Research Library

Reports, data, and references

Industry reports, datasets, timelines, interviews, worksheets, and checklists. Items publish only once sourced, and each one lists the sources it draws on at the end.

How to Run an Experiment That Actually Decides Something — Most A/B tests end in an argument instead of a decision. Here is the arithmetic that sets the sample, the peeking trap that manufactures fake winners, and the honest way to read a result that came back flat.
What Org Structure Actually Costs — Managers are the visible price of structure and the smaller half of the bill. The larger half is coordination, and a reorg makes you pay both twice.
How Companies Actually Get Financed — Debt, equity, covenants and the cost of capital in plain words, with a real filed credit agreement's pricing grid and the tax rule that quietly caps the benefit of borrowing.
Reading a Set of Accounts Like an Owner — The three statements tie together in exactly one way, and every place they can be bent has a name, an SEC case, and a number you can check yourself.
What a Business Is Actually Worth When You Sell It — Three different people compute three different prices for the same business, and only one of those numbers ever reaches your bank account.
Handing a Business to the Next Person — Succession fails less because the successor is wrong and more because the business was never separated from the person leaving it.
Fleet Mix, Damage, and the Winter Gap — What a rental fleet costs to own once you count the repair bill, the deductible layer, and the eight months nobody is renting.
NOI, Capex, and What a Cap Rate Hides — A cap rate is one year of a number the seller defined, divided by the price they want. Here is how to rebuild it from the operating side.
Where You Owe and Who You Employ — Two questions decide most small-business tax exposure (which states can tax you, and which of your contractors are legally employees) and both answers changed while nobody was watching.
Where the Margin Actually Hides — In most ordinary businesses the profit does not come from the thing on the sign. It comes from a fee, an attachment, a prepayment or a price change, and the filings show exactly how much.
Price, Choice Architecture and What Actually Replicates — Price format and menu design really do move behaviour, but half the famous findings shrank when tested properly, and the half that survived is now the half regulators are writing rules about.
The Real Financing Menu for a Small Business — The five instruments an owner can actually get (SBA 7(a), a line, equipment finance, revenue-based money, a seller note), priced with the published fee schedules, rate caps and standby rules that decide each one.
Correlation, Limits, and the Risks That Are Cheap to Remove — Why separate risks turn out to be one risk, what an insurance policy actually pays after the trigger, sublimit and coinsurance clauses have their say, and the short list of exposures that cost almost nothing to delete.
Deal Structure as Risk Allocation — Price settles one question. Earnouts, holdbacks, reps and the working-capital peg settle a dozen more, each one deciding who pays if a specific assumption turns out to be false.
Why Consensus Compresses Returns — Agreement is the most expensive input in any business, and the discipline that separates a genuine edge from expensive stubbornness is narrower and more testable than most people think.
What a Forecast Can and Cannot Do — A forecast is not a prediction of demand. It is an input to an ordering decision, and the difference explains how a company can get its revenue number almost exactly right and still lose 87% of its operating income.
What Happens When You Pay for a Metric — Wells Fargo's staff opened roughly two million accounts nobody asked for, and the metric they were chasing moved by less than a rounding step: the clearest evidence on record that a number can be thoroughly corrupt and still look completely healthy.
Switching Costs, Lock-In, and Who Owns the Standard — The cost of leaving is the most valuable number in your business and it appears on nobody's income statement. Here is how to measure it, what competitors do to it, and why a standard turns private lock-in into a toll somebody else collects.
What Your ROAS Report Actually Measures — Every ad platform grades its own homework, on its own clock, using conversions it partly estimated. The field experiments that checked the answer found the reported number can be several times the real one.
Working Capital: The Loan Nobody Underwrote — Your suppliers and your customers are already financing you, on terms nobody wrote down. The cash conversion cycle is the interest rate on that loan.
When a Sale Becomes Revenue — Cash arriving and revenue counting are two different events, and the gap between them is where every honest judgement and every quiet distortion in the accounts is made.
The Contrarian Principles Field Guide — The recurring structure behind counterintuitive business truths: why the conventional read is so often wrong, and a repeatable way to pressure-test any piece of received wisdom before betting on it.
Who Actually Controls the Company — Ownership is on the cap table; power is in the charter, the board and the vesting schedule, and after three rounds those two documents rarely say the same thing.
What Marketing Spend Can and Cannot Buy — Paid acquisition buys attention, not demand, and the auction that sells you that attention is designed to take back every efficiency you find.
How Marketplaces Tip — Network effects do not automatically produce a monopoly. Here is the specific set of conditions that decides whether a market goes winner-take-most or stays split forever.
Operator Playbook: One-Person AI Company — A composite of how solo founders build meaningful revenue with AI leverage instead of headcount.
Short-Term Rental Regulation Tracker — Short-term rentals are increasingly regulated at the city level: the rules, not the nightly rate, decide whether the model works.
Emerging Opportunity Radar — How to spot where new demand is forming, before it is obvious, using durable signals instead of hype.
AI Adoption in Small Operations — How solo operators and tiny teams are using AI to cover work that used to require hiring, and where the human bottleneck still binds.
Labor Market Automation Exposure — Which kinds of work are most and least exposed to automation: a framework for reading the risk, not a doomsday number.
Operator Playbook: Buying a Boring Business — A composite of how experienced buyers approach an unglamorous, cash-flowing acquisition: sourcing, pricing, and the first 90 days.
Marketplace Fee Structures Compared — How to read the true take-rate of a marketplace (referral fees, fulfillment, storage, ads) before it eats your margin.
Local Services Digitization Report — Many local service businesses still run on paper and phone calls, and modernizing operations is a quiet, durable opportunity.
Due Diligence Master Worksheet — The verify-before-you-buy worksheet: the financial, legal, and operational items that must check out before a deal closes.
Freight Rate Seasonality — Why shipping costs swing with the calendar, and how product sellers can plan around predictable freight cycles.
State of the Rental Economy — Why "access over ownership" keeps expanding, and where the real money in renting is actually made.
Consumer Spending Shift Data — How to read shifts in where consumers spend (goods vs. services, premium vs. value) without over-reacting to noise.
Platform Dependence Risk Survey — When a platform owns your access to customers, it owns your business: how to measure and reduce that exposure.
Unit Economics Benchmark Set — The handful of ratios that decide whether a business makes money on each sale, and how to read them without chasing false precision.
Supplier Verification Checklist — Before you wire a deposit to a supplier, verify they are real, capable, and not a single point of failure.
Entity Selection Decision Checklist — A structured checklist for choosing between sole proprietor, LLC, S-corp, and C-corp: the questions that actually decide it.
Negotiation Preparation Worksheet — Negotiations are won in preparation: know your walk-away, your target, and your alternative before you sit down.
Small Business Acquisition Market Overview — Millions of boomer-owned "boring" businesses are approaching a sale with no successor: the quiet opportunity behind buy-then-build.
Capital Sources Comparison Grid — Every way to fund a business (bootstrapping, debt, equity, revenue-based) and what each really costs you.
Working Capital Patterns in Product Businesses — Why profitable product businesses die of cash starvation, and how the cash conversion cycle explains it.
Recession-Era Business Survival Patterns — What separates businesses that survive downturns from those that fail: cash, concentration, and fixed-cost discipline.
Cap Table Modeling Template — How ownership actually moves as you raise money and grant options, and why founders under-model dilution.
Franchise Economics Breakdown — What you actually buy in a franchise (a proven system and brand) and what you give up in fees and control.
Insurance Float, Explained — How insurers make money holding other people's money before they have to pay it out: the "float" that powers the model.
Core Terms: Unit Economics — The essential vocabulary of "does one sale make money," defined in simple words, in the order they build on each other.
How Subscription Models Evolved — From newspapers and book clubs to SaaS and everything-as-a-service: why recurring revenue became the most prized business model.
Foundational Business Reading List — A short, real reading list that teaches how businesses actually make money: no fluff, no gurus.
A Timeline of Retail Distribution — From general stores to catalogs to big-box to e-commerce to marketplaces: how getting product to customers keeps reshaping who holds power.