Planning season is here. Your board members and investors are asking for your funding priorities for 2027 and beyond. Your team members might be building decks. Are you truly prepared to plan? How do you get from slideware to strategy?
The typical plan shows where the company has been, describes the market opportunity, lists the initiatives the team wants to fund, and ends with a budget number. It takes weeks to produce by a small team – often excluding the teams required to implement it. The world has become more unpredictable than ever, making planning more challenging than ever.
Does it generate more questions from the board than it answers? We can help.
Boards don’t want slideware. They want strategic answers: where is growth stalling or missing expectations, what are you going to do about it, who owns it, and when will it show up in the numbers?
A plan that can’t answer those questions isn’t board-ready or resilient.
What separates a plan from a strategy
In thirty years of building growth engines at FranklinCovey, Globalization Partners, Malwarebytes, Verizon, Yahoo, and Microsoft – as a five-time global CMO – I’ve seen a lot of planning cycles and slideware. The plans that get executed are built on organizational truth – not last year’s budget plus 10% – and created by the people closest to the customer journey.
A real 2027 strategy answers three questions a deck can’t.
Where is friction killing growth across the customer journey? Not where you think it is – where the data and the people closest to each step of the journey say it is. The 7As (Audiences, Awesomeness, Amplification, Acquisition, Activation, Adoption, Advocacy) finds it: a cross-functional audit that identifies every point where the brand drifts, the pipeline leaks, the onboarding fails, or the customer goes quiet.
What will you Preserve, Strengthen, or Transform and why? Most budget cycles are exercises in defending last year’s choices. PST forces a different conversation: what’s working and worth protecting, what needs optimization, and what needs to start, stop, or be completely reimagined. Applied across the 7As and SPARC, PST becomes a shared language for faster, cleaner investment decisions – scored by Level of Impact minus Level of Effort equals ROI. Not politics. Not inertia. Return on investment.
Which roles and programs will you transform – with AI and without it? Where is AI freeing capacity in your GTM and are you reinvesting it or returning the savings? That answer belongs in the strategy, not a separate AI roadmap that nobody reads. Your board will want to know.
Why the human side of strategy is the competitive advantage
Most planning processes get this wrong: they treat strategy as something that happens to an organization, rather than something that comes from it – or something consultants create.
The people closest to your customer journey carry organizational truth that no consultant or deck can replicate. Your demand gen team knows which channels actually convert. Your SDRs hear the same objection every quarter. Your CS team knows exactly where onboarding breaks down. When strategy is built with those people rather than for them, two things happen: 1) strategy is grounded in reality, where friction is real, not hypothetical and crucially 2) the people who helped build it have a vested interest in seeing it succeed.
That’s not a soft idea. That’s how growth gets unlocked.
What a 90-day sprint produces that a planning deck doesn’t
The CLG Method™ – 7As, SPARC, PST – is a 90-day audit, assessment, and action process. I’ve run it inside companies backed by Vista, Bain Capital, Fidelity, and at public companies. It moves fast because it engages your own people, not around them.
By the end of 90 days you’ll have:
7As audit with friction points identified and owned;
SPARC roadmap with OKRs and a 90/30/7 operating cadence;
PST investment matrix with LOI-LOE=ROI decisions on every major program and platform; and
OKRs aligned across functions and ready to activate in Q1.
Not a deck you defend. A plan the board approves – because your team built it, believes it, and is ready to execute it.
The clock is running
It’s late October. Q4 planning windows are closing fast. If your 2027 plan needs to be more than a deck – and if you want a seasoned operator who can move quickly and get your leadership team aligned before planning season closes – let’s talk.
Connect with me or follow CLG Partners.
– Dariusz Paczuski, Founder & Managing Partner, CLG Partners
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