I recently sat down with Gary Manske, founder and CEO of Prairie Growth Solutions, for our second conversation on small business planning. Gary spent more than 30 years inside major organizations before launching his business strategy practice in the Fargo-Moorhead area. He now works directly with business owners to find the profits already hiding inside businesses and their numbers. That background matters for what follows, because the frameworks he brings aren’t theoretical. They come from watching what actually works inside real businesses.

At the SBA, we see it every single year: owners love to dive straight into the fun, creative wish lists while quietly ignoring the hard data. The secret to building a year that actually delivers on its promises comes down to facing the numbers first.

Ask ten business owners in the Red River Valley how their margins looked last quarter, and most can answer before you finish the question. Ask the same ten how many actual customers their marketing brought in, and watch the room go quiet.

That gap, knowing the finance number cold and guessing at the marketing number, is where most annual plans go wrong before they even start.

Start with the scorecard, not the wish list

Planning season has a predictable failure mode. An owner opens a blank calendar in November and starts filling in hopes: grow revenue, hire someone, launch a new line. Those are wishes, not a plan. A real plan starts with three numbers, cold: gross margin, net margin, and cash position walking into January. If you cannot pull those in five minutes without opening three different spreadsheets, that is the actual first project. Not next year’s revenue target.

Think about it the way a farmer thinks about next year’s crop. Nobody decides what to plant based on hope for good weather. They pull last year’s yield per acre, this year’s input costs, and what the crop actually sold for. The plan follows the numbers. It never leads them, and the owners who get this backward spend January chasing a goal that was never grounded in anything real.

Marketing needs the same discipline, and almost never gets it

Here is a double standard almost every business runs without noticing. Ask how sales are trending and an owner will answer within a percentage point. Ask what marketing actually produced last quarter and the answer is usually a shrug, or a number of social posts, which is not the same thing.

Marketing needs its own scorecard for next year, built from the same discipline as the rest of the business. Five numbers actually run your business:

How many leads come in
What share of them convert to a sale
How often a customer comes back
What the average sale is worth
What margin is left once the work is done

Marketing should move the first two, leads and conversion, and be able to show it. If it cannot show its fingerprint on either number, it is producing activity, not results, and activity does not make payroll.

How to know you need outside help

Picture the owner who spends Saturday morning designing a social post instead of placing next week’s order, then wonders Wednesday why the shelf is short. That is not a marketing problem. That is an attention problem wearing a marketing costume, and it shows up in almost every small business sooner or later.

A few honest signs say it is time to bring in outside help. Marketing only happens when business is slow, which means it never happens when you need it most. Nobody in the building can say what last month’s effort produced in dollars, only that something got posted. You are paying for someone’s time or a subscription, not for a result you can point to. And the clearest sign of all: marketing is competing with running the business for your own attention, and running the business always wins that fight.

None of that means you have failed. It means the function has outgrown what you can give it alongside everything else you already run.

Real marketers vs. everyone else claiming the title

Marketing draws more people claiming expertise than almost any other function a small business hires for, and the distance between the real ones and the rest is wider than most owners expect.

A real marketer asks about your numbers before pitching a single service. What does a new customer cost you to acquire right now? What is your average sale actually worth? What would a genuinely good lead look like inside your sales process? If a full proposal shows up before those questions get asked, that is not thoroughness. That is a script.

Five questions to ask before you sign anything:

What is my average sale worth, and how did you arrive at that number?
What does a new customer cost me to acquire today?
What exact result will you show me in the first thirty days, and how will you prove it?
Can I call two of your current clients today, not references picked in advance?
What happens if the numbers do not move?

Watch for guaranteed results with no explanation behind them, reporting built entirely on likes and impressions, and language so thick with jargon you cannot tell what is actually being promised. A marketer confident in their own work will hand you that phone number without flinching.

Making it work once you hire someone

Outsourcing marketing well comes down to a short list, and most failures trace back to skipping one item on it.

Define what counts as a result before work starts. A qualified lead, a booked call, a closed sale: agree on the definition together, in writing, before the first invoice. Set a reporting cadence, monthly at minimum, and hold to it without exception. Keep someone on your side who understands your own numbers well enough to know whether a report is telling the truth or just telling a story.

Do not hand the whole function over and stop watching it. Do not judge the relationship on activity: posts made, emails sent, ads run. Judge it on the numbers you agreed on before you started. And do not skip the scorecard conversation before you hire anyone. A partner who will not talk about your numbers on day one will not start once you are paying them.

Put both meetings on the same calendar day

The businesses that plan well this year will do one thing differently than the ones that do not. They will hold the marketing planning meeting and the finance planning meeting on the same day, with the same numbers on the table, instead of treating one as a creative exercise and the other as the real work.

Your marketing plan is not decoration sitting next to your numbers. It is one of the levers that moves them. Treat it that way this planning season, and the wish list you started with in November turns into a plan you can actually measure by next December.

Thank you to Gary for the straight talk and the practical frameworks. The U.S. Small Business Administration, alongside the ND SBDC and SCORE, offers no-cost advising for any owner who wants a sounding board before committing to next year’s plan. The businesses that close 2027 ahead of where they expected to be will be the ones who started the conversation now.

By Wendy Klug, Deputy District Director, North Dakota SBA.

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Learn more: SBA North Dakota District Office | SCORE Greater Fargo

Wendy Klug

Your 2027 Plan Starts With Three Numbers