In this episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, host Bradley Hamner explores how small business and insurance agency owners can grow leadership, develop teams, and scale profitably by treating operational knowledge as tangible assets. He opens with an analogy comparing beachfront versus non‑beachfront Airbnb properties to illustrate that income follows the value of assets. The core argument is that a business’s assets are not just its people but its documented operating systems, playbooks, and recorded training sessions. Hamner shares a conversation with a highly successful entrepreneur who runs two $5 million‑revenue businesses, highlighting the entrepreneur’s practice of live sales‑play training and the missed opportunity of not recording those sessions. Hamner emphasizes that capturing video, voice memos, Zoom recordings, and turning them into structured playbooks creates intellectual property that can attract top talent, increase enterprise value, and make the business more sellable. He recounts a personal story about losing institutional knowledge when an early executive left, underscoring the importance of systematic documentation. The episode concludes with actionable advice: record all training, create playbooks, and view these artifacts as assets that drive revenue and scalability. Sponsor segments promote Coach P Consulting’s intensive insurance‑agency coaching and Club Capital’s accounting, CFO, and tax advisory services for agency owners.
Chapters
So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. Hey, before we get into today's episode, did you know that Club Capital is the largest accounting advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, providing monthly accounting, CFO services, and tax preparation. Check them out at club.capital.
Hey everyone, uh, so I was talking to a business owner today and I was asking him around what were some of the challenges that he faced in his business. And the very first one that he mentioned was, you know, I really don't know exactly how to be able to grow and scale my business. Specifically, he said I'm not really sure exactly how to be able to scale. Back a few weeks ago, I recorded a, uh, solo episode on a Friday and was called Building at the Beach. And so the whole idea behind that was, if you got a piece of land, you know, what is your vision for what you're trying to build? I mean, do you want to put a shack on there? Do you want to put a, you know, a 4,000-square-foot home? Or do you, or do you want to build a you know, 50-unit condo. Well, depending on what your vision is, is going to require the foundation, how deep you're going to need to be able to go with the, the structure, right? And so I wanted to share somewhat of a similar idea. And we were at our Beat the Odds retreat back in April with different business owners, and we had rented an Airbnb that was, uh, well, it was not actually on the beach, it was just like right across from the beach. If any of you have ever been to the Destin 30 EA area, you'll know what I mean. And so I actually can't remember exactly how much we, uh, rented it per night. Uh, Lauren, my EA, and some of the team had set that up. But you'll get this analogy that let's say that the house we rented, which was maybe 4,000 square foot, there was the exact same house. One was on the beach, like literally you could walk out the back and walk onto the beach. And then the exact same house was right across the street from the beach. And so how much difference do you believe that the house that's on the beach is able to get, say, through Airbnb per night compared to the one who is right across from the beach? I mean, we're talking what, 20, 30 feet, maybe, maybe a little bit more than that, but really close. Well, quite a bit more is the one that's on the beach is going to be able to garner. So the idea there is that's an analogy for income follows assets. Let me give you another one. If you had a 5,000-square-foot penthouse in Manhattan that's overlooking Central Park, but you have a 5,000-square-foot apartment that's in Huntsville, Alabama, which one is going to sell for more or which one would have more rent? Clearly the one that's in Manhattan looking over Central Park is going to garner whatever, 50 times what something in Huntsville, Alabama is. Why? Because the asset is more valuable. So what's the lesson for us in business? I think it is that income follows assets. And so the question is, if income or revenue follows the assets of the business, what are the assets? And the one thing that many of you may be thinking about is, oh, well, the assets are my team. My team is my greatest asset. And I'm not necessarily going to disagree with you, but I do want to kind of encourage you to think in terms of not just your team being the assets, but specifically the operating system that you build for your business and all of the playbooks that you have. So today I was on the phone with an incredibly very, very successful entrepreneur and business owner. He has got two businesses. They are both absolutely truly crushing it. They do combined close to $5 million in top line revenue. They're both very profitable. The cultures of both businesses are just absolutely outstanding. He's got leadership teams in place. I mean, he really is doing a tremendous amount of good. And one of the things he said that he does he does so well and he really enjoys— it gives— it actually gives him energy— is whenever he is actually training his team. And I said, you know, it would have been easy to get like, okay, yeah, it's great, continue to do that. But I started to poke around to kind of get an idea of like, what does that actually look like? Is that whenever he's listening in on a sales call for somebody? I mean, what, what does he actually mean? What are the— what's this specific example? And he was like, well, you know, it's morning whenever I'm teaching a specific play that we run and being able to get feedback. And then I'm setting up some, some, you know, general role plays, and I'm giving them some feedback on how to do that. And we're going through, you know, so it was basically in this particular case, it was some sales training, and he really gets a lot of energy out of doing that. And I asked him a question, I said, do you record those? And he said, no, I don't. And even by just asking him that question, did he record them, He was like, man, I think I probably should do that. Now, this is somebody who he knows the value of creating playbooks. Those plays that he mentions are in documents, they're on a Google document or in a Word document. It doesn't matter what platform, but they're written down. So he's already done that. Okay. And that, that's an asset. But him actually giving all of the nuance and the training and the discussion around that. That is an incredible asset to go along with that word track or that script, that play, whatever that may in particular be. And so he began to realize, he said, yeah, I mean, if I started to actually document and record the videos of me doing the training, where I would be a year from now, the library of training that I would have, that would be an incredible asset that would really allow us to be able to attract even better A-players, because then he could send that to— he could start sending those videos to videographers and they could do some edits to it and they can make it kind of YouTube style. Not for him in particular to put it on YouTube, but YouTube style just internally for his team. And that's when he can start building even greater assets. So income follows assets. So specifically What are some assets? The training that you do every single time, as much as possible. Whenever you're, you're doing some sort of training for your team, record that. Even if it's on the, it's the voice memos on your phone, recording that and capturing those things. Okay. So I love to be able to do as much as possible, uh, Zoom calls. And I just record all of them. Just today I was on a kickoff call, uh, with a client that was on Zoom. We recorded that, sent that over to Lauren. I said, Lauren, will you watch this video and go in and create the playbook that goes along with the context of this new kickoff call thing that we were doing? And she's going to create the playbook that's going to look exactly like all of the other playbooks that we have. Now that becomes an asset to the business. I think I told the story in a separate one, separate session around my very first EA and how I didn't do any of this. And I gave them the context of setting appointments and then walking back. And then whenever she left a year later, all of that IP and all that intellectual knowledge walked out the door with her, and I was completely starting from scratch. And so I think we get the idea of— I'm not the first to say, have a good team and develop systems and processes. That's not new to anybody, but maybe just allowing yourself to start thinking of them as assets to the business. And even if you have a business that you're not able to sell, okay, so you've got a business does, you know, $750,000 in top line revenue, but, you know, really by the nature of that business is not really sellable. Ironically, the same thing that makes a business sellable, where somebody would be willing to buy it, is the exact same thing that allows you to be able to scale that business. And that's what I shared with that business owner I talked to this afternoon. So income follows assets. The more assets that you're able to build, the playbooks, the thing written down, and then if you can add in videos where you've actually trained on that asset, that is whenever you create a— you create enterprise value for that business that if you do have a business that you're able to sell and some of you have multiple businesses at some point, the more that you can continue to unpack the intellectual property in your own head, capture that down in documents along with video formats, you'll be able to grow and scale your business. Hope this served you. All right. So next episode. Lead well.
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