Practical thinking on how businesses run.

Buy ready-made software by default. Build only when how you work is what customers pay for and no product can follow it. A simple test to decide before you spend.

Write down the few routines that cause problems, let the people who do the work write them, and keep each one to a page. Documentation should save time within a month.

A second location copies your habits as well as your offer. Check that the first one runs without you, write down how it works and agree the numbers before you sign anything.

Test a new idea with real customers and a small trial before committing money. Define what must be true, sell before you build, and decide in advance what result means stop.

An owner needs a short weekly view of cash, sales, delivery, customers and people. Fewer numbers, read every week, beat a long report read once a quarter.

Founder dependency is rarely about character. It is usually an operating model that never caught up with the business.

Automation pays when the process is stable, frequent and well understood. Before that, it tends to make a bad process faster.