Most companies that run on EOS® already have a plan. The Vision/Traction Organizer holds a 3-Year Picture and a 1-Year Plan, with revenue, profit and a short list of goals. That plan is a good start. What it usually lacks is a way to tell, every month, whether you're on track to hit it.
That's what a Growth Plan adds.
A Growth Plan, defined
A Growth Plan takes the revenue and profit numbers in your 1-Year Plan and breaks them into three things your leadership team can manage:
- Monthly targets. Where revenue and profit need to be at the end of each month to land the year.
- Drivers. The few numbers that produce revenue in your business, such as new customers, average order size, close rate, price or capacity, each with its own target.
- Owners. One person on the leadership team accountable for each driver.
It isn't a new framework, and it doesn't replace anything in EOS. It's the 1-Year Plan, made specific enough to check against your actual numbers.
Why the 1-Year Plan alone isn't enough
An annual revenue goal is easy to agree on in December and hard to feel in March. If you're 4% behind after one quarter, is that fine or a problem? Without monthly targets, nobody knows, so nobody acts. By the time the gap is obvious, there are too few months left to close it.
The Weekly Scorecard doesn't solve this either. It's built to show whether last week went the way it should. Its goals are set to keep the business running, and they can stay green while the year drifts. (More on that in Why your Scorecard is green and your revenue is flat.)
What goes into a Growth Plan
1. Start from the 1-Year Plan number
Use the revenue and profit goals your leadership team already committed to. The Growth Plan should never quietly change the target.
2. Spread it across the months
Few businesses earn revenue evenly. Use two or three years of your own monthly history to shape the targets, so a slow January doesn't look like a crisis and a strong June doesn't look like a win you didn't earn.
3. Find the drivers
Ask what has to be true for each month's number to happen. For a services firm, it might be billable hours and rate. For a distributor, active accounts and average order. For a contractor, bids, win rate and backlog. Pick three to six. More than that, and nobody can hold them in their head.
4. Set a target for each driver
Work backward from revenue. If you need $400,000 in a month and your average job is $20,000, you need 20 jobs. If you win one bid in four, you need 80 bids in the pipeline.
5. Review it monthly
Once a month, put actuals beside the plan: where you are, the gap, and which driver explains it. That's where the plan starts doing its job.
What it looks like when it works
A leadership team with a working Growth Plan argues less about whether things are going well and more about what to do next. Rocks start coming from the gap to plan, not only from the Issues List. And the 1-Year Plan stops being a number on a page and becomes something the team checks, and steers by, every month.
If you'd like to see how your business compares before you build one, start with the 2-minute Growth Fit Check.
Compare your revenue per employee and profit margin with your industry in about two minutes.
Take the Growth Fit Check