Julia Berger, founder of Core Peak Studio, is on a mission to help more businesses break through a milestone that only about 9% of businesses ever reach: cross the million-dollar mark in annual revenue. She’s already helped three companies pass that threshold, and thinks there should be many more. 

Berger grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, surrounded by entrepreneurs. Her family ran a graphic design and sign-making business, along with two additional product-based ventures in the craft space. Building businesses from the ground up was as familiar as the Arch that keeps watch over the Mississippi River.

“I have endless ideas and options,” Berger explains. “I could do this, and I could do this, but it really comes down to what do people actually need.”

She describes her approach as viewing the business the way you might examine a three-dimensional object—walking around it, zooming in and out, looking for the piece that’s missing. Her superpower is being able to see the forest and the trees, while most business owners are tangled up in the branches, mired in the barrage of day-to-day operational issues.  

“I look at what a business looks like at its highest performing level,” she says, “and then I figure out what’s preventing that from happening.” 

Her process includes a thorough review of the details and layers of the business, understanding what’s broken, disconnected, or won’t scale. “One of the questions I ask is, ‘What breaks if you 2x overnight?’ This tells me what is at risk first.”

Sometimes, the owner themselves can be the bottleneck. 

Berger explains that business owners, when they first start out, likely only have themselves and do everything by necessity. But when they get to a certain point, they need to decide, “what are the things that I should be doing, and how do I delegate and systemize the rest?”

A key challenge of this process is understanding the level of detail that needs to be communicated to someone taking over a task. Owners who are used to running on intuition may only provide part of the picture when the process needs a 15-point checklist for the task to be completed correctly. 

“[They] can’t grow if the owner is always the bottleneck,” she concludes. “Growth will always be capped at [the owner’s] limit.”

It’s at this point where a founder might need some help and, according to Berger’s own research, only 9% of owners actually reach out to an external partner or another source when necessary.

“I think every business owner deserves a support team,” Berger declares, “that cares about their business almost as much as they do.” She wants to be that support system for businesses that need it, when they need it. 

Her data also suggests that 61% of owners misdiagnose their own business problems, making it difficult to identify what is a symptom versus what is a root cause. This is where she comes in, to help identify what’s really going on and what’s blocking everything from moving. 

Every time an attempt is made to fix a problem, there’s a cost of time, resources, and investment. Even if it’s the wrong problem. This makes it particularly important to find out the core issue, rather than slapping expensive Band-Aids on symptoms. 

So when your job is to identify potential bottlenecks and missing pieces within a business, does she apply this process to her own endeavor? Indeed she does and, like many other founders, discovered that she can be both the hero and the villain in her own story.

In her self-review, she’s determined that she—by default—overthinks things. In her line of business this can have an element of value, because she can make connections and uncover nuance. However, left unchecked, it can result in just spinning her wheels. 

And true to the strategic rigor she brings to her clients, she has a framework that allows her to maintain a broader perspective while this is happening. 

“At a certain point,” she states, “overthinking doesn’t serve me.”

She’s also developed a strategy to focus the many internal perspectives that compete for attention; she tries to think of her skillset as a library, and she can only check out three books at a time. This helps her be mindful going into conversations or situations where specific skills would be most relevant.

Berger has recently reached a point of increased clarity on what she wants to become, and how she can connect with business owners to help them identify—and clear—roadblocks on the way to the million-dollar mark and beyond. 

And if she could tell herself one thing when she started the journey, what would it be? 

“Have more conversations sooner,” she says. These conversations, she notes, help quiet the overthinking and provide real-world market feedback. 

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