In the last post I told the story of mailing eleven letters from a USPS box on Richmond Road in 2009, offering financial analysis services to local business owners, and getting zero replies. I named what I now think the diagnostic was: I had offered a relationship, not a unit. A relationship is hard to say yes to. A unit gives the prospect something to evaluate.
This post is the longer version of that diagnosis, because the pattern repeats across most of what I tried between then and now — and because if you are an operator thinking about turning your expertise into a side income, this is the one thing I would tell you before you mail a single letter, post a single ad, or buy a single domain.
The pattern, stated plainly: every venture I attempted that moved money sold a unit. Every venture I attempted that did not move money sold a relationship.
The 2009 letters sold a relationship. The pitch was let me get to know your business, work with you on planning, monitor your results, and develop ideas. That is the language of a consultant. The output is a series of conversations. The price is dependent on the project, which means it is unknown to the prospect at the moment they would have to decide whether to engage. Zero of eleven prospects engaged.
Three or four years later I tried e-commerce. I sourced a baby-product SKU from a manufacturer in China, paid for samples on PayPal in November 2015, placed a bulk inbound order to Amazon FBA in January 2016, and listed the SKU. I had built a unit-economics workbook to model the bet — two scenarios at two price points, with COGS, FBA fees, ad spend assumed (poorly), and a projected break-even date. The cash actually left my account. Sample: $103. Bulk order: $1,190. Final freight and packaging payment: $1,785. Inbound to FBA: more. The trail in the workbook stops at the projection — I do not have the exit data and I would not pretend to. What I do know is that for the first and at the time only time, an idea I had moved into the world far enough to charge somebody.
That product had every flaw of an early-2016 private-label gamble. It was commoditized. It was sandwiched between an incumbent brand and three knockoffs. The marketing budget line in the workbook was $500, which is now obviously a fantasy — by 2016 the ad spend required to win the search box for a category like this one had already eclipsed the unit margin. The bet did not earn out. I would not run it again.
But it taught me the only lesson I think matters, which is the lesson that explains both the 2009 silence and the 2016 break-even projection that did not arrive. The 2009 letter could not move money because nothing in it was buyable. The 2016 SKU moved money because the unit was the entire offer. The prospect — in this case, a stranger on Amazon looking for a baby product — did not have to take a meeting with me to evaluate it. They had to look at the listing, look at the price, look at the reviews, and click. The whole transaction lived inside a single decision the buyer was already in the mood to make.
This is the difference between a relationship and a unit. A relationship requires the buyer to set up the conditions for evaluation. A unit hands the evaluation to the buyer pre-built.
Between 2009 and 2024 I tried a lot of things. Most of them sold the relationship. A real estate brokerage idea inside a personal LLC umbrella, which never made it past three names on a prospect list. An Alexa skill for Lexington trivia, which actually got built and registered and as far as I can tell never produced a download to write home about. A "dad-kid" Amazon brand idea that I summarized in a Word document and ended with the sentence I am having trouble developing a name and branding around this idea. Any help you can provide would be great. That last document is, in retrospect, the relationship problem in microcosm — I was asking for help on the relationship of the venture to its identity, instead of shipping a unit and letting the unit tell me what its identity was.
In early 2024 I ran two faceless brand experiments with AI-generated content. One in a wellness niche, one in personal-care. Both produced content. Neither shipped a product to a customer. Both stalled within weeks. They stalled, again, because the loop ended at publish content; build audience; eventually sell something. That eventually never gets here. The eventually is where the relationship pattern hides its costs.
The pattern is not about whether I am a smart enough operator or whether the categories were right. The pattern is about a structural fact of selling to strangers: a stranger has very little appetite for relationship. A stranger has a lot of appetite for a clear, priced, scoped unit that they can buy in three minutes and use this week.
This is the entire reason this site exists in the form it does.
The site you are reading is a content site, but the content is not the product. The content is how strangers find the unit. The unit is a $67 set of restaurant operator templates — a P&L, a food cost calculator, a labor scheduling model, a break-even analyzer, and a 13-week cash flow forecast. The pricing is fixed. The scope is named. The deliverable is the file. There is no kickoff call. There is no discovery process. There is no scope document. The buyer reads the listing, decides whether the file is worth $67 to them, and either downloads it or doesn't. If they download it and it doesn't earn out, they get their money back inside thirty days. The entire transaction is a unit, end-to-end.
I am writing this for a specific reader, which is the operator who has been quietly thinking about whether they could turn what they know into something on the side. Maybe it's a chef who has been imagining a small consulting practice. Maybe it's a controller who has been imagining a course. Maybe it's a GM who has been imagining a small recurring service for other GMs. The temptation in all of those cases is to imagine that the offer is a relationship — I'll work with three people a quarter and help them through — because that is what your operator brain is built to deliver. You know how to walk into a room and tighten the operation.
The market for a stranger walking into your room is small. The market for a thing the stranger can buy and use in their own room is large.
This is not a moral claim. Relationships are how high-end consulting actually works at scale. If you have already built a brand strong enough to make strangers want a relationship with you, you should sell the relationship — the unit economics are stronger and the work is more interesting. But if you are at the beginning, and your name is not yet a brand the way a name needs to be to sell a relationship, you do not have the option you think you have. The option you have is the unit.
The 2009 me did not understand this. The 2009 me had nine years of operator experience and was certain that nine years of operator experience was the asset. It was not the asset. The asset is the deliverable that the experience produces, packaged so a stranger can buy it without talking to me first.
In the next post I'll close this loop and explain why I came back to it now, what is different this time, and what the second product on the storefront is going to be. The short version: I built the unit I should have built in 2009.
—The Pragmatic CFO
The Toolkit · $67
Run your P&L like a CFO.
The Toolkit is the spreadsheet system this site is built around — the same templates and benchmarks used at the chain-CFO level, packaged for owners and operators. $67.