During this quarter, I’m working with business owners and helping them plan for 2027.

We’ll talk about revenue

• What did we do this year?
• What can we realistically grow next year?
• What does the pipeline look like?
• What people do we need?
• What will they cost?
• Where do we need to invest?
• What profit should we target?
• What will that mean for cash?

They’re all perfectly sensible questions.

In fact, they’re exactly the sort of questions I’d expect us to answer in a good planning process.

However, I’m increasingly convinced they’re not the first question.

Because before asking where the business can go next year, perhaps there’s a more important question.

What are you actually trying to make the business capable of giving you?

Most business plans work forwards

This is how we normally plan.

Start with where we are today.

Add a revenue target.

Work out what needs to be sold.

Decide what people and capacity we need.

Add the costs.

Calculate the profit.

Build the cash forecast.

And see where we end up.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

The problem is that we can become very good at moving forwards without spending enough time deciding where we actually want to end up.

Revenue becomes £1m because this year it was £850k.

Then £1.2m.

Then £1.5m.

The team grows because the revenue grows.

The overhead grows because the team grows.

The founder’s job changes because the business grows.

And eventually we arrive somewhere.

Hopefully somewhere good.

However, that may not necessarily be somewhere that we have deliberately chosen.

A business can execute its plan perfectly and still arrive at the wrong destination.

So I’ve started thinking about planning slightly differently.

What happens if we start at the other end?

Start with the destination

I’ve written over the last few weeks about some of the thinking I’ve been doing around Nuvem9 and the next three years.

I don’t have an exit plan, but I do have a clearer idea of what I’d like my life and my relationship with Nuvem9 to look like.

I’d like to work fewer hours.

I’d like greater freedom to travel.

I’d like to retain high-level CFO advisory because I genuinely enjoy it.

I’d like more time to think, write and develop ideas, frameworks and products.

I don’t want routine delivery or day-to-day operational management to depend upon me.

And I want Nuvem9 to continue providing me with a good income without every pound requiring the same level of my personal involvement that it might today.

That’s not an exit plan.

It’s a direction.

And once I describe it like that, I can ask a much more useful question.

What therefore has to be true?

Start with the personal economics

Freedom sounds great.

However, freedom has an economic requirement.

So put a number on it.

How much do you actually need the business to provide you?

Not how much revenue would look impressive.

Not what another agency owner is doing.

Not an arbitrary growth percentage.

What do you actually need?

What income do you want?

What does your life cost?

What do you want to save?

What other income or assets might eventually exist?

What financial buffer would make you feel comfortable making different decisions?

How much do you want to take from the business?

And how much do you want to leave inside it?

Those answers matter.

If the life you want requires the business to provide £100k a year, that’s one design problem.

If it needs to provide £300k, that’s another.

If, over time, pensions, investments, savings or other income reduce what you need from the business, that changes the problem again.

Freedom has an economic requirement. Put a number on it.

Then design the business economics

Once you know what the business needs to provide, work backwards again.

• What level of profit supports that?
• What margin does the business need?
• What level of overhead is sensible?
• What cash reserves should it hold?
• How much investment will it need?
• How resilient does it need to be if revenue falls?

And perhaps most importantly: How big does it actually need to become?

That’s a question I think we ask far too rarely.

A £2m business with twenty people, significant overhead and a founder working five days a week might be exactly what one person wants.

For someone else it could be completely wrong.

A smaller business with stronger margins, more predictable revenue, a capable team and considerably less founder dependency might provide far more of what they actually value.

Neither is inherently better.

The point is that the size, shape and economics of the business should support the destination.

The right-sized business is the one capable of supporting the outcome you’re actually trying to create.

Now look at the revenue

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Revenue Gap.

If you want a £1m business next year and £700k already exists or is reasonably secure, you have £300k to create.

If only £100k exists, you have £900k to create.

Those businesses may have the same revenue target, but they’re very different businesses to operate.

Now put that into the context of the future you’re trying to design.

• How much of your revenue do you want to already exist when January arrives?
• How much are you comfortable recreating every year?
• How much should be contracted?
• How much should be repeatable?
• How much project work do you want?
• How much should be delivered by the team?
• How much depends upon your personal expertise?

Could some revenue come from IP, products or something you’ve built once and can use repeatedly?

And then perhaps the most important question from last week:

Who has to win it?

I can’t design a future version of my own job with limited responsibility for sales while simultaneously designing a business whose annual Revenue Gap can only realistically be closed by me.

Those two plans contradict each other.

The revenue model has to support the founder role.

And the founder role has to make sense within the economics of the business.

Then look at what still depends on you

Last week I asked whether you’d apply for your own job.

I described how, when I did that exercise myself a few years ago, the answer was pretty clear.

I’d have been mad to take it.

I’ve spent the time since gradually changing that job.

And now I’m doing it again.

I’ve started defining what I want to:

• Keep

• Reduce

• Remove

But writing something under Remove doesn’t magically make it disappear.

If Future You isn’t doing something, there are only a handful of possibilities.

• Someone else owns it
• A system handles it and automates it
• You redesign the process so it isn’t required at all
• Or you stop doing it altogether

That’s why reducing founder dependency isn’t simply a delegation exercise.

If you don’t want to review every piece of work, somebody else needs to understand and own quality control.

If you don’t want every difficult decision coming to you, someone else needs the authority, ownership, confidence and capability to make those decisions.

If you don’t want to hold every important client relationship, those relationships need to belong to the business itself.

If you don’t want to personally create all the revenue, another route to market has to exist.

And these things take time.

You can’t suddenly delegate in 2029 something the business has spent the previous three years teaching everyone only you can do.

You have to start building that capability now.

What does the business need to own?

That brings me back to another question from earlier this month.

What do we own today that we didn’t own twelve months ago?

If I’m trying to create more options three years from now, Nuvem9 needs to accumulate things between here and there.

• More predictable revenue
• Reusable intellectual property
• Processes that don’t depend upon what’s in my head
• Stronger client relationships across the wider team
• A route to market that isn’t entirely dependent upon my personal network
• People capable of owning decisions
• Cash reserves
• Products
• Frameworks
• Reputation
• Knowledge

None of these necessarily shows up as a line on the P&L, but they change what the business is capable of doing.

And they change what I’m capable of choosing.

Those accumulated advantages are what eventually buy your options.

That’s why I’m becoming increasingly interested not just in what the business earns each year, but in what survives each year.

So, where are you today?

Of course, none of this works unless you understand your starting point.

That’s increasingly how I think about The Nuvem9.

Nine decision metrics across:

• Today’s Control

• Tomorrow’s Scale

• Future Resilience

It’s a way of understanding what’s really happening in the business today, across cash, margins, capacity, revenue predictability, dependencies and resilience. 

However, understanding today is only one side of the equation.

The other is deciding where you want to go.

If I know where Nuvem9 is today and I have a clearer picture of what I want my life, role and business to look like three years from now, something interesting appears between those two points.

The gap.

And that gap is where the real planning begins.

Strategy lives in the gap between the business you have and the business your future requires.

Ask: What must be true?

I’ve found this a useful way to think about the next three years.

Rather than immediately writing a huge list of things to do, start with the destination and repeatedly ask: What must be true?

• For my role? What am I still doing and what no longer depends upon me?
• For my income? What does the business need to provide?
• For revenue? How much needs to exist before the year starts?
• For margin? What economics make that possible?
• For people? Who owns the responsibilities I no longer own?
• For clients? Where do the relationships sit?
• For systems? What can’t continue to depend upon memory, habit or my intervention?
• For intellectual property? What needs to exist that doesn’t exist today?
• For cash? What level of resilience gives me the confidence to choose rather than react?

And then take each answer and ask: What therefore needs to change this year?

That’s where an aspiration starts becoming a plan.

Work backwards

If the destination is three years away, don’t simply create a three-year to-do list.

Start at the end.

What needs to be true by 2029?

If that’s true, what must already be in place by 2028?

What needs to have been proven during 2027?

And therefore: What needs to start now?

That might mean transferring a client relationship this year rather than waiting until you want to step back.

Developing someone’s decision-making capability before you desperately need them to make those decisions.

Building recurring revenue before you need greater certainty.

Turning knowledge into IP while you’re still actively using and improving it.

Building cash reserves before you need the confidence they provide.

Testing a product before you need it to replace founder-delivered revenue.

Removing yourself from a process before removing yourself from the working week.

Each individual step might feel relatively small, but they’re all building towards something.

Future You is allowed to change their mind

There’s an obvious flaw in all of this.

I don’t actually know exactly what I’ll want in 2029.

Neither do you.

Perhaps I’ll want to work more than I currently imagine.

Perhaps I’ll find a new part of Nuvem9 I absolutely love.

Perhaps another opportunity appears.

Perhaps I’ll want to step back further.

Perhaps I’ll eventually want to sell.

Perhaps I’ll have no interest in selling at all.

That’s okay.

In fact, that’s the point.

The purpose of building backwards isn’t to lock Future You into a plan you wrote three years earlier.

It’s to make sure Future You has choices.

So what are you actually building towards?

Over the last month, I’ve asked myself a series of questions.

• You don’t need an exit plan, but are you building options?

• What do you own today that you didn’t own twelve months ago?

• How much of next year’s revenue do you still have to create?

• Would you apply for your own job?

They initially look like different questions.

One is about lifestyle.

One is about business value.

One is about revenue.

One is about the founder’s role.

However, they’re really asking the same thing.

What kind of business are all of these decisions ultimately creating?

And that changes the planning conversation.

Instead of simply asking: How big can we make this?

Perhaps the better question is: What does this need to become?

Build backwards from freedom

I don’t know exactly what I’ll want in 2029.

I don’t think I need to.

What I can do is make deliberate decisions now about revenue, margin, people, systems, cash, intellectual property and my own role that increase the number of choices I’ll have when I get there.

That’s what building backwards from freedom means to me.

Not working less for the sake of working less.

Not building a business to sell because that’s what founders are apparently supposed to do.

Not deciding today exactly what my life should look like three years from now.

Something much simpler.

Build the business today that gives Future You the greatest ability to choose tomorrow.

Because I don’t need to decide today exactly what Future Me will do.

I just want to make sure he gets to decide.