Build a Business That Sees Trouble Before It Hits
You didn’t start your business to watch it fall apart from something you didn’t see coming. Yet that’s exactly how many businesses fail—not from carelessness, but from silence. Early Warning Signals is a tactical guide for business owners who want to stop being blindsided and start building systems that flag risks early, clearly, and without drama.
Inspired by public-sector disaster models—but built for the messiness of real-world entrepreneurship—this book helps you identify hazards, map vulnerabilities, and install internal warning systems that catch fraud, failure, and friction before they spiral. It’s practical, not philosophical. Brief, not bloated. Because if you run a growing company, you don’t need 60,000 words—you need a dashboard that works.
Inside, you’ll learn how to design smart triggers, build fraud-resistant systems, monitor team health, and read customer feedback as a signal, not a nuisance. If you’ve ever said, “Thank God they handle that,” this book will show you how to stay informed—without micromanaging.
Early Warning Signals isn’t about preventing every problem. It’s about catching them while they’re still fixable. You don’t need to see everything. You just need to see what matters, before it’s too late.
Build a Business That Sees Trouble Before It Hits
You didn’t start your business to watch it fall apart from something you didn’t see coming. Yet that’s exactly how many businesses fail—not from carelessness, but from silence. Early Warning Signals is a tactical guide for business owners who want to stop being blindsided and start building systems that flag risks early, clearly, and without drama.
Inspired by public-sector disaster models—but built for the messiness of real-world entrepreneurship—this book helps you identify hazards, map vulnerabilities, and install internal warning systems that catch fraud, failure, and friction before they spiral. It’s practical, not philosophical. Brief, not bloated. Because if you run a growing company, you don’t need 60,000 words—you need a dashboard that works.
Inside, you’ll learn how to design smart triggers, build fraud-resistant systems, monitor team health, and read customer feedback as a signal, not a nuisance. If you’ve ever said, “Thank God they handle that,” this book will show you how to stay informed—without micromanaging.
Early Warning Signals isn’t about preventing every problem. It’s about catching them while they’re still fixable. You don’t need to see everything. You just need to see what matters, before it’s too late.
The Cost of Not Knowing
Most businesses don’t fail because the owner was reckless.
They fail because something important was missed.
The fraud that started small and snowballed
The customer feedback that never got passed up
The one key process that only one person knew how to do — until they left
The burnout that turned into turnover, that turned into chaos
Not because the signals weren’t there.
But because there was no system to catch them.
The Real Reason Businesses Fail
Everyone talks about strategy.
About growth, revenue, operations, leadership.
But here’s what no one tells you:
Businesses don’t fail because of one big, bad decision.
They fail because of things that should have been caught — but weren’t.
Because no one was watching.
Because the system wasn’t listening.
Because the early warning signal was either buried — or never existed in the first place.
This book changes that.
What Is an Early Warning System — Really?
In the public sector, early warning systems are used to detect disasters:
Floods. Fires. Political unrest. Pandemics.
They’re designed to:
Monitor known hazards
Identify vulnerabilities
Track signals
Alert the right people
Trigger the right response
And do it before the damage becomes irreversible
What this book does is take that same principle and apply it to what actually brings down businesses:
Erosion of margin
Cultural drift
Fraud and theft
Operational fragility
Team burnout
Customer churn
And the illusion that “no news” means “everything’s fine”
Because your business is a living system.
And you need to know when something’s shifting — before it snaps.
Why Most Business Owners Don’t Have One
You didn’t build your company to watch dashboards.
You built it on hustle. On loyalty. On instinct.
You stayed close to everything because that’s what it took.
But as you grow, that proximity becomes a liability.
The business starts to outpace your line of sight.
And eventually, things start breaking that you never even saw coming.
Why?
Because you were still the system.
And no one told you it was time to build a system that worked without you.
This Book Will Teach You To:
Identify your internal hazards — the real ones, not just the obvious ones
Spot vulnerabilities before they get exploited
Collect only the data that actually matters
Monitor signals, not summaries
Design triggers that catch problems in real-time
Protect your business from fraud, failure, and friction
And evolve from founder-involved to founder-aware
You’ll stop relying on hope, and start designing with foresight.
Who This Book Is For
This is not a book for solo entrepreneurs still duct-taping it all together.
It’s for business owners with 10–100 people on the payroll —
Enough infrastructure that things can go wrong without you knowing
And enough at stake that you can’t afford to be surprised.
This is for:
Owners who want to stop firefighting
Leaders who want to stay informed without micromanaging
Builders who care about resilience, not just growth
Founders who want to protect what they’ve built — without becoming the bottleneck
The Promise
By the end of this book, you’ll have a system that watches the business for you.
You’ll know when something’s off — without having to be in the weeds
You’ll stop missing the early signs
And you’ll build a company that tells you the truth — while there’s still time to act
You don’t have to see everything.
Just the things that matter.
How to Read This Book
This isn’t a padded business memoir.
It’s not 60,000 words of fluff wrapped around 6 good ideas.
And it’s not something you’ll need to “get through.”
This book is a strategic whiteboard session in print.
It’s tactical, designed to be fast, clear, and immediately useful.
Every chapter is short on purpose.
Every section is built to help you think, act, and adapt—without having to translate theory into application.
Yes, it’s brief.
But don’t mistake that for shallow.
You’re not here because you want to read more.
You’re here because you want to miss less.
So treat this book like a tool:
Read it with a pen.
Apply it to your business in real time.
Use it to find the cracks before something slips through them.
You don’t need another leadership philosophy.
You need a system that can see what’s coming.
This book will help you build it.
Early Warning Signals is the type of book you can read in one sitting and get some immediate positive insight from. You can also pick it up and read a lot of the book's chapters without reference to the others. For that reason, I do like the style it's written in.
There is a over-arching message to this book, which may seem obvious when stated plainly, but I do think a lot of inexperienced entrepreneurs could easily overlook - and that is that good small businesses absolutely require the right systems to grow into really great medium to large sized businesses. So I would say this book is for any small business owner that either doesn't yet realize that they themselves are the bottleneck to the growth of their own business, or that perhaps know they need to have some automation in their oversight but don't yet know how to build it.
Early Warning Signals will help you get the wheels turning and introspect about the vulnerabilities of your business. What's great is it's very systematic - start with identifying the risks your business faces (external and based on the type of business), then identify your vulnerabilities (internal and based on your company's strengths/weaknesses), then develop a metric to help you proactively manage that risk and weakness. The book breaks it all down in a way that's easy enough to follow such that by the end, if you do the work, you'll have the dashboard that will allow you, as an owner, to operate at the 10-thousand foot level and stay out of the weeds and allow your business to reach the next level of growth.
In here, you'll find a great mix of the author explaining the why of having an early warning system, and also the how of implementing it, and plenty of example triggers and metrics to get you started.