Rethink Your Small Business Status Quo
Start Fresh, Challenge Your Assumptions, and Redesign Your Business for Long-Term Sustainability
This is your blank slate.
Whether you and your business are in a rut, bogged down by old decisions, or perched on a plateau (and not in a good way), breaking free from the past can be a challenge.
You add new ideas without taking away the old ones. You start to assume that the way things are is the way things have to be. You work with what you’ve got rather than imagining what you could create.
If you’re looking for a way to declutter, start fresh, and build a business for long-term sustainability, you need a blank slate.
Blank Slate is a process for reimagining your business to meet your needs now and into the future. Step-by-step, you’ll design a business that prioritizes what’s most important to you, facilitates the work you love, and creates remarkable experiences for your customers or clients.
I’ve been a coach, strategist, and sought-after educator on business model design and development for more than 15 years. Blank Slate documents my process for helping business owners hit the reset button—at least temporarily—and reimagine a more sustainable business from the ground up.
With Blank Slate, you can develop a strategy that’s clear, decisive, and sustainable.
A guide more than 10 years in the making
Tara McMullin
Tara is a writer, producer, and critic who works at the intersection of small business and the future of work. Her approach combines practical business-building insight with philosophy and theory to offer critical insight to entrepreneurs and workers alike. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, The Muse, and Quartz. She’s the author of What Works.
What’s Included
Blank Slate is designed to be convenient and adaptable. Your package includes a full-color PDF great for working on an iPad or other tablet, a gray-scale PDF for printing and working on by hand, an audio version in a private podcast feed for on-the-go thinking, and an exercise-only workbook for a more minimal printing option.
Full-Color PDF for Tablets
Printer-Friendly PDF
Audio Version for On-The-Go
Table of Contents
Introduction
“I wholeheartedly believe that any business worth building is worth building for long-term sustainability. I believe that the choices we make today should support a future we want to inhabit. I believe that our customers deserve something more than a house of cards.”
Chapter 1:
Needs & Priorities
“Strategy is an architecture for decision-making. A strategic process, like the one in this guide, builds a foundation of decisions that you can then build atop. And as Maren Morris says, The house won’t fall if the bones are good.
The first step in building this foundation is taking stock of your needs and priorities. Because if they’re not at the center of how you conceive of your business, your later decisions won’t reflect what’s most important to you.”
Chapter 2:
Theory of Business
“A company’s theory of business communicates ‘what it is, what it represents, and what its basic concepts, values, policies, and beliefs are.’
A strong theory of business allows you to face novel challenges, weather market changes, and grow without losing focus. It brings clarity to any decision about what to do next as your business evolves. And it helps connect the narrative of your brand with the operational realities of the work you do.”
Chapter 3:
Model & Structure
“A blank-slate business model is more like a hypothesis than it is a blueprint. It’s a strong guess about how things could work rather than a prescription for how they should. When you start from a prescription, blueprint, or formula, you adapt your needs, desires, and values to fit the prescription rather than asking how you might model a business that aligns with your true needs, desires, and values.”
Chapter 4:
Your Offer
“The fastest path to business success is to make a product people want to buy. Not a product that people can be easily convinced to buy. But a product people can immediately recognize as the thing they've been looking for (even if they didn't know they'd been looking for it). There are many ways to do this: solve a readily apparent problem, tap into a deeply felt desire, or jump on an emerging trend, to name a few.
In other words, recognition is a critical and often overlooked factor in a business's success and sustainability.”
Chapter 5:
Operations
“Operations often gets a bad rap as a sort of stodgy, uninspired cousin of the more creative or exciting aspects of business strategy. Plenty of entrepreneurs start to lose interest as soon as you start talking about process and procedure. But operational design has the same creative potential as any other aspect of business strategy. The answer to ‘How do we make this happen?’ could be almost anything, and exploring options rather than trying to do things ‘right’ can lead to novel, clever, or even playful breakthroughs.”
Chapter 6:
Marketing
“Any marketing strategy—no matter what your business is, no matter what tactics you use, no matter what your strengths are—needs to fulfill three core objectives: discovery, nurturing, and evaluation. An effective marketing ecosystem blends ideas and practices that fulfill these three objectives to connect the right people to the right product at the right time.”
Conclusion:
Getting to Work
If you have substantial changes in mind, the best place to start is with one that will give you more stability and ease than you have right now. That initial lurch toward greater sustainability can be a catalyst for realizing other changes in short order. A change that gives you more stability and ease is likely one that impacts your income, schedule, or mental bandwidth.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
If you run a service-based business (e.g., coaching, consulting, design, production, etc.), media business (e.g., premium content), or education business (e.g., online courses or membership), Blank Slate was created with you in mind.
Blank Slate assumes you have a pre-existing business (loosely defined) and at least one year of experience to draw from.
-
If you’re building a business from a true blank slate, you can also use the Blank Slate process. Just keep in mind that early on, things can change fast because you’re learning so much. So use Blank Slate to get a jump on your business design, but come back to the ideas frequently as you learn more about your business and what you want from it.
-
The direct result of the Blank Slate process is a concrete picture of a sustainable business based on your needs. This includes your business model and offer, marketing strategy, and operational strategy.
How you implement that vision and strategy is up to you. Blank Slate pairs well with more specific trainings on marketing, offer development, process design, etc.
-
We offer a no-questions-asked refund policy. We do ask that you purchase and engage with Blank Slate with honest intention in the spirit in which it was created.
-
If you’d like to work with Tara for 1:1 guidance through the Blank Slate process, you can opt for a 3-session coaching package for $2500 that includes feedback on assignments, answers to questions, additional resources as needed, and lots of meaty questions and caring provocation to help you design the next phase of your business.
Blank Slate is also the perfect preparation for an Insight Intensive with Tara. That’s a 90-minute laser coaching session. Learn more here.
Pre-Order Today
Available 1.15.26
A step-by-step guide to challenging your assumptions and rethinking your business for long-term sustainability—automatically delivered to your inbox on or by January 14. Early Bird price available through January 14, 2026. Regular price $99.
You’ll be directed to create an account or sign in before checking out. Your account gives you access to the Blank Slate Hub, which will have the different versions of the guide for download.