Are you building an unachievable plan?

Show Notes

Is your plan unachievable? If you don't know, here are the things to watch out for + how to fix it.

Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Holbein. You are listening to the Revenue Formula.
[00:00:03] In today's episode, we are going to talk about unachievable plans, the problems with it, the signs of it, and then finally the uncomfortable solution to fix it.
[00:00:13] Enjoy.
[00:00:18] So I ask a couple of people that are listening to the show. You know what they're thinking about the intro stuff and some of them like, okay, skip. Skip skips. We need to tell people. And from now you need to
[00:00:29] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:00:30] But what if they skipped over it? So we just need a long pause.
[00:00:33] Toni: like in YouTube you have those
[00:00:35] Mikkel: Ah, right.
[00:00:36] Toni: And they just kind of can jump to the next section
[00:00:38] Mikkel: Well, we can say in maybe five seconds from now, we are gonna start the show.
[00:00:44] Toni: Yeah, but, okay, but how, how
[00:00:45] Mikkel: now Yeah. It's still a problem. I know,
[00:00:50] but, but,
[00:00:51] Toni: it away. Take it away.
[00:00:53] Mikkel: today we're gonna talk about unachievable things. Specifically unachievable plans and, you know, it's actually worse than having no plan. Yeah, it's way worse to have an unachievable plan than to have no plan. And why is that?
[00:01:09] Why is that the case?, we're gonna get into some of that stuff and then we're gonna get into what can you do about it to fix that, basically remedy the situation.
[00:01:19] Toni: Yeah. Actually, before that we're gonna talk about how to spot an unrealistic plan.
[00:01:22] Mikkel: Totally. We're gonna do that.
[00:01:25] Maybe now you start planning. Maybe there's already some plan you can see.
[00:01:29] Depends on obviously when you are listening to the episode, but realizing that there is a plan and is unachievable, that's gonna cause some problems. The most common ones, you're gonna find, whoever you ask, and even if you, you think about initially is, well, people are gonna sit at a town hall on all hands.
[00:01:46] They're gonna see the plan, they're gonna. What on earth is happening? This plan is just not rooted in reality and people are gonna be demod.
[00:01:54] Toni: Yeah,
[00:01:55] And, and sometimes you don't need to be an fp and a Rev CFO type. You just need to be a normal person sitting in the room and be like, that ain't gonna happen,
[00:02:07] Mikkel: that's, that's not what you want to have happen in a town hall. Then you lost. Lost already. And that obviously then follows. You're probably gonna miss. And what happens as you start missing is you're looking at the quota, there's a target, you're behind. What can we do now this quarter to make an impact?
[00:02:22] And you become reactive. And that permeates throughout the. So none of the stuff in the plan happens either. Yeah. It's just, you know,
[00:02:31] Toni: I was just thinking one other really, clear sign of you having unachievable plan is people not wanting to put up dashboards with the revenue target and you trending kind of not towards it with the argument of like, that would demotivate everyone to see that We are totally gonna miss.
[00:02:50] Then this is also. That's probably also gonna be one sign.
[00:02:54] Mikkel: No, I've always had two dashboards. One that's focused on opportunities and revenue and one on brand and traffic, and you know, then you can just switch.
[00:03:00] It's perfect one. Then there's always a good, you know?
[00:03:03] Toni: Yeah. This is only what our marketers can do,
[00:03:05] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:03:07] Mikkel: But there's small problems too than just that.
[00:03:09] Toni: Yes. So this was kind of the, the, the obvious problems, some of the non-obvious ones. and we are gonna get into how we can spot an unachievable plan. But one of the things might be you have a very steep q4, for example, right? Many people do this q1. Ah, we kind of need to hit that one. Q2, Q3 is sometimes gonna be soft, maybe seasonality.
[00:03:32] So they put all the rest into q4. and what you obviously need to do in order to even put yourself into a position of trying to hit that is you need to hire a bunch of AEs potentially in order to build up the quota and so forth, right? And obviously in order to support them, you need to hire a bunch of other people around and spend money and so forth.
[00:03:52] And as you do that, There might be a time. and sometimes we see it three to five, maybe six months, where management is kind of okay with the ramped up spend. and it's accepting this whole notion of, well, you need to spend money to make money. But they're, they're starting to not see any of that stuff actually come back in terms of revenue, right?
[00:04:14] It's only just cost. So what's Then the next thing is gonna be. Once you wake up, and that's gonna be probably around q3, sometimes in the middle of q4, you will basically start laying off people. That's usually the end result, right? You build up this whole machinery to try and hit a number that was unachievable from the start, and suddenly you realize, well, If we don't get that amount of revenue in, we actually can support the cost.
[00:04:43] So what can we do? We can reduce the amount of cost. Again, and I've seen this, myself many times. I've seen this in, in some companies that, I'm a little bit involved with. and it's sometimes almost like a, like a back and forth effect, right? You're hire, you build up, you build hype. And then it doesn't work.
[00:05:02] You fire them again and you do it again and you know, you fire them again and so forth. Right? And that back and forth, that usually is a, is, an outcome, an unobvious outcome of simply terrible planning, unachievable planning, overly ambitious planning that had nothing to do with the reality. that then leads to, you know, all of those people's faiths being, you know, you know, pushed back and forward.
[00:05:24] Mikkel: So we should get into what you can do to protect yourself.
[00:05:28] Yeah, basically there are some red flags to spot unachievable plan. If it's not just straight off the cuff, Hey, this, is, this number's wrong, there will be some red flags.
[00:05:40] Toni: Yes. So the the thing is, just because a management team is putting up a large number, it doesn't mean that it's unachievable.
[00:05:48] Right. That's really important to keep in mind. And, and what's, I think also for. For everyone, listening, maybe not involved in planning necessarily. it's also really important that you as a, as a team, as a company you can decide that something is unachievable and then by that fact will make it unachievable, right?
[00:06:09] So it's really, I think people need to be careful not to judge these things and then, you know, start this chat in the corner and be like, nah, that's not gonna work. Unless you, you, you'll find a couple of clear signs that it won't. and, and we just wanted to go through some of those signs or red flags or, or ways to potentially approach it.
[00:06:28] And that that really kind of then, you know, helps you to get to a much clearer, decision on whether or not this is potentially unachievable and maybe, you know, where you need to look and, and help. So that number one thing obviously is, and this is, this is due to the economic situation that we're in.
[00:06:46], a lot of folks, a lot of CFOs are basically forced to show growth.
[00:06:50] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:06:51] Toni: But with the same and or less or only slightly more, money in the bank account, meaning, you know, budget to spend. So what will, what will a CFO usually do in order to, to make those two things work out? And, the trick number one is to what we call, play around with the processing metrics.
[00:07:15] What are processing metrics? We hear Growblocks differentiate between volume metrics and processing metrics?, volume metrics are your, your counts. So how many mql, how many opportunities, how many customers, and your processing metrics are. The metrics that connect those steps, it's a conversion rate from MQL to op.
[00:07:38] There's also a small sales cycle or a time delay between them. Then you might have opportunity to close one there. You not only have conversion rate and sales cycle, but you might also have average contract value and so forth. Yeah. And, a CFO will typically start.
[00:07:57] Typically start tweaking those numbers a little bit around because, all of these are efficiency drivers.
[00:08:04] So really in order to make more growth with same or only slightly more budget, you need to become more efficient. So basically those, those processing steps, this will be, what the CFO will start playing around with in order then to, show exactly what, what needs to be shown. Right? And, and the danger here is, number one, the typical. CVR.
[00:08:28] So conversion rates, let's just kind of take this up a notch and maybe should be getting better every year, every month, a little bit, right? You know, why is that such a big problem?, sometimes. Sometimes this goes a bit overboard. So you have that idea that you start. Tweaking the conversion rate a little bit.
[00:08:48] Cool. But then as you go throughout the planning period, you realize, I, we need to tweak a little bit more. We need to tweak a little bit more. We, and suddenly you end up with, you know, and I had this, once, it's, from July to August, conversion rate just jumps by five points or something, from 10 to 15, basically.
[00:09:09] You know, and the, the funny thing is when the CFO talks to is like, but Toni, It's just five points. What do you, you know, that's, that's not that you should be able to achieve that. Why are we paying you so much money if you can't achieve that un until you basically point out Sure. Five points, but on a base of 10 points, so it's 50% improvement.
[00:09:28] So there, that's, that's a lot. That's a lot. But it also goes into, hey, we should be raising our prices. We should maybe speeding up our sales cycles. And the funny thing is now, When you combine all of these things, you have this whiplash effect of
[00:09:43] many different improvements building on top of each other, getting you into crazy town.
[00:09:50] And that might sometimes be, and, you won't see it on the, on the individual pieces because volume will go up a little bit. But what you will see is you go from, you know, let's just say 10 deals closed in January. Yeah. To suddenly 50 deals closed. In December, like on a monthly basis without much changing actually.
[00:10:08] And you wonder, how could that happen while this is how it
[00:10:11] Mikkel: why haven't we done this before? And I think the other funny thing is sometimes it has unintended consequences to, you know, put those numbers forward. So if you wanna increase the conversion rate, let's say, just from marketing into sales, to keep it simple, an easy way to do it is just, well, we are only gonna pass those
[00:10:30] who request a demo. Yeah, you're gonna choke the funnel so all of a sudden you have an impact on volume. And that's gonna basically screw you over the same you can say with, price increases.
[00:10:40] Toni: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:41] Mikkel: Is it gonna make it easier for you to close the deal? Probably not.
[00:10:45] Toni: Yeah, no. So that's the funny thing is right, you can, you can kind of hit those processing steps fairly easy by just choking the funnel in, you know, whatever, different way. and, or this is another one, come up with a new metric. So, sorry. Those are all the COO CRO tricks of how to get the budget to work.
[00:11:02] Work out, you know, quotation marks. You invent a new metric, you, you choke the funnel, you do something while I hit the improvement. But, you know, still making less money than before. Anyway. What, what is another, what is another one? Having a crazy q4. So I see there's a lot. Q1 kind of needs to be achievable because you're just walking out of a weak q4, you wanna have a, you wanna have a high five moment for your management team, basically, Hey, let's not look like losers. Then Q2 usually is a bit of a challenge, but you'll, you kind of realize, hey, Q2 is kind of baked already now. q3, while Q3 is gonna be soft because seasonality, you know, you have, you have your, your summer period in, in, in, in Europe.
[00:11:44] But we still need to get to those target things. So let's just push all of this into Q4
[00:11:49] Mikkel: Well, that is usually the biggest quarter anyway,
[00:11:51] Toni: Well, it's the biggest quarter, and Right, we should, and blah, blah, blah. And then you end up with a crazy q4. And, and that obviously is also not gonna happen. That's, that's usually kind of one, one other good, tell sign.
[00:12:03] Another one is, are individual targets going up? And this is, again, this is another efficiency metric just hidden somewhere. So what are, what are individual targets? So for example, the outbound reps, going from eight meetings a month to 10 meetings a month, or 12 meetings a month. I mean, going from eight to 12, really what you're like, hearing here is, Almost a 50% increase again, right?
[00:12:30] Again, you're paying for this same cost base, but certainly a much larger output. Efficiency increase. same goes for AEs and their quotas. There's a different angle on this, obviously, but let's increase quotas. We do need to hire so many people, blah. You know, all of that idea, and I mean, I think everyone gets it.
[00:12:48] Same with CSMs and so forth, right? Not, I mean, the, the
[00:12:52] Mikkel: we can go on. It's a long list
[00:12:54] Toni: It's, you know, think about ramp times and hiring.
[00:12:57] Oh, you know, I need to shrink this a little bit. You know, they just need to get it faster. Let's, you know, let's do that. And then I think the last one really is, especially, and we are gonna get into some of those differentiations and in a second, but especially if you do actually attempt to make some of those assumptions here of conversion rate or ACV or something like that, going up, more realistic by putting a project behind it.
[00:13:22] basically, you know, saying yes and or pushing for tons of different projects,
[00:13:27] Mikkel: Mm.
[00:13:28] Toni: and obviously being too optimistic in, in the outcome, right? And I think the, the, the less abstract version of this is product, just think about product. And I think this is one other way of how to figure out if, if a plan is unachievable or not.
[00:13:43] Go to your VP product and or similar, look him or her deep in the eyes and say like, Hey, is this product thing gonna happen by this day? Because GRR depends on it. Net retention rate depends on it. ACV depends on it. This new market depends on it. And if you see some wavering, because I can promise you the CFO also try to.
[00:14:03] Be, drive, drive efficiency, improvements on the product side. then you should, your, your alarm, you know, your alarm bell should probably go off. Yeah.
[00:14:13] Mikkel: It's always a tricky one also, because we are notoriously bad at estimating time and are always very optimistic. So it's, it is a super difficult one.
[00:14:22] Toni: No, but I mean, the, the problem here is right, it's again, the CFO is between a rock and a hard place.
[00:14:30] He or she needs to put something forward that the board can accept, and then this will usually be the stuff that leads to it. I think what sometimes you're also missing is, that level of complexity and, and tweaking of things needs to be also fully understood by the board level. And rather, you know, have that discussion in this form now instead of, you know, going into oblivion by the end of the year.
[00:14:55] Mikkel: Yeah. So we recently did an episode called, The plan no one makes, which was really into the revenue planning. One of the things we did not get to cover in that episode, which fits fortunately neatly and here is well then how do you go and convince your CEO?
[00:15:12] Right? There's a step here where now you know there's an achievable plan, so does it then follow that you need to go and make a plan, and then how do you bring that forward?
[00:15:21] Toni: Yeah, so let's just kind of shortly recap, right? We said, well, if you have an unachievable plan or you're stuck with it, or you, you have to execute it, there are tons of problems around it. Probably your company's gonna run out of cash faster. You need to do layoffs, all of that, you know, terrible stuff.
[00:15:38] Now you go into, well, Now I know that we actually do have an unachievable plan because all of this stuff was play, everything that Toni just mentioned, all of it was played around with. And, and now it's like, okay, well how do I, how do I, myself, maybe as a founder, as a CRO or something, but how do I, as a RevOps person and or commercial leader, how do I help my organization get out of this?
[00:16:02] And. Mikkel and I, we discuss it quite a bit actually leading up to this, to this show. And, and we actually came to the conclusion that, the only way out is. And I don't think people will like to hear this, but you will need to change your plan.
[00:16:18] Mikkel: Oh man. Not again.
[00:16:21] Toni: Such a, such a boring, obvious. Yeah. Oh, I need a new plan, Toni.
[00:16:25] Thanks. I didn't, you know, didn't realize that, but the, the difficult piece here is how do you get your CEO to do it? Because the CFO probably won't. Because he or she is probably pretty convinced of the validity of the plan. He or she spent time selling the plan. So I think you almost need to go one level higher up, to the ceo and you need to make him or her understand that something is off and something is flawed.
[00:16:53] And if that doesn't land, then well it's, you know, her company, so then she needs to go do that. Right? What are, what are potential ways to approach this? Yeah. And we did some, we did some riffing coming, you know, leading up to this. And, and one, one piece that would be very convincing to me, well, number one, maybe you sent this episode to your ceo so she or he can listen to this, but
[00:17:22] but they can skip the intro part.
[00:17:23] Yeah. Maybe, maybe you skipped the intro part. But the, the. The other piece that would work potentially with me pretty well, and I used that in the past, is just, first of all, you need to have access to the plan itself, to the Excel spreadsheet from the cfo. And you know, that might be difficult, but basically try and sum up what is the difference between all the assumptions that are in here, conversion rate increase, ACV increase.
[00:17:53] Ramp, decrease, all of that stuff. And, something that is less so dependent on assumptions. Something that looks more like what you did last year. and I would, what I would do is I would, take the plan, note down the number in the, the bottom right cell, which is probably your revenue number. and then I would go into the assumption sheet.
[00:18:17] I can promise you there's always an assumption sheet. It might be hidden. You need to un hide it.
[00:18:22] Mikkel: Yeah. There's, it takes, I wouldn't say hours, I would probably say days.
[00:18:26] Toni:, but there's somewhere there's an assumption sheet and stuff built in. And then you dial all of this down to your last year's achievements, again, conversion rate, ACV, and so forth.
[00:18:38] And then you compare the new number that will be on the, on the revenue side, and you will have a gap between those two numbers.
[00:18:46] The way I would describe that gap is, hey, all of this, all of this here is based on assumptions. All of this needs to go right in order to achieve this. Right? And I think what is really powerful to then go to the CEO and say, did you know that 40%, 50% of you know, next year's revenue is based on a, a set of assumptions?
[00:19:10] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:19:12] Toni: And she might say, Actually I didn't because the, the, the, the funny thing is there's obviously lots of trust between finance and, and the ceo and it's also good. It should be like that, but it doesn't always mean that the CEO's deep down into the spreadsheet and understands everything that's going on, then shouldn't even be expected of him or her.
[00:19:32] But, you know, by you taking out that one number, you basically, you basically tell your ceo, Hey, this is, this is the risk threshold that we are dealing with. you aware of that? Yeah. And then the answer could be yes or no. I think another way then to potentially kind of go one level deeper here is to start differentiating between assumptions.
[00:19:56] Those are, sometimes call it, wishful thinking of what's gonna happen in the future without any. Work or, you know, resources put into this versus what you would usually call projects or campaigns or something like that, right? Where you basically say like, in order to achieve that conversion rate, x, y, and Z needs to happen, right?
[00:20:17] If you have a conversion rate that magically goes up, I would call this an assumption. If you have a conversion rate that goes up because you're planning those three things and you're starting to do them now, and you expect the conversion rate to happen in May, the increase happen in May. That's what I would rather call a project.
[00:20:36] Yeah. And those two things have kind of different risk profiles, especially for me as a, as a ceo, I would really like to understand how much of my plan is assumption based and how much of my plan actually is real world reality based. Right. And again, what I would assume, because sometimes some of this planning, especially if it's leaning on the unachievable end, it's a little bit happens in a silo.
[00:20:59] It happens a little bit in the corner office. It happens a little bit between two, three people. So I highly doubt that many of those assumptions are project, support. Which basically will mean that most of the stuff that you just calculated in terms of, hey, those are the, the revenue at risk on the assumption side will be very similar to the revenue at risk of the assumption side minus the project, right?
[00:21:19] Again, this is, this is a way to show to the ceo, listen, this is gonna be really, really, really difficult and probably you probably actually not gonna happen.
[00:21:28] Mikkel: But I think what's also important here is it, it doesn't always have to be that you change the metrics part of the plan as long as you can then back it up with a projects instead.
[00:21:38] Because if, if the conversation then is, okay, we had this conversion rate improvement that we wanted to achieve end of q2, but we don't have the projects to do it. You can also go and fix that.
[00:21:49] Toni: Absolutely. So I don't think we are trying to say that you can't change your conversion rate at acv, but a sign of an unachievable plan is that the, that those numbers go up in a step function.
[00:22:01] Yeah. Without any. Work going into it, it's just gonna happen by
[00:22:06] Mikkel: You're gonna wake up One
[00:22:07] Toni: more and, and what, you know, one thing I realized, especially in revenue planning and revenue engines, nothing just happens by itself. It's, it's just not a thing. Right. and, and the similar thing is really also around, think about MQLs.
[00:22:20] That's usually where I see some of the planning going wrong. Well marketing should just grow by 3, 4, 5, 9%, 10% a That should be doable. Right? And then they just kind of pulled up the, the MQL number. I would call that an assumption. Usually it's not really backed by, the marketing folks and, you know, maybe this is more of a, of a you thing, but, you know, it's.
[00:22:44] Obviously as a marketing, expert, or leader, you won't, you won't plan everything out for the year. We'll plan it in chunks,
[00:22:51] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:22:52] Toni: And, and obviously by definition on the marketing side, there's a bit of softness towards, you know, everything that's a little bit later in the year, and I think that's totally fine.
[00:23:01] But if you even can't see hitting those increases early on in the year, then, you know?
[00:23:06] Mikkel: Yeah. I think it's also because especially for marketing, the, let's say the velocity, so the time it takes from lead to customer is just way longer.
[00:23:15] So when you're in end of q2, then it's really next year almost in many cases. And, and the thing is, If you look at the planning proponent, what tends to happen is you just look at what is the MCAC, so the marketing, customer acquisition cost. So you have a blended metric and when you go into marketing, do you realize how many channels and sources there are?
[00:23:35] And they, they act, first of all, wildly differently. The cost of acquiring a lead that is a fit for, for your business also varies wildly. So you can't just go with that assumption and that that's where you really can, you know, run into.
[00:23:51] Toni: and, we are now, you know, we are making always a little bit fun of the finance side of the business, but now let's, you know, switch side to the, to the revenue and execution side of the business. Well, what is the CMO gonna do, when he or she gets a big MQL target? Yeah. What is gonna happen?
[00:24:08] Mikkel: Some good behavior.
[00:24:10] Toni: Yeah. I, I can tell you, they will hit the MQL
[00:24:13] Mikkel: number.
[00:24:13] they certainly will. That's the easy part. It will be at the sacrifice of the conversion rate. Exactly. The the stuff that actually creates revenue.
[00:24:21] Yeah. Right. And that's what you don't want happening,
[00:24:24] Toni: then also leads to, hey, but I hit my target.
[00:24:27] Mikkel: Yeah. Finger
[00:24:28] Toni: Now the VP sales is just fucking up. Right? I mean, that's the, the typical stuff. Maybe we do like an episode of like finance versus ops, kind of how, how, how all of them are trying to cheat their way. okay. But kind of going back to this year, I think 1, 1, 1 important piece on, you know, on this solution, how to figure this out is, especially with constraints on the, on the budgeting and cost side. you know, and for the last couple of years, in this wonderful market, they just went up and up and up and up. and VC spent more and more money and valuations went up. there was never really a part of the thinking process for planning that was, what should we take away? Yeah. It was always, let's come up with new stuff we can add on top.
[00:25:14] and I think that has stopped now. I think people need to adjust to that. I think instead of just going, what can we put on top, people actually need to start making the exact same dec, it requires the same scrutiny and the same decision making just because it's there. People kind of take it sometimes.
[00:25:32] is what is in place that shouldn't be in place anymore.
[00:25:34] Mikkel: Mm-hmm.
[00:25:35] Toni: And that really is one tactic, one strategy to free up, resources and then allocate them to something differently, right? And that can happen, without changing, people on the team. But it might also be one of the options to say, actually we don't believe in this market anymore, or we don't believe in this channel anymore, or we don't, you know, whatever you have basically making clear, clear decisions on what not to do and then start doing maybe something else with that money.
[00:26:07] Mikkel: Yeah, I think the classic comparison is, project, right?
[00:26:11] You look at an annual and say, Hey, we also gotta say no to projects. But what you're really hinting at is there are existing work that's always just been there. So of course we are gonna continue doing it and actually pausing for a second and assessing, hey, You know, one product out of 10 we have, is that really where we should put our resources?
[00:26:32] Should we even, should we even have that product? And that is a really important conversation to have.
[00:26:37] Toni: And this is typical, hey focus. Little bit obvious thing. I think on top of that, actually, it's also the. And I think this is being rarely discussed properly in management teams is, and sometimes that is a situation that happened to me more in the execution phase three and the plan you're executing, something isn't working out, which is a normal thing, and then there's a gap, and then you're try and, you know, solve the close the gap.
[00:27:02] And then basically what's gonna happen is everyone's gonna come up with all kinds of great creative new projects and add them to the whole thing. And you know, theoretically that works out, but in reality with everything you add to the plate, at that point you are giving yourself a shot at hitting target.
[00:27:24] Yes. Hm. But you are also increasing the odds that you're going perform even worse than without those projects. Yeah. Right. Because you can't just hire all of those people and ramp them up and execute all of this stuff in parallel. you won't have the management system set up. You're one, have the people for that and so forth.
[00:27:41] That gets really complex. So really what happens instead is the people that are already doing projects are now gonna be doing more projects and they're probably gonna end up half-assing the staff that had a much higher likelihood of, you know, hitting the revenue outcome, now with those new, new additional, projects on top, right?
[00:27:59] So balancing that out, super important, right? So, really, trying to, so sorry to tell people, Hey, if you're an unachievable plan, it's worse than having no plan, but it also means you basically need to create a new plan. Boring. But the, but that is, I'm sorry. That's, that's the essence of that, right? And, and I think sometimes then as a CEO listening would be like, okay, well I just went through this whole process with the board.
[00:28:23], it's, it's not that I don't know any of these things. but, but that, that was the budget that we agreed on. And this is probably a bit of a hot take. I think there is no shame in maybe having two plans.
[00:28:40], you can have a budget for the board that you report on. and by the way, you will need to reforecast that thing anyway by the end of q2 because by that time it will be clear also to the board that you're not being able to execute on this thing.
[00:28:55] But you can have already now an operational plan that maybe sets in a different trajectory. Understand that. but it's basically kind of helping you to make better decisions as you go. And then in Q2 when Rebudgeting the season is around, you basically kind of swap those plans around. and my kind of overall, and this is also some of the, Dave, Dave Kellogg's work actually is, putting,
[00:29:20] putting forward an unambitious plan at the beginning of the year might be sometimes difficult to do.
[00:29:29] but I think what people should realize is that they're at that point in a much, much better position with the board to have the conversation, say, Hey, I know I also wanna triple, but it's just not going to happen. And instead of putting this company on a trajectory that's gonna lead to hiring a bunch of people, laying them off again, dealing with all of those issues, having burnt money in the process.
[00:29:49] We should go for, you know, more dialed down plan. you, you're in a better position to negotiate that in the beginning of the year than at the end of the year when you come out of having missed three or four quarters in a row. And people will just say like, what a, what a effing bozo you are, right? and, and balancing those two things out is it's really important to basically not get fired as a ceo, right?
[00:30:10] So really, making sure that, that you, actually, you know, fulfill those expectations. of the board, and, and set them, you know, correctly from the beginning.
[00:30:23] Mikkel: Hopefully this is gonna be helpful.
[00:30:26] Toni: Well, I think there was a lot of, pieces of what, what does it, what does it make an achievable plan, right?
[00:30:32] And then I think the key is you will, you will have to go to your CEO and try and have her change some of that stuff. Otherwise it's probably gonna be difficult for you.
[00:30:41] Mikkel: We covered a bunch of the problems that you are gonna face if you have an unachievable plan. We talked about the red flags to basically spot, are you dealing with a, you know, unachievable plan and then basically we went into the solution mode.
[00:30:55] Yeah. And this is the proponent. You can definitely forward to your ceo, maybe CFO and start that conversation of building maybe a second plan. They can even get a head start to,
[00:31:06] Toni: yeah.
[00:31:07] Mikkel: Wonderful.
[00:31:10] Toni: For everyone. This is not gonna be an easier thing to achieve, changing plan bottom up in the middle of the year, but it, if you truly feel that this is necessary, you need to figure out a way to push for it.
[00:31:21], and I don't think it's gonna happen without someone really pushing ceo, CFO to, to make some of those adjustments. so I hope this works out for you this year. It's gonna be a challenging year for sure. and yeah, thanks for listening.
[00:31:35] Mikkel: Yeah, thank you Toni. And thank you. Thanks.
[00:31:38] Toni: Thanks