Three year decisions made on a gut feeling are costing you more than you think
Guy Wieynk brings over 25 years of C-suite experience to The 24 Hour Business Plan, having established eight global studios at AKQA and served as European CEO of Publicis Worldwide and Global CEO of AnalogFolk. He has architected major business transformations including agency-to-platform pivots, and currently serves as board advisor and investor across multiple ventures including Untold Fable and Otomo, alongside co-founding the UK operation of The 24 Hour Business Plan.
Every year, millions of people put off their annual health check. Not because they can’t afford it, or because they think it doesn’t matter, but because they feel fine and fine feels like enough. Until one day when it doesn’t.
Business owners do exactly the same thing with strategy. They’re growing, moving, hiring, selling, the phone is ringing, the team is busy, and that momentum feels like proof that everything is working. Sometimes it is but momentum masks a lot, and by the time the symptoms show up – a missed number, a client you didn’t see leaving, a leadership team quietly pulling in different directions – the cost of fixing it is significantly higher than the cost of preventing it would have been.
The numbers are uncomfortable
59% of UK small businesses currently have no documented business plan. Not a rough one, not a draft – nothing.
That means the majority of the 5.7 million SMEs that make up 99% of British business are making decisions on hiring, pricing, markets, and product, without a shared, written picture of where they’re going and how they’re going to get there.
And it’s not for lack of ambition. When you ask founders why they don’t have a plan, the answers are consistent: too expensive, too time-consuming, too complicated. They’ve seen what traditional strategic planning looks like: months of workshops, consultants who’ve never run a business telling them things they already know, and a 150-page deck that gets filed away the week after it’s delivered, never to be looked at again.
They’re right to avoid that, but that’s not the only version of planning that exists.
Running on instinct is not a strategy
51% of UK SME owners describe themselves as instinct-led when running their business. Only 19% rely primarily on data to make decisions.
The thing about instinct is it’s built from experience, and experience is inherently retrospective. It reflects the market as it was, the customers as they were, the competitive landscape as you last paid close attention to it. The further you get from the moment that experience was formed, the less reliable it becomes as a guide to what’s coming next.
A good GP doesn’t dismiss what the patient knows about their own body, because instinct and self-knowledge matter, but they ask questions you haven’t thought to ask yourself, run checks you can’t run alone and give you a picture of your current health that you simply cannot get from the inside.
Most SME founders are trying to be the patient and the doctor simultaneously, which works no better in business than it does in medicine.
What the check-up actually tells you
We know that the businesses that do plan grow faster – the data on this is consistent and significant. Companies with a clearly documented strategy grow twice as fast as those without one, over a three to five year period. Having a business plan increases your chances of growth by 48%, and 71% of the fastest-growing companies – those growing at 90% or more annually – have one.
The plan isn’t magic but it does something that instinct alone cannot: it creates a shared, external picture of the business that everyone in the leadership team can see, challenge, and commit to. It surfaces the misalignments that feel small in a busy week but compound dangerously over a year.
Most leadership teams assume they’re aligned but they rarely are, and the check-up reveals the gap before it becomes expensive.
The cost of waiting
The businesses that wait until something breaks, until there’s a crisis to justify the investment in clarity, pay far more to fix it than they would have paid to prevent it. A good year suddenly became a very difficult one, a team was working hard but not in the same direction and a market shifted while everyone was too busy to notice.
Traditional strategy consulting is priced for enterprise. McKinsey charges over $1,000 per hour for a senior partner while a Big Four engagement runs into hundreds of thousands before you’ve seen a single output. That model was built for global multinationals with transformation budgets and eighteen months to spare. It was never designed for a founder-led business making decisions in real time.
But the choice is not between McKinsey and nothing. It’s between structured, facilitated, fast planning and the slow, expensive drift that comes from running without one.
The right check up doesn’t take six months
Here’s what a good business plan actually requires: a leadership team in a room, the right questions asked by someone who’s run a business before, and enough discipline to distil everything down to what actually matters.
That’s four focused sessions: 24 hours of total time. And at the end of it, not a 150-page deck that gathers dust, but four pages your team will actually use: a market context that everyone agrees on, a strategy on a page, a growth plan, and a clear Top 10 list of must-dos for the next twelve months. The kind of plan that lives on the wall, not in a drawer.
Companies that set performance goals quarterly generate 31% more returns than those reassessing annually. The businesses that get there aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated strategy, they’re the ones with a clear plan, shared accountability, and the discipline to review it regularly.
Prevention is always cheaper than cure
You wouldn’t skip the health check because you were too busy to be healthy, and you wouldn’t skip it because you assumed a clean bill of health. You’d go because knowing is better than not knowing and because the small thing caught early is manageable. The same investment that feels unnecessary in a good year is the thing that makes the bad year shorter.
Your business deserves the same logic. The plan doesn’t need to be expensive, it just needs to be done.
This article fist appeared in Startups Magazine.
