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
