You’ve probably seen the meme. Step one: collect underpants. Step two: ?. Step three: profit. It’s funny because it’s a perfect caricature of how most people treat a business strategy. They have the beginning and the end, but the part of the plan that actually connects those two points is usually a blurry mess of "hope" and "vibes."
Look. Writing a business plan is tedious. It's often 40 pages of fluff that stays in a digital drawer. But the missing link—the tactical execution phase—is where things actually live or die. Most entrepreneurs get so drunk on their own vision that they forget to figure out who is going to answer the phone at 3 AM or how they’ll handle a 20% spike in shipping costs.
Honesty is rare in business writing. Usually, you get this sanitized version of "operational excellence." But real operations are messy. They involve sweaty palms and spreadsheets that don’t balance. If you're missing the granular part of the plan, you aren't running a business; you're running a hobby that happens to have a tax ID number.
Why the "Middle" of Your Strategy Fails
We focus on the launch. Why? Because the launch is sexy. It has balloons and LinkedIn announcements. But the middle—the actual day-to-day grit—is where the part of the plan usually dissolves.
Let's look at the "Sunk Cost Fallacy." Dr. Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer did some fascinating work on this back in the 80s. They found that people keep pouring money into a failing project just because they’ve already spent money on it. This happens when your plan doesn't have a "kill switch" or a pivot point. If your strategy doesn't explicitly say "If $X$ happens, we do $Y$," then you don't have a plan. You have a wish.
The Problem with "Scale"
Everyone wants to scale. It’s a buzzword that people throw around like confetti. But scaling is just doing more of what already works. If what you have doesn't work, scaling just makes the disaster bigger.
I talked to a founder last year—let’s call him Mike. Mike had a great product, a niche SaaS tool for plumbers. He had a solid launch. He had the "vision." But his part of the plan for customer retention was basically "be nice to people." When he hit 500 users, "being nice" stopped being a scalable system. He didn't have a CRM strategy, he didn't have automated ticketing, and he didn't have a knowledge base. He burned out in six months because he was the only person answering emails.
The Tactical Meat: What You’re Actually Missing
A real plan needs a "Failure Mode and Effects Analysis" (FMEA). This sounds like corporate jargon, but it’s actually incredibly simple. You list every single thing that could go wrong. Then you rank them by how likely they are to happen and how bad they would be. This is the part of the plan that keeps you from panicking when a supplier goes ghost or a key employee quits to go find themselves in Bali.
- Financial Buffers: Not just "having savings." I mean knowing exactly which expenses you cut first when revenue dips by 15%.
- The Decision Matrix: Who decides what? If the CEO is deciding what color the napkins are, the plan is broken.
- Feedback Loops: Most plans are static. They’re a snapshot of a moment in time. Real plans need a way to ingest data and change.
Think about Netflix. When they moved from DVDs to streaming, that wasn't a whim. It was a calculated part of the plan they’d been eyeing for years. They knew the physical mail business had a ceiling. They built the infrastructure for streaming long before the average American had high-speed internet. That’s foresight. That’s an actual strategy.
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It's Not About the Document
Nobody cares about your 50-page PDF.
Seriously.
What matters is the mental model. If your team doesn't know the core part of the plan by heart, it doesn't exist. Jeff Bezos famously used "six-page memos" instead of PowerPoints. Why? Because prose forces you to think. It forces you to connect ideas. You can't hide a weak strategy behind a flashy transition in a slide deck.
Logistics: The Boring Stuff That Actually Matters
We need to talk about logistics. It's the least "cool" part of any business, but it's the foundation. If you’re selling a physical product, your part of the plan regarding lead times is the difference between profit and bankruptcy.
The "Bullwhip Effect" is a real thing in supply chain management. A small shift in customer demand causes bigger shifts up the chain. If you don't account for this, you end up with a warehouse full of stuff nobody wants, or an empty shop when everyone is clamoring for your product.
Case Study: The 2021 Logistics Crisis
Remember when everything was stuck on ships? Companies with a diverse part of the plan survived. Those who relied on a single factory in one province of China died. Diversity in supply isn't just a "nice to have." It's an insurance policy.
A guy I know runs a boutique coffee roastery. During the shipping delays, he didn't just wait for his beans. He had a pre-arranged part of the plan to source smaller lots from local distributors at a higher cost. His margins took a hit, but he didn't lose his customers. His competitors, who only had "Plan A," went dark for three months. Guess who owns the market now?
Marketing is Not a Strategy
A lot of people think marketing is the whole plan. It’s not. It’s just the megaphone. If you’re shouting about a product that doesn't have a solid operational part of the plan behind it, you’re just accelerating your own failure.
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Marketing brings them in. Operations keep them there.
You need to understand the "Unit Economics." This is basically: how much does it cost to get one customer, and how much money do they give you over their lifetime? If your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is $50 and your Lifetime Value (LTV) is $40, you’re losing money on every sale. No amount of "growth hacking" will fix that. That’s a fundamental flaw in the part of the plan that deals with sustainability.
The Psychology of Execution
Why do we avoid the hard parts of the plan? Because our brains are wired for instant gratification. Checking "made a logo" off a list feels good. Calculating the depreciation of warehouse equipment feels like a chore.
But the "Goldilocks Rule" of productivity says we are most motivated when working on tasks that are right on the edge of our difficulty. Fixing the broken part of the plan is usually exactly where that difficulty lies. It’s hard enough to be meaningful but easy enough to actually do if you sit down for an hour.
Moving Beyond the Paper
The most important part of the plan is the one that allows for human error. We aren't robots. Your employees will get sick. You will have a bad day. The economy will do something weird.
A "Resilient" plan assumes things will break. A "Fragile" plan assumes everything will go perfectly.
The Pre-Mortem
Before you launch anything, gather your team and say: "It’s one year from now and we have failed. Why did it happen?"
This is a real technique used by high-stakes organizations. It removes the social pressure of being "positive" and allows people to point out the flaws in the part of the plan without feeling like they are being a "Debbie Downer." You’ll find things you never considered. "The software didn't scale." "We didn't have a way to track returns." "Our biggest client's budget got slashed."
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Actionable Steps for a Better Strategy
Stop looking for a "complete" plan. You won't find one. Instead, focus on the parts that move the needle.
First, look at your "Bottlenecks." Eliyahu M. Goldratt wrote about this in The Goal. Every system has one constraint that limits its output. If you improve anything else but the bottleneck, you're wasting time. Find the specific part of the plan that is slowing everything else down. Is it sales? Is it production? Is it your own indecision?
Second, define your "Minimum Viable Bureaucracy." You need some rules, but not so many that they choke the life out of the company. If a $20 purchase requires three signatures, your part of the plan for operations is broken.
Third, get real about your numbers. "Profit" is a vague term. You need to know your "Gross Margin" and your "Net Margin." You need to know your "Burn Rate." If you don't know how many days of cash you have left, you don't have a plan. You have a countdown clock.
Finally, communicate. Most failures happen because one person thought the part of the plan was X, and another person thought it was Y. Write it down. Use simple language. Avoid the "corporate-speak" that obscures meaning.
Your business plan should be a living document, something that gets coffee stains on it. It should be used, not just filed. Fix the middle. Worry about the details. Stop ignoring the un-sexy parts of the strategy. That's where the money is actually made.
Next Steps for Execution:
- Conduct a Pre-Mortem: Sit down today and imagine your project has failed. List three specific operational reasons why.
- Audit Your Bottleneck: Identify the one task that, if cleared, would double your current output.
- Simplify the Message: Write your 3-month goal on a single post-it note. If it doesn't fit, it's too complicated.
- Verify Unit Economics: Calculate your LTV and CAC for the last quarter. If the ratio is less than 3:1, adjust your pricing or your marketing spend immediately.