It’s January. If you haven’t locked your 2026 plan yet, you’re not behind.

You might actually be lucky. 

I’ve been through 20+ annual planning processes. Most are fine. Few are great.

But there was one that made me think I was taking crazy pills…

I once spent six weeks in the most rigorous annual planning process I'd ever seen.

Daily meetings. Financial models. Dashboards for the dashboards. Scenario planning. Department-by-department goal-setting. We documented everything. Cross-referenced priorities. Aligned on accountability. Built tracking systems for the tracking systems.

By the time we finished, we had a beautiful plan. Clear. Ambitious. Structured. Felt great.

Three months later, I discovered the company was broke. All that planning? Built on a house of cards.

I'd been hired as CMO at a company I won't name. They'd had a rough year... revenue down, churn up, and the founder had recently stepped back to install a new CEO.

They were stuck at that brutal stage between $2M and $10M... big enough that founder hustle wasn't working anymore, yet too small for the infrastructure they were attempting to build.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was a Hail Mary. They shouldn't have hired me. They couldn't afford me. But the new CEO was convinced that what the company needed was growth, and growth meant marketing, and marketing meant me.

The CEO was inexperienced. He'd never scaled a company through a downturn. But he had conviction.

His conviction, in January, was that the company needed structure.

So we planned.

This was the company’s first time implementing a formal annual planning process (despite being around nearly a decade), and he wanted it done right. I'll give him this: the process was thorough. We modeled scenarios. We debated priorities. We assigned owners. We built dashboards to track everything.

And I mean everything.

Most companies need to track 5 core metrics. Revenue. Profit. Churn. Pipeline. Cash. The numbers that actually tell you if the business is healthy.

We tracked hundreds. No exaggeration. 

Every department had their own dashboard. Every dashboard fed into master dashboards. Every Monday, the entire company spent most of the day pulling data, validating it, formatting it, documenting it for review.

Twenty percent of every week. Gone. Just to report.

Not to make decisions. Not to change course. Just to fill cells in spreadsheets that nobody was going to act on.

Meanwhile, the CEO was celebrating. He'd just launched a podcast. He was obsessed with download numbers. He wanted to spin up new products. New revenue streams. More complexity.

The company had a churn problem that was bleeding revenue every single month.

We didn't fix the churn. Instead, we built a dashboard to track it.

Think about that for a second. It's like having a nail in your foot and meticulously tracking how much blood you're losing each day... instead of just pulling out the nail.

That's what process theater looks like from the inside. Everyone's very busy measuring the problem. Nobody's fixing it.

The new CFO figured it out before I did.

We were at a company event. Team dinner, open bar. People were ordering freely... including some expensive cognac. Louis XIII. Not cheap.

I noticed the CFO watching the bar tab like it was a ticking bomb. Not annoyed. Genuinely upset.

I didn't think much of it. Maybe she was having a bad night.

Later, I asked her about it.

"We're treading water," she said. "Those Louis XIII orders? They're actually impacting the bottom line."

I laughed. She didn't.

She wasn't joking.

That's when I started digging. And what I found made six weeks of planning feel like an elaborate joke.

The company was out of runway. Not "tight on cash." Not "need to watch expenses." The money was gone. We were operating on fumes.

All those models we'd built? Useless. 

All those priorities we'd set? Irrelevant. We didn't have the cash to execute any of them.

All that planning?

Six weeks. $500,000 in executive time. All to avoid a decision that could've been made in one minute: focus on sales.

When I brought this to the CEO, he didn't pivot.

He doubled down.

He was convinced he'd already fixed the churn problem. (He hadn't.) He thought we could create immediate demand without a real brand or substantial advertising budget. (We couldn't.) He believed net new revenue could outpace the money lost from churn.

With their business model and the rate of clients cancelling, it was mathematically impossible. 

It's easy to read this and think, "I'd never do that." But process theater doesn't require a bad CEO. It just requires avoiding hard truths long enough for the dashboards to feel like progress.

It was optimistic. It was naive. And it was rooted in something I've seen kill more companies than bad products or bad markets:

Process as a substitute for truth.

The planning felt rigorous. The dashboards looked professional. The weekly reviews were packed with data. But none of it was connected to reality. It was theater... an elaborate performance of running a company, without the CEO level setting with the leadership team on what the company truly needed.

They didn't need a better operating system. They needed to know which problem to solve first.

Instead, they tried to solve all of them at once... with robust planning, new dashboards, products, GTM function, and structure.

There's no happy ending here. The company was gutted to the studs. Pivoted into something unrecognizable. Years of reputation. Gone. 

All while everyone was very, very busy... doing the wrong things.

Here's the thing about operating systems like EOS or whatever framework is popular this quarter:

They work. I like them. But only when the diagnosis is right and the data is real.

The problem is most founders skip that part.

They implement the framework before they understand the problem. They track 50 metrics before they know which 5 actually matter. They build dashboards before anyone verifies the numbers going into them. They run L10 meetings while the company bleeds cash. 

They’re focused on everything–when the only thing that likely matters at that moment is sales.

Process becomes a way to feel like you're running a company... without confronting whether the company is actually healthy.

Self-implemented EOS has a less than 30% success rate. That's not my opinion... that's what the data shows. And it's not because the system is bad. It's because most companies use it to organize chaos instead of fixing what's actually broken.

I call it process theater.

It looks rigorous. Your Monday meetings are full. Your quarterly reviews are packed with slides. You've got Rocks and KPIs and accountability charts on every wall.

The leadership team becomes a slave to the process.

And underneath it all? Nobody's asked the hard question in months.

If you're reading this thinking, "That's not me. That's not my team"... I'd gently push back.

Research on self-assessment is brutal. In the original Dunning-Kruger studies, people who scored in the bottom 12% of performers rated themselves in the 62nd percentile. They weren't lying. They genuinely believed it.

We are wired to overestimate our abilities and underestimate our blind spots. It's not a character flaw. It's human operating software. And it has nothing to do with how smart you are. 

The same mechanism that gives founders the irrational confidence to start companies also makes us terrible at seeing where those companies are broken.

Avoidance feels like focus. Tracking feels like action. Confidence feels like competence.

That's why the best founders don't trust their own self-assessment. They build systems... and relationships... that force the truth to surface whether they want to see it or not.

If you're reading this in January, you probably just finished your 2026 planning. Or you're in the middle of it. Or you're behind and telling yourself you'll get to it next week.

Here's what I want you to ask yourself:

Is your plan built on what's true? Or what you hope is true?

Do you actually know your cash position right now... not projected, but actual?

When's the last time someone on your team told you something you didn't want to hear?

Are you tracking 5 metrics that matter? Or 50 metrics that make you feel busy?

Is your operating system helping you execute... or helping you avoid the conversation about what's actually broken?

The founders who break through the seven-figure ceiling aren't the ones with the most sophisticated planning process.

They're the ones who know which problem to solve first. Who have the courage to look at the real numbers. Who build their plan on objective truth, not hope.

Process is a tool. It's useful when pointed at the right problem.

It's dangerous when it becomes a substitute for confronting reality.

If you haven't done your 2026 planning yet...

Or you did, but something feels off...

I'm putting together a FREE no-fluff planning guide. No 47-slide Vision/Traction Organizer. No 200 metrics. No six-week process that eats your entire Q1.

Just the questions that actually matter for founder-led companies trying to break through the 7-figure ceiling.

Reply "Hey Chris…send me the PIPER Plan" and I'll send it over when it's ready.

Why most fractional hires fail in their first 90 days—despite being talented AF.

Hit reply and let me know, I respond to every email.

—Chris Piper
The Growth Operator