Beyond the quarter: Why today's wins could be tomorrow's losses
Feeling the pressure? You're not alone. According to Gallup, Australians report the second-highest level of daily stress worldwide at 47%. Rising cost of living pressures and challenging business confidence have created an environment for short-term focus. Nowhere is this more acutely felt than in the performance-driven worlds of product, sales and marketing, where it manifests as an unrelenting requirement for immediate outcomes.
But what if that urgency to clear immediate hurdles is not only impacting your wellbeing, but is the biggest threat to your company's long-term future, or worse yet, your favourite sports team?
Across the board, the short-term imperative
Nowhere is short-termism more vividly illustrated than in the world of English Premier League football. The average managerial tenure is now under two years, a stark decline from the almost four years it was just two decades ago. Strategies are often questioned after a handful of disappointing results, triggering immediate and often impassioned calls for sacking (look away now Manchester United fans). Driven by impatient owners fixated on immediate league position, the club swiftly terminates a manager's contract, pays a hefty severance package, and installs a new leader with a different philosophy. The entire process then resets, leaving the club further adrift of its long-term ambitions.
Quick fixes aren’t confined to the football pitch; they resonate just as loudly in corporate boardrooms. While ASX-listed CEOs might last longer than Premier League managers, their average tenure (around seven years) isn’t exactly enough to build a dynasty. This frequently leads to an over-reliance on short-term revenue tactics and cost-cutting measures (look away now marketing) to meet ongoing investor and board demands.
The all too familiar reality
In many businesses, the quest for immediate revenue overshadows long-term vision and sustainability. Strategic plans, once painstakingly crafted, become amended for ‘agility’, creating a system where quick wins are celebrated while the foundations for sustained success that so many of us enjoy building slowly erode. You might recognise the following:
Sales living one quarter at a time, often leveraging discounts and bouncing between whatever product is currently behind target
Marketing on a hamster wheel of sales deck requests and demand capture campaign blasts, with no time to play the long game
Product teams stuck in maintenance mode, spending 80% of their time keeping the lights on, with little time for innovation
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) becomes so 'ideal' that it’s not considered at all. Marketing focuses on generating short-term, high-volume MQLs, and the business begins cycling through low-LTV, high-churn accounts. With each team focusing on what’s in front of their nose, collaboration becomes tactical and only inches the company along to the next quarter.
The systemic cost of short-term thinking
These sugar hits crash as energy goes into tactical execution rather than scalable infrastructure. Long-term side effects include:
Underinvestment in foundational areas, including brand, data and R&D
Product features are designed to justify price increases rather than deliver additional value for customers
Over-reliance on performance marketing, without a strong brand and organic reach, becomes inefficient and difficult to scale
Foundational assets, including sales playbooks, onboarding programs, lead nurture journeys, content libraries, and long-tail SEO are shelved
High staff turnover as your best people burn out from wider remits and leave
Companies often fail to account for the true value of intangible assets like brand reputation, customer loyalty, and employee morale. McKinsey calls this the “decay of advantage” - the slow erosion of competitive differentiators. Once it starts, it’s hard to reverse.
If it were simple, it would be standard practice
While it’s easy to throw shade and put up theoretical solutions, it's only natural that CEOs consider the short term because this success buys time and keeps the majority of people in jobs. That’s why I admire leaders who make decisions that can deliver long-term benefits at the expense of short-term profit, often with no personal gain after their tenure.
During my time at Commonwealth Bank, our CEO, Ralph Norris, decided to completely modernise the core banking systems at a cost of over $1bn - one of the most ambitious technology overhauls in global banking at the time. This long-term investment in digital scalability and operational agility dramatically improved market share, cost-to-income ratio and retail costs over the following decade. Perhaps most impressively, the bank rose from the lowest to the highest customer satisfaction rankings among major Australian banks.
So, how do you break the cycle?
Most companies don’t have the opportunity to make the type of call Ralph Norris did, but I believe there are incremental behaviour changes that can make a difference in fostering a longer-term growth mindset.
1. Ringfence resources for the future
Capability building shouldn’t be a ‘nice-to-have’ during ‘up years’. Adopt an ‘X% principle’ to ring fence budget and headcount for long-term initiatives. While the percentage will vary depending on financial realities, investment might include:
A data management platform for deeper insights and customer management
Evergreen thought leadership content that engages your target audience
Lead nurture and customer commitment programs to foster loyalty
Sales playbooks to ensure consistent and effective selling
2. Foster the right environment
Leadership sets the tone. Finding the right balance can be complex, but if only short-term wins are celebrated, that’s all you’ll get. Shifting the cultural emphasis to recognising lasting impact is a gradual process, so start incrementally:
Align incentives: Reward long-term contributions in compensation and recognition, not just monthly/quarterly targets
Track relevant KPIs: Measure capability growth with metrics like LTV, organic traffic, brand recall, NPS, and churn - indicators of sustained traction
Communicate the CVP: Ensure clear and consistent articulation of your customer value proposition across the company - the connective tissue between product, brand, and customer experience
Create space for innovation: Encourage experimentation (including failure) and protect innovation budgets from reactive cuts through stronger articulation of future value
3. Align functions around sustainable growth
Businesses that consciously build for the long haul, aligning immediate decisions with a clear strategic vision, consistently outperform their peers in profitability and market capitalisation, as noted by Forbes. Achieving true cross-functional alignment requires navigating potentially competing departmental priorities and fostering a shared understanding of the long-term vision. To help achieve this:
Unify and recommit to your ICP: Align all functions on attracting, serving, and retaining the right customers. Bake it into targeting, messaging, product, sales, and onboarding. Remember, low-value customers often cost more than they earn
Prioritise lifetime value (LTV): Shift focus from transaction volume to building long-term customer value and loyalty
Build shared roadmaps: Foster cross-functional alignment (Sales, Marketing, Product, Enablement) through regular communication, shared metrics, and consistent rhythms
Balance your portfolio: Like financial investing, your growth strategy needs short-term and long-term bets. Paid acquisition provides immediate leads, but brand, content, and lifecycle marketing make the engine run smoother over time
Strengthen board oversight: Where possible, designate a director or committee for long-term strategy, selecting individuals with that perspective and avoiding board compensation tied solely to short-term results
Utilise balanced scorecards: Monitor performance across diverse dimensions, balancing short-term financial targets with long-term customer, process, and learning objectives to ensure immediate actions support long-term aspirations
It’s time to play the long game
There’s a fundamental difference between achieving growth in a single quarter and building the underlying capability that makes success repeatable and defensible over time. Too many businesses are building solely for the present, neglecting the foundations for the future.
Companies that consistently outperform in brand equity, customer loyalty, employee engagement, and overall valuation are those that make deliberate, strategic trade-offs to protect and cultivate long-term growth. The key isn’t to abandon short-term performance, but to consciously balance it with a mindset geared towards building a growth engine that delivers more miles with less stress.
Otherwise, you’re just running faster and faster on a treadmill that never actually takes you anywhere - a bit like Manchester United these days.
