You Set A 5 Year Revenue Target. What About Your Life?

Last Friday I asked what your business is actually for.

An asset to sell.
An income machine.
A vehicle for the life you want.
Something built to last decades.


Four different answers. Four completely different businesses.

Here's the problem with that question…

It isn't a business question.

You cannot decide whether to build something sellable without knowing whether you want to be doing this in fifteen years.

You cannot choose stable income over aggressive scale without knowing what number is genuinely enough for you.


Those aren't strategy decisions. They're personal ones.

And most business owners have never made them.

Think about the asymmetry.

You've got a revenue target for next year. Probably a three or five year number too. You could tell me your margin goals, your headcount plan, where you want the business positioned.

Now… what does your life look like in five years?

Not the business. Your life.

Where do you live?
How much of your week is yours?

What does an average Tuesday actually look like?
What are you doing with your kids, your health, your relationships, your time?

For most operators, that answer is either vague or non-existent.

Which creates a specific problem.

If you have no personal vision, the business becomes the vision by default.

And a business left to its own devices only ever wants one thing: more.

More revenue.
More staff.
More locations.
More complexity.

Not because more is right, but because there's nothing else to measure against.

Every opportunity looks like a good opportunity when you have no criteria for declining one.

That's how people end up with businesses that technically succeeded and lives they didn't choose.

Now compare that to an operator who knows exactly what they want their life to look like.

They can cap growth deliberately.

They can say no to a profitable opportunity because it costs them the thing they built the business for.

They can choose a smaller, more profitable business over a larger, more demanding one, and feel completely settled about it.

Not because they're less ambitious, but because they know what they're aiming at, so they can tell the difference between progress and drift.

That's the actual sequence, and almost everyone runs it backwards.

The life vision comes first. The business gets designed to deliver it.

Not the other way around.

So here's the work this weekend…

Before you set another target, write down what you want your life to look like in five years.

Properly. Specifically. The ordinary Tuesday, not the highlight reel.

Then look at your business and ask whether what you're currently building actually produces that.

Because a business perfectly optimised for an undefined life will still take everything you've got.

It just won't give you anything you actually wanted.

This is exactly the work I do with my 1:1 mentoring clients before we touch a single business metric. If you want the framework I use to build a 5 year vision properly, reply to this email with the word LIFE and I'll send it through.

If you know someone who would benefit from reading this, please forward it to them. It may change the trajectory of their life for the better, and the catalyst could be you.