Working together to develop a written plan, using a one page strategic plan format, is a good starting point.

A one page strategic plan (OPSP) avoids lengthy, scattered documents that no one refers to again. It also keeps the plan brief, forcing clarity. And using a standard format with consistent language and definitions avoids confusion and unnecessary debate.

The OPSP was popularized by Verne Harnish in his best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, and is a key tool covered again in his more recent book Scaling Up.

Other coaching organizations such as my coaching community, Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches, as well as the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) and Metronomics, have all developed a version of the OPSP.

In reality, the one page strategic plan is two 8.5 by 11 inch pages side by side with the company’s philosophy, strategy, 3 year plan and 1 year plan on the left page and the current quarterly company plans and individual plans on the right.

I have found that some elements of the OPSP are more critical than others for small to mid-size companies here in the prairies. So I’ll share what I recommend to include in an OPSP.

Also feel free to contact me to access the one page strategic plan template I use with clients, or complete the form in this article.

The format I recommend to clients only includes a version of the left hand page of the one page strategic plan, which ends with the one year plan. The format for the quarterly plans on the right hand page of the standard one page strategic plan doesn’t allow for tracking progress, so it requires a separate progress tracking tool. This then requires double-entry and makes for more work and potential errors. 

To capture quarterly company plans and individual plans, I recommend a different quarterly planning and tracking tool, which I’ll share in a future article on execution. Once an executive team understands the process of planning and execution, I recommend an online growth system platform that automatically populates the right hand quarterly plans side of the one page strategic plan while providing ways to track progress.

On the one page strategic plan that I recommend, there are four columns.

• Column 1: Core Ideology
• Column 2: Strategy Fundamentals
• Column 3: Three Year Plan & Competitive Strategy
• Column 4: The One Year Plan

Let’s discuss each column one by one.


Column 1: Core Ideology

Jim Collins and Jerry Poiras, in their book Built to Last, outlined the notion of a company’s core ideology, which includes its core values and core purpose. This core ideology, or you might say company philosophy, provides a foundation for every other decision in the company. 

It’s the set of beliefs that, when articulated, enable a CEO and their executive team to make decisions that align with who they really are as a company, so that those decisions are authentic and sustainable. 

A section on Actions to Live Our Purpose & Values is also included in this column. This is a spot for the executive team to capture, and remind themselves of, what they need to be doing to keep the purpose and values alive in the company.


Column 2: Strategy Fundaments

Here, you’ll find a number of decisions that provide the foundation for your competitive strategy. Your Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) is a bold, exciting 10 to 30 year goal that acts as a guiding star for where you want to get to as a company. 

The Profit per X comes from Jim Collins’ best-selling book Good to Great and captures the key company-wide volume metric to grow and make more profitable over time: your “economic engine” as Jim calls it. 

Core Competencies ground you and your team in what your company is really good at right now. 

Your Core Purpose, from column 1, your Profit per X and your Core Competencies provide the basis for using Jim Collins’ Hedge Hog disciplined strategic thought process, also from Good to Great, to determine your Sandbox, being what you will offer, to who, through what channels, and where geographically, as well as your Core Customer, being the psychographic characteristics of your ideal customer.

Ultimately, your Core Customer and Sandbox help to refine your BHAG for where you want the company to win long term.

This 2nd column often takes a quarter or two to work through as a team with the support of a seasoned executive team coach. So these sections are often blank coming out of your first annual planning session.


Column 3: Three Year Plan & Competitive Strategy

In this column, you set your 3 Year Highly Achievable Goals (or 3HAG), that Shannon Byrne Susko coined in her book 3HAG Way. These include 3-year targets for your financial and operational metrics like revenue, unit volume(s) (that is, how many Xs from the chosen Profit per X in column 2), net profit, and, over time, cash in the bank, as your team gets more capable at forecasting. 

Here, companies, over time, also identify other company metrics and targets that capture the health of the business, such as in the areas of people, culture, customer satisfaction and in some cases, vendors or partners. 

This section is followed by the 3HAG statement, which briefly describes where the team expects the company will be in three years relative to its BHAG (in column 2) based on its 3 year financial and operational targets. 

Following the 3 year targets and goal are the Problems We Solve and the key differentiators the company needs to implement, refine or maintain in order to make your product or service unique and valuable in the mind of your core customers to attract and retain more of them to achieve your 3 year targets and goal. 

One can also then include the key competencies the company needs to develop to support implementing or strengthening those differentiators. 

The problems you solve, key differentiators and key competencies often take a couple of quarters or more to determine, unless of course this work has been previously completed. However, we find this to be pretty rare.

We suggest setting 3 year goals in addition to 1 year goals so there is a sense of direction to provide guidance for the coming year, while being a major milestone towards the BHAG. And we suggest 3 year goals rather than 5 year goals because 3 years is more tangible and urgent, whereas 5 years is too far away to really grasp or create much urgency.

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Column 4: The One Year Plan

The fourth column captures what you plan to achieve as a company this year. It includes, first, your Number One Addressable Challenge, a term and process developed by my colleague Mark Green in Virginia.

Your Number One Addressable Challenge is the single most critical company result that must be significantly improved by the end of the year. It’s a result that often has not improved in the past and has been getting in the way of meaningful progress and other important results. Sometimes it’s profit or revenue, other times it’s capacity, other times customer satisfaction, or employee engagement, etc. If achieved, this result will set up the company to be able to make meaningful progress in future years towards its 3-year targets and goal. 

Then come your 1-year targets for the same metrics as in your 3-plan plan. These are the numbers you and your executive team will drive towards day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, quarterly-by-quarter. 

One of your 1 year targets will be your Critical Number, which defines what quantifiable result needs to be achieved to say you’ve resolved your Number One Addressable Challenge. 

Then the root causes of that Number One Addressable Challenge are identified in order to determine your annual priorities, being the three major changes the company needs to make to resolve that single most important challenge. These annual priorities are then broken down into potential quarterly chunks to execute in each quarter. 

The one year plan should be developed in your first annual planning session, and it’s entirely feasible with a qualified executive team coach.


Below these four columns is a short section to capture your internal strengths and weaknesses, and the company’s external opportunities and threats (your SWOT). The SWOT is completed before your three year plan, and greatly informs your one year plan. It provides context for what’s possible over three years and provides clues to identify your Number One Addressable Challenge, root causes and annual priorities.


Think about column 1, your core ideology, as being the company philosophy that doesn’t change and guides every decision and behaviour in the organization. Column 2, your strategy fundamentals, reflects where you’re best to play and grow over the next 10 years based on where you can excel. Column 3, your three year plan and competitive strategy describes what you want to achieve and how the company needs to evolve to position successfully in the market, within your strategy fundamentals, on the way to your 10 year goal. And Column 4, your annual plan, defines specifically what the company needs to achieve and tackle this coming year to move towards your 3 year goals.

The following video builds on my previous videos ”Is Your Executive Team Aligned?”  and “The Alignment Playbook: Scaling Up”.

I’ll go over the one page strategic plan format I use with clients in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

Then I got them into a rhythm of one day quarterly planning sessions to continue biting off parts of their one year plan and adjusting course as needed. Once a year, we also got the team together for a two day annual planning session to assess the environment, adjust their one page strategic plan and plan for the coming year.

They were concerned at first because they didn't fill out the whole one-page plan in that first session. But I reassured them that most companies don't. They work through what they can and then add to it over time. Over the four years I worked with them, they did complete their one-page plan, which gave them more and more clarity about the company’s direction to guide aligned execution. 

The CEO and his team had some difficulty in the first year keeping to the quarterly planning rhythm. Being a seed retailer, they had a very busy winter and spring production, sales and delivery season. The CEO wondered if they needed to do quarterly planning during that period given they didn’t have time to execute much change work. 

I clarified that quarterlies are not just to plan for change, but, more importantly,  to plan for results. If this was their busiest time of year - the season that made their year - was it not critical to have a solid plan for those two quarters?

Instead of skipping those quarterly planning sessions, I suggested making them shorter during the busy half of the year and longer during the slow half. 

During the busy season, we focused the quarterly planning mostly on what results they needed to achieve through sales, production and delivery, as well as to identify and resolve issues that could get in the way of success. 

For quarterly planning during the slow season, we invested more time planning the larger changes and improvements they could make during those quarters to move the business forward and be in a better position for the next busy season.

In the initial annual planning session, we also started clarifying their respective roles, using the Functional Accountability Chart exercise, so they were aligned about what each of them was accountable for. This also allowed them to easily agree on who would lead each company quarterly priority.

​Over time, it also became clear that one of the original leaders was actually playing a role that reported to the other leader, and he didn’t need to be on the leadership team. This role clarification work also revealed that they needed someone to take over HR and Accounting from the CEO. This new leader was brought on quickly, made a part of the leadership team and attended their planning sessions going forward.

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

The following video builds on my previous video ”Is Your Executive Team Aligned?”

I’ll share the story of one of my clients getting their executive team aligned in our next 5 Minute Growth Video.

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here

Hand-in-hand with that plan is the need for a disciplined rhythm of planning. Our discussion on Annual and Quarterly Planning is a direct nod to the Execution pillar in Scaling Up. 

Harnish emphasizes that a consistent meeting rhythm—including annual and quarterly planning—is essential for maintaining alignment, adjusting competitive strategy, and breaking down the annual plan into manageable 90-day chunks. This Execution rhythm ensures the team has the flexibility to learn, adjust, and course-correct as the market and organization evolve. This disciplined planning is a key principle that Scaling Up advocates for.

Beyond annual and quarterly planning to support executive team alignment, the Executiion pillar also covers the importance of data as well as monthly, weekly and daily huddles to support efficient execution.

When you move into the People pillar, the book strongly reinforces the need for Clear Individual Roles and Expectations. We previously talked about clarifying roles, results, and expectations to eliminate duplication, mixed messages, and internal friction. The Scaling Up framework stresses having the right people in the right seats, and one of the best tools for that is the Functional Accountability Chart exercise, introduced in the book. 

The Key Function Flow Map that I use with my clients, and that I picked up from Shannon Byrne Susko of Metronomics, is an excellent complementary exercise to make the Functional Accountability Chart even more actionable.

Scaling Up also introduces the job scorecard—which includes the function's purpose, results, metrics, and targets, and competencies. It is a prime example of a tool strongly featured in the Scaling Up system to ensure every leader is aligned on what they're expected to produce. 

​However, in Scaling Up, the job scorecard is emphasized as a tool for hiring great talent, while only suggesting metrics and priorities for setting expectations of individuals. Whereas myself, and many executive team coaches in my network, also recommend the job scorecard to clients to get clear on not only the “what” of the results expected of each team member, but also the “how” in terms of the competencies needed to achieve those results. Myself and some of my colleagues also suggest including values and behaviours, responsibilities and authority in the job scorecard, to get really clear on what’s expected of each person.

The People pillar also goes well beyond setting expectations to create executive team alignment, to also cover how to hire great talent, as I mentioned, and how to get and keep them engaged.

Finally, we hit the last key: Efficient Executive Team Buy-in. 

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here