5 Year Growth Plan for a Start Up Business with Leonard Grape

Leonard: So don’t get me wrong, during the first year, especially the first six months, I really didn’t know what I was doing. In fact, I didn’t even know how which specific services they, even the price of the services. But your question, which I think is very relevant, definitely the financial aspects are a part of that, that’s for sure. But the way I did it was sort of a time top-line five-year plan with specific core objectives year on year. So this is I think more or less when I was a few months in the company, I think towards the end of year one, which I’d like to call now, was year zero, because that’s essentially really just testing the waters and then trying to build up a foundation in the team and see if the market would even respond to the services that you want to sell.

The underlying component of that is what are the immediate foundational stuff that we need to be in check or in place so that we can even have a legitimate five-year plan, so to speak. So that’s my year one, really everything foundational about who we are as a brand, what our initial organizational operational requirements I need. So at least I have a base structure.

The second year for me is really all about the organizational build-up. Revenue growth is definitely a part of that, as then building the capacity of the team and establishing initial processes and frameworks. So this is what I meant by thinking big, starting small, but really thinking and acting big. So in a year or two, you’ll see a lot of how we start to operate, when should we hire? What should be the first hires that we want? And now we’re really starting to benchmark a clearer number for the financial component. Sean Because we had the benchmark for year one, we had a so-and-so number of revenue. Where do we want to bring this in year two, we now have a better gauge of the price points and how we can push the threshold related to that.

Years three, four, and five would really be about last year and the financial component. How much capitalization? Because I bootstrapped my company, I didn’t have any capital at the beginning, so I just went on, It’s a professional service company, so it’s a little bit lesser in terms of risk but higher reward because I didn’t really need to have capital upfront. That’s how I looked at it. Or the years three, four, and five, which we know about. How do we now establish the systems that can help us grow revenue-wise, capital-wise, and number of clients-wise, at the same time should be developing the expertise of the team. Capacity for us is not exactly immediately organizational growth, although that’s part of it, it’s also a matter of how we deepen our expertise because we want to be a high-margin, low-volume company. How can that translate into the organizational side? Fourth and fifth is really how much capital do I want to have by year five? What are the minimum parameters that I want to be set that are going to include money in the bank, the number of repeat businesses, the way we structure systems and organization, and hopefully for us to be ready to really take a look at where we’re going?

So for us, Sean, the five-year plan that I set is really more as a powering vision that we know that we have a path to go to, but it’s not exactly cast in stone. It has to be this because every now and then we’ll have to revisit. So but for me, the five-year plan is really just for me to have the corporate discipline most likely that I got from working in a traditional company like Ayala and wanting to apply that to a startup mindset.