2026 Virtual Planning Workshop Session 1

David Bush  0:00  
I'm starting to realize that prioritizing time and getting rid of the stuff that doesn't matter is super important to me. Breaking it down into smaller chunks is my secret to success, and I think that if you don't do that for 2026 you're gonna waste a lot of money time on things that don't really matter to you and that are maybe an absolute waste of your time. Welcome to the Business Builders playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind Predictable Revenue Growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by bdr.ai the AI powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started. All right. Well, I think we're ready to get started.

Jenelle Friday  0:56  
Janelle, all right, I love it. Let's go well. First of all, I want to welcome everyone to the very first business builder playbook workshop. My name is Janelle Friday. I'm the Director of Client successor with BDR, and I get the privilege of being your moderator for today's workshop. And the workshop series, I will be interviewing David and Jeff Bush, co owners of bdr.ai, and asking them questions Business Builders want to get answered so they can build a better playbook for 2026 first, let's get right in and introduce you to David bush. He's a business coach, marketing strategist and the president of bdr.ai where he helps entrepreneurs and sales leaders build scalable lead generation and sales systems that create predictable, sustainable growth. A former collegiate and professional football player, David carried his competitive drive into business, first becoming a top producer mortgage broker and leading 17 offices across three states, and later transitioning into a full time business coaching in 2020 sorry, 2004 we used to say in 2020 for more than two decades, he's developed proven automated marketing and sales frameworks that help businesses business owners consistently attract qualified leads, close more deals and build businesses that scale beyond themselves. David is also an accomplished author and sought after speaker, known for delivering practical, actionable strategies that inspire both business growth and personal success. So welcome to the show, David. Love to have you here. Thank you. Janelle, I

David Bush  2:24  
don't know if I could have written a better intro myself. That secret was from the heart.

Jenelle Friday  2:28  
I love it. That's what we're all about. Well, so for people that are new to you and bdr.ai, David, can you share a little bit about who you are and what you do?

David Bush  2:38  
Yeah, well, I'd love to ask those that are here live with us to put in the chat where you're joining in from today, what city and state, country, province, I'd love to just see who's here with us live. If you're watching a recording, you can put it in the comments, and you can let us know in the comments section where you joined in from. But yeah, my brother and I, Jeff, we grew up in Southern California. We grew up in a middle class family. Our dad owned an auto body shop for our entire growing up years. He was an entrepreneur who was a big dreamer. Had lots of fun things that he would put up as pictures on his dream board. We like to call it the refrigerator. And he was a very motivated, hard working and and my my wife and my wife, my mom, supported my dad in that journey of entrepreneurism and and we really learned from them what it was like to chase big dreams and to work hard, and what it meant to, you know, sacrifice. And so when we got through with high school, we both kind of got the idea that would become entrepreneurs. I ended up going on to play college football, as Janelle said, ended up pursuing a dream of mine, which was short lived, but ended up playing four years in college, played arena football for four years, had a 10 second glimpse of fame, because I was the guy that hiked the ball to the now Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback, Kurt Warner. And so, you know, if there's nothing else I can brag about at parties, I can say that Kurt Warner had his hands upon my buttocks. And not sure who came up with that idea, but that's, yeah, that's kind of what got me started in the idea of chasing a big dream and then and to know what it was at 1997 I think it was 1998 I suffered what a lot of experts call our career ending, lack of talent, and had to move on from football into the world of professional sales, which got me into the mortgage industry, which then led it into becoming an owner of 17 offices and three different states. And then after following through with that dream, I really got a passion for coaching entrepreneurs. And so for the last 20 years, I've been coaching entrepreneurs on business planning, goal setting, motivation, mindset, really helping them to develop the skill sets to go to that next level. I wrote a book back in 2020 called. Live an extraordinary life or live live an extraordinary life, and really had to just chase big dreams. And when Jeff and I acquired bdr.ai we got passionate about equipping entrepreneurs and executive sales leaders with the tools that could help them to scale their businesses and to do it where they could buy back portions of their life with all the time and energy that they were spending on so many different strategies and tactics and tools, we felt like that we could take some of our 25 plus year experience in the marketplace and show them what had been successful for us, and you'll get a chance to meet Jeff in just a bit, and he can tell you a little bit more about his story, but yeah, just super excited, honored to be with you today. And you know, let me just tell you the things I'm going to share with you today about planning are going to be things that have worked for me. They've worked for other people. So I love the phrase that the experience of others compresses time. What I'm not going to share with you is a bunch of theories that I created or crafted I took the last 25 years, and I've put it into a presentation over these next three sessions that I'm going to try to give you what was proven out to me, and hopefully you can take that and you can make it your own and make it to be helpful and successful to you. We're not selling something here. We'd love to help you, and I'd love to partner with you if you're looking for help with business development. Business Development. Bdr.ai, is a great system for helping business to business entrepreneurs and executive sales leaders, but really we want to just serve you. We want to help you to come up with a better playbook coming out of football. Janelle, I worked with a lot of coaches that were always coming up with new plays that we could run to help us to win, whether it was on offense or defense. And so when we created the Business Builders playbook podcast and show, we thought, you know, what a great way to kick that off and to really do a workshop on what does it mean to have a playbook, and what are some things that should be inside of your playbook right now that have been proven to win for other people, that could also be helpful for you. So I'm excited to dive in today and share some of the strategies and tactics and tools that we found to be successful.

Jenelle Friday  7:11  
Love that thanks for sharing. We've got a really great audience. We've got folks coming in from Australia. I'm a little partial to my Colorado Springs person. I'm in Windsor, Colorado. We have someone from Poland. So I want to say, you know, no matter where you're hailing from, today, we're so glad that you're here. You kind of answered my next question, which is what inspired you to host the workshop. So let me ask you this, why is it important for business owners to be planning for the next year? It sounds like an obvious question. Why is it important to plan for the next year, but from your perspective, and specifically for this workshop, David, how would you answer that?

David Bush  7:45  
Yeah, there's a couple of phrases and quotes that I've learned over the years that have been really helpful for me. And you know, planning is kind of like an opportunity disguised as work, and a lot of people get caught up on previous failures with planning, or just the overwhelm of planning or just confusion of not knowing what to do. But there's two quotes that I love, and the first one, I don't know who the author is, but the quote is, focus precedes success. Success in the marketplace is not a matter of magic, it's not hocus pocus. It's a matter of focus, focus, and if you lack focus, you're going to waste a tremendous amount of time. There's so much noise in the marketplace, there's so many distractions, there's so many things that are competing for your energy, effort and ideas, and if you don't have a plan, this is coming into the second quote, and it's by Jim Jim Rohn, one of my favorite speakers and authors, and he has this phrase that says, if you fail to create your own plan, chances are you're going to fall into somebody else's plan. And guess what they got planned for you? Not much. And so if you don't take the time to craft your plans, and the plans can be life time, finances, business operations, if you don't take the time to create a plan, you will, without a doubt, fall into the plans of other people, and those plans may or may not be serving your desired outcome and what it is that you want to be do and have in life and in your relationships and in your business, And what you want for your future, and so this is hopefully going to be an opportunity where it's going to accelerate your planning, because you're going to benefit from the experience of others, and that's going to compress the amount of time to do your planning. I do think you're going to have to do some planning on your own outside of this workshop, but I do think that this will really help you, and some of the tools and tactics that we share will definitely be something that will speed up the amount of time that you have to take, because we're going to share some AI tips and tactics that I found to be successful. So if this show is resonating with you and you're ready to take action because you want to scale your business faster, smarter, with more AI and technology and less labor. Check out. Bdr.ai, we help entrepreneurs and executive sales leaders to automate the grind of prospecting so you can focus your time on closing deals and growing revenue where you should be spending your time with. Ai, powered data, digital outreach, automation and done for you, prospecting systems, you'll connect with more qualified leads book more appointments and build Predictable Revenue without adding more hours to your week or the week of your staff. Visit BDR today and discover how our AI prospect finder and digital BDR agents can help you to build your pipeline and your profits. Visit bdr.ai, where business builders learn how to automate and scale their playbook,

Jenelle Friday  10:45  
my last question is this, in this intro is, what do you hope each participant walks away with today, and what does every participant need to do to get the most out of today's workshop?

David Bush  10:55  
Yeah, I think that most importantly, I want to deliver on what I promised. And so, you know the things that we put inside of the invitation. If you didn't get a chance to see it, I'll just review it. So by the end of this three day workshop, I'm hoping that you have a complete 2026, business plan, or what we would call a playbook. Now, there's obviously things that you can always be refining in a business plan, but you should feel like that you have the structure that you could go to work in the new year and feel like that you have a solid plan that's going to help you to achieve your desired outcome. Marketing Plan and automation system. We're going to share that with you more tomorrow on the marketing side, but we're going to show you some things that you can do to really structure your marketing so that it happens on a predictable basis, and it gives you an opportunity to review and measure the results the digital outreach and sales system is going to be the strategies we're going to share with you around bdr.ai, and just more structure and concepts of what could be a very simple way for you to go out there and scale revenue, scale profit, and really scale your business valuation, leadership and operational plan is going to be determined based upon each individual but if you want to scale your business two to 10x in the next three to five years, I believe you need to have a leadership and operations plan to get there. Because if you don't create a business that works, because the business model works, you're going to end up working a tremendous amount, and you're not going to see that progressive growth. You know, we want to see reasonable progress over a measurable period of time, and if we can do that on a particular trajectory, we can end up seeing an opportunity to scale two to 10x it may not be 10, but it has the potential to be 10 as long as your calendar matches that goal, and that might be a jotter downer for today, if I'm giving out jotter downers. Janelle, this is one of them. Is that your calendar in 2026 has to match your desired outcome, and if it doesn't, you will not achieve your desired outcome, whether that be health, whether that be life, relationships, time, business growth, you have to have a calendar that matches your desired outcome. And how do you know if your calendar matches your desired outcome is that you measure what gets measured gets done. So we're going to make sure that you have a good strategy for measuring. We want to make sure you walk out of here with a 90 day execution roadmap so that you know what to do the next 90 days. Things may change after 90 days, but we're going to show you how to make that to be simple, and then we're going to show you some simple AI powered strategies and tactics and workflows that can help you with follow up and relationship building. And I've given you a whole bunch of bonuses, and Janelle will put the link inside the chat, so that all of you can download and access those resources. I created this business builder playbook workbook that's an Excel spreadsheet, and this is what it looks like right here. Janelle will put

Jenelle Friday  13:53  
it in chat right now, just so everybody knows. Click on the chat. It's there,

David Bush  13:58  
yeah, if you can go, if you go to the chat, or if you go to the link in the chat, it'll basically give you the link to make a copy of this Google Sheet, and you'll see the instructions are written right there on the front of the page. So if you have a Google Drive, you can just click on Make a copy. If you don't make a copy, it's not going to be editable, because this is just view only, so you don't have to make a copy to see what we're doing here. But if you want to add your own changes and make it your own, you're going to need to go in there and click on File and make a copy. If you don't have familiarity with Google Drive, you can just go to download and you can download it as a Microsoft Excel document, or you can download it as a PDF document, and you can print it out, and you can use the old pen and paper version. There is quite a bit of content in this, and so you want to make sure, when you go to print it, that you print the entire workbook. You'll see that at the bottom of the page there are these tabs. Each one of these tabs has inside. Insights, tips and ideas, and so we're going to be walking through this together. But just so you know, each one of these tabs is something that you should probably take a look at and see if it pertains to your situation and your interest. You don't have to do every tab to be successful, but there are some things in there that I think are extremely valuable, that are worth taking a look at and I'll go through and I'll explain that during our sessions

Jenelle Friday  15:24  
of that. Well, we did get some questions submitted by folks who registered, but if you're live on the call today and you got a really specific question, if you would throw it in the chat for me. Now I want to make sure we address those, so go ahead and feel free to share. And then we did talk about the value of planning, but let's I want to dig into that a little bit more before we really dig into dig into that playbook. David, so we talked about challenges of what happens when you dominate plan. I love your saying. What gets measured gets done. I like what gets measured gets managed, right? If you don't measure it, you can't manage it. And time management is one of those skills that I think a lot of leaders have heard of. They think that they know what they're doing, but it's difficult to do and know kind of the systems that work for you. So why do you think business owners resist planning?

David Bush  16:10  
I think that it comes down to a couple of things. First one, I think it's motivation. I think that if individuals have bad experiences and they haven't seen that the juice is worth the squeeze. Planning is a lot of squeezing, and if there's no juice at the end, that you see as a quantifiable value, every time you go back to thinking about doing it, you go, I've done that before, but there's a different way of thinking about planning, and that's what I would challenge those of you that have a lack of motivation to plan. Motivation is a contraction between the word motive and action, and when you have a motive that is inspiring, it is motivating, it is a reason why. So you know, you can come up with the negative reasons of why, because there's a whole bunch of negative reasons of why, if you don't have a plan, you are going to pay the price. And so you can use those as a motivation to do it, or you can use more of the growth mindset of what could be possible in my business in the next 1224, 3660 months, if I had a plan that was matching my desired outcome, and I worked that plan day in, day out. I was committed to being consistent. I married the process, and I divorced myself from the results. I didn't look at the results as the reason why I did the process. I trusted the process. I had an I had a proven process that I knew that if I did that process consistently over time, I would see measurable growth over that reasonable period of time, 30 day windows, 90 day windows. I mean, there is a growing process to a business. There are times when you are planting the seeds. You know, when I talk to a lot of, you know, solopreneurs, and they're out there trying to grow their business, I always try to tell them is that there is a growing process. There is a time for planting, there's a time for watering and fertilizing, there's a time for weeding, and then there's a time for harvesting. So you can't go out there with the mindset that I'm going to plant this seed, and then you can just look at the seed and go, grow, grow, grow. But here's the cool thing about planting seeds is that, you know, in an apple orchard, you know you can count the the apples that are in the seed, or you can count the seeds in the apple, but you can't count the apples in the seeds, because the seeds will just continue to produce more and more apples, and if you keep replanting those seeds, you'll have an orchard of apples. So the idea around planning can be either motivation positive or motivation negative. You've got to come up with a reason, and that would be my challenge right now, is that put it into in the chat. What is your motivating reason to create a plan? Let's do this as a workshop. For those of you that are not here live, you can be thinking about, what are your reasons, positive and negative, but throw your reason in the chat. Let's share this with other people that are live here, and if you're watching a recorded version of it, put it in the comments and let us know. What is your motivating reason to craft a plan to accomplish what it is that's important to you.

Jenelle Friday  19:26  
So David, before you go further, we have a comment that I want to call out. So Angela says this, business owners want freedom. That's why we're not employees. Planning is not freedom. How would you address that?

David Bush  19:40  
So there's a great movie. I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, I think that it's called Harriet, and it's the movie of Harriet Tubman. And Harriet Tubman created the underground railroad that saved countless slaves from slavery to freedom, and what she had to do. Sacrifice to gain freedom was something that she was willing to die for. So, you know, planning is not freedom, but it is the bridge to freedom in my mind, because if you craft a plan now, planning by itself, right? That's what they say. Planning without action is the beginning of delusion. You know, you can do a lot of planning, but if you don't take action on that plan, and you don't consistently measure your results to see if you're on the right track or not, then, yeah, the plans are it's just, you know, constantly, just doing the whole insanity thing, repeating the same thing over and over again. So if you do plan. And you see that planning is a bridge that will take you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. Then you'll come back and see planning as the price that you paid for freedom, just like Harriet Tubman was willing to jump into a rushing river. And, you know, go through the process of fearing death and and having, you know, being beaten, and having all of this challenge, and even having her friends and family members turn their backs on her when she offered them, she risked her life to come free them, and then they said, the price that you paid is not real. Is not something that we're willing to pay, and that's why a lot of people stay, you know, as lifestyle entrepreneurs, they don't ever scale, they don't ever grow a business that works because the business works. They just continue to work it. And that's perfectly okay. A lot of people live, you know, ordinary lives in America, and it's pretty extraordinary compared to third world countries. But the opportunity to scale a business and to have a massive exit, or to have a business that's passive income that allows you to to live a life that you could only dream about, that's going to require a sacrifice, and usually that sacrifice comes with a bit of planning.

Jenelle Friday  21:51  
Yeah, and Dan shared this. He said, without a plan, you don't have freedom. You are in reactivity. Planning is intentional, and I love that. So my question for the audience right now is one, what's one thing you wished you would plan better in 2025 right? We want to be reflective. We want to address the fact that we're learning. We're growing. We don't get things perfect. I kind of mucked up our client email this morning. Learning is a process, right? But in order for us to make 2026 the best it can be and maximize it. I think it's important that we reflect on maybe what's one area that I look back on and go, Man, I wish I would have done that better. I'm going to make that as part of my priority list for 2026 so really, I think that there's one of the powerful ideas that you teach is planning isn't just about the business, right? It's about the whole person and the systems that support growth. So can you walk us through the core planning categories that you recommend? Right? So, like first one, is life planning? Right? Absolutely. So why is life planning a foundation of business planning?

David Bush  22:58  
I guess it would. It would come back to a matter of perspective. But I think that most people became business owners or entrepreneurs because the business was a means to an end. It wasn't the business that was the end. It was something that the business could do for them, whether it be that freedom, whether it be freedom of time, freedom of being able to do something that you're super passionate about. Maybe it's the idea of being able to be generous, be successful and significant, but there's something that's a reason behind the actual business. And so while it's great to go in there and jump right into a business plan, I found that it's really important to go back to organizing your life around what really matters most. And I'll bring up the business builders playbook just to show everybody how to navigate to this section so that they can spend a little time with inside of the different resources. So the first tab that we shared is a business assessment. It's on a scale of zero to 100 I give you kind of an example of what in 100 would be. But again, this is relative to what you want, not what it is that I want. But I've tried to give you a guide as to, you know, if you were to score yourself or to give yourself an academic grade, you know, 90 to 100 would be an A, 80 to 989, would be a B, and so on, just kind of moving your way down, and if you're failing, it's not to say that you're a failure. It's just to say that that is your current reality is that you may be failing in many of these different categories, or maybe just one, but at least it's a benchmark. It gives you an opportunity to reflect. And so my encouragement is to assess yourself on these six core categories that we believe are the six critical success factors to scaling a business, and then to print that out and to measure yourself in accordance to how you've progressed at the end of 3060, 9180, days, so that you can see, am I getting better now, sometimes you get to the point where the more you the more you learn, the more you. Become. The more you become, the more you achieve, the more you realize you didn't really know much when you first started. And so you can kind of, you know, challenge yourself on your grading scale, but at least it gives you a simple way to kind of see, am I making progress? And it gives you a benchmark that most people don't necessarily have. This is the life planning page, and I didn't put all these boxes so that you had to feel like, if you didn't fill them all up, that you were living an empty life. Go back to the concept about focus. Focus precedes success. So what I recommend is, is that if you are a person that feels overwhelmed when you write down all of your dreams and goals, you know maybe have another sheet of paper, or maybe take this opportunity to enter the dream or goal that you want to accomplish. You can double click and select the due date. You can also go in there and select a priority. So ABC, this is something I absolutely have to do. It's so important to me. B is something that I want to do, but you know, not as much of a priority as a C is something that, you know, what, if I could do this, I'd like to do it, but it's not going to be a life or death thing. It's not something that's super urgent that I have to do this particular year. But you could put some dreams and goals of things that are meaningful to you, that would make you feel like you had lived an extraordinary life. You know, so many people die with the music that's left inside of them. It never got played because they never had a plan to achieve what it is that they really wanted to be do and have, or they allowed fear, or they allowed their limiting, fixed mindset, or other things, the negative influence of other people, the opinions of other people, to hold them back from living an extraordinary life, and this is my challenge to you, is to put down on paper what it is that matters to you. And when you start to put some due dates, and you start to put some priority, you can look at it and go, Man, I've got way too many a priorities. There's no way that I can have focus if I've got priorities, all of them as a I love the phrase that says, you know, in the world of marketing is that if you focus on everyone, you focus on no one, and if you focus on everything, you focus on nothing. So what is it that's going to be the major success factors in your life that you would make you would it would make you feel like, you know what, I had an extraordinary 2026 if you could do what you really wanted to do from a personal standpoint, you know, for me, Janelle, one of the big things for me, I gave up a lot of health to gain wealth early in my career, I graduated from high school really heavy. I was 327 pounds, but I got away with it by playing football. But at 35 with three small kids under the age of 10, I was unhealthy, and it was beginning to cause me some major life consequences. And so one of the big things that I put into my life plan, back in when I was 3520 years ago almost was, is that I was going to start learning how to live a healthy lifestyle and learn to enjoy it, because I knew it was going to be important for me. So one of my big life goals that became a rock in my calendar was making sure that I had time for my health and my fitness. And there's a section down here that if there's things that you want to be do and have write them down in the present tense, like, in the next year, I have lost a 30 pounds, or I weigh X number of pounds. Or if there's something from a pleasure and leisure standpoint, like, if you wanted to go on a experience, I have gone on a seven day cruise with my wife and kids and grandkids. Or what are the things that would really do it for you if you knew that you couldn't fail doing it and you could craft a plan and it would all come true. What would you put down inside of this particular section? And I'm telling you my experience, in working with people when they have those life dreams, the business challenges and the sacrifices and the planning and, you know, the failures and all those things will not hold them back from getting up the next day and starting all over again and being relentless at the pursuit of an extraordinary life and an extraordinary business and extraordinary relationships, but all of that comes from having a focus of this is what I feel is important to me, and putting it down on paper or putting

Jenelle Friday  29:36  
it in a word, yeah, well, I love that you've given us the example to do that. I'm and this is, I'm the moderator here, but I'm just going to drop a little bit of little bit of neuroscience, which tells us that you perceive your thoughts differently than you perceive what you look at. So by writing down goals and then ranking the order priority, you may look at that list and go, Oh, why am I prioritizing that? Why is that? Am I right? So, so at the very least, you know you can't accomplish everything, but what you consider to be a priority, if you get it into this spreadsheet and really sit back and take a look at it, I think you will be surprised by the area that you thought was really critical to you, but after looking at it, you're like, actually, I need to shift my focus and look at it over here. So just by getting it out of your head. Sometimes that's clarity that people need to really move the needle in what they're focused on and how they're focusing their time, speaking of time,

David Bush  30:28  
sometimes just a little structure will help you come up with some ideas of, like, you know, public service and legacy. Like, what should I put in there? Well, maybe it's the idea of, you know, donating some time. If you donated one afternoon, my wife just went down with her. She's a florist, and she went down with her team to go serve in a place where they make meals for people in third world country, and she served for an afternoon. It wasn't that much time, but she put it into action, and she went out there and did it. You don't have to do a lot of those things before your life feels more significant and you feel more fulfilled. And I'm telling you, well being has a direct impact to your energy levels, your excitement, your happiness. And I can tell you, when I started making healthy lifestyle choices, I did not realize what it was costing me, because you see the world as you are, you don't see the world as it is. And I would go up and I would do presentations, and some people came up to me after I did presentations and I had lost 100 pounds, and they said, I saw you give this presentation two years ago, and you do it totally different now that you've gotten and I did not realize how much it was holding me back from doing the things that are important. And again, this is a business builder's playbook workshop. This is about business, but if you're the number one asset in your business, and you're treating your asset like the first three letters, an asset, and you're not treating it like something that's a valuable tool or valuable resource, or like precious something. You need to rethink your strategy, because it's going to cost you, and you're going to end up giving up all your wealth to give, get back your health, or you're going to give up other things in life slowly, such as, like the activities to go, you know, do things with your kids or your grandkids. I mean, activity levels. You know, there's a lot of things that get robbed of you if you don't start taking the action right now and start putting those things into your calendar. Well, that

Jenelle Friday  32:40  
kind of leads us into our next topic, which is time planning. Right? We talked about why is planning

David Bush  32:45  
before we do that, I want to ask everybody that's live right now, what's the one thing that came to mind that you felt like you needed to put into your life plan. Put it in the chat. I'd love to see some feedback from those people that are with us live, if you're watching recording, put it in the comments. Just would love to make sure that this is resonating with you, and hopefully I'm challenging you in an area that you didn't think you're going to get challenged today on a business workshop, but love to see what that looks like for you in 2026

Jenelle Friday  33:13  
Yeah, love that. Okay, so the question entrepreneurs often feel like they don't have enough time. I think most of us feel that way. So when your opinion, what role does time planning play in creating a successful year plan?

David Bush  33:28  
Yeah, well, I think that time is money, and if you don't manage your time, it's like not managing your money. And again, like Angela said earlier is that, you know, entrepreneurs want freedom. Planning isn't freedom time. Planning creates freedom because if you don't have a plan for your time, chances are you're going to fall into somebody else's plan for your time, and that could be somebody individually, it could be email, it could be employees, it could be relationships, but you have to be the protector of your asset, which is your money and your time. If you don't protect it, and if you don't tell tell it where you want it to go, it's going to fall to the principle of that time take, or work takes as long as the time that you've allowed it to take. So if you give yourself 40 hours a month to do a task, it's going to take 40 hours, but if you give yourself 20 hours to do it, you're going to be a lot more efficient at doing it. Now you'd have to come back and measure that of how effective that you were with the 20 hours, because sometimes the task takes 40 hours. But there are times when meetings don't need to take 60 Minutes. Meetings can be done faster. Certain things can be done faster. You can set limits on yourself, so, you know, social media limits, and you can set up time to say, you know, if I one of my big things, Janelle with. Whole Health journey was, is that I didn't feel like I had time to exercise. And then I read an article in, I think, Fortune or Forbes magazine that said that entrepreneurs who exercise are more creative, more productive, have higher energy levels. And I thought, I don't not have the time to exercise. I have a little time to do it. So one of the things that I said to myself was, is I was going to start prioritizing exercise, and the way I was taught to do it, by a friend of mine, was make the smallest habit, break it down into a micro habit. James clear says this in his book atomic habits, he says, we don't rise to achieve the level of our goals that we've set, we fall to, I think it's, I'm paraphrasing, we fall to the level of our habits. So one of the habits that I started creating was, is that the minimum activity I'm going to do is I'm going to put on my tennis shoes and I'm going to walk to the end of the driveway. Because one of the things I found was, is that if I could just get started, then it would end up being something that'd be a lot easier to do if I just put on my workout clothes and got into the mode of moving myself to the end of the street. I would keep moving and go to the end of the street, and then go to the end of the neighborhood, and then I would walk back, and I would get in a 15 minute walk when I wouldn't have done anything if I didn't have my minimum commitment to put on my shoes and get to the end of the curb or the end of the driveway. So breaking it down into micro, you know, smaller chunks is my secret to success, and I think that if you don't do that for 2026 you're going to waste a lot of money time on things that don't really matter to you and that are maybe an absolute waste of your time. And if you had somebody, I know, for me personally, I'm still, like, the dad that hates to have lights on. It's like, you know, my kids like that country song. It's like, every light in the house. My kids come home for the holidays, and it's all of a sudden, just like, we don't need to have don't need to have lights on the outside of the house, because every light and lamp in our house is turned on, and I'm over there trying to turn them all off. So I don't like wasting money, even if it's just five cents, you know, for kilowatt hours, but I don't like to waste time, especially as I'm rounding 52 years of age, I realized that my days are numbered, and there are a limited number of days for me to go, you know, on trips with my kids and to have experiences with my grandkids. I mean, I got a small grandkid now, so I'm starting to realize that prioritizing time and getting rid of the stuff that doesn't matter is super important to me?

Jenelle Friday  37:41  
Well, what do you think some of the biggest time wasters are that you see leaders struggle with?

David Bush  37:47  
I think the biggest time waster is not having a plan. That's that's the biggest time waster by far. And again, you're the author of your life. Personally, I don't have any ability to narrate your life, and I don't want to be the one that crafts the script. You get to be the one that crafts the script. You get to become the narrator of your life. So you could choose to watch, you know, binge watch NetFlix for eight hours on a Saturday. And if that makes you joyful and happy and fulfilled, then go do that. But if you're feeling unfulfilled, if you're feeling a lack of significance, if you're lacking success in your career, in your business, if you're lacking relationship intimacy, or you're lacking relationship with friends, that needs to find a time inside your calendar. And the only way that most busy entrepreneurs are going to find the time is they're going to have to get rid of some things, and that's where we go through the whole cleanup process. Yeah.

Jenelle Friday  38:43  
So let's talk about, how can someone restructure their week to create more focus and less chaos? Yeah.

David Bush  38:49  
So the first thing that I would do is I'd draw you back into the business builder playbook workbook, and if you climb right over here to the activity audit, I took chat GPT, and I just wrote through, you know, what are some of the common activities that entrepreneurs are involved in? And so I put the list there. You know, these yellow boxes you can fill in those with additional ones. If you need to add additional lines, you can insert a row, and you can add more additional rows. Or you can change the ones here. But if you do these activities, my challenge to you is just to put a one inside of each box that you are actually involved in, so that you can kind of get an idea of is this something that I'm spending time on? And when you get through the entire list, there's eight different categories, or nine different categories, you can see how many things that you're putting your hands to, and then the thing that I would do is I would go back, and I would go and I would pick, like, you know, when you go to a buffet, they typically give you, like, a 10 inch plate. You can't put the whole buffet on your plate. But what I see a lot of entrepreneurs doing is. Is they pi? It's a buffet. You can come back and get a fresh plate, take what's on your plate and go consume it, rather than just continuing to pile it up and mixing it all up and getting to the point where some stuff just looks nasty because you've piled a bunch of other stuff on top of it. So really go through and do a bit of an inventory and identify. What are the things that you are wanting to do? What are the things that you should be doing? I mean, I don't like to tell people to should on themselves, but if there's something that you should be doing that you know is a bridge to take your business or your health from where it is to where you want to go, then you know that it needs to be a priority, and start identifying the things first and foremost, the things that you absolutely need to find time to do. And if it's not something that you absolutely need want should be doing because of your job title, then think about whether or not it should be delayed. And delayed doesn't mean that you completely eliminate it. It's just not right now. So like some of you are thinking about projects and things that you need to work on, but they're not things that are going to move the needle. They're just want tos, or they're like tos. They're not absolutely have tos. There's certain things like business development. If you want to grow your business and you're not doing business development, you've got to work on your business development, or you're going to spend a lot more time working in your business, trying to develop it. And it doesn't work that way. You have to work on your business. There has to be specific things that you're doing that are moving the needle and moving you in the right direction, and then the areas that you need to delegate. And this is where you can go over here and type in your actions of who gets that delegation, who gets that opportunity. You know, we have a great partnership with va USA. They're a great resource if you're looking for additional VA support. They have an amazing system for bringing people on, and I highly recommend you try them out. Va USA is their website, and they can take, let's

Jenelle Friday  42:10  
play by VA means virtual assistant for people who are not familiar with the acronym, yeah? Va, yeah. Hire.

David Bush  42:15  
Va USA, I think, is the domain name. The company's name is va USA, and you could find a assistant for 60 hours a month and 15 hours a week, and you could start delegating some of these things that you have been spending time doing, and it's really simple and really easy for you to take that on, and the cost versus the reward is significantly beneficial in your favor. The deletion portion is there are certain things. These are things that you're not going to want to delete, but there are certain things that you're doing, and maybe it's the idea that you just keep on, you know, leveraging AI to rewrite a business plan, and you're not actually moving forward with the business plan. You're just rewriting it. So maybe there's some things that you need to be honest about and just say, You know what, I need to get rid of that. And when you go through this activity audit, you can start to think about how I could free my time up. And there's also a section in here called the time blocking document that allows you to take the average week some of you may wake up before 5am and some of you may continue to work after 9pm but I took the the week. We all have 168 hours in a seven day week for the most part. As far as I know, 168 if you got any more, just let me know, because I'm not in on the secrets that some people have. But maybe if you go back and forth from Australia to California to California, maybe you can kind of beat the time zone or something, but most of us have 168 hours, and we have to fill our time up with the things that matter. So you know, your faith, your family, your friends, your fun, your firm, all those F words that are oftentimes the things that need to fill up our calendar. What I like to challenge entrepreneurs to do Janelle is to look at their week and just to craft your ideal week, like just start with the month of January. If you were to plan your days so that your calendar matched your desired outcome, what would your week look like in January 2026 again, life doesn't go according to plan. But if you don't plan out and say, This is what I'm going to dedicate my time to, and this is what I'm going to seek for in a result from that time investment, because I need to see an ROI on my time. If I'm not seeing an ROI on my time or my money or energy, I need to rethink what it is that I'm spending that time, money or energy on, but this is a way that I find that entrepreneurs will be more fruitful with their time. They'll see the the time begin to multiply. And we have a little calculation that's inside that workbook that allows you to calculate what your hourly rate is based upon a. On an annual income, and based upon the number of working days that you have in a working working year, you can come up with an average hourly rate. And if you are not earning the hourly rate that you desire from the activities that you're doing, you should be thinking about, how could I delete them? How could I delegate them, and how could I delay them to a time when maybe it's not so important for me to do the things that are important right now?

Jenelle Friday  45:28  
Well, I think it's also, you know, you kind of identify, where am I spending my time? How am I am I time planning? So I want to just give from a personal perspective, what I've learned in my career. When you're looking at a list of priorities and you ask yourself, Okay, I have to accomplish this. You decide, well, how much time is this going to take me? And let's say it's I need to dedicate 30 minutes per day to this priority. Then you use your calendar and you block that time, and you title that time block with the activity. So when I'm focused on outreach to BDR clients. I'm not proactively managing my inbox, because that's not what the time block is for. So by blocking your calendar with time blocks based on your priority, you get to see how much time are you actively spending on these priorities. And maybe it's too much. Maybe it's not enough. Maybe you've not left yourself enough time to do cold outbound maybe, right? You really look at your calendar, go, wow, I have so much time for fitness and exercise because I physically see it in front of me. And again, what we visually see in front of us often helps clarify the chaos that's happening in our brains, right? But I also, I want to ask you a question, which is, really, how does a business owner decide what to delegate and when to delegate it?

David Bush  46:46  
I love saw that. Jeff just joined in. Jeff made it, made a comment, I don't know. It's probably been a couple years ago that's always stuck with me. And he said, If I can delegate something to somebody else, and they can do it 50% as good as I can. They're never they're not going to do everything. Some people are going to or some people can do things, you know, 125% better than you. And those things I want to get rid of as fast as I can. So anything that I can hand off, and I know that I can delegate it, and it can be done as good or better. Those are the things that I'm going to do right away. Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan has this concept where he has a bullseye, and it's a great visual. I don't have it in front of me here, but if you think about the bullseye, the outer ring of the bullseye are the things that you're incompetent at. It's not the things that you're gifted at. You're not skilled at it. It's just something that as an entrepreneur, you have to do it because you're the person that's taking everything on, so anything that you feel that you're incompetent at should be something you should think about delegating. And that doesn't mean delegating to a staff member. It could be delegating it to kids or a spouse or to a outsourced third party. There's accounting. I mean, Jeff and I, we do not like to focus on accounting and spreadsheets, and that's not our passion. It's not the thing that we like to spend time on. So we delegate that out to bookkeepers and CFOs and things that are going to know what to do better than we know what to do with it, and then we're going to take the data that they provide us and make more executive decisions. So incompetent is the outer circle. The next circle is the area of competency. So what are the things that you're competent at? But it's not something that you're excellent or unique at. So yes, you do it and you can do it. So there's certain things. Maybe you can update the website and you're competent of updating the website, or you can do social media posts, and that's something that you're competent at, but it's not something that you're excellent at. So go to competencies next, and then the third area is excellence. And this is a higher level, right? This is separating good from great or excellent from uniqueness. The goal is to get to that center bullseye, which is the area of uniqueness. It's the area of giftedness. It just comes naturally. It's the thing that you could do all day long and feel more energized at the end of the day than when you started the day. I don't know ever. I don't know what that is for you, Janelle, or for Jeff, but I know for me, there's four things that I find if I'm doing these four things, I feel more energized at the end of the day than when I started. And those four things are lead, create, network and communicate. When I do those four things, I find that I'm working in an area that I feel I've been uniquely gifted. I didn't have to go to school to learn those things. I refine those things in my education and personal growth. But it's not something that I feel like it's a lot of heavy lifting when I have to do analysis or when I have to do math, and I have to do a lot of, you know, deep thinking, strategic thinking. That's not where I like to spend a majority of my time, but it's probably something I could be competent or excellent in. I love that.

Jenelle Friday  49:51  
Well, what do you what do you think a mindset? What do you what mindset blocks entrepreneurs from Dell. Allegating sooner. Like, what do you think it is that that an entrepreneur struggles at just letting go of something? Is it a mindset? Is it a fear?

David Bush  50:09  
Yeah, I would say that it's a fixed base mindset, that they're fixed on previous problems or previous challenges. It's oftentimes a fixed fear on false evidence appearing real, right? That's the definition of fear. It's just false evidence, something that they've made up a story in their head. What if this happens, or what if this doesn't work? And so they're basically operating in a fear based, fixed mindset. They're not operating in a faith based growth mindset. And I don't mean faith, specifically from a spiritual context, which you could, you could use it as such, but I'm talking about more from a growth mindset. And, you know, Jeff's taught me a lot about, you know, letting go of certain things and taking risks, and, you know, really treating risks and failure as a bridge to get to your desired outcome. And if you don't cross the bridge of faith, and you don't act like the the person that you want to become, or you don't act like the business owner that you'd like to be, you will never become that person on accident. You have to become intentional. That many people, authors and speakers talk about, you know, give a poor person $10 million and before you'll know it, it'll all be gone, because they never became a millionaire. They just got $10 million so if you want to go out there and to delegate, to elevate, you have to be willing to embrace what that elevation dream is. You have to believe in it, you have to act on it, and you can't allow yourself to become what Zig Ziglar calls a snaia, and that's a person that's subject to the negative influence of other people. And sometimes that other person is the person that you delegated something to, and they failed miserably. And it may be, you know, had a little backfire on you, that you gave them a job to do. They did it and they did it wrong. So are you going to use that as your truth? Are you going to use that as a learning experience that you're going to move forward? Or are you going to say, This is what happens? I give them stuff to do, I've got to do it right, or nothing gets done. And if you operate off of that, you'll never really elevate and you definitely won't delegate.

Jenelle Friday  52:23  
Yeah, well, and Jeff, we're gonna get to you in just a second. I promise. I want to ask the audience maybe, what's one task that you know you should delegate but you haven't yet. I just, I'm curious if everything David has shared has prompted you to go, Yeah, I probably should pass that on to my assistant. Maybe you don't have an assistant. Maybe you have a spouse that could help meal plan, where you're the meal planner normally, and they could take that right? So would love to hear from you. And then the last area we're gonna focus on before we dig in with Jeff, is business planning. So very quickly, David, let's talk about mission and vision. What's the best way for someone to think about their company's mission and business vision in a practical, usable way.

David Bush  53:04  
Yeah, so there's a couple of little simple hacks. I mean, I've put inside of the business builder playbook workbook some 15 questions that you could answer, and if you answered these 15 questions, you could get a lot more clarity as to the mission behind the reason why your business exists. And then you could simply finish this statement that our mission at XYZ company exists to serve by or something of that nature. What I found is, is that if you use AI and you use it consistently around your business, you can take these 15 questions and you can just highlight them, and you can copy them. And you could go take that content, and you could put it right into your AI, so if you use grok cloud or chat GPT, you could paste that content right into this prompt, and you could say something along the line that says, answer these questions on behalf of edr.ai so if you put a prompt in there, something as simple as that, AI is going to give you answers according to what they can find and what it is that You have put into your AI in the past. So if I was to put that in on bdr.ai, and we use AI quite a bit chat. GPT is kind of my go to you don't have to have that. But this is a simple way to kind of get moving with the idea of what is my company's mission statement. Now, some of this stuff is just being pulled off of the internet, and it's being assumed based upon what it is that you've interacted with AI. But there could be some things in here that give you an idea, or you could just take the content which had answered these 15 questions faster than I could have answered them, and then I could just simply say based upon these answers. Is what would be a good one sentence mission statement. So based on these answers, what would be a one sentence mission statement, and it would give you ideas, and if you wanted more than just one, this is what it came up with? Bdr.ai, empowers entrepreneurs and sales leaders to build scalable, Freedom focused businesses by combining authentic human connection with innovative AI powered systems that create create predictable growth and lasting impact. Well, how about coming up with 10 more, and with just a little bit of ideation, after I prompted it with 15 powerful questions, I could come up with some other ideas, and maybe through this process, I could run this by our staff and say, which of these do you think has the most impact, or which one speaks the most to you? And you could have some collaboration with your team, but that's a simple way to taking the concept of mission. And again, mission is something that's unquantifiable. It's not something that you say, well, we're going to accomplish x. That's more of a vision. A mission is something that you get up every day and you strive for. So vision, on the other hand, and I'll wrap this up, and we'll turn it over to Jeff. Is vision is taking the vision of your company, of where you see yourself in five years. And if you want to break it into three years or one year, you're perfectly welcome to do it. But I challenge all of you to come up with a simple paragraph that crafts the vision of where you are five years from now, like just if you were to Paint me a Picture, tell me the things that have happened, just like if I was interviewing you five years from now, and I said, Tell me about your business. And if you were to describe the business structure, what would that look like? How many locations? What would be the revenue? How many team members? What is it that you would be doing in terms of the competition? What would you be doing with technology? How would you be using AI? If you craft a powerful vision statement, you can take that vision statement back to your team, back to your clients, prospective clients, your referral partners, and you can pass on a very motivating vision that they could buy into, because they say this company is going places. And the same thing goes for the questions here. If you want to take these 15 questions, you'll see that this is a common theme throughout the entire document, but you could take these documents right here and say, answer these 15 questions about bdr.ai Five year vision and craft a single paragraph vision statement.

David Bush  58:06  
And again, using AI to augment your intelligence. Don't just take what AI comes up with. It may come up with very good information, but you're getting a chance to see behind the scenes as to what it is that we do when we think about business planning. And could you take this idea, I'd love to see, just put a one in the chat if this is something that's helping you, because sometimes just the right prompt can be a time saver, and it can give you clarity in just a matter of seconds. So in five years, bdr.ai will be the leading AI powered business development platform for small B to B business work businesses worldwide, generating over 20 to 30 million in annual revenue. That's something I like to hear empowering 1000s of entrepreneurs with predictable, scalable revenue or scalable growth systems. We'll expand across North America, Europe and Australia, offering a full suite of intelligent prospecting agents, Omni channel outreach. I mean, when I start talking about this stuff, I can kind of get excited. And again, when, when the vision is clear and the mission is strong, the reason why you do something and you have a clear plan of how your calendar needs to match your goals, and you have a life plan that you're allowing yourself to become both successful in the marketplace, but also significant in the lives of other people. You truly live an extraordinary life. So Janelle, thanks for the questions. I'm looking forward to hearing what Jeff has to say about the financial planning of a business plan. Yeah.

Jenelle Friday  59:34  
Thanks so much for sharing, David. We're gonna hear more from you later, but I'd like to introduce everyone to Jeff. Jeff, Jeff, before you say anything, let me give a quick intro with over three decades of sales, marketing and entrepreneurial success, Jeff is a seasoned business leader known for his ability to scale companies and drive exponential growth. Jeff began his career in sales and marketing, but his passion for building businesses led him to own and operate four, highly six. Successful B to B and B to C companies as a partner in a B to B advertising agency, Jeff played a pivotal role in scaling the company from just five employees and $500,000 in revenue to a thriving enterprise with 90 employees and 40 million in revenue. Bravo, achieving this impressive growth in just seven years. He went on to found a mortgage and Title Company, which skyrocketed from zero to 12 million in annual revenue and 3 million in annual earnings. With a team of 60 employees, Jeff's expertise in creating profitable businesses didn't stop there. After exiting the mortgage industry, he built a B to B direct mail advertising company from the ground up, leading it to 40 million in revenue, 16 point 9 million in annual earnings, and it sold for eight figures. No one is the natural chief revenue and profit officer to his clients. Jeff's deep understanding of scaling operations, optimizing profits and creating sustainable growth has made him a trusted advisor to many business owners. Jeff's proven track record of scaling businesses, driving revenue growth and mastering lead generation makes him a trusted leader in the marketing world committed to helping others achieve similar success. So Jeff, I want to personally welcome you to this workshop today. Thank you so much for taking the time and joining us today.

Jeff Bush  1:01:15  
Thanks, Janelle, appreciate you setting us up. Sorry, I was a little late. I busy doing demos, and I got a even on a cruise ship to Cabo tomorrow. So it's been a crazy day, so, but you got me for 30 minutes till I got to leave and go get a passport. I'm like, wives and passports. Wait until the last minute.

Jenelle Friday  1:01:38  
That's awesome. I love it. Well, let's, let's just kind of dive in. Let me. Let me just set the scene here. Jeff, you've scaled businesses and led large teams for decades when it comes to financial planning for a business. Where does a business business owner start

Jeff Bush  1:01:55  
with a B, hag, a big area, audacious goal, I don't know. That's where I started. I remember when I started my ad agency? Well, all those companies, it's like, wow, it's all coming back. Like 30 years of like, I have stories and where I started. I'll tell you one thing. When I was 29 years old, I had a big w2 job. I was making 300 grand a year. I had 40 sales people, four managers, a wife, a $3,100 house payment, four kids. Wife didn't work. And I remember walking in and quitting that job because I saw other people were making 3 million a year, and I'm making 300,000 and everybody told me I was crazy. I'm like, Well, I'm, I got big goals, you know, I want to, you know, have nice stuff. And so I remember quitting that job at 29 years old and going into business for myself. And I think I I had 12 grand a month, so $144,000 I had enough in the bank to live for a year, half half the income. And, you know, five years later, I was like 34 years old, I remember making $3.5 million I did 12 million in sales of my mortgage company, and I made like, 3.5 million. I'm like, good decision. Most people wouldn't have done that. It was scary, scary and hard for a year or two, and then took me a couple years just to get back to what I was making. So entrepreneurs are crazy. You got to be a little crazy to do, build a business with a big goal and try to sell it. It helps to be nuts. I think most of the CEOs I know that are killing it. Well, the wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, he's nuts. He's got autism. He's on pills. He He's nuts. But vision and drive, Dear God, you know, look at like, what he's built. It's pretty incredible. So anyways, yeah, like, I think it helps to set a goal. And I remember setting a goal that if I could do 100 loans a month at my mortgage company, I could make a million dollars a year. So when I quit my job and started my business, I set a goal 100 loans a month make 10 grand alone. So that's, well, it's like $12 million a year in revenue, and I'll make, you know, $3 million it was something like that. And when I that was like my first business, but the most recent business, I remember starting it going, if I could get this business to $10 million in sales, I could sell it for 10 million. That'll be enough money for me to retire. And I set that goal day one, and, well,

Jenelle Friday  1:04:23  
you just started day one. So let's talk about, you know, you you had this beautiful, amazing vision, and we like crazy here. So let's just embrace the crazy. We're all a little bit crazy. If you're, if you're, if you and I are having this conversation. Say, I have a vision, I have a business idea. I've strapped on to crazy. Where do I start from a financial planning perspective? Do you have a tactical tip or a really good, applicable takeaway that me as a brand new business owner could take and run with just to get me going?

Jeff Bush  1:04:53  
Well, I learned at a pretty young age that business is all about duplication. So if I want to. A 10 million in revenue. I just always work backwards and go, Okay, what can a sales rep sell? Could they sell a million dollars? Oh, I need 10 sales reps. Could they do 500,000 in sales? Oh, I need 20 sales reps. Let's go. Let's start hiring. And then I'm tweaking it along the way. I'm failing forward. Failing forward. So that first year, I sold a million dollars worth of junk mail at a junk mail company, printing, mailing stuff you get in your mailbox. And I just, I'm a big Excel spreadsheet guy, and I'm big on duplication. So what do I have to duplicate? You know, and every business is a little different. I happen to build three of mine through adding sales people. That was just something I learned that worked. I mean, you can duplicate yourself by, you know, having a website and having subscriptions and repeat revenue. I mean, there's so many different ways to do business. I certainly don't have all the answers. I just have the answer that that made me rich. I mean, I'm glad to share it just but it's one way. So 10 million in revenue, I remember doing the math like, Okay, I need 10 sales people selling a million, or 20 sales people selling 500,000 how many support people do I need? What am I selling for? What's my margin? What's my expenses? What's going to drop to the bottom line? So my ad agency, when I set that goal, I don't know when I started, and it's just me in the barn with my wife's horse that just died this weekend. Kind of sad, but just thinking about that too, that horse was sitting next to me in the horse stall, kicking the stall. And people be like, what's that noise? I'm like, it's the horse kicking the barn. It was just me in there for a year in the barn, but I sold a million dollars worth of business. But I worked really hard, and I'm a, I'm an okay sales rep. I got a big work ethic, but I'm not a superstar salesperson, but I'm good. I can sell, but I my work

Jenelle Friday  1:06:49  
has, did you have, like, an Excel spreadsheet that you built from scratch to track where, like, you know, what are the what's the commission percentage of my sales rep? And they sell this, and this is their commission, and this is how much money I'm spending and operating, and this is how much money I've allotted for marketing. Did you just come up with that, or did you have a template that you found somewhere that you kind of kicked up and used to get going?

Jeff Bush  1:07:11  
I had done it ever since I was 22 years old, hiring sales people and trying to drive revenue. What's the goal? How many people do I need, and how much will they sell at? What profitability will I make money? Am I giving it away so I'm just, you know, P and L based, you know, like Excel, like revenue, margin, expenses and earnings, you know. And what was interesting is, um, yeah, whatever building that building, that company, the first year in my barn, I sold a million dollars worth of business, and I made 150 grand my first year in business, but I had no employees. All the money went into my pocket, and I needed 150 grand for rent and wife and kids and cars and so that was, like, I don't know, 15 years ago, I guess when I started I but I remember, like, the first year, I'm like, Wow, I did a million dollars. No one's gonna work as hard as me. So let's just say that the sales reps will sell 500,000 I'll probably hire sales reps that are better than me. So I went out and started hiring people, and I got a building and started hiring and three sales people, 510, 20. And my last year in business, we had 20 sales people. We did $40 million one of my sales people sold $20 million with a direct mail and i w2 them for $3.2 million so yeah, I found sales people that were better than me. It was amazing just by you know, that's just kind of how it worked well.

Jenelle Friday  1:08:32  
So based on your experience, then let's talk a bit about why do you think businesses grow revenue, but they actually fail to grow profit?

Jeff Bush  1:08:40  
Yeah? They're selling too cheap. That's the first thing that comes to my mind. Like, whatever it costs me, like my rule in business was, if it costs me $1 I'm going to sell it for $2.50 I like 60% margin and and 50% margin is when you take your product and you double it cost me $1 I sell it for two. 50% margin is decent, but I make a lot of mistakes. So I said 60% margin, you know, cost times 2.5 that way, I had 10% room for lawsuits, employee issues, attorneys, all the crap that hits you in business, I had a buffer. So I just like high margin businesses. I won't get into a business that business that makes 20 or 30% margin. It's just too hard, you know. So that was just, you know, I had a high margin business, so that helped. It helped generate a lot of profit, and I could pay people really well, and I was left with 20% or 30% to me. And if you build a business and it's doing all this revenue, and you got a big building and you don't make any money. What a bunch of crap that is. I'm like, That's horrible. Like, all the responsibility, what it takes to own a business, and all the risks we take and borrowing money, and it's horrible. Like, I I made sure that I sold at a good price so we had margin. And that just goes back to P and L and a. Lot of sales people. You know, a lot of sales people give stuff away, or they sell cheap. My friend gave me good advice when I was very young. He said, Jeff, lower the price and be profitable on the volume and go out of business in the process. I never forgot that. Like, don't, think you're going to have, you know, Costco operates on 10% margin. That scares the crap out of me. I mean, yeah, the average store does 100 million, you know, a month. So they're making 10 million. But I wouldn't be in the Costco model, no way with all that rent and all those employees, and Costco has been hugely successful. So is Amazon. So like I said, there's other ways to do it, just not the way I did it. So that's how I looked at it, high margin, scaling revenue, duplicating what I proved could be done. If I can do this, I can go get 10 or 20 others, just teach them what I did. And that's how I did it. It was not really that complicated. And, yeah, that was the mortgage company, the ad agency, and most recently, the wedding business. You know, it was all based on numbers and leads coming in, and conversions. And it's all math. It's simple math. You know, I went to Lake Elsinore high school, you know, we had a smoking section, you know, if, if your mom signed a note, you could smoke at 16. I'm like, that's crazy, right? Like, it was a terrible High School in the middle of nowhere, but, like, I could do math. I was real good at consumer math. I think I failed Algebra twice. I don't need algebra. Just give me the math, you know, revenue.

Jenelle Friday  1:11:31  
Let's say, let's say, because, well, we'll talk about this, right? I am not a math person. Thank God for Excel and formulas, right? But let's talk a little bit about, let's get practical. So how can, if someone's listening today, and they're a business owner, how can they build a scorecard that helps them track the right financial metrics? Because for someone like me, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to build that kind of finance like financial works. So so just, I want you to just sit for a second and think about, okay, if, if this is just you and I talking, and I'm asking for practical, tactical advice of, where do I begin? What? What are the metrics I'm tracking? How do I build this Excel spreadsheet you talk about that's giving me real numbers so I can see it right? What are the metrics that I need to kick off right out of the gate?

Jeff Bush  1:12:18  
So setting a goal for revenue but then I guess you got to set a goal for gross profit and what your expenses will be. So you're really setting a goal for net profit, because my $10 million business, I had to make $2 million to sell for a five times multiple to get my $10 million exit. So I had a goal very early on. It was really not a $10 million company. It was a $10 million check. I want out of here. I'm going to build a business and sell it. I want to have that experience. I've never not too many people have a big exit in their lifetime, but that was the goal from the day I started. I'm building a company to sell it for 10 million. If I do 10 million in revenue, how do I drop 2 million to the bottom line times five a five times multiple, I'll get a $10 million check. So everything was built around all those things, not just revenue, but you know, if I do 10 million in revenue at a 60% margin, I make $6 million $6 million I can spend 4 million on employees and rent and attorneys and CPAs, and I'll make 2 million to the bottom line, and I'll sell this company now. I accidentally took it to 20 million, making $4 million when I sold it, and then the next year after I sold it, it doubled to 40 million, and we made $16.9 million that was painful. I sold it about a year too early timing and when to sell your company, when to sell your house, where's the top of the market? Where's the bottom of the market? Hard to predict. Even the professionals can't do it. So that was kind of my story. I actually sold it at 20 million in revenue, but we dropped 4 million to the bottom line and sold for a good multiple. So and then

Jenelle Friday  1:13:53  
for people who don't have a goal of selling the business, if I don't want to sell it and I just want to build something that's successful, I think the approach to how you plan financially and the metrics that you're tracking are going to shift a little bit. Because if I'm not looking for the big buyout, I'm a small business owner who just wants to have a profit. I don't want to just turn a loss. Because I think at the beginning it's kind of, you know, I have this goal of this much profit I'm tracking this much of how I'm how much I'm bringing in versus how much I'm spending, right? But I I don't really have those, those big kind of goals that you do, which I love, that you do, but I want to address not building people that are not being driven by those same goals. Yeah.

Jeff Bush  1:14:36  
I mean, if you're not building a company to exit, then you're what happens when you die. You know, do your kids want to take it over? I had four kids that were not interested, so I'm always thinking exit. I think everybody should someday. You might not want to do this anymore. You might want to get a check and retire, but let's just say I wanted to, let's say I wanted to build that business to 10 million in revenue and make $2 million a year and just keep it going. It? Am I doing anything different? No, no, I'm still building it, revenue, driving revenue, hiring people, duplicating myself. It doesn't change how I run it, but I could have kept that business making $2 million a year and 10 million I haven't worked Friday in 25 years. 25 years I took off Friday. I've had a three day weekend my whole life, and I set that goal a long time ago. So I worked 10 hour days, I answered emails at night, but I didn't work Fridays. I had a three day weekend for 25 years, and I just set that and I made that happen. It was crazy. What do you mean you don't work Fridays? Well, what do you mean you do I just this is what I decided to do. So I did that, 10 hours a day, four days a week. But you know, only reason I say that is because a lot of people want to build a business that's bigger than them, that runs on its own. So they want to go to Italy for a month and come back. And if you have a real business, your business grew while you were on vacation in Italy because other people are building it so that duplication of turning it over. But I never really built my businesses successful enough to go to Italy for a month and just watch it grow. I I couldn't find the right managers. You know, I've seen people take their business. A friend of mine took his business from 10 million in sales to 100 million, and he's not there very often. I'm like, wow, that's a different skill set. I never quite learned how to do that. I was, I had five managers, and I was managing the managers. I wasn't doing the day to day, and I delegated everything. You guys were talking about delegation. I remember telling my assistant, is there any way, is there any way I could delegate going to the bathroom for me? Like, could you please, because I'm drinking a lot of water, I drink a lot of water. Can you go to the restroom for me? I told my wife, Tiffany, do you think you could do my workout for me? Today, I work out every day at 430 forever, I'm going to delegate my workout. I'd love to do that. I looked at delegating everything. I made $4 million I did the math. I'm making $2,000 an hour. So anything that's not that I outsourced, that's less than $2,000 an hour. I'm outsourcing. I got to the point where I was outsourcing, paying people $200 an hour to do work. So I could focus on sales and revenue, because revenue is everything. Revenue is everything. Profitable revenue, good, red. Profitable revenue, drive revenue. Don't freaking do stupid things when I see CEOs doing $20 an hour work. I didn't do Excel spreadsheets anymore. That's $50 an hour work. I didn't do the P L and bookkeeping. That's $50 an hour work. So when I got up to making two grand an hour, I'm like, wow, this is a lot of money, and this is really stupid that I'm working on this. I was very cognizant of that. But I was cognizant of that when I was making 100 bucks an hour, I can outsource it for 10 and I focused on most important activities, which is driving revenue, increasing margin and dropping more money to the bottom line, that was just what what I learned? You know, I don't know.

Jenelle Friday  1:17:50  
What do you what do you think? What would you say are financial red flags when you work with smaller businesses? If you were talking to a business owner, small business owner, entrepreneur. What are some red flags that you've seen in businesses or people that you know that are that indicate that there's something wrong or they're not focusing their time? Kind of can you identify a couple red flags that might be helpful? I met

Jeff Bush  1:18:15  
with a friend of mine yesterday. He goes Jeff. I did, did 10 million in revenue year to date, and I made 1,000,005 and I want to sell this company. I'm sick of running it and all the problems. I just want to sell it, but the business broker just told me I got to take myself out of this business and not make it dependent on me. So most small business owners, what I've learned entrepreneurs are kind of rebels, and we like to do our own thing, and we're kind of scared of hiring people that might steal our business. So what happens is you get this real small mindset where you won't delegate anything. You're a control freak. I meet a lot of control freaks that control themselves down to making 100 grand a year for 10 years, instead of a million or 10 million a year. So I think it's a control issue, because I'm scared I'm going to teach someone to do something and now they're going to be my competitor. So I think people get caught up in that mindset. And I had it happen, people left and started my business against me, stole my customers. It's all part of business. Just live through it and keep going. Keep going. So I think a lot of small businesses just, they're just thinking too small. They won't delegate. They won't build a real business. I don't that's not a business owner. That's like self employed. So if I want to be self employed, I'll go get a plumbing truck and drive around and fix pipes and do it all myself, and I'll make 200 300 grand a year as a plumber. But I don't really have a business. If I leave or get sick or get hurt or go to Italy for a month, I ain't making any money. So do you want to be a business that that duplicates and grows without you, or at least less of your time, you know, do you want to get a duplication on your time? Because we're all looking for time and money. We're looking for both and that balance. And it's hard, you know, you get one or the other, but it's hard to have both. But if you build a real business that duplicates without you doing everything, that's where it gets fun. For me, that was fun, you know, and rewarding, but it's a different skill set. It's a different mindset of how to so even if you're not building it to sell, you're building it to I'm going to pull a million dollar this business and work two days a week. You can do that, but it's got to be mindfulness, setting the goals and putting that in place early, and work it towards getting that done. And you probably need a strong management team. I need five. I think I had five managers, operations, VP of sales, you know, HR, 65 employees, lawsuits in California, minimum wage, meal and rest period, cry babies. I had to deal with all that crap, you know. So it's like, you know, having five managers. And, you know, I just come in once a week and meet with them, make sure they're all doing their job, or replace them, find a new manager. And that was

Jenelle Friday  1:20:48  
before we before we wrap your time, because I'm gonna be respectful. I have one last question for you, which is, and before I ask you this question, if you're listening to this call and you're like, I have a specific financial question you want to throw in the chat, let's go ahead and have you do that now? But here's my question for you, Jeff, for someone who wants to scale beyond themselves, right? Exactly what you're talking about, what financial disciplines must they put in place early? Which is right now,

Jeff Bush  1:21:15  
financial disciplines, the first one that comes to mind, don't spend more than you make a lot of people have that problem. We're all guilty of that, including the credit card debt and, you know, like spending, but that I had money I don't have, understanding your financials and making sure you stay fluid and liquid so you can invest in the business takes a lot of bit. I owned 100% of my company. I never borrowed $1 and I never had a partner on Well, my mortgage company, I did have a partner. Guy put up 400 grand. He owned 25% so that's not true. My mortgage company, my first business, I did have a partner. My next two, zero partners, zero debt, zero borrowing money. I am funding from within. I grew it kind of slow because of that, but at the end, I got all the money. My CPA goes. Jeff. Partnerships were such a great idea, God would add a partner. I'm like, Oh, that's true. Mike, he kind of did, like, didn't have, like, the Holy Spirit and Jesus, like the Trinity. So we argued about that and but anyways, I think that. I don't know how I got off on that rampage. You bring in both good and bad, but yeah, trying to, I self funded. So that's a whole nother thing. You want to give up 49% of your company go raise 49 million in capital and build faster. Sometimes that works. Didn't, wasn't my deal, you know. Like I said, there's different ways to do it. I mean, I'd love to own 10% of Amazon, right? That would have been a pretty good deal, you know. But I just didn't do capital raises. I kind of grew from within and kept it small and private. And what I've noticed is I'm really good building companies zero to 40 million after that, I'm out. Get me out of here. It's too corporate. I don't enjoy it. I no longer am having fun. It's just too much corporate, you know. And that was just my experience, I wanted to sell and get out.

Jenelle Friday  1:23:02  
So awesome. Well, I mean, it's, it's been such a pleasure having you. I really appreciate you taking the time. And if you've got a question around the financial aspect of your business that we didn't cover today, go ahead and throw those in the chat. I'm happy to submit those and get answers for you after the fact. But again, Jeff, so much value coming out of your time today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jeff Bush  1:23:22  
For joining us. Yeah, if somebody wants to chat with me too about skit on their business margins, revenue, P and L, here's another thing I did. I know I'm not that smart, so I joined groups with smarter people than me. I mean, I was in a group with 10 CEOs that were all doing 40 to 100 million in revenue, and I'm doing 10. They taught me what to do. Go join the group where you have people bigger than you. I mean, I can't, you know, our dad, David and our mom and dad, they owned a body and paint shop. You know, blue collar. My dad made 50 grand a year, self employed for 30 years. But he wasn't going to teach me how to be a millionaire. So I got to go get around millionaires and teaching me how to be a millionaire. What do you do? I learned duplication from other people. I didn't you don't learn this stuff in school, right? So I was involved in CEO clubs and marketing clubs. Man, I had a lot of help, but I was a sponge. Man, I listened and watched other people. I learned a lot from their mistakes, which was so valuable. You know, I didn't have to bankrupt my company because I borrowed money, and I just watched a lot of people fail and just take it all in and but I was around a lot of successful people, so a lot of my success has nothing to do with me. It's all the people I learned from. But I was a learner, and I got around them and I watched and I paid attention and I ran stuff by people at a lot of wise counsel in my life. Thank God I had some people, because I'm crazy, right? Live entrepreneur crazy. Let's go. Let's do this. You know, put a million on black, you know. I mean, I'm just, I'm kind of too, too much of a risk taker. So thank God I had some people around me that would calm me down to make better decisions. Because sometimes. Times, as you could probably see, just getting riled up on this call, I get emotional, I get excited, and bad things happen when Jeff does that, you know, I got, I got to, like, calm it down and make good business decisions, because business is tough, you know, it's and I see a lot of people making, making bad ones, and they're, they're painful, lose it all, you know. So what

Jenelle Friday  1:25:19  
clubs, Jeff, could you recommend for somebody who wants to follow in your footsteps and surround themselves with like minded individuals that they can learn from?

Jeff Bush  1:25:28  
Well, I was big on CEO clubs, and I was in three different ones, so I don't have a preference. I was in Vistage. I was in a Christian business leaders group called convene. I was in a marketing mastermind where I was paying $1,000 a month to be in the group. And people are like, Oh, I can't afford that. Well, I can't afford not to. I'm growing. I'm part of the so I was in a lot of groups and a lot of seminar. David mentioned, you know, Zig Ziglar and John Maxwell. And, I mean, I'm attending four or five seminars a year, weekends and learning and so so much of it was just learning from others, because I didn't know what I was doing. You know, how do you learn this stuff? So anyway,

David Bush  1:26:07  
hopefully that Jeff and I were just talking about the University of San Diego, which is a school right near by him. Would you say, Jeff, it was $63,000

Jeff Bush  1:26:16  
a year. Yeah. Saturday, my friend, his daughter, graduated from Pepperdine in three years. Dude, it was 83,000 a year for Pepperdine. Thank God, she did it. She moved fast three years instead of four. I'm like, Dude, you saved but quarter million there. And then his other daughter's going to University of San Diego. That's like 63,000 a year. She's on the three year plan too. So there's 180 I'm like, God, that's a big investment, you know, for or let your kid walk out of college with 300,000 in student loans that'll take 30 years to pay off. That's why people can't buy a home right now. They're so loaded up with student debt and trying to get a $50,000 a year job coming out of college is sad, right? They were sold this dream, and it's not really coming true. You know, AI took their job. It's like, you know, business ownership, you know, could be an option if you have drive and you're willing to do it and set goals. And I got four adult children that I'm working with trying to get them, you know, going into something. And it's that's all not, that's another call, definitely.

David Bush  1:27:20  
Well, there's a whole process of becoming more, to earn more and to build more, and that's a never ending project. And the power of association we talked about before Jeff got on. The experience of others compresses time so you put yourself in an environment where you have other people that have done what you want to do, or who are doing what it is that you want to do. You put yourself in those environments, and you ask good questions, you listen, you add value, you give more than you receive. And what will happen is, is that you will find yourself, you know, much farther along than going back to a college to get a degree. You know, there's, what do they say, Jeff, there's a lot of degrees on a rectal thermometer. And you know what they do with those?

Jeff Bush  1:28:06  
You know? All right. Well, have a good time in Cabo, thanks. Thanks, guys.

Jenelle Friday  1:28:15  
I know you have some helpful tabs in the business builder playbook. Do you want to share your screen and walk us through those.

David Bush  1:28:21  
Yeah, you bet. So if you have forgotten where the resources are, Janelle will put the link back in the chat. This is where you can download a copy of the business builder playbook. You can also gain access to scale University. Everybody that registered for this workshop will get access to our online platform where you can interact with our community. You can watch other courses, and you can have access to lots of other tools and resources. If you'd like to take advantage of the 100 free targeted B to B leads, we basically just ask that you schedule a demo with us, and we'll talk to you about your target audience, and then we'll go ahead and pull some lists for you and help you to find your target audience with the data sources that we have that are premium data sources where we can provide you names, email addresses, LinkedIn profiles and all of the company information, or we can look at how you can source those leads on LinkedIn and using basic search filters, groups, events, posts, or using Sales Navigator searches, if you haven't already had A chance to take a look at our AI digital outreach playbook creator, I strongly want to encourage you this is going to be something we're going to go into more detail tomorrow during our marketing session, but this is a great strategy, just to play with a tool that allows you to interact and learn about how you can level up your about section on LinkedIn with a couple of simple prompts and data entry points, and then we'll customize a AI digital outreach sequence and give you some ideas around a webinar outline that you could use as a lead generation strategy and an added value opportunity, as well as a lead magnet template that can be created right from the webinar. Our content that you record in the upcoming New Year, all of the replays will be here, so just be checking back to this particular link, and we'll be sending out the link to the recording to everybody that registered. So with that being said, just jumping over here to the tabs as we've navigated it through the process. This one here is the business goals tab. Now this one uses some calculations, and so some of these are not going to be applicable for your particular business, but if you use some basic mathematical formulas inside of this Excel worksheet, you can do some math on the number of new transactions with the number of vacation days, how many days each week you're going to work. So in Jeff, Jeff's cases, he's going to work four days a week. He's going to work 10 hour days. And if he has a 20% closing ratio, maybe that's a little bit small for him, maybe he needs to increase that up to a 30% of his leads or contacts. He moves to a presentation, and then maybe on the presentation appointments to paying clients, he has a much higher ratio, and let's say that it's 25% if he puts in his annual income 250 500 whatever the number is. And you click on the goal analysis, it'll do some mathematical equations for you, and it'll tell you that, based upon this math, you're earning about $133 an hour if you're spending 18 180 hours to earn 250,000 so go back to that idea and think about, well, if I'm earning $133 an hour, and I'm spending 10 hours a week doing tasks that could be delegated to a 25 to $45 an hour virtual assistant, That could be a really good place to start practicing arbitrage and leverage. I could start leveraging the use of other people's time to help me to gain more time to invest on business development activities or business growth, or relationships, or building systems, hiring, training, sales point, sales people, all of those things could be part of your future plan, and then it just breaks down based upon if you were going to bring in this many new clients. How many would you need per year? How many would you need per month, per working week, and then per working day? So this allows you to start thinking about, if you wanted to put together a little goal tracking. You could use this as a form of your scorecard, or you could use this with your team and help them to track the number of leads and contacts that they made, the number of presentations or demonstrations that they've done, and then the number of new paying clients that paid on that particular day, using this as a form of metrics, right? Whatever gets measured gets done. What gets measured can be managed, as Janelle said earlier. So those are some simple worksheets that you can utilize, and the document is editable. So if you want to edit it to be more personable to you and your business model, you can it's just not a service that we offer as a free service. There's a pro forma in here that kind of breaks down what Jeff was talking about with growth profit percentages. You can break down the average sale amount, and then you can put in the number of sales, and then it does some calculations for you. It allows you to break down your expenses. And again, this is just good forecasting, so that you get yourself into the mindset as to, what are my expenses, what's my revenue, what's my profit percentage, and how does that match my desired outcome. There's some more comprehensive tools here that are more aligned with having sales teams. If you have individual sales teams, you can be a little bit more advanced in your planning. There's a document here that you can customize with your own personal contents. This is the tool that Jeff used when he scaled his businesses. So we use this as a reference guide, knowing that every individual client is going to be a little different. And then there's the weekly totals. And this automatically comes from basically pulling in from data from other pages and auto populating. And you can change the dates if you want to use this for 2026 so with that being said, Janelle, this is the kind of the bringing us to the close of action, and this is where we're going to start giving you some ideas of how you can move yourself forward. So this section right here is kind of like the catch all for all the things that we talked about, about life planning and time management and making sure that you've put in some due dates and that you've built out, maybe some financial goals for your business. If the pro forma was valuable to you, what do you need to take action on to close the gap on your business plan and your playbook for 2026 and beyond, these are all important to you, but take it as little, bite sized steps and move yourself forward, and you will get to the point where you'll feel more confident and competent that you have a plan that can help you to be successful.

Jenelle Friday  1:34:46  
Well, so that brings us to another good question. Rich is, once I build a plan, right? Once we build a plan, David, what does execution actually look like on a day to day basis?

David Bush  1:34:57  
Well, going back to the concept. Concept of, you know, do you have a plan for your day? And so one of the things that I would encourage you to do is that if you have this individual plan, or this workbook, this business builders playbook, if you put the link into a recurring calendar appointment, and you put that on the very front of your day before you get your day started, you can set up a recurring appointment inside of Google Calendar or inside of your phone, and you could put the link to this playbook, and every time that you come back to it, you get a chance to review. And I love the quote that Patrick Lencioni, the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He said, You know, he's a trainer, and he does leadership training and team training, and he says, over all the years, I've done this, I found that people need to be reminded more than they need to be taught. So most of us don't necessarily need new information. We need some very specific reminders on a consistent basis, and we need to renew our commitment. We need to renew our mind daily on why we're doing it and who we're doing it for, and what's the purpose behind this whole concept of building this business. Because, like Elon Musk said, that entrepreneurs, being an entrepreneur is like staring into the abyss and chewing glass. There's some days that are just really, really hard. You know, when you took on the role of CEO, of you incorporated, you became the person that has to do all of the worst jobs until you can delegate yourself away from them. Staying in that position and continuing to do the worst jobs is not necessarily why people get into business. It could be for you, but most people say, I don't want to do all the things forever. I'll do them for a short period of time, but that's why most small businesses go out of business within the first seven to 10 years. I think that it's 90% of small businesses are out of business in five to 10 years. Why? Because it's just tiresome. You can go have a job and you can earn more money and spend less time doing it, and to have a little bit more freedom than if you're just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Yeah.

Jenelle Friday  1:37:16  
Well, and I think, you know, we've, we've touched a little bit on mindset, but I think that I've heard so many times, fake it till you make it. But really what I want to call out is we all are victims of imposter syndrome. Sometimes. I think you can make a plan. I think you can have the best intentions. I think you can set your priorities. I think you could block your calendar. And at the end of the day, if you don't see the needle move in the timeline that you believe it should then the questions start, am I do I really know what I'm doing? Does anybody really want to buy from me? What am I doing with my time? Am I even? Am I wasting my time? So I just, if you're I'm the emotional one here, if you're listening to this call and you battle imposter syndrome and you're questioning your value, your worth, the effort that you've put in. Is anybody going to buy from you? Why are you doing this? I just want to encourage you right now that, first of all, your brain is habitual. Your brain likes habits, and your brain is the driver of everything that comes out of you and everything that you're made of. And so one habit, micro habit that I teach clients on are come up with three different sentences that are a descriptor of you. I am this. I am a passionate, engaged individual, because I value people. I love the beauty of humanity's differences and cultures and nationalities, because that's what makes the earth amazing. Come up with a sentence or a saying, and you tell yourself that every single day, even on the days that you don't believe it, because your brain is listening. And so I think a micro habit that I would encourage you, if you're a business owner, if you are a leader that struggles with fear, we all do that struggle with imposter syndrome. We all do is to encourage yourself with the truth no matter how you feel, because your feelings are going to betray you, your feelings are going to tank you, your feelings are going to put you on a wayward track, especially if you've made a plan. And I'm like, I have a plan, why can't I stick to the plan? Because your emotions are getting the better of you. So I just want to come in here really quickly encourage you that if you struggle with any of those things, and you're normal, if you do that, you have to also be proactive in managing that mindset that potentially could get you off track if you don't address it kind of right out of the gate and on a regular basis. Speaking of habits, what are some habits or routines, David, from your perspective, that are going to help business owners stay consistent all year long.

David Bush  1:39:42  
Yeah, I think the first one is, is that becoming mono maniacally focused on being committed, to being consistent, if you don't make that commitment right now, if you don't make that fundamental decision, I mean, I love the word decide. I. Did you know that the word decide actually means to kill off any other option. So when you decide to do something, you're basically killing off anything else that could be a possibility, because you're actually moving towards it. So the IDE is actually to kill off. It's like herbicide, homicide or homicide pesticide. So when you think about making a decision and you decide to go after this thing, you got to be committed to being consistent. I can't emphasize that enough. You have to be married to the process, and you have to divorce yourself from the results, and you have to trust the process and be living on the faith that you're doing the right thing. The more you have this, you know, negative influence of other people, the more you have this, you know, imposter syndrome. It's basically stealing from you large amounts of money. We talked about time being money. So how many hours? How many days of 2025? Were you robbed of because of your own belief system. You know, if you look at the word belief or beliefs, right in the very middle of the word beliefs is the word lie. And some of you have accepted a lie about what's true, about the possibility of what's available. And maybe you've had somebody that's really important in your life tell you that it's not going to work, or you've had somebody in your life tell you that you're doing it wrong, or you've gotten some negative pushback because of something that you shared on social media or messaging that you sent to people. Maybe there's a bad email that was responded to and you had somebody that you really took offense to. What it is that they said you have to be monomaniacally That's singularly focused on the commitment to being consistent. And consistency wins, you know, they have. There's many quotes out there about the value of persistence. Well, consistency and persistence is one of the biggest success factors, regardless of intellect, regardless of you know, how perfect you are. But if you keep showing up and you keep refining the process, and you keep pounding the stone, as that great book you know provided the idea of just continuing to be consistent and just pounding that rock, pounding it over and over, pretty soon, the rock is going to open up and you're going to start seeing some of the success that we talked about today.

Jenelle Friday  1:42:19  
Well, I think your fitness journey is a really great example of that, which is like you consistently just committed to, okay, if I just take a walk every day, and that, over time, built to more and more and more to where it became normal and it was a part of everyday habit. I think you translate that into business practices or business habits, which are, you're going to do things that don't feel normal. You're going to have days where you don't want to do the things on your to do list because you don't feel like it. But if you don't do it because you don't feel like it, you're never going to get to where you want to go. So I love that you kind of have that example, and we can use that as a as a metaphor for if you don't go to take your walk every day, you're not going to become the person you want to become. So whatever you need to do to how you define success. How you define Okay? These are the things I have to do. Consistency is the only way you're going to see success that that comes out of that plan that you have. How can someone avoid drifting or losing momentum by February? Because we're building into the end of the year. We're about to wrap 2025 we're all really excited. What do they say that people join the gym in January, and then, like by the end of February, 80% no longer go so we know that losing momentum can sometimes happen after the new year. So what are some things that people can do to avoid that? From your perspective,

David Bush  1:43:35  
well, I love the phrase from Stephen Covey that says accountability breeds responsibility, and so when you have the opportunity to surround yourself with other people that are pursuing similar goals that you you know, love, care and trust or you like, and you're willing to put yourself out there and say, this is something I'm committed to. You know, nobody that I have known becomes successful by themselves when you put yourself into a community of others. I mean, Jeff is just one example that he put himself into an environment with other people, and those other people gave him the pieces of the puzzle or gave him the skill sets and the ideas and the solutions so that he was able to solve the puzzle. So what is it that you need to share with a family member, friend, coach, mentor. You know, one of the things that we're doing@bdr.ai is that, you know, when our clients join us, they actually get access to a community of support. They actually have access to a an amazing support team that can be there for them and meet with them and, you know, basically learn their goals and accomplish the things that they put out in front of them, and then we have weekly get or check ins where you can join up with other people that are in pursuit of growing their business. And it's not the same business as yours, but you can learn from different situations and learn from different business models, how you can grow your business. So if you're looking for a community and you don't, maybe have the. Extra resources to invest in a coach, but you've got a budget that you can invest in business development. And if your clientele is, you know, out there in the marketplace, and it's business to business, we're a great fit for that. And if it's not us, maybe

Jenelle Friday  1:45:13  
it's somebody else. Yeah, I love that. Well, we've got about 15 minutes left, so I want to everyone who's still on the call with us today, if you have a specific question, I know we've addressed several questions already in the call today, but if you have something that is a takeaway or a specific question for David, I would love for you to submit that now. I would also love if you put in the chat what is a really strong takeaway from today's call. You know, we want to hear how this went for you. What specifically call outs. Can you give that was, man, I'm latched on to that, and I'm running with it. Or maybe a question for tomorrow's session, Wednesday session. No Tomorrow is Wednesday, Thursday session. So we really can make sure that we're addressing questions right out of the gate. But I just, let's, let's kind of wrap this all up, David into when you think about really, we're talking to individuals who are kind of at the start of their journey. Maybe they're not really sure where to go. What do you think from, from your perspective, what should participants do after today to get ready for tomorrow?

David Bush  1:46:15  
Yeah, the first thing I would do is just, you know, move forward with the areas that we've talked about. Go back to the life plan. If you just click on these little three dots right here, you can navigate through the different tabs. So start off with the business assessment. If you didn't do that, give yourself a score in those six different areas, so that you can see where your starting point is. You know at the time that you watch this particular session, and then go into the life plan and go back and review and just put in one thing that's going to be an important thing for 2026 and you can always come back and you can add more things, and you can add more priorities and due dates, but go back and put in the things that matter most. If the idea of doing an activity audit and you want to free up more time, if that is something that's motivating to you, you can do the activity audit. If you want to just jump in and do the time blocking schedule, go to the time blocking schedule. And my challenge to you is to not fill up every single box on this chart. Give yourself some margin. Put in the things that you're currently committed to doing. If you're not currently committed to doing all of the things that you put on there, you'll probably not be committed to doing any of them. So what my encouragement is is that if you were to design your ideal week, put in something that you're committed to doing. If you're not committed to doing something for five minutes, don't put it on there. But if you can commit to doing something like reviewing your goals every morning for five minutes, if that's something that becomes a priority to you, and you just type that in. Then now you've got something that's moving you in the right direction. And again, all of these things can be done over time. That's the reason why we chose this particular time to do this workshop series, is that maybe you have some downtime where you can refine and update it. But let's get to the point where we at least have a bona fide plan where you can feel like it's not completely under construction, but that you've got some good meat on the bone, you can move forward with what it is that you've got, and over time, you can make it better.

Jenelle Friday  1:48:12  
I love that. Well, let's address a couple questions. Okay, so the first one is Martina. She said that she requested a demo and is looking forward to getting that scheduled. So let's make sure we reach out. Hopefully you got that request.

David Bush  1:48:26  
Yep, we'll make sure that everybody that fills out the contact us form will give you a calendar link that you can book a time. And obviously, the sooner you book the better, just in terms of the busyness of the season.

Jenelle Friday  1:48:39  
So yeah, looking forward again. Next question from Agata, I hope I say I'm saying your name correctly. What are your tips for creative people that have too many ideas and need to choose what to focus on?

David Bush  1:48:52  
Focus precedes success. Agata, focus precedes success. Just keep telling yourself it's okay to have creative ideas. It's not okay to continue to create new ideas and to implement none of them. So again, put a prioritized list together. And again, you know there's no perfect way to do life, so you have your way of doing life, but set some reasonable goals to moving certain projects forward or a project forward, and be monomaniacally committed to that process that you are going to follow through on that. Because once you see that one project come to completion, or once you get it to a certain milestone, you may have multiple projects, but you have a milestone process where you say, every one of my projects has five milestone, 20% 40% 60% 80% 80% 100% and maybe you've got little names for those milestones. And so now you come back to your projects, and you organize them according to their milestones. And you are constantly reviewing the milestones to say, This one needs energy, this one needs time. I need to spend some time on this project. It. Not about focusing in on one thing for the entire quarter. It's about focusing in on what needs to get moved forward, and then making sure that it does and then moving on to the next thing. So hopefully that's helpful to you. I'm not super creative, but I can, I can get into some creative avoidance. I'd much rather create something new than complete the thing that I created, because my joy comes from creation, not from completion. But I know that if I never see things completing, all I'm doing is I'm just living in a dream world, constantly creating new ideas and new projects that I never complete.

Jenelle Friday  1:50:34  
Well, and I am a creative so I resonate very strongly with this question. I'm one of those people that I'll go to Hobby Lobby and like, well, I could do this project, and I could do that project, and I need that, and I need that. And then I get home and I unload everything. I'm like, what was what was I doing? Again, I don't remember. So I mean, I think it's a good question, because you can get lost in all those creative ideas. I think, write them down, pick which one, because if I do this one, that maybe could make this one a little bit easier, that would replace this one. So again, get it out of your head. Write it down. That always helps with a question from John. So John shared, he's asking, How do I know if my ideal customer profile is correct? And how do we figure out where these people hang out? Yeah.

David Bush  1:51:15  
So the first thing that I would do is is that I would be thinking about, if you could choose John who you would want to work with, describe that person in writing. I mean, just go through the basic profile, and we're going to talk about this tomorrow. So hopefully you'll join us for tomorrow's session. So underneath the section, it's called the ideal client profile. So again, there's 15 questions that are listed here, and if you begin to answer those questions, these little prompts can help you, or you can use the process that we put before and we say, copy these into a chat. And again, you could start a new chat, or you could just go in here and say, answer these questions for a small book keeping practice in the US, and you could get some ideas just with a simple prompt and company or copying those questions in there. So this is giving you some ideas and how you can begin to isolate down who it is that you're looking for. You've got some problems, and so you would know more about the pains and the challenges that they're experiencing, or what is it that they want to do? You can think about Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups. The nice thing about LinkedIn is that you can use filters, and you can look for owner, Founder, CEO. You can look for the average revenue of an individual organization. If you're a Sales Navigator member, they do have a 30 day free trial. So those are some ways that we get a little bit more specific. We also have access to premium data where we can go in there and pull a list of individuals that match the kind of person that you're looking for. And some of this stuff is just getting clear on who am I and what do I like to do, and what are my values, and what are the things that are exciting to me. And pretty soon you'll start identifying, there's, there's this thing in our brains called the reticular activator. And when you start identifying, this is one of the greatest exercises that you can go through, is that when you go through the ICP exercise, and you start identifying who it is that you want to talk to, where they live, when they come into contact with people that are like yourself, where do they spend their time? How do they spend their time? You start thinking about all these different people that have access to those people. The other question I would ask you, John is just thinking about the power partners and that we'll talk about this tomorrow as well. We talk about building referral partners. If you were to think about the five or 10 vendors that your clients or prospective clients are currently paying money to that are not in competition with you, but they would compliment your business. If you would just think about, if you were to go in and you would look at your current clients accounting, and you would identify what types of businesses are they paying money to already. And if you could identify those people, you could start targeting those people on LinkedIn, and you could start networking with the concept of, I do bookkeeping for small businesses, and I'm always looking for good strategic partners. And I would love to have a conversation about what it is that you do and how I could be a good connector for you. And I'd love to tell you a little bit more about my bookkeeping business. How many people do you have to talk to in your community or inside your. Graphical region before you start getting an answer that says yes. I mean, if you talk to 100 people that are insurance agents, you know bankers, real estate agents, financial planners, insurance agents, you know business coaches, business consultants, you know all those types of different people. If you were to make a list of all those people, and let's just say that you had 10 in each category, and you had 10 total categories. That's 100 people. If you reached out to 100 people and you said, I'm looking for somebody I can refer my clients to and my prospective clients when they need somebody that's in your line of work. How many of those people do you think it would take before you'd get a response. My suggestion would be, is that if you're not going out there asking for their referrals, but you're telling them that you're looking for people that you can refer people to, there's a good chance that you're going to get a response from 30 to 50% of those people. The other 50% they're not interested for whatever reason, maybe not right now, but if you had 30 to 50 people that you could talk to about your business, and each one of those people are business owners who could benefit from your service, but they could also refer business to you, because they are getting paid by your clients already, and they could refer business to you, so that would probably be the one thing that I would be using, and that's you don't have to hire sales people for that. You can just become a good connector and a good value creator for people that are in your community and on LinkedIn. And you could use automation and AI through bdr.ai, to leverage time and leverage the amount of energy that you would be required to give out, to find those people and to build a relationship with those people.

Jenelle Friday  1:56:44  
Love that Well, David, any final words of encouragement for entrepreneurs building their 2026 vision,

David Bush  1:56:51  
you can do this. Remember that you can do this. And I'll just say To summarize, something that is very simple to think about, and this is something that a lot of us, we use the term, I'm overwhelmed. I'm just too busy. I don't have time to plan, I don't have time to exercise. I'm just overwhelmed by everything that I have to get done. Remember this phrase, all I can do is all I can do. So I'm going to do all I can, nothing more, nothing less. All you can do is all you can do. So do all you can, nothing more, nothing less. And what's amazing is, if you go back and you have a good plan, not only for your life, but for your time and for your business, you can overwhelm yourself with the success of what you can accomplish in one year, 2026, because you just did all you could do, nothing more, nothing less. So I hope that today's been helpful for you. Thank you to Janelle. Big round of applause for her for helping us to be the moderator for today. Come back for session two, and let's get clear on your marketing plan for 2026 and we'll keep the energy and ideas and tactics flowing.

Jenelle Friday  1:58:10  
Thanks again. Thanks everybody. See you tomorrow.

David Bush  1:58:15  
Thanks for tuning in to the Business Builders playbook. If this episode gave you some plays that you can start running in your business today, hit subscribe and share with another revenue leader who is tired of the pipeline grind. Building Predictable Revenue isn't something you figure out alone. Whether you're looking to automate your prospecting with bdr.ai, or you just want to talk through the growth challenges you're facing, reach out. We help business leaders just like you to build systems that actually scale, and if you're ready to stop being your company's Highest Paid Prospector, let's have a conversation. Reach out to us@bdr.ai until next time, let's keep building you.