In this episode, Bradley Hamner welcomes listeners to 2025 by sharing his personal "word of the year"—"margin"—and explains the concept as the gap between one’s load (commitments, tasks, emotional/financial strain) and one’s limit (capacity, energy, resources). He outlines how increasing limits (through health, energy management) and decreasing loads (by cutting back on meetings, calls, and other commitments) can create margin in time, energy, emotions, and finances. Hamner then shifts to a strategic business focus, emphasizing the necessity of "ruthless prioritization" for entrepreneurs at any revenue stage. He cites the YouTube powerhouse Dude Perfect, which hired a CEO and stressed the need to say no to even good ideas in order to focus on execution. He advises listeners to identify what truly matters in 2025, eliminate low‑impact activities, and concentrate on implementation rather than endless ideas. The episode also includes a sponsor segment promoting Club Capital, a CPA and financial advisory firm for insurance agency owners.
Chapters
No matter the level that you're at, if you're starting out right now and you're getting to your first $20,000 a month, you're trying to get the business to $300,000, or you're on your way to get the business to $1 million in top line revenue, or $3 million in top line revenue, or whatever the number is for you, you have to be able to prioritize. And there's something about the ruthless prioritization. Look, it's easy to say no to not so good ideas. It is much harder to say no to good ideas or a volume of great ideas.
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Hey everyone. Well, happy 2025. Can you believe it's already 2025? I hope you had a great 2024 and hope 2025 is even better. So I'm gonna start out today with telling you my word of the year. Where I picked that up from, and I would encourage you to choose your word of the year. I've done that for a few years. It's been helpful, maybe in some years more than others. I've had joy as one, health as one, focus, surrender, and my joy of the year for 2025 is margin. I heard this at a workshop that I attended recently about margin is the difference between your load and your limit. And so there's things that you can do to increase your limit basically, and through energy management, certainly taking care of your body, mental health, et cetera. And then there's also just managing the load that you have, the number of calls you're committed to on a daily or weekly basis, the number of Zoom calls they have, the number of appointments that you have on your schedule, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So managing those two. And increasing your limit and decreasing your load increases your margin. And that can apply for your time, it can apply for your energy, and apply for your emotions. Can be emotional margin, and it can also be financial margin as well. So I chose that, that's my word of the year. And throughout the year, I'll let you know how I'm doing and specific steps that I've I've already taken, but it's a little early. And then hopefully some steps I'll take throughout the year to be able to increase the margin in my own life.
Okay.
The second thing is more of a businessy strategic thing. And I want to give full credit to Dude Perfect, the famous YouTubers. I'm sure many of you are familiar, especially if you have young kids, but I listened to them on the Colin and Samir Show on YouTube and they were, it's about a 2-hour interview, they were talking about the hiring of a CEO coming into Dude Perfect, and they recently sold off a portion of the company to be able to raise money to hire this CEO and do other things. And what they mentioned several times is just how important it is for them to— that CEO to ruthlessly prioritize. And there was something about that that really stood out to me because maybe you think about all of the opportunities Dude Perfect has, not just the ideas for the YouTube videos, but cities that would love to bring their tour to there, ideas for games, partnerships with incredible brands, sponsorships with incredible brands, co-promotion with other celebrity creators, etc. I mean, there's just so many things that they can do from the focus on doing more YouTube videos, longer YouTube videos, different channels, on and on and on the list. Is pretty incredible. And you know what? They even admitted, look, we've got it beyond what we ever thought we could do. We need to be able to bring on somebody, professional management, to help us really be able to make these decisions and to ruthlessly prioritize what we need to do. And no matter the level that you're at, if you're starting out right now and you're getting to your first $20,000 a month and you're trying to get the business to $300,000, or you're on your way to get the business to $1 million in top line revenue, or $3 million in top line revenue, or whatever the number is for you, you have to be able to prioritize. And there's something about the ruthless prioritization. Look, it's easy to say no to not so good ideas, or even, dare I say, bad ideas. It is much harder to say no to good ideas or a volume of great ideas. So that really landed with me. So I'd encourage you, what are really your priorities for 2025? In fact, I've even heard it say more simply, what matters to you in 2025? And begin to prioritize those things. Those are things that I have actually removed a lot of the things that we did, or we did actually work on in 2024. You've removed a lot of those things. Look, it's easy to talk about simple scales, fancy fails. It's easy to say that. It is much harder to actually be able to focus and to go out and execute. And the way that you do that is through ruthless prioritization, saying no. There are so many things that I would love for us to focus on this year. I'd love for us to focus on bringing out a newsletter. I'd love for us to focus on bringing together a new free community. I'd love for us to focus on deepening and actually creating content specifically on YouTube, having more of a general social media presence. The list is endless. Creating products at different levels to be able to serve all of you. And at the end of the day, what matters is not the ideas. The ideas are endless. In fact, one of our maxims is ideas are everywhere, but it's the implementation that's everything. So today, as you're going through and you're getting ready for the next couple weeks, hopefully you've already put together your 2025 plan. But as you go forth, take a look at your plan. Have I ruthlessly prioritized the things that are the most important? What really matters? And what am I going to go do about it? Hope this served you well. Hope 2025 is truly your best year yet. Lead well and go be great.
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