For owners of financial advisory firms, 10 to 250 employees
A firm that keeps moving when you are not in the room
Most advisory firms carry the plan in the owner's head, so every decision of consequence routes back through him. The one page firm plan is where a leadership team starts fixing that. The whole thing is on this page, free, with a complete worked example.
The whole plan explained section by section, with an example you can copy
A drawing of the full operating system that the page is one small part of
The part no template mentions: what the implementer in the room actually does
Written by Peter Croft, a Certified EOS Implementer in Austin, Texas. More than 100 full day sessions with over 25 leadership teams across 15 industries.
Bring your leadership team to a free 90 minute session
Your team names the firm's number one issue and works it through live, in the room. Name, phone and email. That is the whole form.
That is through to Peter
He reads these himself and will follow up personally. Nothing else is needed from you now.
Nothing on this page is gated. The form is only for firms that want the plan applied to their own business. Your details are not sold or shared.
Three questions, answered in writing, on one page
Where we are going. How we get there. Who owns what. When those three live on a page the whole leadership team shares, the firm stops relying on the owner to be the plan. Here is a complete example for an advisory firm of about thirty five people.
Example: an advisory firm, 35 peopleIllustrative only, reviewed every quarter
Where we are going
Why the firm exists
Families in this county retire without wondering whether they got it right.
Ten year target
$1.4B under management, nine advisors, one office, still independently owned.
Three year picture
$780M under management. Six advisors, each carrying a defined service tier. Partners spend four days a week with clients and one day on the firm.
What we will not do
No held away account management. No new households under $400k outside a founder relationship. No second office before the service model is written down.
How we get there
This year
$520M under management. Two new advisors fully ramped. Every household assigned to a defined service tier.
How we win
Planning first, products second. One written process every advisor follows. Referrals asked for on a schedule, not when someone remembers.
The next 90 days
Client onboarding written as one process and followed by every advisorHead of Advisory
New fee schedule approved and in force for all new householdsManaging Partner
Planning software migration finished and the old system retiredHead of Operations
Service model defined for each client tier and published to the teamHead of Advisory
Advisor training path written, first two modules deliveredHead of Growth
Who owns what
The firm. Final call when the team cannot agreeManaging Partner
New households and referral relationshipsHead of Growth
Advice quality, advisor development, the service modelHead of Advisory
Operations, compliance, technologyHead of Operations
Books, billing, cash and the fee schedule in practiceFinance Lead
An illustrative example written for this page. It is not any firm's plan, and the right hand column carries seats rather than people on purpose. On a real plan that column holds a person's name, because a seat cannot be held accountable and a person can.
The page is the back of the napkin, not the operating system
The one page firm plan is not a secret. It is not complicated, nobody is hiding it, and you have just read the whole thing. That is exactly why it is worth being straight about what it does and does not do.
Plenty of firms have written a version of this page. Most of those pages were true for about six weeks. The page is the smallest piece of a much larger thing: a way of running the firm with a fixed cadence, a set of working parts, and somebody from outside the business holding all of it to account. Here is the whole drawing, with the page in it.
What actually runs the firm
Sixteen parts, installed over about two years. The one page plan is part A1.1.
PART A1.1The one page firm plan
This is the part you came here for. One sheet, three questions, one name against each priority and each area of the firm. Genuinely useful, and free.
Drawn at the same scale as everything else, it is a chip inside one block in the top row. That is not a reason to skip it. It is the reason a firm that writes the page and stops there sees nothing change by Christmas.
GROUP A
Six parts that have to be strong at the same time
A1Vision
Everyone can say where the firm is going and how it gets there, in the same words.
A1.1The one page firm plan. Your starting point.
A2People
The right people in the right seats, judged against what each role genuinely requires.
A3Data
A short set of numbers, read weekly, that tell the truth regardless of how the week felt.
A4Issues
Problems named openly and closed quickly, with a list so nothing quietly disappears.
A5Process
The handful of core processes identified, written down and followed by everyone.
A6Execution
Short priority lists, commitments that get kept, and a firm that is measurably different in ninety days.
GROUP B
The cadence that keeps those six strong
B1Quarterly full day session
The quarter is reviewed honestly, the plan is corrected where reality moved, the next priorities are set.
Peter runs the room
B2Two annual planning days
The long view, the structure of the firm, and the people conversations a single day never fits.
Peter runs the room
B3The weekly leadership meeting
Same day, same time, same 75 minute agenda, most of it spent closing issues rather than giving updates.
Your team runs it
B4Check ins between quarters
Shaped around what the team is actually working on, not a fixed schedule applied to everyone.
Peter, as needed
GROUP C
The working parts that cadence produces
C1A weekly scorecard
Five to fifteen leading numbers, one owner each, read in five minutes.
C2Quarterly priorities with one name each
Three to seven for the whole firm, with done defined in advance so day ninety is not an argument.
C3One name against every area
No area of the firm with two owners, and no area with none.
C4Core processes written down
Identified, documented at the level that matters, and actually followed by every advisor.
C5An issues list that empties
Three to five closed a week, which is forty or more decisions a quarter that used to sit in an inbox.
What holds the drawing together
Every block above is something a leadership team could, in theory, build for itself. Almost nobody does. The firms that try usually have a page and half a scorecard by month four and nothing else by month nine. What holds it together is an implementer in the room: the outside voice that will not let the team settle for a comfortable answer, and the discipline to hold the cadence through the quarter when the firm gets busy.
Sixteen parts in total. The one page firm plan is the one you can write this month on your own. The rest arrive over about two years, in a particular order, with someone in the room who has installed them before.
Anyone can buy the paint
The one page plan is a tool, and a tool that is free and public is not where the value sits. Give a leadership team a blank page and a brush and what you get back is a page.
What changes a firm is the person in the room on the day it finally has to make the call it has been avoiding for two years.
What the page gives youWhat an implementer gives you
The pageA written answer to three questions.
An implementerThe argument that produces a real answer, with every partner in the room and nobody allowed to go quiet.
The pageA list of priorities for the quarter.
An implementerA list of five, because he will not let the team keep eleven, and a hard review on day ninety that the team cannot talk its way around.
The pageAn agenda for a weekly meeting.
An implementerA team still running that meeting in month nine, past the three clumsy weeks where most firms quietly drop it.
The pageA box for who owns what.
An implementerThe conversation about the well liked person in the wrong seat, which the leadership team has been having privately for two years and never together.
The pageA template for a scorecard.
An implementerSeven numbers that genuinely lead, chosen by arguing the team out of the fifteen that only confirm what already happened.
The pageA plan that is true the day it is written.
An implementerA plan still true in quarter six, because four times a year something forces the team to revisit it and correct it out loud.
What Peter actually does in the room
Peter Croft is a Certified EOS Implementer based in Austin, Texas. He runs the quarterly and annual sessions himself, and he stays out of the weekly leadership meeting on purpose. A team that needs him there every week has bought a dependency, not a system.
In a session he is not presenting. He is facilitating: holding the conversation on the real problem rather than the stated one, making sure the quietest person at the table says the thing they walked in thinking, and refusing to move on while an answer is still comfortable and vague.
The other half of what he brings is pattern. Across 15 industries and more than 25 leadership teams, most of what a team believes is unique about its situation is something he has watched play out before. Knowing which part to install next, and which to leave alone this quarter, is the difference between a system that holds and a binder on a shelf.
The rest of this page, in order
Everything below used to sit behind a form. It no longer does. About eighteen minutes, written for a firm with partners, advisors and an operations lead, with worked examples from an advisory firm rather than a factory.
Most advisory firms already have a plan. It is in the owner's head, it is reasonably good, and it is the reason every decision of consequence routes back through him. The firm grows by adding households, not by getting better at being a firm, and the owner becomes the bottleneck on the thing he built.
Writing the plan down does not fix that by itself. Plenty of firms have a forty page strategic document from an offsite three years ago. It was read once, by the people who wrote it, and it has not been opened since. Length is why. A document that takes an hour to read is a document the leadership team will not open on a Tuesday when two partners disagree about whether a project belongs in this quarter.
One page is a forcing function. When the whole plan has to fit, the team cannot keep everything. It has to decide what actually matters this year and leave the rest off. That argument is the valuable part. The page is just where the answer lands, in language everyone on the leadership team can repeat without looking.
The page also makes drift visible in about ten seconds. If a priority has no name beside it, nobody owns it. If two people own the same area, neither does. If the three year picture has not changed in three years, nobody is steering. A binder hides all three for a year. A page cannot.
One page and not a binder
A forty page strategic plan is read once, at the offsite, by the people who wrote it. A one page plan gets pulled up in a Tuesday meeting when two partners disagree about whether a project belongs in this quarter.
Length is not the point. The constraint is. When the whole plan has to fit on a page, the team is forced to decide what actually matters this year, and to leave off the rest. That argument is the valuable part. The page is just where the answer lands.
Section one: where we are going
This is the part most firms get wrong by being vague, and the part that does the most work when it is specific. It answers where the firm is headed, in enough detail that a new advisor could tell whether an opportunity fits.
Four things belong here.
Why the firm exists. One sentence, in plain language, about the difference the firm makes for the people it serves. Not a mission statement written for a website. Something a partner would actually say out loud. “Families in this county retire without wondering whether they got it right” is a real one. “To deliver best in class holistic wealth solutions” is not.
The ten year target. A single number or picture far enough out to be a direction rather than a forecast. Assets under management, number of advisors, ownership structure. Something the team can either hit or miss.
The three year picture. This is the one that earns its place. Describe the firm three years from now as if you walked into it: how many advisors, what each of them carries, what the service model looks like, how the partners spend their week. If the three year picture does not describe a different week for the owner, the plan is not actually changing anything.
What we will not do. The section almost nobody writes and everybody needs. No held away account management. No new households under a threshold outside a founder relationship. No second office before the service model is written down. A firm that has not decided what it will refuse has not decided anything.
A test for this section: hand it to an advisor who has been with the firm six months and ask whether a specific prospect fits. If she can answer from the page, the section works. If she has to ask a partner, it does not.
Section two: how we get there
The middle section connects the long view to the next ninety days, so the plan is not just an aspiration sitting above the actual work.
Three things belong here.
This year. Three or four measurable goals for the current year. Assets under management, advisors fully ramped, households on a defined service tier. Numbers, not themes.
How we win. Two or three sentences on what this firm does differently that makes the goals reachable. “Planning first, products second. One written process every advisor follows. Referrals asked for on a schedule, not when someone remembers.” If a competitor could copy the sentence word for word and it would still be true of them, rewrite it.
The next ninety days. Three to seven firm wide priorities, each with one name beside it. This is the live part of the page and it is replaced every quarter. It gets its own section below.
Section three: who owns what
The last section is a list of the areas the firm has to cover and the single person accountable for each. Not a staff chart, and not a list of titles. A list of functions with one name against each.
Most advisory firms discover two things when they write this down honestly. First, there are areas with no name at all, usually operations, technology or the fee schedule in practice. Second, there are areas with two names, usually growth, where both founding partners believe they own it and neither has final say.
Both are fixable in an afternoon, and neither gets fixed while the structure stays in people's heads.
One name, not one person per area. In a firm of twenty five, a partner may hold three of the five seats. That is normal and it is not a problem. The problem is when nobody can say which of two people decides. Accountability is about who answers for the outcome, not about headcount.
Quarterly priorities with named owners
Every ninety days the leadership team picks three to seven things the whole firm will finish in the quarter, and puts one name beside each. Not a department list. The firm's list.
Three constraints do most of the work here.
Seven is the ceiling and five is usually right. A team that sets eleven priorities finishes four and learns that the list is theatre.
One name, never two. The owner is not necessarily the person doing the work. She is the person who answers for whether it is done on the last day of the quarter.
Done is defined in advance. “Improve onboarding” is not a priority. “Client onboarding written as one process and followed by every advisor” is, because on day ninety there is no argument about whether it happened.
A worked example for an advisory firm of about thirty five people. The owner column carries seats here, as it does throughout this page; on a real plan it carries names.
Example: one quarter of firm wide priorities
Priority
Owner
Done means
Client onboarding written as one process
Head of Advisory
Five steps documented, every advisor trained, next ten households onboarded the same way
New fee schedule in force
Managing Partner
Approved by the partners, published internally, applied to every new household from the effective date
Advisor training path
Head of Growth
Path written end to end, first two modules delivered to the two newest advisors
Service model defined per tier
Head of Advisory
Each tier has a written set of touches a year, published to the team, households assigned
Planning software migration
Head of Operations
All households migrated, team trained, old system switched off and its contract cancelled
Notice that none of these are client acquisition goals. Acquisition is already on the scorecard every week. The quarterly list is for the things that make the firm better at being a firm, which otherwise never reach a calendar because no client is waiting on them.
What happens to everything that did not make the list? It goes on a running issues list, which the weekly meeting works through. Most of it turns out to be smaller than it looked, and gets solved in a week rather than waiting a quarter.
The weekly leadership meeting
Same day, same time, same length, same agenda, every week. The leadership team runs it itself. The agenda does not change, which is what lets the meeting get faster over time rather than slower.
The fixed weekly agenda
Segment
Time
What happens
Scorecard
5 minutes
Read the numbers out. On track or off track, nothing else. Anything off track becomes an issue.
Quarterly priorities
5 minutes
Each owner says on track or off track for her priority. Off track becomes an issue. No status reports.
Issues
60 minutes
Pick the three most important issues on the list. Take the first one. Find the real problem, talk it through, decide, and give the decision a name and a date.
Next steps
5 minutes
Read back every commitment made, with the name and the date. Who needs to hear about any of this.
Issues get the bulk of the hour on purpose. Most leadership meetings invert this. They spend fifty minutes on updates everybody already knew and ten minutes rushing the one disagreement that actually mattered, which then shows up again the following week, and the week after that. The same three topics circle for a year.
The agenda above makes updates cheap. On track or off track takes four seconds per person. What that buys is a full hour for the thing a leadership team is uniquely able to do, which is close an open question that nobody below them can close.
Two habits make the issues hour work. The first is picking the three most important issues rather than working the list top to bottom, because the loudest issue is rarely the most expensive one. The second is spending the first few minutes on what the problem actually is before anyone proposes a fix. Teams that skip that step solve the stated problem and watch the real one return in a month.
A well run issues hour closes between three and five issues a week. Over a quarter that is forty or more decisions that used to sit in someone's inbox.
The weekly meeting is the team's own. It does not need a facilitator in the room to work, and that is the point.
The weekly scorecard
Five to fifteen numbers, read by the leadership team together, every week. Each number has one owner and a weekly goal, and the whole thing takes five minutes because the only question asked is whether it is on track.
The point of a weekly scorecard is timing. Assets under management, revenue and client retention are real numbers, but they tell you about a problem months after it started. Leading numbers tell you in week two, while there is still a quarter left to do something about it.
The test for whether a number belongs: if it moves this week, does something downstream move next quarter? If yes, it is a leading number. If it only confirms what already happened, it belongs in the monthly financial review, not here.
Example: a weekly scorecard for an advisory firm
Number
Owner
Weekly goal
New households opened
Head of Growth
2
Referrals asked for
Head of Growth
8
Referrals received
Head of Growth
3
Planning meetings booked
Head of Advisory
12
Planning meetings held
Head of Advisory
10
Advisor client touches completed
Head of Advisory
45
Households onboarded and fully funded
Head of Operations
2
Open service requests over 5 days old
Head of Operations
0
Review meetings overdue against tier
Head of Advisory
0
Cash position against the floor
Finance Lead
Above floor
Ten numbers, one owner each, read in five minutes. Three of them are activity the firm controls directly, which is what makes them useful when something goes quiet. When new households drop for three weeks, the firm can already see whether the cause is fewer referrals asked for, fewer planning meetings booked, or a conversion problem at the meeting itself. Those are three different fixes, and a firm reading only the household count cannot tell them apart.
Start smaller than you think. A team that builds a twenty two line scorecard in week one abandons it by week six. Seven numbers that everyone genuinely reads beats fifteen that get skimmed. Add numbers when a blind spot proves itself, and take numbers off when nobody has acted on one for a quarter.
Documented core processes
Most advisory firms run on six to ten core processes. Finding a prospect, converting a prospect, onboarding a household, delivering advice on an ongoing basis, servicing a request, billing, hiring and onboarding an advisor. The work is already happening. What is usually missing is agreement on how.
Three things have to be true for a process to count.
Identified. The leadership team agrees on the list and on what each process is called. Firms routinely find two partners using the same word for different things.
Documented. Written down at the level of the handful of steps that matter, with the detail that actually varies underneath. Not a hundred page manual nobody maintains.
Followed by everyone. This is the one firms skip. A documented process that two of five advisors follow is not a process, it is a preference.
The level of detail that works: the major steps on one page, each step owned, with the checklists and templates living underneath where the person doing the work can find them. A new advisor should be able to read the page and know what happens next. She should not have to read it to do the job after her first month.
Example: client onboarding, owned by the Head of Advisory
Step
What happens
Done when
1. Agreement and welcome
Advisory agreement signed, welcome call booked within two business days, household assigned a service tier.
Signed agreement filed and tier recorded in the system
2. Discovery and documents
Document checklist sent, discovery meeting held, goals and constraints captured in writing in the household record.
Discovery notes written up and the checklist returned complete
3. Plan built and presented
Planning team builds the first plan, advisor reviews it before the client sees it, plan presented and agreed.
Client has agreed the plan and the first actions
4. Accounts opened and funded
Accounts opened, transfers initiated, operations tracks each transfer to settlement and chases what stalls.
All expected assets received and reconciled
5. Handover to the service rhythm
Review cadence set per the tier, next two meetings booked, referral conversation scheduled for day ninety.
Future meetings on calendars and the household marked active
Five steps, one owner for the whole process, a clear finish line on each step. Written this way, an advisory firm can answer a question it usually cannot: where exactly does a new household stall, and how often. That answer is worth more than the document.
The six components, in plain English
EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, is not a single tool and it is not the one page plan. It is a set of habits that keep six parts of a firm strong at the same time, because a firm rarely fails on all six and rarely succeeds on one. These are the six blocks in Group A of the drawing above.
Vision. Everyone in the firm knows where it is going and how it gets there. The symptom when this is weak: partners give different answers to the same question about the firm's direction, and advisors fill the gap with their own.
People. The right people in the right seats, judged against what the firm actually values and what each role genuinely requires. The symptom: a well liked long serving person in a seat that has outgrown her, and a leadership team that has been discussing it privately for two years.
Data. A small set of numbers, read weekly, that tell the truth regardless of how the week felt. The symptom: decisions argued on opinion, and nobody able to say whether last month was good.
Issues. A culture where problems get named openly and closed quickly, with a list so nothing is lost. The symptom: the same three topics on the agenda every quarter, and the real conversation happening in the parking lot.
Process. The handful of core processes identified, written down and followed by everyone. The symptom: each advisor running a different version of the firm, and quality depending on who answered the phone.
Execution. The discipline that turns the plan into finished work: a short priority list each quarter, a weekly meeting that closes issues, and commitments that get read back and kept. The symptom: a good plan, genuine agreement in the room, and nothing different ninety days later.
Firms usually arrive strong on two or three of these. An advisory firm with excellent advisors and an owner who sells well is often strong on people and vision and weak on data, process and execution. The gap is not talent. It is that nobody has ever installed the habits.
Drafting a rough version this month
You do not need anyone's permission to start, and a rough first version is genuinely useful. Three sittings:
Ninety minutes with the leadership team on section one. Why the firm exists, the ten year target, the three year picture, what you will not do. Expect disagreement on the three year picture. That disagreement is the most valuable thing you will find all year, and it is the reason to do this with the team rather than alone.
Sixty minutes on who owns what. List the areas the firm has to cover, then put exactly one name against each. Write down every area that comes up with no name or two names. Do not try to solve those in the same sitting.
Sixty minutes on the next ninety days. Pick no more than five things the firm will finish this quarter, give each one a name and a written definition of done, and put the next review on the calendar before anyone leaves.
Then start the weekly meeting, with the agenda above, and seven scorecard numbers. Hold it for eight weeks before you judge it. The first three weeks of a new weekly meeting are always clumsy, and most firms that abandon this abandon it in week four.
What a first attempt will not give you is the hard part: an outside voice that will not let the team settle for a comfortable answer, and the discipline to hold the cadence through the quarter when the firm gets busy. That is the work an implementer is actually for, and it is the fifteen parts of the drawing that are not the page.
What installing it actually involves
Doing this properly takes about two years. It is run as a series of working sessions with the leadership team, not a course and not a document handover.
Before anything is agreed
A free 90 minute session
Your leadership team meets with Peter, names the firm's number one issue and works it through live in the room. Two things usually come out of it. The issue gets closed, and the team has felt what the rest of it is like before committing to anything.
Every 90 days
A full day with the leadership team
The quarter just finished is reviewed honestly, the plan is revisited and corrected where reality has moved, the next quarter's three to seven priorities are set with one name against each, and the issues that have been sitting on the list get worked. Peter facilitates the day.
Once a year
Two days of planning
The long view: the three year picture, the year's goals, the structure of who owns what, and the people conversations a single day never has room for. Peter facilitates these as well.
Every week, without him
Your team's own meeting
Peter does not facilitate weekly leadership meetings and does not sit in them. The team runs its own, every week, which is the entire point. An implementer who has to be in the room is a dependency, not a system. The quarterly and annual sessions are the ones he runs, because those are the days a leadership team needs someone from outside the firm asking the question nobody inside it will ask.
Between sessions
Check ins, shaped to the team
Some teams want a scheduled call every few weeks. Others want help before one specific hard conversation. This is built around what the team is actually working on rather than a fixed schedule applied to everyone.
Around two years in
It stops being something you are doing
By the end of the first year most teams have the page written, a working scorecard, a weekly meeting they would not give up, and two or three core processes documented. The second year is where it stops being a project the firm is running and becomes how the firm runs.
Who wrote this
Peter Croft is a Certified EOS Implementer based in Austin, Texas. He installs the Entrepreneurial Operating System with leadership teams, running the quarterly and annual planning sessions himself while the team runs its own weekly meeting.
He works with owners of financial advisory firms, wealth management practices, financial planning firms and insurance agencies, from ten employees to around two hundred and fifty. Sessions run in person or remotely.
If any of this page described your firm more accurately than you would like, that is usually the right moment for a conversation. His direct line is (512) 639-4338 and his email is peter.croft@eosworldwide.com.
100+
Full day sessions delivered
25+
Leadership teams
15+
Industries
This page is general business guidance for firm owners and is not investment, legal, tax or compliance advice. Every firm is different and results vary. The example plan, the scorecard and the process table are illustrations written for this page and do not describe any real firm or person.
You have the page. The rest is the work.
Write the first version with your leadership team this month. If the gap between where the firm is going and what your partners can recite bothers you, the next step is a free 90 minute session where the team names the firm's number one issue and works it through live. No pitch, and no obligation afterwards. If it is not the right fit, Peter will say so.
