Howard Mann — The Business Brickyard

01 On how I work

I've been in the wreckage.

Not as a consultant called in after the fire. As the person standing in it, wondering what came next and whether anything would.

I've built businesses and watched them nearly collapse. I've had the 3am conversations with myself that nobody else knows about. I know what it feels like to keep fighting not because you believe it will work, but because the people depending on you don't have the option of you stopping.

I also know what it feels like on the other side of it.

When the business starts working for you again. When you walk into Monday morning feeling like yourself. When the thing you built with your hands, mind, stress and grit becomes something you are proud of again instead of something you are just trying to survive.

Nearly four decades of it. A freight company built, nearly lost, then turned around and sold. Two books endorsed by the people I consider my business heroes, Tom Peters and Seth Godin. Stages and Forum rooms around the world. And somewhere in all of it, the realization that business and life are not two things you balance. They are one thing. Pretending otherwise is where most of the pain originates.

I work the way I work because I've needed someone to work this way with me. Someone honest without being brutal. Someone who has lived through so many business battles to have no use for theory, and enough of being human to have no patience for pretense.

That's what I try to be for every client who becomes my friend.

Howard Mann

Author of Fewer. Better. · Your Business Brickyard

02 How this works

Twelve months. One relationship. Here is the shape of the year.

The work runs one equation: Dream × Afford × Time = Visionary Reality. Everything the year contains is in service of running that equation honestly.

The intake

Two months. Lots of calls and "feeding me from the firehose" with everything about your business and its market. Full financial and strategic package. Recorded interviews. Everything moves through the practice's way of working so I arrive knowing your business as well as you do. The month is about getting the Afford part of the equation to be the honest truth. What the numbers actually say. Not what you have been told they say or want them to say.

The Brickyard

Two days. You come to me. One-on-one. We work through the hardest questions the work has, and refuse the answers that are not real. The position only you could ever hold gets written, in your own hand, on the wall. The dream is named at its full size, not the cautious version.

The playbook

The weeks after. The most detailed playbook of your career. Not a strategy memo. A synthesis of your financials, your competitors, the structure of your business, and a month of private conversations with you, written as the most ambitious version of your dream made finally doable.

The year

Weekly calls in the early months. Monthly thereafter. My number on you twenty-four hours a day. The formula stays alive in every conversation. Dream × Afford × Time. Every month, all three at honest values, until the compounding does its work.

The return day

Month twelve. You come back to the Brickyard. We look at the year against the playbook. The conversation about renewal happens honestly. Some clients renew because the work of holding what they have built is harder than the work of reaching it. Some part as friends because the work is done. Both are the right outcomes.