Frequently asked questions.

The Small Business MBA is a free all-in-one membership for business owners. It bundles every Notebook of a COO course (operations, marketing, finance, leadership, and AI), live financial tools like automated P&Ls, an operator community, a free live class every week, certificates you earn on graded work, and new programs added each month into one place to learn systems, run your numbers, and grow your business. See everything inside.

Free forever. No contract. Small Business MBA Live is an optional paid add-on: four live classes a week with JT and the NOC team, the free Tuesday class included, for $99 a month or $990 a year. Everything in the free membership stays free.

Every course (28 core modules and 25 bonus courses, more than 240 lessons), live financial tools, the operator community, a free live class every Tuesday, the certificates you earn on graded work, and new programs, services, and tools added each month. One membership covers all of it, free.

Any business owner, whether you're just starting out or already running an established operation, who wants one place for the education, tools, and community to run and grow the business.

Yes. Every course in the Small Business MBA library is included in the free membership. The one paid course, The Daily Post System, is $67 once and comes with Small Business MBA Live.

Yes. Pass the graded quizzes in the core curriculum and you earn the Small Business MBA Certificate of Completion, with an ID anyone can verify. An Advanced certificate follows when you pass the advanced courses. Both are free. It is a certificate of completion, not a degree or an academic credential.

Yes. Every member can join the free Tuesday class, live every week from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM PST. Small Business MBA Live adds three more live sessions a week, taught by JT and the NOC team: the Monday Live Class, the Wednesday Live Class and the Friday Build Sprint.

A paid add-on to the free Small Business MBA: four live classes every week, the free Tuesday class and three Live sessions, taught by JT and the NOC team, where you bring your real numbers and your real problems and work them through together. It is $99 a month or $990 a year, and the annual plan is two months free. Every course, every tool, both certificates and the free Tuesday class stay free, forever. See Small Business MBA Live.

A traditional MBA costs tens of thousands of dollars and teaches theory. The Small Business MBA is free and teaches the practical systems, tools, and operating playbook you actually use to run and grow a business, built by operators.

No. It's built for owners at any stage and starts with the fundamentals before moving into advanced systems.

We give business owners everything they need to run and grow in one place. The Small Business MBA is our free all-in-one membership: every course, live financial tools, an operator community, and new programs each month.

JT, who spent 15 years in the C-suite as COO, CMO, and CFO, scaling companies from $500K to $1B+ across multiple industries. Notebook of a COO exists so every owner can learn to run the business they built, free, and get help from our team when they want it. Read more about JT.

A consultant produces a deck. A course gives you videos to watch. The Small Business MBA teaches the operator playbook free, with the tools to run your own numbers through it. Small Business MBA Live works it with you four times a week. Our team builds it for you, starting with a free Build Call. And when you want a coach, The Boardroom gives you your own, with a 90 day plan on the one thing holding your business back.

Yes. The Small Business MBA, the Operator Hub and the Operator Quickstart were the old shape, and they were all paid. That is gone. Everything worth keeping moved into the Small Business MBA, which is now free: every module, the operator tools, the workbooks and the private operator community. The printable field guides are free too. See the Small Business MBA.

The boring infrastructure that lets a business scale without breaking. Documented standard operating procedures so the work doesn't live in your head. KPI dashboards so you can see what's actually happening. A hiring scorecard so you stop hiring on vibes. A monthly financial cadence so you know your numbers before you need them. Capacity planning so you grow without burning out the team. Most operators know they need this. They don't have time to build it while running the day-to-day.

Trained AI agents that take work off your plate. You start with the Marketing Director, or with The Operator Team, which is all five working together. Once your first agent is live you can add a role: a Lead Generator, a Sales Director or a Customer Success Director, and a Chief of Staff once you have two agents. After three paid months an agent can be handed over to you, and the monthly ends. They make the people you already have faster, and a person always decides. See the agents.

Each agent is priced for the job it does: a setup fee, then a monthly fee from the day it goes live, plus the tools your agent uses. You see the price at the start step, before you pay, and the setup fee can be paid in three payments by milestone.

14 to 30 days after you send your intake, and The Operator Team 21 to 30 days after. The monthly fee never starts before it is live. If it is not live within 30 days of your intake, you get your setup fee back.

Nothing it makes publishes, spends money or goes to a customer until you approve it. You can loosen that one task at a time when you are ready.

Custom software built around your business, which replaces the tools you rent. You own the code and the accounts it runs on. The scope, the price range and the timeline are in writing before you pay, and builds are billed at milestones. See the three sizes.

Yes. At your stage, the binding constraint isn't the operating layer, it's the business model itself. Customer, offer, pricing, go-to-market. Start free with the Small Business MBA and the Foundation Builder Field Guide. When you want help, the Build Call is free for a business of any size, and from $100k a year The Boardroom gives you your own business coach.

Yes. Everything runs online: the Small Business MBA in the portal, and the live classes and coaching calls on Zoom. Every class time is shown in PST.

The operating layer work is industry-agnostic. We've worked with operators in agencies, professional services, e-commerce, SaaS, healthcare, education, and consumer products. The frameworks transfer.

We have two coached programs. The Boardroom gives you your own business coach, a 90 day plan on the one thing holding your business back and a monthly table of owners working on the same area. The Private Office adds a senior coach every month and a session with JT every quarter. Both are by application, and both start with a free Roadmap Call. See The Boardroom.

Four printable PDFs: one matched to each operator archetype, and How to Read a P&L. Foundation Builder Field Guide (the 4-Box Business Model, customer reality check, pricing floor, 14-day plan). Stuck Operator Diagnostic Guide (3-plateaus framework, numbers audit, hours audit, branched 14-day plan). Scale-Ready Audit Guide (Operator Asset Map, 30-Day-Off Diagnostic, 30-day sellability sprint). All four are free. Grab them here.

A free 3-minute, 15-question diagnostic that places you in one of three archetypes (Foundation Builder, Stuck Operator, Scale-Ready). It routes you to the matching free guide, tells you what I would do next, shows everything we offer beside it, and sends four short emails over the following ten days. Take it here.

Yes. A first name and an email. The guide opens right away, and I email you a copy so you have it. If you take the assessment, it routes you to the right guide automatically.

We use it to send your result and four short emails over the following ten days, matched to your archetype. After that we stop unless you ask for more. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and we don't sell or share lists, ever. Full privacy policy.

Weekly short-form podcast for operators. Operator stories, frameworks, war stories from real businesses. 6 to 12 minutes per episode. No fluff, no guest interviews designed to cross-promote, no life-coach intros. Available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Full episode list.

Weekly. New episode drops every Monday morning.

The Season 3 opener "The 7-day disappearance test" is a good starting point. From there, "Stop running a 2019 business in a 2026 market" and "The business no algorithm can replace" round out the recent thinking. The full back catalog is on the podcast page.

Join the free Small Business MBA and post your question in the operator community. Our team and other operators answer there. Join free.

Message us inside the Small Business MBA. Our team reads every message. Response time is usually within 24 hours on weekdays.

Yes. Brand ambassadors earn 20% of every payment, for each customer's first 12 months, on the paid plans their link brings in. No cost to join. See Careers.

An AI agent goes live 14 to 30 days after you send its intake. We start no more than seven new agents a week, so a full week has a waitlist.

It depends on what you bought, and every rule is in the Terms. An AI agent's setup fee is refunded in full if you stop before the kickoff call, and in full if it is not live within 30 days of your intake. An annual Small Business MBA Live plan canceled within 14 days of its first payment is refunded in full. A seat in The Boardroom or The Private Office is refunded in full if you ask before your first session. Paid courses and Your Last Website are final sale.