A Conversation With Bradley Hisle
Bradley Hisle is the founder of Pinnacle Health Group, based in Los Angeles, California. He grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he played football, basketball, and baseball before winning championships with his college rugby team. He studied at MNSU Mankato after graduating from Saint Paul Preparatory School on an academic scholarship. In this Q&A, he talks about what success has meant to him at different points in his life, and how his definition of it has changed.
How Do You Personally Define Success?
I don’t think of it as one fixed thing. When I was younger, success meant winning. You play three sports growing up, you’re chasing a scoreboard every season. Rugby in college was the same way. We won championships, and for a while that was the clearest proof I had that something was working.
Running a business changed that. Success now looks more like whether something I built keeps running well when I’m not standing over it. If a team can make good decisions without me in the room, that’s a better sign of success than any single win.
Did Growing up in Saint Paul Shape How You See It?
Yes, in a few ways. My mother owned a salon, and my father worked as an electrician for CP Rail. Those are two very different jobs, but both required showing up and doing the work whether you felt like it or not. Watching her build a client base from nothing taught me that success in business is mostly earned in small, repeated moments, not in one big breakthrough.
What Is a Moment You Point to as an Early Sign of Your Own Success?
Getting the academic scholarship to Saint Paul Prep stands out. I wasn’t the kind of student who found school effortless. I had to actually sit down and put in the hours. That scholarship taught me something I still rely on: effort you can’t see from the outside is usually what decides the outcome everyone does see.
How Did Boxing Change How You Think About Success?
Boxing is a strange teacher because it corrects you immediately. There’s no committee deciding whether you did well. You either slipped the punch or you didn’t. I’ve boxed on and off my whole life, and it keeps me honest about the gap between how prepared I think I am and how prepared I actually am. In business, that feedback is slower and easier to ignore. Boxing doesn’t let you ignore it.
Where Does Rugby Fit Into This?
Winning a championship with a team is a different kind of success than winning on your own. You can play well individually and still lose if the team around you isn’t built right. That stuck with me. When I think about Pinnacle Health Group, I think about it the same way I thought about that rugby squad: the result depends on whether the whole group is pulling in the same direction, not just whether a few people are doing their jobs well.
Has Your Definition of Success Ever Gotten You Into Trouble?
For a stretch, I measured it almost entirely by how much I was willing to give, time, energy, attention to anyone who asked. It felt generous, and for a while I thought that generosity was itself a marker of doing well. It isn’t sustainable on its own. I’ve had to learn that success also means protecting enough of yourself to keep showing up the next day.
What Does Success Look Like for the People Around You, Not Just for You?
I think about this a lot in terms of quality of life. Not in an abstract sense, but literally: is the person I’m working with sleeping better, less anxious, more confident than they were a year ago? That’s harder to measure than revenue, but it’s closer to what I actually care about.
If You Had to Pick One Thing That Still Tells You Whether You’re Succeeding, What Would It Be?
Whether I’m still learning. I don’t mean that as a throwaway line. If I go a stretch of time where nothing has challenged how I think, that’s usually a sign I’ve gotten comfortable, and comfortable is where things quietly start to slip.