A working manual, not a theory book.
Releasing Q1 2027. Outgunned is structured the way a small business owner's week actually unfolds - by category of negotiation, with frameworks, tools, scripts, and case studies in every chapter.
Why this book exists
Every small business owner has a story about the negotiation that almost killed the business - or saved it. The frameworks taught in business school weren't built for those nights. They assume parity, time, staff, and counsel. Owner-operators rarely have any of the four.
Outgunned closes that gap. It treats small business negotiation as its own discipline - distinct from corporate dealmaking, distinct from hostage-style tactics, distinct from venture-style fundraising. It is the discipline of negotiating often, under load, with everything on the line, against counterparties who have more time, more information, and more resources than you do.
The four structural realities
The book is organized around four structural realities of small business negotiation. They are present in every chapter because they are present at every table.
Asymmetry
The small business operator is structurally outmatched on information, time, capital, and bench depth. The other side has lawyers paid to win at your expense. The book does not pretend otherwise - it teaches you how to negotiate as the smaller party with discipline, which is sufficient.
Volatility
Cash, supply chains, customer concentration, and key-person dependency mean conditions change quickly. The frameworks have to bend. The book treats every negotiation as a decision under uncertainty, not as an academic exercise.
Overload
The owner-operator is also the salesperson, the dispatcher, the HR director, and the AR clerk. Preparation has to happen in the cracks. Tools in the book are designed for preparation under load - one-page worksheets, triage checklists, scripts for the opening move.
Relational risk
The counterparty in a small business negotiation is rarely a stranger. They are the customer you'll see at the chamber breakfast, the foreman you've worked with for nine years, the landlord who knows your kids' names. The book takes this seriously - it is built for repeated games, not one-shot deals.
What you'll be able to do
This is a working manual, not a theory book. Every chapter includes the same architecture: a representative case opening, a framework, a set of tactical assets (worksheets, scripts, checklists, term sheets), a case study from the field, and a bottom line. By the end of the book, you should be able to:
- Read a master service agreement and identify the five clauses that matter for your business
- Run a one-page pre-negotiation worksheet for any deal, in under thirty minutes
- Design a buy-sell agreement that survives the four Ds: disability, divorce, death, disagreement
- Distinguish the family negotiation from the ownership negotiation from the management negotiation in a family business
- Build a compensation architecture that competes for talent without matching Fortune 500 salary bands
- Negotiate a commercial lease as a ten-year operating decision rather than a ten-day transaction
- Hold structure during a creditor workout, contract dispute, or other cash crisis
- Prepare a business for sale starting two years before you intend to sell
- Build a personal advisory bench - attorney, CPA, banker, fractional executive - that compounds across deals
What this book will not do
This book will not make you a lawyer, an investment banker, or a forensic accountant. It will not replace counsel on a complex acquisition, an M&A transaction, or a regulatory investigation. It will not give you a magic line that gets a procurement officer to concede on Day 1.
What it will do is make you a sophisticated client of professional services - someone who knows when to call counsel, what to ask, how to scope an engagement, and how to allocate the limited dollars and limited hours you have to the deals and clauses that actually matter.
How to use it
The book is built to be read three different ways:
Front to back as a sequenced field manual, building from mindset and preparation through the major categories of negotiation a small business operator faces over a career.
By chapter as a reference - turn to Chapter 10 the next time a forty-page MSA lands on your desk; turn to Chapter 14 when a customer threatens litigation; turn to Chapter 5 the next time you bring on a partner.
As a curriculum for peer advisory groups, trade association cohorts, or graduate seminars in entrepreneurship and small business management.