January hands you something rare: a clean slate and the permission to rethink everything. Most aviation business owners squander it by creating a long list of goals that ultimately cannibalize each other. They confuse activity with progress.
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Here's the question that separates the owners who build enterprise value from those who stay trapped: What is the one thing that—if accomplished this year—would make your other goals either accomplished or irrelevant?
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That's not a productivity hack. It's a forcing function for strategic clarity.
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Alex Hormozi calls this the "$100M Question" and applies it ruthlessly to his own business every year. Greg McKeown, in Essentialism, frames it differently but arrives at the same conclusion: the disciplined pursuit of less always beats the undisciplined pursuit of more.
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The visual is striking. Imagine the same amount of energy either spread across twelve priorities (making marginal progress on all of them) or concentrated on one (punching through to a breakthrough). Same effort. Radically different outcomes.
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How to Find Your One Thing
This isn't about gut feel. Block 90 minutes this week and work through these four filters:
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1. Define the Win in One Number. Pick the single outcome that would make December feel like a different business: EBITDA, qualified leads, dispatch reliability, billable utilization—one number, not a paragraph.
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2. The Leverage Test. List everything you think matters for this year. Now ask: which one, if achieved, creates the conditions for the others to happen naturally—or makes them unnecessary? For an MRO, that might mean landing one anchor customer that stabilizes utilization. For a brokerage, it might be finally building a lead generation system that doesn't depend on your personal network. That's your domino.
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3. The Constraint Question. What single bottleneck most limits your growth right now? In aviation, it's often key person dependency—the owner who touches every deal, every customer escalation, every vendor negotiation. Your one thing should directly attack that constraint.
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4. The No-Fly List. If you commit to one thing, something has to stop. Write down what you will not do this quarter—projects, meetings, reports, "nice-to-haves." If nothing changes, you're not focusing; you're wishing.
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Make It Real
Naming your one thing isn't enough. Assign a single owner who is accountable for the outcome. Hold a weekly review that asks only two questions: did the metric move, and what will you change this week to move it again?
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Protect it like a maintenance slot: block the time first, let everything else compete for what's left.
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Focus, as Hormozi puts it, is measured by the quality and quantity of things you say no to. January doesn't reward ambition. It rewards selection.
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Pick the lever. Pull it until it moves.
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