Who's Number One?: The Overlooked Importance of the Second-in-Command

By Forrest Derr

Can you take a real vacation, phone off and out of reach, for a full week?

If you just laughed, this book is for you. You built something real, and somewhere along the way it started to own you instead of the other way around. Every decision runs through you. Your phone rings all day. You're working so hard in your business that you've lost all sense of what it would look like to work on it. You're not a failure. You've hit a ceiling. And you can't break through it alone.

The way through is a role most founders were never taught to look for: the second-in-command. This is the person who takes a visionary's big idea off the whiteboard and maps out the forty-seven steps between that idea and reality. Drawing on almost thirty years inside founder-led businesses, Forrest Derr shows you what a second-in-command actually does, how to know when you're ready for one, where to find the right fit, and what freedom looks like when you finally stop carrying everything alone.

And if you're the one who's been doing this work for years without a name for it, holding things together while somebody else took the standing ovation, this book is for you too. Forrest calls you a closet integrator. He was one for most of his career. In these pages you'll find the language, the framework, and the confidence to stop operating from the shadows and start owning what you do.

You don't have to be the ceiling of your own company. But first you have to see that you are.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1946730521
• ISBN13: 9781946730527
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Free Agent Press
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.5"