For business owners · Book coming soon
Someone Else Can Lock Up.
Get back to why you started.
Still the only one with the key? Tonight, write down every key on your ring and name one that someone else could hold.
Get the free guide: 7 reasons you still have the only keyOr find your pattern · free 3-minute quiz → Email me once, when the book is out →
Is this you?
Signs you’re the only one with the key
- You unlocked the front door, the back door, the register, the thermostat cover, and a cabinet nobody has opened since the last owner, and it is 6:04 in the morning.
- You gave an employee a spare key once. That night you drove past at nine to make sure the key had worked. From the street. With your eyes.
- Your spouse knows the security code to a building they have never worked in, because you say it in your sleep.
- You have said “it’s faster if I do it myself” about a job that takes six hours.
- The sign says CLOSED. The lights are off. You are inside, eating crackers over the utility sink, doing the one thing only you can do, which is everything.
We know. We have carried that ring, and it wore a hole in the same pocket.
Seven of these have a longer page, and a free PDF. Why you still have the only key
From the prologue
Read the opening
At 10:15, Sergio Delgado let himself into a dentist’s office that wasn’t open yet and wasn’t his.
The key was still on his ring because the general contractor hadn’t asked for it back. The job was done. On Friday his foreman, Wes, landed the last circuits, labeled the panel in block letters, swept the floor, and sent a photo. Sergio answered the photo with a thumbs-up. Then he thought about the panel all weekend, through his daughter’s soccer game and a birthday dinner for his mother-in-law, and now he was here.
He shut off the main, because he was tired and not stupid. The torque screwdriver was set to the number printed on the side of each breaker. He fitted it to the first terminal and turned. It clicked at once, without moving. Wes had set it right.
That side of the panel held eleven terminals, and Sergio checked every one. None gave him a quarter turn of anything to fix. He had driven twenty minutes on a Sunday night to learn what Friday’s photo already told him.
His phone lit up on the floor beside him. Elena. Are you close? Almost done, he typed. That was true in the narrow way.
In the van, he sat a minute with the key in his hand. His daughter drew him a picture in the fall, and he kept it clipped to the visor on the driver’s side. It showed the van, more or less, with a ladder on top the size of a telephone pole. A stick figure in a yellow hat stood beside it. Lucía wrote DADDY WORK across the top and ran out of room, so the K lived on the back. The figure was alone in the picture.
On the passenger seat was a flyer he had pulled off the corkboard at the supply house. A Circle 1 workshop for people who own the place. Monday nights, the library community room, 6:00. Fourteen Mondays. Bring your keys.
Excerpt from the prologue of Someone Else Can Lock Up. © 2026 True Path Publishing.
The key is still on your ring.
Get the free guide: 7 reasons you still have the only keyWhat this book does for you
The sign says closed, and you are still inside. For 14 Monday nights, five owners put their keys on a library table. That is Circle 1 for Owners.
The question under the ring is who else has a copy. Sergio still holds the key to a job his foreman finished on Friday, and he checks all 11 terminals. Alicia carries 31 client keys and has not named a second person to hold them. Ken will not let anyone into the bake room ahead of him.
The landlord, the fee, and whether they pay on time are the outer ring. The rent is the rent. The center is what you say yes to, and what time you go home.
Worth lives in Circle 1. Nowhere else.
We have driven past our own closed sign to check a lock.
Seven reasons you still have the only key
One of these is the reason you are still inside at 10:15.
Seven ways the keys stay in your pocket, with a small mechanical move for each. Start with the title you did not want to click.
Can your business run without you?
More keys than the room has doors. One of them opens a job somebody else already finished. The handoff is one page, not a new you.
Read the guide → 02 Free guide · PDF includedWhy you can’t delegate
You are not looking for a mistake. You are looking for proof. The proof is never in the panel, so you open the panel again.
Read the guide → 03 Free guide · PDF includedSmall business owner burnout
The word is burnout. Under it is a shop that still opens, and a reason you cannot find on a Tuesday. Two letters. One sentence. No speech about selling.
Read the guide → 04 Free guide · PDF includedClients texting after hours
9:40 p.m. The kind reply is already in the box. You have not decided. Your thumbs have.
Read the guide → 05 Free guide · PDF includedAfraid to raise your prices?
The letter is written. It is in drafts. Sending it feels like losing the client who has been with you since the beginning. The fear is the point of the page. The number is not.
Read the guide → 06 Free guide · PDF includedOne bad review
One star, and the rest of the night is gone. The review has one true line. The rest is weather. You do not have to answer the weather before you sleep.
Read the guide → 07 Free guide · PDF includedThe loneliness of owning the place
The shop is full and the work is still lonely. The person who would understand is another owner, not another customer. One table. No pitch.
Read the guide →What is in the book
Five business owners. Fourteen Monday nights. One library table.
Each chapter ends with one small move you can try before you lock up tonight. Seven of them are free right now.
Who wrote this
Brandon spent his early career in Big Four accounting, then built and ran his own businesses. He has been the one with the only key.
We noticed that books meant to help owners tended to be the books owners never finished. Too dry. Too clinical. Too much like homework after a day that ended with a lock you were still checking.
So we wrote the one we wanted to read: something fun, specific, and built around a story you actually follow, with the patterns inside it that work on the Sundays that start with a drive past your own closed sign.
Lorraine brings the heart and the creative instinct. Brandon brings the process and the Method. We have spent years with people who built a place and want to walk out of it at close, and we finally put that into a form we are proud of.
We did not write this from a hilltop.
Brandon and Lorraine Cover, True Path Publishing
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