Surrounding yourself with the right people is a necessity. To embark on this journey, you’ll need to carefully select your team. Pick people who will help raise you up, and remove people who slow you down. A unified team working toward a common goal will always get further than even the most motivated individual.

The climb to the top requires some serious thinking. You have to figure out what you’re really all about, and what makes you different. How do you stand out from the crowd? What are you bringing to the table that nobody else can provide? What story are you telling with your work? This insight will help to develop the strategy you need for the journey.

“Just wing it” is bad advice when scaling a mountain, and it’s bad advice for business. Developing a clear-cut plan for everything you do will keep things running smoothly. Devise a strategy for business operations, meetings, and everything else you do, and keep it consistent.

Actions really do speak louder than words. Even the best plan is useless without follow-through. You don’t have to get it all done in a day, but focus on incremental improvement and keep track as it happens. Only consistent practice can lead to exceptional performance.

A great strategy builds momentum over time, continuing to get better, faster, and cheaper. With the right people, a clearly defined purpose, a detailed playbook, and consistent performance, profits are nearly inevitable. Sir Edmund Hillary once said, “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” (And as one of the first people to climb Mt. Everest, we think he’d know.)