Before Building 2026 Business Plans... Do This.
- Terrand Smith
- Dec 28, 2025
- 6 min read
As founders, our teams look to us for clarity, with questions like where the business is headed this year, what we’re prioritizing, and how we’ll continue to stand out in a crowded market. But between day-to-day fire drills, we rarely have the space to pause, reflect, and plan with intention.
This is precisely why annual planning matters. When done well, it creates clarity, realigns priorities, and establishes a more grounded path for growth. In this post, we’ll walk through an annual-planning approach to get you started.
1) Define Your Happy Place
Defining our happy place begins with finding a space that fosters calmness, happiness, and clarity for yourself and any co-founders. Make sure you identify a place that’s different from your day-to-day working environment. For me, the sound of waves soothes me and helps me slow down.
Once you’re in this place, the exercise becomes a period of reflection. This is often best done as a journaling prompt. Use the following questions to guide your reflection. If your company has multiple founders, each founder should complete this exercise individually before coming together to discuss the patterns.
I want to emphasize the importance of starting any planning process with a period of reflection. Early on, I used to think exercises like this were a waste of time or unnecessary fluff. But starting this exercise with intention- especially through journaling- has proven to be one of the best ways to recalibrate a team’s north star.
This reflection creates a space to either reaffirm your original mission or recognize how it has evolved.
Reflection Prompts
What do I truly enjoy working on in my business?
Which activities give me energy rather than drain it?
What types of problems or challenges do I want to spend more time solving?
Which roles, tasks, or responsibilities consistently drain me?
What does success realistically look like for me this year?
What am I not willing to compromise on — personally or professionally?
How do I want to balance my personal life with my business this year?
Will this year be focused on growth, stability, or realignment?
(Growth doesn’t only mean revenue — it can also represent capacity, systems, impact, or focus.)
Optional Clarifying Prompts (to go one layer deeper)
What am I currently doing out of obligation rather than intention?
If nothing changed this year, what would frustrate me most?
Where do I want to protect my time and energy more deliberately?
How will success for this year align with your brand’s mission and customers’ needs?
2) Realign Between Mission, Brand & Customer Reality
In this step, it’s important to revisit whether what we’re saying, selling, and delivering actually aligns. At the same time, we should assess whether our products — or our partner relationships — are truly solving our customers’ needs and continue to amplify our mission.
Before diving into tactical details, take a step back and recalibrate. Start by confirming whether you’re attracting the right customers for the mission you’re trying to deliver.
Use the following questions to guide this reflection:
Mission & Reality Alignment
If we strip our mission to one sentence, would our current customers recognize us?
Customer Fit & Quality
Which customers are easiest to serve and why?
Which customers require the most support or customization?
With our ideal customer in mind, are we solving their core problems or addressing their most important needs?
Brand Promise vs Delivery
Is our brand messaging consistent across all marketing materials and channels?
If our customer only experiences our brand through one channel, would our brand still feel consistent?
Channel Alignment
Which sales or marketing channels bring customers who already get our value?
Where are we relying on partners to compensate for gaps in our offerings or exposures?
Strategy Alignment
What is currently working for us, yet it feels misaligned with where we want to go?
Forward Looking
Lastly, what would success feel like if alignment, not scale, was the primary goal?
3) What Happened Last Year?
2025 was an extremely challenging year, and simply sustaining your business through it is an achievement worth recognizing. Many of the forces you faced were outside your control, and the decisions you made helped ensure the business’s survival.
Approach this review with pride, not judgment. There is real value in reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, and what you learned along the way. In responding to constant change, you may have unintentionally clarified what matters most — both for the business and for yourself.
To conduct a complete business analysis, review this postmortem with your co-founders and key decision makers, and be sure to include voices from your operations team and those who interact with customers on a daily basis.
Finance
Where did we spend the most time and money?
Where did we leave money on the table?
Marketing & Growth
How can we increase our revenue during our major marketing campaigns?
Which campaigns met our sales goals and which did not?
Operations
How can we be more efficient with our time and resources?
What continued to be a challenge for us this year?
In what ways did we improve compared to previous years?
4) Information Gathering
At this stage, we’re gathering information to help validate and support the experiences and instincts you had throughout the year. In most cases, this data already exists within the tools you use to run your business.
While this may not be the most exciting part of the planning process, it’s one of the most critical steps. Collecting the right information ensures that your annual plan is grounded in reality and informed by patterns — not just perception. Don’t overthink this process; this is strictly about data collection. Here is a simple checklist of the information needed.
Finance
Collect the following financial statements:
Quarterly and/or monthly Profit and loss statement
If possible, categorize the revenue by sales channel (i.e., wholesale, pop-ups, website)
Ideally, revenue should be categorized by account, event, or campaign.
Quarterly balance sheet
Credit card statements
Open loan statements (if applicable)
Marketing & Sales
Sales data from a website platform or an e-commerce platform
Email marketing campaign performance data.
Categorize results by major campaigns (e.g., launches, promotions, seasonal pushes).
Sales by SKU or product family, broken out by sales channel or specific events.
Operations
Failure and/or scrap rate by product
Annual production volume, broken down by SKU and by month or quarter
Throughput or production yield, identifying production capacity and rate.
End-of-year product inventory.
5. Review Data That ReallyMatters
Now that you’ve collected your data, it’s time to distill what actually matters for your business — the information that helps move the needle. Before diving into detailed analysis, start by identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are most useful for you and your team.
KPIs aren’t about tracking everything; they’re about focusing on the signals that inform better decisions. Below are examples you can use as a starting point.
Finance
Did you end the year with positive or negative net income?
On a monthly basis, did you generate enough cash flow to cover upcoming expenses?
Do you know how much you spend on labor costs, both in dollars and as a percentage of annual revenue?
By gross margin, how do your products rank from highest to lowest margin?
Marketing & Sales
From your email marketing platform, what are your average open rates and conversion rates?
From your e-commerce platform, do you understand your conversion rate breakdown?
Which messaging or language performed best in driving conversions?
How do sales by SKU or product family break down by sales channel or specific campaigns?
Which social media channels drive the most traffic and conversions to your website?
Operations
What is the production time and scrap rate for each product?
How long does it take to package each SKU?
How many resources — and what type — are required to produce each product family?
These KPIs are not intended to cover everything. They’re meant to provide clarity, highlight constraints, and support smarter planning decisions.
Taking the time to reflect, review your data, and forecast your annual plan brings clarity to your business and highlights constraints. From there, you can develop and prioritize projects that will create the greatest impact, helping you continue to deliver on your mission and reach your target audience.
Helpful Resources
At 37 Oaks, we help small business owners make decisions with clarity. Check out these helpful resources to guide your next move.
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