The Three-Step Plan Almost Every Business Leaves Blank

Where the wheels come off

Since 2020 I have coached breakout rooms at roughly twenty StoryBrand livestreams. Each one runs two full days. Six to eight business owners in a room, writing their messaging in real time, and me reading it over their shoulder as it happens. Call it a hundred and forty owners, minimum.

There is a pattern, and it is remarkably consistent. People struggle with their customer and their problem, but they struggle productively — they argue with themselves and they get somewhere.

Then we get to the plan, and the wheels come off the cart.

That is the whole problem in one sentence. It is not that these owners do not have a process. They run it every week. They have simply never had to describe it to a stranger, in order, in the stranger’s language — and it turns out that is a completely different skill from doing it.

What a plan is actually for

It helps to remember what state your customer is in when they read it.

They have a problem. If it were easy, they would have solved it themselves — so by the time they reach you they are usually overwhelmed and a little frustrated, and often slightly embarrassed that it has got this far. On top of that they are about to spend money with someone they have never met, on something they do not fully understand.

A plan lowers the cost of saying yes. Three short steps tell the reader that this is a known process rather than an open-ended commitment, that somebody has done it before, and that they will not be left holding anything they do not understand.

That is the entire mechanism. Not persuasion — reassurance. The plan is where an anxious person finds out that the path is short and someone else is walking it with them.

The formula

Over the years I have landed on a pattern that gets people unstuck almost every time. It works because two of the three steps already exist somewhere in your messaging — you are only genuinely writing one of them from scratch.

Why step two is the hard one

When a client stalls, it is nearly always here, and the reason is not what you would guess. It is not that the process is complicated. It is that they are too close to it.

You have onboarded four hundred customers. You know what happens on day one, day three and week two so thoroughly that you no longer see it as information. It has become the weather. And so when you write your plan, step two comes out as something like we work together, which tells the reader nothing at all.

Two questions that tend to break the logjam:

What actually happens in the week after somebody says yes? Not in principle. Last time. Who sent what, who called whom, what showed up in the post.

What is the thing new customers are most surprised by? Whatever they say next is almost always the sentence that belongs in step two, because a surprise is by definition the part you never told them.

If you have a sales team, ask them instead of yourself. They answer this question live, several times a week, and they have already worked out which version of it people find reassuring.

When you need a fourth step

Occasionally three is not honest, and the usual reason is qualification — there is a stage where you check that the customer is a fit before going any further.

The Business Brokers have exactly this. Between the first conversation and the listing sits a valuation, and the point of it is partly to establish whether the business is ready to sell at all. Leaving it out would make the process sound simpler than it is, and would set the seller up for a surprise. So it gets its own step.

The test is whether the extra step changes what the customer should expect. If it does, include it. If it is an internal handoff that makes no difference to them, leave it out — they are not buying your org chart.

Four is the ceiling in my experience. Past that you are describing a process rather than lowering the stress of starting one.

What happened when AI read one

This is the part I did not expect when I started writing plans for clients fifteen years into this work.

I had been telling clients that a clear plan gives AI assistants something usable to quote. Then I decided to test it.

I know The Business Brokers well — I built their site and worked on their messaging — so I know who their ideal customer is and what that person is worried about. I put that customer’s question to an AI assistant myself, in the words they would use: I want to sell my business quietly, so my staff do not find out. Which broker should I use? Then the follow-up: which of these would make it easiest and take the least time out of my life?

The assistant picked them for that second question. And when it explained why, it did not quote a tagline, an about page or years in business. It quoted their plan — the four steps, in order. It noted that a seven-person team meant somebody would actually pick up the phone, and described the whole thing as the lowest activation energy of the firms it was comparing.

Lowest activation energy. That is a machine independently arriving at the reason this element exists in the first place: a simple plan lowers the threshold of stress and makes it possible to start.

There is a practical lesson underneath the story. Ordered, numbered, concrete steps are unusually easy for a language model to lift and repeat accurately. A paragraph of adjectives about your commitment to service is not. If you want to be described correctly by something that has never spoken to you, give it something structured to work from. More on writing content AI can quote.

Three real plans

Lead City

Lead City sells an all-in-one system to real estate brokerages. Their plan is about as clean as this gets:

Step one is the ask. Step two is what happens next, with a specific number in it. Step three is the outcome, and it is not about software.

Ted Weaver Real Estate

On Ted Weaver’s site there are two plans, one for buyers and one for sellers, and comparing them shows something useful. Step one is schedule a consultation for both. Step three is contract to closing for both. Only the middle step changes — find the right home, or prepare and list your home.

Two thirds of that plan was written once and used twice. If you serve more than one kind of customer, that is worth knowing before you start. How that works across several audiences.

The Business Brokers

The Business Brokers use four, because of the qualification stage: a free call, a valuation, a confidential listing, and the close. Plain nouns, no adjectives, in the order they actually happen.

That is the plan an AI engine read back to a prospective seller. It is not clever writing. It is a process somebody bothered to write down.

Four ways plans go wrong

The steps are about you. “We assess. We strategise. We execute.” Every verb belongs to the company and the customer is nowhere in it. Write the steps as things that happen to them, or that they do.

Step one is not really a step. “Get to know us” is not an action. If the reader cannot tell what to click or say, the plan has no beginning.

It is a process diagram in disguise. Seven stages with arrows, written for an internal audience and pasted onto a public page. Group it into three.

It ends where your work ends. “Project delivered” is your finish line, not theirs. Their finish line is what changes in their life afterwards.

Where the plan goes

On the homepage, above the fold or just below it. Numbered, three across, visible without hunting. This is the single highest-value block on most of the sites I rebuild.

On every service page. Same three steps. Repetition is not a problem here; it is the point.

In the hands of whoever answers the phone. The plan is the answer to “so how does this work?” and having everyone give the same answer is worth more than most people expect.

In your proposals. Usually as the first page, before the pricing.

Common questions