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Playground to the Exit Sign: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Escaping the Hamster Wheel
Paperback
Series: The Office to Exit
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 24 2026
Pages: 78
Weight: 0.26
Height: 0.16 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Entrepreneurship is sold as freedom. Then it hands you responsibility-usually before breakfast.
From the Playground to the Exit Sign is a clear-eyed guide to building a business that works in the real world: under uncertainty, under pressure, and with the inconvenient constraint that you are a human being-not a motivational quote with a calendar.
Drawing on more than three decades of business experience across corporate leadership and founder-led ventures (bootstrapped and private-equity-backed), Robert Church treats entrepreneurship as what it actually is: applied judgment. You will learn how to choose the right problem, position your value so the market can recognize it, build a model that survives the math, and earn customers through evidence-not hope.
This book also covers what most advice skips:
- How to operate when everything is uncertain (and still make measurable progress)
- Why busy is not the same as profitable-and how to escape the busy-but-broke trap
- Money pressure, capital decisions, and why a multi-million-dollar exit can still leave a founder with far less than expected
- The legal and tax foundations that prevent expensive problems later
- Systems, delegation, and scaling without breaking quality, culture, or margins
- The long game: identity, resilience, and building an asset that creates optionality instead of consuming it
If you want inspiration, there are plenty of books for that. If you want a practical framework for building a durable business-and keeping your judgment intact while you do it-this book is for you.
You don't need a secret. You need a method.
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