Obsolete By Design™ · The self-paced course
If you turned your phone off for 24 hours, what would break?
Most owners have never found out. OBD Digital walks you to one finish line: your first 24-Hour Ownerless Drill, run inside 90 days. Phone off. Business open. The two of us with you every week on the way there.
Self-paced course. Live office hours with us every week. Lifetime access. One price.
The problem nobody names
You already know what's broken.
Maybe it's the vacation where you spent the whole time on your phone, and your spouse stopped asking when you'd put it down. Maybe it's the grandchild's game you watched from the parking lot, on a call. Maybe it's the senior tech who left for a competitor, and you realized how much of what your business knew walked out the door, because none of it was ever written down.
Every decision routes through you. Every senior employee's knowledge lives in their head. Every Sunday, the laptop comes out at 5 a.m. because the week won't start without it.
The problem isn't that you're not working hard enough. You've been working harder than anyone we know.
That's not a character flaw. That's a systems problem.
The finish line
One day. Phone off. Then you know.
The 24-Hour Ownerless Drill is simple to describe and hard to do. You give your team 48 hours' notice. At five o'clock you turn your phone off, and you stay unreachable until five o'clock the next day. The only exceptions are fire, theft, death, or a federal subpoena. Everything else waits.
The day after, you sit down with your team and run four debrief questions. What held. What broke. What nobody knew how to decide. What has to be written down before the next one.
Nobody grades it. You won't need anyone to tell you whether you crossed the line. You'll know.
Run your first Drill within 90 days of starting. Find out what the business actually does without you.
Why this isn't another course
You don't need more information. You need to get to the date.
Here's the thing. You could ask ChatGPT for a delegation plan tonight and have one in five minutes. A good one. It won't change anything, and you already know why.
Owners don't get stuck on knowing what to do. They get stuck in week two of a handoff, when somebody makes a call they'd have made differently and their hand reaches for the phone. And they get stuck on the date. Booking the Drill is the step that slides to next month, and then the month after that.
So we built OBD Digital around those moments, and we put ourselves in them.
The road to Drill day
The R.E.S.T. Method™: four moves, one destination.
We called it R.E.S.T. on purpose. Not because the work is restful. It isn't. We picked the word because it tells you what's on the other side of doing it: the actual capacity to rest. Four modules, about twenty minutes of teaching each, and a worksheet you finish before you move on. Each one gets your business ready to run a day without you. Maps 1:1 to the book.
Record the Rules
Your team can't decide without you if your rules only live in your head. You build your Owner's Almanac™, a field guide to how you actually think, not an SOP manual. You run a five-day Decision Log and sort every call into four buckets: Delete, Delegate, Decide Together, Only Me. By the end you have your first ten Almanac entries on paper, the ones your team will reach for while your phone is off.
Empower the Team
The difference between handing off a task and handing off a decision. The Trust Transfer Script, an eight-line conversation that moves a decision off your desk. A four-week Delegation Pilot you start now: Observe, Together, Solo-You-Watch, Owned. The decisions you hand off here are the ones that get made on Drill day.
Systematize the Flow
You score a baseline Ownerless Scorecard across six categories, red, yellow, green. Every red is something to shore up before Drill day. You start the Friday voice-memo practice. AI here is succession-proofing, not productivity, the transfer of what you know into something that doesn't take a lunch break.
Test the Trust
The Drill itself. The 48-hour checklist, the Drill day rules, the four debrief questions. You pick the earliest date you can live with, not the best one, and you set it before you finish the module. Then you set the next one, 90 days out.
Where we show up
The course is the map. We're there for the hard parts.
- Office hours, every week. One hour, live, with the two of us, every Wednesday at 2pm Eastern. Bring the decision you can't hand off, the Pilot that's wobbling, the Drill date you keep moving. Every session is recorded, so you can catch up if you miss one. It's us. Not a facilitator. Not an assistant.
- Your Drill date. When you book it, send it to us. One of us writes back. A date somebody else knows about is a lot harder to move.
- Your debrief. After your Drill, send us your answers to the four debrief questions. We read every one and write back with what we see.
What's included
Everything we use ourselves. Nothing held back to sell you later.
- Four video modules. Roughly twenty minutes each, about eighty minutes of teaching total. Record, Empower, Systematize, Test. Watch one a week or run straight through.
- Nine worksheets. The 24-Hour Drill Protocol and the Drill Debrief Questions, plus everything that gets you there: the Five-Day Decision Log, the Owner's Almanac entry template, the Trust Transfer Script, the four-week Delegation Pilot tracker, the Ownerless Scorecard, the Friday Voice Memo practice, and the 90-Day Map.
- Weekly office hours with us. One hour, live, Wednesdays at 2pm Eastern.
- A personal reply on your Drill date and your debrief. From one of us, not an autoresponder.
- A private community. A paid-tier channel inside our Skool group where you post stuck points and read what's working for other owners.
- Lifetime updates. When we ship new content or refine a worksheet, you get it. No re-purchase, no subscription, no expiration.
$497. One time. Lifetime access.
No subscription, no upsell sequence, no tripwire to a higher tier. One product, one price, one finish line. Work through it in a few weeks or take the full 90 days. Office hours are there every week either way.
One-time payment. Lifetime access. No subscriptions, no upsells, no email funnels.
The honest guarantee
No cash refunds. Nobody gets left behind.
Here's the honest reason there's no money back: the worksheets are yours to download the minute you join, so a refund would mean keeping the work and getting the money back too. We're not built that way.
Here's what we are built for. Do the work. The Decision Log, the first Delegation Pilot, the Drill. If you've done it and you're still stuck, you tell us, and one of us gets on a call and works it with you until it clicks.
You don't get your money back. You get us until you get it.
About proof
We could fill this with testimonials. We're not going to.
OBD Digital is new, so we don't have a wall of buyer quotes yet, and even when we do, we won't dress them up to move you off the fence. What's real underneath it: two years running R.E.S.T. in our own companies and a live cohort of operator couples, and the whole method in print in our book, The Owner Shift.
If you want proof before you buy, here's the only kind that matters: your own number. The free Hourly Worth Calculator tells you in about four minutes how much the business is leaning on you right now. Start there. Let the number make the case.
Who it's for
Owners who feel the dependency.
Married business owners and family business operators. Service businesses, trades, equipment, manufacturing, distribution. Anywhere from a few employees to a hundred, revenue roughly between one and twenty-five million. The common thread: you've been at this a while, and the business depends on you in ways you'd quietly like to fix.
It fits solo founders too. We held the live cohort to couples on purpose. We're not holding the digital that way. If you run a business and you want the method, the method is for you.
Who it's not for
A filter, not a wall.
Pre-revenue founders. Owners looking for sales tactics or marketing systems, because this is the operating side of the business, not the growth side. Anyone trying to fix a marriage by buying a business course. People who want done-for-you.
If that's you, we'd rather tell you now than take your $497. The work only pays off for the person willing to do it.
Your guides
Steve & Melissa Fultz.
Melissa came from the Fortune 5 world. Twenty-five years generating more than a billion and a half in revenue. Steve has a PhD in psychology from the University of Tennessee and twenty-five years on church staffs. We left both worlds to run brick-and-mortar companies in Knoxville with about 50 employees and payroll every other Friday. Our daughter Sarah is our controller.
We're not coaches. We're not consultants. We're operators, and we're a married couple running the thing we teach. We've been through the betrayal, the key-employee departures, the seasons where the business ate the marriage, and the slow work of getting our Sundays back. Every framework in OBD is one we lived through on the operational side before we ever taught it.
Read this carefully
What we don't promise.
If any of this bothers you, this isn't your program.
We don't promise outcomes.
We promise a method, a finish line, and direct access to us. What the Drill shows you is yours to act on, because you're the one doing the work on the business.
We don't do countdown timers.
No fake scarcity. No "only 3 spots left." The digital is always available at the same price. If you're not sure today, don't buy today. It'll be here next month.
We don't sell theory.
Every module ends with something you do in your business, not something you watch. The last one ends with a date on the calendar.
We don't run a pitch fest.
The digital is direct-buy. No call required. No funnel to the next thing. The work stands alone.
We don't sell access to an associate.
Office hours are us. The replies are us. Not a facilitator. Not a content manager. The two of us.
We don't promise it fits every situation.
If you're trying to fix a broken marriage by signing up for a business program, that's the wrong order of operations. Repair the marriage first. We'll be here.
Frequently asked (actual) questions
The questions people actually ask.
Final word
Pick the date. We'll help you get there.
Most owners in your seat don't move when something changes on a website. They move when something changes in their life. A key employee walks out. A health scare shows up. A spouse asks a question at the dinner table that doesn't let them off the hook.
If any of that has happened in the last 90 days, start here. Ninety days from now you can know what the business does without you, or you can still be guessing.
One operator talking to another. No countdown timers. No pressure.
— Steve & Melissa