These are the playbooks I actually run — distilled into guides you can use without ever talking to me. No email gates, no teasers. If you work through one and want a second brain on your specific situation, you know where I am.
Each one: a mental model, a worksheet that saves as you check it off, and a clean printout.
Eight guides is a lot to land on cold. Tap the version that sounds like you and I’ll light up its path in the shelf below — or ignore all of this and browse the whole thing. There’s no wrong door; this is just the shortest one.
No steady clients yet, plenty of doubt about whether this is even a business.
Your path
Work is coming in — you’re underpriced, or you blend in with everyone else.
Your path
The business runs, but you’re the ceiling — every job routes through your two hands.
Your path
It works, and you suspect there’s another business sitting right next to it.
Your path
You’re past one business — now it needs to run, market, and survive without you holding every piece.
Your path
not sure which version you’re on? that’s a fine first conversation too — tell me where you’re stuck.
guide no. 1
The adjacency audit: your customers already buy the next thing — map it, design the seams, and wire a flywheel instead of a second job.
Read it freeguide no. 2
Price the context, not the task: the triangle of three, your four levers, and a quoting machine that answers same-day.
Read it freeguide no. 3
Teach first, sell last: build the tool your clients share for you, co-brand it for partners, and ship it in a week.
Read it freeguide no. 4
Working with an executive or virtual assistant: Green/Yellow/Red trust levels, one shared platform, the mistake protocol — and my actual working agreement, free to steal.
Read it freeguide no. 5
Brand segmentation for flywheel builders: separate identities and audiences on one shared spine — with every brand free to fail alone. The sequel to No. 1.
Read it freeguide no. 6
The peer bench: turn a lonely one-person flywheel into a community of peers who make each other better — give first, guard the line, and ask someone who’s done it before. Companion to No. 1.
Read it freeguide no. 7
The operational audit in four passes — revenue vs. cost, the real bottleneck, the bus factor, the invisible machinery — told through the time a friend ran it and built anyway. (This is the bottleneck audit, grown up.)
Read it freeguide no. 8
Control what you can, engineer the rest, and build demand instead of hoping for it — the three-bucket model, environment over willpower (yes, including the hats and the tie-dye jacket), no sacred cows, and taking more swings.
Read it freeguide no. 9
Your FAQ is where deciding customers actually go — stop wasting it on softballs. Answer the scary questions, sell with your exclusions, route every answer somewhere, and mine it all from your real inbox.
Read it freeguide no. 10
Quitting is a skill: kill-or-keep dates set before you’re attached, sunk cost unmasked, the mission separated from the vehicle, and the graceful shutdown — from someone who closed a business that nearly took the rest with it.
Read it freethe shelf is caught up — for now
Ten guides in, the coming shelf is empty and taking requests. Ask for the one you need — the most-requested topic gets written next, honestly, not quickly.
I didn’t invent this thinking — I ran it until it was mine. These are the books doing the heavy lifting underneath the guides. No affiliate links, no kickbacks: buy them anywhere, borrow them from the library, or ask me and I’ll lend you my copy.
Shelf rule: every book on this page — all three shelves — is one I’ve actually read and argued with. Nothing lands here off a best-seller list or a podcast clip.
James Clear
systems beat goals — an idle-mode business is just a habit system wearing a logo. read this before designing any flywheel spoke.
Charles Duhigg
cue → routine → reward: the loop underneath every checklist I build. this is the research-heavy parent of Atomic Habits — read Duhigg for WHY the loop works, Clear for how to stack it. keystone habits are the reason my whole week hangs off one small review.
W. Edwards Deming
quality is a property of the SYSTEM, not the worker. my whole mistake protocol — fix the process, never blame the person — is Deming with a kraft paper wrapper.
Simon Sinek
the philosophy sentence at the top of every guide I write? that’s this book’s fault. the why comes before the checklist, always.
Lex Sisney
how organizations actually scale — energy, structure, and timing. the closest thing I’ve found to a textbook for flywheel architecture.
An honest shelf needs a middle tier: books I genuinely got value from and still recommend — with a caveat attached. The mechanisms are sound; the shtick is loud. Take the machine, leave the costume.
Mike Michalowicz
the envelope trick genuinely works: pay profit first, split the bank accounts, make the business live on what’s left. behavioral finance for operators. the branding is a costume — the discipline underneath is real, and I run a version of it across the spokes.
Mike Michalowicz
yes, that title. but the point survives it: start with what you have and let constraints do the designing. it’s the camera-shop lesson inverted — I had enough runway to fail slowly, and that runway cost me. gimmicky? completely. wrong? no.
A shelf is more honest when it shows what got returned. These are influential ideas I’ve read carefully, understood, and built my businesses in deliberate opposition to.
Milton Friedman, 1970 — “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”
read it so you know what you’re disagreeing with. a business that exists only to extract is a flywheel with no spokes — nothing feeds anything, and the community it sits in is just terrain. mine are built to be load-bearing parts of a place.
Tim Ferriss — automate the business, escape the work
people assume my idle-mode spokes are this book. they’re not. Ferriss automates so he can leave; I build businesses that idle so I can STAY — in the craft, in the community, building the next spoke. work isn’t the thing to escape; unowned work is. also, let’s be honest: nobody’s week around here is four hours.
I believe there’s enough opportunity that competition is mostly optional — and when we finally do need to compete, we carve out businesses, sectors, and audiences that may overlap but hold different goals and purposes, so everyone involved gets to reach their greatest potential.
Partnerships, alliances, and collaboration are how the human spirit has always moved forward. I don’t believe in sabotage. If your closest local rival suddenly starts beating you, the answer is “yes, and” — meet it, build on it, let it make you better.
“I share my knowledge publicly because I want to be beaten — so I can fall down and stand up again ten times stronger.”
— David Teter · this is why the guides are free