Companies are messy.
If you’ve ever worked in one a small one, you know that behind the scenes it's a lot of duct tape and haywire.
But here's the thing: how good the business looks internally doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that you make customers successful—and make money doing it. That’s the core of any business.
As humans, we like to wrap a narrative around that chaos. We call it "business," but really it’s just organized chaos.
This is why stories and team alignment is so important. It helps them rally around something bigger than the daily firefight.
The wrong way to do it
Documenting a business's foundations takes time and energy.
This includes its history, mission, values, and operating procedures.
Then at the end of it - you have a giant document or presentation which is hard to digest and reference.
People don’t invest the time or energy in learning it. Those pages gather dust in the shared drive and we waste time in meetings repeating foundational stuff that everyone should know.
There is a better way to capture and share these foundations.
A one-page plan (OPP).
It’s a simple, concise document that answers the most critical questions in your business:
- What’s the mission? Why does this company exist?
- What’s the vision? What does success look like when that mission is complete?
- What are the long-term goals? What are we shooting for?
- What are the values? How are we going to operate along the way?
- Who is our ideal customer (ICP)? Who are we serving?
The OPP should distill each of these into a few bullet points.
The end result shouldn't be long. One page with bullet points that can be easily read like this.
Two things are important here:
- The OPP must be clear, simple, and easy to reference. There are no excuses for anyone in the company not knowing the basics.
- The OPP must be easy to update, comment on, or change. This is especially true for startups with $0 to $5 million in revenue. They need speed and adaptability to new information and changes in the plan.
Why It Works
Once you have this one-pager, it becomes the base of the pyramid for everything else you do.
- Goal planning for next quarter? Double-check the long-term goals for context.
- Updating our marketing messages? Refer to the mission and vision.
- Operations? They have clear values to hire for and the goals they need to support.
The OPP ensures everyone is on the same page, both literally and figuratively. It avoids repeating basic explanations all the time.
How the OPP Benefits Key Audiences
The OPP isn't just for internal clarity either. It can provide great value to stakeholders like advisors, investors, and partners.
Advisors may want to offer fresh and helpful views. But they may not know the daily operations. Investors may be looking for a clear, concise summary of the company's strategy.
Third parties want to help. But, if they focus on stuff outside the OPP, it might annoy you and frustrate them.
Getting to an MVP Quickly
Starting from a blank page is tough.
Thankfully, you can use ChatGPT to help draft the base content for your OPP.
Use a prompt like this (which you can copy here).
You’ll obviously want to refine and tailor the output to fit your company’s unique needs.
If You Don’t Have One, Make One.
An OPP will take less than an hour to put together and can bring significant alignment to your company.
Every team member can quickly reference this context and because it's just one page, people can absorb it in < 2 minutes.
This means the company can move faster and hopefully have an even bigger impact on the world.
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