Building an Operating System as a SMB Owner
Exactly how we're building out Notion as our operating system to grow our small businesses
I'm approaching my 4th year of entrepreneurship.
It's crazy to see how much has changed in the three short years of building 1 business from the ground up and acquiring 2 others.
I can't even begin to explain how much you about yourself as an entrepreneur.
As we look at what we’ve accomplished the last 3 years,
it’s obvious there has been a constant pull between working in the business and working on the business.
One of which always seems to be neglected.
As we think about the next stages of growth and where we’re hoping to go, we're working to build the necessary frameworks to give us a better path to more sustainable growth…
Growth without us as the limiting factor.
Ask any SMB owner, it’s no small task.
Building a Second Brain
If you haven’t heard of the concept of building a second brain, I highly recommend it from Tiago Forte.
Building a second brain is about creating an external system—usually digital—that stores your knowledge, ideas, and tasks so your actual brain isn’t overloaded trying to remember everything.
The idea is:
Your brain is best at thinking, problem-solving, and creating.
Your second brain (apps, notes, documents, etc.) is best at remembering, organizing, and connecting information.
Instead of keeping important stuff in your head (where it gets lost or forgotten), you capture it in your second brain. That could be:
Notes in Notion, Obsidian, or Evernote
A personal knowledge system like PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive)
To-do lists, saved articles, or voice memos
The power comes when you can trust that system. You know your notes, research, tasks, and ideas are captured and organized, so you don’t waste mental energy remembering details—you can focus on using them.
Think of it as: your brain for creativity, your second brain for storage + retrieval.
Here’s a video that creates a very similar concept to what I’m building:
How I’m using this
We’ve broken down each company in it’s respective area.
I’m using the PARA method, changed slightly to PARTA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Tasks, Archives) because this makes more sense to me.
From here, each area is built out with the Projects, Resources, Tasks and archives.
I’m using Things3 as a daily task manager which I’m figuring out how to connect these two but I’m likely to manage large projects and tasks out of Things3 but use Notion as my second brain
This will allow us to build these in a way to share easily with team members as we grow.
So far, this has been a massive project that’s taken over my ‘nights and weekends’ as it’s working ON the business.
We’re optimistic it’s the necessary building blocks as we transition more and more responsibility to our operators.
A few tools I’m obsessed with right now:
WISPR - Speech-to-text is the only way I write stuff, fast. This is by far the best few dollars I've spent every month.
Amplemarket - If you are involved with anything on GTM, this is one of the best tools I've seen to consolidate data sourcing and sequencing.
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