Podcast Ep 138 | Why the One Page Plan works

Many com­pa­nies might have a plan, but some plans work bet­ter than oth­ers. Focus mat­ters; hav­ing an ide­ol­o­gy, strat­e­gy, and exe­cu­tion goals in one plan enables lead­ers to focus and achieve results. 

By bring­ing togeth­er the ide­ol­o­gy (Core Val­ues & Core Pur­pose), Strat­e­gy (How you’re dif­fer­ent) and exe­cu­tion togeth­er into a log­i­cal fit, you avoid just hav­ing a list of goals with dif­fer­ent time horizons.

This week we dis­cuss the One Page Plan, where it comes from, why it works and the prin­ci­ples that under­ly its suc­cess. Also, we dis­cuss how peo­ple make mis­takes with the one page plan.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Wel­come to The Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing that we talked about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. My name is Brad Giles. And I’m in Perth, Aus­tralia. Today I’m joined by Kevin Lawrence, who’s in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da. Hel­lo, Kevin, how are things today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:26

Good, Brad, you know I real­ized on a show, I think things are almost always good. That’s because I think they are, I’m not mak­ing it up. Yeah, things are great. We’re in our win­ter. Life is good, good, good things hap­pen­ing in the busi­ness sur­round­ed by great peo­ple. It’s a won­der­ful journey.

Brad Giles 00:45

What if I put it to you that the rea­son that things are good is that because you’ve imple­ment­ed a one page plan that works?

Kevin Lawrence 00:54

Well, I would agree with you, I’ve got a one page plan for my firm, I’ve got my own ver­sion of a one page plan called a mas­ter plan out of my book, Your Oxy­gen Mask First, that I run for my world, which is for my work for me, myself as a human, and for my life, which is my fam­i­ly and my friends, my com­mu­ni­ty. So I got I got a cou­ple of sol­id one page plans, and damn, they’re good. They sure help keep me focused on the stuff that mat­ters most.

Brad Giles 01:21

So don’t take this, don’t take this as a com­pli­ment by any means. But per­haps you keep say­ing when when asked how are things Things are good. It’s by way of intent. It’s like you’ve planned it out.

Kevin Lawrence 01:34

It is! It’s not it’s not fluke. Not it’s not luck. It’s a lot of damn hard work. Spend­ing time focus­ing and refo­cus­ing and think­ing and, and eval­u­at­ing and iter­at­ing and all that good stuff that we do with our clients. I mean, yeah, I do it myself. It’s con­stant­ly iter­at­ing and try­ing to make bet­ter choic­es. And I know you do the same.

Brad Giles 01:59

In the his­to­ry of segues, that that could be one of the bet­ter segues. I’ve got to say. We bot­tle that one Oh, yeah, that’s

Kevin Lawrence 02:11

the worst because we weren’t even try­ing. We weren’t even try­ing. And that’s why it segued so well.

Brad Giles 02:16

You’d think after 138 episodes that we’d be able to stitch some­thing togeth­er that made some kind of sen­sor right. So

Kevin Lawrence 02:25

we blue, blue, blue, our cov­er, we just instead of just going with it, we call it Oh, that was fun­ny. That was awe­some. All right,

Brad Giles 02:31

good. All right. So here’s the thing, right? Here’s the thing. Many com­pa­nies have a busi­ness plan. In fact, I’d say that most com­pa­nies per­haps poten­tial­ly have some kind of busi­ness plan. But some plants work bet­ter than oth­ers. Right? Some plans work bet­ter than oth­ers. So if you have your life, and per­haps your sav­ings, and your ener­gy and your focus invest­ed in a busi­ness, per­haps you’re inter­est­ed in why some plans work bet­ter than oth­ers. Yeah, like it’s a sen­si­ble, you know, curios­i­ty, per­haps. So the point here is that focus mat­ters, okay. And get­ting a busi­ness plan that pro­duces the results that you need and want, is some­thing that’s wor­thy of effort.

Kevin Lawrence 03:26

So let’s play a game right now, on the squat. We did­n’t prac­tice this. So if you were to pick one phrase to describe why some busi­ness plans are bet­ter than oth­ers, what phrase would you choose to answer the ques­tion? What, why are some busi­ness plans, notably bet­ter than others?

Brad Giles 03:49

They, they evolve over time with a cen­tral log­ic and experience.

Kevin Lawrence 03:57

Okay, they evolve over time with a cen­tral log­ic and expe­ri­ence. I liked that I saw what I was going to say, and I’m going to upgrade my answer because of yours. But what I was going to say is that they are sim­ple and potent. But I would change it to their sim­ple, potent and con­tin­u­al­ly iter­ate. Very sim­i­lar. They real­ly because we’re boil­ing, like at the end of the day. I’ve seen these busi­ness plans, and some of them are beau­ti­ful. But they’re almost impos­si­ble to fol­low. It’s too com­plex, it’s too much. And because peo­ple don’t ref­er­ence them that often, they don’t con­stant­ly improve them. So they’re, like stag­nant on a shelf. I’m exag­ger­at­ing. Peo­ple use shelves. They use hard dri­ves, more these days, but it’s sim­ple term. What are basics it’s too damn hard to fol­low. And it’s hard when doing it’s hard for peo­ple to fol­low, it’s hard to exe­cute and stay focused on.

Brad Giles 05:10

One of the one of the things that we find real­ly not like it’s not we can’t over­come it, but it’s chal­leng­ing is chang­ing peo­ple’s mind­sets. Like I’ve got lit­er­al­ly a work­shop tomor­row. First, we did an ini­ti­a­tion about 90 days ago, and we’re going to work­shop tomor­row. And the chal­lenge in this team, the thing that the theme is, like, done and won, right, so what why, so we built a plan, like, Why is every­thing not com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent? Like, why has it not changed the whole world and uni­verse? Yeah, like, that is, it’s, it’s, it’s a fallacy.

Kevin Lawrence 05:51

It’s dan­ger­ous think­ing it’s yeah, it’s like, you know, we went some­where for a vaca­tion once. There­fore, we’re gonna go to that same place every time the rest of our life, and some peo­ple might like that. But busi­ness changes and iter­ates. And you can’t just keep doing the same thing over and over again, it does­n’t work. And, you know, in our world, we’d like to see com­pa­nies iter­ate every 90 days. You know, I just had one of the com­pa­nies that I’ve had, I’ve done some work with over the last six months, I nor­mal­ly don’t jump in these days and dri­ve strat plan­ning any­more. My team does those. And I just do more CEO coach­ing and some of the high lev­el strat­e­gy stuff. And but this com­pa­ny, I know the CEO, we said, hey, can you please come help us for a bit? So I’m help­ing them but you know, one of those teams is what do we do? We need to still have a two days quar­ter­ly strat­e­gy. I’m like, yeah, like we’ve, we’ve, we’ve bare­ly sta­bi­lized the ben­to, you’re laugh­ing you’re being liq­uid. We’re not even, we haven’t even sta­bi­lized the patient, we have a shape of our strat­e­gy and we have an exe­cu­tion plan. And yes, we got a plan for next year. But we’re still fig­ur­ing stuff out, we got so much more iter­at­ing to do. And if we try and do it all in a day, we’re gonna be rushed. We’re not gonna have enough think time and more more like­ly to come up, we will come up with a less intel­li­gent plan. Brad you are laughing.

Brad Giles 07:18

You know, how many emails those peo­ple have? They have busy peo­ple, why would

Kevin Lawrence 07:23

I don’t care. We need two days. And if you want me to help you, if there’s a way to do it, I ain’t do it for the size of com­pa­ny. They are I’m not devi­at­ing from it. And they were just check­ing, which is fine. I’m not judg­ing them for it. But it takes time to do this. It’s a dis­ci­pline. It’s kind of like, well, if you’re if you’re a high lev­el foot­ball play­er, whether it’s Amer­i­can foot­ball, or Euro­pean foot­ball, why do you need Why do you need to prac­tice? You already know the game? Why don’t we just show up an hour before the game and have a great game?

Brad Giles 07:59

Or more to the point? So that’s the prac­tice bit, but it’s also plan­ning the game? Yeah. So under­stand­ing what who we’re com­pet­ing against this week? Who are their strong play­ers? What are we going to do? Who are the weak play­ers on our team who’s still slight­ly injured? Like, what are we going to do dif­fer­ent against their game plan, like all of those things con­sti­tute the anal­o­gy that you’re describ­ing. Yeah, the prac­tice is impor­tant, but it’s the prepa­ra­tion for the work that needs to be done.

Kevin Lawrence 08:30

All of that is what it is. You know, Jim Collins says it’s, you know, suc­cess­es, relent­less exe­cu­tion of the bor­ing basics with­in your hedge­hog. You don’t always remem­ber the CEO I worked with in the US. And he’s like, 450 peo­ple, he goes, you know how long it took me? To get the entire team? To answer the phone with­in three rings. When a cus­tomer they’re a ser­vant, pro­fes­sion­al ser­vice, in a way. Team to answer the phone with­in three rings all the time, under­stand the cus­tomer’s needs and get back to them with­in 24 hours. It was you know how long it took us to do that? Three years to build it in. But that’s that’s the core of their busi­ness. Hel­lo, Mr. or Miss cus­tomer? What can I help you with today? Okay, fine. It’s always com­plex. Let me under­stand it. Let me clar­i­fy, I’ll get back to you either today or tomor­row. And that lev­el of ser­vice sets them apart from every­body else. But it was an incred­i­ble amount of work. And it goes back to the one page plan. It was in their long term strat­e­gy or the three year goals to have those incred­i­ble ser­vice lev­els. And they had goals for the year, and then every sin­gle quar­ter they ground­ed out and iter­at­ed and iter­at­ed and iter­at­ed every 90 days until they mas­tered it.

Brad Giles 09:48

So the one page plan con­cept busi­ness plan­ning isn’t new. It’s been around a long time of course, and build­ing a busi­ness plan isn’t new, but that’s specif­i­cal­ly what we’re talk­ing about here is the one page plan. So the one page plan con­cept actu­al­ly came, as I under­stand it from Gen­er­al Elec­tric. And so Jack Welch, who was the CEO, arguably, I think, the most suc­cess­ful CEO ever, where he grew GE 4,000%, over 20 years.

Kevin Lawrence 10:17

He’s known as that sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly true, but that’s what he’s known as.

Brad Giles 10:22

Accord­ing to some peo­ple. Aster­ix. Right, right. Right. So, right, so well regard­ed CEO. So a well regard­ed CEO named Jack went to his train­ing facil­i­ty in Cro­tonVille, in the US. All of the best Gen­er­al Elec­tric man­agers would come from all over the world. And they would learn from the best lead­ers and the best thinkers about busi­ness man­age­ment and strat­e­gy. And they would build their busi­ness plans over the course of their time in Cro­tonVille, and take them back to wher­ev­er they come from in the world, right. And then Jack sud­den­ly came to real­ize that all of these busi­ness plans that were get­ting built that were thick and com­pre­hen­sive and detailed, impres­sive, seri­ous­ly impres­sive, were not get­ting enact­ed. And so then he set the man­date, if it won’t fit on one page, then it’s not a con­sti­tut­ing a part of the busi­ness plan. You can have sup­port­ive argu­ments, but the busi­ness plan has to be on one page if it’s com­ing out of Cro­tonVille. And so that was, as I under­stand it, that was then that con­cept began to get pop­u­lar­ized. And cer­tain­ly for you, and I, one of the areas that came, became pop­u­lar­ized was through the book Mas­ter­ing the Rock­e­feller Habits, which kind of adapt­ed it into the mid mar­ket space for mid­size com­pa­nies. And then has con­tin­ued to evolve since I guess, the ear­ly 2000s, or late 1990s, through all sorts of areas, but that’s real­ly where it came from. And it’s stuck, because it works.

Kevin Lawrence 11:58

It does, and it was inter­est­ing, you know, when we took Rock­e­feller Habits, and you know, and I, you know, went inter­viewed 50 CEOs that used it, and then went and wrote most of the books scal­ing up the first ver­sion of it, which Vern then fin­ished off in the books, Scal­ing Up, and when we inter­viewed those peo­ple, we talked about the one page plan, they raved about it, because what they would con­sis­tent­ly say is it keeps me and my team aligned around what’s most impor­tant. From the cul­ture, to a high lev­el ver­sion of the strat­e­gy to our goals for three years, one year and quar­ter of peo­ple again, and again, loved that tem­plate and how it just made it eas­i­er to stay focused. And yes, there’s a lot of infor­ma­tion on a page, but it’s a page, it’s a doc­u­ment that does­n’t get lost. And peo­ple, you know, iter­ate it and get, you know, make all kinds of con­fus­ing things. But, you know, the way I had it sent to me is it’s, some­one explained is like, it’s like a very clear paint­ing of a beau­ti­ful city. It’s crys­tal clear, and you under­stand what’s going on, where a lot of busi­ness plans are, like abstract pieces of art. It requires inter­pre­ta­tion, every­one’s gonna have an opin­ion, and a view and is that a cow? Or is that a moun­tain? Or is that a pic­ture of a field? Or is it a but­ter­fly? Like every­one’s gonna have an inspi­ra­tion and a thought, we don’t have time for that. We want a very lit­er­al paint­ing that shows us what we’re try­ing to what it is that we’re after. With­out a lot of inter­pre­ta­tion, it makes it eas­i­er for peo­ple to stay aligned, stay focused.

Brad Giles 13:39

So by bring­ing togeth­er the ide­ol­o­gy, right, the val­ues, the pur­pose, the B hag these con­cepts of the ide­ol­o­gy, and then mak­ing them fit with the strat­e­gy, which is how we will be dif­fer­ent. And then mak­ing that fit with how we will exe­cute across the three, one and 90 day time­frames. We avoid hav­ing just a list of goals with dif­fer­ent time hori­zons. Because peo­ple might think, oh, a busi­ness plan, we’re gonna go togeth­er and we’re going to set like some goals, let’s get to $100 mil­lion dol­lars in rev­enue, that’d be cool. But there’s noth­ing else that’s in that goal set­ting instru­ment. Where­as the one page plan it con­nects the key com­po­nents the ide­ol­o­gy, the strat­e­gy and the exe­cu­tion all together.

Kevin Lawrence 14:26

All the stuff of your that your abode. And one page I remem­ber just think­ing as you’re talk­ing, Brad had a province in, in school that allowed us to have all of our notes for a test on a piece of paper. Maybe they allowed us or maybe we just made up lit­tle pieces of paper with notes. I don’t remem­ber at this point. But I’m gonna go with that we were allowed to do it. I’m not sure. But either way, we all had lit­tle pieces of paper with notes of all the most impor­tant stuff to study from now, for that exam. And in many ways, that’s what a one page plan is. It’s all the most impor­tant stuff in one place. So we don’t lose it, and we don’t for­get it. That’s it. And it’s like those lit­tle cue cards or cheat sheets that you have for cer­tain pieces of tech­nol­o­gy some­times have instruc­tions. It’s our mas­ter instruc­tions for who we are, how we’re going to win, who we’re serv­ing, and what we’re going to do about it. Because at the end of the day, peo­ple build all this real­ly, real­ly cool mod­els, and then they get lost and then they get for­got­ten. Yeah, so it’s putting all your notes in a spot in a struc­ture that helps you to know what you’re going to do about it. It’s just think­ing about a com­pa­ny that I worked with it, you know, they had a bril­liant strat plan­ning process. And as they grew and grew and grew, all of a sud­den, they start­ed to think they grad­u­at­ed. And then they start­ed get­ting real cre­ative. And they start­ed using some more inno­v­a­tive approach­es. And they want­ed to give peo­ple more auton­o­my. And they want any­ways, long sto­ry short, they did cre­ate the auton­o­my, unfor­tu­nate­ly, they lost the results. Because peo­ple were get­ting focused on all all kinds of things. And basi­cal­ly, they lost the abil­i­ty of hav­ing a cen­tral doc­u­ment with Cen­tral, very clear, tan­gi­ble goals, to bring every­one’s focus togeth­er. And they just got dis­tract­ed. And in many ways, it would be like being at a con­cert. And there’s a per­former on stage that every­one is see­ing and pay­ing atten­tion to and focus­ing on. And it became like, a cou­ple of 100 dif­fer­ent lit­tle con­certs hap­pen­ing all at once in the same com­pa­ny. And it became messy and noisy and mis­aligned. Now we’ve been able to start to dial it back in again. But it’s just it’s a basic dis­ci­pline that to some degree isn’t that excit­ing. But we can make it excit­ing. But it’s gen­er­al­ly just to keep peo­ple very, very focused.

Brad Giles 17:00

But it pro­duces results, right? It’s a dis­ci­pline, it pro­duces results. So broad­ly, we’re say­ing that, like the team who build the plan, don’t fight the plan. Okay, so you got to get a can’t just be the CEO, or the COO going off to the moun­tain, assum­ing the lotus posi­tion and then writ­ing it all out, right? Because the prob­lem is, is that you’ll bring it back to the team and they’ll go, ​“well, that does­n’t make any sense.” So what do are you doing that for?

Kevin Lawrence 17:26

The leader of the team or the team does fol­low, you have dif­fer­ent prob­lems, if your team are that com­pli­ant, and they just fol­low, you don’t have a very strong team.

Brad Giles 17:34

So it’s messy to build the right one page plan that has a good fit, I say, like a jig­saw so that all of the com­po­nents of the plan fit togeth­er like a jig­saw. And it’s not just a bub­ble wrap plan. So you know, when you get a box from Ama­zon, and it’s full of bub­ble wrap, and it’s got this tiny lit­tle thing in it? Well, it’s just fill­ing up air. And so hav­ing some­thing in a box on the one page plan does­n’t mean that it’s going to make you suc­ceed, okay, it’s got to have a fit. Every­thing from ide­ol­o­gy, through to strat­e­gy through to exe­cu­tion, it all fits togeth­er. It’s built by the lead­er­ship team through a messy process, that at the end, pro­duces the plan and it aligns the plan, and then gives you the tool to exe­cute for the next quar­ter, or the next year or three years.

Kevin Lawrence 18:23

Yeah and you touched on some­thing that I real­ly love. And Bri­an is that the idea of this is to be so clear on where the com­pa­ny is going and what we have to do, that the exec­u­tives and even their teams can then pick and have a lot more auton­o­my, in pick­ing their goals and what they’re going to do to con­tribute to get there. And whether you do it as goals or OKRs. Same con­cept just you know, dif­fer­ent lan­guage, basi­cal­ly the same struc­ture. I love OKRs, because it’s real­ly, it’s very mea­sur­able goals, which they should be to start with, no mat­ter what should be. And a lot of peo­ple don’t although, but the point of it is, is that it cre­ates more auton­o­my and account­abil­i­ty. Because you know, when you do it, well, we’ve got it done for the com­pa­ny. But then you have goals for each of the peo­ple in the room and their teams. So at the end of the day, I love it. I was doing a ses­sion down in the US a cou­ple weeks ago. And inter­est­ing­ly, the CEO was sick and could­n’t attend. And it was the annu­al meet­ing today strap meet­ing with the team. And the CEO was very, very sick. So I was able to run the whole two day meet­ing with zero input from the CEO. I talked to him the night before when he was sick. I just con­firmed the num­bers for the next three year time hori­zon. Yeah, we got a one page plan and we’ve been run­ning for three years. We know exact­ly what the plus strat­e­gy strat­e­gy is clear. Every­thing is so clear. We went and did what I would con­sid­er at least A grade work over two days with noth­ing from him. And then we had we showed it to him at the end he’s like, ​“this is great” because Because the one page plan was so clear, I already knew what the val­ues were and the pur­pose and the B hag, I knew the three to five year tar­gets was updat­ed. We knew what we had to do in terms of our goals to get to the three year plan. Yhe annu­al we clar­i­fied, and then the annu­al goals were pret­ty obvi­ous. And then we broke out quar­ter­ly. And then each exec­u­tive in the room was able to set their own goals for the quar­ter with­out CEO input, because the inputs already on the plan. Yeah, and we’ve done so many cycles, it’s tight, and it ain’t per­fect. But it’s an A grade plan, that, that I, being in sync with the com­pa­ny, you know, could could guide it with great con­fi­dence, because I know all of those ingre­di­ents. And I know, we know what works in this busi­ness and what does­n’t what we need to do.

Brad Giles 20:54

Sor­ry, Kev. What about peo­ple who butch­er the plan? I mean, I remem­ber I had all

Kevin Lawrence 21:00

the things that are real smart.

Brad Giles 21:02

Yeah, there was a, I remem­ber, there was a leader that I that I knew. And he took the one page plan and put it into Microsoft excel at the time, and just removed many of the key com­po­nents. So it was just basi­cal­ly a list of goals, and thought and thought he’d done the job to be done, but did­n’t have any real insight into what it was. And, you know, like, we’ve seen count­less exam­ples of coach­es around the world, or advi­sors who’ve tak­en some plans, the one page plan, and they’ve butchered it, and they’ve made it their own because they want to make it their own. But not real­ly under­stand­ing the sig­nif­i­cance and the inter­play of all of the com­po­nents that are in there and the depth that’s real­ly behind it.

Kevin Lawrence 21:50

Yeah, when you have ama­teurs try­ing to rein­vent a sys­tem, they’re gonna mess up because they don’t know what they don’t know. And I’ve seen it, I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion today with a CEO about this very thing. And he want­ed to imple­ment a new sys­tem. And it’s a sys­tem that I know a lot about. And he’s got a pro­pos­al from a con­sul­tant to do it. He goes, You know what, we’re not going to spend the mon­ey right now. But we’ll just kind of iter­ate it and find a way to make it our own over time. And I’m like, ​“No, eff­ing way, you’re gonna do that?” I said, ​“No. I said, if you do it, you do it, right. And if you do it, right, you get the con­sul­tant to help you. So you do it, right, because your team only knows enough to screw it up. And by the way, I’ve seen the stuff that your team did on a sim­i­lar per­mu­ta­tion before, and it was­n’t good enough.” So and we had any, we have a great rela­tion­ship. So I’m like, No, when you’re gonna do it, let’s do it right, or let’s not do it at all, because we’re just going to cre­ate crap. We’re going to cre­ate bub­ble wrapped filled box­es, because the team does­n’t know and I love his team. They’re great. They just don’t know. So when it comes, you don’t let ama­teurs tweak Mas­ter Sys­tem that tweak Mas­ter Sys­tems. And I talked about this all the time. It dri­ves me bonkers.

Brad Giles 23:05

Because then what hap­pens then what happens?

Kevin Lawrence 23:07

The sys­tem fol­low the sys­tem become a mas­ter, learn from a mas­ter? Cou­ple of years down the road? Let’s have a chat. But until then, how about we just fol­low the mas­ters who spend their life fig­ur­ing this stuff out? And you just don’t know. I get so pas­sion­ate. It’s they hurt them­selves in the process.

Brad Giles 23:24

It’s fine. Because then what hap­pens is they look back and they go, Yeah, we tried that prod­uct, that sys­tem. You know, it just did­n’t work in our, in our busi­ness. I was like, it did­n’t work because it was run by ama­teurs, peo­ple who did­n’t real­ly under­stand what they were doing.

Kevin Lawrence 23:41

Right. So when when Collins talks about bul­lets and can­ni­bals, as a test­ing, you got­ta make it a fair bul­let. Yeah, right. If you put a 45 cal­iber bul­let in a 50 cal­iber rifle, and ain’t gonna work very well. Right? Like, it’s like, that’s just not how we’re so yeah, it dri­ves me bonkers. So my thing is, and I go into we do a lot of work with com­pa­nies around tal­ent reviews. Yeah. And I went into a com­pa­ny recent­ly with a tal­ent review, and a head of HR had some won­der­ful ideas. And I’m like, can I be real­ly direct? You should prob­a­bly undo what you did. Because the changes you made, decrease the val­ue and increase the com­plex­i­ty. So I know we have good inten­tions. And so now after that was this one I was I found a grace­ful way to help tweak it and we will change most of it back. Not all, but I’m kind of cre­at­ing rules and com­pa­nies when we imple­ment these sys­tems. If you want to change it, you talk to me. And again, I’m sound­ing tough about this, but I am, because I see peo­ple dilute sys­tems all the time and they take the sim­plest, you know, when Vern and I were work­ing on Scal­ing Up the amount of time that we spent on a box or a ques­tion you Do you bog­gle your mind when we’re tweak­ing ques­tions or tweak­ing tem­plates, it’s an insane amount of debate on behind these things from peo­ple who spend an insane amount of time in the field. So I think Sor­ry, I just touched a but­ton Brad, but it’s it just dri­ves me bonkers. Don’t tweak it until until you’re a mas­ter and it takes many years to become a mas­ter. And that’s, that’s what makes the one page plan not work or, or one or any sys­tem or tool not work.

Brad Giles 25:27

And look, it goes with­out say­ing, I mean, it goes with­out say­ing that if you’re doing noth­ing, you’re not real­ly going to build a busi­ness. You reduce the chance of build­ing a busi­ness that you want, okay, if you have, if you have a busi­ness plan, you’re prob­a­bly going to have a high­er chance of build­ing the busi­ness that you want. To our open­ing state­ment right around you being hap­py and good. And then if you have a one page plan, with that lev­el of think­ing behind it, you increase the chance. But then when you over­lay a coach on to that, and you get some­one who is a domain expert, some­one who’s built 1000s, lit­er­al­ly 1000s of busi­ness plans, and is just intu­itive­ly sens­ing every sin­gle aspect of where it’s going. Like that’s when you increase the com­pa­ny val­ue the most. From planning.

Kevin Lawrence 26:17

You do have the biggest impact, espe­cial­ly when the per­son who built the plan, has fold­ed plans through quar­ter after quar­ter after quar­ter, and seed an ini­tial the­o­ret­i­cal plan in a board­room, and five years lat­er see what plays out. And I think that’s the biggest val­ue peo­ple like you and I and my team bring, is that we see the the­o­ry iter­at­ed quar­ter after quar­ter after quar­ter to see what actu­al­ly works in the end. Because the ini­tial plans are often way off. And you have to iter­ate and iter­ate to get the value.

Brad Giles 26:47

Yeah, yeah. So let’s move to close. Why does the one page plan work in a sum­ma­ry? Like what, where are we where are we kind of land­ing on this,

Kevin Lawrence 27:01

I’ll go first, then maybe you can do your ver­sion. Mine is that it’s a doc­u­ment that cap­tures our crit­i­cal think­ing about how we win, and what we’re going to do to march towards it. And it does it in a way where peo­ple can be high­ly account­able to mak­ing sure the work they do is com­plet­ed and aligns to that fair­ly sim­ple doc­u­ment of how we’re going to win.

Brad Giles 27:26

Yeah, I guess for me, it works. If I reverse engi­neer, it works, because after we’ve built the quar­ter­ly one page plan, we’ve got clear align­ment with every­body on what must be exe­cut­ed. And because it’s reverse engi­neer­ing, we get that because of the messi­ness that hap­pens in the room to deter­mine the right pri­or­i­ties or OKRs. And we get that because we’ve got real clar­i­ty on the strat­e­gy. How we’re going to be dif­fer­ent in the mar­ket and the core val­ues and the core pur­pose and the BHAG, all of the ele­ments. And then the mul­ti­tude of lay­ers of depth under­neath of that, that val­i­date the strat­e­gy. So that’s reverse engi­neered. But yeah, so we’re basi­cal­ly aligned and in the right direc­tion. So yes, it’s a plan. Yes, it’s on paper/​software. But it’s the pow­er­ful effect of that that makes the difference.

Kevin Lawrence 28:25

Right. So it’s a sim­ple, but chal­leng­ing tool to use because you real­ly got to boil down your think­ing into a way that it’s easy for peo­ple to align to, and make sure they spend their time on the most impor­tant stuff. Very good. Awe­some. Good con­ver­sa­tion. So hey, thanks for lis­ten­ing today. Lis­ten­ing to our pas­sion around this tool that we both use a lot. It helps clients and it endures dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions of it in dif­fer­ent forms and dif­fer­ent the­o­ries. But the idea is get­ting peo­ple on the same page. This has been The Growth Whis­per­ers with Kevin Lawrence up here in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da, and Brad Giles down south in Perth, Aus­tralia. You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast wher­ev­er you get your pod­casts. You can get the video ver­sion at YouTube just search the growth whis­pers and you can catch both of us. We both got newslet­ters and sites with more infor­ma­tion and we’re here also to help you imple­ment these tools. Brad is evo​lu​tion​part​ners​.com​.au and I am and my team is at Lawrence​and​co​.com. Have an awe­some week. And we hope you con­tin­ue to stay focused on the lit­tle things that mat­ter most.