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Fifteen years ago, Tina Larsson and her husband Mark lived in a New York City co-op that raised its maintenance fees about 5% every year. There was no inflation. They were both Wall Street analysts. They read financial statements for multi-billion-dollar companies for a living, and the number didn't make sense to them. So they…

At nearly every business conference, and in what feels like every third LinkedIn post, someone is telling business owners to raise their prices. They have not seen your pricing. They do not know your costs, your margins, your customers, your market, or whether your business is actually profitable. It does not matter. Raise your prices.…

Drea Lynn never wanted to be an entrepreneur. She's an attorney. She spent a decade in full-time church ministry. She was a COO for entrepreneurial companies, then built and led a fractional COO division for the firm she worked for. By her own account she was at the top of her career, making the most…

Fall 2008. Elon Musk is sitting on the last of the roughly $180 million he walked away from PayPal with. Seven years, two companies, both bleeding, both failing in public. SpaceX has just lost its third consecutive rocket. The first stage finally performed, and for about thirty seconds the team thought they had it. Then…

Christopher Quigley lives in a town of about a thousand people on Nova Scotia's South Shore. In January 2025, a woman named Elaine Mosher was killed there by her husband. Christopher had spent a decade in Manhattan before moving to Mahone Bay. Violent death was background noise in New York. In a town this small,…

Cameron Herold was walking through a hallway at the University of Ottawa in 1985 when he bent down to throw away a flyer someone had dropped on the floor. Before it hit the trash can, he read the headline: earn $10,000 and run your own business. His tuition that year was $1,000 — the math…

Sean Pieri's numbers were good. Great, actually. High performance reviews. A bonus he'd just received. A pipeline of wins still coming down the runway. He was vice president of advancement (fundraising and alumni relations) at a liberal arts college, thirty-plus years into a career built almost entirely on national institutions: the United States Air Force…

It's 1971. You've spent seven years building a business that finally works. Seventy percent market share. The category is yours. Then you find out, indirectly, that your only supplier is interviewing your replacement. Not a rumor. Not a misunderstanding. They are actively shopping for someone to take your place. That's where Phil Knight was. His…

Wes Towers did everything right, and the number still came back wrong. His digital agency, Uplift 360, had been running for more than 20 years. Recurring revenue. Long-term clients, some nearly as old as the business itself. A defensible niche serving trades and construction companies. Every metric a valuer looks for was where it was…

Greg Wooldridge was six months from the exit. Twenty-five and a half years in the Navy. A tour commanding a naval air station winding down. Retirement paperwork in motion, résumé pointed at the civilian job market. He hadn't flown a jet in two years. Then the phone rang.

Kathy Eastwood didn't leave her job the day her boss told her, for the third time, that he didn't know why she needed to do something, only that she needed to do it. She'd absorbed lines like that for months by then. Command and control was his whole operating system: give the instruction, skip the…

February 26, 2008. 5:30 p.m. Across the country, people are finishing their workday and heading to the nearest Starbucks. They find the doors locked. Not at one store. Not in one region. All 7,100 of them, at once, on purpose. The CEO walked away from six million dollars in revenue in a single evening, while…