The Next Seat

See what the seat above you pays.

Your role, your metro, the two seats above it — and what those seats are actually judged on.

A Level Up Lab tool — built by Zach Houk

The Next Seat

Here’s what the market says about your seat.

The gap

What’s between you and that seat.

Not skills. What the seat is accountable for.

The tool

Why it still comes back to Excel.

Look at what leaders in any business actually spend their day on: email, Excel, and Teams meetings.

  • Most of the emails have a spreadsheet attached.
  • On meetings, the screen share is either Excel or PowerPoint… and most of the PPT slides are data from Excel.
  • Numbers person or not, finance or not — businesses run on Excel. You can’t own a number you can’t build.
Zach Houk presenting to a room
From Zach

How promotions actually work.

  • I’ve spent a long time in the rooms where raises and promotions get decided. Nobody reads a resume in there. Someone says a name, and the room reacts. That reaction is your work.
  • By the time they tell you in a review, it was decided months ago — usually while everyone watched what you did with a number that came out wrong.
  • A promotion isn’t a reward for doing your job well. That’s what the salary was for. A promotion is a bet: can we put this person in front of the CFO and not sweat it. Budgets set the timing. Trust sets the name.
  • Here’s what I’d tell you if you worked for me. The gap between you and that seat is one of two things. Either you can’t BUILD the number — that’s technical. Or you can’t defend what it MEANS — that’s understanding.
  • Both are learnable. I teach both.
The courses

The gap isn’t a certificate.

It’s whether you can build the number, stand behind it, and defend it in the room. That’s a system. It can be learned.

The Excel Lab

  • Build the number fast, without hunting for the formula.
  • Models that hold up when someone else opens them.
  • Speed that buys you time to think.
Get the Excel Lab
Both courses

The Next-Level Stack

  • Both courses. Build it and defend it.
  • The full path from spreadsheet to the room.
  • One price, no upsell after.

Get the Stack

The Numbers at Work Lab

  • Know what the number means before you present it.
  • Answer the pushback without flinching.
  • Own the story the data tells.
Get Numbers at Work

Most companies have a professional development budget that goes unspent every year. This is what it exists for. Expense it.

Save this report

Send it to yourself.

The seats, the ranges and what each one is judged on, in one email.

I’m a finance manager. I sit in the rooms this report describes — where someone presents a number and everyone watches whether they can stand behind it. I built the Level Up Lab because nobody hands you that skill. You build it, or you stay in the seat you’re in.

Zach Houk— Zach Houk, Finance Manager

Every pay range on this page is from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, for your metro area. Each tile names the federal occupation and the percentiles it shows. A job title that isn’t its own federal category is shown as the lower or upper half of the category it belongs to. These are typical ranges, not a promise about you.

The waitlist

Doors open October 1.

I’m recording through September, so the doors stay shut until October 1. Get on the list and you’ll know the morning they open — and the reference letter, my read of your final work with my signature on it, is reserved for people who are on it.

Capacity is real, and it goes to whoever was here first.

Nothing to pay today.