I'll say this every chance I get, because I think it needs saying. If your plan for next year is just last year with five or ten percent added on top, please don't call it strategic planning. It isn't one.
I see this a lot, and I get why it happens. Looking back properly takes effort. It's far easier to glance at last year's numbers, nudge them up a bit, and move on with your day. But that approach assumes last year was already as good as it could be, and it skips the one step that actually makes planning worth doing, which is learning from what just happened.
When I run a proper end of financial year review with clients, the data is only the first part. Once we've grounded ourselves in the profit and loss, the balance sheet, the trends across a few years, we go further. We ask what actually worked well and flowed easily, what was harder than it should have been, and what was just business as usual, ticking along in the background. That's where the real insight lives, not in the numbers alone, but in what they tell us about how the year actually felt to run.
Skip that step, and you're not planning, you're just guessing with last year's numbers as a starting point. You might still hit growth, but you won't know why, and you won't know what to repeat or what to avoid next time.
Strategic planning is supposed to take effort. That's not a flaw in the process, it's the point of it. If you're not willing to put in the work to properly understand your own year, you might as well save yourself the meeting and just type a number into a spreadsheet.
Maybe with the economic forces at play this coming year, -15% is the right number? Maybe it’s +60%, who knows? And maybe +10% is just right, but until a reflective, big picture discussion is held, how will you really know?
