One-Page Strategic Plan: How To Align Your Team And Achieve Company's Growth (2024)

If you asked 10 employees what your company’s vision and action plan is for this year or the upcoming year, could they tell you? Would you get 10 different answers?

If they can’t, or if their answers are not aligned, then I can almost guarantee your organization’s growth and ability to scale is limited. Here’s why. Even if YOU have a clear vision of where you want your company to be in one, five or ten years from now, without a strategic plan that unites everyone, that vision is just a dream.

In order to scale and achieve your company’s vision, you need to easily communicate a strategic plan to all your employees, so everyone can stay focused and aligned. This might be easy during the early days of having just a handful of employees, but becomes significantly harder as your company grows

This article will introduce you to the One-Page Strategic Plan (OPSP), a simple yet powerful tool that helps you craft an industry-dominating strategy while keeping everyone in your company on the same page, literally and figuratively.

The real power of the OPSP is it makes it easy for everyone in the company to know where they’re going and what they need to do to get there, without being bogged down by an overly complex business plan possibly riddled with unclear and even contradictory statements.

The OPSP is a succinct way to communicate your vision and action-oriented strategic plan to align every employee in your company. Just take a look at what some firms achieved in the span of a year, just by beginning their year with a single-minded focus and plan instead of a random list of 75 things to do.

OPSP Experiences: Holganix, Markitforce, and Towne Park

Let’s walk through the main components of an OPSP that requires you to answer seven basic questions:
who, what, when, where, how, why, and the often challenging question, “But should we or shouldn’t we?”

These are your “shoulds/shouldn’ts”. It will list a handful of rules defining the boundaries for decision making. These core values will help you answer the question: “But should we or shouldn’t we?”

This defines where your company is headed in the next three to six years. It includes measurable Brand Promises to your customers and also summarizes a handful of major Capabilities and Key Thrusts your company must pursue.

This describes what results need to be achieved in the next 12 months.

This describes the theme, celebration, and rewards associated with the #1 priority for the quarter or year.
The theme celebrations give everyone a definitive finish line and a chance to have some fun.

This delineates who is accountable for various aspects of the OPSP.

Lastly, the “when” question is represented by each column’s time frame.

Along the bottom of the OPSP, you will summarize your company’s top three inherent Strengths/Core Competencies and Weaknesses. There is also room to highlight the top six trends likely to hit your company and the industry you’re in like meteors.

The Strengths, Weaknesses and Trends (SWT) serve as the foundation upon which your Vision is built. It is an updated approach of the traditional SWOT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunity and Threat.

While the traditional SWOT analysis has its place in the strategic planning process, its introspective focus isn’t the right tool to spot trends in other industries and distant markets. The SWT in section the OPSP helps you factor trends into your plans.

The OPSP tool is designed to align both horizontally and vertically, providing a logical framework to organize your strategic vision and guarantee you have all the pieces to make it whole. The physical structure of the OPSP forces prioritization and simplicity. There’s not a lot of space to write, so you must be concise.