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Built around the same ideas as everything else here: think like an owner, stay close to people, question everything, keep improving.
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Most guides hand you five valuation methods and no way to choose. Here's the one that actually fits an owner-operated business, plus the real math to run it yourself.
Read the article →A commercial strategy case study on what Trader Joe's gets right about own label — and why Waitrose needs fewer, more distinctive products, not more choice.
Read the article →Two businesses with the same revenue. One can ride out a bad quarter. The other is one slow month from a loss. Here's the number that tells them apart.
Read the article →A commercial strategy case study on why Morrisons' café closures are a format problem — and what a Costco-style food counter could do instead.
Read the article →Revenue tells you how big your business is. It says nothing about whether it's good. Here are the four numbers that actually do.
Read the article →Not a funnel. Not a campaign. A true story, told to the right people, that helps them get what they want — and then travels on its own.
Read the article →Private equity is sitting on 33,575 unsold businesses. That's not the real problem — it's the headline that makes a much bigger, more everyday one impossible to ignore.
Read the article →The SDE-times-multiple estimate is the starting point, not the sale price. Here's what actually changes it once a real buyer and due diligence enter the picture.
Read the article →SDE multiples run from under 2x to over 6x depending on what you own. Here's the real range for 16 Main Street categories — and what actually moves you within yours.
Read the article →The formula is two numbers. Where you land in the range depends on three things most owners never think to check.
Read the article →Debt doesn't create risk. It takes whatever risk the business already had and hands almost all of it to whoever put in the equity.
Read the article →A model with one growth scenario isn't really a model. It's a forecast wearing a model's clothes.
Read the article →Most explanations of leveraged buyouts skip the one part that actually breaks people's models: debt and interest depend on each other, in a circle, on purpose.
Read the article →Raising money isn't a milestone. It's a trade — a smaller slice of something the capital is supposed to make bigger.
Read the article →Ten years running a real business is a specific kind of information edge — but only in the categories where it actually applies.
Read the article →The same law that tells a small business owner to concentrate tells a VC to do the opposite — and the reason why says a lot about who can afford to lose.
Read the article →A sixty-year-old thought experiment about two boxes explains why some businesses get better terms than others — before they've even asked.
Read the article →The math is easy. The goodbyes aren't. That's usually taken as a reason the math is hard to act on. It's actually a sign the math was misread.
Read the article →Power law usually gets explained through venture capital and billion-dollar exits. Here's what it actually means if you run a real business.
Read the article →Every "signs your business is failing" list gives you symptoms to worry about. Here's what actually tells you where you stand.
Read the article →Ten years, three completely different loyalty systems, and real sales data on what actually moved the needle.
Read the article →We had 5,000 phone numbers sitting in our customer data and never sent a single text in eight years. Once we started, one small change made all the difference.
Read the article →My new book started with a realization: the problem was never my discipline. It was the story I'd been told about time.
Read the article →Ten years into running a plant-based ice cream shop, I walked away from Erewhon, Whole Foods, and Gelson's. Here's the honest answer to the question I get asked the most.
Read the article →There's no right answer. That's exactly why it works.
Read the article →After 10 years of running one, here's the paradox nobody talks about.
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