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A quick look at where your Revenue could go. Enter your goals below — share your info to unlock your full profit picture.
Planning Horizon
Current Year Goal
Growth Assumptions
Revenue
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Profit Locked
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Net Profit Locked
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Revenue Growth
| Year | Revenue | Profit Locked | Net Profit Locked |
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You now have three trajectories - revenue, profit and net profit - running out to your chosen horizon. Read them together rather than separately. Revenue tells you how much bigger the business gets. The profit lines tell you whether bigger is the same thing as better, and the gap between them is where most long-horizon plans quietly fall apart.
If your revenue line climbs steeply while net profit stays flat as a percentage, the projection is describing a business that gets harder to run without getting more valuable. That can be a deliberate choice for a period. It should not be an accident that surfaces in year seven. Look at the year the two lines diverge and ask what you assumed about pricing and overhead in that year. Usually one of the two was left on autopilot while revenue did the work.
Somewhere in the projection there is a year your current model cannot deliver. More people than your management structure supports. More volume than your operating systems handle. More revenue than your current pricing can produce. Identify that year and you have identified what to start building now, because structural changes take longer than the plan assumes. A projection whose whole span looks comfortable is usually a projection with an assumption nobody stress tested.
Revenue growth is the assumption people debate. Net profit is the assumption people inherit. Check what the model implies about overhead as you scale, because holding a margin steady through years of growth requires deliberate work, not momentum. Run the projection twice, once with margin held flat and once with it compressing a few points, and compare the ending net profit. If the two endings imply completely different businesses, you have found the number that deserves the most attention between now and your next planning session.
Work backward from a destination instead of forward from last year. Set the revenue and profit you want at the end of the horizon, then divide the distance into years and check whether each year is reachable from the one before it given your people, pricing and capacity. Forward projections tend to describe the business you already have, slightly larger. Backward projections surface the decisions - hiring, pricing, structure - that determine whether the destination is reachable at all.
Do not borrow one. Use your own history as the starting point, then adjust for the specific things you plan to change, and be explicit about which change drives which part of the increase. A rate pulled from somewhere else imports assumptions about a different market and a different cost structure. The useful test is whether you can name the mechanism behind each year of growth. If you cannot, the rate is a wish with a decimal point.
Both, with profit as the constraint. A revenue-only goal is easy to hit in ways you will regret - discounting, taking work that does not fit, adding overhead faster than margin. Pairing the revenue destination with a profit destination forces the harder conversations about pricing and cost structure. Net profit is the line that determines whether the business can fund its own growth, so it belongs in the goal rather than in the follow-up.