Pinnacle: Five Principles That Take Your Business to the Top of the Mountain is a roadmap for ambitious owners, founders, and CEOs of privately held companies with 15–100 employees who want to scale with confidence, create a self-managing enterprise, and dramatically increase business value.
Most leaders reach a point where growth slows, accountability frays, and the company depends too heavily on them. Pinnacle shows you how to break through those ceilings and build a business that thrives—whether your goal is sustained growth, profitability, or a future exit.
Through decades of experience coaching hundreds of leadership teams, Steve Preda and Gregory Cleary distilled the climb to business success into Five Core Principles—People, Purpose, Playbooks, Perform, and Profit—each supported by 15 actionable practices that create clarity, accountability, and momentum.
Inside, you’ll learn how to:
Build an A-player team and culture that energizes your company
Clarify your purpose and strategy so everyone rows in the same direction
Execute with discipline using Rocks, Metrics, and high-impact meetings
Systematize your business with Playbooks that drive consistency and scale
Engineer and sustain elite profitability, multiplying company value 3–5×
Unlike theory-heavy manuals or start-up guides, this is a playbook for mid-size growth companies—too complex for small-business advice, too lean for corporate bureaucracy. Whether you lead a professional services firm, tech-enabled enterprise, or distribution company, you’ll find tools that can quintuple the value of your business in five years.
If you’ve read Traction, Scaling Up, or The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, you’ll recognize the power of practical frameworks. Pinnacle builds on that tradition—helping you avoid burnout, elevate your team, and transform your company into a category of one in your industry.
Why aim for a 5X business value? Because conservative goals don’t inspire. Ambitious targets attract top talent, differentiate your company, and give you real options: financial freedom, succession, or creating your ideal life inside or outside the business.
By the end of the book, you won’t just understand the path to the top—you’ll see how to take the next step on your own climb.
Pinnacle is more than a business book. It’s your guide to building a profitable, self-managing, and highly valuable company—a business that scales beyond you, empowers your people, and delivers the freedom and impact you’ve always envisioned.
PRAISE FOR PINNACLE
"When one reaches tor the highest, they must be touched by the soul of it! Read this book deeply."
Michael E. Gerber, Author of The E-Myth Revisited
"This book is remarkable. Growing your business is hard work and, with many moving parts, business owners rarely have full visibility on what needs to be done. Pinnacle distills countless hours of thinking across many different disciplines and delivers only the essentials you need to build a great growing company. I'm confident you'll keep coming back to it time and time again until you reach the top. Get it, read it and apply it."
David Jenyns - Founder of SYSTEMology
"Pinnacle is the definitive guide for leaders who want to build a great company: A company that achieves superior financial results; makes a distinctive impact to its customers, employees, and community; and is built to succeed beyond the influence of a founder. This book represents a rare blend of the key principles and the "how" to actually apply those principles to a company of any size. This book will forever change you, your leadership team, and your organization."
Luke Carlson, CEO, Discover Strength
Steve Preda's passion is to help Entrepreneurs reach their Ideal Lives while creating a Positive Impact. He built and sold an investment banking firm in his native Hungary before moving to the US. After arriving, he coached Vistage CEO peer groups before becoming an EOS Implementer and Pinnacle Business Guide.Currently Steve is the CEO of Steve Preda Business Growth, that recently launched Summit OS, an evolution of EOS, Scaling Up, and Pinnacle Business Guides. Summit OS and its sequel, Strategy OS, are Coherent, Customizable and Scalable business operating systems, that allow businesses to grow into Inc 5000, and even to Fortune-ranked companies.Steve and his fellow Summit OS Guides help small to medium size businesses become fast-growing, high-profit and self-managing. Many of Summit OS clients then Dig a Moat Around their Business by implementing the toolkit of Strategy OS as well.Steve has authored 4 best-selling books: Buyable, Pinnacle (with Gregory Cleary), Strategy OS, and Summit OS for Doctors, and he hosts the popular Management Blueprint® podcast.
Gregory ClearyFounder PINNACLE Business Guides I Certified Scaling Up Coach I Former Certified EOS Implementer. I love working with Leadership Teams to help them Summit their Business Mountain! The PINNACLE of Business CoachingGreg was one of the first Certified EOS Implementers® and implemented EOS with well over 100 companies before taking his coaching in a different direction. He left the EOS community as the #1 EOS implementer measured by number of sessions and revenue. Greg believes in taking clients to the summit of their mountains - and, importantly, helping them actually enjoy the climb. Greg created PINNACLE Business Guides because he kept encountering leaders who were frustrated and getting stuck in the same places. These leaders needed actionable tools to get unstuck, avoid roadblocks, and keep moving upward. This isn't about theory. It's about action and results - and celebrating the milestones on the way up.Stop the grind and enjoy the climb!
