Level 10 Coaching
Choose the version that fits your business to see where your BHAG could take you.
More industries coming soon.
A BHAG - Big Hairy Audacious Goal - is not next year's target with a bigger number attached. It is a destination far enough out that you cannot reach it with the team, systems and clients you have today. That is the point. The two sheets here run the same exercise through different metrics, so start by picking the one that matches the numbers you already manage against.
If you are an independent financial advisor or you run an RIA, use the advisor sheet. It projects Production and AUM Book and then derives revenue, profit, New Clients and Team Headcount, so the output speaks in the terms your business already tracks. If you run any other kind of business, use the general sheet, which works from revenue, profit and net profit. Both do the same job. The difference is only whether the inputs are the ones you can answer without translating.
The number is the visible part. The value is in what the number requires. A long-horizon goal you can hit by working harder is not a BHAG, it is a stretch budget. A real one breaks something on the way - your capacity, your team structure, your pricing, the way clients come in. Running the projection is how you find out which one breaks first, and that constraint is usually more useful than the destination itself.
A long-horizon goal that never turns into a quarterly number stays a slogan. Take whatever the sheet produced, find the figure at the halfway mark, then ask what has to be true three years out for that midpoint to be reachable. Keep dividing until you reach a target for this quarter that your leadership team can act on. If the chain from a decade out to the next ninety days has a gap in it, that gap is where the goal will quietly die.
BHAG stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal, a term from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. It is a long-horizon destination for the business, and Scaling Up adopts it as the anchor as the anchor that everything shorter-term ladders up to. The idea is that a goal you can reach with current capacity does not change any decisions, while one you cannot reach forces choices about capacity, structure and focus that you would otherwise defer indefinitely.
Far enough that your current team, systems and client base cannot get you there. In practice that means a decade or more rather than a year or a quarter. The horizon matters less than the requirement: if you can see a straightforward path from where you are to the number, extend the horizon or raise the number. The goal is to make the constraints visible while you still have years to work on them.
An annual goal is a commitment you plan to hit with the business you currently have. A BHAG is a destination that requires the business to become something different. Annual goals get built from current capacity forward. A BHAG gets worked backward from the destination until it produces this year's number, and that reverse direction is what surfaces the hiring, pricing and structural decisions that forward planning tends to skip.