business plan key milestones

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How to Use Milestones to Create a Roadmap for Your Business

7 min. read

Updated August 1, 2024

Using milestones to create a roadmap for your business is a necessary step in writing a business plan. It’s the third step for effective planning, following developing your business strategy and defining the tactics to support it .

In this step, you’ll learn how to use milestones to create a strategic roadmap for your business.

What are business milestones?

Milestones are goals that you set for business, with dates and the person or team responsible. For example:

A business plan and strategy can’t turn into a real business without milestones. Milestones are what you use to convert your business strategy and tactics into action.

Just like a milestone on the side of a road marks how far you’ve gone, a milestone in business tracks your progress as you grow and implement your plan. They’re what you use to manage responsibilities, track results, and convert your idea into a functioning business.

How do milestones relate to strategy and tactics?

Previously, I’ve written about building your business strategy and then creating tactics to implement that strategy . Just like there’s a link between tactics and strategy, there’s a link between tactics and milestones. 

Tactics are the things you’re going to do to implement your strategy. For example, using social media marketing might be a tactic that’s part of your marketing strategy.

Milestones are used to add specific details to implement your tactics. Continuing the example above, a good milestone would be to establish a new Instagram account for your business and start updating it regularly. 

It may even be useful for you to outline how your strategy flows into a tactic and then to a milestone like this:

Marketing Strategy: Educate millennials about the environmentally friendly nature of our products.

Tactic: Social media marketing

Milestone: New Instagram account, established by the end of Q3, managed by our social media manager with a promotional budget of $1,000/month.

Now keep in mind that this is a very simple representation of this process. More than likely your strategy will have multiple tactics and each tactic will have multiple milestones. Think of them as a pyramid, building up toward the execution of your overall strategy.

What makes a good milestone:

A good milestone clearly lays out the parameters of the task at hand and sets expectations for its executions. When planning out specific milestones you’ll need to have:

• • A description of the task
• • A due date

And lastly, you’ll need a responsible person to manage and meet these milestones. It may even make sense to work with this individual on setting the specifics of each milestone and task.

Milestones are key to management

You’ll use your milestones to manage your business better . Once a month, when you meet with your team to review your business strategy and business numbers, you’ll review your milestones to make sure your plans are on track. If there are problems or changes, this is when you can make course corrections.

Reviewing your milestones monthly gives you more opportunities to spot problems and identify opportunities. If you only check in on your progress once a quarter, or potentially just once a year, you have fewer opportunities to adjust course and change direction. In virtually every business, there’s always new information to review and changes in what your customers want and need. 

A frequent review of your goals allows you to be nimble and adjust quickly when you need to. For more on why you should review your milestones and other business metrics frequently, check out my post on the topic .

3 types of business milestones

When you’re building and growing a business, you should end up scheduling three different types of milestones:

• • Plan review
• • Assumptions validation
• • Implementation

Plan review

All businesses should have “plan review” milestones. These might be the most important milestones that you create.

The plan review milestone sets aside time to review your business strategy, tactics, forecast and budget. If you don’t regularly check your plan and make adjustments, you can easily get off track. Not to say that you should follow the plan blindly, either. Instead, a regular plan review meeting will give you a chance to look at what’s working, what’s not, and revise as you go.

Here at Palo Alto Software , we have a monthly plan review meeting on the second Friday of the month. We get our management team together, review our financials, and talk about what got done last month and what’s in the pipeline. This monthly meeting is critical for making changes and adjustments to our strategy and changing course as necessary.

For early-stage startups, it might just be a few of you that get together and there might not be much in the way of revenue or expenses to review. That’s okay. Instead, your monthly meeting will focus on the next steps you can take to make your business idea a reality, and what progress you’ve made so far. 

You’ll review your progress on implementing your strategy and tactics, such as developing a new marketing campaign, increasing the number of customers who make a second order by 15 percent, or signing the lease on new office space.

Milestones to validate your assumptions

When you’re just starting your business and figuring out if you’ve got the right strategy, you’re going to create milestones to help you validate your assumptions . These milestones are set for interviewing potential customers to figure out if they have the problem you think they have, and to discover if they’re interested in your solution. You’ll also work to try and figure out what your pricing should be.

Remember, in the early days of your business, you’re making a lot of guesses – assumptions, really – about what your customers need and want. Your initial strategy is a collection of guesses about the problems your potential customers have, how they want their problems solved, and what they’re willing to pay for your solution. Your milestones at this stage should be geared around validating those assumptions so you can build a successful business.

Some example milestones might be:

• • Interview 20 potential customers in my primary market segment
• • Research pricing models of my competitors
• • Creating a preview landing page for my business to see what potential customers think

The milestones that you create at this stage should be focused on the goal of finding what’s called “product/market fit.” This means that you’ve found a target market that’s interested in buying your product and that your product solves a real problem for your customers.

It’s very likely that you find out that you don’t have good product/market fit right away. That’s OK. It’s easy to make changes to your strategy, come up with new assumptions, and go back and test them again with your potential customers. That’s the benefit of validating your assumptions early in the business startup process – you haven’t invested too much in building your business yet and can easily change directions if necessary.

Implementing your strategy

Once your assumptions have been validated, you’ll start creating implementation milestones. These are the tasks you’ll do to actually build your business. You’ll be doing things like building your product, setting up your office or shop, developing your website, and more.

Implementation milestones are typically for companies that have progressed out of the very early stages of starting up and have a proven strategy that they know is going to work. These milestones are all about getting things done to execute your strategy.

With Growth Planning, you adjust as you go

Your milestone schedules will evolve as you go, so don’t spend a lot of time initially documenting every last step you’re going to take to launch your business. Instead, plot out the next few steps you’re going to take. When those steps are done, come back and add more steps as you go.

After all, business planning not just a one-time event. It’s all about creating a plan, running that plan, reviewing the results, and revising before you take next steps.

Having solid milestones will make that process easier and more efficient, helping you build a better business, faster. You can do this process manually or try using business plan software with a built-in milestone planner to simplify the creation, tracking, review, and revision process.

The next post in this series talks about your business model —how you’re going to make money. Read on to learn about the final component of your Lean Plan.

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Noah Parsons

Before joining Palo Alto Software , Noah Parsons was an early Internet marketing and product expert in the Silicon Valley. He joined Yahoo! in 1996 as one of its first 101 employees and become Producer of the Yahoo! Employment property as part of the Yahoo! Classifieds team before leaving to serve as Director of Production at Epinions.com. He is a graduate of Princeton University. Noah devotes most of his free time to his three young sons. In the winter you'll find him giving them lessons on the ski slopes, and in summer they're usually involved in a variety of outdoor pursuits. Noah is currently the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of the online business plan app LivePlan.

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How to Create a Business Plan Timeline

Below you will learn what a business plan timeline is and where it belongs in your business plan.  

What is a Business Plan Timeline?

A business plan timeline lays out the key milestones you hope to achieve in your business and when you plan to accomplish them.   

The Importance of a Timeline

In running a business, it is very easy to get caught up in day-to-day activities and putting out fires. When you do this, unfortunately, it’s hard to grow your business. Having a timeline that lists your key goals forces you to spend time each day, week, and month to work on key growth initiatives.

Also, if you are seeking funding, investors and lenders need to understand these milestones and your projected dates for accomplishing them. This helps give them confidence that you will successfully execute your plan. 

Also, having a timeline helps you better prioritize your time and hire the right people at the right time.

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Where does the timeline go in the business plan.

The timeline belongs primarily in the Operations Plan of your business plan, however, you may include some highlights within the Executive Summary as well. 

Using the established key milestones you have created, you will now assign a timeframe to those milestones to show when you expect to reach each milestone. Remember, use historical data and be realistic in your timeline so that you can meet these goals.  

What Should Be Included in the Timeline?

Your business is currently at point A. Where you want to go is to point B. Now getting from point A to point B requires you to complete milestones.

And the most important ones are what I call “risk-mitigating milestones.” These are the milestones that help eliminate the risk of your company failing.

Some examples of “risk mitigating milestones” may include:

• Finding a location for your business, store, warehouse, etc.
• Getting the permits and licenses
• Building the facility/store
• Hiring and training staff
• New products and services introductions
• Store opening date
• Key employee hires
• Revenue milestones (date when sales exceed $X, when sales exceed $Y, etc.)
• Key partnerships executed
• Key customer contracts secured
• Key financial events (future funding rounds, IPO, etc.)

As an entrepreneur or small business owner, it is your job to identify your risk-mitigating milestones and prioritize them so that you can take steps each day toward the larger business goals.  

How to Create & Prioritize Your Milestone List

Create your detailed risk-mitigating milestone list first. The goal should be to list approximately six major milestones in the next year, five milestones in the following year, and so on for up to five years (so include two in year 5). 

You can use this as a “To Do” list and ensure you achieve your goals each day, week, and month, further developing your business strategy.

Next to each milestone, include the expected timeframe, due date, and the budget you will need to attain them. For example, you may want to launch a billboard marketing campaign over a 6-month period (Expected Due Date: 6/30/2022), and the expected cost is $18,000.

After you create your milestone list, you need to prioritize them. Decide on which milestones you should achieve with the initial funding if needed. Ideally, these will get you to the point where you are generating revenues or profits. This is because the ability to generate revenues significantly reduces the risk of your venture; as it proves to lenders and investors that customers want the products and/or services you are offering.

By setting up your milestones, you will figure out what you can accomplish for less money. And the fact is, the less money you need to raise, the easier it generally is to raise it (mainly because the easiest to raise money sources offer lower dollar amounts).  

How to Develop a Timeline For Your Business Plan

You’ve already completed the hard part. 

Now, it’s time to schedule your milestone list and convert it into a timeline format to give you a quick visual reference. Be sure that your timeline includes all the milestones that you’ve deemed a priority.

There are many businesses that prefer to develop Gantt charts, while others may prefer a calendar, Excel sheet, or another preferred format. Choose the format that works best for you.

There are several format options and platforms to choose from if you do a quick search for “ create a timeline online .” However, keep in mind that it’s not how pretty the timeline is, it’s about functionality and the ease of use to track the progress of all the tasks completed. 

Here are a couple of options:

Source: SlideTeam

This one-page timeline is a downloadable template that is clean and easy to read and follow. While it doesn’t have all the details on this one page, it has enough information to help business leaders understand if the team is on track.

Source: Office Timeline

This is a PowerPoint Presentation add-in that allows you to create a custom Gantt chart with your Microsoft Office account. While the chart above says a 5-year plan, note that they did not include the parts of the milestones beyond Year 1. This may be to reduce clutter and keep focused on the near-future goals. 

Source: GanttPro

This Gantt chart online platform offers another alternative allowing you to assign tasks to others on your team and monitor their progress all in one place. It also tracks the time to complete each task so that you can better schedule in the future for similar projects.

These are only a few of the platforms available online to create an amazing timeline for your business plan. In the beginning, it may be a lot of work to set up, but once you obtain the funding you are seeking, it’ll be well worth the time and effort.

By creating a timeline as early as possible in the business planning process, you can begin to establish realistic goals that can help improve day-to-day decision-making and boost confidence among current and potential stakeholders.

Other Helpful Business Plan Articles & Templates