«If an entrepreneur never looks toward the future, their business is left at the mercy of uncertainty.» That’s the view of Alexander Pankov, a strategic management expert, consultant, and co-founder of A.maze.S. He talked about how to learn to think strategically and plan for the future, even when day-to-day life means constantly putting out fires.

He offers 12 simple steps that can help move a business confidently toward a better future.

«I specialise in strategy development. And I can tell you that in the difficult market conditions we’re living through right now, most companies spend an enormous amount of daily effort just reacting to change and trying to keep the business afloat. We focus entirely on the here and now, and essentially forget that we need to think about the future. And if we don’t, uncertainty simply swallows us whole. That’s why I always tell entrepreneurs: imagine what your business will look like in two or three years — and the decisions will come much more easily.»

By some estimates, small and mid-sized business owners spend only around 5–7 hours a month on strategy and future planning. In other words, almost all of their time goes into firefighting — fires on the left, fires on the right. Day-to-day operations, basically. There’s simply no room to pause and breathe.

It’s almost funny when a business owner comes to me and says: «My plan is to grow the business sixfold. I need a strategic session — I can give it 4 hours and $800.»

So everyone wants success, a bright future for their business — but they’re only willing to give half a day to actually build it. That’s just not how it works, even if an outside expert hands you a checklist or something similar. The thing is, a business’s future isn’t a single alternative — it’s an entire set of them. And each one needs to be run through your own thinking, against your own business. These alternatives let us look at the business model from different angles, take a broader view of the strategy, and end up choosing the most effective tools.

Why is it that entrepreneurs can’t bring themselves to look two or three years into their company’s future? I’ve pulled together eight patterns of owner behaviour from my own experience. Notice that in every single case, there’s an iron-clad excuse for not dealing with strategy.

Pattern 1. The Waiter. A classic case: the owner runs a successful business, has managed to step back from day-to-day operations, and fully intends to work on strategy. But instead, they just sit in their chair, waiting for growth ideas and strategic decisions to appear on their own — which, of course, they never do. Eventually, the owner drifts straight back into operational tasks.

Pattern 2. Who Do I Even Go Forward With? This is one of my favourites: «I’m alone in this. I’m the only one who understands where we need to go and how. There are 100 people in this company, and every single one of them is an idiot. Not one normal person.»

What I usually suggest to owners like this is to go look in a mirror and ask themselves: «And who exactly hired all these idiots in the first place?»

Pattern 3. The Hamster Wheel. Leaders of this type usually just push back: «What strategy are you even talking about? I crawl home late at night and barely make it to bed. Then in the morning, it’s the exact same thing all over again — a pile of urgent problems. Once we get on top of those, then we’ll think about strategy.»

Pattern 4. The Blank Page. The owner has no idea what to do next: prices are already cut to the bone, margins are razor thin. It’s genuinely unclear what could possibly drive the business forward from here.

Pattern 5. Chasing the Competition. This leader is permanently in catch-up mode. Competitors are tearing through the market, and they’re desperately flooring the accelerator just to keep pace. They don’t really know why they’re doing it. They don’t want to change anything. And over time, they simply fall further and further behind.

Pattern 6. Eeyore the Donkey. This owner’s whole philosophy is: just work harder! They grind away with no strategy at all, burn out fast, and end up resentful of everyone and everything.

Pattern 7. Firefighting Right Now. I hear this from some leaders all the time: «Just get through the day, hang on through the night — that’s all that matters. We’ll think about the future at some point.»

Pattern 8. The Grass Is Greener Next Door. This owner has plenty of ideas — just none of them about their own business. Instead of focusing on growing their own company, they pour money into startups, buy crypto, and scatter their investment across everything but the business in front of them.

And in the end, this can lead the original business straight to collapse — because there’s only one wallet, so to speak, and far too many places that money is leaking out to.

In my view, a realistic number is 3 to 4 competitors. Maybe 5 at the absolute ceiling. My usual advice: keep two companies in your sights that you want to overtake, don’t forget about two more breathing down your neck — the ones genuinely worth watching out for and protecting your business against — and keep an eye on the young, bold players growing despite ignoring convention.

In any market, fearless entrepreneurs can show up and completely change the rules of the game. To stay relevant in this space going forward, you need to watch who’s innovating right now, how they’re doing it, and why. What matters here is keeping the focus on clients, not competitors — because clients are the real foundation of a resilient business.

As for the analytical data, this isn’t just current-year revenue — it’s the trend over 3 to 5 years, together with an analysis of what drove growth, what caused declines, and how things looked next to competitors. When gathering client data, we look at whether their numbers grew or shrank, how their requirements and motivations shifted, how their basket of purchases changed, and what happened to the sales model.

Here’s an example from a project we ran for a large organisation. When we looked at the numbers, it turned out that out of 3,500 clients, just over 100 of them generated 70% of the profit. If even one of those clients left, it would hit the business extremely hard. That’s exactly why it matters to identify who’s actually generating your profit, and how that specific client group is trending over time. This is information you’ll need once you sit down to discuss the company’s future.

You need to keep 3 to 5 competitor companies in view and analyse their moves. And the key step here is trying to factor competitors directly into your own business model, by answering questions like:

Discussing the future doesn’t necessarily mean generating brand new ideas. Look at what’s happening in the world, study the major trends, and consider how they affect your business’s development.

My advice is to pay very close attention to what’s happening around you, and adopt interesting solutions wherever they end up genuinely meeting your audience’s needs. Because clients are what matters most.

Now here’s a real question: if the company has, say, only 20 employees, who actually does all of this? Ideally, you’d bring on a marketer, an analyst, or even a junior intern. But owners often look for excuses not to: «There’s no budget for that right now. We’ll hire someone once we’ve made the money.» In reality, that money simply won’t show up on its own. The entrepreneur just doesn’t want to invest in the future.

Don’t be afraid of the truth, even if it means hearing that your product isn’t nearly as good as you thought. Sometimes it’s genuinely useful to let go of your illusions.

Here are a few examples:

If you happen to own a restaurant, for example, take off the expensive suit, put on a server’s uniform, grab a tray, and go talk to your guests yourself. You’ll get more genuine information that way than from any seminar or expert consultation.

To genuinely plan for the future, hierarchy and rank need to be set aside for a moment — what’s needed here is bold thinking and genuinely interesting ideas.

Everything that comes out of this dreaming gets run through a filtering process afterward, calculated, and turned into an actual decision. But the dreaming is where the whole chain begins.

But remember: even the most disastrous experiment is, above all, a source of genuinely important lessons.

Even small details matter. Something as simple as where you hold your working sessions, for example. Change the setting: move the tables, rearrange the space, add a few unexpected details. Basically, create an environment that genuinely invites open opinions, real discussion, and constructive disagreement. One of our clients, for example, ran a strategy session at a kindergarten and hung a sign on the door reading «The Dreamers’ Club.» It’s striking, but the participants in that session were absolutely overflowing with ideas.

Nobody should be dragged toward the future against their will. Not everyone actually needs to be there. Some people, for instance, are excellent administrators with a real gift for numbers — but the idea of looking ahead genuinely frightens them and creates anxiety. The owner’s job is to identify the people who are actually ready to step into the future. They’re the ones who’ll make up the team that develops and executes the strategy.

The worst possible thing in strategic planning is when the main goal is simply «make money.»

I believe money is a consequence, a by-product. If you do the work of thinking through the future properly, the money will come. But what we put at the centre is the clients, the company’s products, and its business model.

When failures aren’t met with public crucifixion, a leader can actually find the courage to say: «It looks like we’re close to a real failure here. I made a mistake somewhere, folks — I need your help.»

Because the usual pattern looks more like this: «I tried to cover up my mistake, hid the evidence, crossed my fingers and hoped no one would notice. What happens after that isn’t really my problem anymore.»

You can spend as much time as you like thinking about strategy and painting the rosiest possible picture of the future — but that’s only 20% of success. The remaining 80% is actually bringing what you imagined to life.

In closing. Open yourself up to the world. Go out and get new experiences. My own view is that you can’t build a genuinely successful business without travelling — it’s a source of energy, of emotion, of that fire in the eyes. Go for walks, watch films, read science fiction and fairy tales. Dream.

If you want to learn more about strategy, subscribe to Alexander Pankov’s channel «Strategy Labyrinths,» where his videos cover the core topics that help anyone aiming to take their business to the next level.