Your sat nav has never once been right about how your journey would go.
It promises two hours ten, then a lorry sheds its load near Swindon and you roll in at two fifty. Do you hurl the thing out of the window? No. It recalculates and carries on.
Your strategic plan deserves the same treatment. Most agency founders bin it instead.
The away day hangover
You know the scene. You book the away day (maybe you bring in an outsider to run it). Post-it notes cover every wall. New positioning, a new service line, a proper leadership team. Everyone leaves buzzing.
Three or four months later the plan starts to look a bit daft. So it goes in a drawer, you go back to firefighting, and you quietly blame the consultant.
I'm allowed to say that. I've been the consultant.
But the plan didn't fail. Around month three, every plan lands in one of three places: behind, ahead or irrelevant. Each one feels like proof the whole exercise was a waste of a Thursday and a lot of Post-its. None of them are.
Behind: the plan was written by the optimist in you
This is the most common one. You set bold quarterly goals, miss them in Q1, chase in Q2, miss them again. By summer the plan feels like a personal insult, so it goes.
What you forgot is that client work doesn't politely pause because you've got a strategy. A big pitch, a resignation, a January that turns into March... they all eat your quarter before you've opened the document.
The fix is dull. Pick one or two things you know you can deliver. Deliver them. Then pick the next. Be a little less excited in the workshop.
Nobody ever put "be less excited" on a Post-it. Do it anyway.
Ahead: the dangerous one
Sales land bigger than forecast. A deal turns up that nobody planned for. You tick the boxes early and think: we make our own luck, who needs a plan?
Maybe that worked at five people. At 20, 30 or 50 it doesn't. Without a plan, every shiny opportunity gets a yes, and before long nobody (including you) can say what the agency actually stands for.
Being ahead isn't freedom. It's drift with decent cash flow.
And the bill arrives later. A year on you're running three half-built service lines, a team that's lost the thread, and a founder who can't remember why any of it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Irrelevant: the world didn't read your plan
Covid. AI. Google changing the rules of its partner programme. A new competitor in your niche with a better deck. A regulator deciding what your clients are allowed to buy from you.
Your plan was sound. The ground moved.
I used to tell founders to be relaxed about this. That was too soft. It's not a bad quarter, it's the normal quarter. Expect it.
Plan in years, run in quarters
A three-year plan gives you direction. It isn't a promise. So execute in 90-day blocks, and at the end of every quarter, replan the next twelve months.
Why quarters? Because a quarter is roughly as long as a team can remember why something mattered. Stretch it further and the reason fades, and the Post-it turns into wallpaper.
Think of the three-year plan as the destination you typed in, and the quarterly replan as the route. Change the route as often as you like. Just don't pretend you never set a destination.
You'll finish the next quarter behind, ahead or irrelevant as well. Of course you will. That's the sat nav doing its job.
Before your next review, try this:
Label every goal. Behind, ahead or irrelevant. Be honest, nobody's marking it.
Bin the irrelevant ones. Without ceremony and without guilt.
Pick the one or two "behind" items you'll genuinely finish. Not the ones you'd like to finish.
Look at what's gone well. If you're ahead, work out whether it's luck or something you should do on purpose.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on the plan, that's what we do with agency leaders every week at gyda.co. Have a poke around either way, there's plenty to read.
So where is your sat nav pointing right now, and when did you last let it recalculate?
Want to chat about it? Email me on Janusz@gyda.co
