Money is always moving. We want you paying attention.
Live Counterflow is where we teach what we wish someone had taught us when we started our first business with a negative net worth. Here’s what we believe, and the ways to learn it with us.
“So far, so good.”
It’s what people say right before real life tests the plan. Revenue is up, the accounts look fine, nothing has gone wrong yet ... so nobody looks at how the pieces actually connect.
Then a slow quarter shows up. Or a tax bill. Or an opportunity that needs cash this week. And it turns out a pile of good financial products was never a financial system.
We’d rather you find that out on a calm Tuesday than in the middle of a hard month.
Five ideas run through everything we teach.
Architecture over products.
Most advice starts with what to buy. We start with how the pieces are built to work together. The right product in the wrong structure still fails you.
Liquidity before growth.
You can’t use money you can’t reach. We build access first and growth second. Our grandparents’ generation understood this better than most of the industry does now.
Profit comes first.
We run Profit First in our own business. Profit gets set aside before the bills are paid, and the business learns to run on what’s left.
Resilience over optimization.
The industry designs for the best case. We design so the worst case doesn’t knock your life over. Fewer forced decisions. Fewer surprises.
Calm by design.
Calm is earned. It comes from a system that expects stress before it shows up, so you’re making decisions on purpose instead of under pressure.
Put those together and something changes. Money stops running the show. You get to run your business and your life, and the money does its job underneath.
We learned this the hard way first.
Amanda grew up on public assistance in rural Ohio. Brandon came from poverty too. We started our first business with a negative net worth, built Overflow Coffee Bar in Chicago’s South Loop and sold it in 2018.
Today Amanda is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional, and we’re both Profit First Professionals. We teach the systems we built for ourselves.
Three ways in. Pick the one that fits this season.
Read with us
Amanda’s Saturday essays on money, business and behavior. The easiest way to see how we think before you spend a dollar.
Subscribe on Substack →Learn live
A one-hour workshop with Amanda for business owners whose profit is showing up and who want to know where it should live.
See workshop dates →Go deeper
The Profit Planning Network. The tools, the trainings and Amanda, month after month.
See PPN and PPN+ →Do this work with us, month after month.
PPN is our membership for business owners who want their money working as intentionally as their business does.
The tools and the community
- The Financial Nervous System Diagnostic
- The Cash Confidence Roadmap, an AI guide trained in how we think about money, available any time
- Flow Foundations: three 60-minute trainings (Cash Flow Foundations, Profit Architecture, Safe Wealth Strategy)
- Monthly live office hours with Amanda
- A members’ space for questions between sessions
You’ll join through Substack, where Amanda publishes every Saturday. Your PPN access opens with the same email address.
Amanda in your corner, one-on-one
- Everything in PPN
- Twelve one-hour sessions with Amanda over the year
- The weekly Monday emails, and Amanda replies to yours
- The trainings and AI tools as we add them
Limited to 15 members a year.
Apply for PPN+ →Tell us a little about your business. If it looks like a fit, we’ll set up a short call to talk it through.
Start with these three essays.
Nobody Fixes the River
A twenty-year-old idea that still shapes how we think about money: go upstream.
The Thousand Dollar Rule Doesn’t Hold Water
What a flooded basement taught us about emergency funds and outdated rules of thumb.
From Citizen to Consumer
The difference between building a life and simply buying one.