Three hours. A 14-foot sheet of brown paper taped across a board room table. A fistful of Sharpies (other marker pens are available). Two shareholders who know their business inside out but had never quite been asked to think about it in this way. And me — a chartered accountant with more than 30 years of experience who has learned that the most important work rarely starts at a spreadsheet.
That is how a 25-page, ten-year strategic plan begins.
Not with a template. Not with last year’s numbers. Not with a consultant’s slide deck. With a question, a pen, and the willingness of two business owners to stand with pens and be genuinely honest about where they are, what they want, and what is standing in the way.
I have seen a lot of strategic plans over the years. Most of them share the same problem: they are documents, not thinking.
They get written because someone felt they should have one. They sit on a shared drive or a shelf. They are referenced at the next planning meeting, politely updated, and then quietly ignored for another twelve months. The business carries on as before, driven by whatever is most urgent rather than whatever matters most.
The problem is not the plan. The problem is that most strategic planning processes mistake the document for the work. The real work is the conversation that happens before a word gets written — the honest, sometimes uncomfortable, often revealing conversation about what the business actually is, where the shareholders actually want it to go, and what is genuinely stopping them.
That is what the brown paper is for.
They had articulated that to themselves, before, but never the harder part... the vision to achieve succession planning and their exits. That is what the three hours was for.
We did not start with financials. We started with questions. Big ones. The kind that feel obvious when you hear them but that most business owners have never sat down to answer properly:
What does this business look like in ten years if everything goes right?
What does it look like if nothing changes?
What do you personally want out of this — and are those two things aligned?
The brown paper is a tool for capturing thinking in real time, without the filter of a keyboard. There is something about standing at a table with a marker pen that unlocks a different kind of conversation. People say things they would not type into a slide. They draw connections. They contradict themselves and correct themselves. They disagree with each other and find the language to resolve it. By the time you roll up the brown paper, you have something no template could give you: the actual thinking of the people who run the business.
The first part of the session was diagnostic. Not financial due diligence — I already knew the numbers. This was about understanding the business as it actually functions: what is working, what is not, and what the owners have perhaps stopped seeing because they are too close to it.
In this case, the business was genuinely strong. Good turnover. Solid profitability. A high proportion of repeat business — the kind of loyalty that only comes from doing good work over a long time. But underneath that strength were some real constraints that the owners knew existed but had not fully confronted: capacity near its ceiling, several senior people approaching retirement, and a governance structure that had served the business well at its current size but would not stretch to the next phase.
Getting all of that on the table, in plain language, is the first act of honest strategic thinking. You cannot plan around problems you have not named.
The second part of the session was harder. Not intellectually — emotionally. Because “where do you want this business to be in ten years” is not really a question about turnover. It is a question about what you want your life to look like, what you want to have built, and what you want to hand on to the people who come after you.
For these shareholders, the answers came in layers. At the surface, there were commercial ambitions: a clear growth target, better margins, improved systems. One level down, there were personal ambitions: one founder was thinking seriously about how and when to step back; both were thinking about what the business needed to look like for that to be possible. And underneath all of it was something that does not appear in any spreadsheet: a real and legitimate desire to protect the culture they had built — to grow the business without losing what made it worth growing.
That tension — between scale and identity, between ambition and culture — is at the heart of almost every strategic conversation I have with successful, founder-led businesses. The ones that navigate it well are the ones that name it early and plan for it deliberately. The ones that do not tend to discover it later, at considerably higher cost.
Once you know where you are and where you want to be, strategy becomes surprisingly straightforward. Not easy — but clear. The question is simply: what needs to change, and in what order?
For this business, the strategic bridge came down to three things;
First, disciplined growth — pursued only when the people, systems and delivery capacity were ready to support it, not simply because the opportunity was there.
Second, leadership and succession — a clear pathway for who leads the business through its next decade, how equity is structured, and how the founding shareholders transition out on their own terms.
Third, governance and operating discipline — the structures, reporting cadence and cultural non-negotiables that allow a business to scale without losing quality or identity.
That is not a long list. But it is the right list. One of the most common mistakes in strategic planning is trying to change everything at once. Real strategy is about choosing what matters most and being disciplined enough to focus on that, even when everything else is also demanding attention.
After the session, I took the brown paper and turned it into a strategic business plan. Not a generic one. A document built specifically around this business, these shareholders, and this moment in their journey.
The plan covers the full strategic picture: vision, strategy, structure, culture, finances, operations, sales, marketing, and systems. It includes a formal valuation — because you cannot plan for an exit or a succession without knowing what the business is worth and what drives that value. It includes tax planning for succession, because the difference between a well-structured and a poorly-structured leadership transition can be very substantial. It includes a director responsibilities matrix, a capital allocation model, and a risk register.
It also includes something less common: a ten-year financial model with cashflow projections that links the strategic ambition directly to the numbers. Growth targets expressed as actual pounds. Retirement income modelled against business profitability. Valuation at Year 10 expressed as a range, with the specific variables that will determine where in that range the business lands.
Because strategy without numbers is just aspiration. And numbers without strategy are just data. The value is in connecting the two.
If I had to name the single most important topic in this work — the one that unlocks everything else — it is succession. And it is the one that most business owners leave the longest.
Not because they do not care about it. Because it feels remote, or complicated, or emotionally difficult to confront. Because planning for your own departure feels like planning for something that is not quite real yet.
But here is what thirty years of advising founder-led businesses has taught me: the earlier you plan for succession, the better the outcome — for you, for the business, and for the people who will run it after you. A ten-year runway is a gift. It means you can shape the leadership structure, grow the right people into the right roles, and structure equity in a way that aligns everybody’s interests. It means you can think clearly about what you want your retirement to look like and make sure the business is actually capable of funding it.
Most founders who start this process late — under pressure, or at a point of crisis — end up with fewer options and worse outcomes than they deserved. The best time to start is when you do not yet feel like you need to.
The honest answer is: any business at a turning point. And turning points come in many shapes.
Sometimes it is growth. The business has reached a size where the way it has always operated is no longer quite enough. The founders are stretched. The management structure that worked well at one level does not work at the next. The systems that were fine when everyone could see everything are now creating risk.
Sometimes it is succession. A founder is beginning — consciously or not — to think about what comes next. There is no clear internal successor. The shareholders have not had the conversation about how the equity should be structured for the next generation of leadership. The business is valuable but that value is not yet organised in a way that can be extracted.
Sometimes it is simply clarity. The business is doing well, but it is not doing as well as it could. The founders know something is missing — focus, alignment, direction — but have not had the space or the structure to identify exactly what.
In all three cases, the answer is the same: create the space to think properly. Not a board meeting. Not a strategy away-day where people go through the motions. A real conversation, with the right person in the room, that starts with honest questions and ends with a plan you actually believe in.
The 25-page plan is finished and in the hands of the shareholders. What happens next is up to them — but they now have something they did not have before: a clear picture of where they are, a defined destination, and a credible route between the two.
In my experience, that is worth more than any number of management consultants or strategy frameworks. Not because the document is clever — though I hope it is — but because the people who own the business built it themselves, out loud, in a room, with a Sharpie. They know what is in it and they believe in it. Those two things are rarer than they should be.
If you run a business that is at a turning point — or that you suspect might be, even if you haven’t quite admitted it yet — I would be very happy to have that conversation. It starts with three hours, some brown paper, and a few good questions.
The rest follows.
