Design Your Growth: Field Notes
Observations of small businesses across America
Why do certain businesses always seem to appear next to each other?
Why does one location support the same type of business for decades—while another turns over every year?
And why do some small businesses quietly survive, without ever drawg attention to how they do it?
Most people pass by these patterns every day without noticing them.
Design Your Growth is a catalog of field notes built around those exact observations.
Each episode captures a single moment in the real world—something seen while traveling through towns, driving past plazas, or walking through local business districts. What stands out is documented as-is, without explanation or instruction.
There are no interviews. No guests. No step-by-step strategies. Just observations.
From clusters of similar businesses to unexpected location choices to long-standing storefronts that seem untouched by time, each field note isolates something that doesn’t quite make sense at first—but feels like it should.
These episodes don’t try to tell you what to do. They simply show you what’s there. And once you start noticing, it becomes difficult to stop.
New field notes are also available in visual form on YouTube and archived in writing on Substack.
Because sometimes the most valuable insights aren’t taught. They’re observed.
