I build free tools for small business. This is where I show the work.
Issue No. 1: what this paper is, and why everything on it is free.
For about twenty years I have had a front-row seat on small business, and the same walls keep showing up. Cash runs tight at exactly the wrong moment. Systems break the week you finally grow. The information that would actually help costs more than the problem does. The useful fixes kept ending up in emails to about three people, so now they go here. Every other Tuesday, one thing worth the click.
Here is how I work. I’m a builder before I’m anything else. When a problem keeps showing up, I build the fix, then I give it away. Not a lead magnet, not a gated PDF, the actual tool. If it’s useful you’ll come back, and that is the whole business model.
Exhibit one is already on this site. The federal government publishes a record of every small business loan it has ever backed, and it is nearly unreadable. So I built a map that reads it. Your county, your industry, your bank… it’s public record, rendered so a person can actually use it, and it stays free.
What comes next is the operations side. The boring problems that actually kill small businesses, the ones nobody makes content about because they aren’t shiny. Some issues will be a tool. Some will be a build log, the how and the why with the mistakes left in. Some will be a number from the public record worth knowing, like how many new businesses filed paperwork in your state last month. And some, fair warning, may be about cookies.
The rules of the paper. Nothing prints unless it traces to a primary source, receipts attached. Corrections print in the issue that carried the error, dated. Back issues stay up exactly as published. And the day-job disclosure, said plainly: I work in small business finance. What I publish here is mine alone, none of it is my employer’s, none of it is advice, and nobody pays for placement.
