In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner walks small‑business owners (typically $300K‑$3M in revenue) through the first part of a three‑week series on building systems. He begins by recapping his earlier roadmap framework—Point A (current state), Point B (desired state), and the plan to get there—showing how a clear roadmap tackles three core pain points: lack of clarity, lack of systems, and owner fatigue. Hamner then argues that the foundation for any system is a single, digital “Team HQ” (or Blueprint OS), a shared‑drive location (Google Drive, Dropbox, Notion, etc.) that serves as the business’s operating system. He defines “assets” as any document, spreadsheet, video, or process that the business runs on, likening existing but unorganized assets to “Rembrandts in the attic.” Using analogies to McDonald’s, the E‑Myth, and Marie Kondo, he explains why small businesses need a central repository, how to choose a platform, set up an initial folder architecture, and begin migrating or archiving existing assets. He also mentions the upcoming episode on core playbooks that will flesh out the OS architecture. Throughout, Hamner balances enthusiasm for systemization with a realistic warning against over‑engineering, encouraging owners to start digitally, optionally create a physical master copy, and iterate.
Chapters
Hey everyone. Well, for the last few weeks, we have been walking you through step by step every Friday on a very key model. So I'm going to take you back for the past just handful of weeks. One of the things we talked about back on February the 21st, we talked about understanding where your business is today. I call that point A. Then understanding the next week, we talked about what your point B is. Where is it that you are going? Then the following week, we talked about what's your plan to get there? Those 3 things combined make up what I refer to as your roadmap. Your business roadmap is made up of where are you today, where are you going, and what is your plan to be able to get there? Now, once you have a roadmap, it helps solve one of the 3 core problems that most small business owners, especially business owners doing $300,000 to $3 million in annual revenue, face often. One is they lack true clarity, and that can be solved by really having a true roadmap for where the business is. Number two is the core problem we talked about a couple weeks ago was they lack systems. And then core problem number three is, well, they're just tired. Well, over the next three weeks, starting this week, we're going to be talking about like If you lack systems, if you really lack systems and you want to learn how to actually systematize the business, how do you actually do that? What does that look like? Look, I'm not the first one that has ever mentioned, and nor will I be the first one that's ever mentioned to you. You've heard this many, many times before, especially if you've read a book like The E-Myth, that you need to have systems and processes. And in some cases, people have even said, I need to McDonaldize the business. And what I'm going to try to do over the next 3 weeks is, uh, next couple of weeks is to start to break down some ideas and give you what I wish somebody would have given me and talked to me about whenever I started down the process of attempting to systematize the business. Now, is it ever perfect? Do you ever get to a place to where the whole thing is just completely systematized? Well, no, but even that's why you see, uh, McDonald's still has, you know, always there. Ice cream machines seem to be broken. By the way, if you want to watch a great video breaking that down, Johnny Harris has done a— did a video on YouTube and it's called The Real Reason McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken. It's got 13 million views, but it's fascinating video that he studied. And I thought, how someone like him to do a video like that. But obviously it certainly crushed and got my attention. I was curious as to why. So anyway, go and check that out. Okay, so look, we're small businesses. We're not McDonald's. We're not going to systematize our business to the level that McDonald's is. I mean, sure, if you want to kind of hold that as, you know, some North Star that you use to navigate by, I think that's fine. Trying to actually get it to that point, I think stifles creativity, and it's honestly just a waste of time as a small business owner. So in today's first part of this, what I want to talk to you about is the fact that you need a central location, something that you can say is your team headquarters. We'll say, we'll call it Team HQ. All right. You need to be able to point to it and say, this is where it is. Now, the simple direct answer is it's going to be on some shared drive digitally. Uh, that may be Google Drive. It may be Dropbox. It may be your Microsoft shared drive, whatever that is that they, that you may be using there, but you need to be able to point to it and say, this is what it is. Now we refer to that as Blueprint OS, but you would say it's your business name OS, okay, whatever that is. So that way you can say, this is the operating system for the business. This is the thing that runs on. No different than your phone is running on, let's just say, Android— or excuse me, iOS, right? So I'm in the Apple ecosystem and my iPhone's running on, uh, iOS. The new Apple Vision goggles, so the new goggles, 3D, uh, goggles, the— or 4D goggles, whatever, uh, that they have, it's running on Vision OS if you actually pull that up. And so I think your business is currently running on an operating system. I think that operating system is just actually you. And we want to really upgrade that operating system. Instead of the business running on a Windows 95 operating system, we need to upgrade it. We need to really upgrade it and change it to where it's running on something that is outside of you. And so if it's outside of us, then we need to have a central location to where everything is. It's a central repository of all the assets. And when I think about assets, how you do things in the business is an asset. And I never actually had used that vernacular language until just a handful of years ago. And now we use it extensively. When you create a document, and let's say it's a PDF, a Word document, an Excel, Google Sheet, uh, whatever, I'll even— a video tutorial, those can be assets of the business. In fact, as we go even more and more digital, in more and more companies and small businesses are going remote, it becomes even more imperative that you're able to say this is what the business runs off of. Now you can run the business off of something like a Notion. We love Notion. We, um, at one time, can— a lot of our members have, and some of our members have successfully started to use and integrate Notion. But even within that, we're pulling in documentation from a lot of different places. The point is you need to be able to say this is what it is. If somebody was going to go and buy the business, what are you going to hand over to them when you shake hands? Like when you buy a house, what do they do? You cleared out the house, you sign the final paperwork, and they slide the keys over to you. What are you sliding over if you were to sell your company? Now, some of you listening to this are actually able to do that. You actually are able to sell your business. What assets are you transferring over? Not just the, the things that they're buying. They're buying your customers, you're buying your customer list, depending on what type of business you, you have. But if they are also buying your systems, your way of doing things, that has a tremendous amount of value in the business. But here's the thing, even if you don't or can't sell your business The same thing that an acquirer would see as valuable is also the same things that make a business great to own. And if we can use that to think about how we want to go about doing it, then we need to start with one central place. So when I onboard— when we onboard new members into our program, One of the first things that we'll do within the first month is to get them to choose where's yours going to be. Where is your operating system literally going to live? And then we'll even get them to start and set up their initial folder structure. We'll call that your, uh, uh, your OS architecture. Okay. All right. What's the structure, the folder structure, where are things going to go? And then one of the very first things that we're going to do is actually we're going to let them know that, hey, if you've been in business any amount of time, and most people, pretty much everybody that we work with has been in business for at least a couple of years, they have created assets. And again, they may not have used that language, but they have created assets in the business. And so we'll tell them that those are Rembrandts in the attic. And I've done a podcast called Rembrandts in the Attic in the past. You can go and search in here and be able to find that. But they have Rembrandts in the attic. And so we'll ask them to go ahead and once you have the architecture set up of where it's going to go, now we can actually go and begin to put our assets somewhere. Let's begin to attempt to, before we even start to create new things, why don't we organize the things that we have? It's almost like where Marie Kondo will say, you know, in The Art of Tidying Up, what she'll do is she'll go into, I think she typically starts in the master bedroom, in the master closet. She'll kind of take all the things out. Well, you don't necessarily need to go into your shared drive where your team is and take all the files out. That would certainly maybe probably take a while. But what you do want to do and what is and what does become valuable along the way is if you have the folder architecture set up, and now we can start to put these, all these assets we already have created, we can start put them in the right places. There's actually some organization into where things go. And is it going to take you a little bit of time with some new language and starting to think? Sure. Then also we'll tell people that you're going to come across a lot of documents that, you know, were half-baked, things you don't use anymore. What are you going to do with those? Put them in the archive folder. Let's create an archive folder and go from there. And so what I'll start doing, what I'm going to do next week is we're going to talk about the handful of core playbooks or the handful of, handful of folders that ultimately, what is the architecture? What is the OS architecture where these things are going to go? And that's what we're going to talk about next week. So you can begin to get some sort of an idea of like, where am I going to start to begin to put some of this stuff. But more importantly today, the biggest idea I wanted to transfer over to you is that we need to be able to have one place to be able to say, this is where the operating system lives. This is our team headquarters. You can point to it. Now, to be clear, some people love to be able to— even myself, I love the analog version of being able to print things off. I love it. I love to, to be able to interact and use a red pen and mark things up. There's nothing wrong with that too. You can have a physical version that is a replica of what you have digitally. Let's start digitally. And then as we start Create Assets, we can print things off. Let's have one master, one that maybe is in a three-ring binder that sits on your desk. And then when it's all done, Then we can go and duplicate that for our team members if you so see fit. All right, everyone. Hope this episode was helpful. Next week we start talking about the handful of core playbooks that make up the operating system and help us to actually start to learn and solve the problem of having lack of systems in the business. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well and go be great.
