The Focus
The Focus is two or three choices the company is genuinely resourcing, with the hardest thing about each one named, on a single page.
Not a strategy document. A page. And the page is not a summary of a longer document; it is the thing itself, because a strategy people cannot recall is not operating on anything.
What goes on it: what winning looks like, specifically enough that you would know. Where you are competing and where you have chosen not to. How you intend to win. The hardest thing standing between you and that being real. And what you will not compromise, whatever the pressure.
Why it works
There are two reasons, and the second one is the one people underestimate.
The page says everything. If the choices do not fit, there are too many, and the page says so without anybody having to be the difficult one.
And naming the hardest thing turns a direction into work. A choice with no named difficulty is a wish with a market in it. This is the part most strategies skip, and it is the part that decides whether anything happens.
Our example software company put it like this.
The hardest thing. We can land enterprise logos. We cannot yet keep and grow them. Enterprise net revenue retention is 104%. Our smaller customer base is 118%. We signed 31 enterprise logos last year against a target of 20, and net new revenue barely moved.
The cause is structural, not effort. Our onboarding was built for a self-serve customer who never needed us. An enterprise customer has a rollout, a sponsor with a reputation at stake, and six internal teams, each of whom needs to see the point. We hand them a login and a help centre.
Read that, and you know what the company should be doing, and you know it without being told. That is what a well-named difficulty does. It removes the need for instruction.
What it looks like on paper
The one page, in full. This is the real artefact from the template, not a summary of it.
WINNING · Enterprise at 45% of revenue in a £50m business. Enterprise retention at or above 115%. First value in under 14 days with no service engagement.
WHERE · Companies of 200 to 1000 employees, operations-heavy services. UK, DACH, Benelux. Direct sales only. Not self-serve, not the Fortune 500, not the US, not resellers.
HOW WE WIN · The only product in the category an enterprise buyer can deploy without a services engagement.
THE HARDEST THING · We can land enterprise. We cannot keep and grow it. Retention 104 against 118. 31 logos signed, and net new revenue flat.
WE WILL NOT · Promise custom development to win a deal. Discount below £24k to make a logo count. Hide a services requirement inside the word onboarding.
THE POLICY · Fix retention before buying more growth. Sales capacity is flat. Rules out more sellers, the US, and a services team. Rules in the 14-day path, qualifying on deployability, and removing the two-person dependency.
THE THREE CHOICES · C1 Win the enterprise segment C2 Keep and grow what we land · this is the hardest one C3 Land the EU market
WATCH WEEKLY · Accounts past day 14 without first value. Above 12, and we are stalling.
Notice the tags. C1, C2, C3. Every measure, goal, experiment and bonus weight in the rest of this book carries one of them. It looks like bureaucracy, and it is the opposite: it is the only reason anybody can ask "what are we doing about C2" and get a whole answer instead of three documents.
How it goes wrong
It becomes a summary. Somebody produces a beautiful one-pager alongside a forty-slide deck, and the deck stays the real document.
It stays at the top. The page exists, the leadership team wrote it, and no team ever writes a goal against it.
It is agreed, but nobody can recall it. The version I find hardest to fix. Ask three senior people what the company is betting on, and you get three overlapping but different answers. Everybody read it. Nobody can recall it. Usually, that means it is still too long, or the words are ones nobody would say out loud.