A founder's planning needs shift with company size. At $200K revenue, build sales systems. At $2M, switch to a formal 90-day sprint operating system with three metrics and five initiatives per sprint. By $20M, optimize the entire customer value chain and set three-year targets broken into quarterly sprints.
Planning and systemization changes as you scale. At $200,000 in revenue, your annual plan doesn't matter. Your mission and vision doesn't matter. What matters is building a sales plan and building sales systems. Also, we don't need to think about systemizing everything. We just need to think about systemizing sales if you want to level up to $2 million. Now at $2 million, this is when we have to stop managing and planning based on gut and instincts is when we need to upgrade our company operating system, upgrade from that UOS, that's you, to an actual company operating system. And instead of planning in like these great big long-term, what we're thinking is 90-day sprints. And every 90 days, I want you to have 3 metrics that you're looking to optimize, 5, 5 key initiatives, new projects to optimize those, and then 1 overarching goal or theme. Repeat this every 90 days. You got it. And essentially what we're doing, if you want to level up, we're moving from task-based management to managing to specific targets. That's the goal here. At $20 million, now we're getting away from task optimization. We're not optimizing individual tasks. We're also no longer managing based on this week or next month. That's for your managers. Instead, we're thinking about optimizing the entirety of your value chain, the whole customer value journey. We're also thinking in terms of 3-year targets broken down into those 90-day sprints. So you're thinking years and you're thinking core. And what we need to do with planning and optimization overall, we need to move from planning as an event, systemization as an event, planning as a ritual done by everybody, not just a select few.
