Howard Mann — The Business Brickyard

I work with really good people at an inflection point in their business. While the situations vary, what doesn't is the quiet fear underneath. That gut sense that something has to change, and you don't know what or how. My work is two things at once... Honest conversations most owners aren't having with anyone and the strategies that come out of those conversations that we implement together. All of it, in service of one thing: a business built to serve the life you'd almost stopped letting yourself want.

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 knew 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've also been on the other side of it. Nearly four decades of it. I've run a freight and logistics company through years I'm still not sure how we survived. Two books came out of trying to make sense of what I learned the hard way so I could try to spare other people from learning it the same way. I've worked across every industry you could imagine (and some I could never have imagined). And somewhere in all of it, the realization that the business and your life aren't two things you balance. They're one thing. And pretending otherwise is where most of the pain originates.

I work the way I work because I needed someone to work this way with me, and never found one. Someone honest without being brutal. Someone with so much real experience of how business works that they don't need a framework. Someone who understands the deeply human side of owning a company.

That's what I try to be for every client ready to do the work.

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.