Revenue Is Easy. Scale Is Earned.
A practitioner's field guide for founders and executives of companies between $1M and $100M in revenue. Built on three decades of advisory work with over one hundred founder-led companies. Twelve chapters. Twenty-plus field-tested frameworks. No filler. Only what works in the field.
This book is for the founder who built something real and is now trying to figure out what comes next. It's for the CEO staring at a $10M plateau, the COO inheriting chaos, and the board member who needs a diagnostic that actually works.
Every framework was developed in the field and refined through direct application with real companies. Each one is scored, with clear thresholds, and built to be used immediately — not filed away.
“I’ve read a lot of scaling books. Most are theory with a thin coat of practicality. This one reads like it was written by someone who has sat in the seat. The chapter on decision authority alone changed how I structure my leadership team. Our operating rhythm went from reactive to disciplined, and the results followed.”
“What stands out in Zero to $100M is Schlesinger understands that scaling is not a strategy problem — it’s a systems and discipline problem. The diagnostic frameworks in this book map directly to what we look at in diligence. Founders who work through this before they need to will be in a different position than those who don’t.”
“I inherited a $12M family manufacturing business that had been running the same way for fifteen years. Profitable, but stuck. The sections on leadership layers and cash discipline were the ones I needed most — and the hardest to read honestly. This book doesn’t flatter you. It’s more useful than that.”
“Most founders underestimate what has to change organizationally between $5M and $50M. Schlesinger lays that transition out clearly. This is not a book about tactics. It is a book about the infrastructure that makes growth sustainable.”
“Most growth conversations focus on the top line and gloss over the financial architecture underneath it. This book doesn’t. The sections on cash velocity, working capital, and operating leverage are the kind of material I wish more operators had read before they needed it. I’ve already passed it along to several people.”
“We scaled from $8M to $110M over seven years and made most of these mistakes ourselves. Reading this felt like a post-mortem on the hard parts. The frameworks around people, process, and decision authority would have cut years off the learning curve. This is not motivational — it’s practical.”
"We had forty-seven employees and three people who actually knew how anything worked."
In Chapter 4, Schlesinger profiles a mid-Atlantic construction firm that hit $22M in revenue and stalled. The founder had built a company entirely dependent on his judgment — every bid, every hire, every client call ran through one person. Using the Founder Dependency Index and the Delegation Readiness Matrix, the company rebuilt how decisions were made and who had authority to make them.
* Names and identifying details have been changed. Metrics are representative of real outcomes.
Jacob Schlesinger has spent three decades working with founder-led companies as they scale from their first million in revenue toward $100 million and beyond. He has worked with over one hundred companies across construction, manufacturing, distribution, staffing, professional services, healthcare services, and facilities management.
The frameworks in this book were developed through direct engagement with real companies facing real scaling challenges. Every chapter opens with a case drawn from practice, works through the underlying dynamics with specificity, and closes with scored diagnostic tools built to be used — not just read.
Available for pre-order in hardcover and audiobook. Twelve chapters, twenty-plus frameworks, and a complete scaling toolkit.
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