Plan B is the job. It is the thing you fall back on, and it is the reason the other thing never gets built. Plan A is the business you would build if you actually chose one.
Eight weeks, for people who have real expertise and nothing that earns from it yet. Consulting, advisory, fractional work, productized services. Solo, no investors, no staff, no office, and portable by design.
You come with an idea, or you come with none. You leave with a direction you are sure of and a business that is set up, priced, findable and ready to grow.
Which is why the program is named after the one you are supposed to be building.
Three different situations, one problem underneath. You know how to do valuable work, and you do not own anything that keeps paying you for it.
Almost every business program begins at the same place: you already have an idea. Then it sells you execution on top of a choice nobody ever checked.
If the choice was wrong, everything built on top of it is wasted, and you usually find that out about 2 years and a lot of money later.
Plan A starts with the choice.
Years of doing work people paid for, a real network, problems you have solved more than once. None of that tells you which business to start, and nobody sells you that answer.
Lists of business ideas are free everywhere, and worthless for the same reason. They are not attached to you. We help you pick the one that fits what you already have.
Most people arrive holding 2 or 3 and stall there for months. We cut it down to the 1 that is most likely to work, and you leave knowing why it beat the others.
Both work. Week 1 splits so you get the right kind of help, and by the end of it you are both holding the same thing: 1 direction, named, with the reasons it beat the others. Nothing after week 1 is different.
We pressure test it and cut it down, against the same 4 questions every time.
Most people arrive holding 2 or 3 ideas. They leave holding 1, and they can tell you why.
We dig through what you have already done and pull the business out of it.
You finish with a real market and a real buyer, found inside your own history.
Not sure which one you are? The Shortlist is a free live workshop, 60 minutes, once a month. You arrive with no idea or too many, and you leave with 3 candidates of your own. It is also the honest way to see how this works before you apply.
What we do not promise is a customer by week 8, or a revenue number. Those are not ours to give, and any program that promises them is selling you something it cannot deliver.
What we do promise is that you stop guessing. By the end you know what the business is, who it is for, what it costs, what you charge, and what you do on Monday morning.
Eight modules, one a week, in this order, for everyone. Two live sessions a week to work through it together, and no scrambling to keep up with somebody else’s pace.
Two a week, 1 full hour each. Not a lecture you watch. Your coach builds the thing alongside you while you are on the call.
Every session is with somebody who has built a profitable solo business and still runs it from anywhere. Group sessions come later, as more people join.
One module a week in a fixed order, a deadline on every piece of work, and somebody who notices when it does not arrive.
The written frameworks for the 5 things every solo business has to get right. Yours to keep.
Four months of Uncommon Company, so you are building alongside founders at your own stage rather than on your own.
Path A scores the ideas you brought. Path B digs through your career for the ones you did not know you had.
A direction is not a business until somebody specific is on the other end of it.
How many months you really have, and the date the decision gets made.
One thing, scoped and priced, written the way a buyer would read it.
A place that says what you do and lets somebody reach you. Proof beats polish.
Organic distribution you can run alone, with no budget, no agency and no team.
The week the theory stops. Most people find this one uncomfortable, which is rather the point.
What survived contact with actual people, what changes, and what you run next.
Week 8 is the worst possible moment to be handed a certificate and shown the door. You finally know what you are building, and that is exactly when most people go quiet.
So Uncommon Company is included from your first day and stays open for 2 months after you finish. Four months in total, twice as long as the program, and you are alongside the other founders the whole time you are doing the work rather than meeting them as a stranger at the end.
After that it renews at the graduate rate, locked for as long as you stay.
Uncommon Company members at a city meetup.
Founders at your stage rather than founders who already made it. Monthly teardowns, including the ones you are not in, city meetups, and free entry to Uncommon Salons.
How to build an expertise business model, identify an untapped niche, close every sale, market without ads, maximize your runway, and run the whole thing as one person. Sold separately at $199 each.
Priced at what we actually charge for these, not an inflated number invented to make the total look bigger.
This is not a video library with a comment box. It is 16 hours of live 1:1 time across 8 weeks, working through your actual situation, plus your work read closely between sessions and scored against the same rubric everyone else is scored against.
The most common complaint in this whole category is generic frameworks that did not account for one specific situation. Two hours a week on yours is the direct answer to that.
You are not paying for a custom plan. You are paying for a proven one, and your situation is what fills it in.
8 weeks means 8 weeks. Nobody is going to keep you on the hook, and there is no upsell waiting at the finish line.
Two live sessions, 1 hour each, in slots you agree before you start. Everything between them happens on your own time and in your own zone.
Two live hours each, every week, is a real limit on how many people can be in the program at once. When the seats are full, they are full.
Plan A builds expertise businesses: consulting, advisory, fractional work, productized services, and the things you can sell off the back of them. Everything below is a good business for somebody. None of it is this program, and it is better to hear that now than after you pay.
Raising money trades 1 employer for several, at the exact moment a solo operator’s advantage is largest. Some businesses genuinely need capital. Those are not the ones this builds.
This is a solo business by design. If the plan needs a team in year 1, the shape is wrong for these 8 weeks.
Inventory, storefronts, equipment, and anything that has to be bought before the first dollar arrives. Different problem, different program.
Working from anywhere here comes from owning your income. If what you want is to work remotely for somebody else, this is not the route.
If paying for this would put you into debt, do not. Take the free tools, run The Runway, and come back when the number works.
This is for everyone. The filter is where you are and what you have already done, never who you are.
No countdown clocks, no expiring bonuses, no price that quietly changes because you hesitated. The price only ever moves up, and when it does, we say why.
The standing price once the founding groups are full.
Published refund scale · no retention call
For the first 2 groups through. Same 8 weeks, same review, lower price for going first.
Published refund scale · no retention call
Some applications earn the Head Start Award, 10% off the regular price at $3,420. It is earned in the application and never negotiated.
What you get back depends on how much work has already been done on yours, and nothing else. No retention call, no forms to hunt down, no surprise renewal. There is nothing to renew.
You can also pause once and pick it back up within 6 months. The clock freezes while you are paused.
I came to the United States on a student visa and made it through the H-1B lottery. Then I was laid off, and the visa gave me 60 days to find another employer or leave the country. I did 40 interviews in 6 weeks and signed in the final week.
After that I made myself a promise: no employer would ever again hold the outcome of my life in their hands. So I self petitioned my own EB-1A green card, with nobody sponsoring me, and built 2 profitable solo businesses without raising a dollar.
None of that came from clarity or confidence. It came from knowing exactly how many months of runway I had, refusing to move the deadline, and doing the unglamorous work while nothing was working yet.
I have run both businesses from more than 40 countries, and that is the part I care about most. Working from anywhere is not the thing you chase first. It is what becomes possible once you own your income.
Plan A is the program I needed and could not buy.
Possibly, and it is not what we promise. A customer is not ours to hand you. What we count instead is the number of real conversations you had with real potential buyers, because that is in your control, we can both see it, and it is the thing that brings a customer in the end anyway.
You have income, which is not the same thing. A business keeps earning when you stop, because it has a niche, a repeatable offer and a way of being found. Freelancing usually has none of those, which is why every month starts at zero and why work arrives through whoever happens to remember you. Plan A is often a sharper fit for freelancers than for people still employed, because you have already found out the expensive way that picking a service is not the same as picking a market.
No. That is Path B, and it is the reason this program exists. Digging for the idea is week 1 of the work, not a warm up before it starts.
Yes, and most people do. The fixed commitment is 2 hours a week, in 2 sessions you schedule before you start, and we will put them where they actually fit around a job. Everything else happens on your own time. Budget real hours for the work between sessions though, not leftover ones.
You start when you are accepted and run your own 8 week clock, so there is nothing to wait for. There is one standing group call every week whatever the numbers are, and once 3 or more people are running at the same time it becomes a proper teardown session.
Uncommon Company, and it is included. Your membership starts on day 1 of the program and stays open for 2 months after you finish, which is 4 months in total. After that it renews at the graduate rate, locked for as long as you stay.
A course hands you frameworks and leaves. This is 16 hours of live 1:1 time plus your work read and marked up between sessions. If a video library were enough, the failure rate in this category would not be what it is.
The refund scale above is published in full and honored without a conversation about staying. You can also pause once and pick it back up within 6 months.
No. There are 6 seats open at a time, and applications are reviewed against the same 4 questions week 1 uses.
Waiting is a decision. It just never feels like one, because there is nothing to sign.
Nobody sits down and decides to spend another year not starting. It happens anyway. Here is what that year actually costs, and none of it is dramatic, which is exactly why it works.
Because most pages like this one will not tell you.
So the question was never whether you can afford $3,800.
Full refund before week 1 unlocks, and a published scale after that. No retention call, and nothing to cancel.
The application takes about 20 minutes and asks about you, not about a business plan you have not written yet.
Bring:
6 seats open at a time.
Some applications earn it. You cannot ask for it and it is never negotiated. There are 2 ways to qualify and either one on its own is enough.
1You can describe the idea specifically. Who buys it, why them, what they would pay, and what evidence you already have. Judged against the same 4 questions week 1 uses.
2You have already paid a price for this. Money or years genuinely spent on this path. A course you finished, an accountant you consulted, savings you moved into a named number, a sabbatical you negotiated.
The best predictor that somebody finishes is that they already paid something to get to the door.
