Brady Hugins: Alright.
Brady Hugins: Good morning, everyone. It's 10.30 a.m.
Brady Hugins: on June, Friday, June 19th, happy Friday.
Brady Hugins: I'm just pulling up some of my information and, getting the webinar up and going for today, so…
Brady Hugins: So, appreciate if you're coming in, to the webinar today.
Brady Hugins: And if not, you're most likely joining us via recording, so… Welcome.
Brady Hugins: I'm in Phoenix, Arizona, it's…
Brady Hugins: During the summertime here, so it's gonna be a nice sunny day, it looks like. 95 degrees, a high of 105, so…
Brady Hugins: Beautiful day here.
Brady Hugins: So, wanted to cover a little bit of today's topic. The introduction… this is part of an ongoing series, or a series that we're actually finishing up today. This is Chapter 7 of our Data Sovereignty series, our signature mirror-mirror series.
Brady Hugins: This is about owning your own system, and tech system, and what that would look like over forever, period of time.
Brady Hugins: So what does that look like for renewal, for structure, for what your needs would look like?
Brady Hugins: So, this is where we take everything that we have designed in the past, and then make it more of our own, over…
Brady Hugins: A longer period of time.
Brady Hugins: So…
Brady Hugins: Happy to have you with us. These presentations are usually anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, depending on Q&A and different directions, so, one at a time and, accordingly.
Brady Hugins: Alright.
Brady Hugins: So, this is the seventh chapter. We built…
Brady Hugins: In early periods of time, we built the spine, Our spinal infrastructure, our…
Brady Hugins: Primary projects are unified, contact profiles, any unified messaging that we have.
Brady Hugins: Our plan, like, what's our business plan? What's our line of production and development? What are we looking to develop first? What are long-term projects?
Brady Hugins: Rhythm, so all businesses go towards a rhythm, whether it's a daily rhythm, weekly, monthly, seasonal, yearly.
Brady Hugins: Even longer in multi-year, and sometimes generational timelines.
Brady Hugins: Engine. So, what are for the primary engines of our tool stack? What workflows? Processes?
Brady Hugins: Do we have different automators and connectors, that are connecting with different workflows, and do we have proper monitoring? Engines are the locomotives of our modern age when we're looking at creating systems.
Brady Hugins: Delivery. Fulfillment to clients, either… For some versioning of money, or currency, or fulfillment of product or service delivery.
Brady Hugins: Is that tuned, and is that happening accordingly?
Brady Hugins: integration. So, there's a number of different… many moving parts, especially when working with many products or many brands, many…
Brady Hugins: Web organization, or much, Data organization that… that may occur, and integration's a core part of that.
Brady Hugins: And then owning, what does that look like over time?
Brady Hugins: And then how do you keep…
Brady Hugins: It, as a part, these systems should serve your needs and make your life easier, as well as
Brady Hugins: Create some sort of ongoing sustenance and sustainability for yourself, so…
Brady Hugins: It's about what does that look like year over year, and decade over a decade.
Brady Hugins: So…
Brady Hugins: A lot of ownership is the ability to have freedom, and a lot of tech design is around different tooling, and so one of the fundamental components is tool neutrality, or having multiple copies of your data, or different tools that you can move.
Brady Hugins: And be able to either install or have already installed multiple tools, like having several hammers in your construction toolkit if you're into construction, or…
Brady Hugins: a few different, like, heavier or smaller pieces of equipment based on that. So, think of it as, like, a system rather than just one individual tool, it's a collection of things.
Brady Hugins: And once you see it as that way, you see your general flow, process, the people that are a part of it as a general system that your data and your tools are helping support.
Brady Hugins: So, it helps with…
Brady Hugins: vendors, and having multiple vendors, if you have multiple people to rely upon, or multiple vendors to rely upon, sometimes it might make sense to one, two, or three different solutions in place.
Brady Hugins: Depending on the situation.
Brady Hugins: And then what's actually the components that are needed to keep the business up and running? Like, what are the key components?
Brady Hugins: So, and then, are you renting? Are you owning those tools? What does that look like for you, specifically? And then, also, like, how does it impact your system?
Brady Hugins: So systems on their own are generally boring on purpose, is they're made to…
Brady Hugins: sustain themselves over time when we look at ecosystems, and any sort of natural ecosystem.
Brady Hugins: It doesn't look like it changes very much unless you're out and involved in observing, and you see…
Brady Hugins: Either property or areas from year to year.
Brady Hugins: Or from area to area in similar…
Brady Hugins: Circumstances. So, a lot of it comes from observation.
Brady Hugins: And that's true of tech data, of understanding what's happening, bottlenecks of different either processes and workflows, or, there might be overproduction in certain areas as well, where it's creating too much.
Brady Hugins: So, you need a rhythm, you need a backup, you need a plan.
Brady Hugins: And you need to ground yourself in practical terms moving forward so that you're…
Brady Hugins: Extending yourselves in the right way.
Brady Hugins: So, maintenance is a rhythm.
Brady Hugins: We shouldn't be rescuing, although rescued does happen from time to time.
Brady Hugins: We shouldn't feel the need to rescue most of the time so that we're in a calm state, so that we can see clearly and creatively, effectively. So, that's an important part.
Brady Hugins: So… Systems can die based on ignored things.
Brady Hugins: When there's a signal, ignored signal.
Brady Hugins: Or there's an improper process in place, that's when systems can… pull apart.
Brady Hugins: So there needs to be either an eye towards
Brady Hugins: Restructuring or considering evolving and innovating on certain steps, if you want to adapt with the times and adapt with the available tools available.
Brady Hugins: Yeah.
Brady Hugins: So you can have things that happen every 15 minutes, once a week, once every 10, you know, 7 years. I have 7-year cycles that I look towards.
Brady Hugins: For building and having certain long-term goals of visions that I have to build, so that things are clear when I'm building things over a long period of time.
Brady Hugins: So, examples of that are weekly, maybe a 15-minute run, or every 15 minutes is, did this particular engine run? Did these emails go out?
Brady Hugins: do these… prospects or leads that you have get sent the following information. Were there any…
Brady Hugins: Dead letter queues, which is where emails or messages are not being sent out properly.
Brady Hugins: Or monthly.
Brady Hugins: Pruning and keeping data hygiene is an important part of
Brady Hugins: Verifying that our data is accurate, and that we can rely on it for any business use cases.
Brady Hugins: And then quarterly, like…
Brady Hugins: Not only do we have to look at our financial performances on a usually monthly and quarterly basis, and annually, of course.
Brady Hugins: But, our goals change. Sometimes our circumstances often change, and quarterly is a good seasonal gathering time that we use for matching with different business needs.
Brady Hugins: Right?
Brady Hugins: So, migration. So…
Brady Hugins: It's important to construct well from the beginning in order to reduce migration fatigue. And migration fatigue is when you're changing tools or changing systems and learning new things, and it's causing stress on the body or the mind in order to do that.
Brady Hugins: When you're overwhelmed with solutions, or you're overwhelmed with options, going from one to the next to the next is fatiguing, and so it's… it's good to look at migration and proper…
Brady Hugins: Times, where you want maybe an annual review of your tools.
Brady Hugins: To cycle to see if there needed an economic review of any sort of variable costs that you have.
Brady Hugins: as well.
Brady Hugins: So, and a good test of ownership, or whether you're owning your own e… your own provision, is whether you have a couple tools in place, and whether you can actually migrate, and you have control over your central data stack.
Brady Hugins: So it becomes of, can we do this to, no, we've done this before, and we have the proper steps in place in order to move and be adaptable as we need to.
Brady Hugins: So it's looking at your vendor, not as, what I believe, an intra-dependent part of your network, rather than a codependent.
Brady Hugins: So, it's, there's…
Brady Hugins: Plug-and-play features to working with different people, and different benefits to working with different organizations, and you might want to work with both of them anyway.
Brady Hugins: So… Yeah, there's… Oftentimes, it's good to have different sourcings of things, and also local sourcing of,
Brady Hugins: Intelligence is… it's a big one lately, agentic intelligence.
Brady Hugins: So, from my stack, every email in… I have 8 brands, goes through one send layer, and then to change providers, all I would need to do is really set credentials and some functionality, not the entire workflows and work chains that I have independent of the system.
Brady Hugins: So, and it's the difference between the tool and the platform. So, and again, my workflows, I can move independently as well to an independent system as well, too.
Brady Hugins: So, there's kind of… there's some joint functionality where you can use
Brady Hugins: Certain systems and certain, instances, and it's better for the system.
Brady Hugins: Web is a good example of having a remote server for your web serving, because it's…
Brady Hugins: It's a different management structure than your own dataset that doesn't need to be pinged as much.
Brady Hugins: So, we have a… principle 3 is grow by extending the spine. So, we have a spinal structure, so it's like having a central data stack in a formation where you're having different layers and different tools that fit the layers.
Brady Hugins: And so it's not about forking it, like making it into two, it's creating that central spine, and then having different tools plug into the spine, so…
Brady Hugins: your data platform for any customers, whatnot, is in one area. Your… messaging system for email, SMS,
Brady Hugins: And any sort of, like, it could be WhatsApp, Discord, it could be any sort of app connector.
Brady Hugins: Is in one system, so that information can be collected from many different sources, whether it's social or…
Brady Hugins: Other sort of app, or other sort of communication devices, or applications?
Brady Hugins: So, it extends the spine rather than forks it, so it… you anticipate that you're going to have multiple systems and working with them.
Brady Hugins: In fact, that's what customers see and experience. They experience all the things from your brand, not just one thing, so they expect that sort of listening and tuning.
Brady Hugins: Okay… So we talked about the contact graph,
Brady Hugins: And then adding in… if you wanted… if we wanted to, we could add in a brand.
Brady Hugins: If we were in that development phase, and we do, in a sense, develop our own brands by developing the own products underneath them.
Brady Hugins: But again, it uses the same spinal structure, so it's very quick to deploy across a broader network.
Brady Hugins: Okay.
Brady Hugins: So, here's the long view.
Brady Hugins: This is the idea of a 10-year operator stack, right? We're in 2026, so think about things in 2036.
Brady Hugins: Like, it's hard to think about, but at the same time, there's certain things that may not change. Email may not still be here, just as it was since
Brady Hugins: The 90s.
Brady Hugins: You know, we'll probably still have connection to the internet.
Brady Hugins: And we'll have our own independent systems, and maybe some remote systems, so…
Brady Hugins: These are things that probably will continue to be true.
Brady Hugins: People like the benefit of connecting with others, but they like to have their own independence as well.
Brady Hugins: So it'd be… Having a thorough…
Brady Hugins: Secure connection with your data that's important to your business.
Brady Hugins: An ownership model where you're backing it up and securing and own it, and are responsible for it.
Brady Hugins: And then the patterns. A single source of truth, a weekly review.
Brady Hugins: Dead letter Q, written down maps and markups.
Brady Hugins: ingestion processes, those are probably all going the same. Like, we're probably gonna have two hands and two feet, like, and be able to talk. Like, those are probably all going to stay the same. What's going to get better over time is our interaction with the tools, and our fluidity, and being able to artistically create.
Brady Hugins: That's gonna get more
Brady Hugins: Interesting. And we'll be able to swap tools that we're interested in. Right now, there's video tools and audio tools that we can swap. They have different connectors where we have different UIs, we're working at it from a human level, and then we can work at it from a more machine or AI perspective with MCP and API and CLI connectors.
Brady Hugins: So think of things as being a little bit swappable and interchangeable.
Brady Hugins: And you're finding, like, the right fit for your long-term ecosystem.
Brady Hugins: Alright, Q&A. So these are good questions to ask yourself.
Brady Hugins: And… about your system. Now, it's good to ask yourself about what is the… proper…
Brady Hugins: Kind of process in order to…
Brady Hugins: you know, survive? Like, what would survive in your system over a month? Like, in general, I know what would survive and what wouldn't survive.
Brady Hugins: What would generally run amok versus what would be… Working fine.
Brady Hugins: So, for me, I run quite a bit of remote management through automation and through Webflow, so those would be one
Brady Hugins: databases that I could definitely develop, or at least develop some sort of backup plan. I do have backups for the actual data that goes out to them.
Brady Hugins: But I don't have any backup for, some of those, so I would imagine those would be the most challenging
Brady Hugins: I do have documentation on workflows and web data, so it's not the data, it would be the deployment, so I guess that's where I would see my own self be vulnerable.
Brady Hugins: If you stepped away for a month, what's the first thing that would quietly break, and would anyone notice? So…
Brady Hugins: Generally, What I've run into is in…
Brady Hugins: designing some of the more administrative tools and workflows internally. There's…
Brady Hugins: In all sorts of agentic work, there's…
Brady Hugins: when I'm finding different black holes and bottlenecks, and searching for those and understanding where there's… Traps and workflows.
Brady Hugins: Because if everything's smoothly working, then that means that every web page is really productive, where it has different features and they're being tracked. And every product is being delivered, and it's being effectively delivered, where people are getting the expectations that they want for that particular product.
Brady Hugins: and delivery.
Brady Hugins: So, A lot of the…
Brady Hugins: So you may walk away from something, like on a vacation, and some things may break, and it may be human error, maybe automated error, it may be financial error.
Brady Hugins: There's kind of some major vulnerabilities depending on the business.
Brady Hugins: And the cycle, and what, like, what… what you're in business for.
Brady Hugins: Is your system written down anywhere, or does it only exist in your head?
Brady Hugins: This is a great one, especially for anyone, any businesses that look to have any sort of legacy sale. You know, you want to leave it on to someone, or you want to,
Brady Hugins: Sell the business.
Brady Hugins: It's almost everyone considers with their business, at some point, is to sell.
Brady Hugins: And… what are they gonna do? Are they going to be able to…
Brady Hugins: Access the workflows in your business and the systems, and what does that look like?
Brady Hugins: you know, if someone… if you died today, you know, what would that look like for anyone that inherited the business? How easy would it be for someone to…
Brady Hugins: Adopt and potentially sell, or… or honestly take on the business if they wanted to.
Brady Hugins: So, there's several reasons why we would want to objectively write something down, other than our… for our own needs that would serve others.
Brady Hugins: Compassionately, and make sure that things are practically maintained for you and your business and other people.
Brady Hugins: So, things to consider over a long period of time. That's what this conversation is about. It's about…
Brady Hugins: How does your… Business survive over years.
Brady Hugins: Alright, so… Made some slight adjustments to this. The… there is some… hold on, someone keeps calling.
Brady Hugins: There is some slight adjustments I'm making to this,
Brady Hugins: Live Cohort is a monthly,
Brady Hugins: fee, but I'll go over this, so…
Brady Hugins: There's a few different options I offer people that they can either…
Brady Hugins: Take a course, an educational course, or there's a monthly fee that we offer people that are able to,
Brady Hugins: be a part of our live production audience. We have some junior developers that are very gifted developers.
Brady Hugins: And we have… some need of…
Brady Hugins: Of some more businesses that have some more cases
Brady Hugins: Walk with and work with some of our developers. So, that's a great spot for you and your business.
Brady Hugins: Part of the training?
Brady Hugins: And then we have our $33 a month. This is our data sovereignty. This includes some of these day, weekly hours.
Brady Hugins: Access to our library of information, which includes our 7-day data sovereignty core, so that comes with that.
Brady Hugins: And then an operator newsletter that we have that gives up-to-dates about operators and tips and tricks needed for people.
Brady Hugins: We do have some more pro level, that's for people that are doing their own series development. That includes markdowns, Python scripts, and different architectural documents. That's important. As well as I'm developing Agentic,
Brady Hugins: support models for API, MCP, CLI, and various agentic Marketing, as well.
Brady Hugins: Alright.
Brady Hugins: Well, that concludes for today. I really appreciate everyone that is able to dial in and listen.
Brady Hugins: to this. We are… Going to be wrapping up the data sovereignty course, I'm…
Brady Hugins: Probably gonna be doing some re-recording because of the…
Brady Hugins: Some of the visuals I want to improve in animations.
Brady Hugins: Those will be included in the course versions that you have, so if you buy this version, you'll be able to see everything that's developed all the way through the remaining part of the year.
Brady Hugins: So… And… That is something we'll be on developing on every Friday as well.
Brady Hugins: So…
Brady Hugins: You're welcome to join us. My email address is brady at roseinthegrove.com, that's a great way to get ahold of me. And then also my phone number,
Brady Hugins: That you can reach me at is 760-484-3472.
Brady Hugins: for any private messages, or for any business messages, that's my cell phone. So, I'm happy to be available to people, and looking to…
Brady Hugins: Develop some of this course over this year, as there's plenty of developers that are…
Brady Hugins: interested in these kinds of processes. So, thank you all for being here.
Brady Hugins: Appreciate you all.