Upgrade Your Strategy
Now that you have your workable goals. Today is where your planning work stops living in documents and starts reshaping how the business actually goes to market. You’re no longer asking “What happened?” or “What do we want?”—you’re asking “How are we going to show up differently this year so those goals become real?”
Bringing your goals to life
The goal is to translate your goals into a sharper, more focused strategy that tells you what to double down on, what to experiment with, and what to walk away from. You are designing the how behind your growth, not a monster to‑do list.
Think of today as moving from “busy” to “intentional.”
Step 1: Start with fewer, better plays
Look at your one-page Goal Sheet. For each focus area, ask:
What are the 1–2 most powerful levers we can pull to hit this goal?
If we did nothing else this year but nailed these, would we still be happy with the results?
Examples of levers:
Shifting from one‑off projects to retainers.
Deepening a profitable niche instead of chasing every type of client.
Improving onboarding instead of constantly hunting for more leads.
Capture these levers in a simple list: “This year, our strategy is to win by…” followed by 3–5 bullet points. Everything you design next must serve those levers.
Step 2: Decide where to focus your market effort
With your levers clear, narrow your strategic focus in three areas:
Who: Which clients or segments drive the healthiest revenue, easiest delivery, and best fit?
What: Which offers or services are truly worth building the business around?
Where: Which channels are genuinely pulling their weight (vs. just keeping you busy)?
Use your SOS lists here:
Double down on the clients, offers, and channels that showed up in your “Successes to carry forward.”
Be honest about those that belong in “Stopping activities immediately.”
Write one clear sentence for each:
“Our primary audience this year is…”
“Our flagship offers this year are…”
“Our core marketing and sales channels this year are…”
This instantly makes your strategy more decisive and easier to execute.
Step 3: Design strategic “plays,” not random actions
Now translate your focus into a handful of strategic plays—repeatable approaches that support your goals, instead of a mix of disconnected tasks.
For each major goal, define 1–2 plays. For example:
Goal: Grow retainer revenue.
Play: Quarterly “Business Review” calls with top clients that naturally lead into retainer conversations.
Play: Build a simple “from project to retainer” pathway for every new client.
Goal: Improve profitability.
Play: Introduce a minimum project size and tighten the scope on custom work.
Play: Standardise 1–2 core service packages with clear boundaries and pricing.
For each play, outline:
Objective (what it supports from Day 3).
Target audience / context.
Core actions (3–5 bullets only).
Owner and rough cadence (ongoing, monthly, quarterly, campaign-based).
These become the building blocks for your plans on building agility, resilience, and habit.
Step 4: Align strategy with your “stop” list
An upgraded strategy is as much about what you don’t do as what you do. Take your “Stopping activities immediately” list and check it against your new plays.
For each item on the stop list:
Decide whether it needs a firm end date, a handover, or a replacement.
Note any dependencies (e.g., “We can only stop this once the new onboarding sequence is live”).
Then sanity check:
Is there anything in your draft strategy that contradicts your non‑negotiables from Planning the Journey Ahead?
Are you accidentally re‑creating work you already decided to stop?
Adjust until your strategy feels clean, not bloated.
Step 5: Choose 90‑day strategic priorities
A year is too abstract; execution happens in quarters. From your list of plays, choose what you will actively move forward in the next 90 days.
For each focus area:
Pick 1 primary play for the next quarter (and at most 1 secondary play).
Confirm: Do we have enough capacity to move this meaningfully in 90 days?
Decide: What does “good progress” look like by the end of the quarter?
Write these into a simple 90‑day view:
Focus Area
Q1 Strategic Play
Owner
Success signals for 90 days (e.g., “5 qualified conversations,” “first pilot launched,” “new process tested on 3 clients”).
This serves as the bridge to our next activity - building agility, resilience, and habit, when you turn these priorities into concrete plans, timelines, and commitments.
Step 6: Sanity check with three questions
Before you close this activity, step back and stress‑test your upgraded strategy with three questions:
Is this strategy simple enough that the team can remember it without looking at a slide?
Does every major play clearly connect to a real lever for growth or ease, not just “nice to have” activity?
If we executed only this strategy well for the next 12 months, would the business be noticeably stronger?
If the answer to any of these is “not really,” trim or tighten until the strategy feels punchy, practical, and energising—not overwhelming.
By the end of this activity, you’re no longer staring at a long wish list. You have a focused, upgraded strategy: clear levers, defined plays, and 90‑day priorities that line up with what your numbers and your experience are telling you. In the next article, we will look at how you can turn that upgraded strategy into a concrete, time‑bound action plan your business can actually run with.
