<aside> 📋 Frequency: Annually | Time: 90 min | Trigger: First two weeks of December

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Most consultants start January with a revenue goal and no structural plan to hit it. Without an annual planning session that connects your revenue target to offer design, capacity, and pipeline cadence, you're optimizing inside the same constraints you had last year. This SOP produces a concrete operating plan — not goals, but the specific decisions that make the goals achievable.

Prerequisites

• Full-year financial summary — total revenue, revenue by offer type, revenue by client, and realization rate by engagement
• Q4 Quarterly Practice Health Check results — the final quarter's debrief and revenue model serve as the input baseline for this session
• Your current offer documentation with pricing and delivery structure for each active offer
• Exit Readiness Check complete or running concurrently — the systems gap list from that SOP feeds directly into this session's priorities

Procedure

1. Set your revenue target for next year. Make it specific and grounded: not an aspiration, but a number you can defend based on offer pricing, capacity, and close rate. If you can't explain how you'd hit it, it's not a target — it's a wish.
2. Run the Revenue Goal Reverse Engineer skill with your annual revenue target, current average engagement value by offer, historical close rate, and available capacity hours as input. Review the output for required pipeline volume, outreach cadence, and any structural gaps between the target and the current model.
3. Run the Offer Suite Designer skill with your current offer structure, the revenue model output, and your Ideal Client Profile as input. Review the output for recommended changes to offer mix, pricing, or structure that close the gap between current model and target.
4. Run the Annual Plan Builder skill with your revenue target, revised offer suite, required pipeline volume, and top systems gaps from the Exit Readiness Check. Review the output for a quarter-by-quarter operating plan with specific cadence commitments, systems projects, and decision points.
5. Review the operating plan output against known commitments for next year — scheduled engagements, capacity constraints, planned time off. Adjust quarter-by-quarter targets to reflect actual available capacity, not theoretical maximums.
6. Identify Q1 actions that need to start in January to hit Q1 targets: updated offer documentation for the Fee Review and Adjustment SOP, capacity targets for the first Capacity Planning Review, and pipeline volume required for the first Weekly Pipeline Reviews of the year.
7. Save the annual plan as your operating reference for the year. Schedule all four Quarterly Practice Health Checks now — Q1 through Q4 — before closing this session.

Expected Outcome

You'll have a revenue-grounded annual operating plan with a revised offer suite, a quarter-by-quarter cadence with specific pipeline and capacity targets, a systems project list integrated from the Exit Readiness Check, and all four quarterly health checks scheduled before January starts.

<aside> ⚠️ Common mistakes:

— Setting a revenue target without running the reverse engineer. A target that can't be traced back to offer volume, close rate, and pipeline cadence is decoration. The reverse engineer is what makes it a plan.

— Planning to maximum theoretical capacity instead of actual available capacity. If the plan only works when everything goes right, it's not a plan — it's a best case. Build the operating cadence around your realistic available hours, then decide what growth requires structurally.

— Finishing the session without scheduling the Q1-Q4 health checks. An annual plan with no accountability cadence is a document. Scheduling all four quarterly reviews before you close December planning is what makes it a system.

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