Independent · Transitional · Sober Living
Temporary stand-in
Replaces: HERO — THE PORCH AT DUSK, HOUSE LIGHT ALREADY ON (horizontal 16:9, plus a vertical crop)
Grade: warm golden key from the porch lamp, deep umber shadows, slight halation on the bulb, no cool fill.
01 Start here
Nobody should pay to find out whether they want this business. Sit in, ask anything, and leave with an honest read on whether this is your work — the boring parts first, because the boring parts are what close houses.
Sixty minutes of teaching, then thirty minutes of live Q&A where Q answers your market, your property, your question — out loud, in front of everyone.
What you’ll learn
Housing with peer support versus treatment and clinical services: what a non-clinical home can offer, what instantly puts you in a licensed category, and how to find out what your own state and city actually require. We teach the boundary — not one state’s rulebook as if it were universal.
Where residents really come from — discharge planners, treatment providers, courts and probation, families, other houses — and the first three relationships to build in any market, in what order, with what to say.
The clauses that decide whether you can legally run a house you don’t own: occupancy and use language, the landlord’s written informed consent, who carries what risk, notice and inspection. Plus the one clause Q now refuses to go without.
Occupancy, collections, days-to-fill and cost per bed — the four-line weekly check that tells you a house is in trouble months before the bank does, and what to do about each one.
Temporary stand-in
Replaces: THE WORKSHEET — “TEN QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU SPEND A DOLLAR”, FILLED IN BY HAND (horizontal detail)
Grade: single warm desk lamp, hard warm falloff, paper reading bone rather than white.
Zero risk, and we mean the boring version of that. No card, no charge, no trial to forget about. Leave at minute nine if it isn’t your business. Registering does not put you on a countdown, a drip sequence or a call list — you’ll hear about the seminar once, and then only if you ask.
Sessions run weekly — schedule to be confirmedplaceholder. Capped so the Q&A stays a conversation.
02 The model
Independent, Transitional and Sober Living describe how much structure a resident needs on the way back to a life of their own. Which level you operate decides your house rules, your referral sources, your staffing and your economics. It does not change the fundamentals — and the fundamentals are what get taught.
Shared, affordable housing for adults who can hold their own routines but do better with community and a standard to live up to. Lighter rules, longer stays, steadier occupancy. Usually the most forgiving place to learn how to be a landlord and an operator at the same time.
Time-bound, structured housing for people re-entering from treatment, incarceration or homelessness. Program partnerships and agency relationships matter here, and so does documentation — sooner or later somebody will ask you for it, in writing, on a deadline.
Recovery residences with real house standards: peer accountability, house meetings, a written testing policy and clear expectations around substance use. Treatment-provider relationships drive the beds. Culture is the product here, and it has to be defended every single week.
Temporary stand-in
Replaces: THE COMMON ROOM — WHERE THE HOUSE MEETING HAPPENS · Murrieta (horizontal)
Grade: table lamps as the only key, warm faces, corners falling to umber. No overheads.
Temporary stand-in
Replaces: THE STREET — AN ORDINARY RESIDENTIAL BLOCK (horizontal, eye-level or aerial)
Grade: golden-hour rake across the roofs, warm amber highlights, gentle vignette.
An ITSL home provides housing: structure, standards, community, peer support. It does not provide clinical or medical services. The moment you offer treatment you are in a different regulatory category with different licensure. Where that line sits — and the licensing, certification, zoning and occupancy rules around it — varies by state and very often by city. We will not hand you one state’s rulebook and call it universal. What we teach is how to find, verify and respect the line wherever you operate, and how to answer a letter from your city properly the first time.
Which properties actually work as shared housing, what the lease has to say, and how to get a landlord’s written, informed consent for the intended use before a dollar moves. Get that in writing. Always.
Housing with peer support is regulated differently from treatment. The line is services. We teach where the line generally sits and how to find your own state’s and city’s version of the answer, because it is not the same everywhere.
Referral sources are people with reputations to protect. What they need from you, in what format, how fast, and what gets you quietly dropped from a discharge planner’s list without anybody telling you.
Per-bed fees, vacancy allowance, house manager, insurance, reserves. Illustrative math you rerun with your own market’s numbers before you sign anything — including the version where it does not work.
03 Is there money behind these beds?
We won’t tell you what you’ll earn. We will show you where the funding pressure comes from, with the source printed next to every figure — because that is the honest version of “is there demand for this.”
$50 billion in opioid settlement funds flowing to states and localities.KFF Health News
Temporary stand-in
Replaces: A RESIDENT ROOM, BED MADE, READY FOR INTAKE · San Diego (horizontal)
Grade: late-afternoon window key raking across the bed, warm dust in the light, deep shadow under the frame.
Settlement dollars are not general revenue. They arrive restricted. Roughly 85% has to be spent on opioid-related uses, states publish the approved interventions they will fund, and expanding recovery housing sits on that list (NASHP). That is not a trend piece — it is a spending rule.
Meanwhile the treatment system that discharges people keeps getting funded. A $2.028 billion block grant and a $7.4 billion SAMHSA appropriation in FY2026 (NASADAD) pay for the assessments, detoxes and programs that end with a discharge planner asking one question: where does this person sleep tonight? Funded treatment produces referrals. Referrals are what fill beds.
Read this bit carefully, because it is where other people lie to you. Earmarked public money plus a funded referral pipeline is why demand for well-run housing is durable and why case managers keep calling. It is not a claim that you will receive any of that money, win any contract, qualify for any grant, or make any amount. No funding is promised to you anywhere on this page. What is being described is the ecosystem your beds would sit in — and how to build a house that referral sources trust enough to use twice.
The teaching exercise we run in the seminar — worked here at five of six beds filled.
Five occupied · one vacant
Same house, one more bed filled
Read that again. In this illustration the house loses money at five of six beds and clears a few hundred dollars at six. One bed changes the sign. That is what we mean when we say occupancy discipline and referral relationships are the business — and it is precisely why we will not hand you an income figure.
Every line above is a teaching figure, not a quote and not a forecast. Per-bed fees, lease costs, staffing models and insurance vary enormously by market and by house type; some operators own instead of lease, run several houses under one manager, or serve agency-funded placements at entirely different rates. The point of the exercise is not this answer. The point is that you can run it for your own market, honestly, before you sign a lease.
04 The programs
Here is exactly what each program is, who it is for, and what is inside it. What it costs is a conversation with Q — because the scope is not the same for everyone, and because he turns people away when the fit isn’t there more often than you would expect.
Free Step 01 · Live online
90 minutes · no card
The whole business in outline: the compliance boundary, how beds get filled, what your first lease has to say, and the four numbers to watch every week. Then open Q&A.
Step 02 · Self-paced
Fundamentals for new operators
The structured version of the fundamentals, worked at your own pace: the three levels of housing, the boundary between housing and treatment, lease and property basics, intake and house standards, and the example budget you rerun for your own market.
Step 03 · By application
Complete Operator Program
Your build, alongside Q and his team: your market, your property, your compliance path, your intake system, your first residents. Scope moves with how much hands-on support you want, including time on the ground in your market.
Ongoing Coming
Membership · in development
For people already running houses. Monthly operator calls, document and policy updates as rules change, incident reviews, and a bench of peers who have already had the week you are having.
By arrangement
One deal, one property, one problem
Private working time on the thing in front of you — a lease you are about to sign, a house that is not filling, a city that has started writing letters. Usually booked by Blueprint clients; occasionally open by request.
Live, in the room
One working day
Not a rung on a ladder — the flagship. A full working day where the whole machine gets opened up in front of a room small enough that your specific question gets a specific answer.
Why no prices on the page? Because the honest answer to “what does it cost” depends on which program fits you, and half the people who ask should be pointed at the free webinar instead of a paid product. So we do it the slow way: you tell us what you’re trying to do, Q or someone on his team calls you, and the number comes with the scope attached. If you already hold a personal code from Q, redeem it here and it will tell you what’s due.
05 Request details · book a call
One form for everything — the free webinar, a program, the seminar, or just a question you can’t find an answer to. No autoresponder maze, no chatbot, no queue you can’t see the bottom of.
Your enquiry is recorded the moment you send it and a human reads it. Expect a reply by email or phone, usually the same working day. If you asked for the webinar, the join link comes first.
Which market you’re looking at, whether you’re leasing or buying, and how far along you are. That is enough to tell you which program fits — or to tell you to wait.
Put you on a countdown timer, add you to a drip sequence, sell your details, or quote you a number before we understand what you’re building.
contact@itslbp.com reaches the same people. The form is faster because nothing gets lost in a spam folder.
06 The seminar
The webinar tells you whether this is your business. The seminar is where you watch someone run it — properties, ledgers, incidents, screening calls, and the questions the room brings. Capped small enough that your specific question gets a specific answer.
Housing with peer support versus treatment and clinical services, and why that boundary is your best friend. How licensing, certification, zoning and occupancy rules vary by state and often by city — and the verification checklist Q runs before touching any property.
Lease structures that let you operate homes you don’t own: what landlords need to hear, how to get written informed consent for the intended use, what the agreement must contain, and the clauses that have saved Q’s houses.
Where residents actually come from, how referral relationships get built and kept, and a line-by-line walk through an anonymised house ledger at full occupancy and at the occupancy that loses money. Every number labelled illustrative on every slide; every mechanic real.
Intake standards, resident agreements, house meetings, testing policy, and case studies of real incidents — what happened, what it cost, and the system that came out of it. We run the awkward screening call as a live exercise.
Bring your city, your budget, or the property you’ve been circling. The room works it: what to verify first, what the lease has to say, who to call. People leave with a written plan for their next thirty days — theirs, not a template.
Temporary stand-in
Replaces: THE SEMINAR ROOM MID-SESSION, SHOT FROM THE BACK — workbooks open, hands up (horizontal). The room, not the presenter.
Grade: warm practical lighting only, amber wash on the backs of heads, screen glow graded warm. No blue projector cast.
Temporary stand-in
Replaces: ONE OF THE HOUSES Q RUNS, FROM THE STREET · Murrieta (horizontal)
Grade: golden-hour front elevation, warm amber on the siding, no cool sky cast.
Deliberately empty. No stock portrait, no stand-in face, nothing that could be mistaken for Q. This slot stays blank until the new portrait is shot: a working environmental portrait at one of the houses, warm window key from frame left, amber falloff into deep umber, no flash.
07 The operator
Q has spent his career inside recovery housing. The intake conversations. The two a.m. calls. The letter from the city. The house meeting where a home either keeps its culture or quietly loses it. He operates properties in Murrieta and San Diego, California right now — which means everything in this training was used this month rather than remembered from a decade ago.
“I’m not going to sell you a dream. I’m going to show you a house — how it runs, what it costs, and what it will take out of you. If you still want in after that, I’ll help you build yours.”
The Blueprint exists because people kept asking him how he does it — families of residents, colleagues from treatment programs, investors who had already seen a badly run house from the inside. Rather than answer one coffee at a time, he built the training he wishes had existed when he started, and he teaches it out of the documents he is actually using.
Why two markets matters more than it sounds. A single-market operator has one city’s zoning interpretation, one referral network and one rent curve — and a playbook that may not survive contact with yours. Running houses in two very different markets forced Q to separate what is universal about this business from what was merely local. That separation is the whole reason the Blueprint is teachable outside his own back yard, and it is why we work with operators nationwide.
08 The houses
Every module points back at a real house — the one that taught the lesson. Scroll the strip; the frame in focus tells you what it is teaching.
Stand-in
Replaces: KITCHEN AT DINNER — residents cooking, hands and steam in frame · San Diego
Stand-in
Replaces: LIVING ROOM MID HOUSE-MEETING — residents seated, one standing · Murrieta
Stand-in
Replaces: TWO-BED ROOM MID-TURNOVER — fresh linen half-made, window open · San Diego
Stand-in
Replaces: EXTERIOR FROM ACROSS THE STREET AT BLUE HOUR — every window warm, cars parked normally · Murrieta
Stand-in
Replaces: INTAKE DETAIL — hands, pen, intake packet, house agreement, keys on the table. Redact all resident detail · San Diego
Every image on this page is a temporary licensed stand-in and every caption names the real photograph that replaces it, so the production shot list lives in the page rather than in somebody’s inbox. Resident faces and any identifying detail will be excluded or released in writing before publication.
09 Straight talk
Restraint is the pitch. Here is what we refuse to say, and what we say instead.
“Six to seven figures.”
We do not publish income figures, ranges or projections — not in a headline, not in a testimonial, not in a slide footnote, and not in a product name. We cannot know your market, your lease, your occupancy or your discipline, and those four things decide the entire answer. Anyone who does publish a number is selling you the number, not the business.
“One hundred percent recession proof.”
Demand for recovery housing has been persistent. It has never been immune. Agency budgets move, funding cycles turn, referral relationships change hands, and local politics can reshape what you are allowed to do on a given street. Build a house that survives a slow quarter and a new city council.
“Guaranteed.”
Nothing here is guaranteed except the material and the access you paid for. If a session is not what you expected, say so and we will make it right on the product — that is a promise about what we sell, which is the only kind of promise we are in a position to make.
“Will you guarantee I’ll make money?”
No.
What we will do is open the whole machine: the unit economics of real houses including the months they do not clear, the levers that decide whether a house sustains itself, the compliance boundary you cannot cross, and the specific mistakes that close new operators in year one. You will leave able to run those numbers for your own city and decide with clear eyes. If the honest answer for your market is “don’t,” we would rather you heard it from us than found it out with a signed lease.
10 Codes
Then you already had the conversation, and the code carries what was agreed in it. Enter it below and it will tell you what’s due.
Marvin gives out personal codes in one-on-one conversations — at the houses, after a webinar, over coffee. If you are holding one it is because he talked with you and thinks you should be in the room. Your code carries its own terms, so entering it is what reveals the amount due; there is no list price on this page for it to be measured against.
Codes are personal and single-use. If yours has expired, ask us — Q will usually sort it out rather than make you pay for his own scheduling.
Try Q-2026-LAMP to see how it behaves. The live version validates the code and its amount server-side against the codes Marvin has actually issued — nothing about the amount is decided in your browser.
Your order
Card charges appear as TDSW.
Card checkout goes live with the new payment system. Until then this hands your code straight to Q with your details, and he takes it from there — nothing is charged now.
No code? That is completely fine — the room is the same room. Codes exist so Q can bring in people he has already spoken to, not to create two classes of attendee.
11 Questions
Start here
Temporary stand-in
Replaces: CLOSING IMAGE — WIDE EXTERIOR AT NIGHT, EVERY WINDOW WARM, PORCH LIGHT ON, ONE FIGURE VISIBLE INSIDE (horizontal 21:9) · Murrieta
Grade: the house is the only light source in frame — deep umber sky, warm amber windows, no street-lamp cool cast. This is the whole art direction in one photograph.
ITSL Blueprint makes no representation, promise, projection or guarantee regarding income, revenue, occupancy or business results. Every financial figure shown anywhere on this site or in our materials is a clearly labelled illustrative teaching example built to demonstrate method, not a forecast for you or for any specific market. The public funding figures cited on this page describe the wider system that produces referrals; they are not a claim that you will receive any grant, contract or payment. Operating recovery housing is an active business with regulatory obligations and direct responsibility for the wellbeing of the people housed. Outcomes depend on your market, your capital, your compliance, your referral relationships and your own operating discipline. Some operators do not succeed.
Looking for a bed, or placing a client? Marvin’s homes are a separate operation from this training business, with their own team and their own intake — nothing you send them touches enrolment. Email contact@itslbp.com with “Housing” in the subject and it goes straight to the house team.