Welcome back to Owner to Owner—a newsletter for 1,200+ small business owners and operators who want to become better leaders and design the next chapter of their companies.

This month, we sat down with Banks Benitez, the founder of Future Forest, a newsletter management agency that runs the newsletter channel for small businesses. 

Banks's journey is a lesson in the difference between a job and a business. After six years as a CEO, he spent time running a consulting practice. The money was good, and the boundaries felt clear. But he was the product. If he didn't show up and perform every day, the checks stopped coming.

Then he looked back at what he'd already built: a newsletter he'd been writing for nearly a decade. It had generated millions in leads. People kept asking him to write one for their company, too. So he wrote in his notebook: "Newsletter as a service." That was the business all along.

What makes Banks's story interesting isn't just the pivot. It's what he did after. He built something that looked like a business but operated like a consulting practice in disguise. Then he made a counterintuitive move: He made an expensive full-time hire. That decision, and his willingness to step out of the center of his own company, is what we wanted to explore with him.

After being a CEO for six years, consulting sounded easy to me. You could close your computer at the end of the day and fully disconnect, and with three to four clients paying $10,000 to $20,000 a month, the money was good. But the problem is that you trade peace of mind for a capped upside; your ceiling is just what you can personally bill in a year.

The deeper issue was that I was the product. If I didn't show up and perform every day, the money would stop coming in, and the referral pipeline would dry up. I had built a job, not a business, and I was tired of being the product. As a former founder, I wanted to buy or build something again, but it was hard to let go of those retainers. Walking away meant trading them for the uncertain math of a real business.

I had gone deep into the Entrepreneurship-through-Acquisition world: brokers, an SBA lender, conferences, Walker Deibel's book. I looked at fencing companies, bagel shops, custom cabinetry, HVAC. The problem was that I kept asking, "Why me?" I'm a generalist entrepreneur, I'm not particularly handy, and in so many of those businesses, I had no edge.

The answer came on a weekend retreat where I journaled the question, "What's the most obvious business sitting right under my nose?" I had been writing a monthly newsletter for years, first as CEO of my last company and then on my own after the sale. It had generated millions of dollars in leads and kept my network warm, and people kept asking if I'd write one for their company, too. I wrote in my notebook, "Newsletter as a service," and that was it. The business had been in my archive the whole time.

The first version of the company looked like a business but operated as a consulting practice in disguise. I didn't focus on one sector; I just took anyone who wanted a newsletter. In the morning, I was writing about AI (artificial intelligence) for a tech company, and in the afternoon, I was writing about AI (artificial insemination) for a regenerative agriculture company. I was all over the place.

All the productized work that should have surrounded the writing process, uploading drafts into Mailchimp or Beehiiv, testing subject lines, auditing lists, reviewing performance, just didn't exist. We were reinventing the wheel for every client. It was a half-step toward a productized offering with the fingerprints of bespoke consulting all over it, and I was still firmly planted at the center of the hub.

The wake-up call came on a Saturday morning, three months before my wife Lisa and I were due to have our first child. I was sitting in a childbirth class and had an "oh shit" moment. As the doula was describing what happens in the first few weeks of a baby's life, I realized there was no way I could show up for my wife and son while still operating Future Forest the way I was. I didn't want to look back on the first few months of my son's life and realize I had been too busy to be available.

At the time, the business was only doing about $22,000 a month, and a good GM was expensive. It was going to eat into my income. But the default move for a solo operator is to hire specialists, and I had watched founders, myself included, do that and stay just as overworked as before, only with more payroll. So I paid more to hire one person to own the whole system. That person is Chris. He stepped in, and I took six weeks off. The business ran, the system held, and no customers churned.

The first removal was physical, stepping out for paternity leave. The second was psychological. When I came back, clients trusted Chris but expected me to re-engage, and there were legacy clients I had a hard time letting go of. Part of it was my own ego. I had convinced myself I was central to delivering value for those clients, but a bigger part of it was that I like being the hero. The more you think of yourself as the hero, the more you write yourself into being imperative in the business.

The real test came recently when Chris started leaving me off the onboarding for new clients. I wrote and rewrote an email to him several times, trying to ask, "Can I be helpful onboarding this new client?" I never sent it. A week later, the feedback came in that the new client was really happy. Most founders write themselves into the epicenter of their own org chart with everyone else orbiting them. The Copernican revolution in small business is putting the GM in the middle and figuring out where you orbit as a star in their galaxy.

If something here sparked a thought, a question, or a story of your own, just reply—we read every note. And if you’d like to be a part of a future issue, let us know through the button below.

Until next month, wishing you a strong week ahead. We’ll see you soon.

— Victor & Brian

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