The Friday Sync

Your Weekly Recap from Operating by John Brewton

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This Week’s Signal

We’re all getting it wrong…

Everyone is obsessed with productizing…ourselves, our services, our value. We want AI twins. We want software that automates what we deliver at zero marginal cost. We’re racing to strip the human out of everything we do at the exact moment when our human stories, our ways of listening, understanding, and solving problems are about the only thing left that isn’t being commoditized.

I’m 60 hours into the 400 I committed to my Operating Founders program, and this is what I keep coming back to. Companies are becoming tech stacks. We are all becoming companies. But scalability is overrated. The operators who win won’t be those who saved the most time, they’ll be those who figured out how to do more, give more, and offer more.

Stop thinking about speeding up. Start thinking about helping people.

That’s the only thing that matters.

This week’s articles hit that nerve from five different angles — Louis Vuitton’s collaboration machine, Jim Collins made actionable for solo operators, a morning protocol built on showing up (not optimizing), the AI Intensity Trap, and a short satirical (hopefully funny) short story about what happens when the human disappears from work entirely.

The number that stuck with me: LV’s classic monogram canvas bags generate roughly 90% gross margins. The runway is the customer acquisition cost. The monogram bag is the lifetime value. That single insight reframes how every creator should think about their content vs. their core offer.

- j -

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One Thing I Changed This Week

I stopped thinking about AI in terms of how I can use it to productize my work, my consulting, my offering and shifted to a place (where I will stay for the year ahead) of thinking about AI in terms of how it can simply enable me to do more in person work, more 1:1 work, more human work.

If our future opportunity is built around our uniqueness as humans, then I think using the tools at our disposal to enable more human work is the critical idea to be considering.

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This Week’s Articles

⭐ Reader Favorite

Operating Stories: Louis Vuitton and the Business of Collaboration (Paid w/ Preview) Louis Vuitton has spent three decades turning collaboration into an operating system — not a marketing tactic. This deep dive breaks down the six hard principles behind every era from Murakami to Pharrell, with verified financials and a playbook you can apply to your own brand. Paid subscribers got the full financial analysis, era-by-era breakdown, branded charts, the LV Collaboration Playbook, and sixteen AI prompts to run the framework on their own business.

The Operating Week Ahead: Unapologetically Speedy Your software stack is becoming a liability, AI is making you faster in ways that might hurt you, and Dario Amodei says we’re near the end of the exponential. Three sharp ideas and three prompts to start your week with clarity.

Operating Habits: My Morning Protocol I combined Steven Pressfield’s War of Art inner operating system with Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Slow Productivity outer operating system into a six-phase morning protocol. This is the exact system that produces everything you read from me — with six deliverables for you to install it yourself by Friday.

Scaling Down the Big Ideas: Good to Great Starts & Ends With You Jim Collins’ seven principles were written for large corporations, but they’re more powerful for creators, solopreneurs, and small operators. This edition translates the Hedgehog Concept, Level 5 Leadership, and the Flywheel into frameworks you can use right now — no board approval required.

Scenes From a Corporate Obituary A short story about the slow, bureaucratic death of corporate life — told through meetings that multiply like bacteria, performance reviews that insult your intelligence, and a calendar that looks like a Mondrian painting if Mondrian hated you. Funny, dark, and uncomfortably familiar.

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Assets & Tools Released This Week

Become a monthly paid subscriber for $7.99 to gain access to these tools, more to be released every week.

• LV Collaboration Playbook — Visual framework of the six principles behind Louis Vuitton’s collaboration strategy

• AI Prompt Pack — Sixteen structured prompts to apply LV’s collaboration principles to your own business (works in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any AI tool)

• NotebookLM Research Notebook — Full Louis Vuitton article and underlying research in an interactive notebook for deeper exploration

• Daily Operating Card — One-page morning worksheet for the six-phase morning protocol

• Invocation Builder — Template for writing your personal creative purpose statement

• Weekly Resistance Audit — Sunday/Monday reflection tool for tracking Resistance patterns and sustainability

• The Operator’s Day — Combined Pressfield/Newport hour-by-hour schedule template

• Good to Great Operator’s Worksheet — Collins’ seven principles translated into a working framework for solo operators and small teams

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Coming Next Week

Operating Stories takes on a new case study. Scaling Down the Big Ideas continues with another classic made actionable. And the Operating Habits protocol gets its first weekly audit…and hopefully one or two things to make you smile and laugh a bit.

Have a killer weekend. Thank you for your support of what I do.

— john —

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We sold out the first 100 Operating Founder seats in two weeks.

So I’ve opened 100 new seats (50 are already taken).

What You Get

Every Friday, you get a 60-minute live cohort session with me. Here’s what’s inside:

• The real numbers. Behind the scenes of everything I’m building — strategy, mistakes, pivots, revenue — documented in real time.

• Business model development. Business plans, pricing strategy, revenue models, and scalable operations — not content tips.

• Live tutorials + my actual data. The same Google Sheets I use, walked through live. No curated screenshots.

• Every template I use. Download and deploy immediately.

• 20 min of open Q&A. Strategy, content, growth, monetization — nothing off-limits.

• Monthly guest speakers. Platform growth, content design, creator ops, and the tools that actually move the needle.

• Access to a community of top-quality Substack writers and collaborators to build your audiences and content alongside and in partnership with.

$99 gets you 52 consecutive weeks — a front-row seat to how I build everything, plus a cohort of serious founders building alongside you.

The offer closes February 28th, or when the remaining 50 seats fill. Whichever comes first.

Once they’re gone, the Operating Founder tier goes away entirely.

[Become an Operating Founder → 50 seats remaining]

John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a Phd. student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and everyday, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.