Your 3-Year Goal: Get Specific About Your Business
The 3-year picture for your business is where we start to get more specific about what needs to be done inside of your business in order to work to achieve that long-term goal.
What does revenue need to look like in three years? What do profits need to look like in three years? As your business scales and grows, revenue should increase exponentially, not linearly. I don’t want three times the revenue I have today in three years, I want five, eight, 10 times the revenue.
When you’re developing your 3-year picture, you need to think about a few key metrics that are going to go into that.
So today you have one location, but in three years you want to have five locations.
Today you have one staff member. Three years from now, you want to have five staff members.
Another one of the metrics you could use in your 3-year picture is the number of customers that you’re serving. Now, this could be the total number of customers you’re going to serve over the next three years. This could be an average number of customers per time period.
But another important way to look at your customers is the average lifetime value of a customer. Do you have repeat customers? Do you have customers that, one year, buy a $300,000 house with you and then, four, five, six years later come back and buy a half-million-dollar house with you? The idea of repeat customers and the average lifetime value of those customers should be an important part of your business’s 3-year picture.
Another metric that you might have as part of your 3-year picture would be the reputation and the brand recognition of your business.
These are ways that you can start to measure the effectiveness of your business, and progress toward your long-term goals, that wouldn’t be found on the financial statements, but that are still critical because they will have effects on your financial statements eventually.
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