The One Page Business

A Simple Approach For Building and Growing a Business That Works

I wouldn’t call it a good day when you wake up to find your checking account overdrawn to the tune of $900…

It’s not the way anyone wants to start their day. But that’s the life I lived for a while. Scrambling each morning to generate the money required for dinner that evening.

Some days, the “hustle” worked. Some days, it didn’t.

Any realistic person would have thrown in the towel after the first month or so. I went on like this for years. Mainly because I was stubborn. Also because I was psychologically unemployable. And finally, because I simply refused to believe I wasn’t here to work for myself.

I thought the problem was that I wasn’t in the right line of work. That led me to jumping from one thing to the next.

Then I thought the problem was that the world didn’t value what I had. That led me to developing some odd chip on my shoulder as though the world owed me something just for being here.

After much trial and error, however, I realized the problem was none of those things.

The real problem all of those years was that I had no understanding of the fundamentals that make a business work.

I was wasting countless hours trying to build my dream “skyscraper” of a business with no clarity about what foundation is required for that type of a project.

We all know “most businesses fail.” That’s what the talking heads on TV like to pound into everyone’s psyche.

What they never mention is WHY. WHY do most businesses fail?

That’s a valuable question. Because if you know the answer, then you can actually do something about it.

Most businesses fail because they do not have the fundamentals required to succeed.

A business doesn’t succeed because you WANT it to succeed, it succeeds because it offers value to the world in a way that leads to something that is sustainable and “growable.”

There is certainly some “luck” (whatever that means to you!) involved, but if that was all it took, every lucky human would have a successful business.

Most people don’t think about business as a collection of systems. I surely didn’t. And because of that, I spent years trying to build a business that had no chance of actually working.

To many people, the phrase “business systems” means things like marketing, selling, accounting or customer service. That’s certainly what I thought during the “lean” years of my business education.

I had no idea there was an entire set of systems UNDER THIS. A set of systems that actually serves as the foundation for any successful business.

These systems are ideas. Organized ideas. Strategic ideas.

The bad news is that without this level of organization and clarity, building a business can be a really hard road.

The good news is that all of these ideas can fit on a single page of paper.

The core concepts required to fuel an entire business can all sit together on one page.

So what does this system of ideas look like…according to me?

Well, it begins with the problem you solve and for WHOM you solve it…

• Is it a problem others know they have?
• Is it a problem they want solved?
• Is it a problem for which they will happily exchange money for a solution?

From there we can move on to how best package and position the solutions you offer. You may have the best solution in the world. But if you put it in a package your customers and clients don’t want to buy, you lose.

Next, we have to address some important questions that need to be answered in the minds and hearts of your prospective buyers. Things like:

• What is it?
• Who is it for?
• What do I get?
• Why is it different/better/more valuable?
• Is this the type of person/business that belongs in my life?
• Why are YOU the one I should get it from?

After that, the system building continues with ideas that differentiate the way you solve problems for others from all of the other options they have, including doing nothing.

Once you’re clear on all of those things comes the amplification.

• How does the world find out about you?
• How do you build trust and credibility in a systematic way?
• How do you attract the right people to what you have?
• How do you take the need to sell what you have off the table so that people just show up wanting what you have?

As you can see, there are a lot of questions to be answered. The good part is that, once you’ve gotten clear on these answers and then gone through a distillation of them, you can whittle this (and the results of the rest of the process) down into one page of information.

Consider it the “map” of the foundation of the business you are building.

You might call it, “The One Page Business.”

You can certainly move forward without this. That’s how I started. That’s how most people start.

Unfortunately, I can tell you what happens. I know. I lived it!

What happens when you move forward without this “system of ideas” serving as the foundation of the business you’re building is that you tend to get confusion.

What also happens is that things that “should” work, just don’t.

Frustration and lack of progress are bad enough, but it gets even worse.

Because the party who suffers most from a lack of clarity at this level is not you, but all of the people in the world who you COULD be serving, were the connection from you to them easier and more obvious.

The One Page Business class is my attempt at putting the hard work of making sure the business has a chance at succeeding FIRST in the process, instead of dealing with the symptoms that come should you decide to just start moving forward without this level of clarity.

We get the clarity first because we lay the conceptual foundation of a business that works first.

In this presentation, we will focus on strategy and STRUCTURE and allow you to fill in the blanks with your specific products/services.

Enrollment for this class is $299.

In my experience, it takes a long time, a lot of practice and a ton of trial and error (mostly error!) to make complicated things SIMPLE.

But that’s my goal for this class.

To make sure everything is thought out and structured in your business in a way that it will be of obvious value to those you serve.

Once you have this, knowing WHAT TO DO becomes far easier to figure out.

At the core of this approach is a simple understanding:

• A business isn’t what you do
• It’s not what they get because of what you do
• It’s not even a way you make money

A business is a system of exchange, a set of processes that transforms one thing (their problem) for another (your solution.)

Consider this your invitation for getting my help on making that “transformation” a success.