The Underdog

In high school, Kylie Wade went to a tennis exhibition with nosebleed seats. Midway through the match, she watched a couple get up to leave from the front row. She ran into the hallway, asked the woman for her tickets — and by the end of the night, Kylie was sitting courtside shaking hands with Andre Agassi.

She's told that story on a TEDxJohnsonCity stage, and it's become more than a fun memory. It's the basis for a framework she calls the Seat Formula, and she's used it to make two of the biggest decisions of her career: leaving NFL Network for Netflix, and eventually leaving Netflix to build Organizing for Life in Johnson City.

The formula has four steps: self-discovery, evaluation, action, and trust. It sounds simple. Watching Kylie actually live through it makes clear why most people stall out before step two.

Step One: Self-Discovery

The Seat Formula starts with a question: what seat are you currently sitting in? Before you can decide whether to move, you have to know exactly where you're sitting and why you ended up there. Kylie spent seven years at Netflix building internal systems at scale — figuring out how to answer a question once instead of fifty times. That's not a skill most people notice they're developing. Kylie did.

"My contributions there and what I built — things like how do I buy back my time by answering a question once — those are things that over time I was like, hey, I think I could do this." — Kylie Wade, Founder, Organizing for Life

A lot of the time self-discovery isn't dramatic. It's an accumulation of small evidence about what you're actually good at and what you actually want, sitting there waiting to be noticed.

Step Two: Evaluation

During COVID, Kylie and her husband moved from LA to Johnson City. On maternity leave, she started sharing her home organization online. One day she posted a photo of her fridge.

"I swore I would never show my fridge. And then one day I did — and all of a sudden I'm the fridge picture girl. That's what took me from a fun little hobby to thinking, this could actually be something." — Kylie Wade, Founder, Organizing for Life

She grew to around 20,000 followers, took on side jobs, and priced herself to reflect her time. By January she'd landed her first whole-home booking — and immediately realized she'd need a team if she ever wanted to go home for dinner. All of this was still happening while she was at Netflix.

Step Three: Action

Action costs something. Kylie's version happened on a team trip to San Jose — mid-task she realized she was done. Her manager told her something that stuck: she lit up every time she talked about renovating a shed, never when she talked about Netflix. She negotiated her exit rather than just resigning, which gave her financial runway. In January, she went full-time on Organizing for Life.

"Do I want to build things for other people, or do I want to start building things for myself?" — Kylie Wade, Organizing for Life

About a year in, a business partnership that had started strong ended. Her advice: think ten years out before giving up equity, and plan the breakup before you ever need one.

Step Four: Trust

Trust that your self-discovery, evaluation, and action got you here for a reason — even when the new seat looks nothing like what you imagined. Kylie spent the year after the split rebuilding: new team, new systems, a renovated office in Johnson City. Her ADHD diagnosis reframed a lot of that work — understanding why organization gives her energy, and building systems that work with the brain instead of against it.

The goal isn't to disappear from the business. It's to have an actual say in where she spends her time. She's moving toward a coaching model, building digital revenue, and creating systems her team can run without her standing over every job.

Kylie went from nosebleed seats to courtside with Andre Agassi because she noticed an opening and asked for it. She's not finished building — but she knows exactly which seat she's working toward next, and she's not waiting for someone else to offer it to her.

Find Kylie on Instagram at @organizingforlife.

Every day, we log into our email here at FoundersForge and find a handful of messages asking the same thing: how do I get investment, what does that look like, can you help me find investors. And a lot of the time, the honest answer is that the business isn't even eligible for outside investment yet, and might not need to be.

FoundersForge actually started out focused only on high-growth startups. But the longer we did this work, the more we saw how strong the need was for small business support too, so that became just as central to what we do. Because of that, our advice is almost always the same: bootstrap as long as you can. The minute you take on an outside dollar of investment, you take on a lot more risk and a lot more responsibility, and that isn't the right fit for every business.

So let's talk about what actually separates a high-growth startup from a small business, using two Tennessee grown companies as the proof.

High Growth vs. Small Business

A small business is built to be sustainable and profitable at a size the founder can manage themselves. A high-growth business is built to scale well beyond that, in revenue, reach, or production, whether that scale comes from outside investment or from reinvesting the business's own profit back into itself. Investment is a tool some high-growth companies use to move faster. It's not a requirement to count as high growth, and it's not a measure of which model is more legitimate. Both are real businesses. They just optimize for different things: control and steadiness on one side, speed and reach on the other.

Kylie Wade is a good example of what that second mindset actually looks like day to day. She thinks in terms of scalability from the start, building systems and processes designed to keep working whether she's in the room or not. That's the instinct that separates a business built to scale from a business built around one person's daily effort.

Small Business, Done Right: Lazy Lady Baking Co.

Maren Close started Lazy Lady Baking Co. in 2018 out of the Mountain Harvest Kitchen, selling pastries at regional farmers markets and wholesaling to local coffee shops. Four years later, she opened a retail storefront in downtown Johnson City. She's still the owner-operator, still sourcing from local farms and mills, and still building relationships with the producers around her rather than a national supply chain.

That's a small business, and it's exactly what a downtown needs. Lazy Lady didn't need outside investors to grow from a farmers market table to a real storefront with wholesale accounts across Johnson City, Jonesborough, and Bluff City. She grew it on her own terms, at a pace she could manage herself, and stayed rooted in the community that supported her from day one.

High Growth, Done Right: Bellhops

Now look at Bellhops, a Chattanooga company that started in 2011 with two Auburn University students helping classmates move in and out of their dorms. The founders built a tech-enabled logistics model for an outdated industry, and they went after outside investment to scale it. Chattanooga's own Lamp Post Group backed them first, then venture firms from California and New York followed with millions more.

That funding is what turned a dorm-move side hustle into a company operating in dozens of cities across the country, all while keeping its headquarters in Chattanooga. Bellhops needed capital to move fast, because scaling to dozens of cities can't be funded out of pocket.

High Growth Without a Dime of Investment: Dave Hatley

Dave Hatley started his first business at seventeen with no outside capital and no safety net. Today he's the founder and operator of LPI, a 740,000-square-foot manufacturing operation in East Tennessee and the number one hot tub manufacturer in the country. No investors funded that growth. He built it dollar by dollar, survived the 2008 financial crisis, and kept the jobs in East Tennessee the whole way through, adding employee-ownership and profit-sharing along the way instead of giving up equity to outside money. He shared that story on stage at our Startup Mountain Summit last year. High growth and bootstrapping aren't opposites.

High Growth, With Investment: Personality Pool

Lauren Glass Mullins is a different flavor of high growth. Personality Pool, the Tennessee tech startup she co-founded, did take outside investment to scale. But her startup journey didn't start with a term sheet. It started with Beds for Kids, where she learned to stretch every dollar and turn donated furniture and volunteer hours into thousands of deliveries a year, long before she ever pitched an investor. That's why Personality Pool taking investment doesn't look like the Bellhops story. She already knew the bootstrapping game cold, so the outside capital got layered on top of habits built the hard way, not used as a substitute for them.

When Growth Can Cost Your Mission

Scaling isn't free, even when it works. Turkey Feather Farm, one of our own Avante graduates in Dickenson County, Virginia, is a small business built on locally raised, small-batch food. If she scaled into wholesale chicken production for grocery chains, she'd be stepping into high-growth territory too, but she'd also be trading away the exact thing that makes her business hers. Starbucks is the bigger example of this. Quality control gets a lot harder once a business has locations everywhere instead of one founder pouring the coffee themselves.

So look hard at your own mission before you decide which direction to grow in. Without the passion behind it, there isn't much of a business to scale in the first place.

Why Small Business and High Growth Need Each Other

None of this means one model beats the other. A local economy actually needs both, and neither one thrives on its own. High-growth companies need the small businesses around them just as much as small businesses need them. A company like Bellhops or LPI still needs somewhere for its employees to grab lunch, get their coffee, and spend a paycheck close to home — and that's Lazy Lady, not a national chain.

That's why FoundersForge supports both paths instead of picking one. A healthy Main Street and a headquarters with a manufacturing floor aren't competing for the same win. They're both proof the local economy is working.