I’m David Teter. I run a small portfolio of professional-service businesses in Lafayette, Indiana — built so they interlink, refer into each other, and keep earning when my attention is elsewhere. People kept asking why I wasn’t selling advice teaching what I actually do. This is me finally saying yes.
Practitioner, not guru. You can go check the work — and the scars.
Each business sits deliberately next to the others, so referrals flow naturally in every direction — no cold outreach required, because the ecosystem does the introducing.
A well-built service can run in low-attention mode — earning steadily while its cash and reputation fund the growth of the next one. Portfolio energy management, not hustle culture.
One person can run a small flywheel. A team can run a big one. Most people can{APO}t design one — how the brands link, where the seams go, what gets productized. That design work is what I do.
Any consultant who won’t show you their scars is selling you a brochure. This ledger is a draft — like everything here — and it gets more honest as I write it.
A note on method: I came up as a product manager, where the discipline is to move quickly and fail fast — because for most attempts, the consequences are smaller than the time lost waiting. So yes, I’ve had missteps in business and in life. I made sure they failed quickly. Cheap tuition, promptly paid.
how this ledger runs
Every experiment gets a kill-or-keep date before I’m emotionally invested. And honesty about the method: quick failures are still expensive — mine cost real time, energy, reputation, and flirted with burnout. Quick doesn’t make the tuition free; it keeps it survivable. The expensive failure is the slow one you keep feeding out of pride. Fail fast, log it, stand up stronger.
entry no. 001
I ran my favorite tagline for years before admitting it didn’t fit the brand it was attached to. Retiring it hurt more than it should have. Lesson: sunk-cost love is real, and taste has to beat attachment.
entry no. 002
This one. People kept asking for it and I kept deflecting, because I wasn’t comfortable. Some of that reluctance was diligence; some was fear wearing diligence’s clothes. Learning to tell them apart cost me years of compounding.
entry no. 003
A retail camera shop — a luxury product — opened during a recession, in a market too small to carry it, executing a misguided version of what I actually wanted: helping people take better photos and live through their memories. The store failed on schedule and was still expensive. The mission survived it — community photography sits at the root of businesses I run today. Full postmortem in the release notes.
entries no. 004+
The honest version of this list takes longer to write than a website. It will grow — that’s the whole idea of a working draft. Ask me in person and I’ll tell you one today.
anticipated
Some of these guides will miss. My first pricing for this work will be wrong in some direction. When it happens, it goes in the ledger — an imperfect early flag beats a polished late surprise.
…and can’t see the adjacent ones hiding next to it. This is where the flywheel conversation lands hardest.
The side-hustle is real; the structure isn’t yet. Let’s build it right the first time.
Everything runs through you and it’s starting to hurt. Delegation, productizing, and pricing are learnable systems.
Several services that don’t yet feed each other — the interlink design is the engagement.
Eight playbooks written down and given away — with a stage-by-stage path (deciding, charging, bottlenecked, expanding, architecting) so you start on the right one. No email gates.
Group sessions, community-priced — the mission is local capability, not funnel optimization.
No rate card, because your situation isn{APO}t a rate-card situation. Tell me where you are and where you{APO}re stuck; you{APO}ll get a real number fast.
“Some of my businesses make money while they sleep — so I can build the next one. Yours can too.”
— David Teter
The first conversation is free and obligation-free. Bring the business you have and the itch you can’t scratch — we’ll find the flywheel hiding in it.
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