Build the person. Develop the leader. Improve the business — and make sure the performance actually serves a purpose. This is the method behind everything else I do.
High performance isn't doing more for the sake of it. It's performing at the right level, in the right areas, for a reason that matters.
Almost all business advice answers only the first. It assumes that if the numbers go up, the owner is winning. I've watched that assumption break too many times to keep believing it — in other people's businesses and in my own. You can hit every target and still dread Monday. You can double turnover and take home less. You can build something genuinely impressive and lose the thing you built it for somewhere around year four.
Performance without purpose becomes a treadmill: real effort, no destination, and a growing suspicion that you're the only one who can't see the point. Purpose without execution becomes unfulfilled potential: a better version of the business exists clearly in your head and nowhere else. Holding both questions open at the same time is harder than it sounds, and it's the whole method.
Performance on Purpose is simple to state and awkward to live: know what you're building the business for, then get properly good at the few things that build it. Everything below — the quadrant, the freedoms, the three pillars, the scoring — exists to keep those two in the same room when the week gets loud.
Not from a textbook. It comes from founding and running businesses across accountancy, law, technology and investment, and from having to build all of them around chronic fatigue and ADHD. I never had the option of out-working a problem. That constraint turned out to be the most useful thing that ever happened to how I work, because it forced the questions most owners get to postpone: what actually moves this, what can I stop doing, and what is any of it for?
You'll find more of that story on my about page, and the working-with-a-chronic-condition version in this article. The short version: the method is built for real pressure and imperfect weeks, not for a retreat.
Two axes — how well you're performing, and how much that performance serves a purpose you'd defend. Every owner sits somewhere on this grid today, and the honest answer is usually not top-right.
Meaningful intention, inconsistent execution.
Strong results serving a meaningful direction.
Low direction, low momentum.
Real effort, unclear destination.
Low direction, low momentum. The business ticks over, the days fill themselves, and nobody in the room could tell you what this quarter is for. The tell is a full calendar and a short list of finished things. It costs more than it appears to, because drifting is comfortable: there's no crisis to force a decision, so a year goes past. The first move isn't a strategy day. It's picking one number — cash in the bank, jobs delivered on time, hours you personally billed — and looking at it every week until it starts to bother you. Momentum before direction. You can't steer a stationary car.
Real effort, unclear destination. This is the box most capable owners are actually in, and it does the most damage, because from the outside everything looks like success. Revenue is up, the team is busy, and you can't say why you're doing it without reaching for a cliché. The tell is a good month that produces nothing: you hit the number, felt flat, and immediately set a bigger one. It costs health, relationships and eventually the business, because nobody sprints indefinitely without knowing what the sprint is for. The first move is subtraction — name the thing you'd stop tomorrow if stopping didn't feel like failing, and stop it for one quarter.
Meaningful intention, inconsistent execution. You know exactly what you want to build and why it matters. What you can't seem to do is hold a standard for twelve weeks running. The tell is a good plan written three times in eighteen months, each version slightly better and none of them delivered. It costs confidence long before it costs money: every abandoned plan teaches you that your own commitments are negotiable. The first move is to shrink the plan until it looks insultingly small, then keep it — one action, every week, for a quarter. You're not fixing the business yet. You're rebuilding the evidence that you do what you say.
Strong results serving a direction you'd defend out loud. You can say in a sentence what the business is for, it does roughly what you said it would, and improvements make your life better rather than merely busier. It is not a permanent address, and treating it as one is how people fall out of it. Growth, a bad quarter, a senior person leaving — any of those can put you back on the treadmill inside a month, and that's normal. The work here is maintenance, not ambition: re-score every quarter, hold the two-priority rule, and act early when the numbers improve but the freedoms don't.
Two questions, scored 0–10, about the last ninety days rather than your intentions for the next ninety.
Most owners over-score purpose on the first pass, because they're rating how much they care rather than how clearly they could explain it. If your one sentence needs a paragraph of context to make sense, the score is lower than you just wrote. Nobody is permanently in one box either — a strong year can move you two positions, and so can losing a key person.
Every improvement should buy you more of these. If it doesn't, it isn't worth doing — however good it looks in a plan.
Increasing financial strength, resilience and choice — so money pressure stops distorting your decisions. Not wealth for its own sake. Enough margin that you can turn down the wrong client and afford the right hire.
Increasing control over your time, with the business depending on you less each quarter. Measured honestly, not aspirationally: what breaks if you switch your phone off for a fortnight, and how quickly.
Sometimes called personal freedom. The freedom to make choices on your own terms, and a head that isn't re-running the numbers at three in the morning. A business that supports the life you actually want.
They're not independent, and they don't arrive in parallel. One of them is currently the constraint on the other two, and working on the wrong one is the most common way a good year produces no felt improvement. Three tests, answered honestly:
Financial. Could the business survive three months of your worst realistic month without you personally funding it? If not, money is driving your decisions whether you admit it or not — including which clients you tolerate and which conversations you avoid.
Time. If you switched your phone off for two consecutive weeks, what breaks first, and on which day? Name the thing. That single answer is worth more than any time-management system, because it tells you precisely where the business is welded to you.
Mind. Is there a decision you already know is right and haven't made? If yes, work out which of the first two freedoms is holding it hostage. Freedom of mind is rarely the first thing to fix, and it's almost always the thing you're actually after.
The sequencing rule I use: financial, then time, then mind. Not because mind matters least — it's the point of the exercise — but because money pressure distorts every decision underneath it, and you can't think clearly about purpose while you're watching the bank balance on a Thursday. Fix enough of the money to stop the distortion, buy back enough time to think, then the third one becomes available. Doing it in the other order feels better for about a month. There's a longer version of this argument in why boundaries lead to bigger wins.
The same method applied at three levels — build the person, develop the leader, improve the business. Each has its own wheel, its own plan and its own page.
How do you become a high-performing person while building a life that means something to you?
→ Personal Performance Plan
Explore →Who do you need to become to lead the next version of your business?
→ Leadership Performance Plan
Explore →What needs to improve so the business becomes stronger, more profitable, more resilient and less dependent on you?
→ Business Performance Plan
Explore →Because the three fail in each other's direction, and every owner has watched at least one of these happen.
Work only on the business and you install systems the owner quietly dismantles by March — not through bad faith, but because a process nobody has the energy to enforce is a document, not a system. Work only on the person and you get a calmer, clearer owner and an identical set of accounts; it feels like progress and it isn't, not yet. Work only on the leadership and you get a well-run team executing a strategy that doesn't survive contact with the numbers.
Run all three and each one funds the next. The person has the capacity to lead the change rather than just design it. The leader sets a standard the business can hold when they're not in the room. The business gives back money and hours, which is what pays for the next quarter of change. That's the whole reason this is a system rather than three separate services.
If you dread the work, start with the person. If the work is fine but every decision routes through you, start with the leader. If you and the team are steady and the numbers aren't, start with the business. If two are true at once, start with the person regardless — the other two need somebody with the capacity to lead them.
Each pillar has its own wheel. Scoring turns a vague sense that things could be better into two areas, two numbers and a date — which is the difference between a feeling and a plan.
This is costing you money, health or people right now. A genuine 0–3 rarely waits for a plan — it needs a decision this month, and often it's a decision you've already been avoiding.
Where most things sit, and where nearly all the available gain is. Moving a 4 to a 6 changes how the week actually feels. Chasing someone else's 9 usually doesn't.
Good enough to leave alone this quarter. The temptation is to polish the areas you enjoy, because progress there is pleasant. A 7 you improved is a 4 you ignored.
Real strengths exist. So does flattering yourself. If you can't name something from the last month that evidences a 9, it's a 6 you happen to be fond of.
"Delegation is a weakness of mine" is a personality trait you can carry around for a decade. "Delegation is a 3, and a 5 by Christmas looks like two projects I never touch" is a piece of work with an end. The number forces a position, makes movement visible, and turns the gap between where you are and where you'd like to be into a conversation rather than a judgement.
Then the rule that makes the whole thing work: two areas, two points, ninety days. Not ten areas. Not perfection. Two areas moved two points each, every quarter, is eight points of real change a year in the places that were holding you back — and it's achievable in the weeks you actually have, including the bad ones. Ten areas at once is how owners end a year exhausted with nothing to show for it.
Don't chase 10s either. A business of honest 7s comfortably beats a business with two 9s and three 3s, because the wheel either rolls or it doesn't. The lowest scores set the ride quality, which is exactly why the method sends you to the areas you'd rather not look at. Same logic as marginal gains: small, compounding, unglamorous.
This is the personal wheel — the one to run first, because it's the level everything else is built on. The leadership wheel has twelve areas and the business wheel has ten; the mechanic is identical on all three.
Do I know what matters and where I'm going?
Do I have the capacity to perform sustainably?
Am I spending time on the things that matter most?
Do my routines support the person I want to become?
Do I trust myself to act, decide and follow through?
Do I understand and manage my emotional responses?
Do I have healthy relationships and the right support?
Do I recover and adapt when things are difficult?
Am I continuing to develop?
Am I building a life I enjoy living?
Six steps, forty minutes, one sheet of paper. This is the part that people skip and then wonder why nothing changed.
The owner below is illustrative — a composite I use to teach the method, not a client. I don't publish client results. Every figure is invented but internally consistent, so you can follow the arithmetic rather than take it on trust.
The owner: a nine-person marketing agency. Revenue £680,000 a year, net profit £54,000 — a margin of 7.9%. Eighteen retained clients, of which the three largest are 38% of revenue. He works 58 hours a week, 21 of them delivering client work himself, and describes the business as "going well" in a tone that suggests otherwise.
Performance: 7. Over the last ninety days the business broadly did what he said it would — revenue up, deadlines mostly met, nothing on fire. Purpose: 3. Asked why he's doing it, he takes forty seconds and lands on "because stopping now would feel like failing". Bottom-right on the grid. The treadmill, and a textbook version of it: everything working, nothing landing.
On the personal wheel: energy 3, enjoyment 3, focus 4, purpose and direction 3 — but confidence 8 and resilience 7, which is why he's been able to run like this for four years. On the business wheel: owner time 2, finance 4, systems 4, marketing 6, delivery 7. Seven areas under 5 across the two wheels, and the instinct in the room is to write seven actions.
Owner time (2) and finance (4). Not because the others don't matter, but because at 58 hours a week he has no capacity to fix anything, and at a 7.9% margin he has no money to buy help. Those two are the constraint on every other improvement available to him. Energy at 3 is the score he most wants to fix, and it's a symptom of the other two rather than the work itself.
Three hours at a time, four blocks, across six weeks, to two senior people. The test isn't a rota — it's two named projects he does not touch, including when they wobble in week three.
Average retainer £2,350 a month, so £141 each, £1,551 a month, £18,612 a year. Against £54,000 of net profit that single lever is roughly a third more profit, from clients who were never leaving over £141.
Hours he personally billed last week. Target: under 10 by week 12. Not revenue, not the pipeline — the number that proves the first two commitments are real.
They scored 6 and 4. Both matter. Neither is this quarter's work, and writing that down is what stops the plan quietly becoming a list of seven things by February.
Same forty minutes, same sheet, original scores visible. Owner time 2 → 5: he's down to 11 billed hours a week — an hour above target, and ten hours a week back in his own diary — and the two handed-over projects survived their wobble in week three. Finance 4 → 6: £1,551 a month of new margin is banked and the January renewals now have a written rule instead of a nervous phone call. Purpose: still 3.
That last number is the point of the example, not a failure of it. Purpose doesn't move because you scheduled it — it moves when there's finally enough room in the week to think about something other than delivery. Ninety days bought him ten hours a week and roughly a third more profit; the quarter after that is when the second question gets a real answer. And notice what the plan wasn't: it wasn't the seven things scoring under 5, it wasn't a rebrand, and it wasn't a target with no first action attached.
The output is never a report. It's a plan you own, in your words, with dates on it.
See honestly where you sit on performance and purpose — two scores, one date, written down.
Rate the ten areas of a high-performing life 0–10, with a sentence of evidence beside each.
Define what matters — and what a good ordinary week looks like when it's going well.
Choose the 90-day focus that will move the needle most, then defend it against everything else.
Turn it into a Personal Performance Plan: first action inside 14 days, one number per priority.
Weekly reviews to stay honest; re-score every quarter against the sheet you kept.
How the plan gets delivered depends on what you need, and I'd rather be straight about the difference. Coaching develops you and your leadership so you make the changes yourself. A fractional COO engagement means I'm in the engine room every week building the systems with your team. A non-executive director seat is oversight and challenge at board level, monthly rather than weekly. Focused advisory work sits between them when you need one specific thing fixed properly. Same method underneath all four — the only variable is how much of the work is mine and how much is yours.
No — goal-setting starts with what you want, and this starts with where you actually are. Intent has never been the limiting factor for the owners I work with; they have plenty of it. What they're missing is an honest baseline, a rule that stops them working on ten things at once, and a number they'll look at every week whether or not it flatters them. The quadrant gives you the baseline. The 0–10 wheel narrows it to two areas. The 90-day plan supplies the review. Set a goal without those three and what you have is a new year's resolution with a spreadsheet attached to it.
Then owner dependence isn't an obstacle to the work — it is the work, and it's your first priority. Don't try to extract yourself from everything: name the single thing that would break first if you disappeared for a fortnight, and make that your quarter. Move three hours, then another three. In the illustrative example above, the owner set out to shift twelve of his twenty-one delivery hours across six weeks in four three-hour blocks and actually moved ten, and the only reason it held was that he stopped touching two named projects entirely. Nobody is ever handed a clear quarter to work on their business. You take four hours a month and you defend them.
A business plan describes the destination; this decides what you'll do about the two things stopping you reaching it. Most strategy days produce a long list of good ideas, a burst of energy, and no change by March — because everything on the list is equally important, which means nothing is. Performance on Purpose caps you at two priorities a quarter and asks for a measurable move, two points on a ten-point scale, rather than an aspiration. It also applies a test a business plan never does: if the strategy makes the numbers better and your life worse, it hasn't worked, and you're on the treadmill with a nicer deck.
You can start with the business, and sometimes you should — if cash is tight, fix cash first. The starting rule is set out above. What that rule doesn't tell you is why the order matters: business fixes installed by an owner running on empty tend to come undone within a quarter, because a new process only holds while somebody has the energy to enforce it. Watch for the tell — you install something in month one, it works in month two, and by month three you are quietly doing it yourself again. That is not a bad system. That is a system with nobody left to run it, and the fix is one level up.
Then you haven't scored yourself yet, you've avoided it — and a row of fives is exactly what that looks like. The fix is the evidence sentence: beside each number, write one thing that actually happened in the last month to justify it. Fives collapse fast under that question, usually into a couple of 3s and a couple of 7s, which is the useful shape. The other common pattern is a wall of 8s from an owner whose business is visibly struggling, and it has the same cure. Scores you can't evidence aren't data about your business; they're data about how you'd like to be seen.
Time and energy move first, usually inside six weeks, because delegated hours and a protected morning are felt immediately. The financial numbers lag by a quarter or more — a price rise only lands as renewals fall due, and recovered capacity has to be spent on something that pays before it shows up in the accounts. Purpose moves last and doesn't run to a schedule, because it isn't a task you complete. If nothing at all has shifted by week six, the cause is almost always that you picked four priorities and called it two, or you set a target without a named first action inside a fortnight.
No. Everything on this page works with a sheet of paper, forty minutes and a willingness to be unflattering about the last ninety days. The sliders on the three wheel pages just do the arithmetic and email you a plan. What a coach adds is the part you genuinely can't do alone: someone who has seen the pattern before, who'll ask why an area is a 7 when the evidence sounds like a 4, and who will be there in week thirteen whether or not you did the work. If you want that, it comes as coaching, as a fractional COO in the engine room, or as a NED seat at the board table.
Book a free, no-obligation 30-minute call. We'll find the biggest opportunity in your business — then you decide if you want a hand fixing it. No pitch, no fluff.
Prefer email? andy@andyjackson.com
