The method
The R.E.S.T. Method
“If you can’t rest, you don’t really own it.”
- RRecord the Rules
- EEmpower the Team
- SSystematize the Flow
- TTest the Trust
Ideas
The frameworksbehind the work.
Named tools for the slow, specific work of taking your brain out of the business and putting it into a system.
Each one came out of our own companies before it went into a book, a course, or a client engagement.
The diagnostic
The Ownerless Business Ladder.
Five levels, from owner-dependent to ownerless growth. The Ladder tells you where the business stands today and what the next level asks of you.
The Ownerless Test is the recurring check. Take it again every time you think you’ve moved up a rung.
- Rung 5Ownerless GrowthThe goal
- Rung 4Systemized Execution
- Rung 3Documented Clarity
- Rung 2Delegated Chaos
- Rung 1Owner-DependentStart
The toolkit
How you climb. What holds you back.
The obstacles
The Five Traps
- 01Identity. “I am the business.”
- 02Trust. “Nobody will do it right.”
- 03Tech. “I’m not a tech person.”
- 04Marriage. “We’ll fix us later.”
- 05Mortality. “I’ll slow down when things slow down.”
For married owners
The Marriage Board Meeting
Monthly, an hour long, and non-optional. It isn’t a date night, and it isn’t an operations fight. It’s the one meeting where the two people who own the business decide together where it and they are going.
The daily tool
The Owner’s Almanac & Four Buckets
A Five-Day Decision Log, sorted into four buckets: Delete, Delegate, Decide Together, and Only Me. It’s modeled on the note cards Pat Fultz kept for 50 years.
For AI
The GUIDE Framework
The six-section path for putting AI to work in a family business, behind the Family Business Facelift Companion Workbook.
Go deeper
Put them to work.
The books lay out the thinking. Obsolete By Design walks you through it step by step. One-on-one, we do it with you.
Start here
Not sure which rung you’re on?
Tell us where the business is stuck. A first conversation is a diagnosis, not a pitch.
We don’t take clients we can’t help.