Planning season is one of the most dangerous times for a SaaS company.
When you miss plan, it’s brutal. Morale drops, credibility with the board takes a hit, trust across the team erodes. On the flip side, when you come out of the gate hitting plan, it feels incredible. Momentum builds. Confidence compounds.
That’s why how you build the plan matters so much.
The Goldilocks framework
Jeff Epstein (former Oracle CFO, now at Bessemer) has written about what he calls the “Goldilocks” budget. Not too hot, not too cold, just right.
He points out that every boardroom is filled with competing perspectives:
The CEO often wants aspirational targets.
The board chair often wants predictability.
The CFO often wants realism.
Left unresolved, these differences lead to “denial games.” We miss the budget, then retroactively declare it wasn’t really the budget after all.
The Goldilocks approach offers a middle path: set targets with explicit probabilities.
Revenue with a 50% chance of hitting.
Profit with a 70% chance.
Public guidance (for later-stage companies) at 90%.
Sales quotas at 30%.
The point isn’t the specific numbers. It’s that you’re choosing the risk profile of the plan deliberately, up front, and aligning everyone around it.
Why I like the 50–70% plan
In my own experience, the sweet spot is a plan with a 50–70% chance of hitting.
Too safe, and you don’t push yourself to get creative about how to achieve greater outcomes.
Too aggressive, and you risk repeated misses, which are hard for the company.
A 50–70% plan sets you up to achieve most of the time while still stretching the team beyond the obvious. It forces people to come up with ideas they wouldn’t otherwise. It keeps the company pushing without demoralizing them.
The case against multi-scenario planning
A lot of finance leaders love building multiple plans — Base, Upside, Downside. I think that’s a mistake, especially for early-stage SaaS companies.
Here’s why:
Complexity. You’re suddenly maintaining three models, with three different sets of assumptions. For a lean finance team, it’s a nightmare.
Confusion. Different stakeholders latch onto different scenarios. Sales points at Upside. Finance clings to Base. Engineering ignores both. It’s chaos.
Avoidance of alignment. Multiple scenarios sidestep the real conversation — how much risk are we actually taking on as a business?
One plan forces clarity. It forces alignment. It puts everyone on the same page.
The board conversation
This probabilistic framing is especially powerful with your board.
Instead of: “Here’s the plan, we think we can hit it.”
You can say: “We’re building a plan with a ~60% chance of hitting revenue, ~70% chance of hitting profit.”
That sparks the real conversation: how much risk do we want to take on? Do we want to lean into growth with shorter runway and higher potential valuation? Or preserve runway and take fewer swings?
Once that conversation is had, you’ve created alignment. And alignment is everything.
Cascading the plan
Once the company-level plan is set, the next step is translating it into department-level budgets.
I’ve written before about why I like to frame department budgets in terms of “pools” of spend. But those pools can be transferred, either within a department or outside of a department. That structure empowers leaders to make their own tradeoffs within boundaries. It shifts the conversation from “I need more budget” to “Here’s how I’ll reallocate within my budget.”
The takeaway
Planning isn’t about predicting the future with certainty. It’s about alignment.
A Goldilocks budget gives you a framework to talk about risk. Probabilistic thinking makes the conversation honest. And one plan, not many, keeps the company moving in the same direction.
Love this take (especially the Epstein distinction).