Put Your Business Foundations Front and Center
January is the honeymoon month for new goals, with its brainstorming energy and high hopes. Ideas are great, but the only way to continue to grow your business is to make sure there’s a solid foundation. The pressure of growth will cause weak spots to crack and crumble. So If you’re thinking about 2026, the most important place to start isn’t brainstorming - we’re going to put that in the back seat for a bit and put your business foundations front and center.
What you need at this time of the year is not more ideas - you need to review and align your existing foundations. Foundations are maintained, not built once and forgotten. And as your goals change, you need to check if your foundations are in sync with and ready to support what you want to accomplish.
This time of year we’re motivated to jump in and work. We tend to overlook our foundational framework because we’re busy and tell ourselves, “I’ll look at those when things quiet down”. But then it’s too late. If your foundations haven’t been reviewed, you will fall behind. This isn’t a motivation problem, it’s a foundation problem. Business owners don’t notice these issues until they are a few months in, and things are not going smoothly in their businesses.
It’s like leaving on a road trip without having maintenance done on your car. If and when your car breaks down in the middle of your trip, you’ll wish you had that maintenance done beforehand.
What qualifies as part of your foundation?
Anything that keeps your business moving forward in a steady and efficient way. Things like:
Offers that are clear, aligned, and priced appropriately
How you spend your time each day, week, and quarter
Actions that are in alignment with your bigger goals
Effective, automated systems for onboarding, offboarding, follow-up, and task management
If those things are shaky, then everything is going to feel harder than it needs to be. This is the month where foundations matter more than enthusiasm.
Should foundations be reviewed annually?
Yes, if your goal is to have a strong, sustainable business. You can’t approach foundations as a set it and forget it thing - they need to be revisited and updated.
Why?
Because foundations don’t totally collapse and trigger an alarm. They show up in ways that drain your energy and motivation - annoying friction, lack of progress, and other small challenges. The changes you may need to make can also be small. It’s not about starting from scratch - just making sure we’re aligned with our operations.
Why do weak foundations take time to show up?
Like any other foundation, you don’t really know where its weak spots are until you keep applying pressure there. Many of these spots that can crumble are predictable: pricing confusion, calendar chaos, stalled momentum, missed deadlines.
A big chunk of your foundation lies in the client journey:
How someone finds you
How they become a client
What happens next
How the work is delivered
The client journey drives everything else. Whether onboarding, invoicing, delegation, outsourcing, or decisions around hiring happen, or don’t. If the client journey is clear, decisions get easier. If it’s not, everything feels heavier than it should. This is why planning season should be about strengthening your business foundation so it can actually support where you’re going.
One Client’s Client Journey
When I walked through this with my client, we established the key elements of her foundational processes. We created a discovery call form to ensure productive discovery calls, and we designed an onboarding experience that would give her and her clients everything they needed. Then we set up a communication process to keep information and milestones accessible and easy to pass back and forth. And we determined how she would set up billing - when she would send invoices and where she would create them and accept payment. Having these in place meant she didn’t have to constantly figure these out with every new client and could put her mental energy into the creative work that she loved doing.
Why is planning so important for keeping foundations intact?
Planning is where you catch any of those weak spots that need to be reinforced as your business grows and evolves. It’s where you get to assess, update, and rework systems, processes, and operations.
Early foundations are simple and only initial starting points. As you get busier, your business grows, and things get more complex, sometimes you need quick fixes - “duct-tape” workarounds. But it gets harder to fill the gap - what you can manually fix for a few clients, may not work for dozens or hundreds of clients.
An example of this is with a client I wanted to set up automated registration and onboarding for her group program. Initially she waved me off and said, “it’s only a few people - we’ll just deal with it.” Luckily, I convinced her to set it up, and she was prepared when her program grew faster than she expected.
FAQs
How do I know what type of foundational planning I need to do for my business?
It depends on your type of business and clients, what you offer, etc. I’m happy to talk through this on a complimentary call.
How do I find the time to plan and evaluate my foundations? I’m so busy.
By taking the time to plan, you’ll be giving yourself back the time you’ve been spending putting out little fires caused by a weak foundation.
Planning is the opposite of reacting. If you’re ready to start planning, sign up for my next CEO Power Planning session on March 19th.
