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2026 Business Plan and Budget
"2026 Business Plan and Budget"
October 2025
Richard T. Hendee
A Silver Fox Advisor
If you haven’t looked at your calendar lately, there are just two more full months left in 2025, and both of those months have major Holidays in them, which means lost business work days and family and personal obligations.
So, what’s my point? Well, if you haven’t started at least thinking about your 2026 Business Plan and Budget, you will be under the gun to finish both by the end of the year for implementation on January 2, 2026.
If you have been in business for a while, you are probably saying, “Why do I need a 2026 Business Plan and Budget”?
My response to you is – “Your business is probably the largest single asset you have. It is also the source of your family’s livelihood”. Don’t you want your business to be successful and generate profitability to support your family? If you said yes to these questions, then let’s do something about it to make that happen!
Writing the key points of a Business Plan are not that hard. Start by writing a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threats (S.W.O.T.) analysis. Use the S.W.O.T. analysis to plan to capitalize on the strengths, improve the weaknesses, take advantage of the opportunities, and identify the threats as best you can, so if they happen, you will not be caught totally off guard.
Now, develop your top three or four business goals you would like to achieve in 2026. These goals can be things like adding a new product in 2026, expanding your facilities, buying a new piece of equipment, or some new vehicles. Then, develop three or four financial goals you want to achieve in 2026. These can be things like increasing your gross profit margin by one or two percent, adding to your reserves for a rainy day, or even expanding your line-of-credit with your bank.
Also, you should generate an organizational chart, identify what each position does, and evaluate the people you have in those functional boxes to make sure you have the right people in the right places to carry out your plan.
Then, detail your marketing strategies and techniques for 2026. Those items can include having a new website built, adding a social media component. Hiring a new salesperson, instituting a customer satisfaction experience campaign.
Those are some of the key elements for your business plan. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make with their business plans is not sharing the plan with their employees. You need all of your employees on the same page you are on if your business is going to be successful. Further, if you don’t tell your employees what you want, how can you expect them to perform the way you want them to?
Next month I will detail the components of the 2026 Budget.
If you need assistance in working through your “”2026 Business Plan”, I recommend you start by contacting the Silver Fox Advisors. Silver Fox Advisors are former or present business owners themselves, and they have experience in running a business, and in some cases several businesses, and they have lots of experience developing Business Plans. We encourage you to visit our website at www.silverfox.org to select a Silver Fox Advisor and also to learn more about the Silver Fox Advisors, as well as our great programs and community outreach endeavors.
The Leadership Training/Mentoring Corner - September Responses
THE LEADERSHIP TRAINING/MENTORING CORNER
In the August 2025 Newsletter, we started a series called “The Leadership/Mentoring Corner” in which we posed a thought-provoking situation for you to think about and put yourself into the situation, detailed and ask yourself – “What do I do now?” and “What precautions should I have taken?”. Below is the situation that was in the September 2025 Newsletter.
SEPTEMBER LEADERSHIP SITUATION
- Consider having an employee who consistently shows poor professional skills. She is a legacy employee and is good friends with the family of the owners of the business.
- She speaks out inappropriately during meetings and engages in circular reasoning, holding the rest of the team hostage.
- She presents data that is erroneously applied to a large team of people, presenting the data as fact.
- She dresses inappropriately.
- She engages in behavior that is insubordinate, often arguing with Executive Leadership.
- She does not complete projects on time and always has excuses for not being able to meet the deadline.
- She does not follow all policies and procedures.
For your redirection you have:
- Spoken with her on multiple occasions one-on-one.
- Written her up for insubordination.
- Met with her weekly to keep her goals on track.
- Included the owner in the weekly meetings.
- Collected a binder’s worth of documentation for poor performance.
The owners have indicated you still do not have enough documentation to “legally” let her go.
What are your next steps?
We polled some of the Silver Fox Advisors, and due to the many complexities of Human Resource Compliance and Labor and Employment Laws, we strongly suggest that legal counsel be consulted before taking any actions. However, you might want to consider the steps below as a starting point:
What are your next steps?
There appears to be one good next step to be taken here. Given the [false] assertion that “there is not enough documentation,” the most strategic way to execute this is to act independently as her supervisor (assuming that’s true):
- Prepare a separation letter stating that today is her last day of employment. Assuming this is Texas (a right-to-work state), you can usually dismiss an employee for no reason as long as it is not for one of the protected reasons (gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.)
- Offer a severance package of your choosing that includes x weeks of severance pay in exchange for her agreement that she holds the company harmless for any claim she may have regarding her employment or termination. Make the severance offer generous enough that she will want it. Give her 24 hours to sign, or the offer expires forever.
- Have a security guard on hand and within earshot when you present the separation letter and severance offer. Collect their badge and keys, if any. Have the security guard escort the employee out of the business location at once, take them to their car, and watch them drive away. Do not let them return to their desk or workplace.
- Have the IT department immediately change all passwords and block all online access to company e-mail, data, records, and utilities.
- Here is the strategic part: Immediately after the employee is dismissed, you report the action face-to-face to your Human Resources Department (if you have one) and your supervisor and acknowledge with a sincere apology that YOU violated company policy and procedure. Then you have forced the company to make a choice: They can either
- fire you (and maybe hire back the troublemaker) or
- reprimand you for violating procedure, give you a warning never to do it again, and carry on as usual with every employee in the company secretly thanking you.
No matter what happens, you and the company are all better off. Remember, you were the scapegoat all along (“you did not get enough documentation” -- laughable!). Why would anyone in their right mind want to work for a company where the management ignores toxic employees and makes YOU the scapegoat for their toxicity? If they DO fire you, you have copies at home of all the documentation that supports your reasonable decision to fire the troublemaker… So, they should make a very generous severance offer in exchange for YOUR agreement to hold the company harmless in YOUR firing! If you have all the documentation in your possession, any good employment lawyer would be happy to take the case on contingency.
Again, due to the many complexities of Human Resource Compliance and Labor and Employment Laws we strongly suggest legal counsel be consulted before taking any actions.
