Episode 525: Punched in the Face - The Real Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs with Chad Cannon

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, it's somewhat of a recast. This is from our 2-day MBA that we did in August of 2025. This episode was all about leading yourself first, or at least that workshop was. And I had one of my good friends who came on the podcast recently, Chad Cannon, to do a presentation. If you don't know much about Chad, he has worked for to some of the biggest names in business. Donald Miller most recently, and then prior to that, he spent, I think, almost 10 years with Michael Hyatt. And so he knows a thing or two about, A, scaling businesses and what those companies did to scale their business, but also, and maybe even more importantly, what has he been able to help other small business owners to be able to do. This episode is kind of a recast from that 2-day MBA. I think you're gonna get a ton out of that. Without further ado, here's the 2 Day MBA episode with my good friend, Chad Cannon.

Yeah, man. Absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

I'm pumped to have you. I'm going to pull it up here in just a second so that you can share your screen. So let me give everybody kind of a background. Years ago, Chad, I actually know when this was, like 2017, maybe 2018, something like that. I was in Nashville, actually at a Michael Hyatt event. Maybe it was a business accelerator event, et cetera. And Chad and I met, I started asking some different questions. He gave me some advice and then we connected. And over the years, we've just become better and better friends. So I'll let him give a little bit of his kind of backstory. But he worked for Michael for a really long time. Came out of that most recently, was working with Donald Miller at StoryBrand. But he has just an unbelievable wealth of experience when I have challenges myself. I have obviously Mike, my coach that lives now over in Spain, but I like to pick up the phone and text and call, call Chad. So I've been in some of Chad's masterminds over the years. And so, Chad, it's really a pleasure to be able to have you in his talk today, which I was super pumped whenever he pulled this up. Punched in the Face: The Real Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs. Chad, uh, welcome. Great to have you here, my friend. Thank you so much. And, uh, the floor is yours, buddy.

Well, when, uh, Bradley called me probably 6 weeks ago and was kind of sharing with me about the topic, um, and kind of wanting to focus on the mindset of the entrepreneur, you know, as, as Bradley said, I'm gonna share a little bit about my background. But, um, I've had kind of this luxury of being behind the scenes, not only with like Michael Hyatt and Donald Miller. But by doing so in both of those businesses, I worked with probably thousands of, of business owners and entrepreneurs, had conversations with many of those, saw the, the ups, the downs, the sideways. And, you know, one of the things that we're gonna touch on here is resilience. Business owners that make it to the end, businesses that are some of the most successful businesses today had massive setbacks, massive punches in the face. and are now global leaders. And some of you may be going through, one of this moment where you feel like you're punched in the face. I'll share this later, but like my, one of my favorite quotes that I talk to business owners about, Mike Tyson said, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face. You know, so we're in halfway through Q3, you know, probably a year ago we started thinking about our plan for 2025. More than likely our plan has not gone exactly to plan. For all of you. I wish everyone was on camera because I'd have you raise your hand and I would guess at least 75 to 80% of you had said, probably said you've changed your plan. So I'm going to just share a little bit and then try to just make some really pointed, give you a formula to what I've seen people to be able to really overcome those punches and to really be resilient and to continue to grow your business. But before I jump in and talk about business, I'd love to just start with a little bit about me. You know, I moved to Nashville in 2004. The city has become home. When I moved here, the skyline looked drastically different. I'm actually in downtown. The Cumberland River is right behind me. The skyline is totally different now. I don't take it for granted. I drive in and I'm like, oh my gosh, the city has changed so much in the 21+ years I've been here. Just— it's incredible. I've got father to two adopted little kiddos. The little— the first photo on the left is of my son Dylan. He's 4. He had his first day of preschool yesterday. That literally came from yesterday. My daughter Crew is 8 and is the joy of my life. Has just been, you know, I wanted a son first. I said, you know, God, God knew he needed to like shave off so many things of my heart and he gave me a daughter first. And I'm so grateful that he did. I love golf. So you probably know a little bit about Bradley. Bradley and I bonded over golf over the years. This is a group of us that went for my 40th 2 years ago to Royal Troon and had a great time. And I just love being able to help business owners like yourselves be able to grow and scale primarily through marketing and sales strategies. My background, depending on when you knew me in my career, 20-plus career, you'd be like, oh, Chad's a marketer, Chad's a salesperson. I've kind of bounced back and forth between sales and marketing. So I've got a very unique skill set. Most people You know, I would say in today's modern world, marketing is more sales than ever and sales is more marketing than ever. And the way that I kind of delineate the two in my world is marketing is all about generating the lead, talking to that lead until that lead actually interfaces with a human being, and then sales steps in. Obviously there's sales as part of the marketing, all of that, you know, if you're like an e-commerce You know, the sales obviously happens in the cart, but it's not a human, things of that nature. We would talk about that a little differently. So touched on a little bit about my time with Full Focus, which is, was originally Michael Hyatt and Company. But my journey started in, in publishing. So I took over a team that was really struggling in the nonfiction space. And in about 6 years, there was 10 divisions at Thomas Nelson. Within, within 6 months, we went from number 10 to number 1. We ended up to working on about 43 New York Times bestsellers. This was kind of the rise of social media back when, you know, I always say Facebook ads was like stealing candy from a baby. You know, you can get 10, 15-cent leads. So we were doing things a little differently in the marketing world or in the publishing world where we would invest a lot of money in building the author's platform and then actually leveraging that platform. You hear a lot of horror stories that publishers don't do anything. When we started doing this, authors were actually coming to us because of our marketing team. And so at the end of that, a lot of authors said, hey, came to me and said, hey, what would it like for you not only to help me launch my books, but actually build my brand, take my IP and build a business off of it? And that's where I cut my teeth. And that's where I started my own marketing agency. So I started working with people like Lisa TerKeurst, Jenny Allen, Judah Smith, Jefferson Bethke. Michael Hyatt was a client at that time. And grew that to about $3 million in 18 months. But I would say I didn't have the knowledge that I have now. Otherwise that business would still be, still be in existence and thriving. And so I went to Michael and said, hey, you know, my agency is growing, but you're only 10% of my agency revenue, but 50% of my time. Because when I joined with Michael, I was employee number 3. They were doing about $1.5 million in revenue over 5 years. We scaled to a mid-eight-figure business. And I'll share a little bit about that journey and some of those things as we go. So I won't give it all away here. And I made him an offer. 2 days later, he said, hey, would it like for you to hire— for me to hire you? I made him an offer I didn't think he'd say yes to. He did. So long story short, I joined them kind of in the marketing side. And then at that time, they didn't have a sales team. And then I built out their sales team selling a higher ticket. Item, which I'll talk about. And then left there, started doing consulting and was consulting with Ryan Levesque and Donald Miller. And similarly, things started going well to the point where Donald was like, hey, I really want you and your team to come on board. Ended up actually joining their team and worked full-time for about 2 years and transitioned out of that last December. And now I'm back doing consulting kind of in a fractional CRO type of thing. So as I shared earlier, you know, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I'm sure you all feel this way, but I do, and I'm going through this right now, candidly. You know, I had a client that, you know, they came to me. It's a big client. You would, you would know them if I said it. They brought me in 45 days out from their largest event in May. Said, hey, we want to come up with an offer, $150,000 offer. And we tried to sell this last year. We couldn't sell it. There seems to be a miss, you know, so I got under the hood. It was all wrong. The messaging was wrong. The offer was wrong. Everything was wrong. So we pivoted. Their goal was, hey, we want to sell 10 of these by the end of the year. So that was May. I got in and I said, hey, the goal was to use the event to generate leads and then close leads after the fact. They weren't willing to pay my full fee. So I said, hey, I'll take 3.5% of all deals. I'll lower my fee to help you. Like, sure, great. Let's do that. So long story short, we change everything. We change the sales process. I said, hey, I think we can sell at the event. I'll come to the event. I'll be part of it. I'll coach your team on how to sell it. I'll do it, everything. They ended up selling 20 seats. At the event. So, you know, they got, they got the revenue 7 months earlier than they thought they would get and they got twice as much. And I, and I knew it, like I was really hesitant to actually work with this client because of some of the stuff I had heard. And so I was, I was due a little over $75,000 in commissions. About 7 days after the event, he called and said, hey, I don't think we owe you commission at all. These sales were too easy, contracts, black and white, whatever. And honestly, this was like, brother, I don't know if I shared this with you, but I was going through this when you called me that day. And so this is where this is coming out of my own and like, okay, I can go to bat. I did all the things. I talked to an attorney, sent the— I could win, but at what expense? And so You know, had the conversation. Long story short, any day now I'm probably going to be getting a third of that. But that was, again, this was June. We're now sitting in August. Who wouldn't like an extra $70,000, especially for your hard work? And to be honest, for me, it wasn't even about the money. It was like the slap in the face for the work that I did. And you're basically saying like, you've made this too easy and now I don't want to pay you. It's like, so that was super frustrating. But guess what? I had to take it on the chin and I had to move on and serve my other clients and I had to move forward. And I'm one that just believes the world's going to go round. And if I shared with you the doors that have opened on the other side of this, it's just been incredible. But it was real easy for me to be one day like, man, I could sulk right now, but guess what? I didn't and I couldn't because there's people that rely on me, there's clients that rely on me, and I had to get up. The beautiful thing I would say, I don't know if this is retribution, and I signed a whole NDA, signed like I can't disparage him or whatever, and I would never, I wouldn't share the name. I wouldn't do that. But if people come to me and ask because they know I worked with them, I get to share everything. And so Guess what? I guarantee he's lost more than $50 grand in the last 3 months because of the people that have come to me. And so that's just, that's also a telltale, like a cautionary tale. And it just comes down to one word and one word only as a business owner that he has is greed. And so I think we want to be careful. This is not part of my talk, but this is kind of a lesson I'm learning through all of this. And like, okay, if I were in that boat, how would I work differently? Let's, you know, business, it's all about growth. I love, but like at what point, I just had a conversation with a business owner yesterday is At what point is contentment? And wrestling with how, at what point in our business can we get to content? Not complacency, not laziness, but content with what we have and maybe even with what our growth trajectory is. And we hear all these, like Alex Hormozi's book's coming out and everyone, I'm sure, is going to be talking about everything Alex Hormozi is doing in the next few weeks or whatever. And I love Alex. I think he's got some really good stuff. I still have yet to meet anyone that's actually implemented. I saw this actually, there's a whole post about this of like implemented Alex's stuff and has grown their business. He's a master marketer, but I would just, it's those trends that I would just like say, hey, let's just like hold back a little bit. Another story here that I think is really important when I was with Full Focus and Michael Hyatt is we You know, when they hired me, the goal was to build non-Michael revenue. So how do we build this business that's not relying on Michael's back? And out of that, at that time, we had, you know, I would say maybe $3.5 million of revenue. 98% of that revenue was online courses. You know, that was the heyday of online courses. And the reality was, when we looked at it, people weren't consuming the content. You know, we called it digital dust. You know, people were buying this for like a, you know, maybe an insurance policy at one point, but they weren't really leveraging it. And so we had to pivot and come up with, we ended up creating a business coaching program that Bradley joined called Business Accelerator that we also launched that, that all that came, the Full Focus Planner, which ended up being a $15 million piece of the business. Business Accelerator was a bigger piece of that business. And that's where I got, you know, the story of Business Accelerator. When we launched it, we, I was overseeing marketing. And I said, hey, I don't have the bandwidth to oversee sales. So I talked Michael into hiring a director of sales who was going to come in, kind of build out the sales team, do the first few sales, prove the model. And our goal at the beginning of the year was to sell 400 seats in that product. And we were sitting at May 1st and we had sold 1 seat. We knew that it would ramp up. We knew it took time to ramp up all of that, build out the sales process. But we had the, we had the wrong hire. So I had to make the decision. I said, hey, we made the wrong hire. Went to the guy. He was already looking for another job because he felt he knew his time was short, you know, just based on goals and all of that. So we were sitting at the table, me and Michael and Megan, his daughter who had become the CEO of the company at the time, and said, hey, what are we going to do? We have 6 months to hit this goal. Or Do we revisit the goal and we try to like dial it back and hit a number? You know, and they knew my personality. So like, I look back, they were using reverse psychology on me. You know, they were like, they were really challenging me at that table. And I would say like, that was a huge lesson in leadership, the way that they handled that conversation. And so what, what would have to be true? The question that, you know, that I think this is like something that Michael always shared when things were hard. I think it's just really good for all of us. It's like, What would have to be true to make that happen? So we're sitting here January 1st celebrating what would have to be true over the next 7 months for us to sell 400 seats. So first I was like, I have to be completely pulled out of marketing. I can't be involved in marketing. I hired a director of marketing about a year ago. She's killing it. She's actually probably better than me. She needs to step in and do that. I need to kind of go in the bunker and just sell. And we need to then leverage this, this, and this, build this funnel. Create this, allowed Courtney to kind of build that funnel. And I ended up selling 425 seats in 7 months of Business Accelerator. And I shouldn't say I, we did. It was an effort that the whole team did from lead generation all the way down. And I look back at that and that was some of the most fun time because we had this, we all got centered on this one goal and we went after it. But it's not always, it doesn't always happen that way. You know, you know, we're surrounded by these highlight reels. You know, you're going to see so much about this Alex Hormozi. I mean, he's like, I think he's spending $10 million on this book launch. The amount of leads he's going to get. You know, we see, you know, 25-year-olds exiting for $40, $50 million. You know, all that. We see these highlight reels, but we don't typically see the long hours. We don't see, you know, what it really took behind the scenes. You hear after the fact, but not in the middle of it. And you're on here because we're probably all in the middle of it. We're all in the middle of trying to figure this thing out. That is business. That's generating leads, converting those leads, closing those leads, building our team, all of that. And there's 3 things that I typically see that are like the biggest things that can kind of like punch us in the face. You know, one is team turnover, team turnover. People. You hear it all the time. People are our greatest asset. And the reality is no one wants to lose team members. But how many times have we as the business owner been like, man, I can't live without this person on my team. That person leaves, someone else comes in and you're like, oh my gosh, I was missing out on X, Y, and Z. That's not anything bad about the other person, but what ends up happening is just there's there's always more and great talent. You know, I feel like I made myself indispensable at companies before as an employee. But guess what? The company moved on without me. I was part of their success, but the company moved on without me and they were successful and someone else came in. And the reality is I wasn't doing my job as a leader. There wasn't people underneath me, but my goal was to have— bring people underneath me. So, you know, if you know, this is Bradley, probably heard this story. Business partner of mine in another venture that I have, you know, he was running a huge live event business. They pivoted during COVID and started offering software to basically turn in-person events to online. They raised $40 million. They had to hire 200 people in a matter of 30, you know, 90 days. And then when COVID kind of slowed down, that business really, they had to pivot. They had to pivot in a big way. Which meant they had to lay off about 40% of their employees. And at the time they were doing these random like kind of meet and greets, like donut via Slack. You just kind of got paired with someone. And so the owner got paired with this person and, you know, it hadn't been announced yet of the layoffs and he knew this person was actually on the list. The person was going to be laid off and she, you know, as they were talking, she kind of shared her personal story, you know, single mom, you know, all of that. And he's sitting there, oh my gosh, like in the next 48 hours, this person's going to lose her job. Like just feeling it as the owner and the stress of it. And so he went back and he maneuvered a couple of things and able for her to keep her job. And 90 days later, he's in a meeting and he doesn't see this woman in the meeting. And he's like, what's going on? And this is the lady, the manager said, well, about 60 days ago she quit. And so he had some other words around it, But, but, you know, the girl quit. You know, I, I like lost sleep over this. You know, you'd say I lost sleep over it. And she, in a decision, she decided to leave the company. And again, that's not always the case, but the reality is everyone kind of has their own agenda. And sometimes letting people go is releasing them. And also, if someone is gone, you can't take it personally and see it as an opportunity. And I've had to let a lot of people go. I've lost great people that I thought I could not live without. And at the end of the day, I always sat back, okay, here are the things— like, I'd start a list right away— here are the things that I really like about that person and that they brought to the table that I think is like irreplaceable. But then when you really sit down and you say, oh, this person is no longer with me, here are the things that I really didn't like or think could be better, you're amazed at how, how much that is. We kind of just get lost because we work with these people every day. You start to really like them, you start to overlook some of the things over time because you're really focusing on these other. And that's not a, not saying, hey, go, go do this with people right now and find better talent. But when that time comes, just mentally, it's important to shift mentally into that place. So team turnover, again, don't take it personally. I know a lot of business owners take this personally and they feel like it's not just, they're not leaving the company, they're leaving me, they're leaving my vision. It's important not to take this personally. Everyone's got their own agenda. I hate, I hate that word agenda, but everyone's got their own world they're living in, and they have to make their own decisions, and it's best for them, and it's not personal to you. And this can get you sideways really, really fast if you take this personal. So don't take it personal. Round 2, probably the thing that, you know, financial setbacks, you know, it's from feast to famine overnight. You know, for me, you know, luckily, I mean, $70 grand to me is, you know, roughly, and again, I just started my consulting business in January. My billables will put me at a you know, a $750,000, $800,000 business this year. So that's 10% of my revenue that I lost. Like, who wouldn't want 10% of their revenue, right? Um, and at the same time, I had a client who their CFO was embezzling money and basically said, hey, we can't pay you. And they owed me, they owed me about $30,000. So, you know, about $100,000 in a matter of 45 days, I felt like was kind of like just taken out from underneath me. But again, this is not something I've shared. This is the first time I'm sharing it publicly. And it's actually like wrestling with my own psyche because of the work that I did in it. I was in therapy, I was having conversations, I was talking to people. It could have really derailed me. And since then, I've gained 2 or 3 pretty big clients, all of it. But luckily, I had also built up a lot of cash reserves. So it wasn't one of those where it's like, oh my gosh, I'm not going to be able to pay bills. I'm not going to be able to pay my team that I have. So I know that Bradley talks about this a lot with you is how do you get ahead and maintain those operating expenses and building really your cash supply is super, super important. So when these things come, you can ride the ship a little bit. And again, It's not just like the numbers and cents, but sometimes when I always sit down with people, when they're, when they come to me or I'm working with the business owner and they're just, you know, they've got their own story of like, hey, we're a services-based business. We just lost our biggest client. What are we going to do? Sometimes that's 35% of their revenue. Is to actually play the game of like, okay, what is the worst case scenario? Okay, let's play this out. What is the worst case scenario? Because if we don't, sometimes we just spin it in our head and we don't actually play it out. Where you play it out and it's like, oh, well, we'll lose them. We may have to like let 1 or 2 people go, or we're going to really double down on lead generation. We're going to be able to replace them. But at the end of the day, like, we've got enough money in the bank. We'll be able to survive it if we can do this in the next 7 to 8 months. You've still got a roof over your head. You've still got a healthy family. You've still got, you know, it's just important to know mentally that it's not, that's not the only thing. And sometimes when we're in the vacuum, I could have made that like this guy is cheating me. I could have just created this whole thing and it could have just sidetracked me for weeks, days, months. And honestly, I would say within 48 hours I was on, I was like, okay, we're going to move forward and we're going to do great. Round 3, burnout and personal fatigue, which I think this is the most important. And this is the thing that can come up without us least— with us least expecting it. And when you're burned out and you are fatigued, everything suffers. And not only your health, but your ideas, your family, all of it. And so you just have to protect yourself. If you're working 60 to 80-hour weeks, your health is suffering, your relationships are strained, and sometimes you don't even realize it. You're starting to be bitey at your kids or your spouse. You know, and to just take a step back and be like, okay, why is that? You know, you can't scale a business that's crushing you. And so you've got to admit that when, you know, and sometimes it's just sitting down and saying, okay, I'm burnt out. How do I get through this? And sometimes if you've got a team and it like you, and it doesn't, you don't need to bring in your whole team. If you've got 1 or 2 people that you really trust, and to share it, to be vulnerable and be like, hey, this is where I feel I'm doing all of this. And this isn't like to put anyone else down, but it's like, I'm burnt out. I need help doing this, this, and this. What are ways that we can— now with AI, there's so many things that we can do to delegate, to streamline, to make more efficient, all of that. I think it's just, there's not a business owner that I haven't worked with that's not dealt with this, and it just looks different. right, to different people. So find a hobby. When we would teach this to people, I would just kind of laugh because this was always a thing that Michael Hyatt would teach someone. It's like, build a hobby, create a hobby or have a hobby. And I would just laugh. I was so career driven. I was like, no, picked up golf and COVID. And the reason I say golf kind of saved me in a lot of ways because it forced me to actually create time in my schedule for something that I loved that was for me. Rather than for someone else. And so it forced me to be able to shut the phone down. And golf's one of the only places that I look at my phone for work. And it's funny when I have guests come out and they're busy and if they're looking at their phone, I'll tell you right now, the fastest way to not let me invite you back to my club is work while we're golfing. That'll be the fastest way because I want, to me, that's me time. It's our time and we can talk business. But we're not slacking, we're not emailing, all of it. And it's honestly, it's my way to protect their burnout and the personal fatigue because if I'm letting that creep in, in that moment, golf is no longer fun at that point. Before you know it, I'm shaking it. I'm hitting, I'm not missing 4-putt putts because I'm thinking about that stupid Slack message. And it's just, and it's eating me up mentally and it's not even that big of a deal. If the business can't run without you on the golf course for 4 hours, or you going and getting a mani pedi, you know, for the females that are out there or the males. I just got one. No shame. You know, don't, don't hesitate. So here's the formula real quick that, you know, 3 R's just to remember. Regroup. Some of this is mentally, you know, stop the bleeding, regroup. Okay. Like, what are we going to do? Recommit, recommit to your goals. So kind of what I talked about, like we could have, we could have easily changed our goals, but you have the decision to recommit to what you're doing no matter what. I've got, I've got financial goals to hit this year. And I could easily said like, okay, more than 15% of my revenue I lost in about 45 days. I could choose to say, I'm not going to do anything about that. I'm going to be okay with it. Or I'm going to recommit to getting that revenue. Or I'm going to recommit to doing something different and rebuild. The reason I'm not spending a ton of time here is because I want to share brands that have done this because sometimes we'll remember this. So Ford, you remember they avoided bailout by mortgaging everything, you know, they had a unified vision and a record profit by 2010. You know, 2008, they chose not to take the government bailout and they mortgaged everything. And got a unified vision and, you know, their stock price skyrocketed. Lego, they were $800 million in debt. Now they're the number one toy brand. They cut complexity. They cut their SKUs by like 45% overnight, doubled down on the brick. And guess what? Number one toy brand in the world. Microsoft, they were like this legacy giant. You know, Google was beating them on search. They lost the mobile game. Google and Apple was ahead of them. They brought in a new CEO. He had a vision for the cloud and AI, and now they're a leader in the AI and cloud space. They actually are the largest, the majority shareholder in OpenAI. So they have more value in their investment in OpenAI than they do in Microsoft, which is crazy. Recommit. These are businesses. Netflix was rejected by Blockbuster. Before they became— now they're a $500 billion-plus giant. No one knows Blockbuster anymore. If you ask a 25-year-old what Blockbuster is, they'll laugh at you. They pioneered streaming. And I mean, you look, I mean, they just spent billions of dollars to stream WWE. Like, they changed cable TV and they didn't— they, you know, when they were rejected by Blockbuster, Best Buy, This is one of my favorite. If you guys are not like, if you want to understand leadership, the new CEO at Best Buy, I think is going to go down as one of the best leaders of all time. Circuit City, all these big box retail closes. I just saw today Claire's is closing all their stores and the CEO is just this like doom and gloom of like, you know, retail is changing. Best Buy came in and said no, like our stores are not liabilities, our stores are assets. And how are we going to do that? You know, the, the monthly recurring that they did with the computer software and all of that to kind of the older— we'll see if Best Buy's got the legs to stand 50 years from now. But they all, for all intents and purposes, they should have been shut down 10 years ago and now they're thriving better than ever. I do think there's an end in sight for that business model, but he probably extended that business at least 40 or 50 years based on what he's been able to do. Nissan, $20 billion in debt within 2 years, had record profit because a new CEO came in. And one of the things that Nissan was doing was they were so stuck with Japan's business culture and to suggest some old ways. The guy came in who understood that culture, honored that culture, but said, hey, the business has to change. And now had record profit within 2 years of him turning over. Rebuilding. Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy before Steve Jobs came back. Now they're the first trillion-dollar company. I share all of this. Obviously none of us are running these types of big companies, but it's these types of decisions that cause the pivot to change. And the other thing, your first idea does not have to be your forever idea. We all know these brands, right? YouTube, they started as a video dating site. Okay? The vision was not to be the number one search engine in video and MrBeast and all the, like where the 25-year-olds are literally just spending 12 to 15 hours a day on YouTube. You know, they listened to their customers, they pivoted. Instagram was a whiskey bar check-in app. Remember back when check-in apps were big? You know, you could check, you know, check in and get all these points and gamify, you know, all of that. Instagram was trying to jump into that space. But they learned a lot. They learned about the software, what people, people wanted to tag, where they were at, things of that nature. And then they pivoted. And got bought by Facebook and was Facebook's number one asset. Nintendo, they started selling Japanese playing cards. You know, they built an audience through that, but then learned video gaming and the platforms better. Amazon was for college students to sell used textbooks. Avon, they were selling books. Perfume was just the bonus. Sony, believe it or not, they started selling rice cookers. Yep, the kitchen appliance. Shopify, they created as a sales swap site for snowboards. I say all of that because these, these brands and companies could have been fine being a $4 to $10 million business with what, with the vision that they launched. Some of you may be at a place right now where your business isn't working because you're not, you don't have the customers. You're too afraid to pivot to what your customers are telling you to do. You know, that's not everyone here. I'm just saying, think about the opportunity if you were to— and when we launched at Hyatt, if we would have not moved from physical, from digital courses to physical planner, we would have never been more than a $4 million company. At the height, we were between $45 and $50 million. I can't say the exact number because I signed an NDA. So otherwise I would, but if we would not have chosen to go physical, physical opened up the door for our, our coaching program that ended up being a $45,000 a year coaching program. We would've been stuck in there. But what we did is every year we would sit down, you know, as Bradley shared kind of that annual planning event at the end of the year. And we went through our goal setting process and started to think through and look back. We listened to our customers and we also said, hey, here's the customer we wanna serve. And when we got really clear on that and really clear on what we do really, really well, it changed everything for us. So don't be afraid to pivot. Also, just in, in closing, one of the things that Michael always said, it's stuck with me in the hardest of days. We're all alive here today. We all have been through trials and tribulations, some of us more than others, deaths in the family, families being not where you intended them to be. Guess what? You have 100% track record of getting through those things. Right now you're living, you're breathing, you have 100% track record of getting through some of the hardest days you've ever been through. And so if you're in it right now, or if it's coming 90 days from now, you don't know it, um, or even just to look back and be like, man, 6 months ago, this is what I did. This is how I protected my mindset. This is how I protected me so that now we're where I'm at. Um, I would just encourage you to stay in the fight and know that you have what it takes to get through to the other side. And business is not easy. Don't do it alone. Bradley's building an incredible community here with what he's doing. There's no, I don't think there's anyone building better frameworks for business owners to be able to enjoy their business and not be bogged down and to be able to stay in the fight. So thank you for your time. Um, chat@chadwickkennedy.com is a great way to reach me if you have questions. Uh, but I really appreciate you, Bradley, for having me, and excited for, uh, what the next two days hold.

Awesome, my man. Thank you so much. Let me unmute myself and add my spotlight up there. There we go. Chad, thanks so much, my man. I appreciate it. Everybody, hands in the camera. That's our little awkward Zoom wave. All right, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to ask Chad, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions. I'd love to kind of tap on a couple of things that you mentioned. While I do that, I would love everybody to post in the chat, what'd you love? What'd you learn? Take a couple of minutes here while I ask Chad a few questions. Chad, practically, when yourself, or when things happened with the people in the businesses that you've worked with, when setbacks have happened, when you were with Hyatt, when you were with Don, yourself, some of the things, what practically did you do to be able to get through some of those? I'm looking for, like, did you personally like to journal? Did you pick up the phone, call some of your mentors? What are the things that get you kind of out of that state, so to speak? I know Tony Robbins talks about the state that you're in to where it's frustration, anger, depression, anxiety, whatever that may be that we face as entrepreneurs because we carry so much all the time. What were some of the practical things that you've been able to do?

Yeah, you mentioned mentor. There's one guy I didn't talk about, and he would be a guy that I would call. His name's Scott Evans. At the age of 24, he promoted me to the executive team at about a $40 million company. It's kind of part of my story that I forget. And actually, the company just sold for $100 million. And I got promoted to VP of Sales and Marketing at 24 of this $40 million company. And I look back and I'm so grateful that he saw something in me and was like, took a risk on me. And so honestly, it's like when things like, he'd be the first person I'd call. And just be like, hey, and that was 2006, 2007 when it was like, and I was at the leadership table during the recession, you know, at such a young age, making those hard decisions of like, do we let people go? Do we stop matching 401(k)s? Do we, you know, all the things that like 24-year-olds don't think about from a business standpoint a lot of times, you know. And so I just had the luxury of that to the point where he and I have been through battle and war together. And so he's one, you know, that's why I say don't do it alone. He'd be the first person I would call, like, hey, I'm facing this. How would you think about it? How would you show up? How can I bring my team along? So mentor for sure. Nowadays, I would, as selfish as it feels, is I get out and golf. I clear the deck and I get out and golf. The reason being is it clears my head. It gets me in a different place. And I don't go with the intention of spending time thinking about it. I'm actually getting— and I'm not avoiding it. By any stretch of the imagination either. But I'm getting out to clear my head. And what ends up happening is by hole 12 or 13, the cloud starts to part a little bit in my brain, and then I want to go into problem-solving mode. And so then I'll start to send a voice note. I'll stop golf at that point if I'm not with someone. If that's just me, I'll stop and I'll start to actually brainstorm what's coming up. And it might not come till the next day. You know, it doesn't always happen in the middle of a round, but find your thing that you do, your hobby, and prioritize that without, without the goal of like using that time to try to like figure it out. Yeah. Another thing that I love to do, I love to go to a baseball game. Something about the smell of a hot dog and grass and all of it. I don't look at my phone, kind of just take it all in. I played baseball growing up, so just like nostalgia there for me. You know, it's funny, my wife and I would just say like, it's the one place you'd never pick up your phone. It's got a baseball game, you know? And it's just something because like, there's just the ADD brain. There's so much for me there that I don't need to, you know, so take it all in, you know? So I would just say like, whatever that is, and it may be different for every person, you know, sports are a thing for me. It doesn't have to be the case for everyone.

Yeah. Well, everybody can see why Chad and I have become such good friends with golf. We were actually talking yesterday about him coming down and we're going to do like a lake golf day. I think he's right, though, about— by the way, my team that's on here, when I'm in one of those moods I was in about a week ago, you guys just tell me, go play golf. Okay? You need to get your butt out and go play golf. That's what—

he'll be a better human. Trust me. He'll be a better human. Trust me.

But whatever that is for you, okay? Whatever that is for you, it may not be golf.

It could be pickleball.

Could be a big one. Tennis, um, um, being out on the lake fishing. I know several people that love to fish. I think there, there's also something scientific about being out in nature too, right?

Actually being out.

Um, we love what these things can obviously do, but I think the biggest thing is one of the things you're, you're saying is also disconnecting from this really for time.

So, yep, yep. I think the other thing that— this is actually a point that I wanted to hit during the talk and I didn't, is that we had a leadership team at Hyatt. One of the things, we had so much trust built that I think it's just important to have trust amongst your leadership team. And it was, this came from Michael and Megan that they would say there's no sacred cows and they don't, they not only said it, but they meant it. Yeah. There's, you know, even though my name, Michael Hyatt's on this door, there's no sacred cows, which gave us the freedom, you know, as a family, family-owned business to be able to share everything that we wanted. And it wasn't gonna take, you know, there, and we said things that were hurtful or harmful or could be, could be hurtful. When your name's on the door and you're the face of the business and all of it. But it's one of the reasons why that thrived is that if you can say anything to your team to like make them free to be able to share their input, it's one thing to say it. You've got to live it. You've got to have the culture that they understand and believe it. There's no sacred cows because their eyeballs are on the business way more than you. They're seeing more than you. The reality is, as the business grows, you become more and more detached from your customer. And, you know, this happened. Like, I could remember, like, I'd have a conversation with Michael. It's like, Michael, you built this thing to $15 or $20 million, but you no longer are the avatar and the customer, and you are far removed from it. You need to listen to us because we are in the trenches with the customer. You no longer are. Like, and that's not a bad thing. That's just the nature of as you grow a business, you kind of start to, you know, like, becomes less accessible. That's just the reality. Yeah. You know, and so that's why you hear some CEOs be like, I want to talk to 20 customers a quarter, or, you know, like in a CPG brand, if you know the whole Levi's story, I don't know if you remember, like the crazy when they went back, like they started visiting customers' homes and just asking them, like the leadership team, they went on this exercise worldwide and say, hey, tell me about your jeans. And people were just going in and, you know, one, one person pulled up and said something about Levi's and they said, this is the jeans that I wear every day. And it was Levi's. And that's how the whole slogan came on. And that's what revamped their whole company. Wow. You know?

Wow.

All right.

I'm gonna put you on the spot here, but I think you're the guy that I know would, but I didn't prep you for this. Okay.

Yep.

Uh, pretty much everybody here, uh, I would feel confident to say has a business in the $300,000 to $3 million space, something like that. Chad, I like to break those two in that into two different journeys. There's the $300,000 to million journey.

Yep.

And then there's the million to 3. Then there's 3 to 10. But we're not going to get to 3 to 10. Okay.

Yep. Yep.

One piece of advice next 12 months. Broad brush stroke here, business owners in that $300,000 range trying to get to a million. What's the one piece of advice for growing their company? This is not out— this is now outside the bounds of mindset unless you have something on that. And then one thing for the company that's trying to go from 1 to 3.

Yeah, $300,000 to a million. First thing is, um, you need to find one or two really trusted employees that should be taking 70 to 80% of your work off your plate because you're coming into a season that you're going to have to do 70 to 80% new things in your business to grow to $3 million. So that could be a virtual assistant. It could be an ops person. It depends on the type of business you're in. You know, and so if you already have a virtual assistant that's got the, like, this doing the admin, the, you know, then you probably potentially need an ops person or you know, a process, a framework, Blueprint OS that you really follow and you use, um, you know, but, uh, you like, and a very good visionary founder owner can grow a business up to $3 million on their back. Most is like, sometimes that ceiling is $1 million. Sometimes it's $3 million. It depends on kind of the talent of that person. I hate to say it. Um, you know, but, uh, you, you can't scale beyond that without a team and without processes. So the $300,000 to $1 million, partially it's a mindset of like, 70, 80% of what you're doing right now, someone else should be doing. And because you're going to have to do 70, 80% different going into the next level. So from the million to 3, um, this is where, um, you've got to get so laser focused on your product and what your product does to be able to scale it and understand your funnel, which means building out a team, you know, which you've got, that's where like you've got to know your numbers. You know, you said that, you know, I know that's been a, you know, something you and I have talked about over the year. What are the key performance indicators? What are your numbers? You need to obsess about those because you're going to be strategic. You know, that's the way you make best strategic decisions is knowing those numbers. And which means you're going to have to build a team. You can't do it all. And that's where you start to even build, you know, a more broad team. It's where if you're driving more than 70% of the sales, you need to get out of it. It's one of the things I love dealing with, you know, is like, is helping business owners get out of, you know, driving the sales, being the rainmaker, because you won't be able to do that forever. Yeah.

Yeah. It was actually, Chad, just so you know, I didn't even think to bring this up. The reason why we did the intensive in May and it was called Know Your Numbers was because of May 2024 when we were in Tampa. And Josh, uh, yeah, good friend.

Yep.

Absolutely ripped into a very successful business doing about $4 to $5 million that they did not know their numbers. And he ripped into them for about 30 minutes and about like, you have to know your numbers. That was like the, ended up being the theme of that, uh, of that entire trip. And from that point I was like, yeah, you do have to know your numbers. What numbers do you need to know? So everybody wants to go back and watch that intensive we did back in May.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode with Chad from the 2-day MBA we did back in August. We're really excited about the Above the Business workshops that we have coming in 2026. So if you're listening to this at the very end of 2025, coming up starting in January, we're going to be running monthly Above the Business workshops. If you want to learn more information about that, go to blueprintos.com. /Assets, blueprintos.com/assets. There you will find all the information that you need for our future workshops. And our workshop coming in January is how do you get traction, execution, and implementation on the plans that you have for the year and for the quarter. So I'm really excited about our very first monthly workshop starting in 2026. blueprintos.com/assets. Assets, go and check that out. Come and join us at our Above the Business Workshop where in January we kick off with traction, execution, and implementation. You plan for the year. Now, how do we actually put rubber on the roads? I look forward to seeing you there. All right, everyone, till next time, lead well and go be great. Hey, if you like videos like this, click below. We'd love to have your support, like and subscribe so we can begin to grow this channel. We have the Big plans going into 2026 to do more things specifically for our audience on YouTube. Would love if you would like and subscribe and maybe even share this with one other person.