10. Why Your Next Move Depends on Your Altitude | Business Stages

Are you actually overwhelmed in your business… or are you solving the wrong problems at the wrong altitude?

In this episode of The Outcome Academy Podcast, Ginny Seeley unpacks the mountain metaphor for business growth and explains why most service-based business owners feel exhausted, stuck, or behind.

The real issue often is not workload. It is altitude mismatch.

You’ll learn:

• The four stages of business growth: Starting, Growing, Scaling, and Selling
 • How to identify your true “camp” based on the problems keeping you up at night
 • Why rushing from Growing to Scaling creates chaos
 • How the 16 strategic growth categories reveal your real bottlenecks
 • The identity shifts from Technician to Operator to CEO to Investor

If you are a service-based entrepreneur trying to build leverage, delegate effectively, increase profit margins, or eventually exit your business, this episode will help you regain perspective and focus on the right problems for your stage.

If you want structured support and strategic altitude alignment, explore The Outcome Academy Mastermind at outcomeacademy.com\summit.

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

Transcript

Okay, so here's something I want you to picture. You're standing at the base of a mountain, and from down there, from the very bottom, you can see everything. You can see the tree lines, you can see where the terrain shifts. You can even see the camps. You can actually see the summit, the very end point of your trek.

There's perspective down here, but the moment you start climbing, that perspective disappears. 

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.

So you started climbing, and now the trees close in around you, the trail bends, the weather changes. Your legs start to get tired. Your breathing shifts, and that summit that felt so clear from the bottom, it starts to feel very, very far away. In the last episode, I talked about your business as a mountain, and I introduced the idea of camps, courtesy of my dear friend Lydia and her retreat last year when she first introduced the concept of how Mount Everest was kind of like our business journey. And boy, did that resonate with me.

So when we think about camps, base camp, camp one, camp two, camp three, camp four, how each one of those represents a different phase of the climb—starting, growing, scaling, selling—today, I kind of want to take that idea a little bit further because here's the thing nobody talks about. The hardest part of climbing isn't the altitude, it's losing the view.

I talk to business owners all the time inside our mastermind group, at events, in one-on-one conversations, and there's one thing I hear over and over again. I'm overwhelmed. I hear it in all different kinds of ways. People feel exhausted, they feel lonely. They don't know what to do next. They have way too many ideas going on. They don't know how to make payroll. They don't even know where to start anymore. They don't even know how to answer the phone. They either want it to ring, or they don't know what to do when it starts ringing because they just can't handle another thing.

And I get it. I really do. There have been seasons in our business at Cavalry Appliance, at the coworking space, where Joe and I just kind of looked at each other and thought, how are we going to keep doing this? But here's what we've come to understand. Most of the time when a business owner says they're overwhelmed, they're not actually overwhelmed by the volume of what they're doing. They're overwhelmed because they're solving the wrong problems. They're running around trying to fix things at the wrong altitude. Stay with me with this metaphor.

So think about what that looks like in practice. Maybe you're in what I'd call the growing phase. You've got a team, you've got steady revenue. Things are moving, but you're spending all your mental energy on exit strategy, valuation models, what the business is worth, how to make it transferable. And right now, in the whole AI rage, you might be diving into making super elaborate systems in various AI tools. All of those things are kind of scaling and selling phase problems.

Or maybe you're still in the starting phase. You're still building your foundation, you're still proving your concept, and you're comparing yourself to the scaling businesses you see online, and you're feeling completely inadequate, like you should be really further along, like something must be wrong with you.

It's not a you problem, I promise. It's an altitude mismatch. There are different levels in your trek up the mountain of business ownership, and at each of those different levels, there are different problems to be solved, different priorities that you have, different levels of revenue, all kinds of differences. And it's really important to stay in your lane where you are and to really focus on the things that matter at your level.

Maybe this one is really common. You're technically in scaling, but you're still operating like an operator. You're still in the delivery. You're still answering every question, and you're still the first person your team calls when something goes sideways. You're doing scaling-level revenue and starting-level owner habits, and that's also exhausting.

This is what I mean when I say overwhelm is usually misaligned altitude. You're not failing, you're climbing with the wrong map. You're doing starting and growing things when you're already in the scaling phase, so you're kind of going backwards, or you're jumping way ahead to do things and solve problems before you take care of the fundamental things at the level that you're at.

So why does this happen? Why do so many smart, capable, hardworking business owners end up solving the wrong problems? Because once you're on the mountain, once you're actually in the work, you lose your perspective. So think about what I said at the very beginning of this episode. When you're at the bottom looking up and you have all your ideas and you have your roadmap, everything looks really clear. And then as soon as you take that first step up the mountain, it all goes crazy, and you lose your focus and you lose your perspective.

From that base looking up, you see everything clearly. You see where you are, you see where you're going. You even see some of the obstacles between here and there. But on that trail, you can't see any of that. You can only see what's right in front of you, and sometimes that looks like sitting at your desk and looking at the pile of stuff that just got dumped there by everyone but you.

This is where it gets really, really good. So in the last episode, I talked about the four camps. I want to add a little more depth to each one today because I think understanding what is native to each of those camps is one of the most powerful things you can do for your business.

So let's think base camp. Okay? This is ideation. This is where you're doing all the dreaming, all the researching, all the asking, thinking to yourself, could this actually work? You talk to your friends, you post on Facebook. I see people posting in our community groups here in New Bern just thinking out loud about different business ideas and asking people if they're even interested in that offering in our community. All of these things are pre-revenue or very, very early revenue where you might be kind of dipping your toes in something, doing something as a hobby. You're testing the idea, and honestly, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being right there at base camp. That's where every single business idea on the planet got started.

So base camp is critical. That's where you pack your pack, that's where you get to know your team. You start talking to other people. You make your plan, you get a map. All those things happen at base camp.

Now, camp one, you're building your foundation. If you're at camp one, your identity is what I call a technician who owns a business. So that's kind of what happened in our case. Joe is a technician. We moved to a new city. He started a business. He was doing most of the work himself. Of course, I was helping as much as I could, but he was literally the delivery, the sales, the person answering the phone. I was doing the marketing. We were both trying to do our hand at bookkeeping. We told you before how that worked out. Not so well. Revenue existed, but it was kind of weird. We didn't really know what we were doing. We didn't have a bookkeeper, and so one bad month, one injury, one sickness could derail the whole thing. That's the starting phase. You're figuring it all out. You're getting your identity. All of those things that you're starting to establish, that's camp one.

Camp two is the growing phase, and this is where the game changes. The primary goal here is building leverage, reducing owner dependence. The identity shifts from technician a little bit towards operator. You hire your first person in this phase, well, a person that isn't in your family and doesn't work for pizza anyway. You start building some systems, mostly because you need to have something in place to hand off to that person that was brave enough to start in a new business with you. You start trying to get out of all of the delivery, and you might even hire your very first technician at this point.

So that's really significant because you're growing. You are not just growing your team, you're growing your capacity to serve. Or you start solving things that don't belong in the growth phase. You start doing really big marketing purchases that you might do in the scaling phase. You start surfing on the web and you go to a conference for some education, and you see some really cool things that people that are way far ahead of you on the trek are doing. And all of a sudden, you've got to do all those cool things too. But what you don't plan for is how costly they are, and you don't have the revenue yet in the growing phase to support those heavy-duty investments.

Camp three is scaling. In the scaling phase, our primary goal is to increase capacity and enterprise value. At this point, your identity is really shifting from an operator-technician kind of persona to a CEO. At this point, you're really, really scaling backwards from doing the work, and you're scaling your business forwards to grow without you doing all the things in the business. At this point, you're building a leadership team. You're thinking really strategically. You are not thinking about tasks anymore. You're managing people. You are empowering people to do the actual delivery of whatever you're doing in your business so that you can do the strategy and grow and scale even further.

This phase also takes years, and that is something really important to focus on. It's not a problem. Because if you do everything in the right order and you take the time it needs to do base camp, camp one, which is starting, camp two, which is growing, and camp three, which is scaling, then camp four is going to go off seamlessly.

Camp four is selling, and this is where you've created lifestyle freedom. I want you to think about defining what that looks like for you all the way at base camp. You need to think to yourself whether your goal for your business is to grow a multimillion-dollar company that you can sell, or if that goal for you is hiring a few technicians and having a really smooth operation that works really well for everybody that you can sell to somebody, or leave for your family, or just exit gracefully when it's over. All of those different kinds of goals will put you on a different trek up the mountain. So just think about it, but think about it knowing that this can all change and grow as you change your mind and as you lean into business ownership.

And you also want to consider how many years you have left that you'd like to work. And notice I didn't put an age on that. If you want to retire at 50, fabulous. Know that in your mind and make a plan to get there. If you love working, you don't see yourself retiring until you're 75, but you want to incorporate the lifestyle that you love into your work, that's fine too. This is really personal, and it should feel right for you.

Camp four, the selling or lifestyle freedom phase, the primary goal is for you to design a business that you can exit in the way that feels right for you. This is your summit. This is what all of this has been building toward.

Now, here's the key insight I want you to sit with. You shouldn't be rushing through any of these phases, especially camp two and three. They're the things that build all the skills, all of the strength, all of the endurance that you need to get to the next phase. So don't rush through it. Sit in them. Build all the skills you need to get to the next level. That's where real strong, successful businesses are actually built.

And when someone tries to skip past all the phases, when they hire too fast or expand before their systems are stable, or try to create an enterprise before they've even got the operational leverage, they almost always end up at base camp or camp one. The mountain doesn't care how fast you want to climb. It only cares whether you're ready for the next elevation.

Now I want to give you something really practical to consider here. Think of it this way. Your problems reveal your camp, not your revenue, not your team size, not how long you've been in business—your problems.

So I want you to think for just a minute. Seriously, just take a little pause here and think. What is consuming the most space in your brain right now? Not what you want to be thinking about. What are you actually thinking about? Is it survival? Is it keeping the lights on? Is it covering payroll? Is it making sure that next month looks okay?

Or is it delegation? Are you trying to hand things off, but you don't really know who on your team you can really trust? Are you finding that nobody on your team does it kind of as well as you want them to do it? Is it complexity? Is it that your team's growing and your systems are straining and maybe you can't even really forecast or plan ahead for the future, and you're wondering how to keep it all from falling apart?

Or are you thinking, how am I going to exit this business? I'm still way too involved. I don't know how I can transfer this. It's still too owner-dependent. I don't know how much my business is worth. I don't know what it would look like to a potential buyer, and I don't know if I can walk away. All of those things.

What are you thinking about? Survival is the starting phase. Delegation, you're most likely in the growing phase. Complexity, probably scaling. And exiting and all of those concerns, that's the selling phase. That one question about what's keeping you up at night and what's taking all your mental bandwidth, that's probably one of the most diagnostic questions you can ask yourself.

If your revenue doubled tomorrow, what would be the first thing to break in your business? If your answer is lead flow, if you'd have more customers than you could serve, you're probably in the starting or early growing phase. If your answer is people and delegation, if you don't have the team structure to handle that kind of volume, you're probably in the growing phase for sure. And if your answer is that your systems would be all over the place and your infrastructure can't really hold onto the weight, you're probably scaling. And if your answer is valuation, transferability, if you're thinking about what doubling revenue does to the multiple of your business and how much it's worth, you're probably in the selling phase because you have a really good handle on exactly how your revenue is impacting everything.

So I want you to think about those two questions.

Now, I want to introduce something that we use inside Outcome Academy that I think completely changes how business owners see their growth. Here are the 16 areas that we go through. All of these things work in concert to keep your business moving forward up the mountain, but at different levels throughout your different phases of business growth.

So think about all of these things for just a second as I run through them. Team growth, team development, team engagement, your workspace, who you're serving, your marketing, which is how you're getting them to even hear about you, your offers, what kind of goods and services are you offering, sales operations, how you're turning your marketing leads into actual money, your technical operations, your administrative operations, your supply chain, your measures for HR, customer service, efficiency, financial measures, and marketing measures. You can call them KPIs or whatever you want to call them, key process indicators, what you're measuring, whatever you feel like calling that in your business. Those are the important ones that we look at. Sixteen categories.

And here's the thing that changes everything when you understand this. Each one matures differently. You might be running really strong in marketing, content cadence, lead flow, brand presence, but be completely underdeveloped in financial KPIs. You know what's coming in, but you couldn't tell me your gross margin, your cash flow, any of that off the top of your head.

Or maybe your technical operations are going really well. You've got your SOPs documented, your delivery is consistent, everything's quality controlled, but your team development is basically non-existent. You haven't built pathways for your people to grow, and so your best people keep leaving.

When we look at businesses this way, something interesting happens. Overwhelm becomes diagnostic. Instead of sitting there saying, I've got too much to do, you can actually say, I have an underdeveloped trail in financial KPIs, and it's creating a bottleneck that's affecting everything above it. That's specific, that's fixable, and it's absolutely not a personal failure. It's just a piece of the trail that needs attention.

Let me give you a couple of examples because I think this makes it really concrete. Team growth in the starting phase, that means you're probably the team. I'm not being funny, but in the very beginning, you are the team, or maybe you and your spouse, or maybe you and your kid that's answering the phone for you.

In the growing phase, it means you're starting to make your first real hires. There's a lot that goes into that first hire. You've got to make a job description. You have to place an ad. You have to interview them. You have to think about all the laws that go into hiring. You have to hire somebody to do your payroll or figure out how to do that legally yourself. Building an actual team with actual roles takes a lot of work.

In the scaling phase, you're starting to build out your leadership team, the people who manage the people, not just the people who do the work. In the selling phase, you may be really looking into somebody like a financial advisor, a consultant, somebody that's already sold a business like yours that you can invest in a relationship, pay them for their knowledge that they have on how you can get to that next level and all the things they had to do to get to the selling phase and have it work out in the best possible outcome.

Using financial KPIs as an example, in the starting phase, that means knowing your revenue and your expenses every month. In the growing phase, it means that you're tracking your margins and your cash flow. In scaling, you're going to start using terms like EBITDA and forecasting, modeling the future, really doing a great job budgeting, not just reporting on the past. And in the selling phase, it means you've got three years of really great financials that a buyer or a bank can actually trust.

Same category, four completely different altitudes within that category. That's perspective. And this is what you lose when you're deep in the climb. And this is exactly what we try to give back to people inside our mastermind.

So we're starting something new this year. We are grouping our masterminds at altitude. So when you apply to be a part of the mastermind in Outcome Academy, we work with you to do an assessment to find out where you really are in your business, not where you want to be, where you really are. We're going to take a look at all of the different categories, the problems that keep you up at night, and then we're going to put you in a room, and it could be a Zoom room or it could be a physical room, depending on where you are. We're going to put you in a room with people who are at your same altitude. You guys have things to share with each other. You're struggling through the same struggles, and you can grow together and support each other without feeling either intimidated because somebody's further along than you, or that you're constantly the one pulling somebody else up the mountain behind you.

Of course, we want to support people that are a step behind us, and we want to get wisdom from people that are ahead of us. But when we're working and brainstorming inside of our groups every week, we want to try to be with people that are close to where we are so we can solve problems together, learn things together, and tackle each of those 16 categories appropriately for the level of the mountain that we're on.

Last September, Joe and I were at the PSA Convention, Professional Servicers Association, and there was a guy there called Tom Howard, and he had a great keynote. Then he had a Q and A afterwards, and he asked if anybody had any questions. And I raised my hand because I'm always raising my hand, but I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Joe also raised his hand. So I quickly put mine down because I wanted to hear what he was going to ask.

And his question was really similar to what I was going to ask, but I was so glad that he was the one that asked it because Joe has been a technician for 38 years, maybe, and he loves it. He still loves it, and he's not anxious to get out of the truck. But at this point in our business, he needs to start thinking like somebody that is a manager and start moving towards the late growing and early scaling time in our business. And that means that he has to start spending a little less time in the truck.

So he asked Tom Howard, how do I get out of my own way? How do I get out of the truck? And it was just so encouraging to hear Joe be that self-aware and realize that he was in his own way. And of course, you know the answer. The answer is that you have to get out of the truck. You have to get out of your own way, and you have to start training the next generation of people to do the work that you've been doing all this time. And you've got to start managing people.

So if you are acting like a CEO but thinking like a technician, you will always feel behind, like the whole thing could collapse at any moment, like you don't actually deserve the elevation you're operating at. And the reverse is also true, and this one is actually a little more dangerous. If you're thinking like a CEO but your business is still firmly in growing, you are going to make all the decisions that the business isn't ready for. You're going to hire a leadership team before you have the systems to support them. You're going to take on growth that your operations can't hold.

And this is why the conversation about identity has to happen alongside the conversation about milestones. Milestones tell you where the business is on the mountain. Identity tells you whether you're aligned with that elevation. And they both matter, and they both have to grow together.

Are you at base camp? Are you starting? Are you growing? Are you scaling, or are you getting ready to sell? Not based on your revenue, not based on how long you've been in business, but based on your problems and what is keeping you up at night.

If you're growing, stop trying to build enterprise valuation models. If you're starting, stop trying to design the leadership bench. If you're scaling, stop spending 40 hours a week in delivery. Solve the problems native to your camp. That alone, just that, will reduce the pressure. And these are the things we do in our mastermind.

You'll hear me talk about it again next week, and this is something that we do every quarter. We enroll new people into our mastermind, but this time we are really going to lean into where you are on the mountain and really make sure we're focusing on things that you need to work on exactly where you are.

I'm really excited to dive into the real specifics of our mastermind in the next episode. I can't wait to fill a few tables with some amazing, smart business owners to create the community that you all need so that you are not doing this trek alone. As always, thank you so much for spending time with me, and I can't wait to see you soon.

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.