Business is Personal
How Getting Married Reinforced My Belief in Work-Life Integration
I think most of us have realized by now that the role of work in our lives has fundamentally changed.
Long gone are the days when our work and personal lives were two separate and disconnected worlds. Even the focus on work-life balance – which views work and life as separate but connected – is on its way out.
Instead, in both my own experience and the experience of many I’ve spoken with, the era of work-life integration has arrived. We are whole and complete humans who are living our lives at all times. Work is life. Home is life. Travel is life. Hobbies are life. It’s all just life.
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I turned down a $60k paycheck
It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Picture this. I had just graduated from the University of Maryland magna cum laude with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. But instead of following the expected path of working at a big fancy engineering firm, I became employee #2 at a startup energy auditing company running out of the back room of a house in the suburbs.
I was living my entrepreneurship fantasy.
There was just one problem…
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Running a Business While on Vacation
I'm back! Did you miss me?
Did you even know I was gone??
Over the past few weeks, I was enjoying the sunny Mediterranean with my partner, Joe and our families.
But I did a couple of things differently this time.
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Perfection isn't the goal. Profitability is.
Treating imperfection as an operating expense
In 2008, some college friends and I started the first stationless bike sharing program in the North America, a decade before bikes and scooters appeared on the streets of every major city.
And the first question everyone asked us was this...
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Blame the System First
This is my culture ethos.
In business, stuff goes wrong. We all know this. And as a company scales, there's more stuff to go wrong. So it will.
And when that inevitable something goes wrong, how do you respond?
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A Business is Not a Purpose
Here’s what a business actually is
How do you think about purpose in the context of what you do? Are the two joined at the hip?
Well here's my hot take. Business is not a purpose.
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What can scalability do for you?
If you could have a meal with anyone famous alive or dead, who would you want to have a meal with?
What is the #1 place you have always wanted to visit, but haven’t gotten the chance to go?
What's your favorite podcast?
These were the hard hitting questions Brian Haney asked me when we sat down to record an episode of The Haney Company's Financial Guy Podcast.
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A Case Study in Scalability
Do you ever wish you had the power to see the future? 🔮
Having a scalable business gives you that power.
Why?
Because when your business is scalable, it has the flexibility and adaptability to respond to future possibilities that you can't see today, but you very much expect to happen.
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Complexity is easy. Simple is hard.
This hit home for me recently when a client said something that I thought was really insightful.
"Brad, we need our systems to be as simple as our business is complex."
But why is simple so hard?
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Your email inbox is not a project management system
One of the most common mistakes I see my clients make as they scale is becoming too reliant upon back and forth communication to get stuff done.
You know what I mean if you've ever had to send 6 back and forth emails just to get a status update, if you've had to answer the same question a million times, or if you've had to dig through your inbox or chat history for that critical piece of information you're looking for.
Yes, communication is incredibly important. But too much of it becomes detrimental if you want your business to be scalable.
Why?
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4 Key Metrics to Scale Your Business
What are the most important metrics if you want your business to be scalable? 📈
I get this question a lot. I guess people think I'm a data nerd (and they're not wrong. 🤓)
While of course there's not a one-size-fits-all answer, here are the 4 key metrics that I focus on with my clients as they scale their business…
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Why being different is difficult
How many times have we all been told that it pays to be different?
What we weren’t told is just how difficult being different can actually be.
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You have to dismount your donkey to enter a house
A Hindu priest and a philosopher dismount their asses and walk into a bar...
At least that's how I'd like to imagine the story starts.
In any case, the two were having a dispute about the path to enlightenment in which the philosopher argued the following...
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Do I need to burn it to the ground and start all over again?
Have you every felt like you just wanted to throw your hands up and just start all over again?
Maybe you've been grinding and grinding and nothing seems to be working?
Or you've been growing so quickly that everything around you feels like a hot mess?
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Find an expert that knows less than you, not more
The future of your business has never existed before.
Think about that.
That vision you have in your head about what you want your business to become has never existed before in the history of humanity.
And that begs a really important question.
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What Doubling Your Business Looks Like in Action
The past few months have been an absolute whirlwind. From some absolutely huge client wins to some exciting leaps forward with BE Lean’s capabilities and offerings, I’ve hardly had time to catch my breath.
Your support has meant the world to me through it all, so I wanted to give you a little taste of what’s been going on as I’ve been working to expand the impact of this little business I call BE Lean.
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The Past, The Future, and Radical Nuns
“When you have one foot in the past and the other in the future, you’re just pissing on the present.”
I can still picture our instructor Michelle standing with her legs spread wide as she imparted this lesson upon our cohort of the Possibilities Seminar, a personal development program focusing on emotional intelligence.
As life-changing as that workshop was for me (and I don’t say that lightly), this particular lesson didn’t really land for me at the time. Sure I got the point - don’t live in the past or the future. Be present.
But how do we move forward in life or in business with two feet firmly planted in the here and now?
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Continuous Improvement and Scalability
Brad Talks Shop on The Edges of Lean Podcast
I had a blast talking with Bella about some of the things I’m most passionate about, including answers to many of the questions people have asked me over the years.
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How to Scale Your Business One Step at a Time
Traction. Profit. Throughput. Innovation.
These are the four ingredients you need to scale a business.
But here's the important bit. At any given time, you should be focused on one, and only one, of them. Do you know which one your business should be focused on?
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Is it too early to systematize your business?
When I talk to people about what it is that I do, I often talk about that time in the growth trajectory of a business when everything that used to feel fun and simple becomes messy and complex.
But what if things get to a point where everything feels that way? When everything feels equally important and equally chaotic?
It's definitely time to systematize, right?
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