237: Get Control of your Business and Time with Brandon Gano

26
Aug

Brandon Gano, Co-Founder of Whadif, is driven by a desire to fix problems and help business owners get control of their business and time.

We learn about Brandon’s journey from being a slave to his business to becoming a true business owner, which inspired him to help others do the same. He introduces his HARMONIOUS Business Architecture framework, designed to help owners focus on impactful activities. Additionally, he discusses The Less is More framework, offering a roadmap for diagnosing problems, strategic planning, and executing efficiently to avoid overwhelm and maximize results.

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Get Control of your Business and Time with Brandon Gano

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Brandon Gano, who is the co-founder of Whadif, a Business Accelerator that provides Fractional COO services to people who want to be in control of their business and want their time back. Welcome to the show, Brandon.

Steve, thanks for having me here.

Yeah, it’s great to have you. And I’m very curious about your personal “Why” and what you are doing to manifest it in your business.

Yeah, it’s a good question. So I personally, from a young age, I’ve always had this desire to fix problems and then help people. So this kind of two-pronged approach, if you will. So I realized from a young age, again, I was good at the solving problems piece. And then as far as helping people, I mean, there’s so many avenues you can go with that, right? So when I first started my business, this was maybe six or seven years ago at this point, I realized that I worked myself into this hole. I worked myself into a job and I was a slave to this business. When I finally got out of that and I became a business owner, not a business operator, I was like, that’s it. I wanna help more people achieve this because this is true for you. Like this is what I started my business for. I’m making an impact for my customers, on my employees’ lives, on my life. I have control of my time. And I said, I need to give more people the gift of business ownership. So I sold that business last year, but that’s what I’m doing now. So that is how it is currently manifesting my personal “Why.” I love solving the problems, helping other people solve the problems in their business that they may not be able to see and then helping them become the business owner that they really want to be.

Yeah I love that. I love that mission. I personally believe that business ownership is great, although, obviously, it’s got two sides to it. It’s not the most stress free existence, way of existence, and it has a lot of challenges, but ultimately, you’re in control of your life and that’s a great thing to have. So, tell me a little bit about this framework that you developed that’s called the HARMONIOUS Business Architecture. So, the way we talked about this on the pre-call that you created this acronym for all these ideas that help people be in control of their business and their time. And then I’d like us to talk about one of the elements of this, which is The Less is More framework. So, tell me about how this HARMONIOUS Business Architecture came about and then we’ll talk about Less is More.

Yeah, absolutely. So much like you, you have strategy OS and you have your pinnacle framework. Fun fact, Steve was on my podcast as well. So we’ll definitely make sure to put a link to that in the show notes because Steve, I loved your episode, you’re a fantastic guest. And I don’t disagree with your framework at all. I think it overlaps beautifully and we say a lot of the same things. And maybe we look at things a little bit differently, but in the end, it’s all about, for us, getting people their time back in an organized way to look at their business so they don’t stress out and start pulling their hair out over the years. So as far as HARMONIOUS, I won’t go too deep into it but it’s an acronym for the 10 fundamental business disciplines that are present in all businesses of all shapes and sizes and it came from actually my business partner. He was a fortune 100 fractional COO and consultant for 25 years. So, he’s walked the walls of literally the biggest companies in the world. You can kind of pick out of a hat of the Fortune 100, he’s probably been there. And what he realized was, okay, so these 10 things are present, but what happens as companies grow and scale, typically they create departments or silos. So think of common language in business, small and large businesses, are marketing department, HR department, sales team. And we start to separate things as companies get bigger. Well, what happens is you end up building organizations that actually compete with themselves for resources, for time, money, people, and this ultimately starts to tear down the organization. You don’t see it at that big level because they have all the money in the world to just throw money and people at problems, but in small businesses, when we start to do that, you end up destroying the culture. That’s where you have people fighting with each other. You have gossiping, all this terrible stuff that manifests behind the scenes. And then as the business owner, you’re left putting the pieces together or duct taping the whole business together, hopefully so it stays together and you can achieve your mission.

So for us, the principle of the HARMONIOUS Business Architecture is cohesiveness. Share on X

We just want to focus on what are those few things that if we pay attention to, we know they affect multiple disciplines. If we put a lot of our attention there, it’s the 80-20 rule, if we could focus 20% of our attention in certain areas, we could probably get 80% of the result these big companies are getting and we could be way more efficient, way more lean, way happier. Our people could be more productive and more happy and fulfilled. And business becomes just a little bit easier. So before we dive into the Less is More side of things, that’s really what it’s all about is just understanding, okay, how is my business working? What’s working or not? And then where do I have to focus to fix it instead of just hoping everything stays together?

Okay, so when you get a new client, when you get into new business, what is the first thing you do? How do you figure out what are the low-hanging fruits there?

So we have a diagnostic that we always run people through. It’s actually free to take, if you go to whadif.com, it’s right there on our website. And we ask 50 questions, relatively simple, it takes 8 to 10 minutes, and we go through them. So, it’s five questions per discipline, that’s how we got to 50. And we can quickly see what areas of your business are not tied together. So, a lot of people will come to us, the two main reasons people will come to us is they either wanna make more money and grow their business or they’re stressed out and overwhelmed and they want their time back. Most of the time, the root cause, which is really what we wanna solve, not the symptoms, we wanna address the root cause, has nothing to do with those two things. It’s somewhere else in their business. So by running them through this diagnostic, we can say, okay, your problem is actually in your strategic planning. That’s why your messaging is off, which is why you’re not getting any leads or not getting enough leads. Or you actually have no order in your business. That’s why there’s complete chaos. People keep coming to you for problems to solve their problems. They can’t solve them on their own. And your calendar is a nightmare and you’re constantly firefighting. So, I mean, those are two quick examples, but through this diagnostic, we can see in an instant exactly what’s going on with your business, and then we can pinpoint the exact solution. So it’s not, by no means is it a templated solution out of the box, a business in the box kind of thing. We customize the solution to every single business based on where you are and where those problems happen to be showing up.

Yeah, that’s great. I mean, that’s what businesses need. They don’t need a one size fits all solution. They want you to intelligently diagnose the business and understand what the problems are and what are the biggest levers to pull, what are kind of low hanging fruits, and start with that, give them some quick wins. And then you can go from there. I love it. Maybe that is a good segue to this idea of Less is More or you called it The Less is More framework. So, what are the three pillars of The Less is More framework?

Well, we just talked about the first one. So, diagnose. We want to make sure we have clarity on exactly where your business is in all of these areas. And again, it’s not a feeling. And the good example that I always like to use is if you were to go into the doctor and you were to say, Doc, I need you to cut off half of my head because I have a headache. And no good doctor is gonna say, okay, lay down, let’s take care of this right now. They’re gonna say, let’s just take a look maybe at what’s going on. And after a few minutes and a few questions, they’re gonna say, sir, you have a splinter in your right thumb. We do not need to perform brain surgery and cut your head open. We probably just need to take the splinter out and wear gloves next time. But that’s what most small business owners do. They say, I have no leads, it’s a marketing problem, everything’s a disaster, throw money at ads, throw money at this marketing agency, on and on and on. So, diagnose, that’s a good way to think about how you’re diagnosing your own problems. Are you going right to the band-aid fix of cutting your head open? Or should we consult maybe a doctor and get some clarity on what’s going on? So, diagnose, step two, after we have that clarity of what’s actually happening, that’s when you want to plan. So instead of going right to cutting your head open or removing the splinter, which is a completely ridiculous scenario, let me just point that out, and I know that, because you can remove a splinter. But if you have a leads problem, but it’s manifesting somewhere else, like I said before, in your strategic planning, you want to plan and say, okay, how did we get here in the first place? Like, what is our real goal as a company and where do we see ourselves going? Who do we serve as clients? Why do we serve them? And maybe even take a look at your products. Do our current products and services actually line up with who we say we are as a company, who we say we serve, and how we say that we serve them? So, this could take a couple weeks, to be honest with you. When we onboard new clients, we call this area of the architecture, it’s the N for navigation in HARMONIOUS. We usually spend two to four weeks, sometimes up to six weeks, just focused on the navigation. Because if you were to go on a cross-country road trip, I’m in North Carolina in the United States, if I wanted to go to California, there’s no way I get in my car without a GPS, not even a map, map’s a bad example. I’m too young to even know how to read a map. So there’s no way I get in the car without a GPS, but that’s kind of what we do in business. We just open our doors, we put up a website, and we say, all right, here we go. Or even if you did start with a plan, after five, 10, 15 years of being in business, you’re so far off that map, off of that GPS track, because you haven’t consistently checked in with it. So, we wanna spend a lot of time there. So, we have our diagnosis, now we develop our plan, we get back on track, back re-centered with where we want to go. You hit the little re-center icon on your GPS, and then we want to execute. That’s phase three. We want to make sure that we have very clear marching orders for everyone in the organization, and this is where a lot of people fall off track too, because it’s about doing a few things really well rather than a million things and going back to crazy. That’s really where we fall off the map anyway. So, we wanna just do a few things really well. We say two to three things on a daily basis per person involved with the company that you know are gonna keep you on track with that plan. And we measure weekly in like little doses, monthly in a little bit larger doses, and then every 90 days, we want to take about a week to analyze where we are on this plan. We go back through the whole thing, diagnose, plan the map, and then back to executing. Whether it’s the same thing or different. So those are kind of the three steps of how we get to Less is More, which we always joke is the Charmin slogan. We didn’t steal it from them. We want to acknowledge that that was the fluffy bears that sell toilet paper, that’s all them.

Okay, all right, so that is very critical. I see that also that people are trying to do too many things, they try to focus on 10 different things, which is obviously at the opposite of focus. And then they either burn themselves out or they just get freaked out by having so many things on their plate and then they just want to get some easy things off their plate, which means they’re gonna do the less impactful things and then they just going to stagnate and not move forward. So how do you actually do that? How do you identify those two or three things that they should be focusing on to move the needle for the business? Is there a process for that?

It’s usually a really painful process to be just fully transparent with you. If it’s the first time we’re doing it with somebody, it’s painful and it sucks. If it’s the second time, now we have at least some data of what’s working, what’s not working. But typically when we start working with our clients, they’re gonna be in the low seven figure range. So maybe they just crossed over a million in revenue or one to five, somewhere in that range. The owner is still at the center of making decisions. And it’s kind of just what got us here won’t get us there, definitely, wherever there is. But they’re calling the shots, right? The team is not used to collecting data, really having input on the strategic plan of the business. So, the first time we do it, we want to break down. We set up three projects for 90 days. That’s really all a company of that size can and should be trying to handle at any one time. So, let’s take one project. So, project one, whatever the topic is, we set the outcome, which is really developing this project into a process that we can duplicate and turn on and off as needed. We set the metric that we think we’re shooting for, and then we just start spit balling, whether you want to call it brainstorming or brain dumping or whatever. What are all of the things that need to be involved for this project to be successful, we think, on paper? So we have that, we call those the ingredients. Then if there’s any tools or resources we’re going to need, whether that’s people, software, anything like that, outside companies, the third-party companies or agencies, let’s put them on the list in a separate category. The third category is what are the activities that must take place in order for this to be successful? Again, we think. So we put as much of that on paper as we possibly can. Then what we want to say is, okay, who’s going to be assigned to this project? So, let’s say you have a team of five people who are going to be assigned to this project. We’re going to divide the activities, the responsibilities, between those five people, and they can only handle, like I said before, a max of two or three per person. So, if you put 50 activities on the list of things that could contribute to the success of the project, you need to start eliminating. Because with five people on the project you can have a max of 15 that get done. So, then we just start questioning and it’s a very laborious process. We say, will that really get the biggest result? And we question every single one and we try to play it out as much as we can. We say, okay, if we do this for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? Do we think that has a better result than this one over 30, 60, 90 days? So, we’re going to do our best, really guess if it’s the first time we’re doing a process like this, then that’s where the evaluation comes in. So, every single week we want to check in, okay, are all of these activities, all 15 of these activities, are they getting the anticipated result? Yes, no, okay. If yes, leave it alone, keep doing it. If no, evaluate. Why? What worked? What didn’t work? Was it an execution thing? Was it a frequency thing? Are we totally off the mark? We don’t wanna make big changes, but we do wanna make tiny tweaks along the way. And then as you go over these, the course of the 90 days, you start to compile a ton of data about what’s working. Did we get the frequency right? Did we get the task right? Did we get the goal right? Or did we blow it out of the water or fall short? And then when you do it a second time, so the second 90 days, core two if you will, it becomes incredibly easy to then identify, okay, we have all of this data now. We know what's working, what's not working, why it didn't work, why it did work. Share on X Then your planning session, if you will, goes from eight hours down to two, because you can start to put things into place really, really quickly, and people are used to operating on this cadence of an actual strategic plan and execution schedule. So, first time, like I said, really sucks, but once you’re in the mindset of it and you use a methodology like this, it doesn’t have to be us. I mean, there’s other people that do this kind of stuff, but once you’re used to executing like that, you start to get really used to it and a lot of traction about actually moving your business forward.

That’s interesting. So that’s kind of a, actually very much though, and like a trial and error process to figure out how to solve the problem. So, for example, you mentioned the lead. So, if it’s a lack of leads, let’s take an educated guess, what would be those two or three activities that would help us get there and then start to measure it. And then you have some data and then you can tweak your process. You see what’s not working, you discard it. What works, you keep doing it or maybe doubling down on it and then you bring in other approaches, and ultimately, you work it out. And so, it’s like a disciplined approach, which may not always be fun, but which actually keeps people trying the right things. It’s kind of an A-B testing of your approaches.

At least for the first time, yeah. But I mean, you think of the alternative, which is what most entrepreneurs get sucked into, is let’s take the lead example. We don’t have enough leads. Okay, let’s go run Facebook ads because it’s like the next shiny thing that’s on your radar. After two weeks, this isn’t working, Facebook ads suck, I’m never doing that again. Let’s go speak on podcasts. Okay, after three weeks, this isn’t working. Next thing, podcast suck, I’m never doing that again. You haven’t given it. First of all, you don’t have a plan. So, you can’t even evaluate if it’s working or not. And you don’t have targets to look at and approach with. But you haven’t given it any time. I mean, you need to let things run their course for at least 60, hopefully 90 days before you really start to evaluate. But that’s kind of the cycle we find ourselves in is try, test, evaluate, fail. And it’s strictly because we don’t have enough data and we don’t have enough time. And that’s where people fall off the wagon, if you will.

So how does a business to business company create these tests with enough statistically valid data so that you actually have something to go on? Because you mentioned this Facebook example. at least Facebook, you can have statistically valid tasks because there’s so many people on Facebook. Now, they may not all be your target audience, so there are other problems that you might encounter, but at least there’s a lot of data out there. But as a business-to-business company, for example, you’re coaching a CO services company, so how do you then test it on enough prospective customers to even know whether it’s a good test or it’s a successful approach or not?

Well, so again, we work with companies who are established in business, they have pretty significant revenue, so we know a lot of things. So, you could take the same approach with a startup or someone who’s a lot earlier in their business journey, it just takes more assumptions. So, I apologize, I’m not really speaking to those people with this, but with our clients, I’ll give you an example. Actually, we’re going through this with a client right now. They’re trying to get more contracts for their business because they’re anticipated to double over the course of the next year. So, we have all of their backend order, their SOPs, their people are all in place. Now it’s about finding the right contracts who we know produce clients that are really easy to work with, and they just fit right with their sweet spot of expertise. So, we have the perfect picture of their ideal client. We know who they are, we know how they operate, we know where to find them, we know what conferences they go to, and that would be their form of Facebook ads. So, they’re not running Facebook ads, they’re going to industry conferences and speaking at those conferences as an authority. So, we know it’s really just, I hate when people say it’s a numbers game, but it kinda is in this scenario because we have everything else dialed in. So, we know that if we get this client on stage at four industry conferences over the course of the next year, because of all of our past data, because of all of their past data, she has a very high probability of onboarding between two and three clients per conference. We’re talking big contracts, she only has about seven or eight at any one time. So, over the course of the year, if we get her on four conferences, let’s say worst case scenario, two clients per conference, she has just doubled her business by getting two times four. So, it’s very, very simple for us to say, all right, we just need a process in place to now top to bottom, find the conference, get on stage at the conference, develop the talk. What’s the current problem that these people are looking to solve that you with your company can solve, become the expert on them because you’re speaking on stage, open the conversation and convert them into a client. So, it’s you zoom out and then you can get hyper detailed on every single step of the process, versus saying she could absolutely take the Facebook ads approach and say, well, I know we deal with, I don’t wanna give the industry away, I know we deal with secretaries in this particular industry and they’re the people that sign the contracts. You could run Facebook ads and target those people, it just wouldn’t be as effective. And you would build data, to your point, like they would have data and metrics about how effective the ads are doing, but it would take so much more money, effort, and time to convert those people into leads from that platform, rather than just going to precisely the stage that we need to go to. So I can put her on four stages over the course of the year and spend honestly no money outside of travel because it’s free to get on these stages and speak, or I could spend $15,000 on Facebook ads a month and get a fraction of the result. So that’s kind of, I hope that makes it a little bit more clear, but you want to just get really identified on who you serve, where they are, how you serve them, and then show up the correct way.

Yeah, love it. So that’s the sort of the elements and the HARMONIOUS Business Architecture has the nine other elements. Which one is your favorite that you think is the most unique for Whadif?

Well, I have two favorites. I have a favorite and I have one that’s most unique. So we touched on my favorite navigation. So, what we focus on is core values, mission and vision usually provides the biggest lift in the shortest period of time. So, like I said, we spend two to four weeks with people. It opens their eyes and reconnects them to really why they started the business in the first place. And the shift that they have in their business, both them and their teams, in the first four weeks of working together is massive. I mean, you touched on when you were on my show, you wanna build momentum in the first 45 days, massive momentum in the first 45 days. That’s where we see a ton of momentum. It’s the ahas, it’s the light bulbs, it’s the tears, the tears of joy saying, I remember why I started my business in the first place. There’s just so much joy and satisfaction that comes from that process. As far as the most unique, the H in harmonious for us stands for home. Humans optimized in a meaningful environment. So traditionally it would be called HR. It sounds really boring and a little bit offensive, but human resources, I’m not a huge fan of that. So that’s two parts, humans optimized and meaningful environment. Meaningful environment is your culture, your workplace, how you are showing up really as the employer, and then the humans optimize. We just believe that if you’re going to hire people and you’re going to pay them and they’re going to contribute to your mission and vision, you should work to optimize them. So we’ve partnered with a very, very good friend of mine and they have this technology where they can quantify everything about a human being in terms of what makes them tick, what drives them, what are they really good at, what tasks are they meant to perform? And they can at a very high level effortlessly. So, we bring in this technology to all of the companies that we work with, top to bottom. Everybody in the company goes through this process. And then we know, okay, we can build a custom organization around the people you have there. We can eliminate any workplace drama. And I mean like in a matter of weeks just because we know how to communicate effectively with each other, who needs to be doing what and if someone is a little bit burnt out? How do we recharge their batteries? How do we get them back on track instead of just saying you know what Susan over there in finance? She’s not that good at what she does. She’s a little bit lazy. Susan’s actually burnt out because she shouldn’t be doing everything she’s doing. She should actually be over here in marketing and she would be like your best employee ever if you just made that little shift and here’s why. So, we rearrange organizations, we get people lit up and excited to come back to work and then the organization moves forward at lightning speed. Rather than the CEO kind of pulling everybody forward, you have a team that’s now pushing the organization forward and it’s fun to see that shift in the team but also in the owner and the CEO, because it just becomes easy and fun at that point.

Yeah, I love this idea of optimizing talent. I mean, I have a strong belief as well that every company underutilizes its talent. It’s basically impossible to completely optimize, but the idea that you actually tailor the job to the person, to people you have, and allow them to really bloom in your organization. And that is hugely empowering. It’s very invigorating for these people. And if you tap into that talent, they’re gonna not just bring their hands and minds, but they are going to bring their hearts to the job and they can help your company be very, very powerful. So I love this concept. So if people would like to learn more about Whadif and what you can do for people to get them back in control of their business, and get their time back, where should they go? Where can they learn more and how can they connect to you?

Absolutely. So I mentioned the diagnostic before, if you have happy fingers and you already typed that in and you took it, awesome, good on you, but really, what I think you should do is if any of this is intriguing, that Less is More framework that we kind of dove into before. I actually have a three-part audio series that we made that goes through just that. It’ll customize to your business. So, if you go to whadif.com/clarity, you will get access to that audio series and the diagnostic is part of it. It’s kind of like step one. So, if you already did that, awesome, you’re a step ahead. But go through that three-part audio series. It’ll take you 30-35 minutes, and it’ll paint the picture for your exact company in whatever scenario you find yourself, it’ll be tailored to you of how you can start to reclaim your time and get that time freedom in the next 90 days through this process.

Awesome, well definitely check out whadif.com. Whadif with a D for December rather than with a T for Thomas. So, whadif.com. Brandon, thanks for coming and sharing your business philosophy, the HARMONIOUS Business Architecture, The Less is More framework and how to optimize people. It’s been fun having you on the show. For those of you listening, stay tuned because twice a week we come with exciting entrepreneurs who unearth their own unique business frameworks, which help you simplify your business and take giant steps forward. Thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

 

 

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