About the author
Zachary Maley
Zach builds businesses by installing systems that make profit and performance predictable. He developed his operating framework leading teams responsible for hundreds of millions in revenue, then used it to buy, fix, and grow his own hospitality and real estate businesses. He is the founder of Built for Cashflow and the author of The FORCE System.
From hustle to systems
Every system in the book was learned the hard way first.
How Zach got from a failed agency to the FORCE System, and what each stop taught him that you can use now.
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Thailand
At twenty-six, Zach moved to Thailand to start an advertising agency, with a few years of experience and no business running a company. He worked twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Six months in, the business was collapsing, and so was he.
Effort without structure is just chaos wearing a motivational T-shirt.
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$80,000 in debt
He closed the agency within the year and came home with $80,000 in credit card debt. He couldn’t afford an apartment, so he slept in a six-by-four-foot closet in his mom’s office for the next year, paying the debt down a little at a time.
Decide where every dollar goes before you spend it.
Worksheet: The Banking Split → -
The strip mall
He and his mom bought a twelve-unit strip mall in southern Utah. He read everything he could about real estate, taxes, finance, and business systems, and tested every idea there. He kept what worked, and that became the foundation of how he runs businesses today.
Test a system in one place, keep what works, then repeat it.
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The RV park
Next came the Virginia City RV Park: fifty-five sites that had underperformed for twenty years, losing nearly $100,000 a year, run on paper reservations and one owner answering every call. They replaced the paper with reservation software, standardized check-in, wrote scripts for the front desk, documented procedures, and set up online booking.
Solve a problem once and write it down, and it stops coming back.
Worksheet: SOP Template → -
The hotel
Then the Silverland Inn in Virginia City, Nevada, a hotel that had lost $350,000 a year for sixteen years and had never made a profit. Zach worked out what each room night actually cost, doubled the rates to cover it, and split every deposit into separate accounts. Within three months it was profitable for the first time in its history, and its first year of profit helped fund an on-site restaurant.
Price from your real unit cost, not from what competitors charge.
Worksheet: Unit Economics & Pricing → -
Today
Zach leads large-scale loyalty and marketing operations for a major hospitality company, overseeing data science, AI-driven decision systems, and customer strategy. He has built a multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio, has lived and worked from Kenya to Hong Kong to Thailand, and lives in Reno, Nevada, with his wife and daughters. He wrote The FORCE System so other owners don’t have to learn it the hard way.
Start where Zach would
Get the free FORCE Toolkit: ten worksheets from the book, starting with Find Your First System.
Book Zach to speak
Talks and workshops for owners and leadership teams on building businesses that run on systems.