Too Busy to Write a Strategic Plan? That’s Exactly Why You Need One !
Everyone who owns a business, invests in businesses, or serves on a senior leadership team knows they need a strategic plan. The sad reality is that less than 20% of B2B businesses have a strategic growth plan. They all have a leader, an owner, or an investor with a future revenue and enterprise value objective, and they turn their goals for the next 3-5 years into an Excel spreadsheet. They share the Excel spreadsheet with their leaders and say… “Make it happen, figure it out; that’s what I pay you to do.”Some have a strategic planning off-site and spend 1-2 days discussing where they want the business to go and how they plan to get there. However, when we meet with an owner and often their teams, we hear common reasons not to have a strategic plan this year. Some people share: “We have too much going on right now to sit down and write a strategic plan. Maybe next year.“ ( after once again having a flat or declining year in revenue and margins are dropping) I hear this most often, especially in struggling teams. They share common reasons for putting off strategic planning one more year, like: The company is growing in people in hopes of getting more done; they hired three people; they are short some people and need to wait; they are implementing new software or systems; new processes; a new machine arrives in three weeks; customers are demanding attention; the receptionist is not dressed appropriately again; the sales team needs coaching; I need to fill an open sales position; operations has quality and on-time delivery problems to solve; and cash flow needs watching, and all while owners, investors, and the leadership team are already putting in 65-hour weeks. They work nights and weekends, dreaming that it will one day get better and they can have a life. So, the strategic plan slides to the bottom of the list. (another year)
What does research say about teams with strategic plans compared to those without?
Decades of McKinsey & Company research demonstrate that strategic planning directly drives enterprise value, provided it moves past rigid budgeting and focuses on long-term capital allocation.
McKinsey also shared that only one in five companies believes it has a high-quality strategy. What do such Strategy Champions have in common? They excel at designing bold strategies—and are even better at mobilizing their execution.
Research by Paul Leinwand, Cesare Mainardi, and Art Kleiner published in HBR tracked how executive teams manage strategic execution. They found that teams that successfully achieve their strategic goals behave vastly differently than low-performing teams.
Harvard Business School shares: Taking part in the strategic planning process forces you to examine and explain why you’re making each decision and back it up with data, projections, or case studies, thus combating your cognitive biases.
We could go on, and likely on and on, sharing what every experienced business leader knows: Strategic planning drives growth.
Yet often, far too often, I suggest a company needs to write a strategic plan to reach its future vision, and I hear excuses why they can’t do strategic planning now.
Here’s my no smoke and mirrors challenge: if it feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day, you need a strategic plan more than ever.
Being busy isn’t the same as making progress.
What is “The Busy Trap” for B2B CEOs and Senior Leaders?
Here’s what happens inside a company without clear strategic direction. One problem gets solved, then another appears. A salesperson needs help. A customer complains. The new software isn’t working the way everyone expected. An installer and someone in shipping call off. The new hire needs training. The machine installation hits an electrical snag. A competitor takes a large customer. A vendor didn’t deliver on time, so you can’t fulfill your largest customer’s order, and health insurance went up 32%. Someone says, “We should probably start doing this,” so you do — and then another priority shows up behind it. The problems you solved last week reappear again, and each week feels like the movie Groundhog Day.
Before long, leadership is spending most of its time reacting to today instead of deliberately building tomorrow. That’s the busy trap. You’re not necessarily failing — you might be growing.
No Smoke and Mirrors Truth: Growth without direction creates chaos, not momentum.
Your problems are the argument for strategy, not against it
Take the examples I hear most often about why companies can’t write their strategic plans now.
“We just hired several people” is good, but why? What capabilities are you trying to build? What should the organization look like 12 months from now? What roles are still missing, and what should each new hire accomplish in their first 90 days? How will you know if that investment in people is paying off? Hire without a strategic plan, and you can end up with more people doing more things — not a stronger organization. Worst case, you hire more people, and your EBITDA per employee drops significantly. Did you just improve throughput and efficiency, or just add overhead? Would you have needed to add new people if your current team were trained and had the right systems and processes?
“We’re implementing new software” is fine, but what business problem is it supposed to solve? What process improves, and what measurable outcome should change as a result? Who owns the rollout, and what should stop happening because the new technology replaces it? Most importantly: how does this support the company’s strategic objectives? Technology isn’t strategy. It’s a tool.
“We’re getting new equipment” that could be a real investment, but what’s the strategic reason behind it? More capacity, lower labor cost, higher quality, a new product, a new market, faster delivery, better margins? Redundancy? The machine shouldn’t just be another piece of equipment on the floor. It should be in service of a business objective, or it’s just capital spend with no direction attached, just to reduce today’s noise.
“We just acquired another company” is another comment I hear in several markets that are consolidating now. I would argue that, based on my experience with acquisitions and mergers, you need a strategic plan even sooner!
I have heard several reasons why business owners who know they need a strategic plan still put it off…for now.
From my own experience, a strategic plan aligns you and your team around what matters and helps reduce all the noise during company growth.
Strategy creates fewer priorities, not more
One of the biggest misconceptions about strategic planning is that the plan needs to contain everything the company could possibly do. I believe the opposite. A good strategic plan tells leadership what not to do. If everything is a priority, nothing is. As I work with leadership teams, we often ask everyone to write on Post-it notes the three to five things the company should do this year. I then group them by category, and we discuss them. One team had over thirty strategic rocks they felt they needed to accomplish to achieve their growth goal. Everyone in leadership was silently executing what they believed was the right plan, and many were working on the same things without knowing it.
I want leadership teams to land on three or four major strategic thrusts ( EOS calls them Rocks), not 27, not a 42-item action list. Three or four things that matter most to the company’s future: grow the right customers, improve sales effectiveness, increase operational capacity and productivity, develop the leadership team. Once those are set, decisions get easier. When another initiative lands on the CEO’s desk, the question becomes simple: does this help accomplish one of our strategic priorities? If not, it probably doesn’t belong on the list. That’s how strategy creates time instead of consuming it.
Your calendar is telling you something
Here’s a question worth sitting with: look at your calendar for the last 30 days. How much time did you spend working on the business versus in it? How much was reacting? How much was spent solving problems that should have been prevented, or discussing initiatives that never got finished? How much did your leadership team spend on the future? How many of the problem
The answers can be uncomfortable, but they’re useful. If the CEO is constantly pulled into operational fires, customer escalations, employee issues, and random initiatives, the problem probably isn’t that the CEO needs to work harder. The business needs a clearer direction.
A strategic plan should answer six questions
You don’t need a 75-page document. You need clarity, and at minimum, your leadership team should be able to answer six questions.
Where are we going?
What should this company look like in three years — not just revenue, but customers, markets, people, capabilities, profitability, and competitive position?
Where are we today?
What does the data say about customers, revenue, margins, sales effectiveness, operations, people, cash flow, and market conditions? Build this on reality, not opinion.
What must change?
Where are the gaps between where you are and where you want to be? This is where the uncomfortable conversations start — maybe you don’t have enough salespeople, maybe they don’t prospect, maybe managers aren’t coaching, maybe you’re carrying too many low-margin customers, maybe operations can’t support the volume you’re chasing.
What are the three or four things that matter most?
This is where you set your strategic thrusts — what has to happen for the company to reach its objectives.
What behaviors must change?
This is the part most strategic plans miss entirely. A strategy sitting in a binder doesn’t change a company — daily behavior does. If the plan calls for 20% growth, what does that mean Monday morning? How many new opportunities need to get created? What accounts need development? What conversations need to happen, what quotes need follow-up, what production improvements need to occur, what metrics get reviewed? Strategy has to show up on someone’s calendar, or it isn’t a strategy—it’s a document.
Who do we want in our sandbox?
Who are your ideal customers today and in the future? What markets do we serve, and do we plan to enter any new ones? What is our team structure today, what should it be for the future, and who owns what? What is the culture we want?
Don’t confuse activity with progress
This might be the most important point in your strategic growth puzzle: a company can be incredibly busy and still moving in the wrong direction.
You can have more employees, more technology, more equipment, more meetings, more customers, more sales, more new products, more problems, and are still not be building a better business.
So instead of asking “what are we busy doing,” ask “what are we doing that actually moves us toward the business we said we wanted to build?” Those are very different questions, and most leadership teams have answered only the first.
The strategic planning paradox
Here’s the paradox: when business is slow, leaders say they don’t have enough money to invest in strategy. When business is busy, they say they don’t have enough time. So, when, exactly, are they going to plan? The answer shouldn’t be “next year”. Next year brings its own set of problems, and if you wait for plenty of time to show up, or excess money to invest it never will.
No Smoke and Mirrors Truth: The companies that scale intentionally understand something the rest miss: strategy isn’t something you do when you have time. Strategy is how you decide what deserves your time in the first place.
Businesses hit predictable revenue plateaus when they don’t have a plan, and you can read more about them here and here. Without a plan, your team will hit a growth ceiling, and net income will begin to decline. A strategic plan helps predict upcoming plateaus and enables your team to sail past them. (You can read about the predictable business plateaus where companies get stuck here)
My Advice on strategic planning?
If a traditional strategic planning process sounds like a three-day retreat and a 100-page document nobody will read, don’t start there. Start with one leadership conversation or workshop.
What are questions we discuss in pre-strategic planning workshops?
Where do we want to be 12 months from now?
What’s preventing us from getting there?
What three things must we accomplish to close those gaps?
What has to happen every single week to make those three things real?
That’s the beginning of a strategic plan and, more importantly, the beginning of strategic execution.
When I help teams write their strategic growth plan, it typically is two pages, and it is a living document. Not something that is saved on a drive to be opened again this time next year.
Some clients prefer a software-led strategic plan today. We have 4 meeting sprints for 2 ½ hours each, and you will have your strategic plan. Some clients do this over two days in a row, and some do one sprint per week for a month. The software builds the information needed for a strong strategic plan, and the tool makes suggestions that can save a ½-day discussion. It is a living plan, and your team has access to the plan and their big rocks 24/7.
We can use the Scaling Up Strategic Planning Framework, which focuses on four pillars: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash.
The goal is to start planning. To take the vision and how we plan to achieve it and put it on paper.
Planning should follow a framework, not just an open dialog or someone advising you what to do without first running an MRI on your business.
If you are starting to plan your next strategic planning meeting, I prepared a list of what to prepare to make the best use of your team’s time at the strategic planning offsite, and you can download a copy of our pre-strategic planning checklist here.
The No Smoke & Mirrors bottom line on writing a strategic business plan
If your answer when we discuss scaling your business is, “we’re too busy to create a strategic plan.“
You aren’t too busy for strategy.
You may be too busy because you don’t have strategy.
A strategic plan isn’t another project added to the pile; when done right, it’s what decides which projects belong on the pile in the first place. It reduces the piles and the time you currently spend solving the same problem over and over again. Your plan creates team alignment and accountability focused on leading and lagging indicators. Part of your plan is a meeting cadence focused on the key drivers to ensure execution.
What should you expect after writing your strategic plan?
We focus on execution.
Some teams want to take the plan and run with it on their own.
Most teams want a coach who has scaled several companies to come alongside and help keep everyone executing what we decided matters most.
Some teams want monthly coaching to stay on track with their plans.
Each quarter we review progress, and each department reports on their big rock completion.
We tackle any constraints we discover as a team quarterly.
We work as a cross-functional team to drive the outcomes we agreed to in strategic planning.
We align the team, create and share our KPIs, and measure what matters.
We improve communication with daily huddles and team focus.
Closing the discussion about Strategic Business Plans
The goal was never a beautiful document. The goal is clarity, focus, and execution.
No Smoke and Mirrors Truth: When everyone on the team knows where the company is going, what matters most, what doesn’t, what we will measure, and what has to happen next, leadership gets something valuable back: time.
In a growing company, time may be your most strategic asset.
No plan means more reacting.
More reacting means more firefighting.
More firefighting means less time building the business.