How to fix your business strategy in 6 steps

Is your 2025 plan already slipping? This simple six-step approach will help get you and your business back on track. Forget complicated business plans - this is all you need.

Welcome to a free edition of Start Up To Grown Up: Your source for ideas, insights and tactics to take back control of your business and scale it sustainably and profitably by Heather Townsend, award-winning author of The Accountants’ Millionaires’ Club and Founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club

How’s 2025 going? Have you got to the end of January, and your carefully crafted business plan and goals for the year have already been consigned to the waste paper bin?

Perhaps you are thinking, strategy? What strategy? And this stuff doesn’t work for ordinary small businesses?

Given that 10-15% of my committed pipeline of new business on one side of my business all but got cancelled this week, I’m sitting here wondering why all my plans now have to be revised!

I’m now going to be deliberately controversial. Do you really have a proper plan which underpins your strategy to grow and scale your business? Whilst you may say you have a strategy, is it really a strategy? Putting some numbers down on a spreadsheet and giving the team targets is a good step forward, but it’s not a strategy. It may have made you feel like you ticked the ‘2025 business plan’ box, but is it something that is guiding your decision making and focusing the actions you and the team make?

I see a huge amount of codswallop (and that’s the polite word for it) about strategy. There’s the ‘strategy’ that AI-created copy loves to include. And what is this ‘strategic goal planning’ that ChatGPT loves? Answers on a postcard please! Let me simplify it for you: strategy means ‘a long-term plan’. That’s all it actually means. Putting it very simply, your strategy for your business is just deciding what you want and figuring out how to get there.

But client stuff gets in the way

Be honest for a moment. How much focused time did you spend on that 2025 strategy and plan? Or was it something that you rushed into? In my experience, so many small businesses are caught on the hamster treadmill of client work that they don’t truly stop and think about what they really want. Is it any wonder that 4 weeks after the start of the new year - which initially held so much promise - the plan has slipped?

You’re busy. Clients are needy. You team are… well, doing their best. And life running your business can feel like you are lurching from one deadline client deliverable to the next. So, the idea of sitting down to “map out your year” or “have a long-term plan” possibly feels about as appealing as going to the dentist to have your teeth pulled out without anaesthetics. But here’s the thing: without a plan, you’ll keep running in circles, firefighting the same problems week after week.

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How to decide on your business’s strategy

I’ve been there in many business meetings where the leadership team have talked about strategy. In my experience these discussions boil down to “let’s win bigger and better clients and be more profitable”. Whilst that is better than nothing, there is a lot more to putting together an effective strategy.

Step 1: What’s your why?

Yes, this is the annoying reflection bit. The bit that you probably didn’t spend enough time on when you were doing your original 2025 business planning. Stop rolling your eyes. I’m not asking you to meditate with your legs crossed, take up yoga or subscribe to woo woo stuff. But if you’re going to put time and effort into growing your business, you need to know why.

• Is it to increase the money you earn from your business?

• Work fewer hours?

• Build a business you can eventually sell?

• Or is it just to stop feeling like you’re drowning every day?

Write it down. Seriously. Knowing your why helps you decide if you’re tweaking what you’ve already got (small gains) or shaking things up entirely (step change).

Step 2: Be honest about your ‘as-is’

It’s now time to be brutally honest with yourself. How is your business matching up? What is working or not working right now? What are you relying on hope to fix? Then, what does the next level of growth look like? It can often feel that everything needs to be fixed right now.

Just today I was working with a business owner who is just about to sign the sales agreement on a business that is £750k in turnover. This acquisition will double the size of their business. During our conversation it seemed like there was so much to do. Integrate the new practice, streamline the billing process, reprice stuff, redo the website, work out who they wanted as a client… and the list went on and on. It would have been impossible to fix the list for this business owner, and it felt overwhelming. So we looked at what was going to make the biggest difference to them personally. This boiled down to them getting out of the day-to-day and building a strong team of client managers who could lead on their client portfolios. With that in mind, they could work on their plan for the next 12-18 months without their brain hurting.

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Step 3: Evolution vs Revolution

The theory of marginal gains, as popularised by Sir Dave Brailsford with Team Sky Cycling team and the British Olympic Cycling team, is about the idea that small improvements in every aspect of a task can add up to significant gains. This method tends to be very popular for small business owners. After all, it feels safe and less risky. After all how far wrong can you go if you are looking for 1% improvements around your business? Firstly, this methodology does work. You only need to look at the trophy cabinet of the British Olympic Cycling Team to realise that. But you are not in charge of a moderately successful sports team trying to become world beating. You are in charge of a small business that may need to make a big step forward to move to the next level. That means revolution rather than the seemingly less risky option of evolution.

If your business needs to take a big step change forward, pivot, radically change your structure or get you or another key individual into a different role or focus, the marginal gains or as it is also known the 1% improvements methodology is not going to work. For example, when you find that nearly all of your fee earners walk out the door in the space of a week (see here for how I coped with this) 1% improvements isn’t going to cut it. If your business needs to go from growing to scaling, which means getting your team to handle most of the client’s work and reducing your billable time, you typically will need to think revolution not evolution.

Step 4: Choose one area to fix first

Being the owner of a growing business typically means everything feels urgent, everyone wants a part of you and overwhelm is your constant friend. It can feel like everything is broken and everything is urgent to fix. However, fixing everything at once is impossible. Break your firm into simple categories:

Clients: Do you have too many bad ones who suck up your time?

Money: Is cash flow constantly tight because you undercharge or wait months to get paid?

Team: Are you doing too much because you don’t trust your staff?

Time: Are you working weekends and still behind?

Or consider doing a SWOT analysis to help you go through a defined process to consider what is working or not working.

Once you’ve identified all the stuff that needs to change or is broken, pick one. We call this your ONE BIG FOCUS. It’s the one thing you are going to focus on for the next 90 days. Is it your systems so you can do more work with the same team in place? Is it improving communications with clients so that there are less crises? Is it going out to win bigger and better clients?

Step 5: Get out of your own way

Here’s a harsh truth: most small business owners are their own worst enemy.

• You’re stuck in the “it’s quicker to do it myself” mindset.

• You’re undercharging because you’re scared clients will leave.

• You’re too busy to think, so you’re always reacting, never planning.

• You are too busy with client work that you never have the time to work ON the business.

The fix? It sounds simple, but its hard… Start letting go. Delegate more. Charge more. Make fewer decisions but better ones. And remember,

Progress beats perfection.

It feels uncomfortable to not be in control of everything. (And I know that from personal experience) But that’s why you build up a trusted team beneath you.

Step 6: Don’t complicate stuff. Keep it simple.

You don’t need an MBA style 20-page business plan or a pitch type document with detailed financials that would be enough to satisfy future investors. At this point in time, a one page document backed up by the financials is all you need. After all, the important thing is you have something that guides your decisions and attention.

Write down:

For the 12 months: What are your big top line goals?

For the next 3 months: What is your ONE BIG FOCUS? What are the business and personal objectives to achieve your ONE BIG FOCUS? Then what will you and your team do to achieve them?

Then, make a monthly appointment with yourself and your leadership team to review how well you are progressing these plans. Are you sticking to the plan? Has the environment changed? If not, adjust. Plans change - that’s fine. The point is to stay focused and in control of your growth rather than reactively responding to what is happening around you.

Summary

Strategy isn’t about big words or big ideas. It’s about deciding what matters most to you and taking small, meaningful steps to get there. So, do yourself a favour and plan some time out to do the thinking to get clear on what you really want from your business in 2025. Once you’ve done that thinking, take an hour, grab a coffee, and write down your plan. A little effort now will save you a lot of headaches later.

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Your actions this week.

1. Book some time to get away from the business and reflect on what you really want your business to deliver for you.

2. Write or rewrite your strategy and plan for 2025 for your business