|
Blog
83% of CEOs say AI depends on people. Only 25% use it regularly.
|
Your growth plan is not a Finance exercise
|
From Budget to Enterprise Value: How Leaders Should Approach Budget Season
Every October, the same pattern repeats inside companies. The sponsor has underwritten a value creation plan. The board expects measurable progress against it. Management opens a spreadsheet, rolls forward last year’s run rate, and spends six weeks negotiating percentages.
Rolling forward last year’s run rate produces a budget. It rarely produces enterprise value.
The question that matters is not “How much can we spend next year?” It is “Where does the next dollar of capital create the most enterprise value between now and exit?”
I have sat on every side of that table. More than 12 years ago I led a SaaS company to a PE exit. Since then I have scaled 15 organizations from $5M to $500M, two of them past $1B, working alongside leadership teams, serving on boards, and teaching the same discipline at NYU. The budgets that moved valuation shared four disciplines: Value, Zero-Based Thinking, Strategic Guardrails, and Dynamic Allocation.
1. Fund Outcomes, Not Departments
The weakest budget question is “What do you need next year?” The right question is “What outcome are we buying?”
Every material budget line belongs in one of three categories, and each maps directly to a lever in the value creation bridge.
RUN THE BUSINESS. The margin lever. The baseline cost of operating the company. The mandate is productivity, automation, and capacity utilization. This baseline should shrink as a percentage of revenue every year. When it does not, it compounds silently and erodes EBITDA.
GROW THE BUSINESS. The revenue lever. Investments that directly increase revenue, customers, share, or commercial capacity: sales capacity, proven channels, expansion revenue, new geographies. The standard is measurable acceleration within the plan year.
TRANSFORM THE BUSINESS. The multiple lever. Investments that change the company’s economics or competitive position: AI, new business models, new markets, platform technology. The mandate is disciplined optionality. These are the investments a buyer pays a higher multiple for, and the ones most often starved in a cost-driven budget.
The board should see the mix across all three explicitly. A company that places nearly all of its capital in Run is managing for stability. A company with no capital in Transform is selling the next owner a business that has already peaked.
This classification moves the conversation from “What can we cut?” to “What are we funding, why, and what will it produce?”
2. Apply Zero-Based Thinking Without Zero-Based Bureaucracy
Full zero-based budgeting is rarely the right tool for a scaling company. Executed poorly, it consumes management capacity the business cannot spare and returns little strategic value.
Apply zero-based thinking instead, targeted at the four categories that accumulate fastest: headcount, software, contractors, and discretionary programs. Nothing carries forward by default.
Every significant request answers five questions:
- What business outcome does this investment enable?
- What capacity constraint does it remove?
- What is the expected return, and over what period?
- What happens if we do not fund it?
- What evidence would cause us to increase or decrease it?
Technology spend deserves particular scrutiny. Companies add applications faster than they retire them. The cost is not only the license line. It is fragmented capability, duplicated functionality, and management complexity that a buyer will find in diligence.
The objective is not indiscriminate cutting. It is to ensure every material dollar has a reason to exist.
3. Set Strategic Guardrails Before Anyone Opens the Spreadsheet
Strategy sets the budget. The budget does not set strategy.
Before Finance consolidates a single departmental request, the executive team and the board agree on three to five non-negotiable priorities for the year, each tied directly to the investment thesis. Each priority carries an explicit budget implication.
Priority: Grow enterprise ARR 30%. Implication: Incremental sales and marketing investment must show a direct line to enterprise growth. Requests serving lower-priority segments are deprioritized.
Priority: Expand operating margin to 15% ahead of an exit process. Implication: New headcount requires evidence that existing capacity is fully utilized or that the role produces a measurable economic return.
Priority: Deploy AI-enabled productivity across the enterprise. Implication: Every technology request names the process being improved, the productivity gain, and the metric that will prove it.
Guardrails convert budget season from a series of departmental negotiations into a single decision system the board can govern.
4. Replace the Static Budget With Dynamic Allocation
A 12-month budget assumes management can predict what the business will need a year from now. Scaling companies rarely can.
Build three scenarios:
BASE CASE. Current assumptions hold.
UPSIDE CASE. Commercial performance exceeds plan. What additional investment becomes attractive, and how fast can it deploy?
DOWNSIDE CASE. Revenue, margin, funding, or market conditions deteriorate. What gets cut first, and what protects covenants, runway, and the core of the value creation plan?
Then tie spending to triggers. A $500,000 Q3 marketing expansion is not released because it appears in the annual plan. It is released when the business hits defined revenue, pipeline, or customer milestones.
The principle: commit capital progressively as evidence improves.
This gives the board two things a static budget cannot: financial discipline and strategic agility. It also creates the bridge to a rolling four-quarter forecast, refreshed as actual performance moves, so the budget becomes a management instrument rather than an annual artifact.
The Execution Roadmap
A framework matters only if it changes how budget season runs. The work fits a six-week management cycle.
Weeks 1 and 2: Diagnose
Run a Cost and Capacity Audit. Identify underutilized software, redundant capabilities, organizational bottlenecks, low-return programs, and initiatives that have grown in scope without a corresponding business outcome.
This establishes the baseline before anyone starts defending next year’s number.
Week 3: Align
Convene the executive team for a Strategic Alignment Session. Lock the three to five priorities, financial targets, investment guardrails, and scenario assumptions that will govern the budget.
The framework is constant. The metrics change with the capital structure.
- PE-backed: EBITDA growth, cash conversion, leverage, and exit readiness.
- Venture-backed: growth efficiency, burn multiple, runway, ARR, net retention, and the next raise.
- Family office and privately held: growth, liquidity, distributions, succession, and long-horizon strategic investment.
Weeks 4 and 5: Challenge
This is where the CEO, the CFO, or an independent board member acts as the friendly challenger. Every leader’s request is stress-tested with two questions:
“If we cut this line by 20%, what specific outcome breaks?”
“If we increase this investment by 20%, what measurable outcome improves?”
The first exposes embedded cost. The second exposes whether an investment has real growth potential. Together they separate habitual spending from strategic spending.
Week 6: Allocate and Approve
The deliverable is not a consolidated budget. It is a capital allocation plan tied to business outcomes and KPIs.
The CEO, the board, and the investors should see on one page where capital is deployed, why, what outcome it is expected to produce, and which conditions trigger a change of course.
At that point, budget approval becomes a leadership decision rather than a Finance exercise.
The Bottom Line
This budget season is the moment to decide what the organization will protect, accelerate, transform, and stop funding.
The framework is deliberately simple. Shift from cost to value. Apply zero-based thinking. Set strategic guardrails. Build dynamic allocation. Execute through six weeks of diagnosis, alignment, challenge, and allocation.
Sponsors underwrite the thesis. The budget is where management proves it can execute it.
The question for every CEO, board, and investor is not whether the company can afford the budget. It is whether the company is allocating scarce capital against the few priorities that will move enterprise value.
That is what budget season should be about.
Sam Palazzolo is an Enterprise Value Strategist who works with CEOs, boards, and investors on scaling organizations and maximizing enterprise value. He is Managing Director of Tip of the Spear Ventures and a Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at NYU’s School of Professional Studies.
How Old Is the Number You Just Gave Your Board?
|