Goals and constraints.
Where you want the business to go, and what limits you — time, money, people, capacity.
A strategy that ignores what you want — or what you cannot do — is fiction. This area pins down both sides: the direction you actually want, and the limits that will shape every recommendation.
What this area covers
- Where you want the business to be in 12–18 months, in concrete terms
- Growth ambitions with deadlines: a second site, a new hire, a new service
- The budget ceiling for tools, and the one-time setup you will tolerate
- Staff bandwidth: who has hours for implementation, and how many
- Owner time: how much you treat, sell, or deliver today — and what you want that to become
- Hard gates: decisions already conditional on a hire, a run rate, or a reserve
Why it matters
Constraints are not obstacles to work around at the end; they are design inputs at the start. A plan that needs ten implementation hours a week from a team that has four will fail no matter how good the ideas are. Naming constraints early is what makes the final plan runnable — and it is why recommendations in the report fit the stated budget instead of ignoring it.
How it relates to the five steps
Informs every step rather than belonging to one: goals and constraints are set down early and carried through — they filter which solutions count in step 3, weigh the ranking in step 4, and show up as gates the final strategy respects rather than overrides.