Small Business Standard exists because every other industry has a standard — and the one with the most failure didn't. We built it.
For nearly three decades, we worked inside the organizations that other people study. Banking. Insurance. Healthcare. Aviation. Automotive. Manufacturing. Government. Media. Telecommunications. Technology. Hospitality. Retail. We led scaling transformations from frontline teams to C-suites. We helped shape SAFe — the scaling methodology thousands of consultants are certified in — field-testing new methods in real implementations and building parts of the courseware and certification exams behind it. We were in the rooms where the decisions got made — at every scale.
Then we became founders. And we watched the same failure modes show up at our own kitchen table. The cash fragility. The decisions that flowed through one person. The processes that lived in our heads. The team that couldn't function without us. Different scale, same architecture.
We tried the frameworks. We tried the coaches. We tried the programs. Every one of them treated the symptoms. None of them rebuilt the architecture that kept generating the problems. None of them named what was actually wrong. None of them set a standard.
That's when we realized the problem wasn't us — and it wasn't unique. Aviation has a standard. Medicine has a standard. Construction has a standard. Every industry that matters has a defined way it's supposed to be built. Small business is the only industry where there's no standard at all.
So we went back to the research. Every documented reason small businesses fail. Every failure mode that gets baked in from day one. We mapped them, named them, and built the architecture that eliminates them — one by one, with gates that prove each one is gone. That's The Standard.
We didn't invent the failure modes. We didn't invent the diagnostic categories. We invented the standard — because no one else had.
"You deserve a business that works just as hard for you as you do for it."
We've been founders. We've felt the weight of being the person everything depends on. We've made payroll a question instead of a given. We've lost sleep over decisions we couldn't unmake. We've worked harder than anyone around us and watched the needle barely move.
We've also built things, lost things, and rebuilt. The Standard exists because nothing else reached deep enough to fix the root cause — and we needed it for ourselves before we built it for anyone else.
Three decades on both sides of the table: enterprise transformations inside the organizations other people study, and our own businesses the whole time. The record is below — stated once, because a standard shouldn't need to keep repeating its credentials.
The same failure modes show up at every scale — from a $2M services firm to a $2B corporation. The scale is different. The Standard is the same.
Josh has been in technology since 1996 — and a founder exactly as long. His first business opened that year; several followed, including a technology company he grew to 45 people across 23 offices in the early Wi-Fi era. He's lived every failure mode The Standard names, at his own kitchen table.
The other track ran through the biggest rooms in American business: a career that began inside Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks, then twelve industries of enterprise transformation — MasterCard's first agile release train, Southwest Airlines' transformation, McKesson, Navy SPAWAR, and dozens more. Along the way: the launches and practitioners in the record above — people who carried the work into hundreds of companies he never set foot in. As a SAFe Program Consultant Trainer and Certified SAFe Exam Developer, he helped build the courseware and certification exams behind SAFe. In 2017 he co-authored Mastering the Art of Success with Jack Canfield; he's a member of Donald Miller's business mastermind.
The Standard is where the two tracks meet — thirty years of enterprise standards discipline, and thirty years founding businesses in the one industry that never had one.
You'll notice The Standard isn't built around its author. That's deliberate. A standard designed to outlast any single founder had better outlast its own — if we built this business around one person's face, we'd be violating the first thing it teaches.
The Standard wasn't designed in a conference room. It was built by people who had to deliver results inside organizations that couldn't afford to fail — and then carried that discipline into the small business world.
The Standard Score is the first honest look at which failure modes are still active in your business. Free. About 15 minutes. The diagnosis changes everything.
Take The Standard Score →No account required · Results delivered immediately