A Business Strategy So Easy a New Hire Can Understand It

There are things a business owner needs to be able to do:

• Develop a cohesive story for a sales pitch
• Hold a team accountable
• Say no to Good-But-Not-Great ideas
• Set up goals, work towards them, and change course when things go sideways

These are learnable skills for an individual.

Doing all of these things consistently, throughout an entire organization, with perfect coordination is a minor miracle.

Today I'm sharing a cheat code to that minor miracle.

Every entrepreneur goes through the cycle of failing to write a business plan at least once:

1. Overwhelmed, a leader decides to GET SERIOUS about their business and decides to write a formal business plan
2. They Google a bunch of templates or get handed one by a mentor/coach/influencer
3. The leader spends hours on the first questions, makes several assumptions to get halfway through, then rushes the rest or just leaves it "to be filled in later"
4. The document doesn't get shown to anyone until it's done...and it never gets done.
5. A month or two later, nothing's really changed besides a newfound sense of shame

At least, this was my experience and the experience of many business owners I've spoken to. Back in 2019, I went to my local SCORE chapter for some free business advice and walked out with a 33 page Word document (which is still on their website!). I won't deny that their template covers a lot of ostensibly valuable ground, but even I, Nerd Supreme, found it too exhaustive.

I didn't "get clear" on my business. In fact, I felt worse because I saw all the perfectly reasonable questions in front of me and despaired. Competitive analysis. Financial structure. Product/Service differentiators. Management structure.

It was a ton of shit I didn't need right then.

It was a ton of shit I never needed.

It was a ton of shit that made me feel shame that I didn't have my shit together.

Years later, I've helped plenty of business owners get un-lost in the business planning process.

Through those experiences, I've found that there's a sweet spot between a business plan being simple (like the Lean Canvas), a business plan being targeted (like a Change Management strategy), and a business plan hinging on strong goals (like the OKR framework).

To aid me in helping business owners find that strategy-tactics g-spot, I created my own business planning framework:

Introducing, the Strategically Tactical Framework

This is a model that I've developed over the years of helping business leaders who struggle to get their small to medium-sized team rowing in the same direction. There's a tight little video I shot explaining how this model works, but at a high level:

• The Strategy section is focused on the abstract and aspirational North Star that guides you through tough decisions
• The Services section is focused on what you actually do, how you communicate it, and how it connects to your North Star
• The Players section is focused on the customers and team members that power your business, as well as how and who is accountable for success (as defined by the Strategy and Services sections)
• The Retro section is designed to help you calibrate when you've put the plan into action and need to course correct (because you won't get it perfect from Day 1).

I made this framework available on the Miroverse, for free. It's better than a 33-page Word document, believe me.

Does looking at this framework make you despair? Reply back to this email with your concerns, feedback, or asks for help and I would be thrilled to help make this framework work for you.

A TL;DR from the CRO

The steps you take in any direction will leave a mark on you and those around you: what do you want that journey to look like?

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

Business Plans From Around the Internetverse

Are you a weirdo who gets excited by business plan architecture? Welcome to the club. Here's several business planning frameworks that helped shape the Strategically Tactical framework:

• ​Lean Canvas - A simple one-page plan
• ​Vision-Mission-Strategies-Values Pyramid - A hierarchy of your North Star
• ​OKRs - It's like SMART goals 2.0
• ​Burke-Litwin Organizational Change Framework - Blending big picture vision with individual elements
• ​Gap Selling - Where a prospect is, where a prospect wants to be, then selling the bridge in-between
• ​Jobs to be Done - A business doesn't help a demographic segment, it helps people solve problems

It's Brain Awareness Week for my close colleague, Lauren the Learning Pirate. She's been sharing "Pirate Service Announcements" about how our brains work and how to make them work a wee bit better.

My favorite hot take from the Learning Pirate is being more aware how our external environments shape our thinking and ability to focus.

Take a walk in the woods with Lauren, here.

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Help your brain by touching grass today,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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PS. Yeah! No!​