The Questions Every Building Materials Leader Should Ask During Strategic Planning

2025 and 2026 have been soft years for most manufacturers. And 2027 doesn’t look much different. But there are always spaces where your products or services can find growth. Even in a soft market, you have to cut through the fat to get to the meaty areas of opportunity.

Our job is to help our clients find the meat in the market. That means looking beyond your traditional definition of the market. Look at adjacent customer segments, underserved audiences, changing buying behaviors. Look at the parts of the value chain that are consolidating and ask where you can add more value. Look at your portfolio and ask not only what is selling today, but what customers will need tomorrow. It may be a geographic pocket, or a commercial vertical/building type, or stretching your capabilities to markets you haven’t historically participated in.

Most companies battle through the grind of a soft market. I have talked with several senior leaders this year and I'm astonished to hear over half of them say something like, “We’re just riding out the storm and waiting for the market to recover." Reactive strategies leave you at the mercy of the market. In these times you need to be creative and purposeful to find opportunities.

All around North America there absolutely are opportunities, you just need to uncover them. But to find them, you must think differently about your “usual” customers or path to market. The winners are the ones looking more deeply for nuances and finding opportunities where others merely take a passing glance.

You have to get away from doing planning as usual. So set up a team of people unencumbered with traditional thinking. Big, analytical thinkers that are known to continuously question norms. Companies that lead from a place of possibility are the ones that find ways to advance while everyone else is waiting for conditions to improve. This is where strategic planning becomes more than a budgeting exercise. It becomes an opportunity to redefine the game you are playing.

This may be the most important question you ask yourself during strategic planning this year. Your answer will impact not only 2027, but years to come.

That question has become increasingly critical as consolidation reshapes the building materials industry. Acquisitions have gained seemingly unstoppable momentum, and companies on shopping sprees are changing the landscape of distribution and consolidating nearly every part of the value chain. Distributors are gaining leverage. Contractors are getting bigger and more sophisticated. And manufacturers are increasingly being forced to rethink where—and how—they create value.

In my view, it’s been remarkable to experience this M&A tsunami in an industry that, for at least 75 years, was famously slow, cautious and seemingly allergic to change.

Now the rules are changing.

So as you sit down to build your strategic plan, ask yourself: Is your company gaining leverage or losing it?

If you can’t answer that question with clarity, you’re probably on the losing side—and struggling to keep or find your footing in the value chain.

Your goal should be to ensure you are a winner, or that you are at the very least partnering and aligning with winners. Your biggest job in the near term is to define how your business model remains relevant as the industry evolves.

But identifying your leverage is only the beginning. Once you understand where you have an advantage, you need to invest in it. And there are a few other actions I always advise leaders to consider during strategic planning.

Don’t start with your existing products. This is where many strategic planning exercises go wrong.

You need to understand how the different audiences you serve actually do business or live their lives. What are their pain points? What makes their jobs easier? How do they define success? What gets in their way? And, perhaps most importantly, what needs are going unmet—especially ones they would never expect you to help address?

Create a deep understanding of their journey—we call it a JourneyPath™—and recognize that not all customers are the same. Segment them into meaningful personas so your sales, marketing and innovation teams understand who they should be focusing on and what those audiences specifically need.

If you start with your existing products, your answers will inevitably revolve around the things you already make on your manufacturing line. You end up asking What else can we make? rather than What else does the customer need?

If 2026 is a softer market, the natural reaction for many companies will be to pull back. Cut marketing. Delay innovation. Reduce support. Wait for demand to return.

I think that’s exactly the wrong instinct.

When competitors go quiet, your voice gets louder.

A soft market can actually create an opportunity to gain influence at a lower cost because there is less competitive noise. The companies that continue to invest can build preference, strengthen relationships and get closer to customers while everyone else is hunkering down.

That doesn’t mean spending recklessly. It means spending strategically.

Invest in the things that make your brand easier to choose and create a better customer experience. Give customers training to sell a higher mix product to drive their profit/job. Equip your sales teams with better tools. Stay visible in the channels that matter. Continue educating the market. Drive more leads to you customers. Help your customers sell your products to their customers.

And don’t confuse promotion with simply running more ads. The objective is to become the steady partner customers can count on when the market is uncertain. Consistent communication, useful education and strong sales enablement can build preference now that pays off later.

Where do you have something that others want, need or cannot easily replicate?

Maybe it’s your manufacturing capabilities. Maybe it’s your distribution relationships. Maybe it’s your brand. Maybe it’s your customer knowledge. Maybe it’s a technology, a proprietary process or a particularly strong position within a growing segment.

Or perhaps your leverage comes from who you choose to partner with.

As consolidation continues, not every company will have the scale to win independently. That doesn’t mean you’re destined to lose. It means you need to be deliberate about where you can create leverage—and where you need to align yourself with someone who already has it.

The important thing is to recognize that leverage is not static.

What gives you an advantage today may become a commodity tomorrow. And something you overlooked yesterday may become your biggest opportunity tomorrow.

That’s why strategic planning cannot simply be a review of last year’s performance followed by a projection of next year’s numbers.

Chart your own destiny by controlling what you can control. That’s always been the foundational intention of a good strategic plan.

But this year, I’d add another couple layers: 1) Uncover new possibilities to find the meat in the market and 2) Know where your leverage is or define a plan to create it. Then build your plan around those two important realities.

Because in a rapidly consolidating industry, and one that is currently soft, simply surviving the market isn’t a strategy. The goal is to uncover new opportunities and define your leverage, invest strategically aligned to these strategies and use it to create a position your competitors—and your customers—can’t ignore.