My 2025 plan was approved on November 14th. I know the exact date because the calendar invite is still sitting in my archive: forty-five minutes, eleven people, a deck I was genuinely a little proud of. This morning I read the thing again over coffee at Ovation and found three sentences that are already wrong.
Not wrong in an embarrassing way. Wrong in the ordinary way plans go wrong. A partnership that was verbal in November has gone quiet. A hiring line moved. A competitor did something in the third week of December that nobody in that room modeled.
Six weeks. Three sentences.
The instinct in that moment is to forecast harder. Get better data into November, run a scenario workshop, buy a category report. I have done all three and I am telling you it does not work.
The problem is not that your forecast was bad. It is that you built a twelve month structure where one assumption quietly holds up four other things.
The fix is an audit, and it takes about ninety minutes. Go through the plan and underline every sentence that assumes something about the outside world: a channel staying cheap, a partner staying interested, a behavior staying popular, a platform staying stable. Then, for each one, ask a single question. If this turns out to be false in March, what else falls down?
Most of the time the answer is nothing much, and you move on. Occasionally the answer is the Q3 campaign, the agency retainer, and two thirds of the content calendar. That is a load bearing assumption, and it needs a second beam next to it before you leave the room, not a better estimate.
The other half of this is knowing what a plan is actually allowed to fix for a year. Positioning, yes. Who you are for and what you promise them, yes. Those should be boring and stable and survive contact with January. Channel mix should not. Campaign calendars past Q2 should not. Budget allocation to the dollar in month nine is not planning, it is decoration with a spreadsheet attached.
Six weeks. Three sentences.
Salt & Straw commits to a point of view for years and to a flavor for a month, and everybody understands which is which. That is the ratio I keep trying to get clients to hold. Long conviction, short commitments, and an honest list of the things you are betting on so you notice fast when one of them stops being true.
Karaoke starts back up next week. The host calls everyone baby and has never once planned a set list, and the night works anyway because the room is the strategy and the songs are just the campaign. I am rewriting three sentences today. The rest of the plan holds.