Wheels Up

Dreams are possible. It is not easy. And nobody hands you the map. The chapters that follow are the map. In 1999, on a sand volleyball court at Camp Able Sentry in Macedonia, a U.S. Army helicopter pilot met a tall woman on the other side of the net. Six years later, they founded Lexicon Consulting at her parents' dining-room table in Fillmore, California — with a laptop, a phone, a P.O. box, and a year living in an RV. By year five, Lexicon employed 460 people on three continents. Inc. Magazine ranked them #4 on the Inc. 500 — and #1 woman-owned in America. In 2012, they turned down an acquisition offer that would have changed every number in their life. They were building something bigger than the check. Twenty-one years later, three generations of the Latshaw family operate together under one roof in Los Angeles, with four ventures running inside the household. Wheels Up is the operating doctrine that made all of it possible — the five non-negotiables and the twenty-one chapters of frameworks that one founder and his wife built across two decades of running companies, and now hand to the next operator at the legal pad. This is not a motivational book. It is a doctrine. With workbook pages at the end of every chapter, because the book is the legal pad. If you read it without writing in it, you have read half of it. For founders. For family teams. For veterans translating the cockpit into the conference room. For anyone who has a dream big enough to be worth the cost — and wants the map a working operator actually used. Dreams are possible. Wheels up.