The Golden Circle

Anna Stubbs • April 14, 2023

Do you understand your ‘why’? Does your team understand it? How about your customers? Your ‘why’ is why your business exists for your customers (and it’s not to make a profit!).


Your ‘why’ forms the centre of The Golden Circle - a concept developed by Simon Sinek in his book, Start With Why. The Golden Circle challenges us to examine the emotional core of what makes our team and customers buy into a company. The next layer is your ‘how’ and the outer layer is your ‘what’.


Everyone knows what they do, some know how they do it, but few actually know why. Success is more likely when we think, act and communicate from the inside out, starting with why.


Your ‘why’ is simply the most important message for marketing your business. It’s your purpose. You should be able to articulate this in seven words or less and it should be broad enough to reflect what you do but not be specific to your current product or service offering. In other words, your purpose should still apply in 100 years.


Consider Tesla’s purpose as an example: to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. This doesn’t limit them to electric vehicles and allows for growth opportunities within the whole sustainable energy industry. When you’ve defined your ‘why’, you can then move to the next layer of The Golden Circle - ‘how’.


Your ‘how’ is your unique selling proposition; what makes you different from your competitors. In other words, how you deliver on your ‘why’. Perhaps yours speaks to quality, delivery speed, cost effectiveness or other reasons why a customer should choose you. Your ‘how’ is what customers can expect every time they do business with you.


The final layer of the circle is your ‘what’. This is obvious to your team and your customers - the products or services you sell. It’s easier to articulate your ‘what’ than your ‘how’ or ‘why’, hence most businesses focus on this first.


By focusing on your ‘why’, you’ll develop an emotional connection with your customers; and they’re likely to buy based on emotion. By acting, thinking, and communicating from the inside of The Golden Circle out, you’ll attract the right fit customers who will become raving advocates.


If you need help implementing The Golden Circle in your business, get in touch.


“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” - Simon Sinek

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In 1961, President John F Kennedy famously announced his goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out. As we know, in July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon, and were brought back to Earth safely, achieving JFK’s goal.  At a time when most people hadn’t even been on an aeroplane, landing on the moon would’ve felt unachievable and overwhelming. However, such a massive goal united people with a purpose; the story goes that even a cleaner mopping the floor at the space station said his job was to help put a man on the moon. So, how did they make the goal achievable? They broke it down into milestones, with each one taking them closer and closer to achieving their ultimate goal. The first milestone was to achieve lift off. So, they set about resolving this challenge. The next milestone was to reach orbit, so they had a team working on this milestone. Then, they had to reach the moon’s atmosphere, land safely on the moon, take off from the moon, enter Earth’s atmosphere and land safely back down to Earth. You can see how breaking the goal down into milestones gave everyone a more achievable objective to focus on which was less overwhelming. Those milestones were then broken down into the actions which needed to be completed. Each action was essentially a small step towards reaching the ultimate goal.

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