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In every P&L I’ve owned, I've chosen to not fund parts of my own strategy.

Strategy is an interesting concept, as if having great ideas means that somehow, magically, you have the budget to implement all of those things. The reality is that I, and everyone else that is responsible for the bottom line, have numbers we've signed up for, gross margin and adjusted EBITDA, and hitting them means some of what I believe in does not get funded. That is not a version of events I enjoy telling, but it is the truest thing I can say about how strategy works once you are the person who has to make it survive contact with a P&L.

The written strategy is the version I present, and the budget is the version I believe, because when the two disagree, and they always disagree, the money is where the real decision is sitting.

Here is what I have learned about operating under constraint, which is the only condition I have ever led in. The urgent will always beat the important and the mandatory will always beat the discretionary, not because I lack discipline, but because the loud thing arrives wearing a face and a deadline while the strategic thing waits quietly and asks for nothing until it is too late to save it. If I leave those decisions to the moment, I will fund whatever is screaming in front of me and starve the thing that moves the business, so the only counterweight I have found is to decide before the moment arrives. That is why I have come to think of strategy less as a plan and more as a set of promises I make in the quiet, before the pressure shows up to renegotiate them.

Three of those decisions are on my desk more often than I would like. The specific facts change every year, but the shape of the decision does not.

The first is a big bet someone on my team wants me to spend real money chasing, where the honest chance of winning is somewhere around one in three. They are not wrong to want it, because their job is to fill the pipeline and they are good at it, but my job is the portfolio, and those two jobs do not add up to the same number. If I chase everything that has a champion and a countdown I will resource nothing well enough to close it, so a one-in-three bet is not an automatic no. It becomes a yes only if the money genuinely improves the odds, or buys me into a customer I have already decided I want, or if losing it is truly unthinkable, and it has to clear that bar on a cold morning before the bet has a face, because once it has a face the emotion in the room will always argue for yes.

The second is the annual planning cycle, which is quietly consuming a finance team that was already too thin before the season started. Mandatory work has a habit I have finally learned to name, which is that it expands to fill every hour of capacity I leave unguarded, so if my plan is to find room for the strategic analysis once planning calms down, there is no version of my calendar where that room ever appears. I do not get to fund the important work with leftovers, because there are never leftovers, so now I wall off the slice before the season begins and I defend it as if it were mandatory too, which is the only way it survives.

The third is the one I worry about, the work that determines what the business becomes, because it is the easiest thing to defer and the last thing anyone notices you deferred. The only people who could do it are my best people, and my best people are consumed keeping this year's promises, so the talent that is indispensable to this quarter is exactly the talent that is never free for the next three. I used to tell myself I would free them up once things calmed down, but things never calm down, so now I carry a fraction of my best capacity as a fixed cost I owe to what comes next, taken off the top, rather than a residual I fund with whatever survives the quarter, because nothing survives the quarter.

What all three have in common is not that I am short on resources, it is that the strategic option loses by default unless I choose for it early and loudly enough to protect it, and that is the part of prioritization nobody warns you about. We talk about it as if it were addition, a clean ranking of everything that matters, when it is really subtraction, and the whole skill lives in the sentence I least want to say out loud, the one that begins with the words “We are not going to…”.

And that sentence always lands on someone. When I choose the future first, someone else loses the headcount or the program they were counting on this year, and they are usually right that their piece matters too. The person with the one-in-three bet is not wrong, they are downstream of a tradeoff they did not get to make. The hardest part of deciding what to fund has never been the spreadsheet, it is sitting across from someone who works for me and telling them the thing they believe in is the thing I am not going to fund this year, so that something else I believe in can survive.

So I am doing the thing that feels backward. Before the season starts, before the pursuit finds its champion, before this quarter swallows my best people whole, I am writing down the sentence I do not want to write and saying it to the people who fund me, naming what loses so that I can protect what matters as an obligation I meet first rather than a hope I get to last.

None of this is complicated, and all of it is uncomfortable, which is exactly why so few of us do it. I already know the sentence we need to say this year, the one that begins with “we are not going to”, and I know whose work sits on the other side of it, which might be why I haven’t said it out loud yet. The season is starting anyway, and the budget I approve will say it for me whether I find the nerve to or not.

See you every other Tuesday

~Alicia

P.S. If you own a P&L, I hope this article helps you recognize what you’re deliberately saying no to this year.