​​How Annual Planning Sets Your Business Up for Year-on-Year Growth

If you want year-on-year growth for your business, then you need to do annual planning. Year-on-year growth, especially the kind that you can continue to build on, does not happen by luck. It is the result of having a clear strategy and being intentional in your business, which is why annual planning plays such a pivotal role in business growth. Annual planning will enable you not to just have a desire to grow your business, but to actual map out how you can achieve that year-on-year growth. Keep on reading to find out how annual planning sets your business up for year-on-year growth.

 

 

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HOW ANNUAL PLANNING SETS YOUR BUSINESS UP FOR YEAR-ON-YEAR GROWTH

 

What Year-on-Year Growth Actually Looks Like

When I talk about year-on-year growth, I’m talking about more than just annual revenue (or turnover) increasing. Seeing that revenue figure go up and up is nice, but there are likely to be other forms of growth you want too. Year-on-year growth includes improving profit margins and increasing overall profit. It’s easy for revenue to go up, but expenditure to go up too. Planning helps avoid this. Year-on-year growth can also include increasing the number of customers/clients, improving client quality, increase brand awareness, team growth and personal freedom.

 

Each business will have different areas of growth that are key. This will depend on the ultimate vision of a business. But essentially year-on-year growth will mean your business is getting bigger (in some form) and better.

 

4 Reasons Why Annual Planning Supports Business Growth

 

1. You Can Reflect On What Caused Last Year’s Growth and Build Upon That

A key part of annual planning is reflecting on the past year. In my annual planning framework, I call this stage ‘Review and Reflect’. It is easy as a business owner to do the work, see the business growing, but never properly stop to work out exactly what is causing the growth. Annual planning gives you that time and headspace to do this type of CEO work. To look back across the year and work out what has been key to my business’s growth.

Over the years of working with solo and micro business owners, there have been so many reasons their businesses have grown, but it is only upon a thorough inspection, the reason has been revealed. It could be anything from a particular marketing channel is performing really well, an increase in sales for one of your offerings, being featured in a particular media outlet, an amazing affiliate, your funnel is converting better, better positioning of your brand, an increase in your pricing, a reduction in expenditure and so much more.

 

There are so many reasons why a business could be growing and if you want year-on-year growth, it is vital you understand what is key to your success right now and build upon that. This means properly looking back at your data (Review) and then also considering your personal experience in the business (Reflect). If you would like help with the reflection part, I’ve put together a list of powerful annual reflection questions for solo and micro business owners. You can access the full list by clicking here. 

 

 

2. Plan Around Seasonality 

One of the major reasons why annual planning sets your business up for year-on-year growth is that you are able to plan around seasonality. Most businesses experience a degree of seasonality, which means there will be some periods of the year that consistently perform above or below average. For example, in many businesses, October to December (often referred to as Q4) is a peak period where a business will generate sales that account for way more than the 25% you’d expect if all four quarters were equal.

 

Sometimes seasonality is dependent on external factors and sometimes it is dependent on internal factors. When you do annual planning, you look at the year as a whole and can make choices to help maximise the peak periods and minimise the low periods. For example, your business might experience seasonality because of its offer suite, so you decide to create a new offer that will specifically fill a low period. Or it might be that the seasonality is a result of external factors and that aren’t going to change. This is common if people are buying at a specific time of the year because of a seasonal factor (Christmas, Halloween, New Year, Summer etc). In that case, you might decide to increase capacity at that period of time, as you know there is a specific window to make sales and you want to maximise this opportunity.

 

WANT TO CREATE THE BEST ANNUAL PLAN FOR YOUR BUSINESS GOING INTO 2026? BOOK A 2026 VISION-TO-STRATEGY CEO DAY WITH ME. A 2026 Vision-to-Strategy CEO Day is the ultimate 1:1 strategic planning day for service-based business owners who are ready to step fully into their CEO role, want to get complete clarity on what their best year ever looks like, and leave with a results-driven roadmap to make their boldest vision for 2026 happen. It will require you to set aside a day, you’ll have me as your planning partner, and I’ll guide you through my signatue annual planning process that guarantees by the end of the end you’ll have crystal clear goals, a clear roadmap to achieve them and be excited for the year ahead. For all the information and to instantly book a 2026 Vision-to-Strategy CEO Day click here.

 

 

3. Keeps You Focused On The Bigger Picture

If you want year-on-year growth, it makes sense to think of the year as a year, but so many business owners are focused on just the week or month ahead. This results in making decisions that might make sense for this week or month, but don’t when you look at the bigger picture. For example, it is easy when sales are slow to panic and think ‘let’s offer a discount as that will increase sales’. However, offering a panic discount is never a good thing. Whilst it might increase sales for that week or month. It has repercussions. It can damage your overall brand, mean you have non-ideal clients and customers, that people start to expect more discounts in the future, and impact yoru sales across the whole year. So whilst it might have solved the sales problem for that one mont,h it could cause sales problems for all the upcoming months.

 

Annual planning enables you to make decisions from a strategic place. Firstly, during the annual planning process, you can review key areas of your business, like pricing, and make decisions about changes when you aren’t panicking but are thinking strategically. It might even be that you come up with a discount plan because you know you are going to be involved in Black Friday or you plan on doing a sale at a certain time of the year. But the difference is this is proactive. You have planned this in advance, thought through the repercussions and come up with a plan you are happy with. Secondly, with a clear plan, when you have to make decisions throughout the year, you can ask yourself, “Is this aligned with my plan?”. This will enable you to make better decisions, faster decisions and have more confidence in your decisions.

 

4. Enables You To Confidently Invest To Ensure Your Growth Is Sustainable

 

No business owner wants their business to have a great year, but then the next year that isn’t maintained or built on. Now the reason businesses will experience rollercoaster year where one year the business grows and the next it contracts is because the growth has stretched the business too far. For example, you take on too many clients and it means the client experience falls or you end up burning out.

 

The aim is to be going to grow the business in a manageable way. A way in which the quality of the customer/client experience stays the same and it doesn’t result in you and your team having to overwork and burn out.

 

Annual planning enables you to properly think through what changes need to happen in order for the business to grow. This could be anything from investing in new technology or upgrading current tech to taking on new team members or increasing the hours of team members. These changes all involve making investments, but with annual planning you’ll be able to see the potential return-on-investment, which will give you more confidence with making investments in your business.

 

That’s it. You now know how annual planning sets you up for year-on-year growth.

 

Year-on-year growth is not guaranteed in business. If you carry on doing the same things the likelihood is you’ll end up with a year that is the same or worse declines. To grow you’ll need to make changes, whether that be in your offer suite, pricing, marketing, sales or operations. Annual planning helps you to use your past learning (both good and bad) to create a plan, and make investments, that will give your business the best chance of year-on-year growth for the year ahead – and beyond that.

 

I hope you’ve found this blog post helpful and are now excited about creating an annual plan for your business.

 

If you’d like help to create an annual plan you have complete confidence in then book a 2026 Vision-to-Strategy CEO Day.

 

A 2026 Vision-to-Strategy CEO Day is the ultimate 1:1 strategic planning day for service-based business owners who are ready to step fully into their CEO role, want to get complete clarity on what their best year ever looks like, and leave with a results-driven roadmap to make their boldest vision for 2026 happen.   It will require you to set aside a day, you’ll have me as your planning partner, and I’ll guide you through my signatue annual planning process that guarantees by the end of the end you’ll have crystal clear goals, a clear roadmap to achieve them and be excited for the year ahead. For all the information and to instantly book a 2026 Vision-to-Strategy CEO Day click here.