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 with a detail most owners skip: making every document in the business look the same. He explains why a shared standard for fonts, headings, colors, and margins signals to the team that the company runs by design. Without one, documents end up looking thrown together, like Frankenstein.

Bradley walks through the Playbook for Creating Playbooks, the template behind BlueprintOS documentation. He shares the formatting standards he uses and the 15-second process for starting any new document: copy the template, name it, and file it in the right playbook folder. He also explains why he loads the same standard into Claude as a skill, so AI-produced assets come back in the house format.

Formatting alone will not grow revenue, and Bradley says so directly. What does it tell your team when every document looks different? How much of your business still depends on your ability to make things up on the fly? And what changes when the owner is the first one to stop winging it? If you are ready to run your business on documented systems, 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

Check out the book Bradley recommends, Thinking in Systems

Catch up on the operating system series with 602: Marie Kondo Your Digital Files

Listen to 603: The Operating System Architecture

Hear the first Lead Yourself First episode with Dustin Booth

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 argues that a business vision becomes a real plan only once the numbers behind it are worked out. He explains how to define point A and set a three-year point B. He then shows how to measure the gap between them across revenue, profit, customer count, and average customer value.

Bradley shares the growth rates required to double a business in two or three years. He explains how revenue per full-time equivalent shapes future team size, and why marketing typically runs 8 to 12 percent of top-line revenue. He also walks through a first-year HVAC owner who reverse engineered a $900,000 target. That owner then had to make hard calls once a $28,000 billboard claimed more than a quarter of his marketing budget.

This episode moves beyond goal setting and into commitment. Can you name your current numbers with confidence? Does your three-year target hold up once team size and marketing spend are calculated? And which plans need to wait because the budget cannot carry them? If you want a vision you can act on with conviction, 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 opens Q4 by focusing on the step that decides whether quarterly priorities actually get done: allocating resources to them. He outlines the BlueprintOS planning structure of three-year vision, one-year objectives, and quarterly priorities, and walks through a simple process for narrowing a long list down to three to five priorities.

Bradley then breaks down what backing a priority looks like in practice, from calendar time, money, and team capacity to trackers, meetings, incentives, planning, and documentation. He shares how BlueprintOS is resourcing its upcoming member retreat and why a client's pool maintenance division has struggled with nothing allocated to it.

This episode moves beyond goal setting and into commitment. Is every priority on your list backed by real time, money, and attention? Which items are actually pebbles or sand? And what would change if you removed the priorities you are not willing to resource? If you are planning your next quarter and want your priorities to turn into results, 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

Traction by Gino Wickman

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 with a step that comes before writing any new documentation. Any business that has operated for a while already holds valuable assets: intake forms, discovery call notes, sales process documents, spreadsheets, and organized folders. Bradley explains why he never recognized these as assets until he started building his own operating system.

He revisits why owners systemize in the first place: fun, freedom, flexibility, and financial success, defined on their own terms. He connects that to the three parts of the BlueprintOS blueprint, which are leading yourself first, a roadmap, and an operating system. He also shares his own Kolbe profile and why a founder with little natural follow-through has to build systems and people around him.

This episode moves beyond documentation and into commitment. What assets are already sitting in your shared drive? What would change if you organized them before creating anything new? And what will you actually do with the next three months? If you keep consuming business content without changing how you operate, 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

Revisit episode 602, Marie Kondo Your Digital Files, to clean up your existing files

Read the book Bradley calls required reading for business owners, The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber

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 closes the operating system best practices series with one principle: owners do not get bonus points for remembering. After hearing "I don't remember that number" from business owners on recent calls, he argues the more important question is whether you know where to look.

He walks through a vendor sales call for the exterior remodeling company, where questions about profitability, job counts, lead volume, and sales rep appointments were all answered from Google Docs and Google Sheets. He explains why memorizing reinforces the business's dependence on the owner, why the same standard applies to key team members, and why memory-run businesses tend to hit a ceiling around $750,000 to $1 million.

This episode moves beyond documentation tactics and into what the business actually rests on. If someone asked for your 2026 objectives, could you pull them up? What happens to the business when you take a few days away with your family? And how much of what your team needs lives only in your head? If you have built the business on your own memory and feel it shaking as it grows, 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 walks through the scorecard he built to evaluate his own business acquisition deals. The trigger is a recent sit-down with the owner of a deck company who has been the rainmaker of his business for 30 years. Bradley uses that conversation to test whether there is a transferable asset to buy or only the owner’s job.

He covers the work in three parts. Before the meeting, write down why you would buy, know your cost to build the same thing from scratch, do your homework, and set the tone. The meeting itself is an eleven-section conversation covering the origin story, lead generation, the customer journey, the team, the owner’s role, and the financials. After the meeting come the document request, red and green flags, and a deal scorecard rated out of 40.

This episode moves beyond deal structure and into judgment. Is the lead flow transferable? What would it cost to build this yourself? And how would a buyer evaluate your own business? If you are weighing an acquisition, or want a business that works as a transferable asset, 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 episode, Bradley sits down with David Meerman Scott, author of 14 books and longtime speaker, to talk about his newest book, The Fandom Playbook. David explains how years of studying the Grateful Dead, the Apollo lunar program, and the neuroscience of fandom led to a practical guide built around nine plays for generating fans of a business.

They discuss why nobody cares about your products and services, how a Southern California dentist more than doubled his new patients by sharing his love of skateboarding, and why bringing customers together in person meets a deep human need to belong to a tribe. David also shares where AI fits, from querying his own library of content to drafting a first pass of an episode recap email, and why he still edits the final version himself.

This conversation moves beyond marketing tactics and into the human side of building a business. What would change if customers knew what you care about outside of work? Where does automation help, and where does it cost you a relationship? And how much of your marketing still sounds like you? If you want to stand out through real human connection while everyone else leans on AI, this conversation 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

• Pick up David’s new book, The Fandom Playbook
• Get the free Complete Guide to Fandom Marketing and an excerpt of The Fandom Playbook, no registration required: fandom.marketing
• Check out Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan
• Listen to the previous episode with David Meerman Scott, here.

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.