Rock Your Strategy

Tag: small business

  • The OGSM Strategy Builder: Build Your Whole Strategy With Claude, One Phase at a Time

    The OGSM Strategy Builder: Build Your Whole Strategy With Claude, One Phase at a Time

    You downloaded the template. You opened it on a Sunday morning with a coffee, and you got as far as the box marked Objective.

    Then you sat there.

    Not because you don’t know your business — you know it better than anyone. But because a blank box doesn’t ask you anything. It doesn’t ask why you’re doing this now. It doesn’t ask what you’d have to stop doing to make room. It doesn’t notice when you write “deliver growth” and let it stand.

    A template gives you a format. What most people actually need is a facilitator.

    That’s what we’ve built. It’s called the OGSM Strategy Builder, it’s available in the shop, and this post explains exactly what it does — and what it deliberately does not do.

    What is the OGSM Strategy Builder?

    It’s a paid Claude Skill that turns Claude into an OGSM facilitator and walks you through building a complete, execution-ready strategic plan in eight phases.

    You install it once. Then you open Claude, say something like “help me build our strategy for next year”, and it takes over: asking questions, pushing back on vague answers, drafting options for you to choose between, and saving your progress as you go. At the end you get a finished OGSM one-pager in the format you want, plus a workbook recording every decision and every option you rejected.

    It is built on the same method taught across this blog — the OGSM as described in what OGSM stands for — and on the Seven Cardinal Sins of Strategy from The Strategy Lie, the free ebook on this site.

    It does not write your strategy. I’ll come back to that, because it’s the whole design.

    What problem does it actually solve?

    The gap between a template and a process.

    We sell a $4.99 Excel template and a PowerPoint version, and they do their job well. Thousands of people have used them. But a template assumes you already know how to run the thinking — how to tell a Strategy from a Goal, how to spot an activity metric wearing an outcome metric’s coat, when to stop adding and start cutting.

    Most people don’t. Not because they’re not smart enough, but because nobody ever showed them. And so the classic thing happens: the plan gets written, the boxes get filled, and three months later nobody can remember what was in it. The plan isn’t bad. The process behind it never happened.

    The other half of the problem is that a facilitator is expensive. A good strategy consultant to run a two-day session costs more than most small businesses will ever spend on strategy. So the choice has been: a blank template, or a five-figure invoice.

    This sits in between. It’s the process, not just the page.

    What is a Claude Skill, and do I need to be technical?

    No. A Skill is a folder of instructions you add to your Claude account — Claude.ai, Claude Code or Cowork. Once it’s installed, Claude reads it and follows it whenever the topic comes up. You install it once, the way you’d install an app, and after that you just talk to Claude normally.

    There’s no coding, no API key, no subscription to anything except Claude itself. If you can download a file and drag it into a browser window, you can install this.

    What happens across the eight phases?

    The order matters. OGSM works left to right, and each element is built on the one before it. Skip a phase and the phase after it inherits the gap.

    Phase 0 — Set-up and Diagnosis

    Scope, time horizon (a 3–5 year strategic plan and a 1-year operating plan are different animals), and who has to agree. Then two diagnostics: the Five-Answer Test — ask five of your leaders separately what the strategy is and count how many different answers you get — and the Seven Sins self-diagnosis. It finishes by asking you to list everything the business currently has in flight. That list comes back to bite in Phase 5, which is the point.

    Phase 1 — Reality

    Key figures first, then a SWOT built by conversation rather than form-filling — the approach in how to do a SWOT right. Where your situation warrants it, it offers deeper analysis: PESTEL, market trends, Porter’s Generic Strategies, Five Forces, the 5P marketing mix. Where it doesn’t, it doesn’t offer them. Nobody needs a Five Forces analysis to decide whether to hire a second van.

    Phase 2 — Objective

    One qualitative, what-by-how statement. It drafts three genuinely different options — different bets, not different wordings — shows you what each one commits you to and what each one rules out, and makes you pick. Then it sharpens the one you picked and runs it through the tests in how to write a great objective. Expect to spend real time here. This is the sentence everything else hangs from.

    Phase 3 — Goals

    Three to five SMART goals, each with a baseline, at least one financial, and coverage of both halves of your objective — the “what” and the “how”. Then the gate: if we achieve exactly these goals and nothing else, have we succeeded? It’s the most useful question in the method and it’s in how to write SMART goals for your OGSM.

    Phase 4 — Strategies

    Three to five what-by-how choices, each with a named owner. Then the We WILL / We will NOT list, which is the exercise that turns a set of intentions into a decision. This is the uncomfortable phase, and if it isn’t uncomfortable it hasn’t worked.

    Phase 5 — Measures

    Per strategy, two structurally different things kept explicitly apart: a Dashboard of 2–4 KPIs, each with baseline, target, frequency and a data owner, at least one leading and one lagging — and an Action Plan of 2–3 initiatives, each with a caretaker and dates. Then the capacity conversation: your Phase 0 workload list comes back and every item gets sorted into continues, paused or stopped. If everything stays, you execute nothing. The full method is in the complete guide to OGSM Measures.

    Phase 6 — Stress Test

    The finished draft is run against the quality rules and the seven failure modes, and reported back in three parts: what holds, what it would challenge, and what it cannot verify.

    Phase 7 — Deliver and Cascade

    The one-pager in your chosen formats, plus cascade guidance (a higher-level Measure becomes a lower-level Goal — see how to cascade OGSM), a communication plan, and the review calendar with actual dates in it. Not “quarterly, we’ll find dates”. Dates.

    Phase 8 — Review (and this one repeats)

    The plan is built. Now comes the part that decides whether any of it mattered.

    Before each monthly or quarterly review, you bring the workbook back. The skill walks the plan strategy by strategy, updates the numbers and statuses with whatever you know, works out whether each goal is actually on the path you set — not just whether it moved — and checks the question almost nobody asks out loud: has anything on your “we will not” list quietly started happening again?

    That last check is the one that earns its keep. Strategies rarely get reversed in a meeting. They get reversed one exception at a time, and nobody notices until the trade-off that made the plan real has been eroded entirely.

    You come out with a prepared agenda, at-risk items first, and the two or three things that genuinely need a decision rather than a status update. Afterwards you come back, say what was decided, and it goes into the workbook.

    What do you get at the end?

    Three things.

    The OGSM one-pager, in HTML, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF — you pick, and most people take at least two. HTML is the living version you share by link. Excel is the one your OGSM caretaker updates each month. PowerPoint is what you present. PDF is what you print and pin up.

    The Strategy Workbook, which captures the reasoning: the options you rejected and why, the trade-offs, the accepted risks. This is more valuable than it sounds. At your first review, when someone asks “why did we decide that?”, the answer is written down.

    A cascade and communication pack — who hears what, how, when, and from whom, plus the review calendar.

    The skill also ships two scripts. One generates the four output formats. The other validates any plan against the OGSM rules: counts, what-by-how form, missing owners, targets without baselines, activity metrics masquerading as outcomes, and an empty “will not” list. You can run that validator against a plan you wrote years ago, on your own, without doing any of the rest.

    What happens if you have to stop halfway?

    You stop.

    The skill writes your progress to a workbook file at the end of every phase and hands it to you. Stop after Phase 2 on a Tuesday, come back three weeks later, hand the file back, and it tells you in two sentences where you left off and carries on. Nothing gets redone.

    This is deliberate. A strategy built over four evenings is worth more than one rushed in an afternoon, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a plan that was really just a long meeting.

    What does the stress test actually check — and what can’t it check?

    The mechanical checks are easy and mostly automated: goal counts, missing baselines, strategies without owners, initiatives that are really operational routines, vanity metrics.

    The judgement checks are the interesting ones. Would five people read this page the same way? Could someone who joined three weeks ago say what the business is trying to do? Swap in your main competitor’s name — does the plan still read as sensible? If yes, you haven’t chosen anything. Is there anything in this plan that costs someone something specific? Do the strategies plausibly deliver the goals, or is the goal 28% growth against three efficiency initiatives?

    And then the part I insisted on: what it cannot verify.

    Every stress test ends with a section naming the assumptions it has taken on trust — your market size, a competitor’s intent, your team’s real capacity, whether the person who has to carry Strategy 3 actually believes in it. It has read everything and lived none of it. Those are the things you check before the plan goes live.

    An AI strategy review produces observations, not decisions. A tool that pretends otherwise is selling you confidence you haven’t earned.

    Who is this for — and who is it not for?

    It’s for you if: you run or lead a business and need a real plan; you’ve tried a template and stalled; you have a strategy nobody can repeat; you’re a functional leader who has to build a plan that connects upward; you want a sparring partner who won’t agree with you to keep the peace. It works for a five-person firm and for a division of four hundred — see OGSM for small business if you’re at the smaller end.

    It’s not for you if you want a plan written for you in two minutes. It will refuse. It will draft options and make you choose, and it will ask you what you’re going to stop doing, and it will keep asking until you answer. If that sounds like more work than you were hoping for — it is. That’s not a bug, and post three in this series explains why at length.

    It also won’t do the political work. If your real problem is that two directors disagree and everyone knows it, no document fixes that. It will name it. It can’t settle it.

    The honest summary

    This is a facilitator, not an oracle. It brings the method, the discipline, the questions and the standard. You bring the business, the judgement and the decisions.

    Your strategy doesn’t need to be complex to be good. It needs to be clear, owned, and reviewed. This is a structured way to get there in an afternoon or four evenings, instead of another year of meaning to.

    Ready to stop staring at the blank Objective box? The OGSM Strategy Builder is available now in the shop — install it once, and build your strategy the next time you can give it an afternoon.

    Founding price — $49 until 31 October 2026. After that it goes to $99, and stays there. Founding customers keep every future update at no extra cost, including the new phases and worked examples already planned for the next version.

    For scale: one facilitated strategy session starts at around $2,000, and five seats of the cheapest OGSM software is roughly €480 a year. This is $49, once.

    Rock on.

  • How to Run Your OGSM Quarterly Review

    How to Run Your OGSM Quarterly Review

    Most OGSM plans quietly fall apart between reviews — not because the strategy was wrong, but because no one built a reliable ritual for interrogating it.

    Running an OGSM quarterly review means gathering your leadership team for 60–90 minutes to assess four things: whether your Objective still reflects your ambition, whether your Goals are on track, whether your Strategies are working, and whether your Measures are telling the truth. You review Dashboard Measures to check the scoreboard and Action Plan Measures to understand why. Then you decide: stay the course, adjust tactics, or trigger a full re-plan.

    In this article you’ll get a step-by-step facilitation guide — what to prepare before the meeting, the exact four questions to ask the room, how to update your OGSM documents correctly, and a 60–90 minute agenda you can run this quarter.

    What should you prepare before the quarterly review?

    The quality of your quarterly review is determined before anyone walks into the room. If you arrive with stale data and no pre-read, you’ll spend the first 30 minutes catching up instead of deciding.

    Prepare at least 48 hours before the session:

    • Update your Dashboard Measures. Pull actual vs. target for every Goal. If a measure is amber or red, be ready to explain the gap — not defend it.
    • Update your Action Plan Measures. Each Strategy should have measurable milestones. Gather those actuals too.
    • Prepare a one-page summary. A single document showing the current state of every Objective, Goal, Strategy, and Measure gives the room a shared starting point. Our OGSM template is built for exactly this.
    • Flag the outliers in advance. Don’t walk through everything line by line. Pre-identify the two or three items that need a real conversation and make sure everyone knows what they are.
    • Send the pre-read 24 hours before. Your team should arrive oriented, not overwhelmed. If people are still reading the summary when the meeting starts, you’ve already lost 20 minutes.

    The facilitation job gets much easier when the facts aren’t in dispute before you begin.

    What are the four questions to ask the room?

    The quarterly review is a structured interrogation of your OGSM. These four questions give the session its spine. Ask them in order.

    1. Is our Objective still the right ambition? Quarterly reviews rarely change the Objective — but you should ask. Has the competitive environment shifted? Has something internally changed the scope of what’s possible or necessary? If the answer is yes, flag it for a full re-plan (more on that below). If not, confirm it and move on quickly.

    2. Are our Goals on track? Goals are your quantified targets — revenue, market share, retention, whatever you committed to. Go Dashboard Measure by Dashboard Measure. Green means proceed with a brief acknowledgement. Amber means diagnose. Red means decide. Don’t skip the green ones — a quick confirmation that something is working builds team confidence and keeps the energy right before you hit the difficult conversations.

    3. Are our Strategies producing results? This is where most reviews get shallow. Strategy is how you intend to win — not a list of activities. The question is not “did we do the work?” but “is this approach generating the outcomes we expected?” Look at your Action Plan Measures here. If the activities are happening but the results aren’t following, your Strategy may be wrong — and that’s a different problem than your team underperforming.

    4. What decisions do we need to make today? Every quarterly review must close with explicit decisions, not vague intentions. Resources reallocated? Strategy retired? New initiative approved? Write them down and assign owners before you leave the room. If you leave without decisions, you held a status update, not a strategy review.

    How do you update Dashboard Measures versus Action Plan Measures?

    This is one of the most common points of confusion in OGSM practice, so let’s be precise.

    Dashboard Measures live at the Goal level. They tell you whether you’re on track to achieve your Objective via your Goals. These are typically lagging or leading indicators — monthly revenue, customer NPS, pipeline coverage, retention rate. You update them with actuals and compare against target. A Dashboard Measure tells you that there’s a problem.

    Action Plan Measures live at the Strategy level. They track whether your Strategies are being executed effectively — things like number of new partnerships activated, conversion rate changes from a specific initiative, or features shipped against a roadmap commitment. These tell you why you may be on or off track at the Goal level.

    The rule is simple: when a Dashboard Measure turns red, go immediately to the corresponding Action Plan Measures. The cause of the gap is almost always there. For a deeper look at how these two measure types work together and how to set them up correctly, read our guide to the OGSM Measures Column.

    Update both sets of measures before the meeting. Update the document formally after — with the decisions and any adjusted targets recorded against the relevant measures.

    When should a quarterly review trigger a full re-plan?

    Most quarterly reviews should end with small adjustments: tweak a Strategy, reallocate budget, retire an initiative that isn’t generating results. That’s healthy OGSM practice.

    A full re-plan is warranted when:

    • The Objective is no longer valid. A market shift, acquisition, or significant internal change has made the original ambition wrong or irrelevant.
    • Multiple Goals are structurally off track. Not a bad quarter, but a pattern that suggests the targets were wrong or the underlying business model has changed.
    • Core Strategies are clearly failing. Not just slow — genuinely not working, with no credible line-of-sight to recovery in the remaining period.
    • A critical assumption has been invalidated. Every Strategy is built on assumptions. If a core assumption has been proven wrong, the Strategy resting on it is suspect.

    Be honest here. Continuing to execute a plan everyone in the room knows is broken is more expensive than re-planning. Trigger the re-plan early and you’ll have better options. Waiting until the annual review because “we committed to this” just compounds the cost.

    What does a 60–90 minute quarterly review agenda look like?

    Keep the agenda tight. Quarterly reviews fail when they sprawl into all-day workshops. Here’s a structure that works for most leadership teams:

    0:00–0:10 — Open and orient (10 min) Confirm everyone has reviewed the pre-read. Note the key items flagged for discussion. Set the decision-making expectation: you’re leaving with explicit calls, not actions to investigate.

    0:10–0:30 — Dashboard review (20 min) Walk through each Goal and its Dashboard Measure: actual vs. target, trend, owner commentary. Mark green, amber, or red as you go. Keep green items brief.

    0:30–0:50 — Strategy deep dive (20 min) Focus only on amber and red Dashboard items. For each one, interrogate the Action Plan Measures. What’s driving the gap? Is the Strategy still valid, or does it need to change?

    0:50–1:10 — Decisions and adjustments (20 min) What changes? Who owns it? Are any Strategies being retired or replaced? Is a full re-plan needed? Every decision gets an owner and a due date before you move to the next one.

    1:10–1:20 — Close and next steps (10 min) Assign follow-up actions. Confirm the date and format of the next review. If you’re unsure how often you should be running these sessions, our article on OGSM review cadence covers the full annual rhythm and when to deviate from it.

    That’s a quarterly review that sharpens your strategy rather than just reporting on it. The difference between teams that execute well and teams that drift is usually this: the ones who execute have a meeting they can’t avoid where the facts are on the table and decisions have to be made. Build that meeting, run it well, and your OGSM becomes a live tool rather than a document that ages in a shared drive.

    Rock on.

  • The AI Strategy Audit: How to Use AI Tools to Keep Your OGSM on Track

    The AI Strategy Audit: How to Use AI Tools to Keep Your OGSM on Track

    You built a solid OGSM. You ran the launch meeting, shared the document, set a review cadence. And then life took over, and six weeks later you’re not sure which Goals are on track, which Measures haven’t been updated, and whether the strategy you committed to is still the right one.

    An AI strategy audit uses AI tools — Claude, ChatGPT, or similar — to systematically review your OGSM: flagging stale Measures, testing whether your Goals are still realistic, stress-testing your Strategies against current conditions, and generating specific questions for your next review meeting. A thorough AI audit takes 30 minutes and surfaces issues a standard review often misses.

    Here’s how to run one — and the exact prompts to use.

    Why AI Makes a Good Strategy Auditor

    AI tools don’t have the same blind spots you do. When you review your own OGSM, you see it through the lens of what you know, what you’re hoping for, and what feels uncomfortable to confront. An AI tool has none of those filters. Ask it the right questions, and it will push back on your assumptions with the consistency of a very patient, very well-read advisor who has no stake in the outcome.

    The key is knowing what to ask. Used poorly, AI just produces generic strategy advice. Used with the right prompts and your actual OGSM data, it becomes a genuinely useful thinking partner for the review process.

    What You Need Before You Start

    Before running an AI strategy audit, gather:

    • Your current OGSM document (or a typed summary of Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures with current RAG status)
    • Any recent performance data relevant to your Goals (revenue figures, traffic numbers, customer counts — whatever your Goals track)
    • The date your OGSM was last formally reviewed

    You don’t need to share the full document at once. The prompts below are designed to work section by section.

    The Five-Part AI Strategy Audit

    Part 1: Objective Clarity Test

    Paste your Objective into the AI tool and use this prompt:

    “Here is our strategic Objective: [paste Objective]. Please assess this against three criteria: (1) Is it specific enough to guide real decisions, or is it too vague? (2) Does it suggest a clear timeframe? (3) Would someone outside our organisation understand what we’re trying to achieve? Please flag any weaknesses and suggest a sharper version if needed.”

    A well-written Objective should pass all three. If the AI struggles to understand what you’re aiming for, your team probably does too.

    Part 2: Goal Integrity Check

    Paste each Goal (with baseline and target) and use this prompt:

    “Here are our strategic Goals: [paste Goals with baselines and targets]. Please assess each one against the SMART criteria — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Flag any Goals that are missing elements, and identify any that appear too safe (unlikely to stretch the team) or too ambitious (unrealistic without a step-change in approach).”

    Ask a follow-up: “Given these Goals, what would need to be true about our business for us to achieve all of them simultaneously? Are there any that might conflict with each other?”

    This second question often surfaces tensions the planning process missed — for example, a Goal to grow volume while simultaneously improving margin, without a Strategy that explicitly addresses the trade-off.

    Part 3: Strategy Stress Test

    Paste your Strategies and use this prompt:

    “Here are the Strategies we have committed to this year: [paste Strategies]. For each one, please: (1) Identify the key assumption it relies on. (2) Describe what would have to be true in the market for this Strategy to succeed. (3) Flag any Strategy where the assumption seems weak or where an alternative approach might be more effective.”

    You can also ask: “Are there any obvious strategic options we appear not to have considered, given our Objective and Goals?”

    This prompt works especially well when you share some context about your market or competitive situation. The more specific you are, the more useful the output.

    Part 4: Measures Audit

    Paste your Measures and use this prompt:

    “Here are the Measures we are tracking: [paste Measures with targets and current status]. Please assess each one and tell me: (1) Is this a leading indicator (predicts future Goal performance) or a lagging indicator (reports past results)? (2) Does this Measure have a plausible causal connection to the Goal it’s meant to support? (3) Are there any Measures that appear to be output metrics rather than outcome metrics?”

    Then ask: “If all of these Measures were consistently green, which of our Goals would you be most confident will be achieved — and which Goals do you think would still be at risk? Why?”

    This last question tests whether your Measures actually cover your Goals — a common gap in OGSM design.

    Part 5: Review Meeting Preparation

    Once you’ve completed the first four parts, use this prompt to prepare your next strategy review:

    “Based on everything we’ve discussed about our OGSM — our Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures — please generate: (1) The five most important questions our leadership team should discuss at our next strategy review. (2) The two or three areas where you think we are most at risk of being off track. (3) One provocation — a question designed to challenge a core assumption we might not be examining.”

    The provocation question is often the most valuable output. Strategy teams have a tendency to examine tactics while leaving core assumptions unquestioned. A good provocation makes the meeting more honest.

    How to Use the Output

    An AI strategy audit produces observations, not decisions. The output gives you better questions to take into the review meeting, not answers to replace the meeting.

    Treat it as pre-work. Share the AI audit output with your leadership team 24 hours before the review. Ask them to come prepared to discuss the two or three risks the audit flagged. This shifts the meeting from information-sharing to genuine strategic dialogue.

    Running the Audit Quarterly

    The AI strategy audit works best as a quarterly habit — done two or three days before each major strategy review. It takes about 30 minutes to run, and the discipline of preparing your OGSM data to share with the AI tool is itself valuable: it forces you to update the document before the review rather than improvising status in the meeting.

    You can also run a lighter version monthly — just Part 4 (the Measures audit) — to catch any Measures that are drifting without being addressed.

    What AI Can’t Do

    AI tools are useful strategy thinking partners. They are not strategy consultants, and they’re not a substitute for genuine organisational knowledge.

    AI doesn’t know your specific market dynamics, your team’s actual capacity, or the political realities that shape what’s truly possible in your organisation. The audit questions are most useful when you’re specific about context — “we operate in a market where…” or “our main constraint is…” — and when you treat the output as input to human judgment rather than a replacement for it.

    The best strategy is still made by people who understand the business. AI helps them think more rigorously about what they already know.

    Ready to Audit Your Strategy?

    If you want to run an AI strategy audit on your OGSM, the first thing you need is an OGSM that’s properly structured — with clear Goals, connected Strategies, and trackable Measures. The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel give you that structure from the start, so when you bring the AI into the review process, you’re working from a solid foundation rather than trying to retrofit one.

    And if you would rather not run the audit prompt by prompt, the OGSM Strategy Builder has both the stress test and the review built in as phases: it runs the mechanical checks, challenges the judgement calls, says plainly what it cannot verify, and prepares your review agenda with the at-risk items first. More on how it works.

  • Is Your Strategy Off Track? 10 Warning Signs and How to Fix Them

    Is Your Strategy Off Track? 10 Warning Signs and How to Fix Them

    Strategies don’t usually fail dramatically. They drift — quietly, gradually, until the gap between where you said you’d be and where you actually are is too wide to close without a serious conversation.

    Your strategy is off track if two or more of these warning signs are present: review meetings focus on activity rather than results, Goals haven’t been updated in months, your team can’t articulate the strategy in a sentence, you keep adding initiatives without removing others, or your Measures are consistently green while your Goals are red. Each sign points to a specific fix.

    Here are ten warning signs to look for — and what to do about each one.

    1. Your Review Meetings Have Become Status Updates

    If strategy reviews are mostly slide decks of “what we did last month” rather than “are we on track and what needs to change,” your review process has become a reporting exercise rather than a decision-making one.

    The fix: Restructure your next meeting around questions, not slides. Start with: “Which Measures are amber or red, and why?” Require anyone presenting a Measure to also propose an action.

    2. Nobody Can Summarise the Strategy in One Sentence

    Ask three people in your organisation to describe the strategy. If you get three different answers — or three blank looks — the strategy hasn’t landed.

    A strategy that can’t be summarised isn’t a strategy. It’s a planning document.

    The fix: Write a single strategy sentence that everyone at leadership level agrees on. Something like: “We are focusing on [target market] with [key approach] in order to [Objective].” Test it until it’s short enough to remember and specific enough to actually guide decisions.

    3. Your Measures Are Green but Your Goals Are Red

    This is one of the most common — and most dangerous — patterns in strategy reviews. Your leading indicators look healthy, but your lagging outcomes are not improving. This means either your Measures aren’t actually measuring what matters, or the connection between your Strategies and your Goals is weaker than you thought.

    The fix: Audit the connection between each Measure and the Goal it supposedly predicts. Are they genuinely linked? If a Measure has been green for three months and the related Goal hasn’t moved, that Measure isn’t a leading indicator — it’s a comfort metric. Replace it.

    4. You Keep Adding Priorities Without Removing Anything

    Every time a new idea or external pressure arrives, it gets added to the strategy. Nothing ever gets removed. The result is a list of twelve “priorities” and a team that quietly does whatever it was already doing.

    The fix: Apply a simple rule: for every new initiative added to the strategy, one existing initiative must be explicitly paused or removed. This forces real prioritisation rather than the illusion of it.

    5. Your Strategies Haven’t Changed, Even Though the Market Has

    A strategy that made sense in January may not make sense in October. If the external environment has shifted — new competition, changing customer behaviour, a technology disruption — and your Strategies look exactly the same as they did at the start of the year, either you’ve genuinely assessed the situation and decided to stay the course, or you haven’t been paying attention.

    The fix: At each quarterly review, spend ten minutes explicitly asking: “What has changed in our environment since we set this strategy? Does our approach still make sense?” This isn’t about rewriting the strategy every quarter — it’s about confirming that the strategy remains valid.

    6. The OGSM Hasn’t Been Updated Since It Was Created

    If your OGSM document looks exactly like it did on the day you built it — same numbers, same RAG status, no updates — it’s become a wall decoration rather than a working tool.

    A living OGSM changes at every review. Status gets updated. Actions get added. Occasionally a Strategy changes. If none of that is happening, the document isn’t being used.

    The fix: Assign a single owner for the OGSM document. That person is responsible for updating it after every review meeting and circulating the updated version within 48 hours.

    7. Your Team Doesn’t Know How Their Work Connects to the Strategy

    If individual contributors or team leaders can’t explain how their work connects to the overall Objective and Goals, the strategy isn’t guiding day-to-day priorities. It’s operating in parallel to the real work.

    The fix: This is a cascade problem. Each team should have a clear line of sight from their tasks to the company’s Goals. If that connection doesn’t exist, either build it through a cascade OGSM or simplify the strategy until the connection becomes obvious.

    8. You’re Consistently Hitting Targets That Require No Change

    If every Goal comes in at exactly 100% every quarter with no significant course corrections, one of two things is true: either your execution is genuinely exceptional, or your targets aren’t stretching enough to drive growth.

    Comfortable targets feel good. They also tend to correlate with stagnant results.

    The fix: Revisit your Goal-setting methodology. A well-set Goal should require your team to do things differently, not just more of the same. If you’ve hit your revenue Goal every year for five years without fundamentally changing your approach, it’s probably time to raise the bar.

    9. Ownership of Goals and Strategies Is Unclear

    In a review meeting, you discuss a red Goal and nobody in the room feels specifically responsible for fixing it. Everyone is vaguely accountable. Nobody is actually accountable.

    The fix: Every Goal and every Strategy on your OGSM should have a single named owner — not a team, not a department, a person. That person presents the status at every review and proposes actions when it’s off track. Diffuse ownership is how strategies die quietly.

    10. You’re Measuring Outputs Instead of Outcomes

    “We published fifteen articles this quarter.” “We ran twelve sales calls.” “We delivered the training programme.” These are outputs — things you did. Outcomes are what changed as a result: traffic increased, pipeline grew, team capability improved.

    A strategy tracked only by outputs is a strategy that can look busy while going nowhere.

    The fix: For every Measure on your OGSM, ask: “Does this tell us about what we did, or about what changed?” Wherever possible, replace output Measures with outcome Measures. “Articles published” becomes “organic sessions generated.” “Sales calls made” becomes “qualified meetings booked.”

    What to Do If Several Signs Are Present

    One warning sign is a flag. Three or more is a signal that your strategy process needs a reset, not just a tune-up.

    A reset doesn’t mean scrapping the strategy. It usually means running a one-day strategy health check — bringing the leadership team together to honestly assess the OGSM against each of these warning signs, and agreeing on three specific changes to make within the next 30 days.

    It also means revisiting your review cadence and format. If the process isn’t working, the problem is usually the structure of the meeting, not the people in it. And it means reassigning ownership explicitly — if accountability has drifted, it needs to be re-established directly, not hinted at.

    The goal isn’t a perfect strategy. It’s a strategy that’s genuinely guiding decisions, being reviewed, and adapting to what you learn.

    A Tool That Makes Off-Track Visible

    One reason strategies drift unnoticed is that the OGSM isn’t in a format that makes status easy to see at a glance. When your Goals and Measures are in a clearly structured, RAG-coded template, it’s much harder to ignore what’s red.

    The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel are designed to make status visible — so the conversation at your next review starts with the right question: “Why is this red, and what are we going to do about it?”

  • OGSM for Startups: Does It Work Before Product-Market Fit?

    OGSM for Startups: Does It Work Before Product-Market Fit?

    There’s a version of OGSM that works before product-market fit — and it fits on a whiteboard.

    Most strategic frameworks were built for organisations that already know what they’re doing. OGSM is no exception — it was designed for Procter & Gamble, not for a two-person team pivoting every 90 days. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless before you hit product-market fit. It means you have to strip it back.

    This post walks through what pre-PMF OGSM looks like in practice, what to cut, and when you should forget OGSM entirely.

    Can OGSM Work Before You Have Product-Market Fit?

    Yes — with significant caveats.

    OGSM’s strength is alignment. It forces a team to agree on one Objective, a small number of Goals that define what success looks like, a handful of Strategies that describe how you’ll get there, and Measures that tell you whether your Strategies are working.

    At the pre-PMF stage, the alignment problem is real. Co-founders argue about whether to prioritise the enterprise deal or the self-serve funnel. The first engineer builds for scale while the founders are still testing whether anyone wants the product. A one-page strategic document can cut through that noise faster than any amount of Slack discussion.

    But here’s where it gets complicated. In a mature organisation, every element of an OGSM is grounded in data — historical performance, market research, validated positioning. Pre-PMF, you don’t have that. Your Objective, Goals, and Strategies are all hypotheses. Nothing is validated. The market may tell you in month three that your core assumption was wrong, and you’ll need to rewrite the whole thing.

    That’s fine. The OGSM is not a contract — it’s a shared bet. The value is the alignment it creates now, not the accuracy it guarantees later. But to get that value without the overhead, your pre-PMF OGSM needs to feel less like a three-year plan and more like a focused hypothesis for the next six months. Horizon matters enormously here. Cut it to 90–180 days maximum and commit to reviewing it at the end of that window.

    What Does a Pre-PMF OGSM Actually Look Like?

    Here’s a worked example for a pre-revenue B2B SaaS startup building a compliance automation tool for SMEs.

    Objective: Become the compliance automation tool that professional services SMEs trust to manage their audit trails.

    Goals:

    1. Achieve 10 paying customers (minimum £99/month) by end of month five
    2. Reach NPS > 50 among pilot users after 60 days of use

    Strategies:

    1. Direct outreach to compliance managers in legal and accounting firms via founder-led LinkedIn outreach — 20 targeted messages per founder per week, no automation
    2. Ship fortnightly based on pilot feedback — biweekly releases tied directly to the highest-friction moments identified in customer interviews
    3. Run a 30-day free pilot with white-glove onboarding — reduce time-to-value so pilots convert before fatigue sets in

    Measures:

    • Outreach response rate (target: ≥15%)
    • Pilot-to-paid conversion rate (target: ≥40%)
    • Weekly active users among pilot cohort (target: ≥70%)

    Notice what this OGSM is doing — and what it isn’t.

    The Objective is qualitative and directional. It describes the position you want to own in your market, not a number you want to hit by a date. That logic belongs in Goals. Goals are where the measurable commitments live — 10 customers, NPS above 50. They tell you whether you’re on track to reach the Objective.

    Each Strategy is a real bet: a specific channel, a specific cadence, a specific go-to-market mechanism. There’s no hedging. If you chose LinkedIn outreach, you chose it over cold email, paid ads, and inbound SEO. That trade-off is the strategy. If every option still looks equally valid, you haven’t made a decision yet.

    The Measures are leading indicators, not lagging ones. Outreach response rate tells you whether your messaging is resonating before you know whether it converts. Pilot-to-paid conversion tells you whether the product earns its price before you’ve closed enough deals to know if the model works. That’s the point — Measures should give you signal early enough to change course.

    That’s it. One Objective. Two Goals. Three Strategies. A handful of Measures. It fits on one page. It could fit on a whiteboard. Nothing here requires a planning retreat or a strategy consultant — just a shared answer to the question: what are we actually trying to prove, and how?

    What Should You Strip Out of a Pre-PMF OGSM?

    Cascading Measures. In a full OGSM implementation, every Strategy has its own Measure set, and you may cascade further down into team or function-level Measures. Skip this entirely. You don’t have enough stable KPIs yet, and you’ll spend more time debating which metric belongs to which Strategy than you will running experiments. At this stage, pick three to five Measures that collectively tell you whether the Objective is on track — and leave it there. (For reference on what strong Measures look like at a later stage, see 7 OGSM Mistakes That Kill Your Strategy — the most common one is Measures that are outputs, not leading indicators.)

    More than three Strategies. If you have five or six Strategies pre-PMF, you’re either hedging or you haven’t made a real bet yet. Three Strategies is a hard cap. Preferably two. Each Strategy should represent a real trade-off — something you’re choosing to do instead of something else. If every option looks equally valid, you haven’t done the hard prioritisation work. Pick the bets with the most signal-per-effort and cut the rest.

    More than three Goals. Your Goals define what success looks like. Two to three Goals forces you to get specific about what actually matters in the next 90–180 days. More than that and you’re writing a wish list, not a strategy. If you have five Goals and they’re all “critical,” none of them are. Ruthlessly narrow it down to the two outcomes that would genuinely change what you do next.

    Long time horizons. Don’t write a three-year OGSM at the pre-PMF stage. You don’t have the data to justify it, and it will be out of date before the ink is dry. Stick to 90–180 days. Review it at the end of that period. If your hypothesis has changed — and it probably will — update your Objective and reset.

    How Do You Build Your First Pre-PMF OGSM?

    You don’t need a facilitated off-site. You need a half-day session with your co-founders and a shared document. Here’s a simple sequence that works.

    Start with the Objective. Before anything else, spend 30–45 minutes on the Objective alone. Write it individually, then compare. The Objective should describe the strategic position you’re trying to own — qualitative, directional, no dates. If you and your co-founder write different Objectives, that’s the most important conversation you’ll have all quarter. Don’t paper over it by merging both into a long sentence. Decide.

    Draft the Goals together. Once the Objective is agreed, Goals follow relatively quickly. Goals answer: what does success look like in numbers, by when? Aim for two Goals maximum at this stage. If you find yourself wanting a third, ask whether it’s really a Measure in disguise.

    Challenge every Strategy. For each proposed Strategy, ask: what is this instead of? If you can’t answer that, it’s not a Strategy — it’s a preference. A genuine Strategy has an opportunity cost. Write the alternative you rejected next to each Strategy you kept, and make sure the team understands why you chose this one.

    Set your Measures last. Measures are often written first because they feel concrete and comfortable. Write them last. Start from your Strategies and ask: what would tell us, within 30 days, whether this Strategy is working? The answer to that question is your Measure. If you can’t answer it, your Strategy isn’t specific enough yet.

    The whole session should take three to four hours maximum. If it’s taking longer, you’re probably arguing about the Objective — which means you skipped the most important step.

    What If You Don’t Know Your Objective Yet?

    This is the real test.

    OGSM’s entire structure hangs on the Objective. Everything else — Goals, Strategies, Measures — is in service of that one sentence. If you can’t write a clear Objective that your co-founders agree on, you’re not ready for OGSM yet.

    And that’s not a failure. It’s useful information.

    If you and your co-founder spend 45 minutes trying to write the Objective and can’t agree, you’ve just uncovered a misalignment that would have derailed any planning process. The OGSM template has done its job without you completing it.

    Common pre-PMF blockers to a clear Objective:

    • Disagreement about whether you’re targeting enterprises or SMEs
    • Uncertainty about whether you’re selling a product or a service
    • No shared view of the time horizon you’re planning against
    • An Objective that’s really a Goal (“grow to 100 customers”) rather than a directional statement (“become the default compliance tool for UK professional services firms”)

    That last one trips up a lot of founding teams. An Objective describes a position — where you want to be in the market, and for whom. A Goal describes a result — what you will achieve by a specific date. If your Objective has a number in it, it’s probably a Goal. For worked examples of how to write a strong OGSM Objective at different stages, see OGSM Objectives Examples.

    If you’re still stuck, don’t force the OGSM. Work on the Objective first — even if that means a half-day offsite with your co-founders before you open the template.

    What’s the Alternative at the Very Earliest Stage?

    If your team is fewer than five people, you’ve spoken to fewer than twenty potential customers, and you’re still testing your core value hypothesis — you might not need OGSM at all yet.

    Two simpler tools worth trying first:

    A one-pager. One sentence on the problem you’re solving, one sentence on the customer you’re solving it for, one sentence on your hypothesis about the solution, and three bullet points on what you’ll do in the next 30 days to test it. Fits in Notion. Can be updated in five minutes. Does not require a planning process.

    A hypothesis map. A simple visual structure: your assumption (customers in segment X will pay for Y to solve Z), the experiments you’re running to test it, and what you’ll conclude from each outcome. This is close enough to strategic planning for the very early stage without the overhead of a full OGSM structure.

    Neither of these replaces OGSM. They’re pre-OGSM — the planning work you do before you have enough signal to build a real strategy. Think of them as the foundation you lay so that, when you do write your first OGSM, it’s grounded in real customer understanding rather than founder assumptions.

    When Should You Graduate to a Full OGSM?

    Watch for three signals:

    1. A validated Objective. You know who your customer is, what job they’re hiring your product to do, and you have paying customers (not just pilots) who confirm it. Your Objective is no longer a hypothesis — it’s a direction the business has already started moving in.

    2. Stable KPIs. Your core metrics aren’t changing every sprint. You’ve settled on the two or three numbers that actually tell you whether the business is working — churn, CAC payback, NRR, whatever fits your model. Stable Measures are the prerequisite for a meaningful Measures cascade. If your definition of a “good week” changes month to month, you’re not there yet.

    3. A team that needs alignment. If it’s two co-founders and a contractor, informal alignment is probably fine. Once you’re hiring fast enough that people are making decisions without full context, OGSM starts earning its overhead. The first sign is usually when you realise two team members have conflicting assumptions about the strategy — and neither of them is wrong, they just never compared notes.

    Once you hit those three signals, you’re ready for the full version — Goals that cascade into team-level goals, Measures for each Strategy, and a quarterly planning process that involves the whole leadership team. For a detailed guide to what that looks like at the 20–100 person stage, see Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up?.

    OGSM is a focused tool. Used at the pre-PMF stage, it works best when it’s small, honest about uncertainty, and reviewed often. The goal isn’t to have a perfect strategy. It’s to have a shared bet — one that everyone on the founding team can recite from memory and hold each other accountable to.

    Rock on.

  • How to Cascade Your OGSM Across Your Organisation

    How to Cascade Your OGSM Across Your Organisation

    A strategy that only lives at the top of the organisation isn’t really a strategy — it’s a set of senior leadership intentions that nobody else acts on.

    Cascading your OGSM means translating the company-level Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures into department-level OGSMs that support the parent plan. Each department keeps the same Objective, then builds its own Goals, Strategies, and Measures that contribute directly to the company’s. Done well, every team member can trace their work back to the organisation’s direction.

    Here’s how to cascade without losing alignment — or your team’s sanity.

    Why Cascading Matters

    Most strategy failures aren’t failures of planning. They’re failures of translation. The executive team agrees on an excellent strategy, it gets presented, and then people go back to their desks and continue doing more or less what they were already doing.

    The OGSM cascade solves this by creating a direct line of sight between the company’s Objective and every team’s day-to-day work. When someone in operations can look at their team’s OGSM and see exactly how it connects to the company-level Goals, strategy stops being something that happens in boardrooms and starts being something that shapes how people prioritise their week.

    The Structure of a Cascade

    Think of it as a tree:

    Level 1 — Company OGSM: The overall Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures for the organisation.

    Level 2 — Division or Function OGSMs: HR, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Operations each build their own OGSM. Same Objective. Different Goals and Strategies that reflect what their function contributes.

    Level 3 — Team or Project OGSMs (optional): In larger organisations, individual teams or major projects may have their own sub-OGSMs cascaded from the division level.

    The cascade doesn’t require all three levels. Many organisations work well with just two. What matters is that every level’s Goals visibly contribute to the level above it.

    How to Build the Cascade

    Step 1: Lock the Company OGSM First

    Don’t start building department OGSMs until the company-level plan is finalised. This sounds obvious, but cascading before the top-level plan is locked leads to department Goals that point in slightly different directions.

    The company OGSM is the fixed point. Everything below it aligns to it — not the other way around.

    Step 2: Identify Each Department’s Contribution

    For each department, ask: which company Goals does this function directly influence?

    Marketing influences awareness, traffic, and pipeline Goals. Sales influences revenue and customer acquisition Goals. Operations may influence quality, retention, and cost Goals. HR influences capability and culture Goals that underpin almost everything else.

    A department doesn’t need to contribute to every company Goal — just the ones where it genuinely has influence. A cascaded OGSM with three relevant Goals is better than one with six watered-down contributions.

    Step 3: Write the Department Goals

    Department Goals should be outcomes that directly feed the company-level Goals above them.

    If the company Goal is “Grow annual recurring revenue from €5M to €8M by December 2026,” the Sales department Goal might be “Close €2.4M in new ARR from inbound leads by December 2026.” The Marketing department Goal might be “Generate 1,200 qualified leads for the sales team by year-end.”

    Both contribute to the same company Goal. Neither duplicates the other.

    Step 4: Define Department Strategies

    Department Strategies are the specific choices that department will make to hit their Goals. These are usually more operational and specific than the company-level Strategies.

    Company Strategy: “Invest in content marketing to drive inbound demand.”

    Marketing’s Strategy (cascaded): “Publish two SEO-targeted articles per week; run monthly LinkedIn campaigns to drive article traffic; build a lead magnet to convert organic visitors.”

    Step 5: Set Department Measures

    Department Measures track progress on the department’s Strategies — and should be reviewed at the same cadence as company Measures (usually monthly).

    The head of the department owns the department OGSM review. The company-level review draws from these department inputs.

    Making the Cascade Visible

    One of the most powerful things you can do with a cascade is make the connections visible — literally. In your OGSM template, cross-reference department Goals back to the company Goal they support.

    For example, in the Marketing OGSM, next to each Goal, note the company Goal it feeds: “Feeds: Company Goal 2 — Revenue €8M.” This keeps the alignment explicit rather than assumed, and it gives every review a natural “so what” test: if we hit this department Goal, which company Goal moves?

    Common Cascade Mistakes

    Building department OGSMs in silos. If departments build their own OGSMs without referencing the company-level plan, you get local optimisation rather than aligned execution. Heads of department should build their plans in a facilitated session, ideally with the company OGSM on the wall.

    Allowing too much divergence. Some flexibility in department-level Goals is fine. But if a department’s Goals don’t clearly contribute to any company Goal, they’re not cascading — they’re operating a separate strategy.

    Treating the cascade as a one-time exercise. The cascade is a living system. When the company OGSM changes mid-year because of market conditions, the department OGSMs need to update too. Build in a review trigger: whenever the company-level plan changes significantly, review department plans within the following month.

    Cascading too deep too soon. For most organisations, two levels is enough. A third level of team-level OGSMs makes sense only when teams are large and distinct enough to genuinely need their own planning. Don’t create complexity for its own sake.

    Cascade in a Small Business

    Cascading isn’t only for large organisations. Even a three-person business benefits from making the connection explicit between the business-level strategy and each person’s role.

    If your business OGSM has a Goal of growing revenue 40% this year, a simple cascade might mean:

    • Person A’s individual plan focuses on sales and client relationships.
    • Person B’s plan focuses on delivery quality and retention.
    • Person C’s plan focuses on operations and cost efficiency.

    Each person knows exactly how their work contributes to the shared Goal, and the monthly review becomes a two-level check: are we hitting our individual Measures, and is that moving the business Goal?

    The Right Format for a Cascade

    Cascading works best when all levels use the same template format. If the company OGSM is in PowerPoint, department OGSMs should be in the same template. If it’s in Excel, same. Consistency of format makes it easy to review across levels and keeps the visual alignment clear.

    The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel are built for exactly this — you can use the same template at company and department level, adjust the Goals and Measures for each, and keep the whole cascade on the same page layout. That consistency makes cascade reviews much faster and alignment much more visible.

  • Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up? A Practical Guide (With Worked Example)

    Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up? A Practical Guide (With Worked Example)

    Yes — if you’re between 30 and 200 people and your strategy is starting to slip through the cracks, OGSM is almost certainly the right framework for where you are right now.

    OGSM is a one-page strategic planning tool that forces alignment across a leadership team that can no longer hold the entire company direction in their heads. The OGSM framework perfectly suits small businesses for its simplicity, clarity, and ease of use.

    Here’s how to know for sure, and what building one looks like in practice.

    When does OGSM actually fit a scale-up?

    OGSM — Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures — is a one-page strategic planning framework originally developed at Procter & Gamble. It’s since become widely used across SMEs and multinationals that want every team member reading from the same page of strategy, literally.

    For scale-ups specifically, OGSM fits well when three conditions are true:

    You’re in the £5M–£50M revenue range (or roughly 30–200 people). Below this, the founder’s instincts and weekly all-hands meetings do the job. Above it, you typically need something more sophisticated. In the middle, OGSM’s single-page constraint forces clarity without adding bureaucratic weight.

    You’re transitioning from founder-led intuition to structured strategy. The classic scale-up inflection point is when the leadership team can no longer hold the entire strategy in their heads. Decisions start getting made in silos. Sales pursues a segment the product team isn’t building for. Marketing campaigns features that engineering has de-prioritised. OGSM gives you a shared document that every department head can point to when making trade-offs.

    You’re hiring fast enough that alignment is becoming a friction cost. Onboarding a new Head of Finance or VP of Sales is dramatically faster when you can hand them a single page that captures the company’s direction, the three or four strategies you’re betting on, and the specific numbers you’re tracking to know if it’s working.

    If you recognise your company in those three conditions, OGSM is worth a serious look.

    When do OKRs make more sense?

    I’m not anti-OKR. They’re the right tool for the right context, and it’s worth being clear about when that context applies.

    OKRs work best when:

    • You need fast iteration cycles. OKRs run quarterly, which suits product organisations that ship continuously and need to recalibrate every 90 days based on user feedback.
    • Teams are largely self-organising. OKRs push goal-setting downward. Individual contributors write their own Key Results and align them to company-level Objectives. That’s energising in a high-autonomy culture.
    • You want bottom-up accountability. The OKR model is built on transparency — everyone can see everyone else’s goals. That fosters peer accountability in flat organisations.

    Where OKRs can struggle at scale-up stage: the quarterly cadence can create a wall of sticky notes that no one looks at after week three. Without a longer-horizon strategy document anchoring the OKRs, teams can hit their quarterly numbers and still drift from the company’s three-year direction. OGSM doesn’t replace the quarterly rhythm — but it provides the strategic spine that OKRs hang from.

    Many scale-ups that thrive with OGSM use it to set the 12–18 month strategic frame, then run OKRs within each strategy pillar for quarterly execution. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

    What does a scale-up OGSM look like in practice?

    Company: Findr — a 35-person B2B SaaS business helping professional services firms track project profitability. Revenue: £8M ARR. Growing at 40% YoY. Headcount doubled in 18 months.

    The problem: Three VPs were making independent resourcing decisions. The Head of Engineering was building an enterprise SSO integration. The Head of Marketing was doubling down on SME content. Sales was pitching mid-market. Nobody was wrong — but the company was pulling in three directions.

    Two half-day sessions with the seven-person leadership team produced this:

    Objective: Become the go-to profitability tool for professional services firms in the UK, trusted by 500 firms within three years.

    Goals:

    1. Reach £15M ARR by end of FY26
    2. Achieve NPS of 45+ across the customer base by Q4
    3. Reduce average time-to-value for new customers from 45 days to 20 days by end of FY26

    Strategies (the specific choices about where and how to compete):

    1. Double down on accountancy and legal verticals — not generic SME, not enterprise
    2. Build a referral-first growth model via existing customer champions
    3. Invest in onboarding, not acquisition, until time-to-value hits target

    Measures (leading indicators for each strategy):

    • % of new ARR from accountancy + legal (target: 70% by Q4)
    • % of new pipeline sourced from referrals (target: 35% by Q3)
    • Average onboarding completion rate (target: 85%)

    It fit on one page. Every leadership decision since has been tested against it: Does this serve Strategy 1, 2, or 3? If not, why are we doing it?

    The SSO integration was deprioritised. The SME content was refocused on accountancy and legal pain points. Sales aligned its ICP to match.

    What are the most common scale-up OGSM mistakes?

    1. Too many Strategies. A five-strategy OGSM is not a strategy — it’s a list of things you plan to do. OGSM forces hard choices. If you can’t cut it to three or four strategies, you haven’t made the choices yet. Go back to the Objective and ask which two or three bets would most directly deliver it.

    2. Objectives that are still Goals. “Grow revenue by 40%” is a Goal, not an Objective. An Objective is directional and qualitative: what kind of company are you becoming? Goals are the measurable milestones that prove you’re getting there. Mixing the two is the most common first-draft error. See the 7 OGSM Mistakes guide for a full breakdown.

    3. Measures no one owns. A Measure without an owner is a wish, not a metric. Every Measure in your OGSM needs a named person who updates it at your monthly leadership review. Without ownership, Measures become decorative — and the OGSM stops being a live management tool and starts being a document that lives in a Notion page no one opens.

    How do you get started with OGSM this quarter?

    Step 1: Download a template and run a draft solo. Before you book a team session, write a rough draft of your OGSM yourself. It doesn’t need to be right — it needs to surface the assumptions and gaps that will fuel the real conversation. The free OGSM template gives you the structure to do this in under two hours.

    Step 2: Book two half-day sessions with your leadership team. Don’t try to do this in one four-hour block. End the first session at the Goals. Sleep on it. Return for Strategies and Measures with fresh eyes — the overnight gap changes the conversation quality significantly.

    Step 3: Pick your first monthly review date before you leave the room. The OGSM is not a set-and-forget document. It works because leadership teams use it to run monthly strategy reviews. Book the first one before the session ends, assign each Measure an owner, and commit to a 60-minute review cadence.

    For more context on whether OGSM suits your specific company stage, compare it with the OGSM for Small Business guide. If you’re already running OKRs and wondering whether to switch, the OGSM vs OKR comparison lays out the trade-offs side by side.

    The framework is simple. The discipline is in the choices.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM vs Hoshin Kanri: Same DNA, Different Operating System

    OGSM vs Hoshin Kanri: Same DNA, Different Operating System

    OGSM and Hoshin Kanri are both strategy-execution frameworks with Japanese roots, and both are built to align an entire organisation behind a shared strategic direction. The core difference is operating model.

    OGSM is a single-page, top-down document that prioritises speed and clarity; Hoshin Kanri is a more complex, bidirectional planning system built for large organisations with mature continuous improvement cultures. For most teams, OGSM gets you further, faster. For enterprise manufacturing environments already running Lean or Six Sigma, Hoshin Kanri may be the natural fit.

    In this article we introduce each strategy framework, describe their differences, and explore when to use either one.

    What Is Hoshin Kanri?

    Hoshin Kanri — sometimes called Policy Deployment — emerged in Japan in the 1960s, drawing on the quality management work of pioneers like Kaoru Ishikawa and Yoji Akao. The name roughly translates as “direction management” or “compass needle management.” Its purpose is to cascade strategic intent from the C-suite all the way to the shop floor, ensuring every level of the organisation is pulling in the same direction.

    The hallmark of Hoshin Kanri is the catchball process. Unlike top-down cascades, catchball is a dialogue: leadership throws a strategic objective down to the next level, that level responds with their capacity and constraints, and the objective is refined before being thrown again. It is iterative, consensus-building, and time-intensive — by design. Done well, catchball surfaces operational constraints that leadership teams simply cannot see from the boardroom.

    The X-matrix is Hoshin Kanri’s primary tool. It maps the relationships between long-term breakthrough objectives, annual priorities, improvement activities, and metrics on a single page. It is a powerful instrument in the right hands. In the wrong hands, it produces a complex document that nobody reads after January.

    What Is OGSM?

    For readers arriving from a Hoshin Kanri background: OGSM stands for Objective, Goals, Strategies, Measures. It originated in Procter & Gamble’s Japan operations in the 1980s — ironically, influenced by the same TQM tradition that shaped Hoshin Kanri — and was designed for speed and portability. The entire plan fits on one page. One Objective (the qualitative ambition), several Goals (the quantitative targets), Strategies (the choices you are making), and Measures (how you will track whether those choices are working). That is it.

    OGSM’s simplicity is not naivety — it is a deliberate constraint. You cannot hide strategic confusion in a one-page document.

    How Do OGSM and Hoshin Kanri Differ?

    Both frameworks are trying to answer the same question: how do we turn strategy into coordinated action at every level? They answer it very differently.

    Dimension OGSM Hoshin Kanri
    Structure One-page linear document (O -> G -> S -> M) X-matrix with cross-linked relationships
    Cascade method Top-down Bidirectional (catchball)
    Time to implement Days to weeks Months (first full cycle)
    Required expertise Low — any team can learn it High — Lean/Six Sigma facilitation typically needed
    Documentation Minimal Extensive
    Review cadence Flexible (quarterly is common) Structured monthly reviews built into the system

    The biggest practical difference is implementation friction. An SME leadership team can learn and run OGSM in a day. A full Hoshin Kanri deployment typically takes a full planning cycle to bed in, and it demands trained facilitators to keep the catchball process honest and productive. That is not a flaw in Hoshin Kanri — it is a design trade-off. The depth of engagement produces better cascade alignment. But it requires an organisation that is ready and resourced for it.

    When Should You Choose OGSM?

    OGSM is the right call when speed and simplicity matter more than elaborate cascade mechanics. Consider it if you are:

    • A small or mid-sized business building strategic discipline for the first time
    • A team or business unit that needs a fast alignment tool without organisational bureaucracy
    • An organisation that has tried and failed with overly complex planning frameworks
    • A leadership team that wants one document everyone can hold in their head

    The one-page constraint is OGSM’s greatest strength. It forces the clarity that most strategy processes never achieve. I have seen organisations spend six months on a Hoshin Kanri rollout and still not be able to articulate their strategy in a sentence. That does not happen with a well-built OGSM — the format will not let you hide behind vagueness.

    For a full walkthrough of the format, read our complete OGSM guide. If you are also evaluating OKRs, our OGSM vs OKRs breakdown covers that head-to-head in detail.

    When Should You Choose Hoshin Kanri?

    Hoshin Kanri earns its complexity premium in specific conditions. It is the right choice when:

    • You are running a large manufacturing or industrial organisation with established Lean or Six Sigma programmes already embedded in the culture
    • Frontline input into strategy is genuinely essential — the catchball process is superior at surfacing operational constraints that senior leaders cannot see from above
    • You have multi-year transformation programmes where annual cycles must stay explicitly locked to long-range breakthrough objectives
    • Your teams already speak the language of continuous improvement, A3 thinking, and structured review cadences

    In these contexts, the X-matrix’s ability to map the explicit relationships between long-term breakthroughs, annual priorities, process-level improvement activities, and metrics is genuinely valuable. Hoshin Kanri is not over-engineered for these environments — it is precisely engineered for them. The infrastructure it requires is justified by the cascade complexity it manages.

    If you are not in that environment, that infrastructure will cost more than it delivers.

    Can You Use OGSM and Hoshin Kanri Together?

    Yes — and some mature organisations do exactly this. The pattern that works is: use OGSM at the leadership level for the annual strategy document, then apply Hoshin Kanri principles for the cascade below it.

    Concretely: the leadership team aligns on the OGSM, then uses a catchball-style dialogue to translate the Strategies and Measures into departmental OGSMs. The X-matrix can serve as a cascade validation tool — mapping which departmental activities connect to which enterprise-level measures — without requiring a full Hoshin Kanri deployment from scratch.

    This hybrid approach gives you OGSM’s clarity at the top and Hoshin Kanri’s cascade rigour below. It is not officially sanctioned by either framework’s purists, but it works in practice. Several organisations I have encountered have landed here after initially trying each framework independently and finding that the extremes of each did not fully serve them.

    OGSM vs Hoshin Kanri: Which Framework Should You Choose?

    Both frameworks exist to solve the same fundamental problem: organisations that set strategy and then fail to execute it. They solve it differently, and neither is universally superior.

    If you want a lean, fast, flexible framework that any team can learn and run without specialist support, choose OGSM. If you are operating in a mature Lean environment and need a system specifically built for complex, multi-level cascade with deep frontline engagement, Hoshin Kanri has capabilities that OGSM does not replicate.

    When in doubt — and for most organisations reading this, doubt is appropriate — start with OGSM. You can always layer in Hoshin Kanri cascade mechanics later as your strategic operating maturity grows. The reverse — simplifying a full Hoshin Kanri deployment that has stalled — is considerably harder and more politically fraught.

    Rock on.

  • Why Most Strategies Fail (And Three Things You Can Do About It)

    Why Most Strategies Fail (And Three Things You Can Do About It)

    Most strategies fail not because leaders are not smart enough, but because they mistake aspiration for direction.

    Strategies fail because they leave room for ambiguity, mistake action for progress, and lack integration into operational processes.

    A strategy that cannot tell you what to say no to is not a strategy — it is a wish list dressed in a slide deck. I have spent years working with leadership teams across industries, from fast-scaling start-ups to established mid-market businesses, and the same three failure patterns show up every time. Not occasionally. Reliably. The good news: all three are fixable.

    What Is the Real Reason Why Most Strategies Fail?

    Ask most leadership teams what their strategy is and you will get a recitation of values, vision, and ambitions. “We want to be the most trusted provider in our market.” “We are committed to exceptional customer experience.” “We are focused on sustainable growth.”

    None of that is strategy.

    Strategy is a decision. Specifically, it is a decision about what you will do — and more importantly, what you will not do. When a strategy cannot tell you what to say no to, it cannot guide behaviour. Teams cannot prioritise. Middle managers make competing calls. Leaders wonder why execution keeps fragmenting.

    I sat in a room last year with a leadership team of twelve people. I asked them each to write down the top three strategic priorities for the year. I got eleven different answers. Nobody was lying. Nobody was being difficult. They had all attended the same strategy presentation six months earlier. But the strategy was written in a way that let every person hear something different — because it had been designed to inspire, not to decide.

    The real problem is not ambition. Ambition is useful. The problem is ambiguity disguised as direction. When everything feels strategic, nothing is.

    The fix: Force the trade-off. Take your current strategy statement and ask: “What does this require us to stop doing, reduce, or decline?” If you cannot answer that, you do not have a strategy — you have a preference. The OGSM framework is one of the most effective tools I know for translating aspiration into specific, testable decisions. It requires you to name Goals that can be measured and Strategies that are genuinely choices — not just activities dressed up as direction.

    Why Do Teams Confuse Busyness With Progress?

    The second failure is subtler — and far more common than most leaders want to admit.

    Teams are busy. Genuinely busy. Calendars are full. Projects are running. Slide decks are being built. And yet six months after the strategy was announced, nothing strategically significant has changed.

    This happens because organisations confuse activity with progress. There is no feedback loop connecting what people do day-to-day to the outcomes the strategy is supposed to achieve. No-one knows whether all that busyness is actually moving the needle — or just keeping people occupied and comfortable.

    I worked with a leadership team who were convinced their growth strategy was on track. Pipeline numbers were up. Sales activity was high. Everyone was running. When we mapped their KPIs back to strategic intent, we found they were measuring effort — calls made, proposals sent, meetings attended — rather than strategic outcome: revenue from new customer segments, retention in the target market, margin improvement. Their measurement system was accidentally tracking the wrong thing. It rewarded hustle and reported it as strategy.

    This is extraordinarily common. And it is lethal because it feels fine right up until the board asks for results — at which point twelve months of momentum turns out to have been motion, not progress.

    The fix: Build a feedback loop between action and outcome. For every strategic priority, define a leading indicator (something you can measure now that predicts the outcome you want) and a lagging indicator (the result you are ultimately trying to achieve). Review these regularly — not annually. If your strategy has measures that only tell you how you did last year, you are navigating with a rear-view mirror.

    This is exactly where a structured approach like OGSM earns its keep. It forces you to define Measures for every Strategy — not just hope that action translates to outcome. You can download the OGSM template to see how that structure works in practice. Having the right measures changes what conversations happen at the leadership level — which is where strategy either lives or quietly dies.

    Why Does Strategy Live in a Deck Instead of Driving Decisions?

    This third failure pattern is the one I find most frustrating — because it is almost entirely avoidable.

    Strategy gets announced, often with great fanfare. There is a leadership away-day, a well-designed presentation, a town-hall. People leave feeling energised. And then the deck lands in a SharePoint folder no-one opens, and the organisation goes back to doing what it has always done — because nothing about the operating system of the business has actually changed.

    Strategy only drives behaviour when it is integrated into the rhythm of how the business runs. Not referenced once a quarter. Not reviewed at the annual planning cycle. Integrated into how decisions get made every single week.

    When a team brings a resource request to a leadership meeting, does it get tested against strategic priorities? When a new partnership opportunity arrives, does the team have a clear framework for deciding whether it fits the strategy or distracts from it? When performance reviews happen, are people being measured against strategic contribution — or just output?

    If the answers to those questions are no, the strategy is not running the business. It is decorating a wall somewhere.

    The fix: Integrate strategy into your weekly and monthly operating cadences. The most effective leadership teams I have worked with have a standing item on their weekly meeting agenda: “What are we saying no to this week?” It takes five minutes. It keeps the strategy present. Over time, it reshapes culture — because the message lands clearly that strategy is not a document. It is a discipline.

    This is also where having a clean, one-page strategy summary matters. If your strategy fits on a single page in plain language, people can refer to it and hold each other to it. If it lives in a 40-slide deck with small print and executive summaries, it will not survive contact with operational reality.

    What Is the Common Thread Behind Every Strategy Failure?

    All three failure patterns share the same root: strategy is treated as a communication exercise rather than an operational system.

    Leaders create a strategy, communicate it, and expect behaviour to change. But behaviour changes when decisions change. Decisions change when there are clear criteria, feedback loops, and a rhythm of accountability woven into how the business actually operates.

    The leaders who execute strategy well share three habits:

    • They can articulate their strategy in a single sentence — and specifically what it rules out.
    • They review leading indicators weekly, not just lagging ones quarterly.
    • They use the strategy to make — and refuse — real decisions, not just to guide presentations.

    None of this is complicated. But all of it is harder than writing a slide deck. Which is why so few organisations actually do it.

    What Should You Do Next?

    If this resonates — the aspiration that never quite lands, the busyness that never quite becomes progress, the deck that quietly dies in a shared folder — I wrote more about it in The Strategy Lie, a business fable about exactly this pattern.

    It goes deeper on why most strategy fails at the execution layer, and what the leaders who get it right do differently.

    Follow The Strategy Lie’s progress →

    Rock on.

  • OGSM for Small Business: The Complete Strategic Planning Guide (With Real Examples)

    OGSM for Small Business: The Complete Strategic Planning Guide (With Real Examples)

    Most strategic planning frameworks were built for companies with dedicated strategy teams, quarterly board reviews, and the kind of budget that covers three-day off-sites. If you run a business with 5 to 200 people, that’s not your world.

    OGSM — Objective, Goals, Strategies, Measures — gives small businesses a one-page strategy framework that forces real prioritisation and runs on a monthly review habit, without the overhead of OKRs or a Balanced Scorecard. This guide covers everything you need to write your first OGSM: the framework explained in plain language, three real-world examples, a step-by-step build process for small businesses, and the review cadence to make it stick.

    OGSM for small business is different. This guide is the most complete practical resource you’ll find on using OGSM as a small business owner, founder, or general manager. By the time you finish reading, you’ll have everything you need to write your first OGSM — or fix the one that isn’t working.

    Table of Contents

    1. Why Do Small Businesses Need a One-Page Strategy?
    2. What Is OGSM, and How Does It Work for Small Business Owners?
    3. How Do You Build Your First OGSM Step by Step?
    4. What Do Real OGSM Examples for Small Businesses Look Like?
    5. How Do You Run an OGSM Review?
    6. What Tools and Templates Do You Need for OGSM?
    7. What Are the Most Common OGSM Mistakes Small Businesses Make?
    8. FAQ

    Why Do Small Businesses Need a One-Page Strategy?

    Here’s the strategy planning mistake I see most often in small businesses: the owner spends a weekend writing a 20-page strategic plan, presents it to the team on a Monday, and by Friday nobody can remember what was in it.

    The plan isn’t bad. The format is.

    Long documents don’t drive execution. They sit in a folder on Google Drive, opened maybe twice before the next planning cycle. Meanwhile, the business runs on gut feel, whatever’s urgent that week, and the priorities of whoever shouts loudest. That’s not a strategy — it’s organised chaos.

    Why Complex Frameworks Fail at Small Business Scale

    OKRs, Balanced Scorecards, and similar frameworks are genuinely powerful at the right scale. The problem is they’re expensive to run. OKRs require a dedicated quarterly cycle with cascading objectives through layers of the organisation. The Balanced Scorecard needs someone who understands the four perspectives, a way to measure leading indicators, and regular calibration across departments. When you have 12 people and everyone has a day job, that overhead kills adoption.

    I’ve watched founders burn out trying to implement OKRs as if they were running Google. The system becomes the work instead of supporting it.

    What OGSM Solves

    OGSM — Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures — was originally developed at Procter & Gamble as a way to fit an entire business strategy on a single page. That constraint is the feature, not the bug.

    For small businesses, that single page does three things frameworks like OKR can’t easily do at this scale:

    • Alignment at a glance. Every person in your business can see the whole strategy, understand where they fit, and hold themselves accountable without a manager explaining the cascade every quarter.
    • Honest prioritisation. When everything has to fit on one page, you’re forced to choose. Most small businesses don’t have a strategy problem — they have a prioritisation problem. OGSM fixes that.
    • Low-friction review. You don’t need a strategy function to run a monthly OGSM check-in. A 30-minute team meeting against a shared document is enough.

    If you want the deeper comparison between OGSM and other frameworks, read our OGSM vs OKR guide — but for most small businesses, OGSM is the right starting point.

    What Is OGSM, and How Does It Work for Small Business Owners?

    OGSM stands for Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures. If you’ve never used it before, here’s what each element actually means — and how they fit together.

    Objective

    Your Objective is a single sentence describing what your business is trying to achieve in the next 12 to 36 months. It’s qualitative, directional, and inspiring. It’s not a revenue target — that comes later.

    Think of it as your “why we’re pushing hard right now” statement. A good small business Objective sounds like:

    “Become the most trusted supplier of commercial kitchen equipment in the Pacific Northwest.”

    One sentence. No metrics. If your Objective needs a paragraph to explain, it’s too complicated.

    Goals

    Goals are the 3–5 measurable outcomes that define what success looks like for your Objective. This is where numbers enter the OGSM.

    Goals are specific, time-bound, and measurable. They make your Objective concrete. For the kitchen equipment business above:

    • Grow annual revenue to $4.2M by end of year
    • Achieve net promoter score of 60+ among commercial clients
    • Expand product range to cover 90% of commercial kitchen categories
    • Retain 85% of accounts year-over-year

    If you hit all four of those, you’re probably the most trusted supplier in the region. That’s the test: do your Goals prove your Objective was achieved?

    Strategies

    Strategies are how you’ll achieve your Goals. For each Goal, you identify 2–4 Strategies — the specific approaches, initiatives, or capabilities you’ll build.

    Strategies answer the question: “What are we actually going to do?” They’re more directional than to-do lists but more concrete than vague intentions.

    • Goal: Grow revenue to $4.2M → Strategies: Launch outbound sales programme targeting hospitality groups; build preferred supplier agreements with three commercial kitchen designers; expand service contract offering to existing accounts.

    Measures

    Measures are how you’ll know your Strategies are working. Each Strategy should have at least one lead indicator (a measure of activity you control) and ideally a lag indicator (a measure of outcome).

    This is where OGSM gets sharp. Most strategies fail not because they’re wrong but because nobody ever checks whether they’re working. Measures force that discipline.

    Strategy Lead Measure Lag Measure
    Outbound sales programme Calls made per week New accounts opened per quarter
    Preferred supplier agreements Agreements signed Revenue from partner channel

    For real-world examples of strong lead and lag Measures across different business types, our OGSM measures examples guide is worth bookmarking. For a deeper explanation of how Goals and Measures differ — and why confusing them is the most common OGSM mistake — read our OGSM Goals vs Measures guide.

    The Worked Example: Coastal Home Cleaning Co.

    Let me pull this together with a fictional small business so you can see how it looks in practice.

    Business: Coastal Home Cleaning Co. — 18-person residential cleaning service, 3 years old, founder wants to expand to a second city within two years.

    OGSM:

    Objective: Become the premium home cleaning brand in our region, known for reliability and trust, ready to scale to a second market.

    Goals:

    1. Reach $1.8M annual revenue by end of Year 1
    2. Maintain 4.8+ star average across all review platforms
    3. Build a waitlist of 50+ qualified residential clients in Target City B
    4. Reduce staff turnover to below 20% annually

    Strategies (selected):

    • For Revenue Goal: Launch referral programme targeting existing 5-star accounts; introduce quarterly deep-clean packages at premium price point
    • For Expansion Goal: Hire city lead for Target City B by Q2; run localised digital ads in Target City B from Q3
    • For Retention Goal: Introduce team lead structure and performance bonus tied to client satisfaction scores

    Measures:

    • Weekly: referral sign-ups; new bookings from ads
    • Monthly: revenue vs. target; review score; staff turnover YTD

    That’s a complete OGSM. It fits on one page, every team member can understand it, and you can review it in 20 minutes.

    How Do You Build Your First OGSM Step by Step?

    Building your first OGSM takes longer than maintaining one, but even a first attempt shouldn’t take more than a few focused hours — or a single 90-minute workshop. Here’s the process.

    Step 1: Write Your Objective

    Start here. Don’t try to write Goals first or you’ll anchor too quickly on today’s numbers and miss the bigger picture.

    Ask yourself: what does winning look like for this business in the next 12–24 months? Write a sentence that captures that ambition. It should be inspiring enough to motivate people but honest enough to be credible.

    Avoid objectives that are really Goals in disguise. “Reach £2M revenue” is a Goal. “Be the go-to accountancy firm for tech startups in London” is an Objective.

    If you get stuck, try the formula: [Verb] + [Who/What] + [Qualifier].

    • “Become the most recommended [category] in [geography]”
    • “Build [business type] that [distinctive position]”

    Step 2: Write 3–5 Goals

    Now make it measurable. For each dimension of your Objective, identify one concrete Goal. Most small businesses need Goals in three to five areas:

    • Revenue / financial performance
    • Customer satisfaction / retention
    • Operational capability
    • Team / people
    • Market position / growth

    Don’t write more than five. Five Goals means five things you’re truly committed to. More than that and you don’t have priorities — you have a wish list.

    Each Goal needs a number and a timeframe. “Grow revenue” isn’t a Goal. “Grow revenue to $2.5M by December 31” is.

    Step 3: Identify 2–4 Strategies Per Goal

    For each Goal, ask: what do we need to do differently to achieve this? Strategies are not business-as-usual activities — they’re the moves that make the difference.

    A useful stress-test: if you kept doing everything you’re currently doing but added nothing new, would you hit this Goal? If yes, you don’t need a Strategy there — just execution. Strategy is for the gaps.

    Write each Strategy as a clear action phrase: “Launch X,” “Build Y,” “Partner with Z,” “Discontinue A.”

    Limit yourself to 2–4 Strategies per Goal. Small businesses don’t have the bandwidth for more.

    Step 4: Assign Measures With Owners

    For each Strategy, set a lead and lag measure, and put someone’s name next to it. Unowned Measures don’t get tracked.

    Lead measures matter more than most people think. Revenue is a lag measure — by the time it moves, the ship has already turned. Your lead measures tell you whether the ship is turning now. For a sales strategy, the lead might be “number of discovery calls per week.” For a retention strategy, it might be “NPS survey sent and response rate.”

    Name the owner. In a small business, this is usually straightforward: the founder, a team lead, or a manager who will stand up in the review meeting and report the number.

    The 90-Minute OGSM Workshop Agenda

    If you want to build your OGSM with your team (recommended), here’s a workshop format that works:

    Time Activity
    0–15 min Framing: where we are now, what’s changed, what’s at stake
    15–30 min Draft Objective: each person writes one, group votes and refines
    30–50 min Goals: generate candidates, pressure-test with “does this prove the Objective?”
    50–70 min Strategies: breakout by Goal owner, rapid-fire, filter to 2–4 each
    70–85 min Measures: assign lead/lag for each Strategy, name owners
    85–90 min Review the full OGSM on one page: does it hang together?

    You don’t need a facilitator. You need a shared document, a timer, and someone willing to kill ideas that don’t belong on the page.

    What Do Real OGSM Examples for Small Businesses Look Like?

    Three complete examples across different sectors. These are fictional businesses, but the numbers and strategies reflect what I’ve seen in real-world small business planning contexts.

    Example 1: Thornwood Partners (Professional Services — Management Consulting, 12 staff)

    Objective: Become the consulting partner of choice for founder-led businesses going through their first significant growth transition.

    Goals:

    1. Grow fee income to £1.4M by year-end
    2. Achieve 70%+ revenue from repeat or referred clients
    3. Launch signature 90-day growth accelerator programme by Q2
    4. Build a team capable of running two parallel engagements without founder involvement

    Strategies:

    • Fee income: Increase average engagement value by tiering service offering; pursue 6 new logo clients per quarter
    • Repeat/referral: Introduce structured client review at 30/60/90 days; launch referral incentive for active clients
    • Programme launch: Develop IP and deliver beta cohort with 5 clients; collect case studies for launch marketing
    • Team capability: Hire senior consultant H1; build delivery playbook for top 3 service lines

    Measures (selected): Weekly pipeline review; monthly revenue; NPS post-engagement; programme NPS; senior hire date.

    Example 2: Drift & Co. (E-commerce — Sustainable Activewear, 6 staff + contractors)

    Objective: Build a profitable direct-to-consumer brand with a loyal community of customers who buy more than once.

    Goals:

    1. Reach $900K annual revenue with 30% gross margin
    2. Grow repeat purchase rate to 35%
    3. Build email list to 25,000 active subscribers
    4. Launch in two new product categories without compromising hero line margin

    Strategies:

    • Revenue/margin: Reduce reliance on paid social by 20%; negotiate better COGS through bulk order commitments
    • Repeat purchase: Build post-purchase email sequence; launch loyalty programme with early access perk
    • Email list: Run quarterly lead magnet campaigns; partner with 10 micro-influencers on co-created content
    • New categories: Test two categories with limited drops before committing to stock; gate expansion on hero margin holding above 32%

    Measures (selected): Weekly: email sign-ups, ad ROAS, inventory turns. Monthly: revenue, GM%, repeat rate, list size.

    Example 3: The Salt Room (Hospitality — Boutique Hotel, 22 staff)

    Objective: Position The Salt Room as the destination coastal stay in our region, with strong direct booking and a reputation that outlasts any single review platform.

    Goals:

    1. Achieve 80% average annual occupancy (up from 67%)
    2. Grow direct bookings to 60% of total (currently 38%)
    3. Maintain TripAdvisor and Google rating at 4.7+
    4. Launch events programme generating £80K incremental annual revenue

    Strategies:

    • Occupancy: Target shoulder season with “slow travel” packages; build corporate retreat offering
    • Direct bookings: Launch loyalty programme; invest in SEO and email capture on website; reduce OTA commission by shifting incentives
    • Rating: Introduce guest experience check-in call at 24 hours; empower front desk to resolve issues on the spot up to £50
    • Events: Partner with local food/drink producers for quarterly events; test monthly supper club format

    Measures: Weekly: bookings by channel, occupancy forecast. Monthly: occupancy, direct booking %, review scores, events revenue.

    How Do You Run an OGSM Review?

    The OGSM you write in January is only as good as the reviews you run in February, March, and beyond. The review rhythm is where most small businesses fall down — not the planning.

    The Monthly OGSM Check-In (30 minutes)

    Once a month, bring together whoever owns the Measures and run through the numbers. Keep it short. The agenda:

    1. RAG status (5 min): For each Goal, is it green (on track), amber (risk), or red (off track)?
    2. Lead measure review (10 min): Are activity levels where they should be? If a lag measure is red, check the leads first.
    3. Blockers (10 min): What’s preventing progress? Who needs to make a decision?
    4. Next 30 days (5 min): Confirm priority actions per Strategy.

    No presentations. Pull up the OGSM document, go row by row. If something is amber or red, talk about it. If it’s green, move on.

    The Quarterly Review (90–120 minutes)

    Every quarter, do a proper review. This is where you decide whether your Strategies are still the right ones — not just whether you’re executing them.

    The monthly tells you how fast you’re running. The quarterly tells you whether you’re running in the right direction.

    Agenda additions vs. monthly:

    • Is each Strategy still valid, or has the market shifted?
    • Do Goals need adjusting based on what you’ve learned?
    • Any new Strategies to add? Any to retire?

    This is also the moment to celebrate wins. Small businesses underdo recognition. If a Goal was hit, mark it.

    The Annual Reset

    Once a year, start fresh. Don’t just roll your existing OGSM forward. Ask the harder question: is the Objective still right?

    Markets change. Businesses evolve. The Objective you wrote 12 months ago may no longer be the right ambition — or you may have achieved it and need a new one.

    The annual reset is a full workshop. Bring your full leadership team (even if that’s just you and two others), block a half-day, and rebuild from the Objective down.

    What Tools and Templates Do You Need for OGSM?

    You don’t need software to run OGSM. A shared Google Doc or spreadsheet works perfectly for most small businesses with fewer than 50 people.

    That said, the right template makes a real difference to first-time adoption. We have a free OGSM template designed specifically for small businesses — structured so your team can fill it in during the workshop, with built-in Measures tracking for monthly reviews. Download the free OGSM template here.

    When You Don’t Need Software

    If you have fewer than 30 people, a shared document and a monthly meeting is enough. Don’t buy strategy software to run a one-page framework. The overhead will kill the habit before it forms.

    When Software Starts to Help

    Once you have multiple teams or departments, each with their own strategies and measures, a dedicated tool makes alignment easier. You can cascade the top-level OGSM into team-level plans, link Measures to dashboards, and run reviews asynchronously.

    At that point, you’re moving toward the enterprise OGSM model — and our main OGSM guide has what you need.

    What Are the Most Common OGSM Mistakes Small Businesses Make?

    These are the mistakes I see specifically in small business OGSM attempts — different from the errors enterprise teams make.

    1. Writing the Objective Last

    Most small business founders start with Goals (because they’ve been thinking about revenue targets for months) and then reverse-engineer an Objective. The result is an Objective that’s really just a restatement of the Goals in vague language.

    Start with the Objective. It should be hard to write. If it comes easily, it’s probably not ambitious enough.

    2. Confusing Strategies With Tasks

    “Update the website” is not a Strategy. “Build direct booking capability to reduce OTA dependency” is. Strategies describe the approach — the how-we-win logic. Tasks sit inside Strategies. If your OGSM looks like a project plan, you’ve gone one level too deep.

    3. Not Assigning Measure Owners

    “We’ll track revenue monthly” is not a Measure with an owner. “Maria tracks revenue monthly, reports in team standup by the 5th” is. Without ownership, Measures don’t get reported, which means Strategies don’t get reviewed, which means the OGSM is just a document.

    4. Too Many Goals

    I’ve seen small business OGSMs with 9 Goals. That’s not a strategy — it’s a bucket list. With 9 Goals, you have no priorities. Everything is equally important, which means nothing is. Three to five Goals is the discipline that gives OGSM its power.

    5. Treating the OGSM as a Once-a-Year Exercise

    Writing the OGSM is not the work. Running the reviews is the work. A perfect OGSM that’s reviewed twice a year is less valuable than a decent OGSM that gets reviewed monthly by an engaged team. Build the review habit before you worry about OGSM perfection.

    6. Hiding the OGSM From the Team

    Some founders treat the OGSM as a leadership document and share a watered-down version with the team. That kills the alignment benefit entirely. If you’re worried about a Goal being sensitive (e.g. acquisition planning), leave it off the shared version — but share as much as you can. The team has to know what winning looks like to help you win.

    Frequently Asked Questions About OGSM for Small Business

    How long does it take to build an OGSM for the first time? Budget 90 minutes with your team for the first draft, plus 30 minutes of solo refinement after. Don’t try to make it perfect on day one. A 70% OGSM reviewed monthly beats a 100% OGSM that sits in a drawer.

    How often should I update my OGSM? Review monthly. Adjust Strategies and Measures quarterly if needed. Reset the Objective and Goals annually, or when something significant changes in the business or market.

    What’s the difference between OGSM Goals and KPIs? Goals are the finite outcomes that prove your Objective was achieved — you set them once per cycle and they don’t change month to month. KPIs (or Measures, in OGSM language) are the ongoing tracking metrics that tell you whether your Strategies are working. One Goal may have multiple Measures. For more on this distinction, see our OGSM Goals vs Measures guide.

    Can I use OGSM for just one department or team? Yes. Team-level OGSMs work well when they cascade from a company-level OGSM. The team’s Objective should support one or more of the company’s Goals. If your team’s OGSM has nothing to do with the company’s Objectives, you’re not aligned — you’re just busy.

    What if I’m a solo founder — is OGSM still useful? Yes, but simplify the format. You don’t need 5 Goals and 4 Strategies each. One page with a clear Objective, 3 Goals, and 2–3 Strategies per Goal is enough. The value is still the forced prioritisation and monthly review habit.

    Is OGSM better than OKRs for small businesses? For most small businesses with fewer than 50 people, yes — OGSM is simpler to implement and easier to sustain. OKRs require quarterly cycles and often a dedicated champion to avoid drifting. If you want a detailed comparison, read our OGSM vs OKR guide.

    Your strategy doesn’t need to be complex to be good. It needs to be clear, owned, and reviewed. OGSM gives small businesses exactly that — a one-page framework that fits how you actually work, forces real prioritisation, and builds the review habit that turns planning into execution.

    Start with the Objective. Make it honest. Then build from there.

    Rock on.