11/25/2025: Planning Your 2026 Revenue Goals with Confidence
In our latest Growth Workshop, we tackled one of the most important strategic exercises for every deck builder heading into the new year: setting smart, achievable, and profitable revenue goals for 2026.
This session broke down the exact framework you can use to confidently plan your growth, understand what’s required to reach your targets, and make data-backed decisions on marketing, budgeting, and capacity.
Key Takeaways from the Session
Why Growth Planning Matters
Your 2026 goal isn’t just a number, it’s the foundation for your marketing budget, your sales targets, and your operational planning. When you define where you want to go, both you and DBM can reverse engineer the roadmap to get you there.
Understanding Growth Tiers
We reviewed three common growth categories in the deck-building industry and what each means for profitability and strategy:
- Slow/Average (3–5%) — essentially “keeping pace” with inflation
- Healthy (10–20%) — sustainable growth for most established builders
- Aggressive (25–40%) — ideal for those focused on market share and willing to reinvest heavily in marketing
Knowing which tier fits your business helps set realistic expectations, and prevents over- or under-investing.
Reverse Engineering Your Revenue Goals
Once your growth target is set, the next step is breaking it down into practical numbers:
- Average project value
- Number of closed projects needed
- Required customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Monthly/quarterly pacing
This turns vague goals into clear, trackable milestones.
Accounting for Seasonality
Demand isn’t evenly distributed throughout the year.
We discussed how to map your growth around:
- Slower winter months
- Busy summer seasons
- The balance needed to make up for low periods during peak periods
Planning with seasonality in mind ensures consistency and keeps you out of “feast or famine” cycles.
Vertical vs. Horizontal Scaling
Every builder faces a crucial fork in the road:
Should you expand into new locations or deepen your presence in your current market?
We explored:
- When it’s smarter to expand into new areas
- When to double down where you’re already known
- How competition and CPCs affect this decision
This clarity helps you grow profitably, not just quickly.
Next Steps: How to Apply This to Your Business
1. Define Your 2026 Revenue Goal: Choose a target growth percentage that aligns with your business maturity, market, and capacity.
2. Break Down the Numbers: Work backward: project value → number of jobs → budget → required lead volume.
3. Review Your Market Strategy: Decide if you're scaling vertically (deeper local market penetration) or horizontally (new areas/services).
4. Consider Your Seasonal Flow: Plan for slow months and capitalize on busy months.
5. Share Your Goal With Your Account Manager: This allows us to map your growth strategy, content plan, and budget recommendations for 2026.
Pro Tip
Your growth goal isn’t just for planning, it’s a strategic tool. The more aligned we are, the more accurately we can build your PPC, SEO, and content strategy around it. Send your 2026 revenue goal to your Account Manager so we can start prepping your roadmap early.