Ask any CEO what keeps them up at night, and the answer usually isn’t a shortage of ideas.
It’s impact.
Whether you’re chasing market share, margins, or mission outcomes—what you’re really asking is: are we seeing traction? Is our strategy converting to visible progress?
Because for all the dashboards, OKRs, and campaign plans in circulation, many businesses still suffer from a familiar syndrome: scattered projects, overstretched teams, and underwhelming results.
The Impact Equation: Impact = Clarity × Focus
At its core, impact is not a vague ambition. It’s the product of two very specific factors:
Clarity—knowing where you want to go, and what actions you can take to get you there.
Focus—executing on these with discipline and intentionality.
Together, they create a simple but powerful equation:
Impact = Clarity × Focus
- Impact: Tangible movement on the metrics that matter—revenue, retention, reputation etc.
- Clarity: A shared understanding of where the business is headed and how it will win.
- Focus: The purposeful deployment of resources—time, talent, and capital—toward the highest-leverage actions.
Here’s how it plays out:
The goal is the top-right: clarity aligned with disciplined execution.
Let’s break this system down.
Clarity: Your Strategic Blueprint
Clarity doesn’t live in the vision document. It lives in your commercial architecture. If your business isn’t clear on these three foundations, growth becomes guesswork:
- Relevance — Who do we serve, and what is the real problem are we solving?
- Differentiation — What makes us the smart choice?
- Delivery — How do we create and communicate the value we deliver?
This isn’t about adding more. It’s about subtracting what doesn’t move the needle.
And when you solve for clarity at this level, it leads to a non-negotiable truth of sustainable growth:
Fair Value Exchange: The Invisible Handshake
When clarity aligns across your business, it naturally produces a Fair Value Exchange—the unspoken contract between your business and its customer.
A value exchange is fair when:
- Customers feel they’ve received something worth more than what they paid.
- The business delivers that value profitably and consistently.
Break the balance, and growth stalls—whether it’s from overpricing, under delivery, or simply failing to articulate value clearly.
Of course, “fairness” varies by segment, market, and business model—and the rise of AI-driven marketing and customer propositioning only adds complexity. But that makes focusing on your Fair Value Exchange even more important, not less.
Focus: Where Execution Lives or Dies
Clarity is just potential. Focus is where potential becomes progress.
Focus means:
- Translating strategy into clear roles, accountabilities, and defined success outcomes.
- Creating operating rhythms that reinforce and track implementation of the plan—daily, weekly, quarterly.
- Ruthlessly pruning activity that doesn’t serve the mission.
But beware of what I call “rhythm fatigue”—rituals without results, meetings without momentum. Structure must serve outcomes, not optics.
Focus isn’t about more meetings. It’s about fewer distractions.
Impact: Not Just Output, But Your Crucial Next Input
Here’s the shift: Impact isn’t the finish line. It’s the feedback loop.
In a well-designed system, impact becomes the source of insight that drives enhancement of clarity and focus. How do you optimise for this?
- Define your expected impact outcome up front.
- Measure performance against expectation.
- Investigate the ‘impact differential’—what worked, what didn’t and why.
That ‘impact differential’ is gold. It sharpens your clarity. It sharpens your focus. And that sharpness compounds.
But—flywheels cut both ways.
Poorly designed systems can spiral down just as easily where clarity and focus is hampered:
- Short term discounts may drive volume.
- Leading to lower perceived value or non-ideal customer acquisition.
- Churn increases, customer satisfaction decreases.
- Deeper discounts are required to sustain customer acquisition targets and / or top line revenue.
That’s a negative flywheel. And it happens fast when growth is pursued without design.
The Growth Engine: One System, Three Gears
This is what I call the Growth Engine. And it has just three moving parts:
- Clarity – Your strategic blueprint (relevance, differentiation and delivery).
- Focus – Your execution discipline (planning, roles, rhythms).
- Impact – The results you generate—and the input for your next cycle of planning.
These gears don’t spin in isolation. You operate in a real-world market—talent constraints, capital limits, competition, and macro forces all apply.
But inside your business? These three levers are yours to master.
When they align, they compound. When they don’t, growth becomes expensive guesswork.
Final Word: Stop Chasing Hacks. Start Building Systems.
Growth isn’t magic.
It’s not found in your CRM plug-ins or your latest AI-generated campaign. While these have a place, growth is firstly engineered from the inside out.
So when planning your for your next 12 – 24 months, ask yourself:
- How clear are you on your strategic blueprint: your relevance, differentiation and delivery?
- Where is your focus compromised and diverted away from the core actions that will drive results?
- What is your ‘impact differential’ actually telling you?
Because growth doesn’t come from guessing.
It comes from clarity, focus and a system that keeps learning.
On purpose. With purpose. At pace.
Ready to Build Your Growth Engine?
If your team is clear on ambition but stuck on traction, let’s talk.
I work with founders and commercial leaders of digital-first businesses to turn commercial clutter into clarity—and clarity into traction.
Whether you’re reshaping your value proposition, rebuilding your go-to-market engine, or simply trying to make strategy stick, I can help you design a system that scales.