9. Why Business Owners Who Climb Together Reach the Summit Faster | Mastermind

What if the difference between struggling in business and reaching your summit wasn’t talent — but accountability?

In this episode of the Outcome Academy Podcast, Ginny Seeley shares research-backed strategies that double business success rates and explains why scaling your business is more like climbing a mountain than running a sprint.

Climbers attempting Mount Everest don’t go straight to the top. They acclimate. They descend. They recalibrate. And most importantly — they don’t climb alone.

Neither should you.

Drawing from studies featured in Atomic Habits by James Clear, research from the British Journal of Health Psychology, and goal-achievement data from Dominican University, Ginny breaks down:

• The accountability strategy that doubles your success rate
• Why writing down your business goals increases follow-through
• The power of investing in professional development
• How masterminds change the dynamic of the rooms you’re in
• Why upgrading the table you sit at accelerates business growth
• The four stages of business growth: starting, growing, scaling, and selling
• How to plan your exit strategy from day one

If you’re a service-based entrepreneur who feels stuck, discouraged, or like you’re climbing alone, this episode will help you rethink your business growth strategy and identify the support system you need to reach your summit.

Because success isn’t about climbing harder.
 It’s about climbing smarter — with the right people.

🔗 Explore professional development opportunities and learn more about the Summit Club Mastermind at outcomeacademy.com/summit

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Your outcome isn’t a wish. It’s a decision.

Transcript

Did you know that when people climb Mount Everest, they have to actually go back to base camp multiple times to get to the top?

Welcome to the Outcome Academy podcast. I am Ginny Seeley. I'm a business strategist and longtime process improvement expert, and I also co-own an appliance service business and a coworking space with my husband, Joe. So I understand what it looks like to juggle growth, leadership, family, and big dreams all at once.

If you're a service-based entrepreneur or executive who wants to stop putting out fires and work on your business and build momentum with systems, smart marketing, and practical tech, you are in exactly the right place.

Something that you probably know about me already is how much I believe in continuing education, constantly learning things, constantly connecting with people that are smarter than me in various things. I think we're all really smart, but we absolutely are smarter at some things than other things. And that's kind of what I want to talk to you about today, really thinking about the people that you are taking along with you on your journey up the summit of business ownership.

Last year, I went to a retreat down in Florida that my friend Lydia Martin was hosting, and when I went to that retreat that Lydia hosted last year, she shared a story that absolutely blew my mind. She does that a lot. She's pretty great. But this one was really, really eye-opening to me. And I have retold this story several times because I found it absolutely life-changing, extremely motivating in the journey of business ownership.

And the story kind of goes like this. When somebody is climbing Mount Everest, first of all, they don't do it alone. There are groups of people that go together on these treks, and they start at base camp, and they can't even go up the mountain for a little while.

They have to take some time to acclimate to the oxygen level at the very bottom of where they start their climb, and then they go up to the first place that they climb, and they get to that area, and they have to hang out there for a few days to acclimate once again to the oxygen level there. And then guess what?

They don't get to keep going up the mountain and keep climbing. They literally have to turn around, go back down the mountain, rest, get acclimated again, and then they have to go up to the next base camp. And then once they start there, they have to go ahead and go to the next level and repeat that whole process.

So when somebody is going to go on a big adventure like that and climb Mount Everest, I always thought they just kind of went up there and hiked to the top. It couldn't be farther from the truth. The journey up to the top is made up of a lot of disappointing times, a lot of waiting, a lot of acclimating, a lot of learning, a lot of encouragement from other people, injuries, blisters, all the things that beat you up along the way to the top, and it is extremely discouraging.

It's not something that you just go and do. And as I was thinking of what I wanted to really end up with as a name for the mastermind that we run, I thought about this and how very much this aligns with the journey of business ownership and how sometimes we feel like we're doing so great and we're traveling and everything's going super well, and all of a sudden we get humbled, we get knocked back down.

Something happens, we find out that we didn't do something right, or a financial struggle appears, or a lawsuit, or a cease and desist. So there are all these things that can knock us back down to the next level where we have to stop, take a breath, figure out what we need to do, dust ourselves off, and then set out to go on the next part of our journey.

A lot of people give up during that time. They're like, you know what? This stinks. I didn't plan on this. It's really hard. It's costing a lot of money. I'm spending so much time. It's not as rewarding as I thought. I thought I was just going to make all this money. They hire a team member. The team member disappoints them.

It's frustrating to be a leader sometimes. All the things that go along with business ownership start to surface as you go along this journey, and what Joe and I have learned, probably the most important thing, is that we don't want to be making this journey alone. We need outside points of view. We need other ideas.

We need people to call us out. We need people to support us when life gets really hard and business gets really hard and we think we might not want to go on in that. That is probably the most important piece of the Summit Club for us, is being surrounded by other people who are smart, encouraging, real, and we can share not only our business journey with them, but our life journey, and we become really close friends.

So I want you to think about that as you're traveling through this adventure of business ownership and traveling up the mountain to the summit, which if you're most people, the summit is their exit from their business. Either they're going to retire and dissolve their business, or they're going to sell it to somebody, or they're going to leave it to their children to run.

In some cases, whatever your personal exit plan is for your business, I want you to think of that as your summit. And so I want you to think about when was the last time you invested in yourself or your business to ensure that you have a process in place for that success? How many times have you set out to do something alone and failed, but then when you knew somebody else was counting on you, suddenly you were willing to stick it out and work a little harder and push yourself a little further?

That literally happened to me this morning at my workout with Josh. I don't think he's ever worked me that hard. And if I was doing that alone, I absolutely would have quit. I would not have kept going, and I certainly wouldn't have kept adding weight. Him being there and encouraging me and just being in the room, expecting more of me than me to give up, was what I needed to keep going.

I want to share a couple of pieces of information from different studies and books. I've told you about the book Atomic Habits in the past, and there's something that James Clear talks about, and that is that people are far more likely to take action when they create a specific plan. And there's another guy that he shares his research.

And that gentleman says people who explicitly state when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. So think about that in comparison to the trek up the mountain. First of all, you're going to say, hey, I'm going to go and hike up this mountain. The first thing you have to do is make a decision that you're going to do it, and then you're going to tell other people that you're going to do it.

You're going to try to rally the troops and get a group of people together to go up this trek with you, and so there's your plan. So James Clear talks about how important it is to make a plan and then to go ahead and tell other people about your plan. Just those two things help you succeed. Then a study in the British Journal of Health Psychology found that 91% of people who planned their intention to exercise by writing down when and where they're going to exercise each week ended up following through.

Meanwhile, people who read motivational material about exercise but didn't plan about it showed no increase compared to the control group. So again, let's think about the mountain. Do you think you are more likely to climb a mountain if you actually plan how you're going to do it and wrote it down and mapped it all out?

Or do you think you'd be more likely to succeed if you just read about other people and how they climbed the mountain? Aren't we guilty of that in business all the time? Don't we watch all the YouTube videos, read all the books, listen to all the podcasts, and then not take action? Has anybody else ever been caught up in that?

Of course you have. We all get stuck in that from time to time. The trick is making sure that you get yourself out of that. You're going to do all the reading, you're going to do all the studying. You have to educate yourself before you go and do something, but then you have to do it. You can't just sit in analysis paralysis forever, planning your journey and planning your trek, and then never doing it.

Now, let's think about the next step, the most important piece of it. I talked about this, I think, in episode one when I talked about our identify, prioritize, plan, collaborate framework that we teach here in Outcome Academy. This is from a study at Dominican University. Quote, more than 70% of the participants who sent weekly updates to a friend reported successful goal achievement compared to 35% of those who kept their goals to themselves without writing them down.

What point does that drive home to you? We talked about coming up with a plan. We talked about writing it down. We talked about telling somebody else that you're going to do it. This piece, this study from Dominican University, speaks to accountability.

You can make all the plans in the world. You can even write them down, which already increases your chances of success. But if you don't tell somebody about it and you don't have people in your circle that are traveling on the same journey that you're traveling, asking you the simple question, did you do what you said you were going to do? That right there, that last piece, doubles your chances of success, and that's on top of all the other ways that you increase your success by planning, by telling someone, and all of those things.

So think about your trek up the mountain. Think about your journey of business ownership, personal development, leadership development, all the skills that you have to develop to do what you're doing.

Look around you and think about who you have around you that you can take on the journey with you. Our friends who aren't business owners do not want to talk about business with us. It's just not interesting to them. They want to talk about other things, and I don't blame them. But when you're a business owner, especially a family business, and it's so consuming and you're so excited to serve the people you're serving and discover new ways to improve, it's just exciting to you because you love what you do.

It's something you're very passionate about, and you want to tell everybody about it. And most people don't care to listen to that. We just talked about how important it is to have those people around you, and so how do you do that? How do you find other people to go on this journey with you on your trek up the mountain?

In our experience, we have found that in a few different ways. The first way we found that is going on the educational experiences that we've invested in for ourselves. I talked to you in the beginning of this episode about the retreat that I went on that my friend Lydia put on in Florida, and during that retreat I met a few people, one of which is the person who taught me how to do a podcast.

Without meeting her, I would have been searching around on the internet trying to find somebody to learn from. It probably would have taken me hundreds of hours to figure this out, and I certainly wouldn't have met my goal of launching this podcast before the end of the year. It was my fast track. I met her at a retreat I went to.

We also attend the United Servicers Association ASTI Conference every year, and many years ago when we were first starting our business, we joined one of their peer groups. We meet with those people once a month. We mentioned this before a few episodes ago. By going to the conference and surrounding ourselves with other business owners that were in the same business we are in, we found ourselves a group of people who could go on this journey with us.

We share issues, we share problems. We come up with new ideas. We think of outside-of-the-box things to solve problems for our customers. We talk about new software, we talk about money. We talk about how to save money. We talk about how many jobs we're getting done on the first try. All of those things. We talk about employees, we talk about hiring. All of that is very, very lonely when you don't have a circle of people around you to talk about all of these things with.

When we first moved here to New Bern, I was personally looking for a group of people to connect with on that level locally. I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, so I started a group where I just invited other business owners to come and hang out and talk business. I was looking for my biz bestie, and it was really awesome.

So I would encourage you that if you aren't going to a conference and you're not in a position where you can invest in a mastermind, look around you and create something yourself. If you are in a position where you want to now move your business forward, you want to be really intentional about surrounding yourself with the right kind of people, I would suggest investing in a mastermind.

Of course, you know we have a Summit Club, and I would invite you to check that out and see if it's right for you. If it is, awesome. If it's not, it's okay. I know that the way we do things isn't right for every single person in the world, but I would encourage you to look for something that fits the style that you want to move forward in at this moment in time and invest in it.

And why do I say invest in it other than joining something free? Because people who pay, pay attention. If you go to a conference and people paid to be there, those people are going to be sitting there ready to learn. They're going to be excited, they're going to come up with new ideas, they're going to be sponges, and they want to share, and they have a passion.

So when you pay to be in a room with other people that also paid to be in that room, you've automatically upped your game, the type of people you surround yourself with. So for the Summit Club Mastermind, we ask that people be at least making $150,000 a year in their business, that they at least have one other employee or team member other than somebody in their immediate family that works for pizza.

So we want them to actually have somebody on their payroll. We want them to be willing to invest in their business by investing in the mastermind, because what does that do? That ensures that everybody sitting at that table is coming there ready to engage and ready to grow their business. And that's important.

It's about surrounding yourself with other people that are willing to invest in their business. Now, if you're not at that level yet, there are lots of ways that you can surround yourself with people that are at your same level. In Outcome Academy, we teach four different stages of positive business growth.

Of course, there are some stages before these, and there are stages after these, but these are the four stages that we concentrate on: starting, growing, scaling, and selling. Before you even start your business, you have the ideation phase. You might be learning, you might even be in college learning about entrepreneurship and getting a degree in entrepreneurship.

You're not at a point where you're actually starting a business. You're not ready for really any of our programs at that point. But you might be somebody that would benefit from going to a small business center or enrolling in some free classes in your community and just kind of putting your toes in the water and seeing if that's something that you want to pursue.

Once you're in the start phase, then you're kind of serious. You're going to start doing things like picking your business name, figuring out who you want to serve, deciding what you want to actually sell, whether it's a product or a service or both. Where you want to be in business, how you're going to source your products.

You're going to secure your name, you're going to get your online things, all of those things. If you're in that stage, we have the Brand Builder Blueprint to help you get started. It's not a mastermind. It's a self-paced online course, and we basically have everything you need to know to kind of get started with your brand for your business and figure out who you are, who you serve, set up all your socials, all of that kind of stuff.

But it's to make that first step of investing in yourself and your business. After that, when you're in the grow phase of your business, you're starting to have different kinds of problems. You're starting to hire people. You need to make the phone ring more because now you're responsible for not just your own money, but making enough money to cover somebody else's salary in the grow phase.

But that's when you really want to start thinking about something like the Summit Club or creating an opportunity in your community space to gather some people around the table and grow together. Just remember if you're going to start a free group like that, it's always better to start with a few too many people than you think are going to stick around because anytime people do things for free, they drop out.

And so you will have more attrition in a free group like that. Just a little tip from somebody who's been down that road, because I tell you what, I didn't start off investing in all kinds of masterminds and retreats and classes and things like that. I learned through my journey that if I wanted to achieve something quickly and I wanted the shortcut, that was the way to do it.

But I'm a DIY queen, and so I respect that, and I know that not everybody's ready to do that right out of the gate. So if that's where you are, it's totally fine. No judgment here. Keep on going. Figure it out as you go along.

Once you're in the scale phase and you're starting to really nail down your processes, add people to your team, grow the locations you're serving, really start growing your business, you have different problems. Then it's scary because sometimes you can grow a little too fast and then you have to move backwards like we talked about in that journey of Everest.

You get to one level, and then all of a sudden you have to go back down and acclimate and start over a little bit. Maybe you need to save up some money. Maybe you need to learn some new skills. Maybe you got injured and you had some losses in your business and it really went downhill for a little while, and you need to recalibrate.

Those issues happen when you're in the scale phase more than any other phase. So that's when you absolutely must start surrounding yourself with high-quality peers, mentors, learning opportunities, things like that so that you can start growing your business.

Finally, when you're ready to think about the sell phase of your business, and to be honest, you should have your eyes on that summit and that sell or the exit of your business from the very beginning, because you want to know what defines success in your business, and if you have your eyes on the final outcome of selling your business, then you're going to be planning to make sure that you're ready to exit that business.

That means that you're setting up a business that can run without your involvement because nobody wants to buy a business that needs that owner in order for it to survive. So as you're experiencing the grow and the scale phases, you want to be nailing down all your systems and processes and financials to make your business look really appealing to somebody that might like to buy it in the future.

So I want to close today with just thinking through that journey ahead of time, making a strategy in your mind, putting it down on paper, thinking about where you want to end up. Of course, with the knowledge that things change. The terrain changes along the way. All kinds of different things can happen to throw you off course along your journey, but you need to have a journey mapped out in the very beginning.

And then my friend Lydia likes to use this analogy as well. When you go on your GPS and you make a wrong turn, it doesn't tell you that you're a failure and you should just go back home. It recalibrates, and it helps you get on the right path to where you want to go. But you need to know where you're trying to get to.

And so that's what I want you to think of. I want you to think of your business as a summit. Think about who you want to bring with you, the tools you need to take with you, the map about where you're trying to go, and all of the things you have to learn along the way preemptively to make sure you have a successful outcome and that you reach that summit that you have your heart set on.

As always, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I appreciate it more than you know. If this was helpful to you and it's a blessing to you, it would be a huge blessing to me if you would share this podcast with somebody that is either thinking about a business, starting a business, growing a business, or scaling a business.

Because I love to share as much as I possibly can about our journey just to make it a tiny bit easier for the next person that's taking the same journey behind us.

As you think about this week, notice where this shows up in your own business. If you want to go deeper into this work, including the Summit Club Mastermind and other ways we support service-based business owners, you can explore everything at outcomeacademy.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.