Meet Aaron Hageman

We recently connected with Aaron Hageman and have shared our conversation below.

Aaron, thrilled to have you on the platform as I think our readers can really benefit from your insights and experiences. In particular, we’d love to hear about how you think about burnout, avoiding or overcoming burnout, etc.

The short answer here, that will naturally beget a longer conversation, is by staying aligned with my “why.”

As an entrepreneur, I have owned many different businesses over the years… a large HR tech platform, a digital marketing firm, a soccer team in New Mexico, an events company, etc. And the common thing behind them all is the impact of entrepreneurialism.

As a little kid, I never had a dream of owning a Human Resources company (I wanted to be a fireman – true story). But I found alignment with my passion and drive around getting up every day and being a big rock in the pond, making a large ripple within my community. As a business owner, our key success markers became how many jobs we created, how much payroll we put into our community (wherever each business happened to be located – what a 20th century viewpoint lol).

Anyways, being aligned with the definition of success around impact is the story here. Creating a job, hiring an individual, creating a career path, that employee got married, bought a house, had kids, donated to their church, etc. That is impact. That is exciting.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

These days, the team and I are most excited about our advisory program for entrepreneurs behind our company 75x Strategy (www.75xStrategy.com). My most successful, and recent, exit was in selling our 1099 HR tech platform to Walmart. In our growth run over the last couple of years before handing over the reigns, we took the team on a 75-X growth run towards a $2billion run rate.

In 2025 we have our Active-Advisor program available for entrepreneurs who are interested in growth, scale, and an organized approach to working ON your business not just IN it. Our program is centered around being an entrepreneur-in-residence, a part of the team, and 1-on-1 consiglieri to the owner and broader leadership team. We focus on strategic planning, financial modeling, and organizational architecture and building a business based on systems with scale in mind that are not reliant upon one (albeit super human amazing and talented) owner.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Self Awareness: This one is can be fun, there are lots of tools out there to learn about oneself. DISC, ColorCode, Meyers Briggs, tests will give us quite a few useful lenses to learn about oneself. But to what end!? This is about communication and personal growth. We have to know our strengths and weaknesses so we can get the best return on our investment of time and resources into leveraging our strengths and improving/mitigating our weaknesses.

Financial Literacy: This one makes these lists often because, well, it should. As far as business owners go we MUST KNOW OUR NUMBERS. Without this skillset there are many pieces of the business puzzle (that we ALL have no matter the type of company) that one will fail at or at best be behind: cash flow, pricing and productization, budgeting, taxes, basic business planning, creating a fiscally healthy place to work that takes care of their first customer (employees).

Lifelong Learning: Once a business owner, always a business owner. This is a skillset that has countless books written about it. Invest here, make a plan, have a budget, get a coach, now get another for a different point of view and skillset, get out of your office and travel, Get better. Be Humble. The key to lifelong learning as an entrepreneur is to understand this is part of your job description. Things change. GenX employees become millennials with different values who become the Gen Z workforce you’re hiring today. The tools you use for marketing today will be obsolete and replaced tomorrow… and those will be gone 4-7 years after that. This is the game. We don’t use the same formulas to value businesses in 2025 that we did in 1985. Make a plan to learn, Make a budget. Be well read. Make it a habit and part of who you are.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

the E-Myth (revisited) by Michael Gerber

ones and zeros. position contracts. unit model economics. This book is the path to “seeing through the matrix” of business.

I’m not sure how much I should go on here, but if we all generally understand the idea of the movie The Founder (about McDonalds hamburgers) is that the key to success isn’t that “mcdonalds sold a $.15 hamburger” it was that “mcdonalds established a repeatable SYSTEM on HOW to sell a $.15 hamburger” and it is THIS difference that is the magic behind the Golden Arches… well then the E-Myth breaks it down for us.

I read this a young entrepreneur (more than once) and have 75X Strategy clients read it these days still. Key takeaways for me:
* Know your numbers
* Know your process to create your product or provide your services
* create structure and systems for your people, not just your product
* have a process to review these systems!

From this book I teach a concept called “No Names on the Whiteboard” which allows us to look at the unit model economics and systems of how are businesses should be structured and run. In a very black and white, non emotional, way and in a way that isn’t necessarily limited by the current resources we have vs defining what we need. ie we shouldn’t business plan for poor sales because we have poor sales people.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.75xstrategy.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-hageman/