Above The Business

In this episode, Dustin Booth opens Lead Yourself First, a new Above The Business series built around a core concept inside the BlueprintOS community. He explains why business owners need to manage themselves with intention before they can lead their team, their business, and their family well.

Dustin frames the owner as the metronome of the business, the person who sets the rhythm and pace everyone else follows. He argues that owners weigh their time carefully but rarely audit their energy, and shares a simple way to sort activities by whether they fill you up or drain you. He also previews the structures the series will cover: a perfect repeatable week, dedicated thinking time, and a weekly planning rhythm built around a big three.

This episode moves past productivity tips and into self-leadership. Are you as deliberate with your energy as you are with your calendar? What rhythm is your team picking up from you right now? And what would more discipline make room for outside the business? If you want to show up with more clarity for your business and the people closest to you, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner continues the operating system series by laying out the folder structure that holds a business's documentation. The previous episode dealt with organizing what already exists. This one gives those assets a permanent home, whether the company runs on Google Drive, a Microsoft shared drive, or Dropbox.

Bradley walks through the four business principles of clarity, alignment, team, and execution, and the three playbooks under each, for twelve playbooks in total. He explains why a playbook, a system, and a process mean different things. He also shows how to build and number the folders so they sort in order, and gives examples of what belongs inside the marketing, attract A-players, and culture playbooks.

This episode moves past folder names and into access. What good is a document nobody on the team can find? Could you pull up how the business sells or handles money the moment someone asks? And would your team know where to look without asking you? If you want every asset in your business to have a place your team can actually find, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Resources

Listen to the previous episode in this series, Marie Kondo Your Digital Files

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner continues the operating system series by applying the KonMari method to the files scattered across a growing business. He works through the six principles from Marie Kondo's book on tidying up and maps each one onto the work of documenting how a company actually runs.

Bradley covers the commitment required to systemize once and for all, why the vision for the business has to come before any documentation, how to gather assets by category rather than by department, and why owners should organize the documents they already own before building new ones. He also explains where every document eventually lands, in the twelve playbooks that make up the operating system.

This episode moves past file management and into what the clutter costs. What happens to a business when the process lives only in the owner's head or a key employee's? What actually sparks joy here, a tidy folder structure or four days away without the company needing you? And which documents already sitting in your business have value you have not recognized? If you are ready to get the business out of your head and into documentation, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Resources

Read the book behind the method, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

Listen to the episode, Operating System Foundational Best Practices

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner opens a short series on the foundational principles behind a business operating system. He goes back to a 2016 Strategic Coach session in Toronto, where an owner doing $40 million in revenue told him the difference came down to documented systems, processes, and a team, then pulled up his computer at lunch and showed him what those documents actually looked like.

Bradley explains why documentation is an asset in the same way a rental property is an asset, and why most owners stall in front of a blank screen. He walks through four best practices: build one template so every document shares a look, appoint a systems champion instead of carrying the work alone, hold yourself accountable to the time you block, and expect resistance. He also shares what he lost when his first executive assistant left inside a year and every process they had built lived only in his head.

This episode moves beyond the idea of systemizing and into the execution of it. What in your business exists only in your head right now? Who on your team is better suited to document it than you are? And what would you hand a new hire if the person doing the work left tomorrow? If you have believed in documented systems for years but have never finished building them, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Resources Mentioned

Pick up 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Check out The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (Reminder: add hyperlink)

The E-Myth, referenced throughout the episode

Listen to the earlier Above The Business episode on appointing a systems champion

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner works through a coaching conversation with a business owner who says twice in the same meeting that he and his second in command need to get on the same page. Bradley asks whether either of them has ever put anything into a shared document. The answer is no.

Bradley walks through what happens next. The two of them list roughly twenty open items on a live screen share, combine those into four to six functional areas of the business, then work each one with questions about where things are stuck and what the outcome should look like. He follows with a second example involving a sales rep entering the third month of onboarding with no defined targets for the next thirty days.

This episode moves past the language of alignment and into the practice of it. Why does every business drift toward complexity rather than simplicity? What does a team member lose when the owner's context stays inside the owner's head? And how much clarity is available in a document that takes fifteen minutes to build? If your team keeps agreeing to get on the same page without ever producing one, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner describes a Friday sales call review he used to attend, where the person running it removed a participant within the first five minutes for showing up without timestamps. He recounts what happened to the woman who came prepared, took blunt feedback on her discovery and her pitch, and returned the following week having closed four of her five calls.

Bradley explains what he found when he finally reviewed one of his own recorded calls, and why the distance between how he thought he sounded and how he actually sounded changed the way he coaches. He covers capturing calls for the team, why reps should self-analyze before anyone else weighs in, and how a weekly session breaking down one call at a time sits alongside role play rather than replacing it. He also makes the case for video, so the team can read body language and not just tone.

This episode moves past role play and into real play. When was the last time someone reviewed a call you personally ran? Do your reps ever hear themselves work? And are you coaching from what you assume happens on those calls or from what actually happened? If you want a repeatable way to improve how your team sells, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner breaks down the eight best practices behind a monthly team bonus that the team tracks on its own. He built the one-pager after a listener emailed asking how to structure one, and he walks through the whole thing here.

Bradley covers aligning the bonus to quarterly priorities or annual objectives, keeping the math simple enough to explain in a sentence, and putting the plan in writing so it survives past the meeting where it was announced. He also covers how often to bring it up with the team, why a plan needs at least ninety days before you judge it, where bonus pay should land as a percentage of total compensation, and whether part-time and fractional team members belong in the plan.

This episode moves beyond the mechanics of paying people. Does your bonus point at the results you are already chasing this year? Can every person on your team explain how it works without looking it up? And have you given the current plan enough runway to tell you anything? If you are putting together a monthly team bonus and want it to actually change behavior, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Resources Mentioned

Listen to the companion episode on compensation plan guidelines: https://podcasts.apple.com/rs/podcast/above-the-business/id1491236828?i=1000780448943

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner makes the case for the Socratic method as a team development tool. He opens with an analogy. A person drowning in the water needs a rope, not a question about how they ended up there. There are moments when a team member needs the answer handed to them, and moments when the better move is to draw the answer out of them.

Bradley walks through what skilled questioning looks like in practice, including Dan Martell's one, three, one method and the questions he used during a performance improvement plan conversation six months ago. He shares two situations where digging past surface behavior changed the outcome, and explains why the person asking the questions is the one in control of the conversation.

This conversation moves past scripts and into curiosity. When was the last time you dug more than an inch deep with someone on your team? Do you know enough about where your people came from to understand how they see the work? And are you coaching everyone the same way when they each need to be met where they are? If you want to become a better coach to the team you already have, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Resources Mentioned

Go back to Bradley's earlier episode on coaching versus consulting.

Listen to the Develop A-Players Playbook episode

Listen to the episode on performance improvement plans

Listen to the episode on the functional areas of business

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner breaks down the three functional areas of a business: growth, delivery and fulfillment, and operations. Owners lean hard into one of them based on what they did before they started the company, and that tilt shows up in the books they read, the conferences they attend, and the problems they instinctively reach for.

Bradley explains how growth splits further into marketing and sales, why a strong sales background often leaves the marketing function underbuilt, and why operations is the area he sees optimized least. He closes with a three-step thinking exercise: name the area you lean into, name the area that needs the most work, then decide whether the fix is a hire or a system.

This conversation moves beyond self-assessment and into the decision that follows it. Which area gets your attention by default? Which one is quietly capping the company? And once you find the gap, do you build the role or build the system? If you have been solving every problem through the same lens, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner maps where developing your team actually sits inside a business blueprint. Team is one of the principles in the BlueprintOS operating system, and it carries three playbooks: attract A-players, develop A-players, and retain A-players. This episode covers the middle one and picks up directly from last week's conversation on performance improvement plans.

Bradley walks through the three elements of the Develop A-Players Playbook. An ongoing training and development system for people who are years past onboarding. A current state and future state accountability chart that shows each role, who holds it, and the three to five things they own. And a performance management system, which is where PIPs live. He also explains why playbooks operate like gears in a watch rather than silos, and why the accountability chart earns its keep twice, once with the team you have and once with the candidate you are trying to recruit.

This conversation moves beyond hiring and into what happens after. What are you doing intentionally to develop someone who has been on the team for five years? Can your current team see what the organization looks like three years from now? And what is your actual process when a good performer drops below quota? If you have built a team and stopped there, this episode is for you.

Join us in the free Circle community and hop on the email list to get practical tools, resources, trainings, and updates on what we’re working on next.

https://blueprintos.com/assets/

Coach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:

https://coachpconsulting.com

Be sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.

Autopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day. They optimize your applicant tracking system, post job listings, and source candidates through social media and local communities.

With their continuous recruiting approach, you can save time, reduce hiring costs, and receive pre-screened candidates without paying hiring fees or commissions.

https://www.autopilotrecruiting.com

Mention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.

Direct Clicks specializes in digital marketing solutions designed for business owners who want measurable results. Their team supports companies through paid advertising, SEO, and strategic marketing systems that help generate consistent leads.

Exclusive offer for listeners:

https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusiness

Get a free marketing campaign audit where their team reviews your website, SEO, content, social media, and paid advertising, then provides actionable recommendations. If you partner with them, all setup fees will be waived.

Above The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale without their constant involvement.