Why Your Planning Routine Guarantees Zero Strategy
How autumn retreats with profit targets ensures zero new ideas
It’s late May. If you haven’t started planning for next year yet, you are already too late.
For some of you, next year’s budget is just ‘this year’s budget plus X%.’ Others believe budget = strategy. Or you can try to handle both strategy and budgeting in the autumn—and it never works.
This might work in stable markets. Is your market stable and predictable? If so, you are lucky and can stop reading. If not, you can make some positive changes in 90 days.
Inside the Club Today
The lies business schools tell us
The financial goals trap
The myth of empty niches
Better planning in 90 days
Why Q3 is too late to start planning
The CEO checklist
The Problem: Business Schools Lie
Calling a budget a ‘strategy’ is like calling a grocery list a ‘long-term life plan.’ But what is ‘strategy?’
Business schools lie to us about strategy. They said there is a universal formula:
A financial, measurable goal (profit or revenue growth, cash flow, market cap).
Situation analysis and forecast—searching for opportunities and studying obstacles (such as competitors).
Strategic concept—a path to overcome obstacles and use opportunities.
A specific action plan.
You set an ambitious financial goal—like growing profits over three years. You find opportunities, create plans and budgets, and wave the starting flag. The race is on.
It looks great—but only in theory. That’s why I called my method The No Strategy Approach.
Starting strategic planning in September is another mistake. If you begin strategising when yellow leaves swirl in the air, it is already too late.
The Reason: why it happens
Setting a financial goal too early turns strategic focus into tunnel vision.
Financial goals create tunnel vision
When you set a financial goal first, you turn a waterfall of ideas into a trickle. Whether you want to or not, you trigger the so-called ‘priming’ effect.
1. You will prioritise ideas that guarantee safe, predictable growth over non-obvious or innovative ones.
Evolution taught our brains that a proven solution is always better than a new one—and the fear of failure only strengthens this effect. A goal like ‘doubling profits in three years’ makes the idea of ‘selling more of what already sells’ look not just attractive, but like the only option that works.
If you successfully sell bricks, enterprise software, or rubber ducks, your team will naturally stick to selling bricks or ducks as the primary source of growth. Innovative ideas? “When they prove they can bring in as much profit as bricks, we’ll look at them.”
2. You see customers not as individuals whose problems you can solve, but simply as walking wallets.
This superficial approach blurs the lines between customer segments and their specific needs. What’s more, ignoring the details of their needs brings a dangerous day much closer—the day a bold startup that pays full attention to them steals your customers.
Situation analysis as a rear-view mirror
Judging tomorrow’s market by today’s data is like guessing the number of floors of a future building by looking at the basement.
When you analyse the market, you see only what your competitors worked on months ago. What you don’t see is what they are building behind closed doors right now.
Imagine you develop enterprise software. You find a promising niche based on current reports, invest heavily, and launch what looks like the perfect feature. But a month later, your competitor integrates an AI agent that makes your entire product category obsolete.
No ‘situation analysis’ can save you from a future you didn’t bother to anticipate.
The myth of unoccupied niches
There is always a gap in the market, but there is rarely a market in the gap.
In most markets, looking for ‘unoccupied niches’ is like trying to find an empty seat on a Japanese metro train in the morning. It is naive to think that a thorough analysis will find a tiny gap in the avalanche of options available in the market.
Profit—a complication #1
When you define your goal simply as profit growth, it pushes your team even further away from finding competitive advantages. There is too much low hanging fruit—from cost-cutting to automation and restructuring.
Of course, these steps might bring short-term results. But they rarely have anything to do with strategy. Loyal, dedicated customers make a business stronger—not an efficient cost structure.
Autumn—a complication #2
Imagine you are revising your strategy in September. What do you have on the table?
You have an ambitious goal (profit growth, for instance).
You don’t see any ‘unoccupied niches’.
You don’t have much time—you need to prepare the annual budget.
Even if you go on a strategy retreat, and even if your team comes up with a fresh idea or two, you won’t be able to test them. You won’t have time for customer research, market tests, or prototyping.
As a result, you fall into what is called the ‘Strategy-Budgeting Trap.’ You end up with an annual budget that looks like the older brother of your previous budget. You will do exactly what you do now, just slightly bigger or better.
In plain English: you won’t have a strategy.
But a small tweak to your mindset and timing can dramatically improve the situation. It won’t require a lot of resources—but it can deliver huge results.
Want to upgrade to a paid subscription for yourself and your team to get access to books, guides, and premium content, but prefer not to pay by card? Have someone reach out to us, and we will issue an invoice. Simply reply to this email.
The Solution—Tweak Your Planning Approach in 90 Days
Forget about strategic goals and budgeting. Well, forget about them for a while. You will get back to them soon.
Start with a Big Customer Problem. And start now—don’t wait until the end of the third quarter.
A quick reminder—The Big Customer Problem is part of The Customer-Axis Framework. This is a problem shared by many customers—one they might not even realise they have—and nobody in the market is solving it today.
Ask yourself: what will be the foundation of your business tomorrow when an aggressive competitor attacks your market? As a CEO, you cannot afford the luxury of ignoring this question. They will copy your best products and your business model. What will you do?
The only cure for this pain is to find a problem nobody else is solving and a solution nobody else has thought of. You need 90 days. You won’t have to work on it full time.
Don’t wait for September—start right now. I know—you’ve got a lot of problems at hand. But it’ll pay off.
Days 1-30
Form a small team of creative minds and start digging. Do some market research, explore adjacent markets, and use AI to comb the Internet.
Build some initial hypotheses. Interview customers. Talk to experts. Don’t look for ‘empty niches.’ Look for the problems nobody solves.
What you get: The list of possible Big Customer Problems.
Days 31-60
Gather your team and review the problems you’ve found. Brainstorm practical solutions—these could become your future products and business models. Don’t try to invent the next iPhone. Often, small improvements to your product or business model are enough.
What you get: The list of possible strategic solutions.
Days 61-90
Test your hypotheses. Build prototypes. Run more customer focus groups. Estimate the investment and the ROI. Pick the best ideas.
What you get: A shortlist of ideas for your annual budgeting procedure.
By September, when the next strategy and budgeting cycle begins, you will have concrete ideas ready. They will turn your budget into a real plan, not just ‘this year’s spreadsheet + X%’.
The CEO checklist
Before you think about execution, use the quick checklist below to diagnose how high your strategic risks are. If you find these risks high, the recommendations above are exactly for you, and I have a practical solution for you right below.
What percentage of your revenue comes from products with a clear competitive advantage?
What percentage of your revenue comes from truly loyal customers?
Which products and customer segments will definitely bring more revenue and profit next year, even if you change nothing? Why are you sure?
Are there competitors who could seriously threaten your growth next year?
Is there a high risk of new players entering your market—ones you don’t even know about today?
How could AI change your market over the next three years?
If you think your business faces no threats in the coming years, you don’t need to change your approach to planning. But if you see risks ahead, this article is for you.
Implementing this tool
Implementing this tool on your own isn’t rocket science, but it takes hours you probably don’t have. If you want to bypass the trial-and-error and get it done right, I have room to work with exactly two companies this summer.
Together, we’ll build and stress-test your strategic concept so it’s fully operational by autumn. This is structured as a fixed-scope, 3-month project—not an endless corporate contract with massive monthly bills.
What you will get:
A list of specific growth projects
A payback estimate for each one
An action plan
If you want to claim one of the two slots, reply to this email and tell me a bit about your business.
Next Tuesday, I will explain why top managers often hate me when I first come in to consult a company—and why CEOs thank me later. Stay tuned!
A lot of organisations confuse budgeting with strategy because numbers feel concrete and controllable.
But strategy is really about directional judgement under uncertainty.
Budgets should support strategy, not replace it.
Otherwise organisations end up optimising for the current status quo model while the landscape changes underneath them.
Strong piece. The distinction between budgeting and strategy is critical, and most companies blur that line because budgets feel safer than hard strategic choices.
I especially liked the point about starting with the big customer problem rather than financial targets. Revenue goals matter, but they should follow clarity, not substitute for it.
The real risk is that teams end up optimizing last year’s business model while the market is already moving somewhere else. Strategy has to create new options, not just fund old assumptions.