MIDDLEMAN Book Review: What Is Actually Inside (By the Author)

I wrote MIDDLEMAN. That means this isn't an independent review, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Here's what I put in it, what it leaves out, and who should save their $6.99.

What you're actually buying

You can get MIDDLEMAN as an ebook: ePub and PDF together, $6.99, delivered the second you pay. No account, no app, no DRM. The same manuscript exists in print through Amazon, and the listening edition is on ElevenReader, but this review is about the words, not the format they arrive in.

The manuscript is 57,062 words across 48 chapters, one per law, printed at 200 pages in the paperback edition.

The shape: seven floors, one locked door

The cover says 7 x 7 = 48, which is wrong on purpose. Seven floors of seven laws should give you forty-nine. You get forty-eight, and the last one sits behind a sealed 49th floor.

The seven floors, in order:

• The Eyes - learning to see the middlemen already standing in every transaction around you.
• The Position - taking the spot between two sides and controlling what passes through it.
• The Grip - owning the customer so nobody can go around you.
• The Moat - the walls that keep a competitor from copying what you built.
• The Climb - turning one good deal into a machine that runs without your hands on it.
• The Choice - picking the floor worth working hard on, before you work hard on the wrong one.
• The Penthouse - the view from the top, and the shut door above it.

You can see the titles on the 48 laws. Start with the floor that matches the problem you're facing, rather than reading all seven in order.

How the chapters are built

Don't expect uniform chapters. Most laws run somewhere between 600 and 1,300 words - a few minutes each, built to be read on a break and used that afternoon. But they're not identical in shape or length. Law 44 runs past 2,000 words, and Law 46, the one where I explain why I chose construction as my own floor, runs to roughly 4,900 - nearly five ordinary chapters put together, because it's the one law in the book where I stop teaching and tell you exactly which doorway I walked through myself and why.

Named examples turn up regularly, not as an occasional flourish: Rockefeller in Law 4, the failed cleaning-app Homejoy in Law 6, Paul Reuter's pigeon telegraph in Law 8, Bill Gates and IBM in Law 9, Costco's capped margin in Law 32, Warren Buffett's own account of his worst investment in Law 36, and the Netflix-Blockbuster meeting alongside Kodak's shelved digital camera in Law 48. Each law is anchored to something you can go and check for yourself, not left as an abstract metaphor about a building.

Two people work the same hours. One gets rich, one stays broke. The only difference is the floor they chose to stand on.

That line opens Law 36. That's how most laws start: a short claim, then the example that backs it up.

What you can use

The structure earns its keep. Most laws are short enough that you can pick the one that matches the problem you actually have this week - the customer who's threatening to go direct, the supplier you've been starving, the market you're not sure is worth the years - and read just that one. You don't need the whole book cover to cover before any single law is useful to you.

You might already stand in the middle without calling it that. Recruitment. Agency work. The question the book keeps asking is whether you control the customer or just arrange the introduction. If you already do this work, it mostly hands you the name for what you're doing, and a way to check whether you're doing it well.

What it is not

It is not a workbook. There are no worksheets, no templates, no spreadsheets to fill in. Most chapters keep the "I" to a sentence or two and get out of the way - Law 46 is the deliberate exception, where I stop teaching and tell you which doorway I walked through myself and why I picked buildings over anything else. And the book will not do the finding for you. It gives you the seven questions to test whether a gap is worth standing in, but it does not hand you a gap. You still have to go and look for one in your own town, your own trade, your own phone.

If you're after a step-by-step "start here on Monday" plan with a worked example, read how to become a middleman before you buy.

Who should skip it

If you already own the customer relationship, already keep your margin invisible, and already make going around you a downgrade for both sides, you have probably already lived most of these laws without needing them written down. Use the seven floors as a checklist against your own business instead of a purchase: can the customer go around you? Does the work stop the day you stop showing up? If both answers are no, keep your $6.99.

Who it's actually for

It's for the tradesperson, the driver, the freelancer, the person on the ground floor selling hours because nobody ever showed them another way to get paid. It's for anyone who has felt the gap between their effort and their pay widen every year and never had the mechanism explained plainly. And it's for the person already standing in the middle without knowing it, who needs the position named before they can defend it properly.

Where to go next

For the mechanism underneath every law in the book, read How the Rich Get Richer. For the first practical move if you've never stood in a doorway before, read how to become a middleman. For the missing law behind the cover, read Why Is MIDDLEMAN Called 7 x 7 = 48?.

Get MIDDLEMAN: $6.99 for the ePub and PDF, delivered the moment you pay.