In this solo podcast, Bradley Hamner uses the metaphor of a scavenger hunt—and later a laundry‑sorting analogy—to illustrate how businesses unintentionally create chaotic “digital scavenger hunts” when they store files without a clear system. He argues that teams should optimize for retrieval (knowing where an asset lives) rather than for speed of creation, and he proposes the role of a “Chief Reminding Officer” who habitually asks where new documents are placed and why. Hamner stresses the importance of a single source of truth, sharing a concrete example where he responded to a teammate’s request for a 2‑Day MBA document with a short Loom video that explained both the location and the reasoning. He outlines practical steps: ask the creator where a file lives, explain the rationale, correct misplacements, and embed these habits so the organization runs like a well‑oiled machine instead of a hand‑crank. The episode blends storytelling, analogies, and actionable advice to improve digital asset organization and team efficiency.
Chapters
Hey everyone. All right, so have you ever been on a scavenger hunt? Well, whenever you're a kid, or even I've seen some adult scavenger hunts, or if you have small kids, the kids love to go on scavenger hunts. You get kind of like a map and you're trying to find a clue and you go to the next spot and then everybody's like, okay, wait a minute. It's almost like the idea of escape rooms in kind of a way, right? But you're not trying to escape something, you're trying to to find the next clue, to find the next clue, to find the next clue, to eventually you get to, you know, whatever it, uh, it is. I remember I was in a fraternity, my first, um, when I was in college, and, uh, they had us kind of do this thing. I was a Sigma Chi. That was what seemingly was like a scavenger hunt, so I thought, but it ended up being kind of an empty thing, and it was more of a metaphor of like, hey, what you're searching for is Actually not something that you're going to find out there. Well, in business, oftentimes we are unknowingly putting together scavenger hunts for our team and even for ourselves, and they're no fun. Here's what I mean. You've heard me talk a lot about at times or mention you know, Rembrandts in the attic. And this is referring to the idea that on your desktop, okay, or on your shared drive, whatever shared drive formula you use, that you have assets that are of a tremendous amount of value in your business. It's the organizing function that makes it to where you are able to find it. We optimize for retrieval, not for speed. Okay, we optimize for the retrieval of the thing, not for speed. Once again, I want to share that we do not want to just spin up documents. So Bradley, you're kind of going high level, get down to the meat of it. Here's it, here it is. When you're creating and spinning up a new document, an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document, you're creating an asset. Oftentimes we can just throw the thing together and then where we put it, we give no thought to it. Whatsoever. How would I know? Well, because that's what I would do. And so it would either sit on maybe my desktop, or maybe I would share it to the team in an email, and then I would just hope that they put it somewhere where they could find it. And I would default to them creating their own individual scavenger hunt. And so then what would happen is people would be like, where is XYZ? Versus thinking about, wait a minute, I've created this thing. Now where is the best place for me to put it? Scavenger hunts are fun when you're with your kids or you're doing something in a new city to explore the city. They are not fun when it comes to business. We want to optimize where we put things for retrieval and not for speed. I've shared this before, but it's worth repeating. I think sometimes, even for myself, it's important to be Chief Reminding Officer, and I think it is for, for you as well, to be Chief Reminding Officer to your team. Assume nothing. And so what that means is, is when you are creating a new asset, or when your team member creates a new asset, asking them, where did you put that? And why did you put it there? And the more times you do that, it takes— listen, we're talking about this taking 20 seconds. It's the intentionality. Okay, that's great. That goes here. Here's exactly why it goes here. Now we always know where we have put it. I don't know if it's the best analogy, but it's the analogy I've been able to come up with so far that seems to make the most sense. In my head, which is the laundry analogy. You know, you, you do laundry, you go do a load of clothes in the washer, you do a load of clothes, you know, put them in the dryer at that point, and then you— it's time to take the laundry out of the dryer. Well, what are we going to do? We're going to start randomly putting clothes underneath the kitchen sink. Maybe let's throw some in the kids' toy room. Let's throw some in the media room. Let's put some into the garage. And not even think about it. Versus, no, you don't do that, right? You probably maybe fold them in the laundry room, or you maybe dump them on the bed, and you go through and you fold them, and then you put them away. The towels go where the towels go, the socks go in the socks drawer, so on and so on and so forth. Why do we do that? Why, why do we do that? We do that because when you're getting dressed the next morning, or at any point, you're going to go and say, okay, where's my shorts? Okay, I know where my shorts are, and I know where all of my golf shirts are, and I know where the socks are. And you're going to go do that, and you're going to go find your shoes, and your shoes are likely going to be in the place that you put them. And so without even knowing it, you have like basically a system for the way that you're doing things. I'm encouraging you to do the same thing with your digital assets in the business. These are some of the things when I would— I would be afraid to have asked people. In fact, I just didn't. I just didn't ask people these kind of things because I felt like it was I don't know, too mundane or too granular or silly to ask these questions, but I'm sharing with you these are the things that actually help your business to run like a well-oiled machine. The opposite of that is a hand crank where, you know, the team comes to you constantly, Bradley, where did you put XYZ thing? Bradley, where is this? And I will tell you, there are still times occasionally that the team says— and what prompted this, and I share this often, that a lot of these solo podcasts come from the experiences that are happening as we're running the businesses. And so I got a message today from one of my team members, Courtney, and she said, Bradley, I'm looking for this particular document, and I want to know what, which, where is the single source of truth. We actually use— that's language we use often. What is the single source of truth? And so if we're coming up with, let's say we're planning at this particular time, we're planning for the 2-day MBA that, that's coming up. Matter of fact, this um, is going to drop on the podcast on August 2nd, as a matter of fact. So right before the 2-Day MBA. And we have a document called the 2-Day MBA, and it's the single source of truth. So that's some language that we have. So Courtney was asking me, where's the single source of truth? Which is the single source of truth for this thing? And so I share a short, quick Loom video. It's about 3 minutes long. Not only— I didn't just give her the answer, but I shared with her why it is there. Sent back a quick thing. That makes complete sense. Thank you for that. Now she knows. So it's still at times the team is wanting to know. And so we're not perfect in that. They want to know though, is this the right place for me to be looking? Is this the right, the correct drawer for me to be in? And if we go there, and this doesn't happen often, but if I go, say I'm poking around in something and I see something that's like, wait a minute, why is that there? If I know who put it there, it's almost like, why is there a pair of jeans in the sock drawer? It doesn't really make a lot of sense, right? Then you would be like, wait a minute, why did you put it there? Not to you know, get on to the person, right? But really just a, hey, was that a mistake? Was there some reason you put it there? And sometimes it's a mistake. Sometimes they were trying to go too fast with something, and that's, look, that's understandable, right? And so we just gently redirect there and say, hey, it actually goes here, and here's why. And again, these are some things that, hey, we can be dismissive of them, but when you start to embed that in your team, it allows the business to really operate a lot more efficiently versus the business really being more of a hand crank. All right, hope that helped.
