Learn With Us · Free and open to the community
Pull Up a Chair
A gathering for small business owners, and for the people thinking about becoming one. One topic each session, talked through in plain language, with room for your questions. No cost. No pitch. No gatekeeping.
When we meet
Every other Sunday. Join the list below and the dates come to you.
How the porch works
Ground rules
Come as you are.
No question is too basic. The basics are the point, and the person next to you is probably wondering the same thing.
Talk about your own business.
Share your own numbers and your own story if you choose to. Nobody else’s books get discussed in this room.
What’s shared here stays here.
People speak honestly about money when the room can be trusted. Be the reason it can.
Plain language wins.
If a term shows up, we define it before we move on. That is a promise, not a preference.
Nobody is selling anything.
Including us. This hour exists to share knowledge, not to pitch services.
Why this is free
Because the knowledge was never supposed to cost anything. How money works in a small business is not a secret. It was just kept in rooms our communities weren’t invited into, and dressed in language built to keep it that way.
Porch & Main is a working advisory practice. Clients pay us to keep their books and sit with their decisions. This room is different. This room is the front porch, where the knowledge gets handed around freely, the way it always was in the kitchens and circles our communities built for themselves.
Your host is Alvin Findlay, Porch & Main’s founder and lead advisor, with more than twenty years spent inside financial systems most people only see from the outside. You can read more about him and the bench on the advisors page.
How we gather, what we capture, what we send you, and how you leave
Revision date 2026-08-10
What this is. The Learning Circle is community education. Free, no tiers, no fees, nothing to apply for. It is not an engagement with Porch & Main, and nothing said in a session is accounting, tax, or legal advice for your situation.
Your seat. Signing up is an RSVP, not an account. We ask for a real name because the room works when people know who they are sitting with. Your seat page is where everything lives: the next gathering, past sessions, notes, and the games.
When we meet. Every other Sunday. The date, time, and place always live on your seat page. That is the only place we keep it current, so when anything moves, it moves there first.
What we capture. Sessions may be captured in full: audio, video, transcription, notes, and playback in any form. We do this for educational and training purposes, so someone who finds us late can catch up, and so what gets worked out in the room can become teaching material for the wider community later, including through the Porch & Main Academy. When your words travel that way, identifying details are scrubbed and removed first.
What actually happens today. Notes only. Sessions are recorded so the notes can be written from them, and that is the whole reason the recording exists. It stays on our own machines, it is not posted, and it is not shared. If any of that changes, this page says so before it does.
Talk about your own business. Your numbers and your story are yours to share. Someone else’s are not yours to bring.
Email. The only thing we will ever email you about is this program: a note when you sign up, a reminder before each gathering, and a note when session notes go up. Nothing else. Your address is not shared with anyone. Leaving takes one click and one confirmation, and you are off the list. Right now nothing sends automatically, so if you sign up before the season opens, the first thing you get will be a note with your seat page in it.
The signup sheet
Save your seat
Joining the list is free and it is not a commitment. It just means the date, the topic, and the meeting link reach you first. Telling us a little about your business, or about what you want to learn, helps us shape the sessions around the room we actually have.