Scenarios are useful tools to plan out many potential futures for your company.
While you could create a new scenario completely from scratch, for 99% of the cases we recommend duplicating your current forecast and modifying it to fit your needs. This ensures you have all of your employees and current forecasts included in the new scenario, as opposed to having to remember to add everything independently. One of the most common scenarios we see is a more optimistic sales forecast. In this walk-through, we will create Aggressive scenario using our Base-case scenario as a starting point.
1. Start by Copying an Existing Scenario
Navigate to Settings from the sidebar on the left. Select Scenarios tab on the navbar, and Copy the Baseline scenario.
2. Rename the New Scenario
Select edit,
...and rename the scenario using the Name field. Optionally, you can use the Description to communicate what you're trying to achieve with this scenario. The more specific you are, the easier it is to communicate to your team and to your investors how the scenarios differ from one another.
As a result, this is what you should see under the Scenarios tab:
3. Modify Forecasts - Employees
Now that we have created the new Aggressive scenario, let's walk through how you can modify the forecasts for this specific scenario. If you are new to Flightpath you might want to review Hiring Plan support article before you get started.
In this example, we will add additional Sales Reps to the Aggressive scenario, but not to others.
3.1 Navigate to Hiring Plan and select the Aggressive scenario from the drop down menu, located on the top of the page.
3.2 Scroll down until you reach your Sales Team, and create a new hire to the by clicking Add Employee button.
3.3 Once the Create Employee page opens up, make sure the Aggressive Scenario is selected (it should be, as you selected it in 3.1). Fill in the properties, and click Save and Close without clicking Copy to All Scenarios. Remember that in this example we don't want this employee to be present in any other scenario, but sometimes you do want that. For example, your aggressive scenario might mean that you're hiring the same sales people but just a lot faster.
Now, we can view the new employee - Stella Sales - under the Sales Team:
3.4 Finally, let's go to verify that our newly hired employee is only present in the Aggressive scenario, but not in the Baseline. On the Hiring Plan page, select Baseline, and verify that Stella doesn't have any values for her in the Baseline scenario.
4. Modify Forecasts - Revenue & Expenses
Aside from employees, you probably want to forecast other accounts differently from the Baseline forecast. For instance, Aggressive sales scenario might mean increased advertising spend.
4.1 Navigate To Operating Model and select Aggressive from drop down menu on top:
4.2 Click on the row you'd like to edit. Here we're going to edit Advertising:
4.3 Modify the values to fit your needs by using Autopilot or Manual forecasts, or select Google to use your own custom forecast. In this example of Aggressive growth, we will manually grow our average advertising spend from $157k by $8k a month. Once done, make sure to save for the changes to take effect.
