Ingress & Egress

Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin the inventor, the diplomat, the face on the hundred-dollar bill. Almost no one knows Franklin the operator: the printer who worked out how to own, run, and profit from businesses in cities he would never visit, staffed by people he could not supervise, across distances that took weeks to cross.

Ingress & Egress is the story of that hidden Franklin. Beginning with a beaten apprentice who broke his indenture and fled Boston, it follows a young tradesman who was stranded in London by a powerful man's empty promise, who once broke faith with money entrusted to him and spent years making it right, and who turned those hard lessons into a system. Contract by contract, he built the largest printing network in colonial America, then arranged to be paid handsomely by it for the last eighteen years he had nothing to do with it.

Along the way you'll meet the widow who rescued his Charleston shop by keeping the books her husband never could, the runaway apprentice who rose to audit a continent, the beloved nephew the system could not save, and the famous wheelbarrow Franklin pushed through the streets so the whole town would see him work. You'll see how a man built something durable enough to outlive not just himself but his own intentions, until the network he made for money became part of the infrastructure of a revolution.

This is a book about the oldest problem in business: how do you control what you cannot see? Franklin solved it three hundred years ago, with none of the modern tools, and the discipline he discovered, get it in writing, keep true accounts, settle everything in advance, is as teachable now as it was then.