Stop Carrying Forward Yesterday's Assumptions

For many small and mid-sized businesses, annual planning starts with what already exists. Last year's budget becomes the baseline. The current team stays largely intact. Revenue goals increase. A few expenses get trimmed. Maybe another technology platform or position gets added. Then everyone is expected to produce more.

As companies begin planning for 2027, I think there is a better place to start: Is the business we have today actually built for where we are trying to go next?

That question goes beyond marketing, which is why I recently sat down with Darrell Fincher-Crusan, a Fractional CHRO and business advisor with more than 25 years of experience helping organizations navigate growth, transformation, workforce challenges, and organizational change. His experience includes leading HR for a $1.5 billion U.S. business with more than 5,000 employees and advising leaders through restructuring, technology adoption, succession planning, and growth through Your Transformation Partner.

• I tend to look at a business through customers, revenue, marketing, technology, and commercial performance.
• Darrell looks at it through people, capabilities, structure, leadership, and risk.

For a growing business, those conversations cannot happen separately.

Busy does not always mean productive

I recently reviewed a business where six social posts went out on Facebook in a single day. The company had roughly 375,000 followers. One of those posts generated fewer than 100 likes and virtually no measurable business impact. My first question was not whether they needed a better social strategy. It was whether that was the right work for that person to be spending time on.

That question matters even more in a smaller company because there may only be one or two people carrying an entire function. When the team is lean, every hour has an opportunity cost. The same problem can show up throughout the business.

• Reports get produced because someone has always produced them.
• Employees manually complete work technology could handle.
• Marketing activities continue without a clear connection to revenue.
• Leaders add responsibilities without removing anything.
• Platforms get purchased but only a fraction of their capabilities are used.

People can be extremely busy while the company gains very little from the activity. Planning for 2027 should include a hard look at what the business is asking people to do. What should continue? What should change? What should stop?

Start with the value you are trying to create

Darrell made an important point during our conversation: businesses often build plans in pieces. There is a financial plan, a marketing plan, an operations plan, a technology plan, and a people plan. In a smaller organization those pieces may be managed by the same few executives, but they can still become disconnected.

Leadership needs to start with a more basic question: where do we expect additional value to come from in 2027?

• More customers?
• Higher retention?
• Greater customer value?
• Better margins?
• Expansion into new locations or markets?
• Lower operating costs?
• Greater productivity?

Once that is clear, the people, spending, and technology decisions become easier to evaluate. Darrell's career provides good evidence that people decisions are business decisions. His work has included reducing turnover from 115% to 50%, leading organizational redesign that generated $75 million in savings, and executing workforce changes that reduced costs by $3 million without compromising operational performance.

Those may sound like HR metrics. They are really business performance metrics.

Is the person wrong, or has the business outgrown the role?

This is especially important for growing companies. Someone who was exactly right when the company had five locations may struggle when it has fifteen. A leader who could personally manage every decision at $10 million in revenue may become the bottleneck at $30 million. A marketing person hired to manage social media may eventually need to understand CRM, customer acquisition, analytics, and revenue. That does not automatically mean the employee is wrong. The role may have changed faster than the person has.

• Redesign the role
• Reskill the employee
• Automate lower-value work
• Outsource specialized capabilities
• Bring in experienced outside leadership temporarily
• Hire for a capability the company does not currently have

Darrell's point was that companies first need to understand what capabilities the strategy requires. Only then can they determine whether the current team is built to deliver them.

Do you know how to use what you already bought?

AI makes this issue more visible, but this is not really an AI problem. Most companies already own technology with automation and AI capabilities embedded in it. Before buying something else, I would ask whether we are getting everything we can from the technology we already pay for, and then whether our people actually know how to use it.

This is where smaller businesses have both an advantage and a challenge. They can usually move faster than large enterprises. There are fewer approval layers and fewer systems to unwind, but they also have less room for a bad investment.

If a company with a lean team buys technology that adds complexity instead of removing it, the burden often falls on employees who were already stretched thin. Technology should create capacity, not another task, and when it does create capacity, leadership needs to decide what happens next. If automation gives someone five hours back every week, where should those hours go? Better customer relationships? More sales activity? Better analysis? Strategic planning? Process improvement? Saving time is useful. Turning that time into business value is the goal.

Business acumen matters more as companies get leaner

One of the strongest themes from our conversation was the importance of understanding how the business actually makes money. In a smaller company, employees rarely have the luxury of staying entirely inside one functional box. Marketing affects sales. Operations affects customer retention. Hiring affects productivity. Customer experience affects repeat business. Technology decisions affect nearly everyone. The more connected employees are to the economics of the business, the better decisions they can make.

For owners and CEOs, that means helping people understand not only what they are responsible for, but why it matters. A marketing employee should understand the connection between awareness, acquisition, conversion, retention, and revenue. A people leader should understand the financial impact of turnover and poor staffing decisions. An operations leader should understand how service quality affects customer value. Every function eventually connects back to the health of the business.

Start small, but start deliberately

Neither Darrell nor I believe companies need to transform everything at once. For most small and mid-sized businesses, that would be unrealistic. Instead, identify two or three areas directly tied to the 2027 strategy. For each one, ask:

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• What is it costing us today?
• Is the gap people, process, technology, or structure?
• What would better performance look like?
• How will we know whether the change worked?

Then test, measure, learn, and move to the next priority. That is transformation in a much more practical form.

The question for 2027

Before carrying another budget, role, process, or technology investment into next year, I would put one question in front of the leadership team: if we were building this company today for the business we want to be three years from now, would we build it the same way?

If the answer is no, that does not mean tearing everything apart. It means identifying where yesterday's assumptions are limiting tomorrow's business. Planning for 2027 is not just deciding what you are going to spend. It is deciding whether the business you have today can support the business you are trying to become.