Questions Business Owners
Ask Before They Pick One

The Pick One Method is a strategic decision-making framework for small and midsize business owners. It helps owners identify the highest-leverage issue or opportunity in their business, understand its root cause, choose the right strategy, and build a focused plan to address it. Instead of trying to fix ten things at once, this method helps leaders determine what matters most right now.

Stephen Wright developed the Pick One Method after years of working inside turnaround, growth-stage, and owner-led businesses and repeatedly seeing the same problem: leaders often know they have issues, but struggle to identify which issue will create the greatest impact if solved first.

Pick One is designed primarily for owners, CEOs, and executive teams of established small to midsize businesses who are figuring out what the next stage of growth looks like.

The Pick One Method works across industries because the methodology focuses on fundamental business issues, such as strategy, positioning, sales, operations, profitability, people, capacity, and leadership, that apply to any industry.

The Pick One Method can be used when a business is facing issues such as stalled growth, declining profitability, owner dependence, weak sales performance, operational bottlenecks, unclear positioning, capacity constraints, leadership problems, or too many competing opportunities.

It can also be used when nothing is obviously wrong, but the owner knows the company has reached another inflection point and needs to determine where the next stage of growth will come from.

No. Some of the best strategic decisions happen before a company is in trouble. The Pick One Method can help a growing or profitable business decide which opportunity to pursue, what not to pursue, where to allocate capital or leadership attention, and how to prepare for its next stage of growth.

It's useful whenever the number of possible directions is greater than the organization's ability to pursue them well. It identifies the root cause issue that can often reduce or eliminate many other issues at the same time.

One pattern I've seen repeatedly in owner-led businesses is that the leadership team can easily create a list of ten or twenty legitimate problems. The difficulty isn't finding problems, it's determining which one is driving the greatest number of the others.

Several problems may also share the same underlying root cause. Solving the root cause issue can often eliminate, reduce, or make a wide variety of other problems easier to solve. The Pick One Method doesn't mean ignoring everything else. It means deciding which issue, and its root cause, deserves disproportionate attention right now.

That's great. But one of the most expensive mistakes in business is solving the surface problem without understanding the root cause.

Over the years, I've walked into many businesses where the owner was convinced the biggest issue was sales, marketing, people, or operations. Sometimes they were right. But often, once we started asking deeper questions, we discovered the visible problem was being caused by something else entirely.

The Pick One Method tests whether the issue you're seeing is actually the root cause or simply a symptom of something deeper. If you've correctly identified the issue, the process should reinforce that decision and then help you determine the right strategic response and build the plan accordingly.

The Pick One Method means identifying the primary strategic priority for the current season of the business. Other essential activities continue, but one strategic initiative receives disproportionate leadership attention until the solution takes hold and pushes the business forward.

Once meaningful progress has been made, the process is repeated so the business can reassess and determine what should become the next Pick One priority.

Most owners gain significant clarity relatively quickly once they stop treating every issue as equally important. The initial Pick One process is designed to identify the priority and create a focused 90-day action plan. Some businesses see measurable improvement within weeks, while larger operational or strategic changes naturally take longer.

The objective isn't a quick fix. It's to make the right move first, then execute it with enough focus to produce measurable results.

The four strategies are Revise, Expand, Disrupt, and One Core Value. Revise means improving or changing something you already do. Expand means taking something that works into a new market, territory, customer group, product, or opportunity. Disrupt means making a more fundamental change to the way the business competes or creates value. One Core Value means deliberately building the business around one defining value or competitive advantage.

The challenge isn't understanding the four strategies. It's determining which one your business needs now.

It's closer to strategic planning with a high focus on root cause decision-making and implementation than traditional business coaching.

Traditional strategic planning can produce dozens of goals, initiatives, and priorities. The Pick One Method deliberately narrows the field and asks: what is the most important strategic move for this business at this particular point in time? Once that decision is made, the methodology helps turn it into a practical execution plan.

A Pick One engagement starts with evaluating the business and identifying the most important strategic issue, constraint, or opportunity. From there, the goal is to choose the appropriate strategy and translate it into a focused 90-day implementation plan with clear actions, ownership, and measurable outcomes.

Depending on the business, this can be followed by coaching or implementation support to help leadership maintain focus and turn the strategy into results.

Many business programs give owners a broad system for improving marketing, sales, operations, people, finance, and leadership at the same time. The Pick One Method starts with a different question: what is the one strategic move that would make the biggest difference to this business right now?

Instead of beginning with a predetermined solution, the Pick One Method starts with diagnosis. It helps you separate symptoms from root causes, select the right strategy (Revise, Expand, Disrupt, or One Core Value), and turn that decision into a focused action plan. The goal isn't to do more. It's to choose better so you can multiply the results.

EOS® (Entrepreneurial Operating System) is primarily an operating system designed to help leadership teams run their businesses more consistently through structure, accountability, meetings, scorecards, and processes.

The Pick One Method is primarily a strategic decision-making and planning framework that helps leadership determine what the business should focus on next. It helps an owner answer a different question: of everything we could work on, what is the one strategic move most likely to materially improve this business?

The two can work together. A company may use EOS, Scaling Up®, or another operating system to run the business while using the Pick One Method to dig into what deserves its strategic attention next.

Traditional consulting often begins with a functional problem, marketing, sales, finance, operations, or people, and then works to improve that area. The Pick One Method begins one level earlier by asking: before we start fixing anything, are we certain this is the right thing to fix?

The emphasis is on diagnosing the highest-leverage issue first, so time, money, and leadership attention aren't spent optimizing something that isn't actually holding the business back.

After working with companies through periods of growth, stagnation, and turnaround, I've found businesses often stop growing because something that worked well at one stage no longer works at the next. It might be that the owner is involved in too many decisions, a sales process that hasn't evolved, margins that can no longer support growth, an outdated offer, or a leadership structure the company has outgrown.

The first step is to identify what is actually constraining growth right now. Once that's clear, you can decide whether the business needs to Revise something, Expand something that already works, Disrupt the current model, or build around One Core Value.

That's often a sign that too many decisions, problems, and priorities are competing for your attention. Working harder usually doesn't solve that problem.

The Pick One Method helps you step outside the daily firefighting, identify what is creating the greatest friction, and concentrate resources on the change that can reduce complexity and give you back greater control of the business. The objective isn't simply to become more productive. It's to work on fewer things that matter more.

In my experience working with business owners, the problem that gets everyone's attention first is often not the real problem. Weak sales, poor margins, owner overload, or operational issues can be symptoms of something happening much further upstream.

One question I regularly ask leadership teams is, ‘if we solved this issue completely, what other problems would disappear or become easier to solve?’ The key is to start by separating the symptom from the underlying cause. For example, declining sales may look like a sales-team problem, but the real issue could be poor lead quality, weak differentiation, the wrong pricing, an outdated offer, or a market that has changed. Likewise, an overwhelmed owner may appear to have a time-management problem when the real issue is weak systems, unclear accountability, or too many strategic priorities.

One of the biggest shifts I try to help owners and CEOs make is moving from asking ‘what needs my attention today?’ to asking ‘what deserves my attention most?’ Those are rarely the same question.

In turnaround and growth situations, I've seen CEOs and their teams spend enormous energy on urgent operational issues while the strategic issue actually holding the company back gets very little attention. That isn't always the loudest problem or the item demanding attention today. The highest-value priority could be profitability, sales performance, positioning, leadership capacity, operations, cash flow, people, or an emerging growth opportunity.

The CEO's role is to distinguish between what is urgent and what is strategically important. The right question isn't “what needs to get done,” it's “what is the one thing that, if we made significant progress on it, would make the biggest difference to this business?” This becomes the strategic priority. Everything else should be evaluated in relation to it.

Firefighting usually happens when too many problems repeatedly reach the owner before the underlying causes are addressed. The solution isn't simply better time management. You need to identify why the same types of problems keep occurring, which may mean unclear roles, weak systems, insufficient training, poor accountability, capacity problems, bad handoffs, or an owner who remains involved in decisions that should happen elsewhere in the organization.

Start by tracking the issues and categorizing them. Look for patterns, then ask which one underlying problem is generating the greatest number of those interruptions.

No. The book gives you the complete thinking and framework behind the Pick One Method, but you can take the 7 Questions assessment or schedule time to talk with Stephen E. Wright, author and business turnaround veteran, to see if this would be valuable for your business.

In fact, the assessment can help you identify where you may be stuck before deciding what your next step should be.

Your answers are used to help identify where your business may be experiencing strategic friction and where further investigation could produce a good return. You'll receive guidance designed to help you think more clearly about the underlying issue rather than immediately jumping to another tactic or solution.

From there, you can decide if a further conversation would be useful for your business.

The Pick One Method is a business strategy framework and can be used by business owners regardless of their faith background.

Stephen E. Wright is a Christian, and his personal approach to leadership, stewardship, purpose, and business is influenced by his faith. He also works with Christian business leaders and can incorporate a faith-based perspective when that's appropriate for the individual or group. The core Pick One methodology itself is focused on practical business strategy, clarity, and execution that everyone can walk through.

Pick One: Four Proven Strategies to Focus & Accelerate Your Business is available on Amazon. The book walks through the Pick One framework, including how to evaluate your business, recognize strategic friction, choose between four proven strategies, and translate that decision into action.

Get the book on Amazon →