🧨   Dry Powder
🎯   18 Month Planning
🎳   Track Progress Weekly
🧨 Keep Dry Powder
Warren Buffett said, “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” That requires cash and patience.
This is a market of dichotomies.
On one hand, employment numbers are up, and the stock market is flying. On the other hand, the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for 100 days, which I anticipate is a permanent structural change.
It’s a market of mixed signals: things are great, but we may be heading for a crisis.
A key lesson I learned in my family business was to always keep dry powder. We maintained at least six months of payroll in cash to weather a storm.
This was a significant asset for us in the Great Recession of 2008. It gave us the ability to pivot to new markets and be proactive. We grew while the rest of our industry was in freefall.
With things as frothy as they are, the advice holds. Keep dry powder. Having cash on hand lets you be offensive while your competitors are defensive.
🎯 18 Month Planning
How do you develop a 5 year plan when once-in-a-generation events happen every other year? You can’t. As a result, strategic planning cycles are getting shorter.
In CoStrategy’s strategic planning with clients, we recommend 18 month strategic plans. Anything past 18 months is almost dreaming. You may be able to envision a bigger future, but how you get there is less predictable.
Growth strategy isn’t static. It’s a process based on execution.Â
An 18 month plan has 6 quarters or blocks of work. This cadence enables you to make key policy decisions, validate assumptions, and make clear investments in people, processes, and infrastructure.
This pragmatic lens has two key benefits. First, it reduces decision paralysis. When priorities aren’t forever, it empowers your team to make clearer, more tangible decisions.
Second, it makes you more strategic. In CoStrategy, we describe this as Activate-to-Strategy. Accelerating the planning and implementation cycles increases your ability to understand and adapt to market conditions faster and more decisively.
đź“ŠÂ One Stat to Watch
Q2 2027
Don’t expect oil prices to come down soon. ADNOC CEO Sultan Al Jaber said, “Even if this [Iran] conflict ends tomorrow, it will take at least four months to get back to ​80% of pre-conflict flows, and full flows will not return before the first or even second quarter of 2027.”
🎳 Track Progress Weekly
The companies that act fast and adapt faster gain the advantage. A big driver of their speed is how they track and report data.
Rather than using complex dashboards and studying multiple KPIs, they report 3 to 5 targets to improve (TTIs) weekly in a bowling chart report.
A TTI is a behavioral metric that you would like to improve in a defined timeframe. They are often written as, “From X to Y by When.” For instance, from 30 to 40 units shipped per week in six months.
A bowling chart resembles a bowling scorecard. It’s a table that tracks progress on a structured cadence: daily, weekly, or monthly. The target is marked green or red to indicate if it was hit or missed.
The simplicity of the system is its advantage. It provides regular reporting with an early detection system when targets are falling short. Rather than analyzing the past, you can make real-time adjustments so that you’re constantly moving forward.
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
We’d love to hear your feedback. Message with any thoughts, comments, or ideas for future issues.