Which Rung Are You On?

Key Takeaways

• Every rung needs a “done when” written in plain language before you start. Not “improve pricing” but “the price is live and someone has paid it.”
• Three ladders by revenue: Founders Circle ($0-500K, you are the business), Core ($500K-2M, you are the bottleneck), Prime ($2M+, the business is the asset). Finishing one is the entry condition for the next.
• What’s left off is the point. Vision statements and org charts matter, but at $300K they’re a convincing way to feel productive while changing nothing. Order matters too: document a process before you hand it off, or you’ll take it back.

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Ask a founder how their business is going and you usually get a no-answer.

Good week. Rough month. Busy, which could mean anything.

We do this because we have no pathway to answer from. There is no obvious next step. There is just a pile of work, and whichever part of the pile is the loudest is where we answer from.

Recently, I started asking founders a better question.

Not “How’s business going?” but, “Which rung are you on?”

Why a ladder and not a checklist

There are so many unhelpful business frameworks that promise everything, but don’t actually help. The reason is almost always the same. A framework shows you everything at once. It shows a $250K founder an org chart and a compensation philosophy and a quarterly all-hands, and the founder looks at all of it, correctly concludes that none of it is their problem this month, and erases it from memory..

A ladder does the opposite. It shows you one thing. The next thing. And it tells you when you are done with it.

Knowing when you are done matters a lot. Every rung has a done when, written in advance, in plain language. Not “improve your pricing.” Instead: the price is live and someone has paid it. Not “get better at delegating.” Instead: done three times by someone else without you redoing it.

You an’t argue with a done-when. That is the whole point of writing it down before you start.

Three ladders, because $200K and $12M are different jobs

There is not one ladder. There are three, and which one you are on is decided by revenue, because revenue is a decent proxy for what is actually breaking.

The Founders Circle Ladder. $0 to 500K. You are the business.

The constraint at this stage: everything runs through you, nothing is written down, and revenue is unpredictable. Ten rungs, starting with owning your numbers and ending with setting a target for the year.

The Core Ladder. $500K to 2M. You are the bottleneck.

First hires are in, nothing is documented, and there is no management layer. Ten rungs, starting with a 13-week cash forecast and ending with two consecutive weeks fully out of the business.

The Prime Ladder. $2M and up. The business is the asset.

A leadership team exists but may not lead, your own role is undefined, and enterprise value is real but unmanaged. Ten rungs, starting with closing the books by the 15th and ending with deciding what happens next: hold, scale, sell or transition.

Finish a ladder and you are ready for the next one. The last rung of one ladder is genuinely the entry condition for the next.

What is deliberately not on your ladder

Here is the part founders find hardest to believe.

The Founders Circle Ladder leaves off vision statements. Mission statements. Org charts. Core values. Employee scorecards. Manager rhythms. The quarterly all-hands.

Those are all important. They all matter. But none of them is your constraint at $300K, and doing them early is one of the most convincing ways to feel productive while changing precisely nothing.

They are on the Core Ladder, where they belong, for a founder who has people to point them at.

Leaving things off is the benefit. A ladder that includes everything is just another pile.

One rung at a time, and in order

The rungs are sequenced, and a couple of them are sequenced for reasons worth mentioning..

Take rungs 8 and 9 on the Founders Circle Ladder. Rung 8 is empty your head: write down one key process that only you know how to do. Rung 9 is hand one off: one recurring task that was yours is now someone else’s.

That order is intentional. You cannot hand off what is not written down. Every founder who tries to delegate before documenting ends up doing the task twice, deciding the person is the problem, and taking it back (demoralizing for everyone). The rung order prevents a specific failure I have watched happen dozens of times.

Start where you actually are

Most founders, asked to find themselves on a ladder, pick a rung two or three above where they are. They mark the rung they have been meaning to work on, not the one they are actually on..

Use the done-when to check yourself. Have you actually held that weekly block for four weeks? Has someone really done that task three times without you redoing it?

When you find the rung where the honest answer is “no,” that is your rung. And that moment, where you stop guessing and name the next thing, is when you begin to break past your revenue plateau.