The Banana Stand:
Small Business Resources for
People Actually Running One

Most small business systems assume
you already know what you’re doing.

This one doesn’t.

Every small business I’ve watched fail had the same problem: the owner thought it was one thing but it was always something else.

They’d blame cash flow. But a shortage of cash flow the the symptom. It was never the problem, it was just what broke first. The real issue was somewhere else: how they priced work, which clients they took on, whether they’d built systems that only worked if they stayed small, or the way they structured their week so they had zero capacity to fix anything when things started shifting. Better spreadsheets and software don’t fix these things.

Most small business advice says you just slot a system into place and everything else follows. It doesn’t work that way. You need to understand what’s really happening in your business before any framework matters. And you need to know which problems will kill you this month versus which ones you can ignore until later.

That’s what you’ll find here: the thinking behind what actually breaks small businesses, and what’s worth fixing first.

Six core pieces of writing walk through the patterns. Browse them. See what lands for you.