Frequently-Asked Questions

It replaces the guessing. Instead of a pile of advice with no order to it, you get one path laid out across twelve months, shaped by where you are starting from, so you can see what belongs in this quarter and what belongs in the next one. Most people who read it say the relief is less about learning something new and more about finally being able to stop holding all of it in their head at once.

Because the cost of a wrong order is measured in months, and months are the one thing you cannot get back. People rarely fail at this because they picked a bad idea. They fail because they spent the first half of the year on work that only pays off later, and the money ran out before the part that earns.

No. One of the six questions is whether you have one, and roughly half the people who fill this in do not. If you are in that half, your roadmap sends you somewhere different from the person who has already picked.

Then you are somewhere on the path already, and the roadmap is more useful, not less. Freelancers in particular tend to be much further along on one part and further behind on another, and seeing that laid out is usually the point where things start moving again.

About ninety seconds. Six questions, four of them multiple choice.

The roadmap is free and complete on its own. There is a free live workshop you will hear about, and a paid program that some people go on to apply for, and neither is required to get value out of what you are downloading here. If all you ever take is the roadmap, that is a perfectly good outcome.

It gets your roadmap, then roughly one email a week about building a solo business. It is not sold, shared or handed to anyone else, and there is an unsubscribe link on every one.

It gets you out of the waiting. Instead of hoping something arrives, you spend an hour working forward from evidence you already have, and you come out the other side holding three or four directions you could actually pursue. For most people the relief is less about learning something new and more about finally having something concrete to react to.

Because the raw material is invisible to the person carrying it. Fifteen years of being good at something makes that thing feel ordinary, which is exactly why you cannot see the business in it on your own. The worksheet is a set of questions that make the obvious parts visible again, in an order that goes somewhere.

Most of them do not, at first glance. That is the point of step three. The pattern holds across operations, finance, legal, engineering, design and marketing, because you are looking for the person whose problem you solved rather than for a version of your job title that already exists as a company.

No, and it is often better if you have not. Doing this while the paycheck is still landing means you can choose on the merits rather than choosing whatever might bring money in fastest.

About an hour, and it is worth doing in one sitting. Step one usually takes the longest, because remembering what people actually came to you for is harder than it sounds.

The worksheet is free and complete on its own. There is a free live workshop you will hear about, and a paid program some people go on to apply for, and neither is required to get value out of what you are downloading here. If all you ever take is the worksheet, that is a perfectly good outcome.

It gets you the worksheet, then roughly one email a week about building a solo business. It is not sold, shared or handed to anyone else, and there is an unsubscribe link on every one.

Free. No card at registration, no card at any point during the session, and no upgrade required to get the recording. The workshop exists because a portion of the people who attend eventually apply to Plan A, and that is the entire business model behind it.

Register anyway. Everyone on the list gets the recording within 24 hours and it stays available for a week. You will miss the last 20 minutes of live questions, which is where most of the value sits for people who already have candidates, so come live if you can choose.

This is the session built for you specifically. Roughly half of every group arrives with nothing, and the first half of the workshop is designed to be run from a blank page. The registration form asks which camp you are in so the follow up matches your situation.

Sometimes, and that is worth an hour of anybody’s time. More often it survives in a narrower and more specific form than the one you walked in with. Either way you leave knowing where it stands instead of hoping.

No. Cameras are optional and most people keep them off. Questions can be typed in the chat and asked on your behalf, so you can put a real situation in front of the group without appearing on camera.

A list of business ideas is attached to nobody. It cannot know what you have been paid to do, who you can reach, or what you would refuse to spend the next 5 years on. Everything in this session comes out of your own history, which is why you leave with 1 direction you believe in rather than 30 you do not.

The teaching portion is recorded. If you ask a question out loud during the last 20 minutes it is in the recording, so keep anything confidential out of it, or send it through the chat instead. Nothing you write in the registration form is ever shared or published.

Once a month, same format. If this date does not work, register anyway and you will be told about the next one. The material changes as the questions change, so a later session is not a worse session.

Start where you are stuck, not at number 1 out of tidiness. If you cannot name what you sell, start with the expertise business model, because every other toolkit assumes you have answered it. If you know what you sell but not who buys it, start with the niche. If you have both and no customers, start with closing. The operating system is the one to leave until after your first customer, since building systems before you have any is procrastination in a productivity costume.

A downloadable document you work through, with worksheets and templates included. Length varies by subject, because they are written to be complete rather than to hit a page count. None of them is padded, and none of them is a summary.

Not at once. Most people buy 1, use it, and come back for the next one when they hit the next wall. The set exists because the discount is real and because the credit toward membership makes it the cheaper path for anyone who was going to end up joining anyway.

What you already paid comes off the price of the set. The same applies going into membership: if you own toolkits and later join Uncommon Company, where all 6 are included, what you spent credits toward your first year. Nobody pays for the same thing twice here.

All 6 are included in full at every level of Uncommon Company . If you are already sure you want the membership, join and the toolkits come with it. The standalone prices exist for people who want the systems without the community.

These are instant downloads, so they are not refundable once delivered. That is exactly why every toolkit page states the failure it prevents and who it is not for before you reach the button. If a page has not convinced you it applies to your situation, do not buy it.

No, and most buyers are not. They are written for somebody working evenings and weekends around a job, which is when the runway and the operating system questions matter most.

They are built on how markets, buyers and solo operations behave, rather than on whichever platform or tool is current, so the substance holds for years rather than months. If a toolkit is revised substantially enough to be a new edition, that edition is sold separately and you will hear about it first.

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.

No, and that is the point. Every comparable community asks for a revenue number at the door, which quietly excludes everyone still building. We look at your stage and at how you describe the work instead. Somebody at $0 with a specific answer gets in ahead of somebody at $200K with a vague one.

Most people should start at The House. It contains the community, the monthly reviews, the office hours and all 6 toolkits, which is the majority of the value. Move up to The Atelier when you want a standing group of 6 working on the same problems every month, and to The Front Row when you want private time on your own business. You can move up at any point and pay the difference.

Not for the first 4 months. Membership opens on day 1 of the program and stays open for 2 months after you finish. After that it renews at $595 a year against the $895 public price, locked for as long as you keep renewing. Graduates are admitted automatically, so there is no second application.

No. A standalone toolkit purchase credits in full toward your first year. If you bought the set, that amount comes straight off your first year of The House.

Because who is in it is the product. A membership people join for a month and leave is a chat app, and part of what you are paying for is that everyone else committed too. If the annual figure is the obstacle rather than the commitment, The House has a quarterly payment plan.

Admission runs 4 times a year rather than continuously, so there can be a wait of up to 3 months. That is deliberate. Everyone in an intake arrives together, and arriving together is most of what makes the first few months work.

Fair question, and plenty of memberships are exactly that. The parts that are not a chat: monthly reviews where real work gets read against a rubric, monthly office hours with solo business owners who already built one, all 6 toolkits, meetups and Salons in person. If you removed the chat entirely, those would still be worth the entry price.

Tell us in the first 30 days and you get the year back in full. After that we refund on a published sliding scale rather than a phone call with somebody trained to keep you.

Uncommon Salons are, free, every one of them, at every level. Uncommon Summit and Uncommon Retreats are ticketed separately, and The Front Row gets first booking on both.

Yes, within the window that applies to what you bought. Toolkits refund in full for 14 days. Membership refunds in full for 30 days from the start of a year. Plan A follows a sliding scale across the first three weeks. The full detail is on the Refund Policy page.

Card, through our checkout. Plan A and the membership can be paid in full or in installments. Everything is priced in US dollars.

Toolkits, yes. Once you buy one it is yours, including any updates we publish to it. Membership access lasts as long as your membership does. Plan A includes lifetime access to its materials.

There is a bundle discount on the full set of six toolkits. We do not run sales on individual products, because it is unfair to everyone who paid full price the week before. If cost is the only thing standing between you and the work, email us.

Not yet. Everything on this site is being built, and the waitlist is how you get told when each piece opens. Joining costs nothing and never asks for a card.

Yes. Pricing, positioning, finding customers and running a business of one work the same way almost everywhere. The exceptions are tax, company structure and health insurance, which are local to you, and we say so wherever it comes up rather than pretending otherwise.