Built on the Front Lines

I did not set out to write a book about business growth. I set out, thirty years ago, to keep a job. I was twenty-two. I did not have a business degree. I did not have a mentor. What I had was a folding table in the corner of an outsourced call center, a headset that never quite fit right, and a stack of support tickets nobody else wanted.

That eight-person operation became twenty, then fifty, then a hundred and fourteen. I did not plan that growth. I built the multi-tiered support process the same way I'd built everything else — one ticket, one shift, one small fix at a time — and then I wrote the pattern down, because the same handful of moves kept working, in slightly different clothes, no matter how big the pile got.

I have been repeating it ever since: through IBM, a distributor merger, a financial analyst seat at a company that sold for two billion dollars, hotel developments lenders said couldn't be financed, and now a consulting practice that helps developers get their deals funded. Different industries, different capital stacks. The same underlying moves, over and over.

This book is that pattern, written down properly for the first time. — Shik Han