John Seiffer

Calls Pittsburgh irrelevant. Things originating in Pittsburgh: Polio vaccine, ferris wheels, public television, commercial radio, nuclear submarine engines, pull tabs on cans, retractable domes, gas stations, movie theaters, baseball stadiums, bingo, Zippo lighters, Daylight Savings Time...to name a few things. Also a leader in AI, robotics, medical research & education, manufacturing. Was once a worldwide leader in steel and glass manufacturing when those two industries were among the biggest industries in the world. Not to mention sports championships: Steelers (6), Pirates (5), Penguins (5), Riverhounds (1), Pitt Panthers football (9 claimed, 8 unclaimed). The only things irrelevant in this conversation is Jordie and Barstool. Hey @barstoolsports, come get your child. He clearly needs his chicken nuggies and a nap.

@markbdelaney @ClintFiore I grew up in a home with 2nd hand smoke & no seatbelts in the car. Also lots of drinking & driving at that time. My survival isn't useful as a pattern.

@BetterCeo @ClintFiore This is not my peer-reviewed study, everyone! Just providing anecdotes is all

My bro in suburban Denver says there's an absolute "plague" of kids on e-bikes and e-dirtbikes bombing around the streets and neighborhoods at high speeds. 7-14 year old boys equipped with capabilities they're not mature enough to handle safely, drive like banshees through yards and intersections and golf courses etc. I don't see too many of those here in small town TX and when I do they don't seem to be terrorizing anyone. Curious if this is happening where you live or not. Is this a big deal?

@Molson_Hart I don't know your kid but I'd look at it differently. Let kids experiment without judgement (when there's no immediate harm, obviously) and they're likely to learn on their own.

@BetterCeo don't want to create a princess

my daughter wants a pair of blinking shoes what should I do?

@clayhepler @readwise save

I spent an entire Sunday mapping our transaction workflow. Every step. Every handoff. Every potential failure point. 48 steps from contract to cash collection. I found 11 places where a single missed task would stall the entire deal. That's not a workflow. That's a minefield. We fixed 9 of the 11 with one change: Checklists with deadlines that auto-escalate when missed. The system doesn't need to be complex. It needs to be followed.

@clayhepler Too many people won't insist on SOPs being followed because they don't want to be seen as micromanaging.

@markbdelaney @ClintFiore Survivor bias would like a word.

@ClintFiore When I was in this age bracket, it was gas-powered electric scooters I'd say more dangerous. We all lived

@juliusmarchi It's called trade skill.

What you think you need to start a business: - MBA - Experience - Investors/Capital What you really need: - Grit - A few grand - The ability to provide a service people need

@TylerPurcell24 @HelenGuo_ If you're trying to buy an old anything & fix it up you better know what you're doing or have very little competition & lots of time or have a large financial cushion. Deals are sexy but the money is made in operations.

@HelenGuo_ If you’re running the “buy an old laundromat and fix it up” playbook you’re in trouble. Lots of money flowing into the space.

If you've been eyeing laundromats, I need you to read this first. Three years of influencer content turned them into one of the worst first acquisitions you can make… - All that content sent thousands of buyers toward laundromats at once. Prices have gone up. You're now buying at artificially inflated multiples due to hype. - Laundromats run cash-heavy. A lot of income never hits the books. When the SBA needs verified revenue to underwrite your loan, it's not there. Financing becomes extremely difficult. - The buyers winning these deals already own laundromats. You're not competing with other first-timers. You're competing with operators buying their third or fourth location who know every lever to pull. - There are thousands of better opportunities out there - without the artificial competition. Members in our program have closed $184M in deals. ONE of them was a laundromat (and that person already owned one).

@lawyer4SMBs Personally I've always built. But buying proves there's a market, though that comes with risk. Usually a PG and always opportunity costs. Leverage cuts both ways. And if you have investors you have to split the upside.

@BetterCeo Do you have a preference for buying vs building (before operating to make the real money)?

Deals are sexy. But the money is made in operations. aftertheclose.biz

@ClintFiore I would say Stop ... relying on the Internet for health advice. But you do you.

I take Creatine most days (8g or so) but never notice any difference in my life... should I stop? keep going? increase?

@helloparalegal Lucky Claude didn't hallucinate.

A friend of mine from Harvard Law set up his own firm last year. Solo practice. No associates. No paralegals. Working out of a co-working space with a laptop and a coffee habit. Last month a mid-size business owner reached out looking for outside counsel. Three firms were being considered. Two of them were 15-attorney shops. The kind with pitch decks, associate teams, and glass-walled conference rooms that smell like fresh carpet and overbilling. My friend was a one-person firm with a WeWork membership. He almost canceled. He thought there was no way he could compete with that. I told him to try one thing before he walked away. Open Claude Code. Give it the owner's name, the company name, and 45 minutes. Ask it to build a complete intelligence report using only publicly available data. He did not think it would work. He tried it anyway. Claude came back with a 13-page report. He read it over coffee. Took 28 minutes. By the time the Zoom started, this solo attorney knew things about the prospect's company that the owner's own in-house team probably had not assembled in one place. The company was incorporated in Delaware but registered as a foreign entity in Texas 14 months later. That is expansion. A second member was added to the LLC in 2024. Claude pulled the operating agreement implications from the state filing and flagged what a new member meant for governance, profit distribution, and decision-making authority. Three active trademark applications filed in the last six months. Two were in a product category the company had never publicly announced. Nobody on the website knew about it. The trademark filings did. PACER hit. The company had been named as a defendant in a vendor dispute 18 months ago. It settled. But the complaint was public and Claude read every page of it. The core issue was a supply agreement with no termination clause. My friend now knew this company had been burned by a bad contract. They would care deeply about airtight vendor agreements going forward. He did not have to guess. It was in the filing. State court records. The owner had a dissolved LLC from 2019 with a different partner. A business divorce. Which meant this owner would value clear partnership terms and buy-sell provisions this time around. People who have been through a bad breakup want a prenup for the next one. Same principle. Hiring activity. Four job listings posted in 60 days. Head of compliance. Operations manager. Two warehouse roles. They were scaling fast and hiring operational infrastructure. That is exactly when companies need outside counsel the most and know it the least. They think they need a lawyer when they get sued. They actually need a lawyer when they start hiring a Head of Compliance. Glassdoor. 11 reviews. Every positive one mentioned culture. Every negative one mentioned the same thing. "No HR. No handbook. No process." A company growing faster than its internal policies. An employment claim waiting to happen. And a business owner who probably had no idea what his own employees were writing about him. Google reviews. 4.3 stars. But Claude flagged a pattern in the 1-stars. Three different customers mentioned the same issue. Product delivered late with no communication. The biggest operational liability was not product quality. It was fulfillment. That is a breach of warranty problem, a customer retention problem, and a potential class issue if the pattern scales with the company. Then there was a section Claude titled "Founder Mindset." It pulled a transcript from a podcast the owner appeared on and analyzed his communication patterns. One quote stood out. He said "I have spent more on lawyers fixing problems than I ever spent on lawyers preventing them." That one sentence told my friend exactly how to position his entire practice. Not as a litigator. Not as a fixer. As the lawyer who prevents the problems in the first place. The pitch wrote itself. Claude also analyzed the owner's communication style across LinkedIn posts, podcast answers, and X replies. Based on patterns it flagged what mattered for the meeting: this person values substance over rapport. He distrusts anything that feels like a pitch. Lead with what you know. Skip the small talk. Show your work before you ask for the engagement. My friend adjusted his entire approach based on that analysis. The Zoom started. No pleasantries. No "let me tell you about my firm" warmup. The owner gave his overview. What the company does. Where they are heading. What they need. Then my friend said "I noticed you filed two trademarks in a new product category last quarter. Is that the line you are launching in Q3?" Silence. "How do you know about that?" A solo lawyer working from a coworking space just earned more credibility in one sentence than the 15-attorney firm earned in their entire pitch deck. He walked the owner through everything. The vendor dispute and what it meant for future contracts. The hiring pattern and the compliance risk it signaled. The Glassdoor reviews pointing to an HR exposure. The fulfillment complaints that were one bad quarter away from becoming a warranty liability. He did not pitch his services. He showed the owner his own blind spots using the owner's own public data. Then he said which ones he would fix first and why. The owner said "the other firms sent me a brochure. You just showed me you already understand my business better than they do." He hired my friend that week. A solo practitioner over two 15-attorney firms. No associate team. No paralegal pulling research. No marketing department. One Harvard Law grad with Claude Code, a 13-page report, and 28 minutes of preparation that the other firms did not think to do. This is what I keep telling solo lawyers and most of them do not believe me until they see it. The advantage is not firm size. It is not headcount. It is not a fancy office or a partner track or a receptionist who offers sparkling water. The advantage is showing up knowing things the prospect did not expect you to know. That is what wins the engagement. Every time. And right now it is easier than it has ever been. Because almost everything about a business is public. It is just scattered across 15 different sources that no lawyer checks before a pitch meeting. Claude checks all of them in one run and hands you a report you can read before your coffee gets cold. Secretary of State filings. Incorporation, officers, registered agents, foreign qualifications. PACER and state court dockets. Every lawsuit, motion, and settlement. USPTO. Trademark filings tell you where a company is going before they announce it. LinkedIn job postings. What a company is hiring for reveals what is broken inside. Glassdoor. What employees say when nobody from management is reading. Google reviews. The 1-star reviews are where the legal risks hide. Podcast transcripts. The founder's own words analyzed for how they think and decide. UCC filings. Who they owe money to. What assets are pledged. Property records. Leases, liens, ownership structures. Communication pattern analysis. How this specific person talks, processes information, and makes decisions. So you know exactly how to show up. All public. All free. One report. Under 30 minutes to read. The solo lawyer who builds this into their pre-meeting workflow will win clients over firms 10 times their size. Not once. Every time. Because nobody expects a solo to show up that prepared. And that gap between what they expect and what you deliver is the most valuable asset in your practice. My friend is a Harvard Law grad. He has no team. He works from a coworking space. He is winning over 15-attorney firms because he spends 45 minutes doing what they never bother to do. The playing field was never about resources. It was about preparation. And preparation just got automated.

@SuccessWithJake That's been my experience. I had 13 doors for rent and one point. I have done better in the stock market.

I have a lot of questions

@pestctrlguy @dylan_milr5777 Sometimes people need to be reminded what the benefits cost. Not all team members are fluent in company economics. I've heard of companies adding a list to people's pay stubs.

@dylan_milr5777 My crew is very appreciative luckily. If they weren’t, they are aware I’d find a new crew lol

We rolled out company health insurance in 4/1. That brings our following benefits to: - 100 hours PTO/sick leave - Above market pay - 4 ten hour shifts - Flexible schedules - Company gear, beanies, winter coats, etc - 9 paid holidays - Paid parental leave (through the state) - Boots/ uniforms - health insurance - vision and dental insurance - 3.5% 401k match - take home vehicle - company phone Pretty much every benefit a company can offer. Our crew is happy and well taken care of.

@ashleyschendel @readwise save

I think a lot of household resentment comes from the fact that some people count tasks and other people count responsibility. Those are not the same thing. Taking out the trash is a task. Being the person who notices it is full, remembers the pickup day, sees the extra bag by the door, and makes sure more liners get bought is responsibility. That difference is where a lot of the frustration lives. You solve that by making the household run more visibly.

@girdley BREAKING: Same advice can be great in one context & terrible in another.

BREAKING: There is some terrible business advice on this site. ALSO BREAKING: Some of it may be from me.

"What does DONE look like?" This is a really powerful question and if you don't have 100% alignment on the answer it's a problem. For many SMB owners the details are assumed not spoken - often because you haven't articulated them to yourself. Dig deeper.

The sphere in Vegas just doing Sphere things 😲

The highest quality video of the moon was just released… this is so beautiful.