10-Year Target: The Long-Term Goal That Makes Every Other Business Decision Easier

Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the creators of the Balanced Scorecard, reported in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article that 95% of a company’s employees are unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy. Sit with that number for a second. Nineteen out of twenty people you pay every two weeks cannot tell you where the company is trying to go. That is not a communication problem. It is what happens when a company has no 10-year target: no shared destination for anyone to aim at.

I have sat across the table from founders running $8M and $15M companies who could describe next quarter’s revenue goal to the dollar and could not describe where the business would be in ten years without pausing to invent an answer on the spot. Their leadership teams felt it. Every big decision, whether to open a second location, whether to take the enterprise client that would swallow half of operations, whether to hire the expensive VP, turned into a debate with no scoreboard. Nobody was wrong, because there was nothing to be wrong against.

A 10-year target fixes that. It is one of the least glamorous tools in a Business Operating System and, in my experience, one of the highest leverage. When a leadership team commits to a single, specific, long-term goal, the hundred small arguments that used to eat their meetings start resolving themselves. This is what a 10-year target does, why so many growing companies operate without one, and how to set one that actually pulls the business forward instead of gathering dust in a slide deck.

What a 10-year target actually is

A 10-year target is a single, concrete goal that describes what your company will have become roughly a decade out. In the EOS framework it sits at the top of the Vision/Traction Organizer. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras named the same idea a BHAG, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, in their 1994 book Built to Last. Ninety.io, the software platform many operating-system-driven companies run their vision and traction on, calls it a Compelling and Audacious Goal (CAG). Different labels, one concept: a finish line far enough away to be ambitious and clear enough that everyone knows whether you crossed it.

The famous versions are easy to recognize once you know what you are looking at. Microsoft’s early “a computer on every desk and in every home.” Amazon’s “every book ever printed, in any language, available in less than 60 seconds.” Starbucks aiming to become the most recognized and respected consumer brand in the world. NASA’s commitment to land a man on the moon and return him safely before the end of the 1960s, which Collins cites as the cleanest example of the form because it had an unmistakable finish line and a date.

Your version does not need to be world-historical. For a $10M professional services firm, a real 10-year target might be “reach $60M in revenue with 80% recurring and offices in three regions.” For a trades business, it might be “become the dominant commercial HVAC contractor in the state with $40M in revenue and an owner who works because he wants to, not because the phone rings.” The scale is yours. The structure is universal.

Why founders skip it, and what it costs

Most founders I work with did not decide against setting a long-term target. They just never got to it, because it feels less urgent than the fire in front of them. Ten years is abstract. This week’s payroll is not.

The cost shows up as drift you cannot see day to day. Gallup’s workplace research has found that only about 22% of employees strongly agree that their organization’s leadership has a clear direction. When people cannot see where the company is headed, they optimize for their own patch, and you get the classic growing-company disease: every department is busy, everyone is working hard, and the business is not actually getting anywhere in particular.

The upside of getting it right is measurable. In their six-year Stanford Graduate School of Business study behind Built to Last, Collins and Porras tracked 18 visionary companies against comparison firms in the same industries. From 1926 through 1990, the comparison companies outperformed the general market by roughly 2 times. The visionary companies, the ones built around enduring purpose and audacious long-term goals, outperformed it by 15 times. A long-term target is not a poster. It is a mechanism that changes how thousands of decisions get made over years, and the results compound.

The five tests a real target has to pass

A goal only functions as a 10-year target if it survives a few hard questions. Here are the ones I use with leadership teams. Borrowed partly from the CAG discipline in the Ninety.io library and partly from twenty-plus years of watching which targets stuck and which ones evaporated.

It has a number and a date. “Be the best in our market” is a wish. “$50M in revenue by December 31, 2036” is a target. Make it SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. If you cannot tell whether you hit it, it is not one.

It is a stretch, not a fantasy. The rule of thumb I trust: your leadership team should believe there is somewhere between a 50% and 70% chance of hitting it. High enough to commit fully, low enough that it demands sustained focus from the whole company. If everyone is 100% sure you will get there, the target is too small. If nobody believes it at all, you will quietly abandon it by spring.

It connects to why the company exists. A target that has nothing to do with your purpose will not move anyone. The number is the scoreboard; the reason behind it is the fuel. When a crew member or an account manager can see how the ten-year goal ties to what the company is actually for, the goal stops being management’s and starts being theirs.

Everyone gets it in one sentence. If explaining the target requires a paragraph of qualifiers, it will not travel past the leadership team. The people in the trenches should be as clear on it as the executives. A convoluted mission statement dressed up as a goal is not a target.

You would commit 100% even at 60% odds. This is the emotional test. A real 10-year target makes the room a little uncomfortable, because it should. “Can we really do this?” is the right reaction. If the goal is safe enough to be comfortable, it will not organize anyone’s behavior.

Do not expect the first draft to be perfect. Most leadership teams take 60 to 90 days to get fully committed to a target they believe in. That is normal. Rushing it produces a number nobody owns.

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How the target cascades into this quarter

A 10-year target that lives only at the ten-year mark is useless. Its whole value is that it works backward into what your team does on Monday. The chain is straightforward, and it is the part most companies get wrong by skipping the middle rungs.

The target breaks into a 3-year picture: what the company looks like at the one-third mark, specific enough that people can nearly see it. The 3-year picture breaks into 1-year goals: the handful of things that must be true twelve months from now to stay on the ten-year pace. The 1-year goals break into quarterly Rocks: the three to seven priorities each person or team commits to over the next 90 days. This is where a platform like Ninety.io earns its place, because it keeps the whole ladder visible in one system, so a Rock owner can see exactly how this quarter’s work ladders up to the long-term goal instead of feeling like busywork.

I have watched what happens when the middle rungs are missing. A company sets an inspiring ten-year number, never builds the 3-year and 1-year steps, and by the second quarter the target is a fond memory. The Rocks are the proof that the target is real. If nobody’s 90-day priorities connect to the long-term goal, the goal was decoration.

If you have not built the quarterly layer yet, that is the place to start, and I have written separately about how quarterly Rocks turn a long-range plan into 90-day execution.

What this looks like in a real company

Early in my operations career in Saskatchewan telecom, I watched a leadership team that had every tactical meeting you could name and no shared destination. We could tell you the churn number, the install backlog, the truck-roll count. Ask where the company would be in a decade and you would get five different answers, one per executive, each privately convinced theirs was the plan. The result was predictable. Two vice presidents fought over the same budget every quarter because one was building toward a future the other did not know existed.

In my fractional COO work through Ops Harmony, I see the same pattern in professional services and trades businesses stuck between $3M and $10M. The fix is not complicated, but it is uncomfortable. I put the leadership team in a room and refuse to let them leave with five visions. We argue toward one number, one date, one picture of the company at year ten. The first session rarely lands it. Somebody’s version is too safe, somebody’s is a fantasy, and it takes a few rounds to find the target that makes everyone slightly nervous and fully committed.

The change afterward is not subtle. The next time a big client wants a custom arrangement that would pull the company off its niche, the decision takes ten minutes instead of three meetings, because the team can hold it against the ten-year target and see whether it moves them toward the goal or away from it. That is the real payoff. Not the poster on the wall, but the arguments that stop happening because there is finally a scoreboard.

Signs your company is running without one

You do not need a diagnostic tool to know whether this applies to you. A few honest questions usually settle it:

If you asked each member of your leadership team, separately, where the company will be in ten years, would you get one answer or several?
When a major opportunity shows up, does the decision get made against a known destination, or relitigated from scratch every time?
Can a front-line employee tell you what the company is ultimately working toward, in a sentence?
Do your quarterly priorities ladder up to anything beyond the current year, or does each quarter start from a blank page?
Has “where are we actually going” ever come up, unresolved, in a leadership meeting and then quietly gotten dropped?

If more than one of those lands, you are running a business without a long-term target, and the drift is costing you more than you can see from inside it.

Setting your first one

You do not need a two-day offsite to begin. Block three hours with your leadership team and one question on the whiteboard: where is this company in ten years, expressed as a single number and a date? Let people argue. Push past the first safe answer and past the fantasy answer until you land on the version that scores a 50% to 70% belief in the room. Write it down. Then, and only then, sketch the 3-year picture and the 1-year goals that would put you on pace. It will be rough. Rough and written beats polished and imaginary.

Come back to it every quarter, sharpen it, and let it settle over the next two to three months. A 10-year target is the one goal that makes every smaller goal easier to set, because it finally gives them something to point at.

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