27. Internal Hazards, External Hazards, and How to See Them Coming | Business Strategy

There are two ways a business gets knocked off the mountain. One comes at you from the outside with no warning. The other one you build yourself, one small decision at a time. If you have ever had a rough quarter and could not quite name what caused it, this episode is for you.

Ginny breaks down the difference between external hazards, the threats you cannot control, and internal hazards, the weaknesses you create without meaning to. You will learn a simple twist on the SWOT analysis that turns it into a hazard map, where your strengths and weaknesses are the forces inside your control and your opportunities and threats are the forces outside of it. She also shares the SUPERSWOT, the quarterly exercise the Eight Thousander Mastermind runs across all sixteen business categories so no danger gets to hide. And she explains why you cannot name your real hazards until you know which camp your business is actually in.

This one is for the service business owner who is tired of being blindsided and ready to see trouble coming before it costs them. After you listen, take the quick quiz at OutcomeAcademy.com/findmycamp to find your camp and the top three hazards most likely to knock you off the mountain at your stage.

Grab a notebook, because you are going to want to map a few of these out for yourself.

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

Transcript

There are two ways to get knocked off a mountain. One comes at you from the outside, out of nowhere, and you never saw it coming. The other one you build for yourself, one small decision at a time. And that, my friend, is one that nobody wants to talk about.

Welcome to the Outcome Academy podcast. I'm Ginny Seeley. I'm a business strategist and longtime process improvement expert, and I also co-own an appliance service business and a co-working 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.

Today we are talking hazards.

Picture this: it's an ordinary day of the week, everything's going fine, and then you get a phone call that changes everything. The referral partner that's been sending you work for two years is suddenly moving out of state. Your main supplier doubles their price overnight. Or your main competitor opens up a couple miles away with a louder marketing budget than you'll ever be able to afford. You didn't do anything wrong. The mountain shifted under your feet.

Now I want you to picture a completely different week. Nothing dramatic happens from the outside at all. But you quote three of your jobs too low because you didn't really take the time to figure out your numbers. You took on a customer that you knew in your gut was the wrong thing. And you kind of let things slide for the third week in a row with your follow-ups because you're just busy. That is not when the mountain happens to you. You happen to the mountain because you kind of just sat down.

When a business owner has a rough quarter, they almost always know that one of those two things happened. What they usually can't tell me is which kind it was, or what they could have seen coming or not, to make sure it doesn't happen again. They feel the impact, but they never take the time to name the cause.

Every quarter inside the Eight Thousander Mastermind, we do a planning rhythm that forces this exact kind of question out into the open. And the more I watch business owners work through this whole entire process, the more convinced I am that it is the difference between the ones who keep climbing and the ones who are sliding back down the mountain. And it's not about talent. It's about taking an honest look about what's going on and figuring out the hazards before they happen. So that's what today is about. Seeing those hazards before they see you.

Most of us run our businesses in reaction mode. Something breaks, we fix it. Something threatens us, we scramble. But we're so busy carrying the load that we never lift our eyes up the trail to see what's actually waiting for us up there. And I want to be clear, this is not a character flaw. It's what happens when capable people are doing too much without a system to think ahead.

The problem is not that hazards exist. Hazards always exist. There's no altitude on the mountain where the air is perfectly safe and nothing can go wrong. The problem is that we wait to meet our hazards until they're already sitting on top of us, when they're too expensive and urgent, instead of meeting them earlier, when they're cheap and quiet.

There's a problem underneath that problem, and it's the one I really want to sit with today. You cannot accurately name the dangers in front of you until you know exactly where you are standing on the mountain. A climber at base camp and a climber pushing for the summit, they're not facing the same dangers. The base camp climber is worried about whether their gear is right, whether they're trained enough, whether they're healthy. The summit climber, the one at the top, they're worried about how thin the air is, the weather window that could shut them down in an hour. Completely different hazards. If you handed the base camp climber the summit climber's safety checklist, it would be useless to them, and a little terrifying. And it wouldn't even protect them from the one thing that could actually hurt them right now.

It works exactly the same way in your business. In our last episode, I asked you to answer one honest question, which is, which camp am I actually in? Not where you want to be or where you think you should be, but where you actually are today. The reason that question matters so much is this. Your camp determines your hazards. And until you know your altitude, every warning you hear is just generic noise, and you can't tell which dangers are yours to watch and which ones belong to another climber at a totally different stage.

So let me give you a lens for this, and it is one you've probably heard of, but I'm going to bet you've never used it in quite the way I'm going to show you today. It's called a SWOT analysis. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Most people meet SWOT in a boring corporate setting or a workshop of some sort. They fill out the four boxes and they never touch it again. I'm going to rescue you from that kind of mentality, because the SWOT becomes the best hazard map that your business can have.

Here's the part that unlocks it. Two of those boxes are about forces inside your business, and two are forces outside of your business. Your strengths and your weaknesses are internal. They live inside your business, which means they live inside your control. Your strengths are the gear and the training you've built up, the things that make you steady on the trail. Your weaknesses are the internal hazards, the cracks either you created or that you allowed, and the things that can buckle you under the worst possible moment. These are the dangers you make.

Your opportunities and your threats, they're external. They live outside your business and outside of your control. Opportunities are the favorable conditions, like a clear weather window, an opening in the market, a moment that's suddenly yours to seize. Threats are the external hazards, like a storm rolling in that you didn't summon and you can't stop. The rockfall, the avalanche, the shift in conditions that arrive, whether you're ready or not. These are the dangers that happen to you.

So, strengths and weaknesses, the S and the W, internal forces. Opportunities and threats, the O and the T, the external forces. And here's what I want you to really take with you. A serious climber assesses both before every single push to the next camp. They check their own gear, their own readiness, the inside. They read the sky, the conditions, the outside. They would never check one and ignore the other, because the mountain can take you out either way. Your business is no different. As you journey up, you have to identify all of them, the dangers you make and the dangers that are coming for you.

What does that look like in practice? Let me make both kinds real for you. Let's start with the external hazards, your threats, the things that happen to you. A loyal referral source dries up. A new competitor lands in your area, the economy tightens, and people start delaying the kind of work you do. That's happening right now in the appliance industry. The customer search changes. Well, that's happening right now too with AI search. And we talked about that back in episode four. A key employee gives notice. A supplier raises prices. You didn't cause any of these, and you can't uncause them. They're the weather.

The internal hazards, your weaknesses, the dangers you build yourself could look like pricing that never actually covered your costs because you guessed or compared to somebody else before actually calculating. A business that runs entirely through you, so it can't do anything without you saying yes or no. An undocumented process, quality that depends on whether you happen to be having a good day, chasing every shiny new idea you hear on a podcast or in a Facebook group, which is its own kind of hazard because doing Camp 4 work when you're still at Camp 1, it will exhaust you and drain your finances. Nobody handed you any of those. These are things that grow quietly in the cracks while you're busy and when you're not really paying attention.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Once you can see a hazard for what it is, you actually have moves. You cannot control whether a storm comes in, but you absolutely can control whether you're ready when it does. Your strengths are what buffer you against those threats that you can't prevent. The cash reserve you built is what turns somebody else's recession into your opportunity to grab market share. And every internal weakness that you identify and address is one less crack waiting to happen under your worst time. You want to build your strength and you want to shield yourself against your weaknesses. This way, when opportunity opens up, you can move.

This is the part most people skip. They do their SWOT on their business one time, as a single big picture exercise, and they feel really good about it. But guess what? Your business isn't just that one little peak. In the mastermind, we do a big quarterly brain dump across all 16 categories of our business that I've talked about before on this podcast. And then we do something called a Super SWOT. We don't just do it on our whole business. We do a SWOT analysis on every single one of those 16 categories: marketing, finances, operations, quality, every single one.

And why would we go to that trouble? Because being strong in one area doesn't really protect you from another area that you're weak in. You can have the best marketing in your entire town. Leads can be pouring in, and you can still get taken out because your finances or your hiring are in the toilet. If we look at our business as one big blur, the hazards can be right there. We don't even notice them. The Super SWOT puts all of those dangers into the light, category by category, so nothing can hide. It's honestly one of the most clarifying things we do all year.

And here's where it ties back to your camp. The specific hazards that are most likely to take you down are different at every single altitude. The top threats for a brand new business owner are not the same as the top threats for an owner who is scaling with a team, which are not the same as the threats for somebody preparing to sell. I'm not going to go and list every single one of them right now, because guess what I did? I built you something that does a far better job than I'm going to do in a podcast right now. It's a short quiz, seven questions, and it tells you which camp you're actually in, and then it hands you the three hazards most likely to knock you off the mountain at your exact stage, with what to do about every single one.

So I want to reframe one thing before we land because I know how this can sound. Sitting down to list everything that could go wrong in your business can really feel kind of negative, maybe like even you're inviting trouble. But it's the opposite. Naming your hazards is not pessimism, it's leadership. Pretending the dangers are not there does not make you brave, it makes you exposed. The strongest climbers in the world are not the ones who refuse to think about what could possibly go wrong. They are the ones who are most honest about what the mountain has, exactly what could go wrong, which is precisely why they're still standing. Clarity about the hazard is what lets you respect it instead of fearing it.

And here is the piece that for me holds the whole thing together. You do the work on what is yours to carry, the internal hazards, the weaknesses you can actually shore up. And the things that are genuinely outside of your control, the weather, the threats you cannot prevent, you don't have to carry those alone. I do my part on what is mine, and then I trust God with the storms I can't stop. That's not me checking out of the work. It's what lets me do the work from a place of peace instead of a place of panic. You prepare like it depends solely on you, and then you rest like it depends on Him.

So the goal here was never a fearless climb. Fearless climbers are the ones who do not make it back down the mountain. The goal is a prepared one. You're not trying to guarantee that nothing is ever going to go wrong. You're trying to know your mountain so well that when something does go wrong, it doesn't get to be the thing that ends you. Does that make sense?

So here's kind of what I want you to take away this week. If you're being honest about your business right now, do you actually know what is most likely to knock you off the mountain? Or have you just been hoping it doesn't? If you're not sure, I made you a map. Shocker, right? Head on over to OutcomeAcademy.com/findmycamp and take the quiz. Seven quick questions, and you are going to know your camp and the top three hazards waiting for you at your altitude. And then I'm going to walk you through each one in great detail over the next few days after you take the quiz so you can see them and know what to do about them. We take a deep dive and then we show you exactly what you can do to make sure these things aren't happening to you.

So let's just revisit this for just a quick second. Just to summarize, first you need to know where you are on the mountain. Are you at Base Camp? Are you planning your business, securing things like your LLC, your insurance, your business name, making sure nobody else is using it, things like that. Are you at Camp 1 where you're the one doing everything? You're answering the phone, you're doing the work, you're doing the bookkeeping, you're sending the invoices, you're handling the problems, you're marketing, you're doing everything. Maybe you and maybe a spouse, but that's it. In Camp 2, you've started to hire a team. You have some help. You're not doing everything by yourself, but with that comes managing other people. You've got to train, you've got to do job descriptions, and then you're at the mercy of what they're delivering and they're representing your business. So it's a whole different ballgame once you hire a team. In Camp 3, when you're scaling, you're building your team, you're looking at your leadership team, you've got people to help you manage your people now. But again, this opens a whole new stage of business ownership. You've got maybe a couple locations, you've got lots of trucks on the road to maintain, things like that. Camp 4 is selling, and at this camp, you're planning your exit strategy from your business. You are making your business into a sellable asset.

So I want you to think about what we just talked about today: the SWOT analysis, the hazards along the way. They look super different for somebody that's doing everything themselves than somebody who's preparing to exit their business. So you need to know what hazards are coming for you depending on your business stage. So head on over to OutcomeAcademy.com/findmycamp, find out where you are on the mountain for sure. Then you can look forward to several emails from me going deep on the specific hazards that are most common at your stage of business and what you can do about them.

I'm here to help you. I'm always cheering for you because I truly believe that when good ethical business owners win at business, everybody wins, right? Your church wins, your community wins, your family wins, and most of all, the people that you're serving, they win. So I'm here to help you win. I can't wait to see what camp you're in, and I can't wait for you to take the quiz. I'm super excited about it. I just created it, so let me know how it works for you.

So that's it. That's the pod for today. I wanted to talk about hazards, not to be a pessimist, but just to help you be the most prepared climber in the universe when you're climbing your business journey up the mountain. 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 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.