I’ve recently been doing some detailed three year planning and mapping out what that means for me personally, my family and for Nuvem9.

It began with serious thinking about what I want my own working life to look like by then.

I’m not planning to retire.

I’m not planning to sell Nuvem9.

And I certainly don’t have some grand exit plan sitting in a drawer.

What I do know is that I’d like to work fewer hours.

I’d like to travel more.

I’d like more of my time to be spent doing the parts of the work I’m particularly good at and enjoy most.

I’d like Nuvem9 to be less dependent on me personally.

And I’d like a greater proportion of our revenue to come from things we’ve built once and can use repeatedly, rather than everything ultimately being connected to another hour of somebody’s time.

So I’ve started working backwards.

• What would need to be true by mid 2029 for that all to be possible?
• How much money would we need personally?
• How much would the business need to generate?
• What would I still be doing?
• What would I no longer be doing?
• What would the team need to own?
• What would our revenue mix need to look like?
• What would we need to build between now and then?

I’ve been putting numbers around those questions.

• Savings targets
• Pensions
• Business cash
• Revenue requirements
• Recurring versus project income.

The amount of money we actually need to live the life we want.

While doing this, something really interesting happened.

I realised I wasn’t really creating an exit plan.

I was creating options.

And I think there’s an important difference.

Do you have an exit plan?

It’s one of those questions business owners seem to be expected to answer in an instant.

• Sell in five years
• Management buyout
• Pass it on to the family
• Build it to £5m and walk away

And maybe you have a beautifully articulated answer.

I don’t.

And I suspect plenty of founders don’t either.

Maybe you still love what you do.

Maybe you’re nowhere near finished.

Maybe you can’t imagine selling the business you’ve spent years building.

Or perhaps, like me, you simply don’t know what you’ll want ten years from now.

I think that’s perfectly reasonable.

The problem isn’t not having an exit plan.

The problem is building a business that eventually leaves you with no options.

Selling isn’t the only destination.

You might want to:

• Reduce your work down to three days a week
• Stop personally facing and delivering client work
• Retain a handful of clients you genuinely enjoy working with
• Appoint somebody else to run the business while you retain ownership
• Provide you with income while you pursue something completely different
• Create another business alongside it
• Take three month sabbaticals every year
• Eventually decide to sell

Or you might want something neither of us has even thought about yet.

You don’t need to know which one you’ll choose.

That’s the entire point.

Good business design isn’t about predicting the decision you’ll make in five years.

It’s about making sure you still have a decision to make.

Growth doesn’t automatically give you more choices

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year.

Because it’s entirely possible to build a bigger business and simultaneously reduce your own options.

Imagine an agency grows from £500k to £1m to £2m.

On almost every conventional measure, that’s success.

However, imagine that along the way the founder becomes the principal salesperson.

The largest clients expect them in every important meeting.

Headcount grows.

Fixed costs increase.

More people need managing.

The founder becomes the person who deals with the exceptions.

And because their own lifestyle has expanded alongside the company, the amount they personally need to take from the business increases too.

They’ve built a £2m business.

However, they can’t take six weeks off. They maybe can’t even take a couple of days off.

They can’t easily reduce their hours.

They can’t stop selling.

They can’t remove themselves from key client relationships.

They can’t afford a significant reduction in profit.

And selling isn’t particularly straightforward because so much of the value still revolves around them.

Has that founder become more successful?

Financially, perhaps.

Have they created more choices?

Perhaps not.

That’s the distinction I’ve become increasingly interested in.

Growth tells you how much bigger the business became.

Optionality tells you what that growth allows you to do.

You are building a business for someone you haven’t met yet

There’s another problem with traditional long-term planning.

We assume we know what our future selves will want.

I’m 50 now.

What I want from Nuvem9 today isn’t exactly what I wanted when I started the business in my late 30s.

So, why should I or would I assume that what I want at 55 will be identical to what I want today?

Life changes.

Children grow up.

Financial commitments change.

Your interests change.

Your energy changes.

New opportunities appear.

You might discover something completely new that you want to pursue.

You might simply decide that the thing you’ve enjoyed doing for twenty years isn’t how you want to spend the next twenty.

That’s not failure.

That’s life.

Which means you’re making business decisions today partly on behalf of someone you haven’t met yet.

Future You.

And I don’t think our responsibility is to predict exactly what that person will want.

It’s to avoid unnecessarily restricting their choices.

Try the three-year question

Forget ten-year exit planning for a moment.

Let’s make this much more immediate.

Imagine it’s October 2029.

You decide you want your relationship with your business to be fundamentally different.

• Could you change it?
• Could you work three days a week?
• Could you stop delivering?
• Could you disappear for eight weeks?
• Could you retain ownership but have somebody else operate the business?
• Could you take an income from it without being involved every day?
• Could you sell it?
• Could you start something else alongside it?

• Could you afford to choose?

That final question might be the most important one.

Freedom isn’t just a time problem. It’s a financial design problem.

A founder with a resilient business, personal savings, recurring income and low dependency on any single client has choices.

A founder whose lifestyle requires every pound the business currently generates, whose revenue needs recreating every year and whose clients expect their personal involvement has considerably fewer.

Even if that second business has a higher turnover than the first.

So what actually creates options?

I don’t think there’s one answer.

However, there are certainly characteristics that clearly matter.

Things like revenue durability, economic quality, transferability, capability, assets and financial resilience clearly matter.

We’ll explore some of those over the next few weeks.

Stronger for what?

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been writing about two related ideas.

First, understanding the numbers that actually tell you whether your business is healthy.

That’s what sits behind The Nuvem9.

Then last month, I looked at growth.

Not simply whether you can grow, but whether the growth in front of you is actually worth pursuing.

This reaches to a third and equally important question that needs to sit above both.

Stronger for what?

You can have excellent management information.

You can make perfectly rational growth decisions.

You can increase revenue and profit.

And still gradually construct a business you don’t actually want to own.

Numbers help you see where you are.

Better decisions help you move.

However, neither tells you where you want to end up.

That’s where optionality becomes important.

I’m not writing an exit plan

So my July 2029 plan isn’t an exit plan.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll want to do then.

Maybe I’ll want to work three days a week.

Maybe I’ll want to spend several months travelling.

Maybe I’ll only want to do a small number of high-value advisory engagements.

Maybe the products we’re developing today will have become a much larger part of Nuvem9.

Maybe I’ll still be doing substantially what I’m doing today because I’m still really enjoying it.

And maybe an opportunity will appear between now and then that I can’t currently imagine.

The point is: I don’t need to decide that today.

What I can do is make sure the decisions I’m taking now don’t close those doors unnecessarily.

So I’m asking a slightly different question.

Will this decision give Future Me more options or fewer?

A new client.

A new employee.

A new service.

A new product.

A new fixed cost.

A change in pricing.

A revenue target.

An investment.

They all look slightly different when viewed through that lens.

And perhaps that’s a more useful way to think about long-term business planning.

I’m not suggesting you sit down this weekend and write an exit plan.

I’m suggesting you ask yourself something much simpler.

Is the business you’re building today increasing or reducing the choices you’ll have tomorrow?

You don’t need to know exactly what Future You will want.

You just want to make sure they still have options.

Next week: Does another year of trading actually leave you owning a better business?