply asking yourself those 3 questions— where have I been? Where am I at? And where am I going? So I hope that that analogy has, has helped, maybe given you a little bit of perspective to think about not just judging other people, but judging yourself too harshly without having the perspective. So if I'm going to work with a, with a business owner, I'm going to ask them the questions. First of all, tell me where you are today. And then I want to know where, where have they been? I want to hear the story. That's honestly why I started asking a long time ago in the interview podcast around, uh, tell me your background and origin story. It's the very first question we ask in those interviews. And then I want to ask, where do you want to be a year from now? And sometimes I'll ask that, uh, I'll use, uh, it's called the Dan Sullivan question. I'll ask Fast forward 3 years from now, you kind of lean out 3 years from today. Tell me what needs to happen both personally, professionally for you to be happy, look back on that time and be happy with your success. Okay. That's a great question. And that's a great question to ask yourself. But I really love framing things. For me, it gives me great perspective of not just where someone is today. That's good. But it's not nearly as full and complete as knowing where someone has been and really where they want to go. It's a great thinking time exercise for all of you to do next time you have 30 minutes and you have a legal pad or your iPad on GoodNotes, or if you use, uh, David Peterson, I really love the Remarkable 2s. If you want to use one of those e-ink Or if you just want to use a legal pad, take the time to think, where have I— where was I a year ago? Where was my business a year ago? Where am I today? Where's my business today? And where do I want to be in the future? 350 pounds. Where was that person a year ago? Were they 700 pounds or were they 175 pounds? Very different scenarios with very different outcomes of how we would begin to move forward. So anyway, hope that served all of you. Appreciate your time and attention as always. Until next episode, lead well.
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