If you just found this page, welcome.
I built, scaled and sold companies across telecoms, tech, SaaS and services over twenty years. The Founder’s Field Manual is my field notes from the middle of it. Not the clean version. The real one.
Most business writing is written from the far side of the outcome, once the story has been tidied and the wrong turns quietly removed. That version is easier to read and it is no use to anyone standing in the middle of it. The middle is where the decisions actually get made and it is the part nobody writes down.
So that is what I write about.
The fear that never leaves. It does not go when the first customer arrives. It changes subject. Before the launch it asks whether anyone will come. After the launch it asks whether they will stay. Twenty years and three companies later it was still asking. The trick was never silencing it. It was noticing the questions got better.
The family who loves you without understanding the work. My mother asked what I actually did for a living for years. She never understood the businesses and she never missed calling on a launch day. You do not need the people who love you to understand the work. The investor asks what it does. The family asks how you slept. Keep both.
The quiet Tuesdays nobody sees. No launch, no announcement, nobody clapping. Just the invoice that goes out and the follow up that gets sent and the thing that gets published again the week after nothing happened. Most progress is not lost through lack of ambition. It is lost through neglect of the basics.
Who this is for
Anyone betting on themselves. That is wider than founders and I mean it to be.
If you are starting a freelance practice, building income outside a job, publishing to a subscriber count you can still count on your fingers, managing people for the first time, or choosing to build something slowly on purpose, the pressures are the same shape. The numbers change. The questions do not.
The stories here are mine, so they come out of building companies. They are told so you can hear yourself in them whatever it is you are building.
What you get
A new essay every Tuesday. Something extra now and then when the moment calls for it. Field notes in between. No frameworks bolted onto experiences that did not need them and no advice I have not paid for myself.
One promise
I read and answer every reply. Not most of them. Every one.
Hit reply and tell me what you are in the middle of.
That is the whole thing. If that is where you are, you are in the right room.
Three to start with
The Work Is Waiting. Why confidence usually arrives after you begin, not before.
Who Shows Up in the Dark. Why character matters more than charisma when the weather changes.
Playing Not to Lose. Why success often makes people more afraid than failure.