Yes. And understand that confidentiality runs from the first call, signed or not.
The conversation is completely confidential before any paperwork exists. Your numbers, your cast problems, your partnership, your read of your own operation — none of it leaves the engagement. I do not comment publicly on individual operators or brands, and I never will, which is a position you can check across everything I have published.
The One Carve-Out #
My framework, my published vocabulary and my methods are mine and stay mine. An NDA covers your information, not the instrument I brought in the door. I will not sign an agreement that puts my own published work — which is already free and public — inside your confidentiality perimeter, or that restricts me from continuing to write about mechanisms I was writing about before we met.
What I write about is patterns, never operators. If you ever see your operation in something I publish on Hacksterism or Restaurant Physics, you have misread a pattern for a portrait. That distinction is the whole discipline.
What An NDA Does Not Fix #
It does not make the read safe. The uncomfortable part of this work was never that the information might get out. It is that you are going to hear an accurate account of your own operation, and you will be the one holding it afterward. No agreement can protect you from that, and if you are looking for paperwork that will, the engagement is not the thing you actually want.
Send it over and let us talk: Let’s Talk. The site’s own policies are in Legal.
