A small-business field memoir

Lessons From the Front Lines

Insights from 40 years on the battlefield of small business — dealing with people, daily challenges, keeping your sanity, and the joys and frustrations from being engaged with your people.

Buy on Amazon What's inside
$15.95 · Paperback on Amazon
Lessons From the Front Lines cover
What's inside

Hard-won answers to the questions that keep owners up at night.

Four parts, no theory and no jargon — just the lessons that only show up after you've been doing this a while.

01
Management
Dealing with the day in and day out realities of keeping the doors open, keeping your sanity, and touching people’s lives. Picking gems for your team — and keeping them.
02
Leadership
Building a sustainable business that isn’t dependent on one person (you!) being the know-it-all. Dealing with difficult issues and challenges.
03
Engagement
Listening well and creating an environment where motivation can thrive.
04
Practical tools and forms
Summaries of learnings after each chapter, provocative questions to get you thinking about how to apply the lessons in your own environment, space for note taking, and practical tools you can put to work right away.
A note before you start

More than forty years ago I joined my father and his partner's business as a night shift leader in a fast-food location in a mall. I had no idea what a journey I was starting.

This is about everything I wish someone had told me first.

Kurt Schauermann
Kurt Schauermann
About the author

Kurt Schauermann

Kurt started more than forty years ago as a night shift leader in his father and his partner's fast-food location in a mall. Four decades of small business followed — the good years and the brutal ones — and he learned most of what's in this book the hard way.

He wrote Lessons From the Front Lines for the owner who's in the thick of it right now — the one who could use a straight answer from someone who's already been there.

Get the book

Forty years of lessons, summaries, and practical tools — in paperback, with room to write in the margins.

Buy on Amazon — $15.95

Paperback · Available on Amazon