One page business plan: five questions for every goal
A one page business plan for a goal answers five questions: which levers, in what order; what resources (time, people, money); what you will not do even if it is faster; which leading indicator shows it is working before the deadline; and who owns it, with a first checkpoint that triggers a revision. If the plan does not fit on a page, split the goal.
In this article · 9 sections
- What a one page business plan is (and is not)
- The five questions, answered on one page
- Before and after: the same goal, planned twice
- Constraints: the row that protects you from yourself
- Check that the plan is big enough
- Plans must not fight each other
- Where this does not reach
- Fifteen minutes, one page
- Published research
"We need to increase profit."
Most business plans start and end with a sentence like that, dressed up in more words. A coffee shop owner named Andrew lived inside that sentence for months. He knew his levers (prices, menu, suppliers, portions), yet he could raise the price of coffee on Monday and find the room empty by Wednesday, or drop a menu item without noticing it was the one his regulars came in for. Pulling the right levers without a plan is roulette with your own business.
What finally changed things was not a thicker plan. It was a thinner one: one page, five questions, for one goal.
A goal without a plan turns every lever into a gamble. The Jirgenson Model fixes that as a control system: goals in order, real numbers, and a one page plan per goal. It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934).
What a one page business plan is (and is not)
If you came here for a one-page pitch for investors, this is a different tool. This is a one page plan for reaching one specific goal: raise the margin, build a reserve, cut your hours. Every goal gets its own page; together the pages make your overall plan.
The five questions, answered on one page
Here is the template with Andrew's actual answers for his goal: raise the margin from 9% to 15% in six months.
| Question | What it asks | Andrew's answer |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Levers | Which ones, in what order? | Remove the 2 most loss-making items; rework the recipes of 3 low-margin items; a new milk contract; prices up 5% in month two |
| 2. Resources | How much time, how many people, how much money? | 4 hours of his time a week; his senior barista's help |
| 3. Constraints | What will we not do, even if it is faster? | Do not lower the quality of the coffee beans; do not raise prices by more than 5% in one step |
| 4. Leading indicator | Which figure shows it is working before the deadline? | Average margin per receipt, every week |
| 5. Deadline and owner | Who, when is the first check, what result triggers a revision? | Andrew. First check in month two: below 10%, the plan is revised. Final result in month six |
| Backup lever | What if the first check falls short? | Track and reduce write-offs |
If a question has no answer, what you have is not a plan but a wish, and finding the answer is your next task. Copy the first two columns, write your own goal at the top, and fill in the third.
Before and after: the same goal, planned twice
The fairest way to see what the page does is to put it next to the plan most owners actually have:
| "Increase profit" | The one-page plan | |
|---|---|---|
| What to do on Monday | Unclear; ten minutes of "we have to do something" | Remove two loss-making items |
| What is off limits | Nothing written; anything goes under pressure | Cheaper beans, price jumps over 5% |
| How you know it is working | When the month's accounts arrive | Margin per receipt, every week |
| When to change course | When it feels bad enough | Month two, if margin is under 10% |
| Plan B | Improvised | Write-offs, decided in advance |
When Andrew reread his page, he saw what had escaped him: before, he had been "trying to increase profit". Now he was doing four concrete things, knew what was off limits and could check whether it was helping.
Constraints: the row that protects you from yourself
The third question matters most, and it is the one most plans leave out. A constraint answers: what will I not do, even if it would save the goal? It must be written in advance and in earnest, because in a crisis any means looks acceptable, and whoever has not decided what they will never do ends up doing anything at all.
What Andrew valued most were his constraints. Cheap beans would have delivered margin within a month and cost him customers within six. And the 5% step limit made the experiment readable: had he raised prices by fifteen per cent on the first Monday "just to be sure", some customers would have left, others would have been confused, and he would never know how much of the drop came from the price.
Constraints from other lives in the book: a freelancer will not email people who have not subscribed; a thirteen-year-old saving for a bicycle will not borrow money or skip school to earn it.
Check that the plan is big enough
A plan can be well written and still too small. So add up the expected effects of the levers and compare them with the gap. Andrew's margin gap was 6 percentage points:
| Lever | Expected effect |
|---|---|
| Remove two loss-making items | +1.5 pp |
| Rework three recipes | +1.0 pp |
| New milk contract (€150 a month off €1,500 of milk) | +0.5 pp |
| Prices +5%, losing 2% of customers | +3.1 pp |
| Total | +6.1 pp against a gap of 6.0 |
The plan passes, with almost no buffer. That is exactly why the first checkpoint is mandatory and why the backup lever was written down in advance. At the check in month two, the margin had reached 10.5%, above the revision line. Not proof yet (the season, the sales mix and supplier prices could all play a part), but consistent with the plan working.
Plans must not fight each other
A week later the senior barista spotted a problem: "You write that you'll raise prices. And that you'll launch discount cards. Don't those two contradict each other?" They did. Andrew added a rule: card discounts start only once the margin is at least 14%.
When you have several one-page plans, check them in pairs for contradictions, then put all their resources in one table. Plans that are compatible pair by pair can still claim the same hours and the same money.
Where this does not reach
A one page plan is a working plan for a goal, not a full business plan for a bank or an investor, and it does not replace legal, tax or financing documents. Its estimates are hypotheses: lever effects are guesses until the leading indicator confirms them. And if a goal genuinely needs more than a page, that is a signal to split it into two goals, not to write smaller.
Key takeaways
- One goal, one page, five questions: levers, resources, constraints, leading indicator, deadline and owner.
- Write constraints in advance: what you will not do even if it is faster.
- Add up lever effects and compare them with the gap; plan a backup lever if the buffer is thin.
- Check plans against each other for contradictions and shared resources.
Fifteen minutes, one page
Take one goal that is in trouble, set aside fifteen minutes, and answer the five questions in writing. Be most honest with the third. Any question you cannot answer is your next task. A page forces you to choose what matters, and what matters is exactly what you will actually do.
To see how the model connects plans to the levers behind them, read levers of control. The goals that every plan starts from are in Chapter 1, free in the free sample. The full method is in Steer, Don't Guess on Amazon.
Published research
It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:
- Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
- Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
- Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
- GitHub: experiment folder
- Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
- ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552
The full chapter, with every calculation, is in the book.
Buy on AmazonQuestions people ask
What is a one page business plan?
Here it means a one-page plan for reaching one goal: which levers in what order, what resources, what you will not do, which leading indicator you watch, and who owns it with a first checkpoint. Each goal gets its own page.
What should a one page business plan template include?
Five rows: levers, resources, constraints, leading indicator, and deadline with owner and a revision trigger. A backup lever is a useful sixth row when the plan has little buffer.
How do I know if my plan is big enough?
Add up the expected effect of each lever and compare the total with the gap to your goal. If it barely covers it, set an early checkpoint and write a backup lever in advance.
This topic is covered in Chapter 6, Control concept: every goal has a plan of Steer, Don't Guess: Setting Priorities, Reading the Numbers and Correcting Course in Business and Life. The numbers in the examples are illustrative; the book states its limits in Appendix G.
Read Chapter 1 free
The Introduction and Chapter 1, with the refusal test, about 9,500 words.