Latest / Marci talks money (and life) / Technology, Artificial Intelligence & Business Growth with Barry Bradham
Transcript
- Marci Grossman (00:16) Hello, I am MoneyMarci, welcome. I'm thrilled to welcome today's guest, Barry Bradham. Barry is a serial entrepreneur, systems architect, and founder of Barry Bradham Entrepreneur, where he helps business owners eliminate operational chaos through automation, AI, and scalable digital infrastructure. With decades of hands-on experience building and operating companies across marketing, e-commerce, technology, and professional services, Barry doesn't just talk about systems, he builds and runs businesses with them. Barry's passion for technology was born out of necessity. While scaling his own companies, he repeatedly encountered the same challenges most entrepreneurs face, missed opportunities, fragmented communication, manual processes, and burnout. Instead of accepting those limits, he began developing software, automation frameworks, web apps, and AI driven tools to create leverage and regain control. He is the founder of DigiLink, a digital business card platform used by entrepreneurs and teams to streamline networking, lead capture, and follow up, as well as IQ AI tools designed to support the entrepreneurs he mentors with smarter decision making and execution. Barry is currently developing a disruptive technology for the trade show industry, an innovation he's especially excited about for its potential to transform how businesses connect, track engagement, and scale growth. His mission is simple, help entrepreneurs build businesses that work for them, not the other way around. In addition, Barry serves as a regional director for M3Linked Southern California, where he leads an invite-only collaboration community for high-level founders and executives across Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. His focus is building trusted rooms, spaces where authentic relationships, strategic introductions, and mastermind-level conversations thrive beyond surface-level networking. I feel like I just introduced three people, maybe five. Welcome, Barry. Barry (02:08) Marci. MoneyMarci, thank you for having me on your show. I feel like 5 people, sometimes 10 Marci Grossman (02:38) Well, you know, do you sleep? Barry (02:45) I do, I do. And like you, focus on making sure that money's being made while I sleep. Marci Grossman (02:52) Good deal, good deal. So tell me, how did you get here? How did you get in so many rooms doing so many things? Barry (03:02) Well...The long and short of it is when you learn automation, scaling, leadership, and delegation, it frees up a lot of time. And when you learn how to build systems and teach other people how to work those systems, and keep them passionate and excited for it, and if your vision is strong, much like a Steve Jobs kind of vision, and you're good at presenting that in a way that people buy in and want to follow that path, and then maybe even make it stronger and better, it allows for a lot of growth. Marci Grossman (03:32) You didn't wake up one morning knowing how to do all these things. I assume these are things you built into your knowledge base one at a time. Barry (03:41) Yeah, and you know it's been quite rapid this last couple years, but mostly I would say building my longest running business has led me down a road to develop a lot of different skills and to develop a lot of different partners and people on my team. And then being able to leverage that to other businesses and other platforms has been very beneficial. Marci Grossman (04:05) So a smart person surrounding himself with other smart people gets a lot done. Barry (04:10) Mmm. You can get a lot done. Marci Grossman (04:12) Did you always want to be an entrepreneur? Barry (04:14) I think so. Yeah, if you look back at kind of my history starting at maybe eight years old, I think that the groundwork was being led that direction. Marci Grossman (04:24) Were your family entrepreneurs or was this branching out? Barry (04:29) I had a good, know, much like the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I had a couple different dads, neither was poor, but one kind of led more of a rich life in terms of having time to spend with family and, and freedom and flexibility of his life because he had his own business. At some point he got to that position from a CFO to, to a CPA, much like yourself, I think, as I learn more about you. And, and he had the flexibility when I was home for, you know, for Christmas vacation and for holidays to work from home in the morning, do his stock market stuff, work with some client follow up, schedule a few meetings and then have a long two and a half hour Mongolian barbecue lunch for example. When I was in town I just thought that was pretty spectacular because you know my real dad didn't ever have that kind of time and flexibility. He worked hard and he worked a great career and he's retired now and happy and doing great. ⁓ But you know 13 hour days and didn't really have that flexibility in his life to do that and when you know looking at both of those role models, the path was pretty clear for me. Marci Grossman (05:30) Fair enough. So you talk about building scalable income through systems instead of hustle. What does that mean and how can people implement that in their lives? Barry (05:44) Really, it means figuring out the things that are bogging you and your team down on a daily basis, especially those non-revenue driving tasks and what can be automated and how do we do that in a way that makes us more efficient and also clears kind of that ugly work up, to where we can do less of that type of thing. Or outsource that to somebody who enjoys doing that kind of thing ⁓ with kind of a non-revenueing paycheck, I guess, if you could outsource that to somebody else, or I prefer automation, if we could do that. But sometimes, you know, creating jobs are good, too. So you know, it's a balance of what those jobs look like. Typically, there's a lot of things that a lot of businesses can do to automate and kind of clear up that repetitive thing, starting out with templates, you know, just basic templates, answering frequently asked questions, doing those in a really grand way with video and with, you know, from the owners or from the people who really know it well. And then that way other level employees can easily answer those same questions if they know what pulls to, know, what levers to pull and what, strings to tug on at that given moment. So customer ants ask this question. I've got the great answer. Let me send you this with the video and everything in this email. And then if you have further questions, let me know. Usually though, if that's done well, that's going to take a 40 minute, perhaps conversation down to a two minute conversation. And you just freed up 38 minutes for that employee to repurpose doing other more productive things. Marci Grossman (07:13) So you use a fair amount of AI. Barry (07:17) A fair amount of AI, ⁓ but AI still isn't the brain. It has to have the brain and structure into it. And that's definitely something that I talk a lot about. Marci Grossman (07:31) Yeah, I am a recent 3D printer hobbyist. yeah, so, you know, I've got friends who have 3D printers and they were making these magnificent things. And I'm like, I want to learn how to do this. And I get my 3D printer and I get started and I find out that all these magnificent prints they were doing off of sites of people create things and share things. But I didn't know the people who were creating. I only knew the people who were being shared with. Barry (07:37) Fun. Marci Grossman (08:01) So I had to go to AI to start learning how to do and where to find things from 3D print. And there's a lot to do and learn to be able to make AI work for you. I spent three days in what could have been done in less than three hours if I learned how to talk to AI or if I'd have had a person I could just ask questions to. So I think AI is an interesting tool, but to be able to use it effectively and efficiently, there's a lot that goes into it. Barry (08:37) Yeah, absolutely. And then to string sequences together in an automated way will help somebody along their path to maybe discovering a business plan or a marketing plan with action steps and, you know, to actually create some type of an executable plan is something we focus on a lot as well. At my company Metaverse Digital. Marci Grossman (09:00) Okay, well because you talk about IQ AI tools to support entrepreneurs. How do you use AI in a way that helps entrepreneurs? Barry (09:03) So that was something that I developed last year that basically met the entrepreneur where they're at in time. And if they're an existing business and they wanted to find out maybe how to grow their company, how to scale their company, how to become less stagnant, maybe they're declining. What are some things they can do to spark business growth, to automate certain things like lead generation? How can they do that and where do they start even. So this will walk them through a series of questions to allow them to explore the journey that they're on and then utilizing AI prompts that I have coded in the back end will help them to get to the endpoint where they can discover the action plan that's going to turn their business around and really help them with some solid structure and ideas. Marci Grossman (10:02) Okay, so we talk about wealth building and we talk about entrepreneurs. Are you looking and really working with a certain level of whether it's income or net worth? Because someone obviously is if they're going to hire you for coaching or whatever, they're going to need to be able to afford it. But assuming I had a windfall that paid for a coach, so I didn't have to worry about what it costs to hire you, at what kind of income or wealth or whatever would you be able to add value? I mean, is there a point where someone is too small that they can't take that kind of step yet? Barry (10:44) Well, I offer a group mentorship. So once or even twice a month, we have a group hall where people can come in and they can see lots of different things. We share knowledge. We have education. We've got great speakers that are very important to entrepreneurs. ⁓ Usually, there's something in that room during that time that's going to resonate with more people. And a lot of times we will listen to what their requests are, what their needs are. And from there we can, really example role model and talk to what those things are using other stories or other people in the room that might be able to share those experiences. I also have a mastermind community that we do for my ⁓ networking group, M3Linked, and we're in California, Florida, and Houston actually now, not just Southern California. And there are other M3Linked in other areas. But if people do business nationwide or just want to connect, grow their business referral based community and also be part of a mastermind where we share resources and really work as a peer-to-peer advisory group, we offer that level as well. Both of those are very affordable, the one starts at about I think it's just under $300 a month and you get that kind of support, group support, group mentorship, and then the other one is a it's a whole community where we do a lot of things and you get a CRM Called GoHighLevel that will grant them as part of their membership and then we do workshops to teach them how to use that and really help to tackle all those important things that are important for businesses to be able to do. Marci Grossman (12:16) That's awesome because I think a lot of people, they're starting out, they're newer to their dream. I don't know if they'll even call themselves entrepreneur but to the small business or practice that they're growing and they're afraid that the resources they want are too expensive or everyone else would be too big for them to feel like they fit in but it sounds like there are resources out there even for those newer to the practice. Barry (12:41) Absolutely. Marci Grossman (13:32) Now, I know you also talk about emotional resilience and you've gone through some challenges yourself, especially in 2007. What can you tell us about that? share? Barry (13:45) Well, yeah, absolutely. When you're in it, it's hard to know that you're in an educational moment and you're in a learning moment because the pain can be real. ⁓ know, relationships, you learn the ones that are best ⁓ suited in your life during those times and the ones that are going to be good support and the ones who are going to run and not be good support. And so those times are very, important. And we encounter those sometimes at different levels. That was a pretty big one for me at the time. I was, I think, 31 or 32 years old and a lot of relationships were impacted by that situation. But I learned a lot about myself and it took a few years to realize that that was a real growth period and I was still young and the road ahead is still very bright even if credit is jeopardized and even if money is jeopardized and finances and everything else, you just have to stay positive and it's more important than ever during those times to really have a good structure of people around you, be in the right rooms and just grow and just be willing to grow and to be humble and learn from those times. And I've had several moments like that and not usually that devastating, not ever that devastating actually. But if it wasn't for that, I would have had this perfect plan that I thought I was going towards, which was here. And now I've got the whole world that I work with and I travel around and writing books and have two different books that are releasing and one is going to be in with Sharon Letcher who is the of course co-author with Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad Poor Dad, very excited about that collaboration and some other books. One that I'm going to be releasing in think 60 days called "How I Built a Million Dollar Business in Board Shorts" and that tells the story of building that 18 year company that I had to learn everything from. The automation, the e-commerce, the importing, all the worldly stuff and all the, know, and growing that through COVID and through all of those types of experiences and AI now and all of that. And that's been quite the journey. Marci Grossman (15:47) I bet. What have you learned along the way building these businesses that if you'd have known way back when you started would have changed your whole process? Barry (15:57) In terms of real estate, I didn't have to lose everything. I needed stronger partners and still to this day, it's about stronger partners. It's about strong people that, that we can, you know, really grow with and grow from their knowledge, their experience, but then also to give back on our knowledge and our experience. And it really is a push pull relationship with people. And as long as everybody's good and striving and, and, you know, trying to, work things out and they're honest and ethical, then I would just say get in as many rooms as possible and find one that really fits for the entrepreneur and one that talks about these challenging things not before they're already mainstream but that that handles you know Bitcoin back in 2016 was a hot topic and and that would have been one to really pay attention to then so more to be you know a first or also called an early adopter of new technology and new things to really explore it and to do that though you have to have the free time you have to have enough bandwidth left after your day with all the people and all the things that we're doing to be able to have time to read other things. I was ⁓ very fortunate to have a conversation with Jeff Hoffman who is the founder of Booking.com and Priceline. And one thing that he said is every day he likes to start his morning learning something, spending 20 minutes learning something that really is not in his industry. And he started doing this before he founded Priceline and Booking.com. And what happened was he ended up reading something that was very important to his discovery of that. And so you never know what new information is going to resonate with something that maybe you're already thinking about, maybe an industry you're already in, but a new idea might be just that one thing that just helps to spark that new creative surge, whatever that is. Marci Grossman (17:43) I like that. One of the things that you mentioned in the pre podcasting form was the importance of showing up and doing the reps when building your business. I love the way that that sounds just showing up and doing the reps because so many times it's so easy to get disheartened when you show up and you do the things you're supposed to be doing and it's not moving forward. How did you learn to trust yourself on doing those things when building your business? Barry (18:13) Boy, that's tough. It's tough because I used to tell myself, try 10 things today. Nine of them are going to fail. And if you're lucky, one's going to be successful. And so you have to learn that the ratio is much like a batter in the MLB. It's not a high percentage of wins if you're trying a lot of different things. It's a low percentage. But that low percentage can be mountains in your world, in your life, and in your business. Marci Grossman (18:40) Right, but doing the reps, mean, you have to practice batting over and over again. It's hard to say in your business what is the doing the reps. I guess the sales calls maybe or the digging in to try and tweak something. Barry (18:52) Boy. Yeah. It could be different code, it could be different languages to try to code something correctly, could be ⁓ changing algorithms, could be exploring different algorithms, could be exploring split testing when it comes to marketing, just always, I've got something that's not working, okay, how can I make this in a way that does? And then study the people that have had success in those areas. For example, in marketing, you're having a landing page that's not converting, you might want to study Russell Brunson. You might want to study NEPQ, neural emotional programming questions, ways that are going to resonate and generate a high converting sales page. You know, just that kind of thing. And I try to gravitate towards studying and researching people or businesses that have success in certain areas that I'm trying to obtain that success. And then just try to model that same behavior and learn as much as I can about it. But yeah, tons of practice, enormous practice and tons of testing and just continuously going down the road. And when you have success, you're still testing to try to increase the batting average, so to speak. Marci Grossman (20:02) Right. How did you, with all of these things going on, with the learning, with the projects, with the networking, how did you balance your time and your personal time? Because you still want to have those two and a half hour lunches at Mongolian if you can find one that's open anymore. Barry (20:20) Another really great question Marci. It's important to time block and it's important to reduce the noise in our lives. For me, that was a big thing for me was to study Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and there's so many other great people, but those are names people know. ⁓ But what they do well is they reduce the noise. Everybody's still got the same number of hours in the day. We still need the same amount of sleep. But how could we be more efficient with those conversations with team members, with our relationships and also create enough time where efficiency doesn't matter in some conversations and to be able to just be able to know that this is downtime and I just want to explore this relationship. But you have to, it's all a give-and-take you can't give all the noise all the time all every time. You can't. You know for me I limit my social media intake. I don't watch very much television and the information that I consume usually is something motivational, something educational, something informative or something new in a new technology, something like that. I'm absolutely not perfect. I try to be better based on my role models and people that I follow and my mentors. But those are things that really helped me. It was time blocking and reducing the noise. And if I've got a couple things and I try to always know what are my most important priorities, how am going to make sure I get those done within XYZ number of days? And if that's what it is, I don't let anything in the way of disrupting that. Now, family and friends, that's why time blocking is important. I'm not just being all consumed during those two or three days, but I have my time of focus to make sure those three things happen. But I'm still a balanced human with fitness and exercise and sleep and diet and health and that kind of thing. Marci Grossman (22:16) How do you define success differently now versus how you might have seen it when you were getting started? Barry (22:24) Now it's I think the you know in this stage in life I'm very interested in my legacy and and the help that I've done upon the world and with people that I've impacted and and I've really started that journey this year to really make it less about me and more about those that I can impact. And that's not a dollar. That's not a quantitative as far as financially, it's not quantitative to me. It's more about impact. It's more about creating ⁓ fulfillment, I guess, and helping other people obtain balance in their life with their relationships, with their health, their diet, their fitness, all these things that are so important. Family is absolutely important. And for me, starting a family is important because everything has gotten in the way of that and I've never felt really ready. I don't know if that is something that you really feel when you're ready. But I definitely feel ready now and that's that's important to me and it's a lot of that is because I just didn't make the time, I didn't really know how to manage the time as well decades ago. And that's been a journey for me, and that's why I'm passionate about helping other people in that area. Marci Grossman (23:33) I think that's great. It's so important to figure out what's right for you. And for some people, getting married and having kids in their 20s is the right thing they've got to do. For some people, it's whenever it is. It doesn't matter. There isn't a right or wrong answer. There's a right or wrong for you answer. It's hard to believe, but it's all different and there aren't always one right answer. Barry (23:53) Yeah. That's right. That's exactly right. Marci Grossman (24:05) Do you see any new opportunities in technology? I mean, I don't want to take any business ideas away from you but opportunities that people should be looking at, changes you think might be coming in technology that could make a difference in the way people practice. Barry (24:22) Yeah, there's a big buzz the last couple months around OpenClaw and around creating AI agents. ⁓ And that's something I'm interested in exploring. I'm still hiring people though ⁓ in doing that. And maybe these AI agents will have an impact in a role with each of my employees. And so I'm hoping that we can like 10X them using AI agents. But to still have employees is important. It's important for my soul and for my work environment and my work day. So I'm working with people and developing people, not just training bots. ⁓ But I do think that OpenClaw is something to pay attention to and to research and to know about. I won't get into that today, but that is definitely something that works with an AI model. Can be set up on its own computer, it can have its own email address and have all these different things, and it can be programmed and trained to do a systematic type of things. And that's something I'm definitely pursuing. ⁓ Just paying attention to, as always, and this isn't new today, this is always paying attention to things that are creating shifts in the way people do things, the way they live their lives, the way they work. All those things are always important. So reading and staying abreast of that is ⁓ so very critically important. Making sure that we're not just reading memes on social media, but actually reading some good publications that are well thought out and well presented. Marci Grossman (25:51) Yeah, yeah, there's more to life than memes, but publications for professional publications aren't nearly as amusing. So it's finding the balance in those as well. Barry, before we wrap up, do you have anything else you'd like to mention that maybe we haven't covered? Barry (26:08) You know, I know this is a kind of, you talk a lot about money and finance right Marci. Marci Grossman (26:15) Right, financial literacy and understanding the intersection of money and life. Barry (26:22) Okay. One thing that I'm really interested is being a point in my life where the revenue that my companies generate, that I'm always paying myself first, and then that money gets invested, and then based on those investments, that's the money I live on. Not the other way around. You don't wanna, for me anyway, my kind of more recent goal in the last decade is to build that wealth, invest that wealth, and then live on the income that that generates and that could be real estate. It could be other businesses. It could be numerous other things. But that's something that I'm interested in. That way we're not eroding all the money we make through life, but we're actually saving that, investing that, and hopefully those types of things appreciate. And, and so that overall, ⁓ investment just values over time, increases in values over time. The other thing I would say is if you're not, if, if your listeners are, you know, working really hard and you feel like you don't have a great network of people, then come win with me. Go to comewinwithme.com, connect with me, I'll connect with you. You'll be invited to several different things where you can talk about your business, network with other people, learn about some of these things that I've talked about, and have the opportunity to work with the people I work with and really be a part of something pretty great and be part of some pretty amazing rooms, not just in the city where I live, but nationally and even globally. Marci Grossman (27:54) That's awesome. Thank you. Barry, thank you so much for being my guest today. We appreciate you taking the time to join us here. Barry (28:02) Thank you so much, Marci. It's been a pleasure. Marci Grossman (28:05) And to my listeners, I will be sharing a link to Barry's information in the show notes. Please check him out. He shares a lot of interesting information. And don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review and stay tuned. I'll see you next time. This has been MoneyMarci on Marci Talks Money (and Life). You got this.