It’s January and You Still Don’t Have a Plan?
How to get started....
I was on a few calls this week with founders. All wicked smart. All growing fast. Honestly, they’re killing it.
But when I asked “what’s the plan for 2026?” there was a pause.
One started telling me about out-of-office policies. Another walked me through their Q1 hiring plan. A third gave me a detailed rundown of a customer negotiation.
All good stuff. All tactics. None of it was the plan.
Strategy isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation. It’s how you make decisions. It’s how your team knows what matters. Without it, you can’t build a plan. Without a plan, no budget. Without a budget, no KPIs. Without KPIs, no goals. Without goals, no accountability. No clarity.
But there’s a ton of confusion between tactics and strategy. Between what you’re doing and where you’re going. Between the dance floor and the balcony.
The Balcony vs. The Dance Floor
When you’re on the dance floor, everything feels like a mosh pit. You’re bumping into people, trying not to get knocked over, can’t see the whole room. Just trying to survive the next song.
The balcony is different. From up there, you see the whole thing. Your job as CEO is to get up there regularly and figure out how to turn the mosh pit into a conga line.
When you’re scaling fast, it’s easy to live on the dance floor. You know the tactics cold. You can name every problem. But ask yourself to go up a level, to articulate where the company is in its arc, what this year needs to be about, what success looks like in December, and you struggle.
Not because you don’t know. Because most founders were never shown where to start.
That’s what this post is about. Not the whole plan. Just zero to one.
The Strategy Is Already In Your Head
Most founders can articulate their strategy if forced to say it out loud. The problem isn’t that they don’t know. It’s that they haven’t stopped long enough to name it.
On one of those calls, I kept pushing. “Go up a level to the balcony.” “Push back from the keyboard.” “Where are we in the arc of this company?”
Fifteen minutes in, the founder said something he’d never said that cleanly before: “We need to lock down market share and maintain technological leadership.”
Boom! That’s the strategy. It was in there the whole time.
A Few Questions That Help
If you’re in January1 without a clear plan, try these:
Where are you in the arc? Every company has a journey. Build it, nail it, scale it. Where are you? One sentence.
What was last year’s theme? What’s this year’s? This founder was “finding product/market fit” last year. This year is “building the GTM engine.” Finish this sentence: “This is the year of _______.”
What are the 2-4 pillars? Not fifteen priorities. The strategic pillars everything else hangs on. Usually something about product, something about market, something about the company itself.
If you’re celebrating on December 31st, what happened? Get specific. What are you high-fiving about? What needs to be true for this year to be a success? This forces you out of vague aspirations into concrete outcomes.
Some people grind anyway because they’re built that way. Others drift. You end up with a bimodal team: half killing themselves, half coasting. Everyone’s frustrated because nobody knows what winning looks like.
Clarity creates focus. Focus creates urgency. Urgency creates results.2
It starts with going up to the balcony and deciding what the conga line looks like.
You already know your strategy. You just have to say it out loud.
Or anytime. Remember, I LOVE LOVE LOVE Friday updates, because they force you to do this at least once per week.
Clarity, Focus, Urgency. My holy trinity!