Planning sets the direction and defines the metrics that tell you whether you are progressing.
Planning is a management discipline practised across the organisation, not handed down from the top. Toyota makes the point: continuous improvement was never a leadership-team concept there. Kaizen was practised by every manager and every employee, every day. That is what made it work.
A plan is a goal that answers four things
In its simplest form:
1. What are we going to do?
2. From when to when?
3. Why?
4. The metrics which define success, expressed as outcomes.
Most plans fail the fourth. They describe activity — launch the campaign, hire the team, ship the release — and never say what has to be true afterwards for it to have been worth doing.
Metrics are the backbone
A plan without metrics is a wish list with dates on it. Metrics do three jobs: they tell you whether you are winning while there is still time to change it, they settle arguments that would otherwise run on opinion, and they make accountability possible without surveillance.
The trap is measuring what is easy rather than what matters. Activity is easy to count. Outcomes are harder and are the only thing that tells you anything.
The smallest useful version this week
Take your current plan — the real one, whatever it actually is — and write it onto one page against those four questions. Most teams discover the second and fourth are missing entirely: no end date, and no definition of done.
That is not a failure of the exercise. That is the exercise.
A worked example
Every worked example in the canon uses the same company — Burke & Wills EV, a hypothetical Australian off-road EV maker — so the picture builds across frameworks instead of restarting each time.
# Burke & Wills EV — Plan Canvas (MQ1)
What is our plan, and what metrics tell us if we are successful?
Our 2025 plan, distilled from the 7 Questions of Leadership into one page. We're at the inflection from proven R&D to commercial launch. Tech's done — 50 beta units delivered, IP65 certified, +85 beta NPS. This year is about turning that into a real business: getting the Wills out the door, building the network to support it, and owning the category before anyone else does.
Strategic Context
- Year: 2025 (Jan 1 – Dec 31)
- Stage: Post–Series A ($25M raised, 24-month runway). Series B prep underway.
- The one thing: Launch the Wills. Everything else serves that.
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Retrospective Distillation — Start / Stop / Continue across the 7 Pillars
For each pillar from our 7 Questions of Leadership work, we asked what to stop, start, and continue this year — then named the annual focus.
1. Vision & Purpose
- STOP treating ourselves as an R&D outfit proving a concept — the concept is proven.
- START operating as a launch company: "Adventure without compromise," shipped to real customers.
- CONTINUE holding the line that sustainability never costs capability.
Annual Focus: Become the company that actually delivers Australia's off-road EV, not the one that promises it.
2. Market & Customer
- STOP chasing the whole 4WD/SUV market — we don't fight Toyota on price or volume in Year 1.
- START targeted acquisition of "Adventure Alex" (42, $180K household, 6–10 outback trips/year) across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.
- CONTINUE converting the early-adopter beta community — 40% beta referral is our warmest channel.
Annual Focus: Capture 500 of the ~8,000-strong early-adopter segment with the Wills.
3. Strategy & Positioning
- STOP entertaining the alternatives we already rejected — mass-market EV and IP licensing.
- START pressing our uncontested first-mover claim: "the only EV genuinely engineered for Australian off-road conditions" (−10°C to +55°C thermal, IP65+, 800km+ range, 3,500kg towing, real off-road geometry).
- CONTINUE widening the moat the incumbents can't follow — diesel-only LandCruiser, US-design Cybertruck, Rivian not sold here.
Annual Focus: Own the premium adventure EV niche outright while it's still uncontested.
4. Business Model & Value
- STOP carrying the cost of a pure beta-fleet model with no commercial volume behind it.
- START D2C sales at $89,000/unit ASP, building toward 22% gross margin at our 500-unit run rate.
- CONTINUE the direct-to-consumer relationship plus regional service partners — we keep the customer, partners keep them on the road.
Annual Focus: Stand up a $50M revenue engine at $89K ASP and 22% margin, EBITDA at −$5M by design while we scale.
5. Customer Experience
- STOP the hand-built, white-glove-everything beta delivery — it doesn't survive 500 units.
- START a repeatable delivery and onboarding journey that holds quality at scale, plus the remote charging backbone (50 stations) so the promise is real off-grid.
- CONTINUE the "Would you take it to the outback?" quality test on every vehicle and the 4.9/5 experience our beta owners already rate us.
Annual Focus: Carry beta-grade delight to commercial scale — +65 NPS across 500 deliveries.
6. Employee Experience
- STOP running on founder heroics and a skeleton crew.
- START hiring 45 people into a production-ready org, including the Regional Sales Manager — Queensland, and running 100% of the team through the adventure program.
- CONTINUE the culture that got us here — Friday adventure stories, the annual company expedition, open-door engineering, and our values: Explorer Spirit, Authentic Australian, Sustainable Future, Adventure Together. "Join the expedition."
Annual Focus: Build a team that can build the cars — 45 hires, 85% engagement, 90% key-talent retention.
7. Goals & Priorities
- STOP spreading effort across the full product line — Burke (Year 2–3) and Sturt (Year 4–5) wait.
- START the three needle-shifters: Wills launch, national service network, brand leadership.
- CONTINUE Series B readiness so the metrics we hit this year fund the next.
Annual Focus: Three goals, one model, this year — Wills, network, brand.
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The Three Needle-Shifting Goals → One Annual Goal
Our 7-pillar work surfaced a dozen candidate outcomes. We consolidated them down to three needle-shifters, then to a single annual goal.
Step 1 — Outcome Inventory (the candidates)
| # | Candidate outcome | Pillar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wills launched, 500 units delivered | Vision / Priorities |
| 2 | Zero critical quality issues across all deliveries | Customer Experience |
| 3 | $50M revenue at $89K ASP | Business Model |
| 4 | 22% gross margin achieved | Business Model |
| 5 | 500 of ~8,000 early-adopter segment captured | Market |
| 6 | 2,500 qualified leads generated | Market |
| 7 | 35% test-drive → purchase conversion held | Market |
| 8 | 12 regional service partnerships operational | Customer Experience |
| 9 | 50 remote charging stations live | Customer Experience |
| 10 | 45% unaided brand awareness (from 5%) | Strategy |
| 11 | +65 customer NPS at scale | Customer Experience |
| 12 | 45 hires, 85% engagement, 90% key-talent retention | Employee Experience |
Step 2 — The Three Needle-Shifters
| Goal | Target | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Wills launch | 500 units delivered, zero critical quality issues | Sarah Mitchell (CEO) |
| National service network | 12 regional service partnerships operational | James Thornton (CCO) |
| Brand leadership | 45% unaided awareness in target segment | Lisa Park (Marketing Director) |
Supporting owners across the plan: Emma Richardson (Head of Customer Experience) on NPS and delivery journey, David Chen (Head of Production) on the 500-unit build and quality gate, Marcus Webb (People & Culture Director) on the 45 hires and engagement.
Step 3 — The Single Annual Goal
"Launch the Wills model successfully into the Australian adventure EV market — 500 units delivered, $50M revenue, +65 NPS — establishing Burke & Wills as Australia's off-road EV leader."
Why this and not twelve goals: the launch is the business this year. Revenue, margin, awareness, network and NPS are all downstream of getting 500 great Wills into customers' driveways. If we only achieve one thing in 2025, it's this — and the rest follow.
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Top-5 Success Metrics
| # | Metric | Type | 2025 Target | Source of truth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wills units delivered | Primary | 500 (zero critical quality issues) | SAP |
| 2 | Revenue | Revenue | $50M ($89,000 ASP × 500) | Xero / Fathom |
| 3 | Customer NPS at scale | Customer | +65 | Delighted |
| 4 | Unaided brand awareness | Growth | 45% (from 5%) | Brand Track |
| 5 | Gross margin | Operational | 22% | Xero / Fathom |
Watch-line targets behind the top 5: 2,500 qualified leads (HubSpot), 35% test-drive → purchase conversion, 12 service partners and 50 charging stations operational, 45 new hires at 85% engagement (Culture Amp). EBITDA lands at −$5M — planned, not a miss, while we invest into scale.
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Operating Cadence
We review this plan on the 1/12th rule — the annual goal broken into monthly waypoints.
- ELT weekly sync — Mondays 9:00–10:30 (CEO). Wins / Scorecard / Goal progress / Roadblocks.
- Daily production standup — 7:00, 15 min (Production Supervisor) — guards the 500-unit run rate and the zero-critical-issue gate.
- Monthly commercial review — first Friday, 90 min (CCO) — leads, conversion, network, brand.
- Manager 1:1s fortnightly; Board monthly; quarterly planning offsite.
Plan, goals and progress live in Waymaker; the exec scorecard renders in Power BI off SAP, Xero, HubSpot, Delighted and Brand Track. One plan, one page, one source of truth.