A quick note before we begin

This episode was recorded in January 2026, when Six Figure Safety was my main programme. That programme no longer exists in the form described in the original episode, so I’ve removed its promotion and updated the final invitation to Momentum.

The forecasting method itself still sits underneath the way I work. My positioning has moved from money coaching into revenue strategy, but that has made this conversation more relevant, not less. Forecasting is the bridge between the revenue you want to create and the pay, capacity and financial decisions that revenue needs to support.

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In this episode

You open the forecast, type in the sales you think you might make, then immediately distrust every number because, well, you cannot predict the future.

That is the most common objection I hear about forecasting. It feels like guessing, and if the income is not guaranteed, the entire exercise can feel a bit like making up numbers in a spreadsheet and hoping they become real through exposure to a tasteful shade of green.

But a forecast is not a promise. It is a working model built from what is already known, what is reasonably likely and what you plan to influence.

In this episode, we’re talking about:

• why forecasting feels unsafe when your income has been inconsistent;
• the difference between a forecast and a guarantee;
• the sales and financial data you need;
• how to treat signed payment plans in your forecast;
• why your business needs an overflow strategy;
• the three numbers you can make more predictable;
• and how to turn a revenue target into an actual sales decision.

“But forecasting is only guessing”

Yes, part of it is.

You do not know exactly who will buy, when a client will enquire or whether the offer you launch in three months will convert at precisely the rate you expect. A forecast contains assumptions because the future has not happened yet. Deeply annoying, but difficult to resolve.

The mistake is deciding that because some inputs are uncertain, every input is unknowable.

Your existing payment plans are knowable. Your subscriptions are largely knowable. Your current client capacity is knowable. Your past conversion rate is discoverable. The amount you want to pay yourself can be decided. The number of sales needed to close a projected gap can be calculated.

A useful forecast does not remove uncertainty. It separates the known numbers from the assumptions, so you can see which bits of the future require action.

Why you do not trust the numbers yet

If you have spent years experiencing your business as unpredictable, typing a calmer version of the next six months into a spreadsheet will not immediately make your body believe it.

Your brain uses familiarity as evidence of safety. Familiar does not necessarily mean comfortable, profitable or good for you. It means known.

So a business that swings between a brilliant month and a quiet one may feel awful, but it is familiar. A fixed salary, a forward revenue view and a sales plan may be objectively more useful, while still feeling suspicious because you have not experienced them often enough to trust them.

This is why forecasting is a process rather than a one-time spreadsheet exercise. You forecast, update the actual numbers, compare what happened with what you expected, then adjust the next forecast. Every cycle gives you more evidence.

Some people feel better the moment the numbers are visible. Other people fill in the sheet correctly and still think, Lovely, but what if all of this goes to shit?

Both responses are normal. The second person does not need a more inspirational spreadsheet. She needs repeated evidence that she can see a gap, respond to it and make a decision before the bank balance makes the decision for her.

A forecast needs three things

The method I use has three parts:

1. Data, so the assumptions are grounded in what has already happened.
2. An overflow strategy, so you know how strong months support quieter ones.
3. Predictable numbers, so fewer parts of the business have to be reinvented every month.

None of them requires a finance degree or ten tabs full of dropdown menus. I cannot do mental maths and have no desire to build systems that require me to become a different person before they work.

One spreadsheet. One clear view. Maths that a calculator can do.

Part one: use your own data

When people ask what a good conversion rate is, they are often hoping an industry benchmark will tell them whether their next launch is safe.

But your own data is far more useful than somebody else’s average.

Imagine you sent a sales sequence to 50 qualified people and made five sales. That gives you a rough conversion assumption of one sale for every ten people reached in that campaign.

It does not mean sending ten emails guarantees one sale forever. It means you now have a starting point. If the next plan requires 15 sales from an audience of 40, you can see that the assumption is doing some rather athletic work.

Sales data might include:

• how many people saw the sales page;
• how many clicked through to checkout;
• how many bought;
• how many discovery calls were booked;
• how many calls converted;
• where each lead came from;
• and whether conversion changes by offer, campaign or audience temperature.

If you have not been tracking it neatly, the information may still exist in your checkout platform, website analytics, payment processor, CRM or email platform. The first version does not need to be perfect. Go and retrieve what you can.

The aim is not to produce a gorgeous historical report. It is to make the next decision less fictional.

Financial data tells you what is already committed

The second half of the data is what comes in and what goes out.

Start with income already under contract. If a client is paying monthly for the next eight months, place those payments into the relevant months. If another client finishes in October, stop the income in October. If three contracts end in December, your forecast should show the drop before December turns up looking smug.

Then map the expenses you already know about. Software subscriptions, contractors, memberships, insurance and regular professional support are not mysterious because they happen next month rather than today.

Even when a subscription changes slightly with exchange rates, you can forecast at the higher end of its usual range, then replace the forecast with the actual payment each month.

The forecast is alive. Updating it is not evidence that it failed.

Payment plans count as recurring revenue

This is a hill I remain very comfortable dying on.

If somebody has signed a contract to pay you over six or twelve months, those payments belong in your recurring revenue forecast. They are not imaginary because the client chose instalments.

You might be thinking, “But what if a payment fails?”

A card can expire. A payment can bounce and clear three days later. A client can miss a payment. Those are cashflow events you need a process for, not a reason to pretend every signed payment plan may evaporate at any moment.

Your contract should explain what happens when a payment is missed. Your payment platform should retry where possible. If a client disappears, you follow the process, communicate in a trackable way and enforce the agreement you both signed.

Basically, you become your own revenue protection officer. Less fluorescent train uniform, more contract folder.

There is an important boundary here: do not forecast unsigned contracts as committed revenue. An enthusiastic voice note is not MRR. “I’m definitely joining next month” is not MRR. Put signed sales into committed income, and put future sales into the plan used to close the gap.

Forecast payment plans conservatively

When you plan future sales, you may not know how many buyers will pay in full and how many will choose a plan.

You do not need supernatural accuracy. Use a sensible, conservative assumption.

If most of your clients tend to choose payment plans, model the future sales as payment plans. A pay-in-full sale then improves cash received that month rather than rescuing a forecast that assumed money you had no evidence would land.

You can refine the ratio once you have enough data. Until then, the useful forecast is the one least dependent on the most optimistic payment behaviour.

And please, keep the calculation simple. If you expect three new clients on a £500 monthly plan, the monthly addition is 3 × £500. We do not need a separate spreadsheet, twelve colours and a dropdown called probability-adjusted revenue scenario to discover that the answer is £1,500.

Complexity does not make the assumption more accurate. It can make the uncertainty harder to see.

Part two: give strong months somewhere to go

The forecast becomes much more useful when it connects to your overflow.

Overflow is the money remaining in the business after tax, your pay and the other financial obligations have been accounted for. I use that term deliberately, because knowing the business made a profit does not tell you what that profit needs to do next.

A £20,000 profit figure can look fabulous. But if it needs to cover tax, six months of owner’s pay, debt repayments and a pension contribution, the full £20,000 is not sitting around looking for a cute new investment.

Profit means very little until it has jobs.

Your forecast should show how overflow grows and shrinks over time. In a stronger month, surplus moves into the overflow pot. In a quieter month, overflow can come back out to maintain the agreed owner’s pay.

That is how a business owner can pay herself the same amount in a £10k month and a £4k month. The salary is not being recalculated from whatever happens to be in the account on payday. The business has planned for variation.

Episode 6 explains the full business overflow concept, and Episode 3 covers how to pay yourself consistently.

A negative forecast is information, not a verdict

When the forecast shows overflow shrinking below a comfortable level, that does not mean the spreadsheet has delivered terrible news and must now be closed for emotional reasons.

It means one of three things is happening:

1. Income is too low.
2. Expenses are too high.
3. The available profit has been given more jobs than it can currently fund.

That gives you three sets of levers.

You can increase income by selling more of the right offer, raising a price where the model supports it, following up with qualified leads or running a planned campaign.

You can reduce expenses by cancelling, pausing or renegotiating costs that are no longer creating enough value.

Or you can review what the profit is funding. Perhaps a debt overpayment, pension contribution, savings target or temporary increase in personal pay needs to change. Tax is not a casual optional extra, obviously, but the timing and size of other allocations may have room for adjustment.

The forecast allows you to choose the lever while there is still time for the decision to work.

Without it, all three problems tend to receive the same response: panic-sell something.

Part three: make three numbers predictable

People often say self-employed income is unpredictable as though every number in the business arrives by raffle.

Some things will always move. You cannot control the exact day a new client decides to buy. But you can create far more predictability than most businesses currently have.

I would start with three numbers:

1. Your owner’s pay.
2. Your expenses.
3. The recurring income created by your payment plans.

The more stable those become, the less work the forecast has to do with pure assumptions.

Set the pay first

Choose what the business needs to pay you, then pay that amount on a consistent schedule, weekly, fortnightly or monthly.

The frequency matters less than the rule. You are replacing random transfers with an agreed obligation the business needs to fund.

This turns your personal income from an afterthought into a commercial input. If the business needs to pay you £3,000, cover £2,000 of business expenses and allocate money for tax, the revenue target must support all three. “I’d like a £10k month because it sounds successful” is not the calculation.

Your revenue goal should come from what your life and business need, not the number currently performing best on Instagram.

Once your pay is fixed, the forecast can show whether existing contracted revenue and overflow support it, and where new sales are required.

Put a ceiling around expenses

Many business expenses are already predictable. The chaos usually appears through one-off decisions.

A course here, a new tool there, a contractor hired because this month was busy, then suddenly fixed costs have crept up without anybody checking whether next quarter can hold them.

Set an expense ceiling. If the business currently spends £1,500 a month and you have decided it can sustainably carry £2,000, you have £500 of room for a new commitment. If a proposed investment pushes costs to £3,000, put that number into the forecast and see what happens to overflow.

You are not asking whether the business account can afford the first payment today. You are asking whether the business model can keep affording it.

That is a completely different question.

Design payment plans around the revenue gap

I used to stretch payment plans because I wanted the monthly amount to feel as affordable as possible.

It looked generous. Commercially, it meant I needed more clients, carried delivery for longer and received less cash each month than the business needed. The buying option felt easier for the client while the resulting cashflow made the offer harder for me to sustain.

Payment terms need to work for both people.

Imagine the forecast shows a recurring revenue gap of £1,500 a month. You could create a £250 monthly payment and need six new clients. Or you could create a £500 monthly payment and need three.

Both routes create £1,500 of monthly revenue. They do not create the same business.

Can you reliably convert six people? Do you have capacity to serve six? Does the lower payment extend beyond delivery and create financial risk? Can the offer genuinely support a £500 monthly price? Would three better-fit clients give you more certainty than six sales you are not confident you can make?

This is where a forecast becomes revenue strategy. It does not merely say, “You need £1,500.” It helps you decide which combination of offer, price, sales volume and capacity can produce it.

Episode 10 explores how buyer fit, capacity and the wider client journey shaped one of my own pricing decisions.

Forecasting changes the sales conversation

Without a forecast, the sales plan often begins when the bank balance creates enough discomfort.

You notice money is low, decide you need a cash injection, invent an offer, announce it with the emotional composure of somebody throwing a saucepan at a kitchen fire, then hope enough people buy quickly.

The offer may be good. It may even sell. But it was designed around immediate panic rather than the revenue model, capacity or next problem your clients actually wanted solved.

With a forecast, you can see that three payment plans end in November and a £1,500 monthly gap begins in December. You now have time to decide whether those clients are suitable to continue, whether the pipeline can replace them, whether an existing offer should be sold or whether expenses need to change.

The gap has become a sales brief.

That is exactly what Episode 13 on making more money without launching a new offer helps you think through. Once you know the number and timing, you can look for the most commercially sensible route to it, rather than building something new because the panic wants an activity.

Use three versions of revenue

One useful way to keep the forecast honest is to separate revenue into three categories:

Committed revenue

Money covered by signed contracts and active payment plans. The amount and expected timing are known.

Probable revenue

Money attached to a specific opportunity with evidence behind it, perhaps a proposal sent, a renewal conversation underway or a warm lead with a defined next step. It is not guaranteed, so keep it visibly separate.

Planned revenue

The sales you intend to create through future marketing and selling. This category should connect to an actual sales plan, not sit in the sheet as a number called “launch, £20k.”

The distinction stops potential income being mistaken for money already secured. It also prevents committed revenue from being dismissed as equally uncertain as a campaign you have not planned yet.

As the month progresses, update each category. Move a signed sale into committed revenue. Remove an opportunity that has gone cold. Replace forecasts with actual income and expenses.

That is not fiddling with the numbers. That is the job.

Your forecast is allowed to be wrong

The point is not to predict every pound perfectly.

If the forecast expected £8,000 and the business made £6,500, the £1,500 difference contains information. Did fewer people see the offer? Did conversion change? Did a sale move into the following month? Did more clients choose payment plans? Was the original assumption unsupported?

You use the answer to improve the next forecast and the commercial decisions around it.

A forecast that changes is more useful than a static annual plan everybody stopped opening in February.

Trust comes from watching the model respond to reality. You see that a missed target does not make the entire system collapse, because you know what changed, what it affects and which lever is available next.

The real purpose is less mental load

Every undefined number remains an open decision.

How much can I pay myself? Can I buy this? Do I need to make a sale? Can I take August off? Is that money for tax? What happens when those payment plans finish?

When the rules are decided in advance, you stop re-answering the same questions from a different emotional state every week.

You know the fixed pay. You know the expense ceiling. You know the committed income. You know the overflow available to smooth a quieter month. You know the size and timing of the revenue gap.

There will still be decisions. It is a business, unfortunately, not a Tamagotchi we can keep alive with three buttons.

But the decisions become specific. And specific decisions are much easier to make than the permanent background feeling that something financial might be wrong.

A forecast should tell you what to do next

If your forecast only tells you that the future is uncertain, it is not finished.

It should show:

• the revenue already committed;
• when payment plans begin and end;
• the owner’s pay the business needs to support;
• recurring and planned expenses;
• tax and other financial obligations;
• how overflow changes each month;
• the remaining revenue gap;
• and the sales activity intended to close it.

That final part matters. A revenue target with no offer, sales volume or conversion assumption underneath it is a wish wearing spreadsheet borders.

Build the forecast from the life and business you are funding, add what is already known, make conservative assumptions where the future is genuinely uncertain, then use the gap to decide what needs to sell.

You cannot predict the future. You can stop meeting it completely unprepared.

Continue listening

Why Being Good With Money Feels Aspirational, Not Relatable

Want your forecast to become an actual revenue plan?

A spreadsheet can show you the gap. It cannot decide which offer should fill it, whether the sales volume fits your capacity or how to turn the revenue into reliable take-home pay.

Inside Momentum, we work across the full model, revenue target, offer design, sales system, cashflow and owner’s pay, so the forecast becomes something you can act on rather than a collection of numbers you vaguely hope will happen.

Apply for Momentum, and we’ll build the business behind the numbers.