“It took Chris three hours — it took me thirty years. I’m very good at doing this with other people. But I cannot hold that mirror up to myself.”
Tim Hammond — Founder, Hammond Realty
Revenue’s growing. So is responsibility. And everything still runs through you.
Free. Forty-five minutes. One tension named.
I’m Chris Clearfield — coach to founder-CEOs running $1.5M–$10M businesses, author of The High-Altitude Entrepreneur.
Most coaches support you to more effectively navigate the problems facing your business. I help you get to the root of them by identifying the tension underneath, which you can’t spot from inside your own organization.
You’ve hired. You’ve restructured. You’ve brought in people who are good at what they do. It’s all working.
Every fix changed the business.
But none of them changed how you operate.
You’re still holding on to things you already know aren’t yours to do anymore — because you can’t see why you’re holding on.
“It took Chris three hours — it took me thirty years. I’m very good at doing this with other people. But I cannot hold that mirror up to myself.”
Tim Hammond — Founder, Hammond Realty
What you’re carrying isn’t just the workload. It’s a set of tradeoffs that never resolve.
Control versus trust. Urgency versus strategic focus. Loyalty versus performance. Every problem that keeps coming back is sitting on a tension, like one of these.
A problem yields to a solution. A tension only yields to being seen.
You can’t see it from the inside. Nobody can.
Seeing it gives you a choice. Once you have a choice, you can redesign the way you work.
“Before this work, everything felt urgent — chaotic, pressured, reactive. Chris gave me the perspective I’d been missing. Once I mapped my tensions, I could finally understand why I was overwhelmed and how to change it. I’m steadier now, clearer, and my team has stepped up in ways I didn’t realize were possible.”
Laurel Parks — Co-Founder & COO, Houston Pump & Gear
Ten minutes, one page. A name for what you can already feel.
Get your Tension Map“Working with the High-Altitude Framework was more impactful than I expected. The steps look simple on the surface, but they brought real clarity — helping me see what matters most in my business and what I could let go of. The shift I experienced was meaningful both professionally and personally.”
Anthony Luna — CEO, Coastline Equity
I’m Chris Clearfield. I wrote The High-Altitude Entrepreneur and created the High-Altitude Framework™, which lets you see the tensions your hardest problems are sitting on.
I’ve coached leaders at Netflix, Microsoft, and Etsy. But the work I keep coming back to is with founders running $1.5M to $10M businesses. Design firms, real-estate brokerages, small manufacturers, healthcare practices, advisory firms. Different industries, same pattern: they built something successful and still can’t get out of the middle of it.
I’m also the co-author of Meltdown, which won the National Business Book Award and the Thinkers50 Strategy Award.
Forty-five minutes. Nothing to prepare, nothing to bring. We talk about your business, your team, and the future you can see but can’t reach.
We go after the thing that keeps coming back. Not the problem you’ve already solved four different ways — the tension underneath that keeps regenerating it.
You leave able to name something you haven’t seen before. If I think there’s work worth doing together, I’ll say so and you decide what’s next.
Home for dinner and actually present. Coaching the kid’s team again. A vacation where the phone stays off. A Sunday where you don’t touch your email.
A business that no longer depends on your constant vigilance. A team that takes ownership — not because they were told to, but because you designed the conditions for it. You’re finally giving the strategic work the attention it’s been waiting for.
You have the confidence to seize your next opportunity because the business can carry it.
Not the absence of problems — better problems. Problems worth having.
You become the founder your next phase requires.
The vision stops being something you can see and can’t reach — it becomes the foundation you’re building from.
