Harness your data: 3 steps to create a stellar 2026 strategy

Welcome to 2026! Hopefully you’ve had time to take a little break for the holidays, but now it’s time to get planning for the year ahead. 

An annual plan or strategy isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have. Whether you have a team of 20 or just the one (you), it’s really important to be able to describe what success looks like. A good plan gets everyone on the same page and makes sure you stay focused on the right things throughout the year.  

You can’t look ahead without first glancing behind: looking at your numbers to understand how your business really performed in 2025. Here’s how to start forming your 2026 strategy.

Step 1: Review your key financial reports for big patterns

Profit and loss

Your Profit & Loss report (P&L) shows you the big picture of your finances - how much income you had, how much you spent on costs, and, crucially, how much profit you made. 

Take note of any income sources that were particularly profitable for you last year. You might want to focus your efforts on these. Similarly, are there any costs that jump out as particularly high - what can you do to reduce these?

Cashflow

Take a look at your cashflow over the year: you’re keeping an eye out for any ‘pinch points’ with negative cashflow (times when your outgoings were higher than your income). 

Do you understand why this happened? Can you plan cash buffers this year to protect your business in case this happens again, or look at spreading out your costs so you don’t end up with a huge bill at an inconvenient time of year?

In FreeAgent, you’ll find last year’s cashflow graph on your dashboard.

Assets

Quickly check your capital accounts to make sure you know how much money you have in the business overall. This may impact whether lenders would offer you a business loan. You can use the Balance Sheet and the Capital Assets report to see the total value of your business’s assets.

Tax

The last part of your overall financial picture is to understand your tax bill. In FreeAgent, you can see how much tax you’ll owe for 2025 on your Tax Timeline, or within your Self Assessment or Corporation Tax page. This’ll give you a rough idea of how much you need to be saving each month to pay your annual tax bill - an important part of budgeting. 

Step 2: Dig into your sales and marketing data for specific insights

Customer lifetime value

Your customer lifetime value (CLV) tells you how much your average customer spends with your business throughout your entire relationship. This is really useful when setting your marketing budget, as it tells you what’s a sensible amount to spend acquiring new customers to still make a profit.

You can calculate your customer lifetime value by multiplying your average customer annual revenue with your average customer lifespan.

Top customers 

Looking into your customers from 2025 will help you identify two important bits of information: who your most profitable customers are and whether you have any problems with customer concentration. 

Your Customer Sales report will show you your top customers for the year. Understanding them can help you develop an ideal customer profile (ICP). An ICP, in turn, will help you target the best customers for your business, and therefore get more bang for your marketing buck. 

The Customer Sales report will also show you if the majority of your income is coming from just a few high-spending customers - potentially putting your business at risk if you lose one of them. If this is a risk for you, you can either focus on bringing in more big spenders (using your ICP) or try to upsell and re-engage your less profitable customers. 

Conversion rates

This is where you look into your different marketing tactics and find out which were the most effective at attracting paying customers. Are there any high cost strategies that aren’t translating into customers? 

Really assess your past year and identify a couple of changes to make your marketing and customer acquisition more efficient. 

Customer feedback

Read as much of your customer feedback as you can to understand your business from their point of view. Check your reviews and any specific questions you’ve received to understand what you’re doing well, what you could be doing better, and whether there are any common points of confusion.

This will give you ideas of what benefits to lean into in your 2026 marketing and ways you could improve even more.

Step 3: Check for ways your team could be more efficient and more satisfied  

Time tracking

Roughly calculate how much time you spent on the business, breaking this down into income-generating work and essential business admin. Are there any tasks you’re spending too much time on? Is 2026 the right time to outsource certain tasks, or invest in technology to speed you up? 

If you have employees, consider the same questions for them. How can you use their time most effectively? Would they benefit from extra support to speed up parts of their job, or are you able to delegate additional tasks to them to reduce your workload and give you more time for business development?

Capacity and wellbeing

Ask yourself whether you had the right balance of work and recharge time in 2025. You likely started your business to have more control of your life - so don’t lose sight of the life you want. 

You can decide what business success looks like, so make sure you set goals that match what you want for your business and your life. 

Similarly, if you have employees, the start of the year is a great time to check in with them to discover their goals. Did they feel overwhelmed or underutilised last year? Are there tasks they’d like to take on or skills they’d like to learn that could help their professional development and your business? 

Step 4: Set your 2026 goals

Now, armed with all of this fantastic knowledge and increased understanding, you’re ready to set your goals for the year! 

Remember, keep them SMART: Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely. This’ll help you prioritise your work throughout the year and motivate yourself and your team. 

And don’t worry about planning for every eventuality - if things change, you can change your plan. It isn’t set in stone! Make sure you’re checking your key metrics throughout the year so you can keep your plan purposeful and up to date.