If you are anything like my 6-figure clients, you are an avid reader of business books and can repeat most of their strategies back to me (oh and yes, you also have a stack of them still unread on your bookshelf).
You have probably even included elements of these books into your current strategy. And they worked. But as you continue to scale your business, you’re starting to miss the big picture and want a simple, coherent plan you can refer back to again and again- something that grows as you do, a roadmap that you can hang on your wall and use day in, day out, regardless of what’s going on in your business.
Let me introduce you to my favourite strategic tool:
The One Page Strategy
When you are in the throes of your success, you don’t have time to create elaborate business plans. Plus an overly complicated business plan will not be helpful to you or anyone else you are working with. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan; you need to plan so you make the right decision for the future of your company.
How can you plan whilst also biasing action? By getting everything on just one page in a One Page Strategy. This forces you to boil down your business to its simplest form and align each piece of your strategy with one another, giving you a filter through which to make all decisions.
The One Page Strategy includes six elements:
- Your Why
- Your Moonshot Goal
- The 3 Ws
- Goals
- KPIs
- 90 Day Priorities
YOUR WHY
Why does my business exist, and what is my deeper purpose? Your “why” answers that. It is the reason you get out of bed in the morning, the basis of everything. And it is about more than money – you can pay your bills in many ways, but why have you chosen this particular path for yourself? Simon Sinek has explained this concept brilliantly in his book “Start with Why”. Here, we put his advice into action.
THE 3 Ws
The three Ws answer the most critical thing in your business: Who you are serving? The difference between a business at the startup level and one that makes millions is how well you understand your customer. The secret to millions is one. Know this one person better than anyone else in the world.
To do that, think about their story: What are they struggling with? What thoughts keep them up at night? Where are they hanging out – online and offline? What do they need to hear in these moments? What is the exact language that your ideal client would use to describe their struggle?
This is what will set you apart from other people doing the same thing as you.
GOALS
Businesses – no matter their size – need a set of goals to understand how they are doing and what direction they want to take. These goals might change over time, but they should never be abandoned. Aimless drifting is dangerous for a company.
To decide your goals, we need to have a look at your overall numbers. Write a list of all your revenue streams in the last 90 days and how much you made from each one.
Let’s take a closer look: Which products or services bring in the most revenue? You might discover that you are hanging onto an offer that is close to your heart but of little interest to your ideal client. The numbers don’t lie.
Look back at the last 90 days and note which offers were the most successful in that time. If you notice something is seriously amiss, it’s worth going back a few more months and see what happened.
Your time matters too: Don’t only look at your financials, calculate how many hours you spend on each offer, and if the effort justifies the outcome. If not, you might need to adjust them. That might mean hiring someone to do the work for your (if it’s a popular product) or letting it go (a painful but necessary decision). It is never easy to give up on an idea that is important to you – but your business has to be one thing over all others: profitable.
KPIs
That’s where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come in. Which ones do you need to hit your targets? How many visitors does your homepage have to attract to convert the number of clients you want to have? Which social media channels have helped you reach your targets (either more visibility or more sales)? How many calls does it take to convert leads? If you give up on vanity metrics such as likes on social media and make sure you invest in the right numbers, you will see that you can grow much faster without putting in more effort. You need to zoom in on the things that move the needle.
Write down these numbers and work backwards with your goal in mind. Now break these down into months and weeks, and you have some exact numbers you and your team can work with. “More sales” doesn’t mean anything, but “we need 100 calls a month to reach our target of 10 new customers” creates an action plan you can get behind.
Since these numbers are not based on wishful thinking but metrics derived from the past quarters, they are also more realistic than those you might get if you guessed or look at what your competitors are doing. Compete with yourself first.
The One Page Strategy is a great tool to keep your eyes on the prize – to deliver a great product together with fantastic service, all whilst your business reaches new heights. Seems you might not need to read all these other business books after all… ?
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