How to run annual planning on Starch

Annual planning is the once-a-year forcing function where you turn the mess of the last twelve months into commitments for the next twelve: headcount targets, revenue goals, budget allocations, and the three to five bets that actually matter. It sits on most operators' plates because nobody else is going to do it — and because getting it wrong means you spend the year executing against the wrong priorities, or running out of runway two quarters before you expected.

What this looks like in practice varies. A bootstrapped services firm is mostly modeling capacity and pricing. A venture-backed startup is stress-testing runway under three hiring scenarios. A CPG brand is doing demand planning against seasonal cash flow. The underlying job is the same: gather the numbers, align the team, make the calls, and put it somewhere everyone can actually find it.

On Starch, the result is a set of connected surfaces that stay current after the planning cycle ends — a financial model where your actual Stripe revenue and bank balance update the baseline automatically, a scenario comparison that shows what happens to runway if you add two hires in Q2, a shared doc where last quarter's decisions are findable when someone asks 'didn't we agree not to do that?' in September, and a board-ready summary built from your real numbers. The planning cycle produces artifacts that stay useful — not a spreadsheet that's already wrong by February.