How much of today are you trading for a promise about tomorrow? That is the question at the center of Stop Negotiating with Tomorrow: Build the Life You Keep Putting on Hold, the new book from Alexis Coates — founder and publisher of Black Business Review — released this week through Coates Publishing in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon, with the audiobook edition following on Audible this month.
The book opens on a familiar scene: waiting for someone to commit, for a business deal to close, for the right moment to chase a goal that has been carried for years. Coates calls that waiting what it is — a negotiation, renewed daily, in which today is traded away for a promise about tomorrow. His argument is that patience has a line, and most people cross it without noticing: patience becomes postponement, and postponement becomes the life they meant to live, deferred.
A Book Built Like a Decision
Across ten chapters, Stop Negotiating with Tomorrow walks the reader through the places the bargain hides. Early chapters take on chasing outcomes that never arrive and giving effort a purpose instead of a hope. The middle of the book turns to relationships — keeping yourself in them — and to business, where Coates is blunt: a business deal is not your destiny, and no single closing should hold a life hostage. Later chapters deal with believing beyond the familiar, preparing while you wait, and beginning again after an ending, before closing on independence you can use and releasing the need for applause.
Each chapter pairs real-life case studies with practical exercises and reflection questions, so the reading turns into decisions. The book closes with “Your Next Thirty Days,” a structured action guide, and readers get access to a downloadable 30-Day Action Planner — choose one area of life that has been on hold, and spend thirty days taking concrete steps to change it.
From the Author of 12 Great Business Principles
Coates writes from the operator’s seat. He is the founder and publisher of Black Business Review, the media platform covering Black-owned business; the founder of Alexis Coates Consulting, where he advises small businesses on technology and AI adoption; and the author of 12 Great Business Principles, the book behind BBR’s Business Class series. His consulting career spans more than fifteen years, including a dozen years owning an IT company — a background that shows up in the book’s insistence on terms, deadlines, and decisions over motivation.
That insistence is the thread through everything he publishes: collected results over activity, ownership over waiting. Stop Negotiating with Tomorrow applies the same standard to a life that it applies to a business — stop renewing a bargain that costs you today and pays in promises.
The timing is deliberate. The book lands as Black Business Review closes its strongest year — an audience of more than 92,000 across Instagram and Threads, a twice-weekly Briefing, and a growing Orbit community — and it gives that audience the publisher’s own operating system in print: how he decides, what he refuses to wait on, and why he measures everything by what gets collected, built, and finished. For readers who know Coates through the magazine, the consulting practice, or the Business Class series drawn from his earlier book, Stop Negotiating with Tomorrow is the fullest statement yet of the philosophy behind all three — and a working manual, not a memoir.
How to Get It
Stop Negotiating with Tomorrow is available now in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon: get the book on Amazon. The audiobook edition, narrated in a digital voice, has been submitted to Audible and is expected this month. Readers can download the free companion 30-Day Action Planner referenced in the book here, hear Coates’s thinking on the BBR podcast, and get stories like this one in the free BBR Briefing every Tuesday and Friday.
Join Orbit — where Black professionals, entrepreneurs and leaders connect, collaborate and turn opportunities into action. https://orbit.blackbusinessreview.net/
