How Audacious Targets Drag Your Business Into Strategy
Every so often an owner-managed firm finds itself basking in a success it can’t quite explain. One day a phone rang, a conversation happened, and before anyone could spell the word procurement a flagship client materialised. The revenue line blossomed, everyone took a bonus, and (here’s the rub) nobody paused to ask the only question that mattered: Why did we win? Once the celebration subsided the directors discovered that their single largest customer now accounts for more than half the payroll and most of the confidence, yet they still can’t trace the causal thread from first handshake to signed contract. Strategy, in other words, never showed up to the party.
Why should it? Strategy is a demanding guest. It needs evidence, perspective, the willingness to choose one future over a dozen flattering alternatives. It asks that we isolate the handful of capabilities that make us dangerous and double down on them while discarding comfortable distractions. None of this feels necessary when the order book is comfortably full. As long as invoices leave the building and cash comes back, it is astonishing how long a company can coast on unexamined good fortune. Mediocrity isn’t always visible from the inside; it often looks like stability.
The cure is not another away‑day with coloured Post‑its, nor a hastily hired Head of Transformation. The cure is a goal so outrageous it makes the present moment look amateur. One Marketing Strategist that I follow calls it The Schwarzenegger Goal, borrowing from Arnold’s habit of setting ambitions so oversized that they dictated not just what he did, but who he became. You don’t aim merely to win Mr Olympia six times; you decide to become the most recognised body on the planet. That scale forces your routines, your network, your diet, even your life to mutate until they are equal to the dream.
To put this in business terms; A client of mine invoices roughly £15 million a year to a single household‑name customer (with a 35% profit margin). On paper that makes them solidly successful. Behind the scenes it makes them fragile. Ask the founders how they first landed the deal and you get folklore, not analysis – “someone met so-and-so at a thing and then we won a little job, then we got more and it’s just grown…” Ask what unique value they provide and you get a gesture toward a presentation created by someone who hasn’t worked for them since before covid. Ask how they would replicate the win elsewhere and the room goes noticeably quiet. They have, in short, a £15 million anecdote, not a playbook.
When I pressed them to declare where they wanted the business to be in five years they muttered about inflation‑plus growth. That’s not a strategy. So, looking down the other end of the telescope, we reframed the question. What would it take to bill £100 million across five marquee clients by 2030? The number is arbitrary, it serves to sever the comforting notion that tinkering with what you’ve been doing up until now will be enough. The leap from £15 million hinging on one relationship to £100 million diversified across five demands a forensic audit of value proposition, sales architecture, delivery model, even culture. It requires a narrative you can articulate to strangers, not just the insiders who have always liked you.
Notice what happens the moment that larger goal lands on the table. The team begins to map the customer journey they never documented. They dig into why procurement directors on one continent sign quicker than those on another. They debate whether their technical edge lies in speed, in risk absorption, or in plain‑English communication of something competitors insist on wrapping in jargon. In short, the company starts to think, and thinking at scale is the very definition of strategy.
One well known Business Angel I work with likes to ask founders how they would achieve their ten‑year objective in twelve months. It’s the same provocation dressed in a different hoodie. The content of the target matters less than the behaviour it unleashes. Compressing a decade into a year forces you to strip away incrementalism. Suddenly you are scavenging for force multipliers: partnerships, intellectual property, capital injections, because there is no time for polite organic growth.
Will my client hit £100 million by 2030? I have no idea. That isn’t the point. What matters is that their day‑to‑day decisions are now benchmarked against a destination that dwarfs business‑as‑usual. They have begun documenting the sales DNA of the original £14 million win, converting myth into method. They have built a dashboard that exposes how value is created, captured and defended. They have, in other words, entered the strategic gym and started lifting heavier cognitive weights.
If you suspect your own company is living off accidental kudos, try this experiment. Take your current annual revenue, multiply it by seven, and set a deadline that makes you uncomfortable. Then ask, calmly and without excuse, What would have to be true for us to get there? Feel that subtle panic? That is the sound of complacency cracking. It is also the moment strategy becomes inevitable.
Audacious goals will not guarantee success, but they will guarantee movement. They expose the brittleness of your existing model and force you to decide whether to reinforce it or reinvent it. That decision, conscious, evidence‑based, courageous, is the beating heart of strategy. Everything else is just busywork dressed for LinkedIn.
So set the Schwarzenegger Goal. Write it in ink large enough to make your present look small. Let it humble your habits, interrogate your luck, and translate your single lucky break into a system that wins on purpose. Your future self will thank you, and so will every new customer who never has to rely on your folklore to discover your value. Because value, once you’ve thought it through properly, shouldn’t be a mystery even to you.
