Where do you want to be in 10 years?
It may seem fetched to ask that, but long-term planning helps a company (and to some extent, an individual) to shape their short-term goals.
Take a company with no long-term plan. What projects are the most important? Normally the answer is “the ones that feel the most urgent right now”. This mode of thinking puts people into a continual state of “busy fool”, where you’re always working on something that feels important – getting that warm fuzzy feeling that you’re being productive.
But this is a fallacy, when you do short-term work, you only ever make long-term progress by accident.
How to make a 10 year plan
We recommend just two simple numbers. A one-liner and nothing more. It gives you a target to hit.
Here are some examples from our customers:
- “£10m revenue at 8% net profit”
- “£200k net profit, with 2 hours of owner-time per week required to run”
If you know where you want to be in ten years, then you can give all of your shorter-term plans a simple test of “will this help us to hit that goal?”.
1, 2 and 3 year plans are important! But when you make them, keep your ten-year plan in mind.