The 90 day revenue plan

A company that needs capital in the next ninety days has two real options. Go outside and raise under pressure, at a discount, from investors who can see the clock. Or go to the people who already own it, the founders, the existing investors, the board, and ask them to carry the company across the line.

The second option is usually better. Insiders already understand the business, the terms are faster to negotiate, and a bridge from insiders signals confidence to everyone who comes later. It is also usually harder, because insiders have watched money go in and have not yet watched it come back. Asking them for more without changing anything is asking them to repeat the last decision and hope for a different result.

What changes their mind is not a bigger vision. It is a smaller, sharper plan: what revenue arrives, from whom, by which date, and what it costs to get there.

Why most bridge requests fail

Bridge conversations fail for predictable reasons.

The plan is a forecast, not a plan. A forecast says revenue will grow. A plan names the customer, the offer, the owner, the date and the evidence. Insiders have seen plenty of forecasts.

The ask is sized to survive, not to win. Companies ask for just enough to reach the next milestone, so the bridge buys time without changing the trajectory, and everyone is back at the table in six months with less leverage.

The money funds the same activity. If the bridge pays for more of what produced the current results, insiders already know what it will produce.

Nobody owns the numbers. When the plan has no single owner and no weekly cadence, the first missed week becomes the first broken promise.

The sequence that works

The 90 day revenue plan reorders the work so the company earns its bridge rather than asking for it. The sequence is simple to state and difficult to execute well.

Days 1 to 30: Price and collect. Start with money the company has already earned or already gives away. Every service delivered for free, every bit of scope creep absorbed, every pilot that never converted becomes a priced offer. Every receivable past terms gets a collection plan with a named owner. Every contract up for renewal gets repriced to reflect the value actually delivered. This phase rarely makes headlines, but it produces cash quickly, and more importantly it proves discipline to the people being asked to fund the bridge.

Days 31 to 60: Sell to the yeses. The fastest new revenue comes from customers who already said yes once. Map every current and recent customer against what else the company can deliver to them. Build one or two packaged offers with clear pricing, a short sales cycle and a defined delivery path. Put a weekly target on each one. The goal is not to launch something new. The goal is to monetize trust the company has already earned.

Days 61 to 90: Raise from strength. By now the company has a track record measured in weeks, not years. Revenue is arriving on the dates that were promised. That is when you go back to insiders, and then to outside capital, with a different conversation. Not fund us so we can try, but here is what the last sixty days produced, here is the plan for the next two quarters, and here is the round sized to accelerate it. Often that round is larger than the one the company first planned to ask for, on better terms, because the risk has visibly changed.

What makes the plan credible

Insiders and investors look for the same five things in a revenue plan, whether or not they say so.

1. Named sources. Every line ties to a customer, a segment or a contract, not to a growth rate.
2. Dates. Each source has a date it converts and a date cash arrives, and those are different dates.
3. Owners. One person is accountable for each line and reports on it weekly.
4. Cost to deliver. The plan shows what it takes to earn the revenue, so margin is visible, not assumed.
5. A cadence. A weekly review where the plan is compared to what actually happened, with changes made in the open.

A plan with those five elements does something a pitch deck cannot. It lets the people with the checkbook watch the company perform before they commit, which is the single most persuasive thing a company can offer.

Where companies get it wrong

The most common mistake is treating the plan as a document instead of an operating rhythm. It gets written, presented and filed. By week three the numbers have drifted, nobody has updated them, and the credibility the plan was supposed to create starts working in reverse.

The second mistake is running it alone. Leadership teams that need a bridge are usually stretched across the business, the board and the bank at the same time. The plan needs someone whose job for ninety days is to drive it: pricing the offers, running the cadence, preparing the insider conversation and structuring the round that follows.

The third mistake is separating the revenue plan from the capital plan. The bridge terms, the next round, the debt that might replace equity, and the structure new investors will come into should all be designed alongside the revenue plan, so that when the company wins the next ninety days, it is ready to capitalize on it immediately.

How we run it

Generis Advisory Group runs the 90 day revenue plan as one engagement with the capital strategy around it. We build the plan with leadership, own the weekly cadence, prepare the insider bridge, and structure the raise that follows so the company goes to market from strength. Then we stay to make sure the revenue engine that funded the bridge becomes the way the company operates.

If your company needs capital in the next quarter and the plan for earning it is still a forecast, that is the place to start.