The sixty rules I would insist on

Rules are not slogans. A rule earns its place only if it changes behaviour under pressure.

Read these monthly. Put the relevant rule into a calendar, checklist, contract, dashboard, or refusal before the situation arrives. A rule remembered only after the damage is a lesson, not a control. Do not worship the list. Install it. Each rule should eventually live somewhere operational: a cash meeting, a contract clause, a hiring scorecard, a customer script, an escalation trigger, a personal boundary, or a professional-review gate. If a rule stays only in your head, pressure will negotiate with it, usually when you are tired.

Truth and self-command

1. Tell yourself the bad number first. Cash, churn, defects, overdue invoices, missed commitments, and pipeline do not improve when renamed. Bad numbers are not insults. They are early rescue signals.

2. Do not make irreversible decisions in emotional heat. Anger, fear, desperation, envy, and euphoria narrow attention. Stabilise, write facts, calculate downside, and seek one disconfirming view before signing, sending, firing, borrowing, or transferring.

3. Protect sleep, health, and sobriety as decision controls.

Exhaustion is not proof of commitment. It lowers judgment and transfers cost to customers, colleagues, and family. Treat impairment as an operating risk, not a badge.

4. Keep one weekly appointment with reality.

Review calendar, customers, pipeline, cash, experiments, people, risks, and self. Never skip because the week was bad.

5. Decide your never-list before the price appears.

Do not misstate numbers, fake proof, hide material risk, misuse data, or sell what you know cannot help. Lines decided in the moment are only preferences.

6. Be the same person in every room. How you treat the person with less power is evidence of how you will behave when you have more. Reputation travels through people you forgot were watching.

Customer and market

7. Speak to customers before substantial building. Reconstruct real workflows and recent events before months of development. A buyer’s current workaround teaches more than your private certainty.

8. Treat payment, usage, renewal, and referral as stronger evidence than praise. Compliments are kind. Commitment reveals value. Ask what the customer will risk next: money, time, data, political capital, or introduction.

9. Solve one expensive problem for one reachable segment first.

“Small businesses” is not a market. Name the buyer, context, pain, budget, route, current alternative, and trigger for change.

10. Ask about the past, not imagined behaviour.

People are poor witnesses of what they might do. They are better witnesses of what happened last time, who was involved, and what it cost.

11. Promise only what can be controlled and measured.

Scope, success, exclusions, dependencies, risk, and change process belong in writing. Vagueness feels flexible until the customer remembers a different promise.

12. Repair customer harm before polishing the story. Stop further harm, communicate accurately, remediate appropriately, and change the system. Public explanation without operational change is reputation theatre.

Sales and distribution

13. Diagnose before pitching. Understand pain, priority, current alternative, buyer, blockers, cost of inaction, and timing. A relevant diagnosis makes the pitch shorter.

14. Ask for the order or next commitment clearly. Do not return deciding labour to the buyer with “let me know.” Offer a clear next step, a date, or a clean close.

15. Follow up until a decision, date, or reason to stop. Every follow-up must add clarity: recap, answer, evidence, changed scope, or decision request. Stop when asked or when fit is gone.

16. Disqualify poor fit early. No pain, authority, budget, urgency, access, trust, or safe delivery means no current opportunity. A bad-fit win invoices you later.

17. Own a path to customers. One platform, partner, algorithm, marketplace, or paid channel should not be the only route to demand without a contingency. Borrowed distribution can change rent.

18. Do not discount to compensate for unclear value. Diagnose trust, proof, segment, urgency, and risk before cutting price. If you reduce price, trade for scope, speed, volume, or learning.

Time and execution

19. Put the strategy on the calendar. If discovery, selling, delivery, hiring, or systems matter, they receive protected time. A calendar is a more honest strategy document than a deck.

20. Choose one must-win outcome per day and one constraint per quarter. Ten priorities are a refusal to choose. The business improves when attention concentrates on the current constraint long enough to move it.

21. Give every experiment an end date and decision rule.

No endless prototypes. Define continue, change, stop, or collect-one-fact before the result becomes personal.

22. Close loops before opening attractive new ones.

Finish the test, deliver the promise, document the lesson, collect the cash, then choose. Novelty is often avoidance with better lighting.

23. Eliminate and simplify before automating or hiring. Do not pay people or software to move waste faster. Remove the unnecessary step before you make it repeatable.

24. Use mission briefs for material work. Purpose, definition of done, authority, boundaries, assumptions, checkpoints, and escalation triggers fit on one page. Correct misunderstanding before effort begins.

Money and financial truth

25. Separate personal and business money from the first paid work. Clean records protect decisions, compliance, partners, and family. Messy money turns every later argument into archaeology.

26. Tax, payroll, statutory, and customer-purpose money are not operating float. Reserve and pay obligations. Do not finance today by stealing from a known due date. This is a red line, not a working-capital tactic.

27. Run a 13-week cash forecast. Model timing, late payment, committed outflows, protected reserves, and minimum cash. Forecast by customer and due date, not by hope.

28. Read profit and cash separately. A profitable business can fail when collection timing, inventory, payroll, or growth consumes cash. Profit is evidence; cash is survival.

29. Do not increase lifestyle from one good period.

Build reserves, remove bottlenecks, fund repeatable growth, and diversify concentration before permanent obligations. Make lifestyle increases gradual and reversible.

30. Never risk household survival for business theatre.

No launch, office, valuation, speculative position, or status purchase deserves emergency security. Family safety is not seed capital.

Capital and risk

31. Do not borrow to discover whether demand exists.

Use conversations, proposals, deposits, paid pilots, and bounded tests before fixed repayment. Debt is for engines, not wishes.

32. Model personal guarantees to the ugly case.

Understand collateral, enforcement, family impact, timing, and recovery with independent advice. Optimism should never be the only signature witness.

33. Increase bet size only after evidence and loss capacity increase.

Optimism alone does not earn a larger allocation. Larger bets require stronger evidence, better controls, and survivable downside.

34. Keep a written risk register. Name owner, trigger, prevention, detection, response, review date, and evidence. A risk without an owner is a future surprise.

35. Treat growth as amplification, not medicine. Scale makes good economics better and bad economics worse. Press growth only when you know what it will amplify.

36. Never let obligation duration outrun revenue visibility without deliberate review. Long leases, permanent hires, debt, and multi-year contracts can turn a downturn fatal. Match commitments to evidence and flexibility.

People and ownership

37. Never promise equity casually. Equity is economics, control, governance, dilution, departure, IP, and future dispute. A casual promise can become the most expensive sentence in the company.

38. Work with a potential co-founder before marrying the cap table. Observe truth, pace, conflict, boring work, money behaviour, stress, and customer conduct. Chemistry is useful; work evidence is better.

39. Use vesting, leaver terms, and dispute mechanisms.

Goodwill is not a deadlock process. Write the agreement while everyone still wants to be fair.

40. Hire against a written outcome scorecard.

Evidence and job-relevant work outrank charm, pedigree, or similarity. Use the same core evidence for comparable people.

41. Give feedback close to the event. State fact, impact, standard, question, and next expectation. Do not store resentment until it becomes cruelty.

42. Do not protect a toxic high performer. The behaviour you tolerate becomes the culture and teaches good people to leave. Results do not launder conduct.

Leadership and systems

43. One important outcome has one accountable owner. Collaboration can be broad. Accountability cannot be anonymous. Shared ownership often means shared escape.

44. Delegate outcome, authority, resources, standard, and escalation together. Incomplete delegation creates dependence or unmanaged risk. Giving responsibility without authority is theatre; authority without standards is drift.

45. Document recurring work while it is fresh. Memory is not a system. Include exceptions, quality checks, and improvement. Document the path while the work is still warm.

46. Bad news moves upward and early.

Reward responsible escalation before small truth becomes large damage. Punish hidden facts, not honest alarms.

47. Scale only a unit that creates value responsibly. More leads, customers, employees, or capital magnify both result and defect. Fix quality before you buy attention.

48. Build continuity before absence tests it. No one device, password holder, founder, vendor, bank, or customer should be an unexamined single point of failure. Redundancy is cheaper before panic.

Knowledge and decisions

49. Learn from primary evidence before personality. Customers, measured results, official documents, contracts, filings, and verified operators outrank fame. A confident storyteller is still a source to check.

50. Convert every useful lesson into a decision, experiment, or rule. Otherwise it is content consumption. If nothing changes, the lesson was entertainment with better notes.

51. Keep a decision journal before outcomes are known.

Record facts, assumptions, options, downside, emotional state, decision, and review date. Memory edits in your favour unless paper stops it.

52. Seek the strongest case against your preferred answer.

Disagreement discovered before commitment is an asset. Reward the person who finds the fatal flaw early.

53. Match decision speed to reversibility. Move quickly through two-way doors. Slow down for equity, guarantees, sensitive data, major contracts, regulated risk, and actions difficult to undo.

54. Verify current rules at the official source. Tax, law, labour, securities, data, insurance, government schemes, and filings change. Use dated professional review and keep the source link with the decision.

Wealth, freedom, and stewardship

55. Reinvest in the proven bottleneck before upgrading appearance. Capital should improve customer value, capacity, resilience, or durable distribution. Appearance is funded last because it rarely fixes the engine.

56. Protect wealth from concentration as it grows. With suitable advice, build reserves and diversify part of long-term wealth beyond the operating company. Concentration may create wealth; unmanaged concentration can remove it.

57. Keep speculation capped, separate, and non-essential. Do not borrow, average down from ego, or relabel speculation as investment because the price rose. A capped loss teaches; an uncapped one commands.

58. Define enough in advance. Without an enough floor, every success creates a larger requirement and freedom keeps moving away. Define the life the money is meant to protect.

59. Protect family and relationships with the seriousness you give customers.

Give honest information, protected time, and respect. Do not make loved ones absorb every unpriced business risk. They are not silent investors.

60. Leave people, institutions, and the city better than you found them.

Pay fairly and on time, teach what you can, honour the law, create useful work, and use wealth as stewardship. The final audit is not only your balance sheet.

· GE ch. 45 · LG pp. 90–115 · ASC pp. 136–141 · TABLE pp. 79–81 · MM pp. 116–118. Rules are canonical operating defaults; financial, health, legal, insurance, securities, and India-current items require professional/current-source review.

FIELD MANUAL · TWENTY-FOUR REUSABLE TOOLS

Turn judgment into a dated decision.

Print the tool that matches the decision in front of you. Complete it from evidence, not memory; write unknown when you do not

know; and finish with one owner, one date, and one visible proof. These pages are working instruments—not tests, forecasts, legal

records, or substitutes for professional advice.

A blank is unknown, never zero. Mark every input F (Fact), A (Assumption), or Fc (Forecast). Date the source. Preserve the old version when the decision matters.

How to use this manual

Start with the decision, then choose one tool. Do not complete several worksheets merely to feel thorough. Use the header to establish who owns the page and what evidence was current. Use the body to expose the mechanism and the uncertainty. Use the footer to close the loop. When a formula produces a clean number from weak inputs, the number is still weak.

Amounts are in rupees unless another currency is written beside the figure. Percentages need a named denominator and period. Forecasts need a base case and a downside case. A regulated decision remains unverified until the relevant current official source and professional reviewer have been recorded. Never copy an illustrative threshold from this book into a policy without choosing and documenting your own.