What are the eight pillars of executing a business plan?
A great strategy is worthless without execution, and 24HRBP frames execution around eight pillars: Marketing, New business (sales), Operations and Product, then Relationships with clients, Strategic partners and Talent, with Financials as the ultimate outcome. The first seven are the levers you actually pull; the financials are the result of getting them right.
Which eight pillars make up great execution?
There are eight, and they’re easy to hold if you take the first four in order: Marketing, New business, Operations, Product (MNOP). Marketing still rests on the four Ps (product, price, promotion, place), though for many businesses promotion, brand and lead generation are what they most control. New business is a disciplined approach to driving sales, B2B or B2C. Operations is your systems, processes and even meeting rhythms, now with AI reshaping the options. Product, the key to it all, asks whether your offering is as good as it can be, and whether the pricing is right. Then come three more: Relationships with clients, Strategic partners, and Talent (how you recruit, onboard, train and develop your team). The eighth, Financials, is the outcome of the other seven.
Which pillars do businesses most often overlook?
Two stand out: client relationships and strategic partners. We tend to obsess over winning new business, but growing the clients you already have is usually the easier path, and most companies don’t concentrate on it enough. Do you genuinely understand your clients, and are the relationships as strong as they could be? Strategic partners are the other blind spot, and one of the most forgotten parts of business planning altogether. Many companies simply can’t operate at their best without a key IT, technology or supply-chain partner, so it’s worth mapping which partners you’re close to, which you’re not, and which you might be missing. Sometimes outsourcing to an expert partner beats trying to do everything yourself. Neglect these two pillars and you leave some of the easiest growth and the biggest operational risks unmanaged.
Why can’t you fix a business by focusing on the financials?
Because the financials are the outcome, not the lever. In corporate life a general manager would often stride in saying they’d turn the whole business around on, say, people and culture, or on new business. The honest answer was that it’s one of seven things, not the only one. When a business is struggling, the cause is almost always in one of the first seven pillars: sales aren’t converting like they used to, a competitor has lifted its marketing, systems and processes have stopped fitting as you’ve grown, the product feels tired or is priced wrong, or a couple of key customers walked last year. You can stare at the financials and hope they turn around, but the only way to actually move them is to focus on, optimise and execute the first seven pillars well.
How 24HRBP approaches this
In a 24 Hour Business Plan session we pressure-test all eight pillars, because a plan only delivers if it’s executed across every one. The financial result you want is downstream of getting marketing, sales, operations, product, clients, partners and talent right.
Watch the full episode on The 24HR Business Plan Podcast: Episode 7 - Executing a Business Plan with Excellence
