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If you’re like most founders, “creating a yearly business plan” is one of those tasks you keep bumping to the bottom of your to-do list.

Maybe you tell yourself you’ll get to it when things slow down, but they never do.

And before you know it, you’re steamrolling into the new year without a plan, which leads to overthinking every single decision and drowning in busy work.

And somehow you end the year wondering how you were so busy… without feeling like you moved the needle at all.

Stacy doesn’t want that to be your reality at the end of 2026. That’s why today, she’s walking through the exact planning framework she uses with clients inside her membership, The Boutique Investment Collective.

In this episode, she covers:

How to set a 10-year “10-bagger” goal that feels exciting and directional (not something that makes you freeze or avoid the plan altogether)
Her process for breaking big annual goals into quarterly focuses you can realistically carry while still running a business (and a life)
Why it’s time to stop using AUM as your only scorecard
How to get clear on what’s in your control, what isn’t, and where you’re wasting energy trying to force outcomes
The mistake that’s making your sales harder than they should be (and how to streamline your sales process in 2026)

TRANSCRIPT

Below is an AI-generated transcript and therefore it may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Stacy Havener: Hey, my name is Stacey Er. I'm obsessed with startups, stories, and sales. Storytelling has fueled my success as a female founder in the Toughest Boys Club, wall Street. I've raised over 8 billion that has led to 30 billion in follow on assets for investment boutiques, you could say, against the odds. Yeah, understatement.

[00:00:24] I share stories of the people behind the portfolios while teaching you how to use story to shape outcomes. It's real talk here, money, authenticity, growth, setbacks, sales and marketing are all topics we discuss. Think of this as the capital raising class you wish you had in college mixed with happy hour.

[00:00:46] Pull up a seat, grab your notebook, and get ready to be inspired and challenged while you learn. This is the Billion dollar Backstory podcast.

[00:00:59] Wouldn't it be [00:01:00] cool if you could diversify your investor base and add some non-US investors? Europe could be fun, or Latin America, maybe Antarctica. Hey, icebergs aren't really my jam, but you never know. You've only got one problem. How the heck do you do that? Fair question, but maybe this is a who not how thing.

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[00:02:32] All right, so let's talk about business planning in general. It seems like you could skip it. It's like one of those things, right? My LinkedIn post yesterday, the Little lies we tell ourselves, we don't really need a business plan, though. We could do that another time. I'm going to. Suggest, strongly suggest that you do not skip this.

[00:02:53] It becomes a touchstone for you for the entire year. And to kind of set the stage, I'm gonna show you [00:03:00] how we use it with clients so that you can really see how this works. Okay, so it all starts at the top. I want us to think about. 10 years from now. Holy cow. You wanna know what really puts this in perspective.

[00:03:18] If you have children, I want you to think about how old they will be in 10 years. Do the math. Do the math, friends, how's that hitting? Okay, so you see what I just did there? So new name came up with it last couple days. Instead of 10 year Target. This is our 10 bagger. Okay? We gotta make it finance. Take a 10 year target, make it finance 10 bagger, 10 years.

[00:03:45] Big audacious goal. Ain't nobody want Harry in their goal. Okay, so that BHAG thing, Cy, we're 10 bagging it. All right. 10 year goal. [00:04:00] I want you to think about this. Here's the permission I'm gonna give you on your tenure. It doesn't have to make an ounce of sense. In real life, the idea of a big, audacious goal is that you actually have no idea how you're going to get there.

[00:04:17] For example, ours 10 years from now, 2035, our 10 bagger is to help. 2035. See what I did there in 2035 will help 2035 clients. Use this new playbook, this new blueprint. Do I know how that's gonna happen? No clue. Okay. Because to date we've helped like a little over a hundred. Here's the thing with big 10 bagger goals, and this is a great book.

[00:04:52] If you ever read it, I have my copy from when it wasn't even like official. 10 x is easier than two [00:05:00] x. I'm in a nutshell it for us, if you have a goal that's just two x what you're currently doing in anything, right? There are a million ways you can get to two x. The reason 10 x is easier than two x is there's probably one way that you 10 x your goal.

[00:05:20] It's gonna be difficult, but there's not a million different ways to get there. Okay, so 10 year target. I want you to think about this. It doesn't have to make any sense. I'm also gonna give this to you because I know we're finance people and we really love numbers. And of course, we want the goals to be smart, right?

[00:05:40] Specific, measurable, actual, reasonable, and time bound. Try not to make it a UM. Try not to make the 10 year a UM. Are you having a meltdown? It's okay if you are. Tell me if you're melting down. When we did our 10 bagger the first time, it was an a UM number. The problem with a UM, it's not that we [00:06:00] don't wanna have it in our minds, it's that it's very difficult to control.

[00:06:05] It's very difficult to control. Be careful with setting it as a an a UM goal. I'd love to see you do revenue. I'd love to see you do. Number of clients helped, which is what we switched to. Okay. It's just a sentence. That's the tenure. Now watch how this happens. Okay? We kind of don't need to know how we're gonna get to that.

[00:06:25] The next goal I want us to work on is the three year. The three year. We wanna have some basis in reality. The idea, though, is that if we hit this three year target. We will be that much closer to the 10 year. Again, we're not really sure how we're gonna get to the 10 bagger, but we know if we get to the three year, we're closer than we are today with the three year, uh, I mean, world's your oyster here.

[00:06:56] If you are familiar with Eeo s, you're gonna actually paint a picture of what [00:07:00] this three year target looks like, and it should have more than numbers in it. For example, one of ours, which I've been very vocal about, is to have an office in London. Does that help me get to my tenure of helping 2035 firms?

[00:07:18] Yes, right. It gets me a footprint. It gets us a footprint in another location serving more managers outside of the us, so I don't really know, but I know that that's one thing. It's a qualitative thing. It's not an asset number. What else is on our three year? I have mine, so I could give you some ideas. I'm a big per like, give me examples so I can make 'em mine.

[00:07:42] How many employees we have that's on our three year marketing wins An industry award. We did that this year. Actually, check that off. So when you do the three year, I want you to have numbers, whether it's revenue, which is how EOS does it. You could [00:08:00] have a UM, I want you to have numbers here. But I also want you to give the goal some depth and some richness and some qualitative, and not just numbers.

[00:08:13] So we got the 10 bagger. We don't know how we're gonna get there. We've got the three year, which has a number and has a nice picture that if we were to close our eyes and someone were to read it to us, we would be like, heck yeah. That's a firm I wanna be a part of, right? From the three year. I want you to think about a one year goal by which if we hit this one year goal in 2026, we are on track to hit the three year, and we know if we hit the three year, we're that much closer to the 10.

[00:08:46] Do you see how we're working backwards? Okay. The one year is kind of the annual planning bit, right? So in the one year. I would like you to think about [00:09:00] quantitative is real here. Let's have an a UM goal and I wanna help you get to a number of clients goal as well. Let's have an a UM goal. Let's have some numbers here.

[00:09:09] Timestamped could be revenue, and this is what we want to achieve by 1231 of 2026. So typically this one year goal is gonna have that a UM number. It's gonna have a date. If you wanna do revenue, then you would also do profit. If you're gonna run it like Pure os, then I want you to do that growth plan formula, which is to work backwards from that target and break it down into how many clients does that mean?

[00:09:41] Okay, so now you're gonna have a client target for the year. Great. So it's the things we can control. And that's what's a little bit tough about the a UM number. It's difficult to control it. Okay, well, how's that actually gonna get done? What are my [00:10:00] KPIs or OKRs to pick your acronym that you wanna track in route to these things happening?

[00:10:07] This is how it works, friends. So 10 bagger, three year, one year, now. You get to your quarterly campaigns, which if you're working with us on the other side, this is what we do for clients. We basically take that one year number and we break down how does it get done? And then we set up quarterly campaigns.

[00:10:32] EOS would call it rocks that say if we hit these things, we know we are on track to hit our one year. So you see how that all works down from the 10 bagger? That's how I want us to be thinking about it and to go in that order from top down. Okay, so a hundred meetings a year. I want you to then break that down and say, okay, are we gonna come outta the gates and we're just [00:11:00] gonna divide by 20, you know, by four and do 25 a quarter?

[00:11:04] Or do we maybe wanna ramp? So could first quarter be. Hey, this quarter we wanna do 15 meetings, and then over time as we kind of get that process down and get a flow and figure out what works, we're gonna do more. Because what is difficult is if we just say, yeah, it's 25 a quarter and we miss it, we're gonna beat ourselves up pretty good.

[00:11:26] So when we set our quarterly goals, I want them to be, what's the A in smart, achievable, attainable. Right. Look, I'm so guilty of this. As entrepreneurs, we're all, you know, optimists. I'll be like, oh heck yeah, we can do that. Done big. And then you get in there and you go, wow, okay. That was a lot harder than I thought.

[00:11:49] So we didn't hit that, right? So part of what this process teaches us is how to be better at predicting how to be better at [00:12:00] predicting things that are very difficult to predict. Client closing a UM revenue. All very difficult to predict. What can we do to figure this stuff out and how can we work backwards from where we're trying to go.

[00:12:19] What I would say is we do not do it all at the beginning of the year. We do the first quarter in the context of the annual. Okay. Because then you might wanna adjust, which is why I was saying take this from. Experience. Be careful about going right out of the gates with 25. Give yourself maybe a little bit of a buildup when you're gonna do your meeting goals or whatever.

[00:12:44] So you'd come up with your most important things for the quarter, and then you'd actually break down, okay, how are we gonna get that done? So it's just literally. Apparently, there's a lot of things I have like allergic reaction to. Another one is the elephant thing, [00:13:00] like you eat an elephant, one bite at a time.

[00:13:01] Why are we eating an elephant? I don't wanna eat an elephant ever. So also something I don't like, but like breaking the goal into bite-sized pieces, and that's what that quarterly campaign's gonna do. But there's more on the business plan. I wanna go over that growth plan formula, which is basically, we're gonna have some math, math thing right now.

[00:13:22] So we sometimes do this on the three year, by the way, as opposed to the one year. But you can do it on either one. If you think about, you know, three years from now, what does success look like? All right, let's take that number. Let's say that's capacity, that's like done for us. Like we don't need more than this.

[00:13:39] And you basically look and you say, okay, if that's my capacity or my three-year target, or whatever it is, what's my average client? And let me divide very simple. Let me divide my available capacity by my average client size and come up with how many clients is that? And if we're doing it on the [00:14:00] three year, then you would take that number of clients and you would divide by the number of years you have to get there.

[00:14:06] It really makes it so much more accessible. So now you're basically giving yourself that client goal. So EOS, pure, and this is why we're trying to adapt it a little bit. EOS pure would say revenue and profit, which of course if you're an entrepreneur, you care about, let's not like, I mean, that matters. I think the bit that's difficult in this business is how much of the revenue is out of our control, and so that's why we switched from a UM because a UM also reflects market.

[00:14:40] So we switched ours from a OM to clients. Mm-hmm. Because it was like we have more control over how many clients we take and how many clients we serve. If we structure our client relationships, minimums and all of that kind of thing in the right way, we're gonna get to a OM and we're gonna get to revenue.

[00:14:58] So I don't mind [00:15:00] revenue and a UM being there. I just think it almost just needs an additional piece, which is the client goal. Because we can always say yes to any client. And the reason this is a great segue is it goes to target market. So when you think about target market, the way our EOS person, Lisa is her name, the way she pushes us is she'll be like, how big is that market?

[00:15:25] So like for us, we would say it's, it's boutiques, right? We have a definition of that. We have a bunch of criteria. If there was a scorecard that you could check off of what, how we define a boutique. We like founder led, right? So we have all these kind of boxes that can be checked. What I don't know is how big that market is.

[00:15:49] Now I could find out there are databases that would allow me to do the work, but it's difficult I think to scope the size of a target market. But the [00:16:00] reason she pushes this on this, and I really do, I see it, and I know we need to probably do the math part, is if the target market is too big. So for example.

[00:16:15] If Greg said My target market is RIAs and family offices, that is monster, monster size, it's huge. So the pushback would be okay, Greg, if that is, I think there are 300,000 advisors in the us. So Greg, are you as one person who also is wearing a lot of hats, gonna have time to talk to 300,000 advisors? No.

[00:16:44] Okay, how do we make that target market smaller? So Greg could say, well, you know what? My target market is RIAs and family offices in Northern California and Pacific Northwest. [00:17:00] Now I'm picking something arbitrary. But you'd want to be doing the target market of your ideal client. You wanna do that first and then use that to inform your overall target market.

[00:17:14] We want a more manageable size. This is how you take these big things and you make them bite size. It's not an elephant though. It can be something else like a pumpkin pie. Okay. Like we're making it bite size and, and it's telling us what to do next. So, quarterly campaign idea for Greg could be, you know what, we're gonna start with Northern California.

[00:17:39] Or whatever it is, and my goal this quarter is to have 15 meetings with RIAs and family offices in Northern California or whatever. It's right. For Liz, it might be, we're gonna go to a conference and we're gonna do a conference campaign and we're gonna come up with measurables of what does [00:18:00] success look like at that conference.

[00:18:02] Right. Typically shortcut if you do a conference, if you get one client out of that conference. It's a whip usually pays for itself and then some. So that's our sort of cheat on any sort of event or conference. Okay. So we've gotta get this target market down to a number that's manageable for the sales business development team that we have.

[00:18:32] So like we have one. Which is Justin. Maybe I'm a half, I don't know. So maybe we have one and a half, but typically, like we're not gonna have this huge Sales Client Act team that's gonna be out there canvassing, you know, the us. So it's gotta be a number that one person can manage. It's not that you have to touch the, you don't have to own the entire target market, but try to shrink it down.

[00:18:55] So what might be interesting if you did the work and it was a [00:19:00] huge number. You said, you know what? Right now let's look at our clients. Let's pretend that geographically they're mostly on the eastern seaboard. I don't know. Okay. So if that's true, then that's, how does that narrow it? Just things like that that make it more manageable for proactive planning for quarterly campaigns.

[00:19:22] The other thing that's big in here is what do they value? So you, when you do target market, you have demographics, you have, is it geographics, demographics or is geographic is part of demographic. There's three things. Demographic, psychographic, and one other. And I dunno if it's a graphic or not. Well, whatever.

[00:19:45] So that can be part of it. Age, you know, anything you can screen on revenue of the business type of business. Things like. Size of the firm. You could say size of [00:20:00] the firm, a UM. You could also say size of the firm in employees. Wanna know why that matters? Red tape. Red tape sucks. So if you are trying to get somebody to take a chance on you because you're in the earlier party, or evolution as a firm, if you can find.

[00:20:20] A solo practitioner or somebody who is making their own decisions about investments that is gonna be in your favor because they don't have somebody else who's gonna go, yeah, but have we thought about this? Or have we looked at BlackRock though? Doesn't BlackRock have that strategy? So like, we don't want that firm.

[00:20:38] So you can also do it by size of firm or size of investment committee. These are all things, by the way, that are in a database like Dakota. Because they have to report these stats to the SEC, so you can screen on them. So they are demographics. Psychographic is different. Interestingly, oftentimes [00:21:00] core values of the company apply to the client.

[00:21:06] So if one of core values is simplicity. Then if you have a client who comes to you with a hella a lot of complexity, you are like, no, no, thank you. Right? So a lot of times that's another way you can get at the psychographic, is look at your own core values and then create some type of scorecard. I love the idea of a red flags list on phrases.

[00:21:30] I always say if somebody says they need a billion dollars yesterday, they are not for us. And it's not just that it's like crazy. To have that mindset, in my opinion. 'cause it's so unrealistic. There's something about it around the entitlement that gets me. It's like, I should have a billion dollars yesterday.

[00:21:51] Should you though? And why? Clearly the market doesn't think you should or you'd have it. So what's going on here? There's something about that like, [00:22:00] I deserve it and I don't have it yet, and it's not, and no accountability for why they don't. So the psychographic is a little bit tougher, but it's also work that matters.

[00:22:12] I think, again, we re-underwrite all of this target market and the whole thing every year. So you can change as you change, but one of the things I've been thinking about for us is LinkedIn. So if someone really doesn't believe in LinkedIn. Do we have other ways to get them there? Yes. Like we can do other ways of filling the funnel and engaging the funnel, but there other ways are not really as powerful.

[00:22:42] And so we've, we have, like if someone's not great at LinkedIn, we have other things, other sort of tricks. We in our bag of tricks that we can, you know, okay, let's try this, but they just don't work as well. So I'm kind of like, why are we dicking around with that then if you don't believe in LinkedIn, we're not for you.

[00:22:58] Sorry. Sure, there's lots of [00:23:00] marketers that'll help you, but we're not the right firm. Not saying that that's where we're gonna end up, but I'm feeling that more because it is a mindset. It's a mindset of being brave enough to put yourself out there on social media and sound like a person, not a walking, you know, portfolio.

[00:23:18] And if that's not your mindset, like maybe this system isn't for you. You have to meet the people somewhere. So that could be LinkedIn, that could be conferences. You could go on the podcast circuit, you could go on a speaking circuit, but you have to go, you have to have a broad sort of top of funnel tool, which then would go to the newsletter, which then would get activated through webinars and you know, bottom up sales work, right?

[00:23:49] That would then lead to clients. To us. There's more to it than just LinkedIn. But if you don't have that, [00:24:00] what's the top of funnel thing that gets people to sign up for the newsletter? That's where the problem is. Because if we say to a client, all right, our main goal, this is like the funnel we want you to build, how do we get people in if we don't use LinkedIn?

[00:24:17] That's where I struggle. I'm open to feedback there. And remember, your differentiators, differentiators need to be sharp edges, polarizing, attractor, repel, all the things we say about differentiators, right? So if ours are as follows, the art of storytelling, the science of human behavior, and the power of personal brand.

[00:24:45] So that last one, the power of personal brand that really matters. We have in our psychographics that the client believes in storytelling, but I don't know that we're really finding out if they believe in the power of [00:25:00] personal brand. And if I actually sat down and went back and looked at the clients that have been successful and the ones who haven't.

[00:25:07] I wonder if I would see a pattern there. I feel like we need to talk about our differentiators more than we do. We imply them. We are very good at implying things, but like then we're making people do the work, so we need to explicitly say what the differentiators are. I am trying to even train myself to use our differentiators more often explicitly.

[00:25:35] So again, on the differentiators, I want you to make sure they're sharp and then challenge yourself to use those more. Let's be real. No one wakes up and says, I can't wait to build some operational infrastructure today you are here to manage money to build something that lights you up, not chase down reports across five systems and 15 service providers.

[00:25:59] That's where [00:26:00] Ultimas Fund Solutions comes in there. Your ops dream team, consolidating all your middle and back office chaos into one clean, scalable setup. Registered funds, private funds, sma, all integrated. One team, one tech platform, one rock solid source of data. But here's the real differentiator service.

[00:26:25] I know that fund in a box sounds convenient. It's also a box. Know what? You can't put in a box? A human who picks up the phone when you call and need help. Real life people who know your name and your fund, and they care about getting it right. Ultimas was built on people doing business with people. You get institutional strength combined with boutique level service without getting stuck in a phone tree of doom.

[00:26:54] If you're ready to simplify scale and start working with a team that feels like an extension of [00:27:00] yours, check out billion dollar backstory.com/ultimas. That's ul. T-I-M-U-S. You've got the investment strategy, the vision, the track record. Now it's time to upgrade the engine behind it all with ultimas. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

[00:27:25] The information is not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation of any of the funds, services, or products, or to adopt any investment strategy. Investment values may fluctuate and past performance is not a guide to future performance. All opinions expressed by guests on the show are solely their own opinion and do not necessarily reflect those at their firm.

[00:27:45] Manager's appearance on the show does not constitute an endorsement by Stacey Haven or Haven or Capital Partners.

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