Direction
Four stations, in order: take stock, name the core, choose what to count, know how to say no. Each one has a read and a block of The Direction Page. Read one is below in full and it is free; the other three are inside Base Camp.
Take stock — what you’re here for
Ask three people in your company where it’s headed this year. You’ll likely get three different answers — or three versions of “we’re doing fine.” That is not a people problem. It is a direction problem, and it is the most common one there is.
Most owners hear the word direction and think it means giving people direction — pointing, deciding, chasing it all day. It isn’t. Direction is a short written page anyone in your building can read: what you’re here for, what you stand for, where you’re going, and what you won’t do.
Written down. Used. Not a statement for the website — a page the person who answers your phone could read out loud and recognise as the place they actually work.
Once it’s on the wall, the arguments get shorter. The page decides, not the loudest voice in the room.
When it isn’t written, a business drifts toward whatever pays this month. Every hard call — which customer to keep, who to hire, what to turn down — gets argued from scratch, because there is nothing to measure it against.
The part most walls get wrong
Here is how it showed up for me. In the years I’ve spent walking into companies, nearly every one had “values” painted somewhere. Almost none could tell me what those values had ever cost them — a customer turned down, a hire not made. Mine included, until I put a date beside one. A value you can’t point to a real decision for isn’t wrong; it just hasn’t been tested yet.
What good looks like in your shop
It doesn’t matter whether you run a rental yard, a clinic, or a bakery. Good looks like one plain line your whole floor would say the same way — the work, and who it’s for. Short enough to say from memory. If it reads like it could belong to any company, it isn’t yours yet — keep cutting until only your business is left standing in the sentence.
Take stock. Twenty minutes, alone.
Write what you already have — values, mission, plan — and beside each one the last decision it changed. Blank means declared, not tested, and that is an honest line. Then say, in one sentence, what your business is for and for whom, in a customer’s own words. The sheet is free.
Open the free sheet, Take stock →Inside Base Camp this sheet is Block 1 of The Direction Page, and station two, Name the core, comes next.
Knowing what this gear is takes ten minutes. Doing it is the rest of the chapter.
The other three reads and The Direction Page — what we are here for, what we stand for, where we are going, what we will not do, on one page, with the quarter check behind it — are inside Base Camp, along with your own four gear results and a second reading ninety days out.
The other three stations, and the page they fill.
You have just read station one. Stations two, three and four are the reads below. In Base Camp they come in order, each with its own block of The Direction Page: the values first, then the number you grow, then the no.
Values that cost something.
The exercise, run on Summit itself — three decisions behind one value, every one of them the more expensive option, and two values honestly marked as not yet tested.
Every business I have walked into has values. Almost none of them can tell me what those values have cost. That is the whole exercise: one line per value, and beside it a decision that value made uncomfortable, dated.
INSIDE BASE CAMPThe unit you count.
Two goals set in his own businesses. One was never reached and had to be replaced; the other was hit. What separated them was not effort, and the test that comes out of it is the sharpest thing in this gear.
Twenty trucks running the whole continent by year five. Thirty to thirty-five routes against the six the business already had, by year three. A truck is an asset you own. A route is a piece of work that repeats and earns.
INSIDE BASE CAMPNever, yes-if, not yet.
Why most refusals in a business are lazy, the record that says which column got broken, and what it cost him to hold the line on price — the most expensive decision in his history.
Focus is mostly saying no, and “we don’t do that” hides which kind of no it is. Only one of the three kinds is for good, and the column an item sits in tells you who is allowed to move it.
INSIDE BASE CAMPThis is the biggest gear, and it is the one you finish last.
Direction is a quarter of work or more, not an afternoon. It is also the gear with the strongest pull toward producing something handsome and consuming none of it. Judge your progress by how many later decisions were made differently because a page exists — not by how many pages exist.
Operations is the next chapter. Read its free read →
Every story in this chapter comes from the operating history of the people who built Summit. Companies are unnamed on purpose and individuals stay unnamed permanently. Nothing here is adapted from anybody else’s material.