Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where we explore the journeys that lead to success.
I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you
insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders, and experts who will share not just their expertise
but the milestone moments that have reshaped their journeys and led to significant achievements.
So if you're looking for motivation, you're in the right place. Subscribe now and discover the
milestones that mark the path to success.
Welcome to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. I'm Sheila Slick,
your host, and today my special guest is Brandon Gano, which I thought was Gano, which in Spanish
means to win. He is owner of What If and works with his clients to design and build systems that
streamline their operations to consistently deliver a steady stream of new leads and clients.
Welcome to the show, Brandon. Thank you so much for having me here. And yes, I've already submitted
the paperwork. I'm changing my name with the government. It's a done deal. Thank you for that
gift that you shared with me before we started recording. So what was that turning point in
your life that led you to where you are today? So I actually, before this company, before What If,
I had started another company that I grew to hate. And it was because it wasn't serving my
bigger mission. I had gotten into business in the first place because of two main reasons.
The first was I love business. I think it is the coolest thing in the world that you can go
sell something and help somebody with a problem or solve a problem that they're having. You could
provide a solution, whatever the industry is. It could be consulting or selling t-shirts like that
business was in. And when I started to figure out, I didn't have to operate this business. I could
own the business and still have the impact and actually have a bigger impact by owning it and
operating it. I wanted to give that to other people. So that's what drove me. My mission was
to help other people become business owners, not business operators. I pursued a path in that
industry to turn that company into a franchise. And that's when I started to hate the company
because the industry wasn't my favorite necessarily. And that path was going to be
a lot more narrow than I really wanted it to be because it was only helping people who wanted to
sell t-shirts become business owners. I want to help everybody become business owners. So that's
why I transitioned to this industry, sold that company. Now we're here. And with my business
partner, that's what we do. We help small business owners have the clarity they need and to make
confident decisions to grow their businesses and become business owners, which is what we all start
out to do in the first place. But a lot of people get tied up in the operator role, which we try to
prevent. So the company that you had started and built and ultimately sold was in the custom merch
industry, turned that into a franchise. What was that unique value proposition? I'm just intrigued
about the business model. It's really easy as a matter of fact. And it's not just that industry,
but if you've ever dealt with a service-based industry or a service-based business in really
any of the trades, they're local businesses. They usually only serve a local geographic market.
And I'm talking t-shirt businesses like I had, merch business, plumbers, electricians, HVAC
companies. These are notorious industries for having terrible customer service. So I was actually,
I was a customer of one of these businesses before I started my business. And I was like,
why is it so hard to order a t-shirt? It should not be this complicated. We're talking about
t-shirts, ink on fabric. This can't be this complicated. So my naive self thought, well,
if they can't do it, I'll do a better job. So I was like, all right, let's start this company
and see really how hard and complicated this is. Turns out it wasn't complicated at all.
But where people lost focus was they focused on the art of producing the product or delivering
the service, which is where a lot of entrepreneurs get caught and they neglect the customer
experience. So my only focus from day one was maximizing the customer experience, making sure
they had a fantastic experience with us. And of course, quality is important, but that's kind of
like built into everything we do. If you're not putting out quality, nobody's going to come back.
So that's baseline. Think about a restaurant even. You have to have that. So that's all I did.
And it was very quickly took off because no one really had ever seen that in the industry before,
at least not in the market that I was in. And that's when I started to ask some more questions
and realize, no, this is really industry wide nationwide. It's very rare for someone to have
a good experience with a business like this. And that's how it started to take off so quickly. So
it was one of those things I just, I solved my own problem and then I made it into a business
and quickly realized by accident that there might be something here.
So the customer service was a big important factor of that success. So now you talked about some
systems that have allowed you to launch six and seven figure businesses while building amazing
relationships along the way. What do these systems look like?
Yes. And one of the things that I realized as I was kind of going from scaling that company to
being the operator, to being the owner and getting out of it was I was really chained to my business.
I was working 60, 70, 80 hours a week throughout the year and it only got worse when we were busy.
So I knew that wasn't the most sustainable way to build a company. And if I wanted to be present
for my family and my kids, you couldn't do both. You can't be working that much and see your family
and have relationships with anybody, let alone your business. So I had to figure out what was
holding me back from scaling, from actually getting out of the business. And that's when I realized that
some things were connected and that's what we teach today. So my business partner really,
he was the one that realized that this is present no matter the size of the company.
He's consulted with Fortune 100 companies all the way down to solopreneurs and startups
and everything in between. What I started to realize was if you have systems that guarantee
success in your business for everything, I'm not just talking about delivery of the product, but
how you do everything in your business, how you hire, how you fire, and then how you get leads,
how you market, how you fulfill your service, it kind of ties everything together. And the other
thing was if you have mission-driven people on your team, it's really easy to scale. And that's
an oversimplified way to put it, but those two big things really changed the direction of my business
and my time working in the business because I started to be able to hire the right people
who are on board with the mission and where we were taking the company. They could see themselves
in that vision of where we were going in three, five, 10 years. And we had everything documented.
So that if one person was out sick, anybody else in the organization could pick up the slack for
the day and it was seamless. It didn't require my input. It didn't require me to make decisions.
And that's what holds a lot of businesses back is when the owner or the CEO is in charge of
signing off on all decisions, well, they're a bottleneck. So when we started to, or as I
started to pull myself out of the business, I knew that these things had to be in place.
And as questions would come up, I documented them every single thing. If someone had a question
now, it would mean someone else would have a question in three months. So we just made sure
there was a library of information that was easily accessible so that anybody could answer
questions without me confidently. And I was able to quickly scale and get out of that business
while going from six to seven figures from 80 hours a week down to one to two hours a week.
Less than five hours a week by the time I sold it. And the company grew itself without me,
which is I think the goal of every company. So these systems, you implement them now,
or you just advise. So we do in what if in our company now, my, so my business partner that I
mentioned, he's identified these 10 fundamental areas of business that are present no matter the
size, scale or industry. So what we'll do is we call it a business architecture or a business
operating system. What we do is we'll come in and either show you how to install that yourself.
We'll show you how to do that, make sure it goes well, and you can start to install this
architecture in your business. If you need a little bit more hands on support, your business
is a little bit bigger. For example, like Nike, Uber, Johnson and Johnson, the companies that,
that he has worked inside of and consulted for, then we do fractional COO work. So that's where
we'll actually be technically on staff to some degree at that company as a consultant and outside
consultant, but still working inside the company to make sure that everything is tied together as
efficient as possible. Either way, we have the same results. I mean, we have a hundred percent
success rate implementing this model in businesses because it's the most efficient way to do business.
We always call ourselves the lazy consultants. We want to do the least amount of work and get
the most amount of return on the backend. And that seems, it seems stupid to say that, but
that's what we all want. That's as human beings, we want to be lazy and do a little bit of work
and get a lot out of it. We just cut out the noise and the excess and we can leverage that
for business growth. So how long does a transformation take from the moment that you start to the moment
until you see those results? Very quickly. We see results within the first three or four weeks.
We always start in the same place though. And that's because it's always the most broken when
we get into businesses. At least that's what we found. So the area of business that we call
navigation, which is what traditionally in business is called strategic planning. A lot of small
businesses don't do that. And fun fact, a lot of big businesses don't do that well either. They
don't have a very good grasp on it because they need to please shareholders and CEOs and boards
of directors, small businesses. We just think that's like writing our goals on the wall for
the year is like, oh cool. My, my goals, I want to hit a million dollars in revenue. That's not
strategic planning. That's, that's a hope and a dream that you may or may not accomplish.
The way we tackle strategic planning or navigation is planning your company's,
giving your company a map, a roadmap of where it is now, where it wants to go,
and exactly how you get there. So once we do that and we install that portion of the architecture
in your company, we start to see entire teams align, get on the same page and growth starts
happening very quickly. Within the first 90 days, companies tend to look drastically different than
when we started with them. Can you share with us how the framework to simplify your business helps
make better decisions for the companies? Yeah, that's, that's one of the things that
holds back a lot of entrepreneurs from scaling. We call it decision fatigue, whether it's, you know,
who, who do I hire? I'm between two candidates or as simple as where do I go for lunch? The
overwhelming number of decisions that we have to make as business owners and leaders
every single day is, is crazy. And it's something that's not really talked about in terms of
leadership and scaling a business. But as you grow, as you get past the six, seven, eight figure mark,
there's big decisions to be made. And there's consequences that could be very massive for not
only you and your company, but all of your employees. So one of the things that we have
in place in this architecture is we leverage the connections between the 10 disciplines.
So if you think about departments or silos in a big company, that's how these things are typically
looked at. There are 10 different areas of the business that you focus on individually. Well,
that's where the model breaks in big business and the standard business model, because the magic is
in the links. Everything in business is connected. So once you know exactly where things are connected,
where your marketing is connected with your company's vision, where your HR is connected
with leadership and sales and legal. Once you have that information and it's very clearly laid out on
one computer screen, you can start to make decisions really quickly. So we have everything as a filter.
If you have a decision to be made as a leader, the easiest thing that we do, and this is, once you
have this in place, the four questions we ask or the process we take our clients through is we call
the four Ds. It's do, delay, delegate, and delete. We actually reverse that order. That's the order
people would typically attack things in. So as a business leader, if I were to come to you with
an opportunity, you would usually say, okay, can I do this? We flip that around. So anytime a decision
needs to be made, we take it in with the business leader, with the CEO and say, can you delete this?
Is this in line with your company's vision? Does it even need to be here? If that's a yes,
then the next thing we ask is, can we delay it? Does it have to be decided or solved right this
minute? If that's a yes, if it's a no, then we can push it off to some later date. If it's a yes,
then we say, okay, is it delegatable? Is there someone on your team? Is there a third party
you could outsource this to, a VA, whatever that may be? Can someone else handle this situation?
Or does it have to be you, the leader, founder, CEO? If and only then it's a yes,
do you actually do it? So it would have to be in line with your company's vision.
It would have to be immediate and urgent. It would have to be you with your unique skill set
that could only do it in your company. And then you would do it. And that's what we call the golden
line. So we have this filter in place to where anytime something comes in, you go through that
process and it's quick. Once you do it a couple of times, it's like, okay, boom, boom, boom.
Yes, awesome. I'll do it. I'll put it on my calendar for this date. You eliminate 98% of
the things that we end up doing throughout the day, throughout the week and month as a business
owner. And you'd be surprised how quickly your schedule gets from overwhelmed to calm.
When you were going through those steps, it was almost like conditional statements. If then,
if then how do people make the decisions? Is it just a process that goes through your mind? Is
it with pen and paper or is it an app or a software where I'm able to put an input and then just get
an output? Because if you haven't thought about doing a software that helps you through that
process, you should with the way that you think. Yeah, we're not smart enough for software. So if
anybody's listening to no software, please reach out to me. But no, so we do have, it's a little
bit tight in software. So we do build dashboards for our clients that we work with. We just use
Notion if you're familiar with it. It's a very flexible platform. So what we do have and where
these decisions come in is we work in quarterly projects. So every quarter, it's based off the
book, the 12 week year, if you're familiar with it. So we have these 12 week sprints, quarterly
sprints. We only have three projects in any company at any one time. Doesn't matter the scale.
So based on what those three projects are, let's say you were to come to me and say,
we found this opportunity to incorporate Facebook ads in our marketing. Well, if marketing is not
on one of these three projects, it's immediately a delete. So we're referencing the projects
for that first filter. If it's part of the projects and we can't delete it, then it's just a filter in
our head and it's habit really. So once, like I said, once you do it a few times, you get the
hang of it and you get to see, okay, it's part of the projects. Where does it go? Delay, delete, do
most of the time, everything's going to be delayed or delegate. If it makes past the delete step. So
really when we work with our clients, they're surprised and also a little bit, they're mostly
shocked is really what happens because they're so used to just saying, yes, we're yes people as
entrepreneurs. And when we have them saying no, 95 plus percent of the time, it can be a little
scary at first, but like I said, their calendar shows the results and then they can be more
effective and productive because they're doing the right activities, not all activities.
So what's your next milestone?
Our next milestone. So we actually have a, we have a community that we're building and we're pretty
excited about it. So there's three things that we've kind of noticed that most entrepreneurs want
or they look for and it's clarity, confidence and community. So we can do the first two really easy,
the clarity to make decisions. We just talked about that, the confidence then to make a decision and
put it into place and chase your company's vision. The part that was lacking was the community. And
that's because as, as high level leaders and CEOs, it's hard to relate. I mean, we have employees
and yeah, they're, they're fantastic and we can talk to them and be friends and all that kind of
stuff, but no one really understands the decision making level and the decision fatigue that we have
to make decisions. So we're building a community of seven, eight figure entrepreneurs who are
pushing their companies through getting to that next level. And the milestone is a hundred for us.
We want a hundred people in that group right now. I think we're close to,
we're just shy of 20 in that group right now. And we're hoping to achieve that milestone by
Q3 or end of the year this year. Can you share how we can follow your journey, find you online
or perhaps even join that group? Yeah. So I would say if, if anything I said, how'd you say, huh,
that's interesting, but that's a different way of looking at that. The best way to look at that is
to just be a little bit more open and open to the world. And I think that's the best way to do that.
And the best way to see where your company stacks up is to actually take our assessment. It's called
the BAD, the business architecture diagnostic. And what it does, it'll ask you 50 questions in the 10
different areas of business that I described, and it'll show you where the holes in your company are.
And they're usually never where you think they are. That's the magic of everything being connected.
Like I said, so if you take that assessment, go to whatif.com, answer those 50 questions. It'll take
you eight to 10 minutes and you'll get a report on the backside of that, of exactly what's going on
in your company. So that's the clarity. And then in that report, we'll kind of paint the picture for
you of exactly what you need to do to fix it and get yourself back on the right track, if you will.
And that's the confidence piece. So like I said, I could deliver those first two really, really easy.
If you want help with it, obviously we can come in and work with you, but that's absolutely free,
that assessment. So you get confidence and clarity for free in eight minutes. I can't think of a
better deal as a business owner. So what advice would you give my listeners to take that first
step and turn their what if into reality? Ask a lot of questions and make sure you keep going.
So yeah, what if is, we always joke, it's the question that births all great ideas, right?
But you have to be willing to just learn from your failures. There's no such thing as failure. It's
just learning experience. So if you have that what if in your head, you're like, what if I turn this
into a business or, or what if I can help people in this way, chase it, seek a mentor, get guidance,
have a good plan and learn from your mistakes, but never ever stop if you think it's an idea
worth chasing. Thank you so much for your time today and for joining me in another episode of
Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. Thanks for having me.