Planning Next Year Without a Spreadsheet

Why elaborate plans fail

Not because they are wrong. Because they are not read after the week they are written.

A plan with twelve initiatives requires remembering twelve things, and a business with two people running at capacity will remember two.

Which means the plan quietly becomes a document rather than a set of intentions, and the year proceeds as it would have anyway.

A plan that fits on one page and contains three things has a chance of being followed.

Choosing three

The hard part, since everything on the list is worth doing.

The question that narrows it: which of these, if it went well, would most change the year?

Not which is easiest, and not which has been on the list longest.

For most small businesses the candidates are a small set: getting reviews, fixing what stops enquiries converting, raising prices, adding capacity, or dropping the work that does not pay.

Three of those, done properly, is a substantial year. Twelve of them is a list.

What each one needs

• A month when it happens, not a quarter.
• A first step small enough to do in an hour.
• Something that would show it worked.
• A date to check whether it did.

The second is what gets things started. Improve the website is not a first step; write the price range for the three main services is.

A worked example

A trade business that had written a detailed plan the previous December and followed almost none of it.

The following year they wrote three lines.

Ask every customer for a review, starting in January. Put prices on the three main service pages, in February. Introduce a minimum charge, from March.

Each had a month, a first step, and a way of knowing.

By June all three were done, which had not happened with any previous plan.

Their assessment was that the previous plan had failed because reading it took twenty minutes, so nobody did, and the three-line version was visible on the wall.

Putting dates on things

The mechanism that turns intentions into actions.

A month rather than a quarter, because a quarter has no beginning and things assigned to one happen in its last fortnight or not at all.

Spread across the year rather than clustered, since three things in January is one thing in January.

And placed with the business's rhythm in mind: not during your busiest month, and not in a period you know is unpredictable.

A calendar entry for each, on the first working day of its month, is what converts the page into something that interrupts you.

Deciding what would show it worked

Agreed in advance, for the same reason as any other measurement.

Reviews: a number, by a date.

Prices on pages: whether enquiries mention them, and whether fewer arrive that are not serious.

A minimum charge: whether the small jobs taken were profitable.

None of those requires anything sophisticated, and each is answerable.

What does not work is a plan whose success criterion is that the thing was done, since that measures activity rather than outcome.

Reviewing it during the year

The step that separates a plan from a December ritual.

Look at it once a quarter, for five minutes, and ask only two questions: has this happened, and is it still the right thing.

The second matters, since circumstances change and a plan written in December may be answering a question that no longer exists in June.

Changing a plan deliberately is different from abandoning it, and writing down why it changed is worth the sentence it takes.

What is not worth doing is rewriting the whole thing mid-year, which is how a one-page plan becomes a twelve-page one.

The counter-case

Where a fuller plan is warranted.

Anything involving significant money, a lease, hiring, or borrowing, where the detail is the point and a bank will want to see it.

A business with several people, where a plan is also a communication document.

A genuine transition, such as changing what the business does.

And anything where the sequence matters and dependencies need working out.

For an ordinary year in an ordinary small business, none of those applies, and the three-line version outperforms the alternative because it is the one that gets used.

Nothing new is also a plan

Worth allowing explicitly, since December invites the assumption that something must change.

A business that had a good year, is working at capacity, and has no obvious problem may reasonably plan to do the same again.

Which is a decision rather than a failure to plan, and it is better than inventing an initiative to fill a page.

The useful version still has a check date: a note in June asking whether anything has changed enough to warrant a plan.

That keeps the option open without committing to activity nobody wanted.

Writing it where it will be seen

The practical detail that decides whether a plan survives February.

A document saved somewhere sensible is a document nobody opens again.

What works is putting it where you already look: pinned in whatever you use daily, printed and stuck inside a van door, or written on the back of the office calendar.

Which sounds trivial and is the difference between three things that happen and three things that were decided in December.

What not to put on it

Worth naming, since these crowd out the things that matter.

Anything vague enough to be permanently in progress: improve marketing, be more visible, work on the brand.

Anything dependent entirely on somebody else, since it cannot be started or finished by you.

Anything that has been on the list for three years, which is evidence about whether it will happen rather than a reason to try again.

And more than three things, which is the failure this whole approach exists to prevent.

The page

1. Three things, one line each.
2. A month against each.
3. A first step you could do in an hour.
4. What would show it worked.
5. A calendar entry for each month.
6. Somewhere you will see it.

The sixth matters more than it looks, since a plan in a folder is a plan nobody reads and a plan on the wall is one that gets noticed in March.

Three things done properly is a better year than twelve things intended, and the page is what makes the difference between the two.

Judging whether they worked is covered in deciding what success looks like first.

Frequently asked questions

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