As a doctor, former financial advisor, and property investor, I'm sharing the lessons I learned from being a busy, time-poor professional to building a life of time and financial freedom. 

My journey to financial freedom began with the standard advice of getting a great job, working hard, and hoping the system would take care of me.  After 20 years of service in the Royal Navy and as a doctor, I realised this was a myth.  This standard narrative will only take you so far, and I have started to seek better ways to build time and financial freedom for myself and my family. This realisation inspired me to share my journey and the lessons I've learned with you. 

My journey led me to earn my MBA, work as a financial adviser in London, and eventually transition into entrepreneurship. Investing in property and sharing financial lessons through our financial education start-up Building Out.  

I hope that sharing these lessons will help you on your path to Building Out a life of time and financial freedom.  The journey can be challenging, but it's certainly worth it!

Sign up for our free weekly newsletter at: 

www.building-out.com

Good luck on your journey!

Nothing on our website, blog, socials or newsletter is designed to provide financial advice and is for educational purposes only. For individual financial advice on your circumstance, please seek the advice of an FCA-approved advisor.

Diarmaid Mcmenamin

The NHS operates as a monopsony.
What's that? 

A monopsony is a market with one dominant buyer of labour.

Most doctors never learn that word in medical school.

But they feel its effects every single day.

Here’s what a monopsony does:

→ Pay is influenced by political budgets rather than market value
→ Working conditions are centrally determined
→ Exit options are limited and costly
→ Individual bargaining power is minimal

In most professions, if your employer undervalues you, you move.

In UK medicine, mobility is constrained by training pathways, geography, and licensing barriers.

So what do you do?

You stop relying on a single employer for 100% of your income.

You build a portfolio career:

• Locum work for schedule control
• Medico-legal work for premium fees
• Digital products for scalable income
• Investments for compounding wealth

You don’t have to leave medicine.

You just stop letting one institution hold all the cards.

♻️ Repost if this resonates with a doctor you know.

undefined undefined

Building Out

Property Investor

Partner

Royal Navy

As a doctor, former financial advisor, and property investor, I’m sharing the lessons on the path from being a busy, time-poor professional to building a life of time and financial freedom.

A UK consultant earned £1 more. Their tax bill went up by £22,000.
Here's why: 

That is not a typo.

The pension annual allowance taper means a single pound of additional income can trigger a five-figure tax charge.

The BMA surveyed its members. This is what they found.

Mid-career doctors exist in a financial "kill zone":

→ Highest effective marginal tax rates of any UK profession

→ 35% real-terms pay cut since 2008

→ Mandatory professional fees just to be allowed to practice

→ A pension system that penalises you for working more

The public sees a six-figure salary.

The doctor sees 29p of every additional pound earned.

The system extracts maximum clinical output while capping the ability to build wealth.

Financial freedom in this environment is not an accident.

It is an engineering project.

Full breakdown on the blog → link in comments.

♻️ Repost if a doctor you know needs to see this.

Every doctor should know one number.
It's this:

Not their salary.

Not their pension statement.

Not their student loan balance.

Their Freedom Floor.

Here’s what it is:

The minimum annual cost of the life you actually want to live.

Not the consultant lifestyle.
Not the Instagram version.
Not the “after I make partner” fantasy.

Your real life.

Roof.
Food.
Heating.
Kids’ shoes.
The occasional takeaway.

Strip it back.

Calculate it.

Most people never do.

Because if the number is lower than they thought...

They’d have to admit they’re working far harder than necessary.

Once you know your Freedom Floor, work backwards.

What invested capital — earning a reasonable long-term return — would cover it?

That’s your Freedom Number.

When your assets cover your floor, something shifts.

Work becomes optional.

And optional work behaves very differently from mandatory work.

Optional work energises.
Mandatory work erodes.

Same hospital.
Same rota.
Different psychology.

You don’t need £5 million.

You need clarity.

Know your number.

Everything changes after that.

www.building-out.com

33% of UK doctors say they are struggling with daily workloads. 16% have already taken steps to leave medicine. But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Most of them don’t actually hate medicine.

They hate financial dependence.

Because when your life looks like this:

Mortgage → depends on your job
School fees → depend on your job
Car → depends on your job
Family security → depends on your job

You don’t just have a profession.

You have one fragile income pillar.

And when everything sits on one pillar...

even a good job starts to feel like a trap.

So the solution isn’t more “resilience training”.

It’s financial architecture.

Doctors who regain control usually start with four moves:

→ Claim the tax relief you’re owed (many forget you can go back 4 years)

→ Use pension contributions to escape the £100k tax trap

→ Build a portfolio career (over half of UK doctors already have one)

→ Create income that isn’t tied to NHS shifts

Something interesting happens when you do this.

Medicine stops feeling like a cage.

And starts feeling like a choice again.

Don’t hate the profession.

Understand the trap.

Then build your way out of it.

www.building-out.com

No alternative text description for this image

Do you know the biggest financial mistake mid-career doctors make?
It's this:

They try to earn their way to wealth.

But when your marginal tax rate is 60–71%...

Working harder is the least efficient strategy you have.

Every extra shift:

→ Loses Personal Allowance
→ Gets taxed at punitive rates
→ Increases burnout risk
→ Barely moves your net position

You don’t have an income problem.

You have a structure problem.

The leverage isn’t in the extra hour on the shop floor.

It’s in tax efficiency and asset protection.

3 moves that actually shift the needle:

Max your ISA
£20k per year.
Tax-free growth.
Tax-free withdrawal.

Salary sacrifice
Reclaim your Personal Allowance.
Avoid the 60% trap.

Build income outside the NHS
Assets that earn without you being present.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth:

If your wealth depends entirely on NHS policy...

You don’t own your future.

The goal isn’t more income.

It’s optionality.

A portfolio that compounds quietly in the background
means the next pension reform or pay freeze
doesn’t dictate your decisions.

Extra shifts increase income.

Assets increase freedom.

Choose accordingly. ♻️

24% of UK consultants have cut waiting list work.

Not because they’re lazy.
Not because they don’t care.

Because the incentives are broken.

The BMA surveyed 5,000+ senior doctors and found:
almost 1 in 4 consultants reduced WLI sessions due to pension tax taper rules.

Stack the penalties and the question gets uncomfortable:

Are you paying to work?

Pension “cliff edges” that punish extra sessions

The 60% tax band that turns pay rises into rounding errors

Mandatory professional overheads paid from net income

Frozen thresholds pulling more people in each year

If the answer is “yes” — even occasionally — something needs to change.

Not the system (that’s a long fight).

Your personal setup.

A practical checklist:

→ Audit your marginal tax exposure
→ Model pension outcomes before you take extra work
→ Build assets outside the NHS so policy changes don’t own you
→ Get specialist advice (not generic “financial planning” chat)

Financial freedom for mid-career doctors doesn’t happen by accident.

You build it. You protect it. You keep it.

Want to know more?
www.building-out.com

building-out.com

Most doctors were told the same story.
But it was wrong: 

Work hard.
Get the grades.
Choose the “right” career.
The system will look after you.

I believed it.

I spent nearly 20 years as a military doctor in the Royal Navy.

High income.
Prestige.
Security.

And yet...

I wasn’t building wealth.
I wasn’t buying time.
I was renting a lifestyle from my calendar.

After leaving the Navy, I did something unusual.

I qualified and worked as a financial advisor in London.
I passed a MBA. 
I trained with some of the best property investors in the country.
I studied how money actually works.

That’s when it hit me:

Doctors don’t have a money problem.

We have a structural problem.

Late earning.
Heavy taxation.
Complex pensions.
Golden handcuffs disguised as stability.

And almost zero financial education.

I still love medicine.

But I no longer rely on it as my only financial strategy.

Now I help doctors understand the rules of the game:

→ How tax really works
→ How to build assets outside the NHS
→ How to buy back time without walking away from medicine

You can be a good doctor.

And still build optionality.

You can enjoy clinical work.

And still design a life that isn’t dependent on it.

The system won’t build that for you.

But you can.

If you’re a doctor who wants more control over your time and money, sign up for our LinkedIn newsletter above or visit www.building-out.com and sign up for our free newsletter there. 

Good luck on your journey!

“Gold is a perfect inflation hedge.”

Half true.

Which makes it dangerous.

Here’s what the data actually shows:

→ Gold tends to respond well to inflation spikes in the short run
→ Over long periods, the relationship weakens
→ It reacts most when inflation accelerates sharply
→ In low, stable inflation, it often does very little

Gold isn’t a thermostat.

It’s a smoke alarm.

It doesn’t gently adjust with every temperature change.

It screams when something is burning.

And stays quiet when it isn’t.

That’s an important distinction.

If you buy gold expecting it to steadily track CPI, you’ll be disappointed.

If you own it for regime shifts — policy mistakes, currency stress, sudden inflation shocks — you understand its role.

Don’t buy gold because you’re confident inflation is coming.

Buy it because you accept that you might be wrong about the future.

Insurance isn’t about prediction.

It’s about humility.

Most UK doctors don’t realise they’re in a 60% tax bracket.
Here's why:

Earn £100,001
and your next £1 can be taxed at 60%.

Not a loophole.
Not a mistake.

Just how the system works.

Here’s why:

Between £100,000 and £125,140
you lose £1 of Personal Allowance
for every £2 you earn.

By £125,140?
Your entire £12,570 tax-free allowance is gone.

That creates a stealth marginal rate of 60%.

(67.5% in Scotland.)

This isn’t rare.

The average consultant salary sits right in this range.

And because thresholds are frozen until 2031,
inflation alone is dragging more doctors into it every year.

You don’t need a pay rise to hit 60%.

The system moves you there automatically.

The fix is boring — and powerful.

Reduce your adjusted net income below £100k.

Most commonly:

→ Pension contributions
→ Salary sacrifice (EV, cycle-to-work)

Example:

A £10,000 pension contribution
can save ~£6,000 in tax.

That’s a 60% instant return.
Before the money is even invested.

Sometimes the smartest financial move
isn’t earning more.

It’s understanding the rules
before they understand you.

If you’re a consultant drifting above £100k,
this is worth checking.

And someone in your department probably hasn’t. ♻️

How much does it cost you before you even get to work? 


Name another profession
where you pay thousands each year
just to be allowed to work.

I’ll wait.

UK doctors carry mandatory overheads
that come straight off net income:

→ GMC registration: ~£455/year
→ Royal College fees: £200–£600+
→ Indemnity for private work: often thousands
→ Postgraduate exams: £2,000+ per sitting
→ Courses, CPD, portfolio fees

This isn’t optional.

You can’t practise without them.

And here’s the part most people miss:

These costs come out of post-tax income.

So if you’re in the £100k–£125k band...

You earn £10,000.
HMRC keeps ~£6,000.
You pay your regulator with what’s left.

A corporate executive doesn’t pay a licence fee to attend meetings.

A management consultant doesn’t fund their own regulator.

Doctors?

They pay to practise.

Then they’re taxed at 60% on the rest.

This isn’t outrage.

It’s arithmetic.

And arithmetic compounds.

Are you telling yourself that everything will be ok when you reach the next milestone? This is the Deferred Life Trap, and here's how to escape it.

A career committed to protecting life requires you to defer your own. Nobody puts it that bluntly in the admissions brochure. But every doctor reading

How To Escape the Deferred-Life Trap For Doctors

You buy a £5 ready meal. You microwave it. It tastes awful.
Do you finish it?

Most people do.

Because throwing it away feels like wasting £5.

But the £5 is gone either way.

Finishing it just adds 10 minutes of misery.

Now replace £5 with:

→ 6 years of medical school
→ A decade of training
→ £100,000+ of debt
→ Your twenties and thirties

This is the Sunk Cost Fallacy in scrubs.

Doctors stay in:

• Toxic departments
• Specialties they’ve outgrown
• Jobs that drain them

Because walking away feels like wasting the investment.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

The investment is already gone.

The only thing you control now is the next 10 years.

Staying miserable doesn’t honour the sacrifice.

It compounds it.

You’re not “quitting.”

You’re reallocating capital.

Your time.
Your energy.
Your remaining decades.

Smart investors don’t throw good money after bad.

So why are smart doctors throwing good years after bad?

Stop eating the bad meal.

Becoming a doctor costs more than tuition.
After graduation, you're immediately hit with:

→ GMC registration: £433/year

→ Indemnity insurance: £hundreds/year

→ BMA membership

→ Royal College fees

→ MRCP Part 1: £478

→ MRCP Part 2: £478

→ PACES: £694

→ MRCGP AKT: £505

→ MRCGP CSA: £1,674

Fail an exam? Pay again.

A GP registrar earning £40,257 can face over £5,000 in mandatory professional costs.

Before travel. Before courses. Before portfolio expenses.

The BMA called these costs "completely unaffordable."

And here's the part most doctors miss:

You can claim tax relief on some of these fees.

But almost nobody tells you that.

Because nobody taught you to ask.

www.building-out.com

Do you feel successful but still trapped financially?

I. The Paradox of the Modern Medical Career You made it. Consultant. GP Partner. Specialty Doctor with a decade of experience under your belt. Whateve

Why Doctors Feel Successful but Financially Paralysed

In 1896, an Italian economist noticed something strange in his garden.


20% of his pea pods produced 80% of the peas.

So he looked at land ownership across Italy.

Same pattern.

80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population.

Vilfredo Pareto had stumbled onto something bigger than agriculture.

The pattern shows up everywhere.

Business.
Wealth.
Medicine.
Time.

In your world it looks like this:

→ 80% of your clinical impact comes from 20% of your decisions
→ 80% of your stress comes from 20% of your tasks
→ 80% of your income comes from 20% of your leverage
→ 80% of your admin doesn’t require your brain

Yet most professionals optimise the wrong 80%.

They refine emails.

Tweak slides.

Perfect discharge letters.

While their real 20% — the decisions, the strategy, the leverage — gets squeezed into whatever energy is left.

The question isn’t:

“How do I do more?”

It’s:

“What actually moves the needle?”

Find your vital 20%.

Protect it like an asset.

Delegate, delete, or downgrade the rest.

Because productivity isn’t about volume.

It’s about asymmetry.

And most people are working very hard in the wrong half of the equation.

www.building-out.com

Most doctors don't realise they're caught in a monopsony.
What's that? 

It's a market with one dominant buyer of your labour.

Most learn the word eventually, but only when it hits home.

Your pay isn't set by market forces.

It's dictated by budgets, politics, and central control.

Working conditions? Mostly decided from above.

Options to exit? Limited and expensive.

Your bargaining power? Almost zero.

In most jobs, if you're undervalued, you leave.

In UK medicine, that's hard.

Training pathways, licensing, geography, they keep you stuck.

So what can you do?

Stop relying on one employer for everything.

Build a portfolio.

Locum shifts for flexibility.

Medico-legal work for premium rates.

Digital products that scale.

Investments that compound over time.

You don't need to quit medicine.

You just need to stop letting a single institution call all the shots.

Because when your income depends on one buyer, your power is limited.

Real wealth comes from diversifying that power.

Should I invest in gold? Here's some food for thought

You don't invest in gold. You insure with it. And if that sentence irritates you, good. It means you've been taught to think about gold the wrong way.

Why Invest In Gold - For the Busy Professional

A brief history of gold and money:

1870–1914
The Classical Gold Standard.
Currencies pegged to gold.
Trade imbalances self-correct.
Stability.

1944–1971
Bretton Woods.
The dollar pegged to gold at $35/oz.
Other currencies pegged to the dollar.
It works... until the Triffin Dilemma makes it mathematically unsustainable.

August 15, 1971
Nixon ends gold convertibility.
The dollar floats.
Gold floats.
A new era begins.

Since then?
Pure fiat.

Now look at the present.

2010–2026
Central banks flip from net sellers to aggressive buyers.
By 2024: 1,000+ tonnes annually.
The largest sustained accumulation in modern history.

Why?

Because monetary systems don’t last forever.

They stretch.
They strain.
They reset.

The pattern isn’t ideological.

It’s structural.

Every few decades, the rules change.

Gold is the only asset that has existed in every version.

Empires change.
Currencies change.
Policy changes.

Gold remains.

You don’t need to predict the next reset.

You need to survive it.

Why is it that high earners are still not financially free?

The Paradox of the “Rich” Doctor You've reached the milestone. Thirteen years of training. Maybe more. The exams, the rotations, the nights where you 

Why Most High Earning Doctors Aren't Financially Free

There’s a salary band in the UK where every extra £1 you earn...
You only keep 38p. And you can lose £10,000 in childcare.

Not a typo.

Between £100,000 and £125,140:

→ You lose £1 of Personal Allowance for every £2 earned
→ Effective marginal tax rate: 62%
→ With a Plan 2 student loan? 70%+

But here’s the real landmine.

Earn £100,001.

One pound over.

And you lose:

❌ 30 hours free childcare
❌ Tax-Free Childcare eligibility

No taper.
No smoothing.
A cliff edge.

I’ve seen this happen in real life:

A consultant accepts a £2,000 Clinical Lead allowance.

Salary moves from £99.5k to £101.5k.

Net result?

Worse off by ~£8,000.

The system wasn’t designed to punish doctors.

But it absolutely punishes drift.

Here’s the fix (and it’s boring):

Lower your adjusted net income below £100k.

Most common way?

→ Pension sacrifice.

Do that and you:

• Restore your Personal Allowance
• Regain childcare eligibility
• Avoid the 60%+ trap

For a family with two children, that one decision can be worth £20–25k a year.

This isn’t tax optimisation.

It’s financial self-defence.

If this surprised you,
someone in your department is about to walk into it. ♻️

Former GE Capital Executive | I help founders and executives see what their financials aren’t telling them.

I spent 25 years inside the machine.

GE Capital. GE Vernova. NBCUniversal. Unilever. Structured finance, capital markets, project finance across Latin America. I was the CFO who sat across from banks, governments, and Fortune 500 boards and made the numbers make sense. I closed an $800 million power plant deal. I managed capital market teams and hundred-million-dollar sales budgets. I built financial models that moved real money in real markets.

I was good at it. For a long time, that was enough.

Then it wasn't.

I stayed almost eight years past the moment I knew I was done. Eight years of golden handcuffs, institutional momentum, and not having a single person in my corner who could help me think through what leaving actually looked like -- financially, strategically, personally.

When I finally left, I made mistakes. I jumped into a startup that looked great on paper and had no financial foundation underneath it. I learned the hard way that passion without financial intelligence is just expensive optimism. Then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars learning the things corporate never taught me -- how to sell, how to communicate with conviction, how to walk into a room and make people feel what I knew to be true about their business.

That education nearly broke me. And it turned me into something rare: a former Fortune 500 CFO who can read your financials like a surgeon reads an MRI and sit across from you like a partner who actually gives a damn.

That's what I do now.

I work with a small number of founders and executives -- people who've already built something substantial and want a strategic partner with real financial depth. Not a coach. Not a consultant recycling frameworks. Not a bookkeeper calling themselves a fractional CFO. Someone who's been in the rooms, closed the deals, read the balance sheets, and came out the other side with a clear point of view about what actually matters.

If you're a founder past $1M who can feel that the way you got here won't get you to the next level, I can show you exactly where the growth is hiding and where the model breaks.

If you're an executive who knows you're meant for something bigger than the title on your business card, I've been where you are. I made the leap. I can help you think through yours.

I don't work with everyone. I'm selective about who I take on because the work only works when both sides are all in.

One conversation is all it takes to know if we're the right fit.

Cruz Gamboa

Most founders don’t go bankrupt overnight.

They bleed slowly.
From numbers they refused to look at.

Revenue looks good.
Growth feels exciting.
Ego feels validated.

But:

➡️ Cash flow is tight
➡️ Margins are thin
➡️ One client controls everything
➡️ Burn rate is “we’ll figure it out”

That’s how businesses die.

Not from lack of ambition.
From lack of financial discipline.

Here’s the cheat sheet I wish every founder read earlier.

Ignore red flags early → pay the price later.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Your P&L Is Hiding the Real Problem.

Most founders check 3 things:

Revenue.
Profit.
Growth rate.

Then they relax.

That’s the mistake.

Because your P&L is a scoreboard.

Not a diagnosis.

And scoreboards don’t tell you why you’re winning,
or why you’re about to lose.

Here’s what it’s not showing you 👇

If revenue is growing but cash is tight…

You don’t have a profit problem.
You have a cash flow problem.

If sales are strong but margins are shrinking…

You don’t have a demand problem.
You have a pricing or delivery problem.

If profit exists but stress keeps increasing…

You don’t have a money problem.
You have an operational problem.

Most businesses don’t collapse overnight.

They erode slowly:

➡️ Slightly rising CAC
➡️ Slightly lower margins
➡️ Slightly higher payroll
➡️ Slightly longer collections

Small leaks.

Compounded monthly.

And because the P&L still “looks fine,”
no one panics.

Until they should have.

Here’s what real operators track:

✓ Gross margin trends
✓ Cash runway (in months) 
✓ Revenue per employee
✓ CAC payback period
✓ Churn rate

Those numbers tell you where the fire is starting.

Revenue is vanity.
Profit is sanity.
Cash flow is survival.

Read your P&L.

But interrogate it harder.

Because the businesses that scale aren’t the ones with the best revenue.

They’re the ones who catch problems before they show up on the bottom line.

Your financial reports are perfect.

Clean P&L.
Accurate balance sheet.
Cash flow that ties out.

Yet decisions still feel slow, reactive, or unclear.

That’s because reports don’t create leverage.
Interpretation does.

Most founders read numbers like history.
High-performing operators read them like instructions.

Every metric should force a decision:
→ double down
→ fix fast
→ kill it

If nothing changes after reviewing your numbers,
you didn’t review them, you admired them.

This cheat sheet breaks down:

➡️ The questions that actually matter
➡️ The metrics that lie
➡️ And how to spot 1% changes that unlock outsized results

Save this before your next finance review.

cruzgamboadrive

patagonia-solar-llc

This guy bought one random car dealership.
Turned it into a $5B empire.

No fancy startup.
No venture capital.

Just one smart business move.

Terry Taylor started like most people in the auto industry:

Working inside dealerships.

Climbing the ladder.

But he realized something important:

No matter how hard you work…
You’re still building someone else’s business.

So in 1982, he bought his first dealership in Daytona Beach.

Most people would stop there.

He didn’t.

But the real genius wasn’t buying more dealerships.

It was how he structured them.

Instead of hiring managers, he:

• Gave them 20–25% equity
• Helped finance their buy-in
• Let them run the store

Now managers weren’t employees.

They were owners.

And owners think differently.

They protect profits.
They grow the business.
They care about reputation.

So scaling became easy.

1 dealership → 10 → 50 → 120+ dealerships

Today the network does $5B+ in revenue.

Simple lesson:

People work harder for ownership than salaries.

Build partners.
Not employees

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Terry Taylor

He spent 31 years running Trader Joe’s.
Mastered pricing. Supply chains. Consumer psychology.
But one thing bothered him more than anything else: food waste.

Every year, the U.S. throws away 120 billion pounds of perfectly good food.
Not unsafe. Just didn’t fit profit models.

Millions of families struggle to afford groceries.
Most CEOs see this as “business as usual.”
Doug saw it as broken design.

After retiring, he didn’t join a board. He didn’t consult.
He asked a different question:

💡 What if food waste became the foundation, not a byproduct?
What if access mattered more than margin?

✅ Daily Table is born.
✅ Grocery store built on surplus food.
✅ Affordable meals. Nutritious produce. Dignity first.
✅ No charity branding. No eligibility checks.
✅ Nonprofit by design. Every surplus reinvested in lowering prices.

Critics say it can’t scale. Doug agrees.
It wasn’t meant to dominate. It was meant to fix a failure everyone ignored.

From grocery CEO → noticing waste everywhere → building a store that feeds people, not profits.

If you want to rethink how systems work, look at incentives, not supply.
This is the anti-profit grocery model.

Daily Table

He was a waiter at Red Lobster.

He had $40.

Most people would complain. He built a $6B brand.

Here’s how:

✅ Saw a problem: kids in his neighborhood paying too much for hats.

✅ Took action: taught himself to sew, made hats at home.

✅ Scaled smart: sold locally → hip-hop stars wore FUBU → national attention.

✅ Got creative: turned his living room into a factory, raised money when banks said NO.

✅ Played the long game: built FUBU → became Shark Tank investor → mentors hundreds of startups.

Most people chase attention.
He chased problems that matter.

Critics said it wouldn’t work. He did it anyway.

You don’t need permission. You don’t need hype.
You need clarity, hustle, and persistence.

From $40 → living room hustle → global empire → Shark Tank.
That’s how legends are built

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Daymond John

Most people think billion-dollar companies start with experts.

Crumbl Cookies started with two tech guys who had never baked a cookie.

In 2017, they noticed something simple:
Cookies were America’s favorite dessert, but the category hadn’t evolved.
So they focused on a few key moves:

▶ Perfected one cookie first
▶ Kept the menu simple (1 classic + 4 rotating flavors)
▶ Turned weekly flavor drops into social media events

That simple strategy turned a 900 sq ft store and $10K into

✅ 800+ locations
✅ 1M cookies sold daily
✅ $1B+ valuation

They didn’t win by doing more.
They won by focusing on the few decisions that drive everything.

That’s true in finance too.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, go to scalingcfo.io
Take the free assessments and see exactly where to focus first.

Crumbl Cookies

Some people launch snacks.
Some create global empires from leftovers.

Arch West did the second.

➡️ 1960s. Disneyland.

Casa de Fritos. Tons of stale tortillas. Wasted daily.
A small vendor saw opportunity.
“Cut them into triangles. Fry them. Add some seasoning.”

No PR. No hype. No flashy launch.

Just execution.
Just obsession.
Just seeing value where others saw trash.

1966 → Plain Doritos, national launch.
1972 → Nacho Cheese.
From leftover tortillas → multibillion-dollar snack empire.

Scaling lesson:

Opportunities are everywhere. Most ignore them.
Those who see the leverage, execute relentlessly, and scale turn accidents into legends.

Some people chase attention.
Some quietly turn scraps into billions.

#scalingup #ceo #founder #businesslessons

Doritos

$30,000 → $7 BILLION.
No hype. No fluff. Just strategy.

Dennis Washington was 30, broke, and borrowing $30k from a Caterpillar dealer.

He bought one bulldozer and started doing construction in Montana.

Within 5 years? He was the largest contractor in the state.

But he didn’t stop there.

He asked a simple question:
"Where is everyone running from?"

Then he built a formula:

✅ Buy failing businesses that everyone else ignores.
✅ Fix the basics cut costs, improve management, unlock cash flow.
✅ Use the profits to buy the next one.
✅ Repeat.

First test: a worthless copper mine.
Bought for $15M → $100M profits in 3 years.

Next: a struggling global construction firm, merged it → Washington Group International → sold for $2.6B.

Now? Real estate, aviation, railroads, marine services… a $7B empire all from turning broken things into cash.

Most people run from broken businesses. Dennis Washington built a $7B empire fixing them.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Dennis Washington

He had nothing.
No friends. Barely spoke English. ADHD made school unbearable.

At 16, he dropped out. Taught himself to code. Became obsessed with modifying video games.

At 22, he moved to Canada. New country. No network. Just a laptop and a love for snowboarding.

Started an online snowboard store → it failed.

But the software he built to run it? People wanted it.

💡 Lightbulb moment: Forget snowboards. Sell the software.

✅ Shopify is born.
✅ Made e-commerce simple.
✅ Millions of stores. 175 countries. Even Amazon switched.

From high school dropout → coding every week → building the internet’s mall worth $147B.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io
Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

TOBIAS LÜTKE

Most “profitable” companies are one bad month away from dying.

Here’s why.

Profit is an opinion.
Cash is oxygen.

You can look profitable on paper and still miss payroll.
I’ve seen businesses doing 7 figures collapse because one client paid late.

Revenue doesn’t matter if:

• It’s delayed
• It’s unpredictable
• It’s already spent in your head

Growth makes this worse.

You hire early.
Lock in fixed costs.
Sign long-term tools.
Upgrade lifestyle.

Now your burn is permanent…
…but your income isn’t.

That’s the trap.

Another hard truth:
If the founder steps away and sales stop, you don’t have a business.
You have a high-stress job with employees.

Margins won’t save you.
Busy won’t save you.
Brand won’t save you.

Only cash flow will.

Simple rules that keep companies alive:

• Collect faster than you spend
• Keep fixed costs boring
• Build 3–6 months of runway
• Systems before scaling
• Liquidity before vanity growth

The strongest businesses aren’t the loudest.

They’re the ones that can survive a bad month without panicking.

That’s real leverage.

Peter Steinberger could have built “cool” software.

He didn’t.

He built useful software.

PDFs were everywhere. Developers were stuck with messy workflows. Peter asked:

What if developers had tools that just worked? That solved real problems, not just looked good on a portfolio?

✅ PSPDFKit → powers PDF apps across mobile & web.
✅ Open-source projects → simplify workflows, save engineers hours.
✅ OpenClaw → personal AI agent that actually helps you code.

Most people chase attention. Peter chases problems.

Critics say niche tools won’t scale. Peter doesn’t care.
He’s not in it for hype. He’s in it for impact.

From engineer → spotting friction everywhere → building tools that make developers’ lives better.

If you want to build something meaningful, solve real problems.
The market rewards results, not ideas.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Peter Steinberger

LVMH is worth $292.9 billion.

You're worth $10M and stressed about payroll.

Same industry. Completely different money game. Here's why.

I've sat inside dozens of $5M–$50M businesses as a fractional CFO.

The pattern never changes.

Founders confuse 3 separate problems:

❌ "We have a cash flow problem."

No. You have a timing problem. Revenue is fine. Your money is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's fixable in 90 days.

❌ "We have a scaling problem."

No. You tried to grow before your operations could hold the weight. Every single time. Growth didn't break you, the lack of systems did.

❌ "We have a fundraising problem."

No. Investors don't fund vision. They fund numbers that prove the vision is real. You don't have a pitch problem. You have a financial story problem.

Now look at the billion-dollar brands:

Inditex built Zara to $193B by selling inventory before the bill came due.

Hermès built $235B by turning scarcity into a balance sheet strategy.

Fast Retailing scaled Uniqlo globally because they built finance infrastructure first.

None of that is luck.
All of it is decisions, financial decisions dressed up as brand decisions.

The difference between them and you isn't capital.

It's that they stopped running on gut feel and built a machine that tells them exactly where every dollar is going, and why.

You don't need a $500K CFO on payroll.

You need 10 hours a month of the right financial brain in the room.

That's the actual arbitrage most $5M–$50M founders are sleeping on.

If your finances are running you instead of the other way around,

Comment "CFO" below and I'll show you exactly where to start.

Most founders don’t fail overnight.

They bleed slowly.
From decisions they ignored.
From processes they never set.
From metrics they refused to measure.

Revenue looks fine. Growth feels exciting. Ego feels validated.

But underneath:

➡️ Decisions get delayed → chaos spreads
➡️ Processes depend on you → hero culture burns out
➡️ Metrics are “nice to have” → guesswork rules
➡️ Accountability is optional → everyone points fingers

That’s how scaling dies.

Not from lack of ambition.
From lack of rules.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.
#scalingup #founders #ceo

Most people saw a ping pong table.

Max Koehler saw a business.

In 2019, he noticed something strange:

Table tennis is one of the most played sports in the world,
but in U.S. cities there were very few places to play regularly.

Most founders would open a traditional club.

Max built PingPod instead.

Small glass studios.
Open 24/7.
Booked entirely through an app.
No staff. No front desk.

But the real genius?

A camera above every table.

Every rally gets recorded.
One tap → instant replay → share on social.

Players created the content.
The content created the marketing.

Clips went viral.
Bookings exploded.

Today PingPod is valued around $40–60M.

All from one simple observation.

The best founders don’t just build products.
They build systems that grow themselves. 🚀

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, go to
scalingcfo.io

Take the free assessments and see exactly where to focus first.

#scalingup #founders #CEO

Max Koehler

The trillion-dollar scoreboard isn’t just impressive.

It’s a warning. ⚠️

AI is no longer a feature.
It’s infrastructure.

Distribution beats product.
Platforms compress margins.
Specialisation scales faster than breadth.

And the giants NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple aren’t just companies anymore.

They’re rails.

If you’re a $1M–$10M founder, here’s the real play:

➡️ Build on top of giants, don’t compete with them.
➡️ Own your audience, don’t rent it.
➡️ Go narrow, dominate a micro-niche.
➡️ Push recurring revenue.
➡️ Move faster than anyone with a board meeting.

The economy is consolidating at the top.

But execution speed is still decentralised.

That’s your edge.

If you're building between $1–$10M and want to scale intelligently, not just aggressively

Come to the workshop → https://lnkd.in/efBiFQRg

I keep having the same conversation.

Founder calls me. Revenue is up -- sometimes way up. 

But they're taking home less than when the business was half the size. 

They hired the consultants. They wrote the plan. They pushed harder on sales. And somehow the business keeps snapping back to the same number like a rubber band.

After sitting across from enough of these founders, I started seeing the pattern. It comes down to three things nobody wants to talk about -- and none of them have anything to do with selling more.

I broke it all down in this week's newsletter.
#scalingup #founders #growth #CEO

I talk to a lot of founders. Like, a LOT. And something keeps coming up that I can't ignore anymore. Almost every conversation -- doesn't matter what 

Open article: The 3 things nobody tells you about getting stuck by Cruz Gamboa • 5 min read

The 3 things nobody tells you about getting stuck

Samsung wasn’t always a tech giant.

It was a tiny grocery store in 1938.

Lee Byung-Chull had $0. Just noodles, dried fish, and ambition.

Most people would stay small. He built a $720B empire.

Here’s how:

✅ Saw a need. Korea needed industry after the war.

✅ Took action. Trading → textiles → heavy industry.

✅ Bet on the future. Electronics in 1969. First black-and-white TV. Then semiconductors. Then global domination.

✅ Built a culture. Quality over quantity. Meritocracy. Vision.

✅ Played the long game. Critics doubted. Scandals happened. Growth didn’t stop.

From noodles → TVs → semiconductors → Galaxy phones → global tech leader.

Most people chase attention. Samsung chased leverage.

Legends aren’t born. They’re built.

SAMSUNG

99% of founders do this backwards.

They try to scale a business
that no one has proven they want.

Then they try to sell a business
that only works because they exist.

Here’s the real order:

1. Start
Don’t build the product.
Sell it first.

If no one pays, it’s not a business.
It’s a fantasy.

2. Scale
Do less. Better.
One offer. One audience. One channel.

Systemize everything.
If it needs you to survive, it’s not scalable.

3. Sell
Buyers don’t pay for hype.
They pay for predictable cash flow.

Clean books.
Recurring revenue.
Low founder dependency.

Start with proof.
Scale with systems.
Exit with leverage.

That’s how you build something that prints money, not something that prints stress.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Most founders don’t have a growth problem.
They have a focus problem.

Their dashboards are full.
Their results are not.

Tracking more KPIs doesn’t make you smarter.

It just gives you more ways to avoid the hard decision.

Here’s how serious founders think about metrics:

If a number doesn’t change what you do this week,
it doesn’t belong on your dashboard.

That’s why the only startup metrics that actually matter answer 4 questions:

1. Is demand growing?
2. Are customers staying?
3. Are they paying more over time?
4. Are we running out of cash before we figure it out?

Everything else is noise.

The best operators I’ve seen track 5–7 metrics max.
They review them weekly.
And they tie each metric to a clear action.

Everyone tracks KPIs.
Very few track the right ones.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io.

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

taplio

The Battle

Diarmaid Mcmenamin

Cruz Gamboa

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreDiarmaid Mcmenamin's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreCruz Gamboa's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Diarmaid Mcmenamin

Cruz Gamboa

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Diarmaid Mcmenamin's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreCruz Gamboa's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDiarmaid Mcmenamin's LinkedIn Performance