Benefits of The One-Page Strategic Plan: Simplicity Scales & Focus Drives Results

February 6, 2023

One of the hardest things to do in a fast-growing company is to keep everyone focused on what’s most important: to take care of the customers, keep the business from being too chaotic internally and enable the business to scale towards the strategic long-term vision.

In a recent conversation with a CEO and executive team, the CEO clearly articulated that he prefers to stay strategic and visionary. However when there’s no clarity and transparency around both financial performance and operational KPIs – as well as progress on the goals the team has chosen to implement – he finds himself dropping into details and micromanagement. He feels like a pilot flying a plane without instruments or visual references.

That’s a natural response if we don’t have the right information flowing in to confirm you are heading in the right direction.

Excellent reporting systems range from real-time, to daily, weekly and monthly data to give senior leaders, and the people doing the work, the information they need to know that things are on track. Goals and execution of the strategy that indicate the operational part of the business is healthy, the financial performance to know that you’re on track with the budget, and the performance and health of the team to know you’re getting stronger as you grow.

First, you need a clear and simple strategic plan.

The One-Page Strategic Plan

The One-Page Strategic Plan (OPSP) – which CEOs rave about – is a core tool to help companies scale and keep things simple. It’s part of Scaling Up 2.0, the updated version of Rockefeller Habits, for which I was fortunate to spend hundreds of hours, interviewing 50 CEOs, around the world.

You may have your own tools to help you to clarify, execute your strategy and stay focused, but the OPSP is the best I’ve seen to march you towards your vision and get smarter along the way. And, well worth the challenging process to get it right, and easier to maintain the discipline to iterate every 90 days, to sustain focus.

In a recent interview (Scroll down to view, and look for the segment What is the Single Most Powerful Tool You Use with Your Clients?) with Lawrence & Co advisor Dean Ritchey, we talked about how the OPSP – which we’ve been honing and perfecting for 15 years at Lawrence & Co – is one of our favourite tools to help clients to be successful.

This document is designed to:

Help you get to clear on all your annual and quarterly goals
Be clear about what needs to be executed to be aligned with your strategy
Make sure that you are accomplishing what is needed to enhance your competitive advantage, operational excellence and growth
Align an executive team and, ideally, an entire company around the long-term vision, the medium-term strategy the company will focus on to win, and what needs to be executed on an annual and quarterly basis to make the company achieves its growth targets and becomes more capable.

The major benefit to this tool is it’s simple, condensed format that forces people to be succinct about what matters most.

The Challenge

How simple and scalable is your vision, strategy and execution goals?
What would you need to know, change or improve to know that the plan that you have will get you where you want to go?

If you need help to either build a simple One-Page Strategic Plan that enables you to scale, or to do a tune-up to enhance your existing plan, please let us know.

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