The Main Street Journal Live

The books · The Books

The books

Cash, payroll, inventory, multiples. How a shop stays solvent without enterprise software.

Features

In this section

Tape

War stories on this desk

Hand-picked public posts. Account on the card. Not a timeline.

capital allocation
Only move into another trade or market when you can answer a few important questions: > Can we predictably generate enough leads to support the existing operation? > Do we know our CAC and acceptable acquisition cost by channel? > Is our current market actually saturated, or have we stopped finding ways to grow within it? > Do we have the people and systems to handle more demand without the owner becoming the bottleneck? > Can our marketing operation support another set of campaigns, budgets and performance targets?

2026-08-19 · on this paper

How you grow — CAC, people, owner-as-bottleneck. Answers, not a feed.

The wire is owed

Multiples, SBA rules, cash, payroll. This desk prints numbers that already exist in public tape — never invented CPMs or traffic.

The vehicle, not a raise

Also in the paper

Related