Backwards Planning, with author Nick Bare

So the importance of forward thinking. But one of the most practical things that I listened to in the book, because I listened to it on audio, was backwards planning. So forward thinking, but backwards planning. What's your backwards planning kind of whiteboard metaphor?

We use this in the military and it's one of those things that it's common sense, but so many people don't put into action. Right. So like backwards planning, you have this whiteboard and on the left side of the board is where you're at today. The right side of the board is where you want to be, like your big goal. For us, like right now, it's a $100 million company. In between where you're at today and where you want to be, there are some milestones And some things you have to accomplish to get there. So you start making a backwards timeline of okay, from this big goal, $100 million. Probably a year before that, we have to make sure we do this. We probably need this many employees, this many departments filled, these many wholesale accounts. We need to be shipping out this many orders. So that means our warehouse needs to be this big, and fulfillment operations need to be able to operate and fulfill this much. A year before that, we need to be at this point. Maybe we have these events covered, and we need this many people coming to our website, and our conversion rate needs to be here in order to meet this. Revenue mark, and the year before that there's another goal. So then you fill in, okay, there's all these little micro things you need to do to reach these bigger milestones in order to get you to the X. So that's backwards planning in a nutshell. Backwards planning keeps you on track to be where you need to be. Things are going to change, you're gonna have to pivot and readjust. It's never perfect, but it aligns the things that you need to do to hopefully get to where you want to be.