Six practical strategies to plan your best business year

Executive overview

Noah Kagan shares a six-step annual planning framework drawn from running Sumo.com to eight figures in revenue. The process combines honest self-assessment, vivid visualization, and a single unifying metric to align the whole team.

The core insight: one singular goal, mapped month by month, beats a sprawling list of objectives.

The framework also encourages personal growth — learning a new skill and building a personal bucket list — to keep founders humble and motivated throughout the year.

T3B3 — top three, bottom three

• Ask a trusted colleague or partner to name your top three contributions and your bottom three weaknesses.
• Equally apply the exercise to your business: what did the company do well, and what fell short?
• Raw feedback surfaces blind spots that self-assessment misses.
• Feed the bottom-three findings directly into your next quarterly plan as explicit improvement targets.

December 31st visualization

• Close your eyes and write a short story set at the end of the coming year.
• Describe concrete details: number of customers, what you are working on, what you have stopped doing.
• Visualization creates a mental path that makes execution feel like following a route rather than guessing.

Pick one singular goal

• One north-star metric aligns the entire company and filters every decision.
• Sumo's goals by year: 50k emails → 500k emails → (no goal, missed) → 3,333 customers → traffic → revenue.
• The year they skipped a singular goal, they missed targets.
• Consider non-revenue metrics — NPS, active happy customers, engagement time — to avoid short-sighted optimisation.
• Every other metric in the business should ladder up to this one number.

Map it out month by month

• Once the annual goal is set, break it into monthly milestones on a spreadsheet.
• Work backwards: if the target is $100k by December, set $90k for November, $80k for October, and so on.
• Include the supporting drivers — new customers, churn, headcount, revenue — for each month.
• The map is a living document; adjust the route when conditions change, just like a GPS rerouting.
• Reference the proactive dashboard video for a worked example.

Learn one new skill

• Picking up something completely unfamiliar — a language, instrument, or martial art — forces you to be a beginner again.
• Being a beginner cultivates humility and prevents the "I already know everything" trap.
• The meta-skill of learning how to learn transfers directly back into the business.

Build an annual bucket list

• A yearly bucket list is more achievable than a lifetime one and creates concrete milestones to look forward to.
• Examples: a revenue target, a podcast download milestone, working remotely abroad, attending two conferences.
• Schedule each item into your calendar at the start of the year so it does not get crowded out.
• Having big personal goals running in parallel with business goals sustains motivation across the full year.