Establishing North Star Alignment

Long-term Outlook

Your entire marketing strategy must stem from an ultimate orientation to the ideal outcome the business’ stakeholders have for the business. What is their vision and goal? Do they want to grow to IPO the business in a certain timeframe? Do they want to hold onto the business and take distributions from the profits for a long time? Understanding this is paramount in ultimately determining how the business can grow, the culture be established, and the marketing program be carried out.

Here are the 5 core things you (and your marketing team) need to understand:

(1) Historical Equity / Debt

Helps set the baseline for a growth strategy to answer: how much are the stakeholders in for, and how much will they likely expect to sell for to see a return on their investment?

• How much money has been fundraised up to this point (equity/debt)?

• Did the stakeholders acquire the business (if yes, for how much)?

(2) Stakeholder Makeup / General Cap Table

Does not need to include hard equity numbers, but should provide an understanding of the major stakeholders to provide transparency into the ultimate decision-makers who will be setting financial thresholds.

(3) Industry Valuation Standards

What do businesses in your category typically trade for? What are their valuations based on? Usually, this is either a multiple of the business EBITDA or a forecast of future sales. There may be other strategic components to consider such as intellectual property, brand, etc.

(4) Exit Strategies

What exit strategies are stakeholders considering through Darkroom's lens? Identifying optimal exit strategies for financial returns. This could mean an acquisition event, an IPO, or just sizable cash distributions from net profits.

(5) Core Objectives & Challenges

What are the major milestones or initiatives the company will need to execute properly in order to reach a state where the above exit strategies become viable? This is more of a short brainstorm that helps focus everyone on the things that matter.

Annual Outlook (Includes top-line revenue goal)

An annual marketing outlook needs to be a collaboration with company stakeholders and marketing leaders. The goal with this is to provide the team with a bird’s eye on what needs to be achieved for the calendar year and how to anticipate initiatives. Here’s what to include:

(1) Top-line revenue projections and goal

• Financial goal-setting should be done after understanding the long-term outlook and where the company is pacing overall to the stakeholders’ goals

• In the end, you want to work with the stakeholders to create a worst-case, conservative case, and goal case for top-line revenue

• How do you get there? Run a projection of what revenue can be expected from returning customers over the entire year, then reverse engineer how to hit your worst, conversative, and goal case with net-new customer acquisition

• What are the specific/relevant obstacles hindering us from hitting those targets?

  • Break those obstacles down into solution-oriented ideas

  • Prioritize those ideas based on what will work fastest and most sustainably to prop us up for the next set of priorities

(2) Annual Campaign Planning

• Determine what high-level campaign launches or improvements are a priority for hitting customer acquisition and retention targets

• “Sketch out” a roadmap for evergreen (or longer-running) campaigns that could be operationalized and layered on top of one another in a simple list format

(3) Calendar Planning

• Create a brief Quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) roadmap that includes:

  1. High-level sketch of the QoQ growth strategy priorities/thoughts

  2. Major promotion event timing/campaigns

  3. Seasonality notes

  4. Relevant product development / launch timing