Notebook of a COO

A service truck that has not moved since May is not a parked truck. It is about thirty three thousand six hundred dollars a month of billed work, and the raise the owner calls unaffordable is 2.6 percent of it. This is The Install: one tool, one vertical, one appointment on your calendar by the end. Today the tool is The Candidate Offer Stack and we are putting it in a residential HVAC company. A...

A toddler room that has been closed since June is not an empty room. It is twelve thousand nine hundred dollars a month of enrollment nobody can sell, and there is a waitlist for it. This is The Install: one tool, one vertical, one appointment on your calendar by the end. Today the tool is The Candidate Offer Stack and we are putting it in a licensed child care center. A worked example, not a clie...

A dental practice with two doctors and $1.9M a year lost a hygienist in March and the operatory sat dark for five months. Every Thursday the owner opened the applicant inbox, found nothing, and rewrote the job posting again. The posting was never what was broken. One hygiene day in that chair produces about $1,400, which is $22,000 a month, so five dark months cost about $110,000 of production tha...

Every class this week was full. Members are up on last year. And the month still comes in smaller. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because of something nobody on the floor can see while it is happening. This is The Install: one tool, one vertical, one appointment on your calendar by the end. Today the tool is The Creep Sheet and we are putting it in a gym. A worked example, not a client...

Your color line went up twice. You started giving away a bond treatment. Your team got a raise. Your menu did not move. That gap is where a salon quietly loses money, and a full book is exactly what hides it. This is The Install: one tool, one vertical, one appointment on your calendar by the end. Today the tool is The Creep Sheet and we are putting it in a salon. A worked example, not a client. A...

Your crew got a raise. Your contracts did not. That gap is where a cleaning company quietly loses money, and nothing on the invoice tells you it is happening. This is The Install: one tool, one vertical, one appointment on your calendar by the end. Today the tool is The Creep Sheet and we are putting it in a cleaning company. A worked example, not a client. You clean an office three nights a week...

Your costs arrive weekly. Your price changes once a year. That gap is where a kitchen quietly loses money, and nothing on the page tells you it is happening. This is The Install: one tool, one vertical, one appointment on your calendar by the end. Today the tool is The Creep Sheet and we are putting it in a restaurant. A worked example, not a client. A chicken dish sells at fourteen dollars. Twelv...

An auto shop owner with five bays and $1.6M a year kept closing months that looked good on the profit and loss and felt wrong in the bank account. There was no single bad line. There were four hundred small ones. A 25 percent Section 232 tariff had pushed his real parts basket up 14 percent while his pricing file sat untouched since 2024, and his own tiered matrix was quietly demoting his markup e...

Monday's teardown priced TrueFlow Plumbing's missed calls at one hundred twenty six thousand dollars a year. This Install walks the Missed Call Money Map into a two partner law firm, where the ticket is not six hundred twelve dollars, it is a three to ten thousand dollar retained matter, and the caller in trouble never leaves a voicemail. I quiz you on the chant, then run all five steps with law f...

Monday I showed you one hundred twenty six thousand dollars going to voicemail at a plumbing company. Today the Missed Call Money Map walks into a dental practice, where the front desk is checking in one patient, on hold with an insurance company, and listening to the phone ring. I walk the five steps with dental numbers: why misses pile up at lunch and Monday at eight, what a new patient is actua...

A plumber with six trucks and $2.1M a year had never once opened his phone system's call log. When he finally did, he found 44 calls a week ringing out to voicemail, and six or seven callers who never came back. At a $612 average ticket, that pencils out to $126,000 a year walking to the next plumber on Google. In this teardown, JT walks the fix in three parts: measure the leak, price the coverage...

The Owner Tax Ledger rides shotgun into a home services company, where the owner is the estimator, the dispatcher, and collections, all from the truck seat. The handoff is the Standard Ten, one page that prices your ten most common jobs so quotes go out in minutes and stop waiting on your evening. This Install builds on Monday's anchor episode, Everyone Got Labor Day Off Except You. Start there if...

The Owner Tax Ledger walks into a salon, where the owner is also the highest paid stylist in the building and the tax hides in the gaps between foils. I show you what goes on the card, why booth renters do not break the tool, and the one page Front Desk Decision Card that hands the circled item off for good. This Install builds on Monday's anchor episode, Everyone Got Labor Day Off Except You. Jum...

Everyone got Labor Day off except you. In the Season Four premiere I tear down Rosa's Table, a fourteen table restaurant doing one point four million a year, where three tasks route only through the owner and a broker priced that habit at roughly three hundred and ten thousand dollars. The food was never the problem. The holiday everyone else got off was the evidence. New season, new shape. Every...

Your team already knows the right answer, and they are asking you anyway. Today I break down why the line outside your head is a decision-rights problem, not a people problem, and give you three moves to fix it: count the asks, put a price on a decision, and coach the decision instead of the outcome. One list and one number this week, and the phone starts going quiet. ------------ GET THE FREE SMA...

Q4 is not a four month runway. October first to December thirty-first looks like ninety-two days, but once you pull out the weekends, the holidays, the dead week between Christmas and New Year, and the time off your team already asked for, you are left with about fifty-five days where work actually gets produced. Most owners write a fourth quarter goal without ever checking whether fifty-five days...

Most owners hire a mini version of themselves, then wonder why they are still stuck. The smartest next hire is not the work you are best at. It is the work you hate. In this episode, JT Taylor breaks down how to hire your headache first: find the draining, recurring work that does not need your genius, turn it into a playbook before you delegate, and hire someone to own the outcome instead of perf...

If your business stops the moment you stop, you do not own a business, you own a job. In this episode, JT Taylor breaks down the one test that tells you how dependent your business really is on you, and the three moves that turn a job that owns you into an asset that works whether you show up or not: the 30-day test, documenting the decision instead of the task, and the one number plus one backup...

We are slammed. We are so busy. Owners say it like a badge, but busy is not a business model, and being slammed is more often a symptom than a sign of health. In this episode, JT breaks down why most of the work filling your days is motion, not progress, and the three moves to get your time back without the business falling apart: learn to tell motion from progress, kill the work that feels produc...

The worst surprise in business is the customer who leaves out of nowhere, except it was never out of nowhere. They decided to leave weeks or months before they told you, and the cancellation was just the paperwork. In this episode, JT breaks down why retention is not measured at the renewal but decided in a hundred small moments along the way, and the three moves to see churn coming while you can...

My prices are too high. I keep losing deals on price. Almost every owner believes it, and it is almost never true. In this episode, JT reframes the most common complaint in small business: you are not too expensive, you are selling to the wrong people. Built on the Market Pyramid, he breaks down the three moves to fix it: see the three tiers of every market and choose yours on purpose, make the fo...

Before you spend another dollar on ads, hear this: most small businesses do not have a marketing problem, they have a follow-up problem. Half of all leads never get followed up with even once, and most sales take five or more touches to close. In this episode, JT breaks down the three moves that plug the hole in your bucket: trace what actually happens to a lead after it comes in, build one simple...

Most businesses that fail were profitable when they died. Profit is a story you tell at year end. Cash is what is actually in the account on the day payroll is due, and the two are not the same thing. In this episode, JT breaks down the money truth that quietly kills more good businesses than any competitor: why growth eats cash, the levers that shorten the time between doing the work and getting...

Every business has that one person who just handles it, and that warm feeling you get about them is hiding your single biggest risk. In this episode, JT breaks down why your best, most loyal employee is often a single point of failure, and the three moves that defuse it: how to find the key-person dependencies hiding in plain sight, how to turn tribal knowledge into documented systems your busines...

Everyone is racing to add AI, but AI will not fix a broken business. It will expose one. JT breaks down the three moves that separate the operators who make AI pay off from the ones who just add another tool to the pile: why automating a broken process just scales the chaos, the document, simplify, then automate sequence almost everyone skips, and the move nobody talks about, using AI as permissio...