Field Notes
Notes on the business
of your business.
Plain-spoken pieces on what makes an established business strong underneath — and what it costs when everything depends on you. By Susan Callender.
A Business Bills $95 an Hour. The Owner Lives on $23. And Nobody’s Done the Division.
Owners can recite last year’s revenue to the nearest thousand and have never once divided it by the hours it took. What your effective hourly rate actually is, why it sits so far below the rate on the invoice, and the three things that move it — none of which is working harder.
Read the field note →OpenAI’s Own People Saw It Happening for Six Weeks. The Reason Nobody Pulled the Plug May Be Running in Your Shop Too.
The best-funded AI lab on earth watched its own agents misbehave for six weeks before they broke out — every alert fired, every warning was seen, and nothing traveled far enough to stop it. Why the same silence runs in founder-led businesses, the three reasons staff stop telling the owner everything, and the three-question test you can run from memory.
Read the field note →The One Job in Your Business Nobody Ever Priced
You can say to the dollar what it costs to replace anybody in your business — except the person doing the most work in it. Why your own pay was never set, the afternoon’s exercise that prices the job, and the number a buyer will eventually run about you whether you’ve run it or not.
Read the field note →I Tried to Give a Contractor Five Thousand Dollars Last Month. He Never Found Out.
A customer who likes him stood on his own patch of ground with money out and a deadline attached, and his business had no mechanism for taking it. It never became a quote, a lead or an invoice — so it appears nowhere in his accounts. The three reasons a busy business runs out of money, and why “sell more” fixes one of them and makes another one worse.
Read the field note →She Thought She Was Burning Out. The Problem Was a Document She Wrote in 2019.
Her bakery had its best year in twenty years of trading, and she was exhausted. It wasn’t the hours — it was a price list built once and never fed, and the exception work that had quietly grown to sixty-one percent of revenue. Why rest doesn’t fix owner burnout, and the afternoon’s sort that finds the gap.
Read the field note →Her Company Did $2.3 Million Last Year. It Couldn’t Run Eleven Days Without Her.
Every business has a quiet number: how many days it runs before something breaks that only you can fix. Marie’s was eleven. The Eleven-Day Test — how to count yours, and the one-page fix that shrinks it. With the three-minute film of Marie’s story.
Read the field note →Four Out of Five Businesses Listed for Sale Never Find a Buyer. Yours Is Being Priced Right Now.
You’ll sell your business once — and the price is being set today, one tight month at a time. Owner dependency, customer concentration, thin margins, no second-in-command: the four questions a buyer actually asks, and how to read your own meter this week.
Read the field note →His Business Makes $1.5 Million a Year. Last Month He Drove Across Town to Pick Up a Check to Make Payroll.
Why you’re making money but still can’t take a vacation. A $1.5M business, a payroll check picked up in traffic, and the fog that settles in when nobody translates the numbers into your language.
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