What 40 small businesses really bring in(and the catch)

What a typical one takes in each year, and the catch nobody tells you. Every number from official records.

In the library: a 2-minute case file for every video

Case file 010

How Marriott Makes Money From Empty Rooms

Marriott owns or leases just 51 of its 9,805 properties, and still gets paid when the rooms sit empty.

Case file 007

Why Nobody Can Copy Orkin

A teenage farm kid with 50 cents and a bag of arsenic started Orkin, which now sits inside a business of about $3.8 billion a year.

Case file 006

How a $6.6M Bike Company Ended Up in Bankruptcy

A family that welds titanium bikes by hand filed for bankruptcy owing about 200 customers $650,000.

Case file 009

How One Angry Customer Went After Adobe

A developer who says Adobe charged him a fee to quit put out free versions of 7 Adobe apps within 3 days of his first line of code.

Case file 002

How a $23 Million Coffee Chain Went Broke

Two Marines built a 25-café coffee chain, and it sold at auction for about $4.5 million.

Case file 003

How 4 Cryotherapy Studios Went Broke in One Year

Two couples went from one cryotherapy studio to four in a little over eight months, and a year after opening day one of their companies listed $434 in the bank.

Case file 004

How Wall Street Broke a Land Rover Shop

A Wall Street company holding $115 million of investors' money picked a shop that hand-builds $300,000 Land Rovers, and the shop got none of it.

Case file 005

What a Med Spa Owner Really Makes

VIO's top quarter of med spas averages $2,320,621 in sales, but across all 51 open a full year, the average is $1,254,631.

Case file 001

How a $25 Million Cookie Company Went Broke

Doug and Sara Taylor built a cookie company reportedly worth $25 million, and 15 months later it was in bankruptcy court.

One email gets you every one of them, plus the 40.

One email gets you

The 40

One page: what 40 small businesses really bring in, and the catch for each, from official records. A new row with every video.

The two-number test

Before you sign anything that takes a cut of your sales (a franchise, a delivery app, a card processor): what they earn in your worst month, and what it costs you to leave.

Every case file

The numbers, the catch, and what to steal, in two minutes. A new one with every video.