How I Forecast Revenue (And Hit Every Target for 8 Years Straight)

If you ever try to grow a business and you just feel like you're stuck, you're not really sure what to do, or you tried to grow your income as a sales rep and you're like, ah, it's like, seems to be all over the place. Well, I have done projections every single year and every single month and quarter for all of my businesses ranging over the multiple eight figure companies that I've owned myself. And I've always hit them within a very, very, very precise margin. The reason for that is that I have developed a forecasting system which I think just makes sense. It makes me see the good, the bad, the ugly of my business. I can start to know exactly what I need from the departments. If I'm a sales rep, I know what months I can go on holiday, what months I have to back off when I have to go harden the paint and I have a step by step full plan for the entire year. And when I have that, at least I know that I'm doing everything that I can do to be able to get the outcome. Okay, so in this video I'm going to take you through a full forecasting. This is how you plan your revenue, your income, your commissions, whatever it is you want, but this is actually how you do it and how I manage to grow multiple businesses to eight figures in like less than 48 months. All right, so basically this is the projection sheet that I've used. I'll put a blank copy of it. This is something that sales reps, sales managers, anyone who wants to hit a target should be doing. I don't care if you're like an individual, whatever, because I'm going to explain the methodology behind it. Now, I've been doing this for years and the reason why most people don't do projections is because they think like, oh yeah, but what if. Or they're always looking for reasons why. Like it's not going to be predictable, but you can definitely predict stuff. And then the more you do it, the better you get at it. But also it's like the first time you do this, it's not going to be like the correct way of doing it. It's about figuring out how to do it and getting better. So this is like an altered version of my 2025 projections for my business dialer. All right, so this is a blank spreadsheet of the one that I used for the 2025 projections for dialer. These numbers have been changed and altered a little bit. So not to give away the full thing, but however. Okay, so first things first. I set a goal, okay? And then the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go over here and I'm going to go like, what's equals 2.5 million? And then I'm going to be like, all right, cool. That equals 2.51, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 divided by 12, okay? So I know that's going to be that, okay? So now this isn't what my projection is going to be, but, like, that is what I'm going to have to hit, okay, on an average run rate, in order to hit my outcome, okay? So run rate, go on an average, okay? Now what I have to do is I have to go, where am I starting? Okay, let's just say I'm starting at 30,000amonth, okay? Then like, I have a delta. And it's good to just write all this stuff down because this is how you start making assumptions. This. I actually start doing this. This is a process. Thinking through it and doing it this way is what start when you start to uncover the things that you must do and the stupidity of your plan or the brilliance of your plan and how you can do things. So I have a delta. It's going to equal that minus that, okay? Okay. So I'm $178,000 in the hole straight up. So that means that I have to make that up somewhere, okay? So let's just say I go, okay. People always do this. They go, I'm gonna have a fucking. I'm gonna grow 50% month on month. It's like, no, you're fucking not. Like, that's outrageous. Like a new business, you can get up to kind of like that, say fifty, a hundred grand a month pretty quickly, right? But once you start going more than that, maintain that kind of growth is very difficult. And the reason being is because it's an allocation of resources within the business. Or like if you're a sales rep, like, it's just time, right? So you have to get significantly better to be able to reduce the time to be able to then hit those goals, right? So we can't really do it that way. What I've always done in, like once the business is somewhat established is actually a 4% compounding growth, which if you have a look at it, like over the year, it's quite significant, right? From 30 to 45. So if that was from 300 to $450,000, it's pretty significant growth. But then what you can do is you can go, okay, cool. I know that we can go 10% here, 10% here. This is going to be a big month. It's going to be 15%. The reason why it's going to be a big month is because in April we do this, or at the end of March we do this. So you can start to have a look, okay? And then you can start to go like, okay, like, what do I feel comfortable with? What do I think is reasonable? Is there any months that I know are going to be shit, like in 2026, I can tell you right now that November is going to be garbage because it's the midterms, right? So not only have you got midterms, you've got major sporting events and you've got Thanksgiving and you've got Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You've got a lot of things that are going to be eating up an awful lot of one, consumer confidence with, with the, with the elections, like midterms and elections always throughout the consumer confidence index. So if you want to have a look at like close rates, for example, and you want to put that against like if your business running for a while and you can get a, they do a quarter to quarter as well. But like, as you can see, like the consumer confidence in 2020 fucking took a, took a shit in the bed and it really spiked up rather aggressively. Which is why like this period here, from the dip in 2020 to that peak in like just before 2022 was like the golden age of sales. Because you can see this huge recovery of people's kind of one, there was like stimulus money, but there's this huge recovery effect of people's like, well being and they were like wanting to get back. And then from there, like it did, it's progressively gotten harder, right? And so you can see from 2009, like, man, ain't nobody buying shit. That 2008, 2009, like sales would have been like a hellscape, right? I was in Afghanistan and shit during that, so like I was fine. But you can see and you can look at different markets, you can look at different things, but this is a really good thing for people to realize because it might like, it might just be that like there's this huge economic event happening and that's why you're having bad outcomes like that month. You can see month by month, consumer confidence by generation, right? So who are these gen zers? Look at this, look at this optimism, right? It's funny, you can see Silent generation and Millennials are very similar. That's interesting. My theory on that is lots of war, and then boomers and Gen X make sense, and then Gen Z's up here. So you can look at all these things, and they, you know, they give you a lot of insight. So you can go, all right, cool. If I have a look for my industry, month by month, right? We're gonna see. Okay, cool. Like, maybe. I know that, like. Or if you have historical data, I know that, like, November is, like, say, somewhat trash. And I know that, like, say August is somewhat trash right now. What I don't do is, like, go. I need to mindset my way through this bullshit. You just go like, no, no, no. Like, what we're gonna do is we're just gonna be adults, and we're gonna go like, these are probably not great months. So I'm gonna forecast, right, for a point nine five, right? Maybe you go backwards a little bit. Not a big deal. Guys, these things happen. We're trying to hit goals over a quarter. Okay? So then you're going to be like, all right, cool. So. And what we're doing here is we're kind of ramping up this delta. So what I would do, like, in this particular instance is like, okay, cool. Like, we cannot grow this one product line fast enough to get to this goal. So we either adjust the goal or we open up another product line. So if I go into, like, the dialer ones that I've done, okay, as you can see here, like, I've got all these blank spaces, so. And I've got different types of things. So I've got seats. Like, this is how many seats I want to be doing. And I've got these kind of, like, bursts of seats, right? So, like, like. And what they are is, like, kind of B2B deals, right? And as you can see here, I have a. Like, I've Factored in the 0.98. The 0.98. Is that, like, churn rate, right? And we hit this, like, I hit my projection within about a couple thousand dollars, right? So it was pretty interesting. So that. That 100, as you can see there, that's a B2B deal. So I'm like, okay, cool. I'm going to be growing by, like, I'm going to be growing by this much. I'm going to be cruising. I'm adding 100. Adding 100. Adding 100. Okay. And so I'm just growing up. My goal is 100 seats per month. I'm going to have a 98% retention rate, right? We probably ended up with, like, 93 or something like that. I Have to go back and finalize all the numbers. But it's like, bang. I'm trying to get this like, nice, steady growth now. It's like, okay, cool, this is my average sheet, right? This is the how much per number, my cold charges per se on average, or what I thought they were going to be, right, based off the numbers and my guessing. And then I can just change it later. Activation fees, build fees, right? So it's like again, all this is like 20, 20 new accounts signed by 500, because I have an average amount per account, right. Which, you know, is all kind of around here. Then from there it's like, all right, cool, we want to release SMS because we want to, like, be able to grow, but without having to sign a lot more clients. Because, like, what that does is that creates a lot of complexity. And with a software, like, especially with any business, to be honest, like, you hit these points where, like, you want to start monetizing your clientele more. So it's like, let's start going a little bit deeper than we do wider to like, limit the issues that we have with taking on new clients. Because taking on new clients is like a tremendous burden. And so you just start to look at it and go like, all right, cool. The growth is not as aggressive as what I want it to be with this sustainable rate of growth. So let's do something else or add something in. We've. We're launching our AI SMS model, right? So we were going to launch it here. This never ended up happening because it took much longer to build than what we thought this is going to launch later on. Okay. Then we've got a secure pay thing that we want to launch as well. Okay. If you have revenue lines, you want to kind of go your revenue lines out. So you might have like a low ticket, a high ticket and a mid ticket. Okay. And then you'd be like, okay, how much of the low ticket and am I going to do how much of the mid ticket, how much of the high ticket? Now is that going to be the same month to month, am I going to start to bend towards one or the other? But the whole point with like revenue planning is that you don't ever want to max out any one channel. So, like, if the reason why you want to have like a couple of different product lines and ways to go wide and ways to go deep is that if you're like. It's the same with marketing. If you're only got one channel of marketing, like if you're just doing Facebook ads, vsl, whatever. And that's it. You can only crank that lever so hard and everyone has a tendency to want to crank it as hard as they possibly can. That's not the way to do it. You want to have say three to four different incoming channels where you can get sales calls and leads from. And then you sit them all at 70% because then when one of them inevitably goes down, it's easy to raise the other ones to 80, 90 for a period of time while you get it back up. Then you ramp them back down. You want to have the ability to do that. Without that, it's really difficult. Which is why, like, for sales reps, it's important that you have referrals. You, you're able to do outbound, you're doing CRM tasks, you're getting your inbound leads, you're doing follow ups. Without that, you're just a fucking, like, you're just waiting for the worst case scenario to happen. And you're like, you're sitting there like watching people turn into zombies and you're like, nah, I should be fine. Like, it's fucking, it's retarded. You're so weak, you know? And this is what business owners especially and everyone don't understand. That the mere act of doing this, like, you start to realize things about your business that like, I don't know about this. Like, like, let's just say I want to go and I want to like, I just go, like, let's ramp it up to I want to get 2000. Because people go so crazy with their, like, we're gonna triple this year. It's like, whatever, dude, you know, so, and it's like, it's like, if I was to factor that in, then I have to sign, man, I'm gonna have to sign like 200 every month. So it's like 200. You know what happens if I sign 200? Like, do you know how hard it is to sign up? Like, we're not even doing ads. We're starting ads this year. But like, even that's not enough. So like, I would get to the end, right? And I would go like, oh, like, I just don't think that's gonna happen. And people go, I have a bad mindset. You just gotta figure it. It's like, no, mate. Like, keeping 98% of my clients and signing up 200 every month is fucking wild. Like, the average client's gonna be four seats. That's so many clients. Like, we need, like, that's the sales staff required, the onboarding stuff required. Like, that's too many. The most accounts we brought in in a single month was like 41. And it's like, man, like, that's a lot, right? So that's like 160 seats. That's a lot. So it's like, okay, like, that's a bad idea. So then you go through and you adjust it and then you go, all right, well, if we're going to be at this rate, there's this rate seems unsustainable now. Maybe I go, okay, in August, like, I have these events, right? So, like, I do Cole Gordon's events. I do stuff like that. I've got all my events and masterminds kind of like scheduled in. I've got them here. And I might go, like, okay, cool. I've got events. So I'm going to go. I'm going to do an event here where I'm going to get one. My goal is to get 100 seats, right? And I'm going to do an event here, and I'm going to do an event here, okay? So I'm going to get 300 seats, okay? Which then if I go back to that kind of 100 mark, you know what I mean? Then I know that I'm going to get 200 here, right? And then I'm going to get my 200 here, and I'm going to get my 200 Here from my baseline, which is back to 100. Okay? So. And just the mere fact of you playing around with this. Okay, because what you're going to do now is go, okay, team, we're going to have a couple big months. So in May, we are going to onboard double the amount of clients that we usually do. We're also going to do that in August and November. So, like, be forewarned. And then what you do is you create a plan for the event. Now, maybe this one, you actually only end up getting 60. So you're like, okay, cool. What did I do right? What I do wrong? This one, you end up getting 100. This one you're getting 150. You're like, oh, fucking sweet. I've cracked that code. Now I know every time I go to an event, I can get between 100, 150. Sweet. So I know that all I have to do is book those three events. That's 450 seats for the year. Cool. If my goal is 1500, I know that now I only have to factor in 1050 into normal growth patterns. Now maybe I can take that down to 800 if I can figure out another way to activate some higher level B2B where I get like, my goal is to get one, is to get to 100 seat clients and then I'm going to go through, I'm going to go, okay, what does 100 seat client look like? Where would I find them? How would I get that? Because I've only got to get two in the entire year. I've got one year to get two clients. I can plan that, I can get the referrals, I can do all the things. Right? This is how you plan out a fucking business or anything else. Okay? I have planned out every business I've done like this and I've hit every fucking projection I've ever put on paper. Like, because once you actually sit down and think about it, I'm not thinking about what can I make projections that make the business look incredible. I'm making projections that actually fucking give me what's going on. Then I can copy them and I can make a worst case and a best case scenario. Then I can plan for both. And I'm going to do my expenses on the worst case and I'm going to do my income on the middle case. And I'm happy as Larry and I can, I can get my staffing plans in place, everything, you know, I'm also going to be like, are there any major holidays? Are there any like, you know what's going on? If I'm a sales rep, like, when's am I going on holiday for a month? Because if I am, that's now zero dollars, okay? That has to be made up somewhere else. These are the things that you need to consider when you're doing these plannings, okay? Like July is always a bit shit because everyone's away for a week. This is a short month. February, okay? Black History Month, they didn't give us a full month. Okay? So like, and then we got January in Australia. People don't turn on till after Australia Day, okay? But everyone kind of hits the ground running from January six onwards, right? Especially that one year, you know what I mean? Right. So okay, then what I'm doing is I'm going to go, okay, cool, like what's my rough, you know, what's this looking like? So it's like I'm just going to go through cogs, cost of goods sold. The way that I do it is like anything that's responsible for making the sale, you know, I mean, so like it's an above the line cost, okay? So I just put all these things in here and Then from there I can start to make some assumptions. I like to do it along with growth. So, like, if my. If everything's growing, then everything has to increase. You can't have, like, I'm gonna have the same amount of people when I'm triple the size. It's retarded. It just doesn't work that way. And if you can see that there are these spikes, like, if I know that, like, okay, I have, you know, 31 seats here and 600 here. Okay, man, we better start hiring some CS people because, like, that ramp up is quick. We need to start hiring. They need to be on here. And we're onboarding two a month from here on because, like, that's ridiculous. So these are things that you should be seeing. Then you can go to your department heads and be like, hey, this is the growth trajectory. What do you need in order to, like, sustain this? Because if you redline your stuff, it's the same as redlining your ad accounts or redlining your marketing. It's just a bad idea. Redlining your staff and going like, maximum full tilt growth all the time is a way to destroy everything. And the same thing here, like, Dev, like, this got way more expensive than what I thought it would, right? So it was like from 10 to $50,000 a month. I mean, so then I've got all these things and then from there I'm like, okay, cool. It's like we're losing money for the first couple months or obviously we're a software company, yada yada yada. Okay. And then from there I go, okay, cool. Like, what does a rough profit look like? And it's like, sweet. I'm fucking happy with that. And then you can go, listen, like, I don't need that much profit. Like, we're looking to grow. So I can start messing around. I can start going, okay, cool. Actually, like, what if this. What if this is actually like, you know, what if it starts off at 10,000, right? And then it goes up. It goes up, right? That times 1.1. It just gets 10% more expensive every month because we're going up like, sweet. Now it's a 28k a month. All right, well, like, hey, I've still got profit, Jimin. Like, I'm still good to go. Sorry, down here. So it's like, boom. Yeah. I mean, so what have I gotten from 168 to 151? Still happy with that. So I know that I can spend on CS people. Like, all right, cool. Sales department ops, you know, I can Mess with it. And it's like, hey, as long as I'm happy making some profit, whatever it is. Right now this is where like I do like my what? Like what is the point? So I've got my vision and my mission for my cool dial to be the most highly praised and sought after dialing solution, providing the highest quality service and dialing performance to its customers. And our mission is to be the fastest growing bootstrapped seat based SaaS company Falcon Ever. Okay? So now if I want to do that, I got to find somebody who's done it. So Ninja one, I did some googling on the interwebs and I was like sweet. This business, 2017, 2023 went from 4 million to 150 million a year. Now they borrowed money about here, so they got from 4 to 50 without borrowing any money. This is their rate of growth and how did they do it? So just go and research the company, right? Product led growth, content, education partners, multi channel. Like they did it fucking brilliantly. Now are they the same business as us? No, they're not a dialer but they're a seat based SaaS company. So like same shit man. Like I'm not looking for reasons why stuff won't work. And it's like cool. Here's the two different enterprise values because the goal of dollar is to sell, right? So you want to have an outcome, you want to know what you're doing right? At like at that level, at the level that we hit about 30 million bucks, pretty, pretty normal, right? And then it's like here's the gross revenue, gross profit, net profit, net operating profit. Net operating profit is net profit after tax guys, right? Then from there this is my like 2025, 2028, right? 3 million, 6 million, 12 million, 24 million. At that level we're worth anywhere between sort of 180 and 240 million which is like that's fine by me, I'll take it. Okay, now revenue expansion plans, SMS secure play, influencer campaigns, external like spam monitoring agents. Okay? So these are ideas to expand the revenue beyond just the seats because like the growing of the seats is a harder venture than getting your current clients to take more of your stuff. Especially with software. Okay? So it's like cool. Then from there what I do is I go, okay, now I've got to figure out what that means on like a day to day, okay? And so I'm going to do a really quick thing of this. So I've got my cash, I want to get new cash of like 50k mrr of 250k, right? That's going to be like, you know, seats sold, you know, etc. Etc. So we're gonna go dollar seats. So what you want to do is you want to go like, alright, cool. So in order to get like, in order to get 10 sales and an average sale and there's always an average. So you go, oh, there's no average. I don't know. It's always a fucking average, you retard. I'm retarded. It's gonna be four seats which is going to be $1,000 a month worth of mrr plus. Okay. Anyway, so we go, okay, cool. So that means we're adding $10,000, you know, we're doing 10 sales, right? This is random numbers. Now the close rate, okay, let's just say 25% which means that like pitches held needs to be equals 10 divided by 25%. Okay? So we need 40 pitches. Show rate cold two. We do a two cold close. It's going to be, let's go with 80%. Which means that call to held. This is all super fucking easy math. If you can't grasp this, then send me your address and I'll order you a helmet. So we need 50 coal to books, okay. Which should be like. Yeah, I mean the show rate to call to Boom, Call to held, call to books. I'm just gonna say the. At this bit. This is the held rate. Held. Okay, cool. Call one show, right? Let's just say that we pass through like we from, from like 80 people. Okay. Okay. Then we go call one show rates, okay? So we need 100, okay, 100 call ones booked. Okay. So then we might go like leads. Like lead to booking rate is 30%. So that means we need that. Nope. Divided by that equals leads. Okay, now I'm just gonna go like lead costs, okay, Is you know, fucking 10 bucks. So the ad budget is this, okay, okay. That's how you figure that shit out. Okay. So you go through and then you go alrighty, cool. Then you can figure out time, all that kind of shit. You can figure out your MRR growth, you know, yada, yada, yada. But you need to have this in place, okay. Because then you can start to go like, well, okay, so in Q1, okay, we're making this much money doing this many sales. What's my Q1 mind is most important numbers and drivers. All right, so now you're like, now I have a goal. My goal is to make 192,120. Okay? My goal is to do 391 seats, okay? Which is broken up into like, if you do equals 391 divided by 4, it's 97 sales, okay? Or 98. So I. So I can change this to 98. So if I go boom, boom, done. Sweet. So I need 98 sales, I got to spend $30,625, which then what I can do is I can attribute that, the proportionality of that to this. That makes sense, right? Like, that's how you start to do that. Then what you do is you do the entire month. Entire. You do the year, the quarters, the months. Then you break that down and you look for the stupid stuff and then you go, like, I can't do that. I have to introduce a different revenue line. Or like, this is way too optimistic and you're looking for like, okay, am I being conservative? Am I being conservative? What I'm going to spend? Like, am I probably over budgeting? Okay? If I'm over budgeting, I'm doing something probably good. Okay? Am I putting away from my taxes? Do I understand that? Am I not being a fucking loser? Okay, Am I okay with losing 90 grand right over that first two months? The answer is yes, I am. Do I think that my rate of growth is sustainable and achievable? And do I understand, Do I have enough marketing sources to be able to do this? Do I have the people to be able to service that? Because, you know, I mean, like, that's a. That's a lot spicy meeple, right? So there's a lot of considerations to do this well. And then it's like, am I reaching my delta? Do I need to readjust? Am I going to have a big ramp up period? Am I going to have a, like a sustainable period where I don't try and grow that much? And again, all this is applicable to business owners, to individual households, to whatever. This is how you do this. Okay. All right, guys, so that was helpful. I'll put this down below and I hope you guys get something out of it. All right, bye.