A client sent me a planning template Monday. Twelve columns across the top, January through December, a row for every channel. She asked me to fill in Q3. I stared at the Q3 column for a while, then I called her instead of typing anything, because I did not have an honest number to put in it and neither does she.
Britain started vaccinating people this week. Here the timelines get argued about daily and settled by nobody. Whether your customers are gathering indoors in August is not a marketing assumption. It is a public health outcome you will learn about roughly six weeks before it hits your calendar.
Which is exactly the problem with the twelve column spreadsheet. It never asks what you know. It asks you to perform certainty in a format with no place to write down doubt.
A twelve month plan is a guess with a budget attached, and what you actually need is a written list of what would have to be true to change your mind.
Here is the version I have been running with clients since spring. It takes about three hours.
One. Write the assumptions out loud. Not goals, assumptions. We believe in-store traffic returns to sixty percent of last year by June. We believe our wholesale accounts survive the winter. Say the number, put your name next to it, and notice how uncomfortable that feels. The discomfort is information the spreadsheet was hiding from you.
Two. For each assumption, name the trigger and the owner. Not a vague check-in. A specific observable thing, a date you will look at it, and one person whose job it is to look. If wholesale reorders are down more than thirty percent by March 15, Dana pulls the trade budget into direct. Written like that, in advance, while everyone is calm.
Three. Commit money in tranches instead of one annual pour. Hold a quarter of the budget back as an explicitly unallocated reserve and tell everyone it is unallocated. Otherwise it gets spent in February by whoever asks first, and you will have nothing left on the day you finally know something.
The point is not to predict the year. The point is to decide now, while you are thinking clearly, what evidence would make you turn. Decisions made in advance are cheaper and braver than decisions made in a panic on a Thursday.
Decisions made in advance are cheaper and braver than decisions made in a panic on a Thursday.
My karaoke bar in Southeast is still dark, so a few of us do it over video now, which is genuinely terrible. The lag turns every duet into a pileup and the host who calls everyone baby has to unmute to do it. I keep showing up anyway. I have no plan for when the room reopens. I have a trigger.