After working with close to hundred businesses in their planing exercises over the last decade, I can tell you—most strategies don’t fail because of competition, market conditions, or bad luck.
They fail because they start wrong.
Here are seven mistakes that quietly sabotage your growth.
1. Incremental Growth Thinking: Thoda Thoda Badlenge
If your strategy only pushes for five to ten percent growth, you’re not planning—you’re budgeting. A plan that doesn’t challenge your business won’t change your business.
2. Top-Down or Bottom-Up? Pick a Side!
Some teams dictate from the top, others pile up random insights from the bottom—both could lead to confusion. If your plan isn’t co-created, it won’t be co-owned.
3. Planning Without Data: Pehle Plan, Baadme Fact-check
If you’re gathering key data during the planning meeting, you will hardly be able to decide. Plan is about decisions in detail.
4. Same Story, Different Words: Confusion ka Dusra Naam Strategy
If your strategy says increase brand awareness, expand reach, improve visibility, capture demand, and strengthen positioning—you don’t have five goals, you have one badly explained goal.
5. Not Talking to Customers: Apna Sapna, Apna Rona
Many business plans focus internally—cost-cutting, efficiency, structure. But have you checked if your customers even care? A strategy without customer ka dimag is just a risk list.
6. Not Writing It Down: Plan Jo Likha Nahi, Woh Plan Nahi
If your plan isn’t printed, pinned, or stuck on softboards, it’s not a plan—it’s a theory. Make it easy to refer or watch it disappear by Q2.
7. Finishing the planning exercise in Mid-May: Trial Ball Pe Pehla Quarter Waste
If your new FY strategy starts in May, you just gave away twenty-five percent of your year for free. Why start the game when others are already scoring?
And the biggest mistake of all?
Treating strategy as fixed instead of emergent.
Your plan isn’t school time table with holidays—it should evolve. If you’re still sticking to an April strategy in October, you’re playing a different sport altogether.
Do you see any additional mistakes that keep businesses stuck in their planning cycle?
