A clear direction for the next year, not just a to-do list.

A structured goal-setting session and a twelve-month roadmap with quarterly milestones, the numbers behind each goal, and the two or three things that matter most in the next ninety days. It is quoted as a fixed fee agreed in writing before we start, based on the size of the business and whether there is more than one shareholder in the room. Ask at the discovery call and you get a figure, not a range. The pre-work — a short questionnaire and your last set of accounts — is included, and so is costing the plan afterwards rather than leaving you with goals and no arithmetic.

Half a day for most businesses, and a full day where there are several shareholders or a genuinely big decision in play — a new site, an acquisition, a change of model. The roadmap follows afterwards rather than being written live, because costing each goal properly takes longer than the room does. It is a working session, not a presentation: expect blunt questions about margin, capacity and what you actually want out of the business, and expect to disagree with at least one of your own assumptions before lunch.

You need something reliable to plan from. Last filed accounts plus current-year management figures is usually enough. If the bookkeeping is materially behind, the honest answer is to fix that first — planning on unreliable numbers produces a confident document built on sand, and you will make real decisions from it. What you do not need is perfection. Gaps that surface during the session, such as nobody knowing the true gross margin by product line, are useful findings in themselves and often reshape the plan more than the goals do.

Better to find that out in a structured session than eighteen months into a plan neither of you owns. It comes up more often than people admit, usually as a difference over pace, risk or how much cash comes out of the business rather than a fundamental split. Surfacing it with a facilitator in the room, against actual numbers, is a reasonable use of the day and occasionally the most valuable part of it. If the answer is that you want genuinely different outcomes, that is a shareholder conversation and it is cheaper to have it now than at an exit.

Most of them are wrong in the detail — the question is whether you find out in month four or month twelve. The plan is written to be checked against: each goal has a number, a date and an owner, so when revenue lands 15% under, you can see immediately whether it was price, volume or timing, and adjust one thing rather than rewriting everything. Some clients review it themselves quarterly. Others build it into management accounts or coaching so it gets looked at whether they feel like it or not, which is the version that tends to survive a busy spring.

Yes — the costed forecast that comes out of the session is the basis of a funding application. Lenders want to see numbers that hang together, assumptions they can interrogate, and an owner who can explain them without reading from the page. What sinks applications is usually not ambition but inconsistency: a forecast that does not reconcile to the last filed accounts, or growth with no matching cost of capacity. We build it so those questions have answers. The lending decision itself is always the lender's — see business financial services.

Sometimes not, and that is a fair thing to test on a call before spending money. If you can state your twelve-month revenue and profit targets, what capacity and cash they need, and what the first ninety days require, you may already have the plan and just need it written down. Where it earns its keep is the costing: owners routinely set a profit goal that their current margin and overhead structure cannot produce at any achievable volume, and that arithmetic is uncomfortable but far cheaper to discover in a session than in October.