How founders can set smarter goals for 2026

Not everything is an emergency. Not everything can be a priority.

This is a lesson I learned early in my career and try to teach to everyone I work with.

If 2025 was the year of “more” — more channels, more content, more dashboards, and more noise as we all scrambled to meet budget in a tough market — then 2026 needs to be the year of less.

Not less ambition, not less growth, but less clutter. Less frantic context-switching. Less chasing 12 priorities and finishing none of them. Founders don’t fail because they don’t care enough; they fail because they care about everything at once.

The most successful brands in the next 24 months won’t be the ones that do the most. They’ll be the ones who master the discipline of restraint, choosing fewer, better-thought-through goals and executing them with a ruthless, almost monastic focus.

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Here’s how founders can set smart goals for 2026 in a way that doesn’t burn out their teams, blow out their budgets, or bloat their roadmaps.

1. Marie Kondo your to-do list

Most founders enter a new year with last year’s debris still stuffed in their strategic pantry. It’s time to get Spring cleaning.

Before you set 2026 goals, stop and conduct an audit:

2. The rule of threes

The reason goals don’t stick is because many founders create endless lists rather than pointed priorities. And they don’t onboard the team with the priorities, but rather send countless daily Slack tasks, overwhelming everyone around them. Don’t be that boss.

Your business, if small to medium, can meaningfully pursue three priorities per year, not 10. Not 20. Three. Especially in lean teams and trying times.

For a consumer brand, it might look like:

Increase profitable customer acquisition by 20%

Improve margin by 5–10 points through product, pricing and ops

Strengthen brand equity through one powerful, memorable creative platform

Everything that doesn’t support these priorities is noise and distraction disguised as “experimentation”.

When you pick three, you give your team clarity. When you pick 14, you give them anxiety. It’s our job as leaders to allow our teams to execute their plans properly and with focus; that’s how we’ll see the ROI on the other side. That doesn’t mean we’re not nimble, but we’re nimble for the right reasons, not whims.

3. Practice the art of saying no

Most founders think strategy is choosing what to do. The best founders know strategy is choosing what to stop doing.

Ask yourself and your team:

What would break if we stopped doing this?

What only exists because “we’ve always done it this way”?

What project has a high emotional attachment but low commercial impact?

Where are we spending time to feel busy rather than to drive results?

4. Annual goals work for corporate boards, not growing companies.

None of us has a year to wait to find out if the strategy we are implementing is working. This is what it means to be focused, but nimble. Your three 2026 goals should break into four quarters:

Q1: Set foundations and test

Q2: Optimise the winners and ditch the losers

Q3: Scale what works

Q4: Cement gains and prepare for 2027

This cadence gives teams momentum and prevents the October panic scramble or Black Friday reliance and sales cycle that brands fall into. Trade promo marketing is not a strategy; it’s a tactic — a lever that one should deploy very carefully, and one that will grow tiresome and heavy for the brand in the long run. It’s also often the symptom of not having a clear plan and the gusto to stick with it. And it is avoidable, even in this dumpster fire of an economy.

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