THE EDGE
What I Learned About Money After I Put The Tools Down
Two firms do the same work, in the same town, at the same prices. Ten years later one owner sells up a millionaire and the other is still chasing invoices on a Friday night. Same tools. Same hours. Same skill.
The difference is not effort and it is not luck. It is a set of things one of them knew and the other did not. Rules that move money. Numbers that decide who wins a contract. Laws that decide who gets paid and who waits. I call it the edge, and this book is me handing it to you.
A readable on ElevenReader. First chapters free, then $4.99 for the whole book. 24 chapters, around two hours. Listen on the drive, in the van, or with your eyes shut.
I am not a professor. I carried the tools first.
Plumbing, then other trades. The miles, the cold houses, the jobs done with my own hands. Then, step by step, out of the work. Today the business behind me has delivered more than eight thousand jobs across the country, and my job is no longer fixing the leak. It is making sure the leak gets fixed, and making sure the money behaves while that happens. Everything in this book I learned the expensive way.
Written by someone who has waited to be paid.
Every business book I ever bought was written by someone who had never waited eighty days for a job he finished in a week. I have. That is the edge in the title. Not motivation. The specific things, in the right order, that turn a good tradesman into a business that pays him, instead of the other way round.
Volume One is about the money. Where it hides inside a building business. Who is allowed to hold it and for how long. What the law actually says about getting it back. And how to win the contracts that pay on time without being the cheapest name on the list.
If you only ever listen to one book about the business side of the trade, make it this one. Then play it again in six months and notice how much of it you are now doing.
Press play. Get smarter. Keep your hands free.
THE EDGE lives on ElevenReader, the reading app from ElevenLabs. You open the link, press play, and the book is read to you in a natural voice while you drive, work or lie in the dark. No paper, no Kindle, no sitting still. That is what I mean when I call it a readable.
The first chapters are free. The whole book is $4.99, less than the fuel to the next job, and it is yours to replay as many times as you need. Nobody learns payment law once.
- ✓ First chapters free, no card needed
- ✓ 24 chapters, five parts, about two hours
- ✓ iPhone, Android and the web
- ✓ Replay any chapter, any time
Opens ElevenReader. Free to start, $4.99 for the full book.
Five parts. Twenty four chapters.
Every chapter stands on its own. One idea, one mechanism, and one thing you can actually do with it. Stop in the middle of chapter nine and start again at chapter ten. Nothing is lost.
The Money Machine
Why growing businesses die of success.
The float. Why cash, profit and wealth are three different things. The one number that decides whether you ever get rich. And the honest arithmetic of a million, with no fairy dust on it.
The Rules of the British Building Game
The rulebook your competitors never read.
Pay now and argue later. The twenty eight day weapon. Retention, the reverse charge, gross payment status, and the status trap. There is a legal mechanism in here that can force a full payment because somebody missed a deadline.
Where the Money Is Going
The demand that arrived almost overnight.
Awaab's Law and what it did to repairs. The repairs mountain. Billions committed to warm homes. The second wave landing in private housing. And why the labour shortage is a moat for whoever is ready.
How to Get the Work
Winning without being the cheapest.
The lists you have to be on. The marks nobody bothers to collect. Building an offer that cannot be compared to anyone else's. The five kinds of stranger who read your pitch, and how to talk to a person who holds a budget.
The Operator
Getting yourself out of the way.
Find the bottleneck and starve everything else, including the night the bottleneck was me, sitting in a car park. Why you buy a business instead of building one. And what two weeks can honestly do.
Made to be listened to, not read.
Nobody in this trade has a free evening to sit with a book. So this one was built for the parts of the day you already waste. The drive between jobs. The wait outside a merchant. The hour before sleep.
The words are plain on purpose. Where a piece of jargon matters I explain it once in normal words, then use it like a normal word. And where something is law, it carries its date. Where something is a proposal and not yet law, it says so.
It is not a motivation book. There are enough of those.
Read this if
- ◈You are good at the work and still short of money at the end of the month.
- ◈You are owed more than you are comfortable saying out loud.
- ◈You want the bigger contracts but keep losing them on price.
- ◈You are the bottleneck in your own business and you know it.
- ◈You want to know what the money actually does before you chase more of it.
The third book
MIDDLEMAN shows you where to stand. The Family Secret takes you into the sealed room at the top of the staircase. THE EDGE is the working knowledge that makes the money behave once you are standing there. Laws, numbers, mechanisms. The part nobody hands you.
Press play.
THE EDGE is live on ElevenReader. Start it free, buy the whole readable for $4.99, listen on anything, and take Volume One a chapter at a time.
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