The hundred-day model

The board of a growth company stares too often into the rear-view mirror. We go through the past month, note that sales are lagging, approve the minutes. Then everyone goes home and the founders carry on alone.

That is not board work. It is an extension of bookkeeping.

A company going from zero to market does not need a supervisor. It needs three things at once: the right direction, enough speed and high quality. Direction without speed is a strategy paper. Speed without quality is chaos. Only all three together create growth that lasts.

A thousand days is too far away for everyday work

I have written about the thousand-day growth plan since 2022. I still like it. Three years is long enough for structural change and short enough to grasp.

But I have made the same mistake in several companies. We built a handsome three-year plan, presented it to the board and were pleased. Three months later nobody remembered what the next step was. The plan was right. The time span was wrong for everyday work.

That is why, inside the thousand days, you need a leadership tool that fits in a person’s head. A hundred days.

The hundred-day model answers one question

What must be achieved in the next three months for the company to move towards its thousand-day goal?

No more. No less.

The model is worth drawing. A flowchart that shows the dependencies: what is done first, what follows from it, which result must exist before the next phase can begin. When the dependencies are visible, the conversation changes. People argue about order, not about opinions.

A good hundred-day model prioritises four things:

  1. The most important goals: three at most, otherwise nothing has been prioritised.
  2. The most important people and responsibilities: a name after every line.
  3. The most important actions: what, who, how, when.
  4. The most important measurable results: a number, not an adjective.

When founders, the management team, the board, investors and key partners look at the same single page, a shared situational picture is created. One plan reduces misunderstandings and speeds up decisions more than anything else.

By Ville Tolvanen. Originally published in Finnish: Sadan päivän malli. More in English: Aura Boards — start here.