Make Business Strategy Work: A Simple Business Strategy Canvas for NZ Business Owners

by Sean Foster | July 31, 2025 | Strategy

Why a Clear Business Strategy Still Matters

In uncertain economic times, business owners in New Zealand often get stuck between reacting to day-to-day challenges and leading their teams with clarity and purpose. Without a clear strategy, it's easy to drift.

A well-thought-out business strategy doesn’t need to be long or complex to work. In fact, simple, actionable strategies are the most effective. Equally, an effective strategy does not rely on assumptions that your staff ‘get it’, and neither do the casual ‘water cooler chats’ about where the business is going, make up for a business strategy. This is where the Strategy-On-A-Page (SOAP) comes in. The SOAP is a practical business strategy canvas built for clarity, communication, and accountability. You can download an example here.

This article will guide you through what makes a great business strategy, why the SOAP method works, and how AI tools can help sharpen your thinking and the result. It's written for Kiwi business owners who want real results.

What Is a Business Strategy and Why Should You Care?

A business strategy is your roadmap for the business. It specifies the clear intentions you make about where your business is heading and how you'll get there. It sets your direction, helps manage risks, and keeps your team aligned.

“Having a clear business strategy will help you keep your business on track and guide your decision making.”[1] 

So do you really need one? The short answer is no you don’t, and especially with SME’s, many don’t. And speaking from personal experience, where for many years I did not have one, I have learnt through trial and error that a great strategy is worth its weight in gold.

As humans, 99% of us struggle with the balance between urgency and importancy. This is well laid out in the classic Eisenhower matrix. The SOAP specifically focuses on the important, typically non-urgent aspects of the business that tend to have a long term compound positive impact on the business. There is no other tool available that more effectively achieves this than the SOAP.

Related: Developing a Business Strategy

The SOAP: Strategy-On-A-Page Explained

The SOAP is a one-page business strategy canvas. It’s designed for busy business owners who want to clarify their direction and get their team on board, and especially without being drowned in documents and spreadsheets..

The SOAP keeps your strategy simple and concise, while also being visible and living. It includes:

1. Both the 1-yr & BHAG

The strategy identifies both the short term (1 year) and long term (20 year) ambitions of the company. Afterall. Who likes to commit to anything unless you know where that commitment is leading to?

2. Vision and Purpose

What will the business look like and what results will be achieved three years from now. And related to Simon Sineks ‘Why’, what is the real reason for the existence of this business? Are we able to build a culture around the purpose such that it is important to every single team member, and hopefully to our customers and suppliers as well.

3. Our Values & Convictions

As humans, we are ruled by our emotions, even if you think you are a purely logical person, inevitably your final decisions are made by your ‘hunch’, your ‘feeling’, these are all emotional manifestations and directly tied to these emotions are your Values. They are largely stable and make for your identity. They are incredibly influential in how you run your life and the decisions you make. It is for this reason that we need to define what they are for the business overall, afterall, the business is made of humans.

4. We Will Win By

A business strategy will offer little value unless it allows your business to perform better than if it had no strategy. And with no strategy, the chances of you outperforming your competitors diminishes significantly. This section outlines exactly how we are going to outcompete our competitors.

5. The Primary Metrics

Nearly anyone can drive a car and make sense of the few gauges that are shown on the dashboard. But how many people can fly a Jumbo and make sense of the hundreds of gauges and dials? It’s the same with your SOAP. We show the three primary (most important) metrics (KPI’s) that we need to track to ensure we are delivering on our SOAP. And the acid-test here is that they make sense and are viewable by everyone in the company who has influence on the success of the business.

Why it works

The SOAP is practical and both easy to update and to share with the team. In fact you can create your business SOAP for absolutely no dollars - it’s free. Your SOAP will become something your team uses in meetings, 90-day planning, and employee development reviews, it is 100% not something that sits lost in a drawer.

Business Strategy Example: Turning Ideas into Action

Let’s say you're a construction company in Auckland. You’ve been growing fast but your profits are flat and although you have some great employees, something just seems to be misfiring. Maybe it’s too much rework, or things are just falling through the cracks, or we are just stressed out! A simplified SOAP might have some information like this:

• Vision: Be Auckland’s most trusted small-scale builder for home renovations
• We Will Win By: Improve project margins and staff efficiency
• Primary Metrics: Gross margin % increase; time-to-complete vs budget; customer satisfaction
• Values & Convictions: Honesty; Team; Perfection
• Purpose: To be the trusted company that households call when they have a problem with their new builds or renovations
• Where We Play: Auckland, North of the bridge to Warkworth and west to Riverhead. Home owners and renters of homes

So the above is super simple & easy to remember. But how effective is it? Is it believable? Will it have any impact within the business?

The above is just a simple illustration, a more complete example of a SOAP can be found here.

How AI Can Support Your Business Strategy Canvas

Commonly available AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity aren’t replacing your judgement. But they can make your strategy process faster and more focused.

Here’s how AI can support your SOAP:

1. Clarify ideas:

Type rough thoughts and get a clearer version back

2. Spot blind spots:

Ask AI what you may have missed based on industry trends

3. Summarise feedback:

Combine team ideas or customer reviews into strategy inputs

4. Draft plans:

Turn objectives into team actions or 90-day goals

For example: Looking at the Vision, this looks uninspiring and probably no different to that of some of our competitors. So pasting that into AI and explaining what you are after, and giving it more context around your business who will be able to develop a far rich and meaningful vision.

I did this and asked for 5 alternatives:

1. Deliver reliable, high-quality home renovations across Auckland — done right, on time, and without surprises
   
2. Build a business where homeowners feel confident from the first quote to the final walk-through.
   
3. Make residential building projects simple and predictable — for our clients, our team, and our partners
   
4. Set the standard in Auckland for small-to-medium home renovations that run on time and on budget
   
5. Help homeowners enjoy the renovation process by being the most dependable and organised builder in Auckland.

These may, or may not work for you, but no doubt they will fuel your direction until you get to a Vision that really connects 🙂

Aligning Your Strategy With Day-to-Day Decisions

A strategy only works if it’s used. Here's how to link your SOAP to what actually happens:

1. Budgets that match your plan

Cash to a business is like oxygen to a human. And when I refer to cash here, I am referring to the bigger picture related to the overall financial health of your business. And in terms of business strategy, it is meaningless unless you tie it back to the financial numbers, and that means you need a budget and the discipline to track actuals against the projected (budgeted) numbers.

2. 90-Day Plans

Break your SOAP into achievable 90-day blocks. Each team or person has goals that link back to the strategy. This helps avoid drift and keeps things measurable.

3. 1-on-1 Meetings

Use your SOAP to shape employee conversations. Ask how their work links to the company priorities. This builds purpose and accountability.

4. Development Reviews

Performance isn’t just about hitting the numbers, it’s about contributing to the overall strategy. Reviews that reflect your SOAP create buy-in, not just evaluation.

Why Simplicity Wins in Strategy

You don’t need a degree in management to build a great strategy. According to research by Harvard Business School, overly complex strategies are often ignored or misunderstood by staff. [2]

Instead, business leaders who focus on clear communication, regular review, and team involvement tend to build more adaptive and successful businesses.

Keep the SOAP on the wall, in your team’s folders, and discussed at meetings. It should live and evolve, it should not be sitting in your inbox or bottom draw.

Next Steps for NZ Business Owners

If you don’t have a clear business strategy, or if your current one feels too complex, now is the time to simplify.

Here’s what you can do this week:

• Register in Sukuma for free here or sketch your own SOAP
• Run a 30-minute session with your team to shape it
• Ask ChatGPT to review your current goals, risks etc
• Link your next 90-day plans or budget decisions back to your SOAP
• If you want a starting point, you can find a free SOAP example here.

How Much Detail in a Business Strategy?

This may be a question you have already asked yourself, or it may be yet to surface 😏. The value of a SOAP is that it fits on one page, is extremely concise and makes for easy memorization. But I get it, you run a complex ship! How are you going to make the SOAP sufficiently valuable unless you have some more space to note certain critical points?

Sukuma’s SOAP allows for this. If you feel that it is essential to document additional information in say the Vision, simply right-click and add it. This approach will not clutter the SOAP, but the additional notes contained in the Vision block can detail the extra bits that you believe are important to include. But, caution: Being able to add additional notes in each block does not in any way take away the need to be extremely concise. Everything that is important must be shown in the front-facing block. The notes are just supplementary.

Final Thought

Great business strategy is not about clever words, it’s about clear thinking, regular use, and team-wide understanding. Whether you’re in trades, professional services, or retail, your SOAP becomes your anchor during uncertain times.

Keep it visible. Keep it alive. Keep it simple.

Footnotes

1. New Zealand Government. (n.d.). Business Planning. Retrieved from https://www.business.govt.nz/business-performance/business-strategy/introduction-to-strategy
2. Harvard Business Review. (2010). Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do About It. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-strategy-execution-unravels-and-what-to-do-about-it