“Brandon, what’s next year’s plan?”
I was running a scale business with billions in revenue at a Fortune 100 company, and my boss called on June 30th to ask what my plan was for the following year. I didn’t have an answer. I hadn’t even started thinking about next year. I was too busy closing the quarter to hit earnings.
I never made that mistake again.
Why Q2 Is the Right Time to Plan
Now I start building next year’s budget and plan at the close of Q2 every year, without exception. It takes time to turn an initiative into a number. When’s the last time you don’t go from idea to revenue overnight? Never. You go from idea, to resourcing, to build, to test, to launch, to results and each step eats weeks.
At Forward, we’ve already identified the major capability we’re announcing in January. We know the steps required to build and test it, and we’ve already modeled its financial contribution to our partners for next year.
The Same Rule Applies to Your Payments Business
I encourage every software platform we work with to think about their multi-revenue-stream business the same way.
If you’re a software company monetizing the payments flowing through your platform, a good benchmark is your payments income should be equal to or greater than your software revenue. If it isn’t, that’s not a footnote, but your biggest room for growth. The question isn’t whether the opportunity exists. It’s what steps you’re going to take to close the gap.
A Simple Diagnostic: Did You Make Progress This Year?
Here’s how I evaluate the AI and SaaS platforms not yet leveraging Forward: did they make material progress on payments this year? What about the year before?
If the answer is no, twice, that’s a structural limitation holding you back. It could be a bad contract, an initiative that was never resourced, or an offer that was never competitive to begin with.
Identify those barriers today so you have time to make an informed, researched decision on how to move the needle. Platforms that start this work in the Summer go into next year with initiatives already showing results. Platforms that wait until December go into next year explaining why they haven’t started.
What’s Your Plan for Next Year?
Every year, the same call happens. Someone asks what’s next, and too many operators don’t have an answer because they were busy closing the quarter in front of them.
Don’t be that operator twice. What’s your plan for next year?
