A one-page strategic plan: one ideal customer, three battles
Your team isn't executing your strategy badly. It's executing the version it understood very well, and everyone understood a different one.
By Thibaut Vanderhofstadt · CEO of Sortlist for 11 years, founder of FounderOS.
A useful strategic plan fits on one page: who you sell to, what you turn down, three battles for the quarter and the numbers that tell you whether you're winning them. Anyone can read it in two minutes, and everyone finds their own line in it.
The real cost of vagueness
A vague strategy costs nothing on the day it's written. It costs every day after: in every trade-off that lands on your desk, every project half-launched, every salesperson selling to a customer who earns you nothing.
The worst part is that it passes for agility. You say yes to one good opportunity, then another. Every yes is smart; together they dilute focus. The scarce resources of a growing company aren't money. They're attention and focus.
Signs your strategy isn't being read
What works: four choices to write down
1. The ideal customer, in numbers. Put your customers from the last 36 months in a table. The ones who pay well, stay long and cost little to serve have things in common. That's your ICP. "Tech SMEs in Belgium" isn't an ICP; it's an area.
2. What you turn down. You recognise a strategy by what it excludes. Write down the customers, offers and markets you no longer pursue, even if they bring in a little.
3. Three battles per quarter. Not five. Each with an owner and a number that says whether it's won. Two done well beat six started.
4. A page on the wall, not a deck in a drawer. Printed, pinned up, opened at the start of every review. A frozen one-pager is a poster; a living one is a tool.
What FounderOS installs
Strategic Clarity goes in during week 2, in a 1:1: your ideal customer, documented; your three battles and their health KPIs; your one-pager printable as A4, poster or slide, in your colours. The platform gives you a score that shows what's missing, and the Copilot pre-fills it from what your company has already validated. You build it alone or in a workshop with your team.
What the books that matter say
Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey Moore
To go from early customers to the market, pick a narrow segment and dominate it rather than trying to please everyone.
Business Model Generation
Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
A company can be described on one page: for whom, what, how, and how the money comes in. The strategic one-pager applies it to the quarter.
Frequently asked questions
Isn't one page too short?
That constraint is what forces the choices. If your strategy doesn't fit on a page, it hasn't made its choices yet. The detail lives elsewhere; the page says what matters.
How often should I review it?
The direction and the ideal customer rarely change. The three battles and their numbers are reviewed every quarter, with the team.
Who should write it?
The CEO holds the pen, the leadership team challenges it. A strategy the team hasn't argued about won't be carried by the team.
How do I define my ideal customer?
In a spreadsheet, not a workshop. Take your customers from the last 36 months: revenue, margin, lifetime, cost to serve. The ones at the top of all four columns describe your ideal customer.
Go further Why a growth machine is essential to scale · The full article on Thibaut's blog
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