No, that's like giving your wife a book on weight loss, the onus is on you to triple the sales and then the hobbyist starts wondering how his going to get that done.
I think it is more like him giving me the book The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (which was great and opened my eyes a lot) and me returning the gesture.
On the other thing - I've just 2.5x-ed the sales now but we are working out together how to scale production. So I am looking on ways to optimise our relationship.
The Goal is a book that influenced me over 25 years ago. The concepts are sound but i have gifted it to over 20 people since and a handful get it for what it is. However it isn’t a book about business and more a story about complexity and constraints applied to a theoretical business. I have never had occasions where there is an aha moment about a business i am in that literally is explained in The Goal.
It seems to me you have the makings of a good partnership and i have read your comments and it does look like you are committed. In my opinion you could shift to looking at how your customers view your business and working backwards. It might be that your answers are to be less self obsessed and more customer obsessed. Not saying you are not doing this already but in my view the hierarchy for a business prioritises the customer first and works backwards. Issues in your partnership can then be weighed against this mission. Good luck.
The Goal was very eye-opening to me since before that I've always have worked only on the side of business where I give my best to sell as much as possible and never cared about how are we then going to deliver this, handle the peaks that I create or the lows when I fail.
In this context for me it was the fundamentals that I needed to have in order to have meaningful conversations about capacities, production bottle-necks and optimisation without making the conversation a tutoring session for me.