Find, Build, and Anchor are the three phases every business moves through. Most owners are stuck in one without knowing which. Each phase has different rules, different priorities, and different failure modes. Using the wrong playbook for your phase is why growth stalls.
Find
Find is survival. You are looking for the offer that works, the audience that pays, and the channel that delivers them. Revenue is inconsistent. You are testing constantly.
The only metric that matters in Find is proof of concept: can you get a stranger to pay for what you sell, repeatedly, without a personal relationship driving the sale? According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail because there is no market need. They never finished the Find phase. They skipped to Build and tried to scale something nobody wanted.
In Find, speed matters more than polish. Your SOPs do not need to be perfect. Your brand does not need to be final. You need transactions and feedback loops. The Phase Check tells you exactly where you are.
Build
Build is where you install the systems that let the business operate beyond your personal capacity. You have a proven offer. Now you need it to work without you touching every part.
This means SOPs, team structure, financial tracking, and client delivery processes that run on documentation instead of memory. Build is the hardest phase because it requires the owner to do less of the work they are good at and more of the work they have been avoiding.
A 2025 McKinsey study on SMB scaling found that businesses in the Build phase that invested in operational infrastructure grew 2.4x faster over three years than those that just hired more people. Headcount without systems is just more chaos with a higher payroll.
Anchor
Anchor is where the business holds its position and compounds. Revenue is predictable. The team operates independently. The owner’s role shifts from doing to deciding.
Few businesses reach Anchor because the owner cannot let go of Build habits. They keep intervening. They keep optimizing things that are already working. Anchor requires trust in the system and the discipline to focus only on strategic growth.
The Sprint framework helps operators in the Anchor phase identify which growth levers to pull without destabilizing what already works.
Know Your Phase
The biggest mistake is applying Anchor thinking to a Find problem or Find energy to a Build need. Each phase has one job. Do that job. Then move forward.
Anthony Spitaleri is a business performance coach based in South Florida who works with entrepreneurs, operators, and CEOs building businesses that run without them.
Book a free strategy call at https://bit.ly/anthonyclaritycall