My name is Peter Bergeron, and I am the author of The Trapped Operator™ and creator of the 12 Fatal Issues Framework™ — a structural diagnostic system built from fifty years inside small businesses, including nearly two decades running my family's business before closing its doors in January 2020.
That fifty years did not start in a classroom. It started on the showroom floor of my dad's business in 1977, when I was four years old. By six I was matching incoming inventory against packing lists. By fourteen I was good enough at the work that my mom, who ran the administrative side, had to fire me for the kind of trouble fourteen-year-olds cause when they know too much and answer to nobody.
I spent the next two decades working inside other small businesses — a gas station, a financial services firm, a job shop, a beer distributor — moving through bookkeeping, controller, and operations roles, learning the same structural patterns repeating across different industries, different owners, different decades. When I finally had enough experience and an MBA to back it up, my dad called and said, in the way he said most things, "I think you might finally be smart enough to come work for me." I said yes without hesitation.
What a podcast audience gains from a conversation with me is not theory. It is fifty years of pattern recognition from inside the businesses most frameworks were never built to describe. The 12 Fatal Issues Framework™ identifies the twelve recurring structural pressure points that keep small business owners trapped in their own operations, organized across three Operational States and four structural systems.
It was built from observation, tested against research, and grounded in a doctoral dissertation focused on why family business succession fails at the rate it does — and what the structural answer actually looks like.
I am a doctoral candidate in business administration at Johnson & Wales University with a dissertation focus on family business succession and generational transfer. Additionally I am an adjunct instructor of Entrepreneurial Mindset at Florida Gulf Coast University. The Trapped Operator™ launched July 1, 2026, with additional information, content preview, and special bonus gift available at thetrappedoperator.com.