The Trapped Operator: How to Build a Small Business That Outlasts You
Most small business books were written for organizations with shareholders, management hierarchies, and boards of directors. They got handed to the owner standing next to his front-line employees every single morning and presented as the answer.
Some of them help. None of them were built for you.
Peter S. Bergeron has spent fifty years inside the pressure cooker of small business - starting at age four in his father's shop, moving through manufacturing, distribution, and professional services, and ultimately returning to run the family business. When his father passed unexpectedly in 2019, Peter was at work the next morning, because that is what a small business demands from its Trapped Operator. On January 13, 2020, he was forced to close the doors on that same business for the last time.
The Trapped Operator introduces the 12 Fatal Issues Framework(TM) - grounded in doctoral research, built around the owner at its center.
The twelve issues are not a checklist of problems to fix. They are observable indicators of structural pressure - the forces that keep producing the same fires regardless of how hard the owner works, which systems get installed, or how much experience accumulates. The framework maps those forces across four structural systems and three issue groups, giving the owner a diagnostic lens rather than another action plan.
Inside the book, readers will find:
The Fatal Snapshot(TM) - a six-question structural assessment that places any business in one of eight profiles, from At-Risk to Fully OwnedThe three Operational States - Survival, Scale, and Stability - and why moving between them changes which issues carry the most structural weightThe Four Structural Systems and how pressure travels between them when one area weakensThe containment disciplines for all twelve issues - not elimination, but the structural work that keeps pressure from spreading70% of small business ownership transfers fail. The 30% who succeed were built with a clearer lens.
The Trapped Operator gives owners that lens - and a framework to finally understand why the fires keep coming back.
Peter S. Bergeron is a doctoral candidate at Johnson & Wales University, an adjunct faculty at Florida Gulf Coast University, and the creator of the 12 Fatal Issues Framework for Small Business. He is the founder of Wrestling Against Time LLC and 12fatalissues.com.
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