Episode 307: The Bottom Line - The Someday Shelf
In this episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, host Bradley Hamner addresses the common entrepreneurial dilemma of having countless good ideas but lacking the structure to execute them effectively. He introduces the "Someday Shelf" – a simple framework for capturing, categorizing, and deferring ideas until the business is ready to act on them. Hamner explains why entrepreneurs often resist routine and process, leading to half‑baked initiatives and open loops, and argues that selective focus on a few high‑impact projects is essential for scaling profitably. He walks through practical steps for implementing the Someday Shelf using tools like Notion, Google Docs, and Word, and shares a real‑world example of how he and his executive assistant use the system to vet and prioritize initiatives. Throughout, he emphasizes the importance of clarity, accountability, and a performance culture. The episode also includes promotional segments for Club Capital’s financial, CFO, and tax advisory services, and announces a new leadership podcast community launching on June 1, inviting listeners to engage directly with podcast guests.
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Whenever I put a someday shelf and I started it as a bullet point and it sat there, the more I realized, oh, you know what, actually I have a place that I can put something. I can actually start a playbook or I can start an idea. I can start a page in Notion or I can start another Google document or Word document. I actually can start something and begin to get all my brains out and get it out of my brain and get all these ideas out for that thing and I can put it somewhere.
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 gonna 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 better understand your financials and take charge of your tax bill? Well, Club Capital's here to help. As the largest accounting advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, they are way more than your everyday run-of-the-mill CPA. Club Capital provides financial, CFO, and tax advisory services to help you plan and forecast your financial success. You'll meet every month to review your agency's financial performance, the difference between your profit and actual cash flow, along with helping you better understand your bottom line. Visit club.capital to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm.
Hey everyone. Well, first of all, when you are listening to this, this episode is going to drop the day after Thanksgiving. So let me share with you a day late how thankful I am for all of you. Thankful for your time and for your attention and for the feedback and for the messages that we get and for just giving us a little bit of your time and We hope every one of these episodes is there to serve you and help you to be able to grow and scale your business and go on to make a bigger impact in the world and ultimately be able to make a greater income. But I want you to know, if you haven't heard today, that I am grateful and thankful for you. Okay, so on to today's episode. So last week I mentioned this idea called the Someday shelf. It was basically a tease of, "What do I do with all of these ideas?" As an entrepreneur business owner, I have seemingly never a shortage of good ideas, or at least ideas that I think in the moment are good ideas. Come to find out, many times they're not great ideas, or maybe they are the right idea, but I'm not executing them at the right time. You listen to podcasts like this, you read a book, you go to a conference, you go to a seminar, and you get fired up and you get emotional, but emotional in a good way. You start to see what's possible. You hear what other people are doing, and you hear about this new play that somebody is running, this new process that they have, this new marketing idea, campaign, etc., that somebody else seems to be doing. You hear about this new compensation plan. And I know I'm not the only one that's out there because I've talked to so many of you on a weekly basis that you too can relate to that. And it's all coming from a good place, whether it's an idea that you have organically or if it's an idea that you've heard somewhere else. You're trying to grow the business. You are certainly never thinking, you know what, this is the idea that's absolutely going to sabotage everything that we're trying to do. I mean, if we thought that was going to be the case, we would never do it. But we double down, we triple down, we promise this is the one that's actually going to get it done. This is the compensation plan. This is the organizational structure. This is the org chart. This is the person. This is the idea that's going to get it done. And in some cases it is. But I think a lot of times we end up with a lot of half-baked ideas. At least I certainly know that I have. Here's an idea. But I kind of sort of implement it, but not all the way. You listen to someone like Coach P and you hear how they maybe run a play, or you hear from Autopilot Recruiting about how you can structure the entire recruiting system, but we kind of halfway do it, or maybe in some cases, 25% of the way do it. We don't go all the way. And so what we end up with is a lot of open loops. Lot of several different things that we're trying to do simultaneously, but we're really not doing any of them well. And last week I talked about how we actively, as the entrepreneur, as the business owner, will push hard against structure and process and routine. Why? Because we didn't want to be told what to do. We started this business for that very reason, to be in complete control. We rejected the 9-to-5. To take the 9 to 11, and I don't mean 11 AM. I mean, that's the dream, is to be able to wake up and do what you love and be done by 12 and go play golf, go fishing, go do whatever you want to do the rest of the day. And that certainly is possible, but we push against structure and process and routine. And so one of the things that I needed to try to figure out for myself is, what do I do with all of these good ideas? What do I do with all of these things that I really want to implement, execute. It's like, I have this idea and I don't know what to do with it. And so what I typically used to do was try to implement it. And I would couch it and share with my team in as many ways as I needed to that this one, we do need to do this, and here's all of the reasons why. Well, at the end of the day, you're the boss and they're going to go with it. But over time, they begin to sense that you're crying wolf. Here we go again. Bradley has yet another idea. He said these are the things we were going to execute on this month. He said this was the plan. This was what we're going to execute. This is the plan for the quarter. This is what we're going to execute this month. But yet by Wednesday, that now has seemingly all changed. And no matter how many different ways we put it, we are constantly changing things. And so I thought, well, I just need to say no to good ideas. And by the way, I do believe that there is some relevance to saying no, we're not going to do that at all. But oftentimes what I found for me is it wasn't completely rejecting. Some of the bad ideas for you are fairly easy for us to kind of identify. And say, no, we're not gonna do that.
Have you ever thought, wouldn't it be incredible if you had direct access to our expert podcast guests in real time and be able to ask a question specific to your business? Well, now you have the opportunity to do that. After 3 and a half years, we're finally launching a leadership podcast community, and we want you to be a part of it. We're launching this podcast community on June 1st. Go to club.capital. /podcast and you'll get all the details. You'll be able to interact with every single one of the podcasts that we record in real time and ask us questions and be able to ask the guest questions. In addition to that, we're going to have a monthly exclusive Q&A just for our Leadership Podcast listeners. Go to club.capital/podcast. That's club.capital/podcast and be one of the very first to join. I can't wait to see you. In our leadership podcast community.
What I think is a lot harder, however, is to say no to the good ideas. And really, it's not even no, it's not right now. And so I did not know what really to do with that. And so I don't really know the genesis of it, but one day I just typed into Notion someday shelf. And specifically, we have this framework called the Growth Engine. It's how do you attract? How do you convert? How do you deliver? And I'm not gonna get into that today. That's for a whole nother day. But under each one of those, and there's really typically 3 things under each one of those, but I needed to put, well, let's just take marketing as an example. What are the ways that we are getting leads? Now, a lot of people call that lead gen or lead generation. And so if you think about all of the different ways to be able to get leads into a business, especially if you're a small business, you can't execute on all of them all at one time. We're better suited to choose 2 or 3 of them and do incredibly well, know exactly how we're going to attract those leads and know exactly how we're gonna nurture those leads, how exactly we're gonna take those leads and convert them, et cetera. And so whenever I put a someday shelf and I started it as a bullet point and it sat there, the more I realized, Oh, you know what? Actually, I have a place that I can put something. I can actually start a playbook, or I can start an idea. I can start a page in Notion, or I can start another Google document or Word document. I actually can start something and begin to get all my brains out, get it out of my brain and get all these ideas out for that thing. And I can put it somewhere. Even just this week, there was one last week, but then there was another one this week that whenever I had my daily sync with Lauren, my EA, I shared with her, "Hey, I have an idea of an offer, of an opportunity, and I want to share it with you. And I want you to know that I've already put it on the someday shelf. This is a 2024, maybe late 2024, if not 2025 initiative." And she said, "Okay, share it with me." I shared it with her and she said, "Actually, I really love that idea. I think that's actually a great idea." And so we spent probably 10 minutes or so on a call going back and forth. Well, we could do this and we could do this and here's the things we could do. And we started to even brain dump even more of those things into that document. But what's key is that we're not taking any specific steps. If you've heard me before talk about outcomes, accountability, et cetera, mentioned that in passing. I'll talk about a performance culture at some other point. Typically, if we were going to move forward with that initiative, with that specific project, then we would start to get ideas of, okay, who's going to own this? And when are we going to release it? And what's the timeline of that? And what's our outcomes that we're shooting for? And what does success look like? And start asking all those questions. We didn't answer. We didn't do any of those things. Why? Because we're not moving forward with them, but it sits somewhere. And the act of having a someday shelf— someday I'll get to that. Someday, whenever we are ready to pull the trigger on starting that process, we will move forward. I'd shared this last week with a couple business owners and they loved it. And one even sent me a Voxer back and said, I just had a meeting with someone and I was able to tell them, we are not doing that right now. Here are the two, I think it was two, maybe three things that we are specifically working on and we're going to be great at these. And then one day, whenever I feel like these are humming, we really have this down pat, then we'll start on that. That is a great idea. But we're not going to do that right now. We're going to do that someday. And the person came back to them and said, I really admire your conviction. I really admire the clarity that you have. And so his message back was twofold. He said, I feel so much confidence in what it is that I'm doing and the clarity that I have about, I now have a place that I can put something. And he said, "Business can actually be fun." And I wish more people would actually see that if they start choosing, it's not restrictive. It actually is liberating. It can make business more fun. So I consider— I invite you to consider starting a someday shelf. All of those ideas that you have, all of those— the next meeting you go to at the end of the year, the first of the year, and you start to get Oh, we could do this and this and this. Hopefully now maybe that even gives you some permission to hear all of that, think about it, and say, you know what? That is a good idea. I think we do want to implement that one day. But now I have a place to put it. I could put it on a someday shelf. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well.
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