The Case for Thinking 30 Months Ahead

“I’ve come so far, I believe I can run on some more.”
– Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith

Annual planning is hard. You’re overworked, under-resourced, and pulled in a dozen directions at once. Every department thinks marketing exists to execute their requests on demand. You’re juggling product launches, community events, vendor delays, and budget battles. Then, right in the middle of all that, you’re expected to step away from the whirlwind, zoom out, and map the next twelve months. That’s no small task. It takes discipline to sit down and create a plan for the year. That’s exactly why most bank marketers stop there.

Some see quarterly planning as an alternative. It’s a way to be “more agile” and avoid the weight of building a yearlong plan. But quarterly planning is even worse. You’re constantly resetting, rehashing priorities, and reacting to the latest noise. You never get to build momentum because you’re too busy redrawing the map every three months. There’s no time to establish a direction, much less stick to it. It’s a treadmill: lots of running, but you look up and you haven’t moved.

Quarterly and annual planning are two sides of the same coin. They both leave you in the dark. Quarterly planning feels like moving through an unfamiliar building with a dying flashlight. You can see a few steps ahead, but everything else is swallowed in black. Somewhere in the distance, a noise echoes. Maybe it’s a door creaking, maybe something worse. Your flashlight beam cuts through the dark, but it also throws strange shadows against the walls. Shapes twist and stretch until they look like monsters. You inch forward, heart pounding, reacting to whatever jumps into the narrow cone of light. Annual planning is about the same. Only the batteries are a little fresher, so we can see a bit further.

Why don’t we just turn on the lights?

Flip the Switch

Imagine having a plan that shows you not only this year in full detail, but also how this year sets up the next, and even the opportunities you might want to capture in the six months after that. The first year is clear. The second year is outlined with major priorities. The final stretch is a space for ideas that may come into play sooner than you expect. It’s all connected, so every decision you make now feeds into what comes next.

We realized we could see further than the typical annual plans, and when we did, we found it was a better system. So, we started doing 30-Month Planning. Despite how it might sound, it’s actually easier than annual planning. You’ve already done the hardest part by mapping out the first year. Extending the logic forward takes less effort than starting from scratch each January. It also takes the pressure off getting everything perfect in the short term. Because you’ve already sketched the long game, you can shift, pull forward, or push back projects without losing momentum or direction.

When you start thinking this way, the pieces fall into place quickly. That first year you’ve already planned becomes the foundation. From there, you look at how those projects, campaigns, and investments will set up the next year. Then, you sketch the six months after that, which is an open space where you can park ideas, extensions, or potential opportunities that might appear sooner than expected. It’s not abstract theory. It’s simply connecting today’s work to tomorrow’s results with intention instead of unfounded hope.

Building the Framework

The first time you build a 30-Month Plan, it is a difficult task. There’s no getting around that. You have to rise above the daily noise, push past the urgent requests, and carve out the time and headspace to look at the bigger picture. That effort is required to get ahead with a solid long-term plan. 

Once you commit to that higher view, the real structure starts to form. You gather the long-range vision from your executive team to determine where the bank is headed, how success will be measured, and the major initiatives on the horizon. Then, you pair it with the tactical priorities from each line-of-business leader by listening to understand how they plan to reach leadership’s goals, so you can help you achieve them. Those two perspectives, strategic vision and ground-level action, form the spine of the plan. When you see them together, the connections start to appear. You can trace how the work of one year sets up the next, and how each step moves you toward something bigger.

That’s when the payoff starts. When something changes (trust me, it will), you don’t panic. You don’t scramble to invent something from scratch or cobble together filler. You look at the plan and adjust the order of what’s already there. We’ve seen it firsthand. One client was about to begin a campaign for a new product launch when the project was delayed indefinitely. In most banks, that’s a crisis: Deadlines slip, the marketing calendar develops holes, and momentum stalls. With a 30-Month Plan, we simply moved another campaign forward. It was already scoped, ready to start, and fit seamlessly into the open slot. The gap closed without stress, the schedule stayed intact, and progress kept rolling. That’s the rising tide effect. Every initiative lives in a context where it can shift without capsizing the whole effort.

And the plan doesn’t collect dust. We revisit it every quarter to sharpen and extend the plan. Those sessions are refinements: tightening the near-term based on what’s happened, bringing next year’s priorities into clearer focus, and moving speculative ideas into position when the timing works. Because the foundation is solid, updates take hours, not weeks. You’re not trapped in the exhausting cycle of rebuilding the year. You’re simply seeing beyond a horizon that used to feel out of reach.

Clarity will fade as you move further out, and that’s intentional. The current year is a fully mapped collection of campaigns, timelines, resources, and ownership. The following year is outlined with the major initiatives and goals you’re expected to reach. The final six months are a flexible space to capture ideas so they don’t vanish. The goal isn’t to predict every detail two-and-a-half years in advance. It’s to make sure the decisions you make today set up the wins you’ll want when you get there.

You Can See Further Than You Thought

The real hurdle isn’t the work. It’s the mindset. Most bank marketers have never been asked to think beyond a year. Annual planning already feels like climbing a mountain, so anything more looks like Everest. But, if you stop and look, you can already see further than you think. If you’re launching a campaign today, you probably know what follow-up it will need next year. If you’re investing in new technology this quarter, you can already imagine what it will make possible two years from now. Those threads already exist. A 30-Month Plan just ties them together so you can pull on them with intention.

Once you start working in 30-month stretches, everything changes. You stop living in reaction mode. You stop resetting every January. You gain the flexibility to shift projects without losing direction. You connect executive vision with tactical execution in a single, living framework. And you turn quarterly planning from a stressful overhaul into a quick, focused adjustment.

This isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about shaping it. Once you’ve done it, anything less feels like stumbling in the dark.