What if I told you that there is One Thing that, if you rallied your team around and focused your attention on in the next year, could grow your business by double-digits?

One of the most misunderstood and controversial topics in company strategy is the idea of the One Thing. Nine times out of ten, when I introduce the concept to a management team, the response is “It’s impossible for us to choose just one thing. We just finished our strategic planning, and we have 10 key priorities this year. If we drop any of these balls we’re dead in the water. Our business just isn’t that simple.”

Don’t confuse the One Thing with your operating priorities. In any well-run business, each department is going to have multiple priorities for the year – things they need to improve on, process they need to optimize, and so on.

I’m also not talking about a silver bullet, which typically sounds something like “if we had this one feature”, “if we sold in this one country” or, “if we would just lower our price”. Silver bullets are grasping at easy solutions to tough problems, and there’s nothing easy about the One Thing. To paraphrase Ben Horowitz in the Hard Thing about Hard Things, there are no silver bullets, just lots of iron nails.

The One Thing is about focus, and finding the 80/20 rule for your business. It’s the answer to the question – “What that one thing that, if we’re able to get every team and every department rallied behind, would be our biggest lever to growth this year?”

When this concept was first explained to me, it was by a former CPG executive who took over as CEO at an aging and declining food brand, and by focusing on their One Thing, achieved 3x growth in less than 3 years. After struggling to figure out why sales were declining, the CEO and his direct reports went out into the field to visit grocery stores first-hand. After visiting just a few dozen stores around the country, they observed that, as an older brand, they were consistently being moved to the bottom shelf in favor of younger brands. They quickly realized their One Thing was shelf positioning. Was it as simple as asking to be moved up a shelf? No, it required a coordinated strategy of meetings with the executives at the nationwide grocery chains, participation and cooperation of dozens of broker teams, special promotions, and much more. Having One Thing doesn’t mean your strategy will be easy to execute, but it does mean you will simplify the goal and the message to make it easy for everyone to understand.

We’ve used the One Thing to help transform and turn around a number of businesses. In a manufacturing company, our One Thing was improving the relationship with their dealers. Sales were sliding, so we started traveling around the country to reconnect with our dealers to try to figure out what was going on at the source. We expected to hear that we were missing something in our product suite, or that we were too expensive. Instead, we heard a number of deeply concerning things – “you’re difficult to work with”, “you take forever to ship”, and my favorite, “sometimes I can’t even get a hold of you”. When we got back to the factory, we also tuned in to how we talked about our dealers internally, and we heard things like “our customers are so demanding” and “XYZ customer is a pain to deal with”. We realized were taking our dealers for granted, and we had created adversarial relationships with the channel. A new competitor simply wanted the business more, and they were willing to be more flexible, they were doing a better job of listening to their needs, and they were providing better service. They were stealing away our dealers all across the country. To turn our sliding sales into growth, we realized we’d need to rebuild our trust with the channel. Sounds simple, right? On the contrary, it meant everything from changing how we managed finished goods inventory to how we invoiced. Every department needed to be on board. Having a single overarching priority that year meant we all shared a common goal, and a common language. It meant we tracked our progress to that goal. Most importantly, it meant it was top of everyone’s mind. The result? Our sales slide turned into double-digit sales growth.

Sometimes the One Thing isn’t self evident. More often than not, discovering your One Thing requires time in the field, polling customers, listening to employees, and lots of self-reflection. Having someone from the outside provide a fresh, non-biased perspective doesn’t hurt either. If you’re intrigued by the One Thing and want to chat about how to find the One Thing for your business, drop me a line at matthew@spark-insights.com