In government, they say “gouverner c’est prévoir.” As an entrepreneur, I live by this mantra for financial planning and the product roadmap.

“I’m completely under water.”

“I’m trying to work through my backlog.”

“Give me some time to catch up first before I review your request.”

Sounds familiar? I would be lying if I said that I had never fallen behind in my work, even though I have a reputation for being organized. For my personal work organization, I always plan 2–4 weeks ahead. That works well to stay on top of day-to-day activities and tasks.

Still, sometimes I am drowning in urgent work that turns my beautiful plan upside down. Why is that?

It’s because for strategic topics, planning ahead for 2–4 weeks is not enough. You will not compensate strategic urgencies with better personal organization. Rather, you will have to work hard to achieve what I call a strategic advantage.

Sounds confusing? Let’s look into two real-life examples from Yonder, the company I co-founded.

Cash Flow Plan and Business Plan

Cash is king for both businesses and households. That’s why maintaining an elaborate and accurate cash flow plan is a key activity for any entrepreneur.

How far ahead should you plan? The general recommendation is to forecast cash flow for 2–3 years, and to use a business plan for anything beyond 3 years.

Now, how can you achieve a strategic advantage with your cash flow plan and your business plan?

I recently merged the cash flow plan and the business plan into one huge Excel spreadsheet. Every revenue and expense item is modeled and aggregated for monthly and yearly figures. For the next ten years.

A static cash flow and business plan doesn’t earn you a strategic advantage. The strategic advantage is achieved when you incorporate scenario planning into your plan. What happens if customer X doesn’t renew the contract in September 2026? What happens to our revenues if the U.S. Dollar nosedives? And as a consequence, when do I have to lower which cost items to still cut a profit?

All these questions can be answered in my merged cash flow and business plan, and the results are shown instantly in updated liquidity and P&L charts.

Now, how does this turn into a strategic advantage? I can plan for the worst case long before the worst case occurs. As a consequence, I’m neither surprised, nor do I suddenly have super-urgent financial problems on my desk that draw me down.

Product Roadmap

The other strategic planning tool I use is the product roadmap for our SaaS product.

In the early days of the company, we often had to make feature promises to win the first few deals. Also, the early features still had lots of room for improvement, so customers made many feature improvement requests. We couldn’t always keep our promises, as bugs took more time to resolve than planned, and new requests from new customers who screamed louder came in at inconvenient times.

Fast-forward a few years. The product has matured, and so has the product roadmap. We still receive feature improvement requests and new feature requests from our customer base, but we consolidate them much better than in the early days. We discuss roadmap items both internally and with our customers to make sure that the priorities serve the majority of our customer base.

And that’s the key word to achieve strategic advantage: Priorities. It means you accept that you cannot do it all at the same time. That’s a struggle to communicate internally and externally, but there is no way around it.

But before you can communicate the priorities, you need to have an overview of all the roadmap items and feature requests at hand. Achieving and maintaining that overview is your true strategic advantage.

Conclusion

Planning years ahead in terms of cash flow and quarters ahead in terms of the roadmap might sound like a waste of time: Surely, things will change, and as a consequence, you will have to replan.

Yes, you will have to replan and replan again, but that’s less strenuous than reacting to unfolding major events without a plan.

It’s an old saying in government: Gouverner, c’est prévoir. To govern is to plan ahead. And what’s true for a government is true for any business and any household.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a pessimist, but you will have to plan for the worst and hope for the best. That’s the way to avoid strategic urgencies that make you fall back in your day-to-day work.