Dave Lavinsky talks with Jason Barnard about starting at the end.
Start At The End! Dave Lavinsky—serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, distinguished business strategist, and the founder and president of PlanPros.ai—shares the game-changing methodology that's helped over 1 million entrepreneurs build bigger, faster-growing companies. Drawing from 30+ years of experience launching, scaling, and exiting multiple ventures across diverse industries, Dave reveals his proven "reverse engineering" approach to business planning that transforms wishful thinking into concrete roadmaps for success.
Get ready for a deep dive on:- The "Start at the End" methodology: How to envision your ultimate business goal and work backwards to create an actionable plan- Why traditional business planning fails and how reverse engineering your success changes everything- The exact framework for breaking down 10-year visions into yearly, monthly, and daily actionable steps- Asset-building strategies that compound over time vs. daily tasks that waste your potential- The psychology behind goal-setting and why most entrepreneurs lose sight of their end game in the daily fires of business
This episode delivers transformative, battle-tested wisdom for entrepreneurs, founders, and business owners ready to stop drifting and start building systematically toward their ultimate vision.
#StartAtTheEnd #BusinessPlanning #EntrepreneurStrategy #BusinessGrowth #ReverseEngineering #AIBusinessPlanning #FastlaneFounders #DaveLavinsky #BusinessStrategy #EntrepreneurJourney #StartupPlanning #BusinessSuccess #VisionaryPlanning #GrowthStrategy #EntrepreneurTips
What you’ll learn from Dave Lavinsky
This episode was recorded live on video August 26th 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wNsDwtfcCI
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:https://planpros.ai/https://www.growthink.com/Dave Lavinsky
Transcript from Dave Lavinsky with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Start at the End
[00:00:00] Dave Lavinsky: So if we have a hundred employees in 10 years, we probably have 90 in nine years. You probably have 80 in eight years, right? Obviously, it's not linear, but it's gonna be somewhat of a trajectory going forward. So yes, let's look at five years, where do we need to be in five years?
And get that down on paper. And then once again, and keep moving backwards to figure out what we need to achieve this year. Because I think a lot of businesses, if we look at this year, even if they're successful from a profitability perspective, are they building the assets that they need to build to get to where they really want to be?
[00:00:38] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy? A legacy we're proud of.
Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:01:07] Jason Barnard: Hi, everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard, and a quick hello and we're good to go. Welcome to the show, Dave Lavinsky.
[00:01:20] Dave Lavinsky: I like that. Thanks for having me here, Jason.
[00:01:22] Jason Barnard: Yeah, you get the baritone.
[00:01:24] Dave Lavinsky: I'll take it.
[00:01:26] Jason Barnard: Lovely to meet you. We're gonna be talking about Start at the End, which is a really cryptic title.
[00:01:32] Dave Lavinsky: Okay.
[00:01:32] Jason Barnard: Can you, in one sentence, tell me what we're gonna be talking about?
[00:01:37] Dave Lavinsky: When we talk about Start at the End, we talk about envisioning where you want your business to be in X years, which is the end, and how you create a plan, reverse engineer that end vision so that you can achieve that vision over the next X years.
[00:01:56] Jason Barnard: Right, which is why you got tagged as interesting guest by Gab.
[00:02:00] Dave Lavinsky: We'll take it.
[00:02:01] Jason Barnard: The podcast production manager, we were discussing that just before and now I a hundred percent understand exactly why she made that particular tag.
[00:02:10] Dave Lavinsky: Okay.
[00:02:10] Jason Barnard: Before we get into that, Kalicube® looks after personal brands and corporate brands for entrepreneurs, and you have a lovely Knowledge Panel.
If I search your name on Google, you look great. It lists you as an author, which is unfortunate because you're actually an entrepreneur, but you look really good. Is your name unique?
[00:02:34] Dave Lavinsky: Mostly. There is a couple. There's one David Lavinsky, but I'm the only one that goes by Dave. So there is. If you do search on just Lavinsky or David Lavinsky, you'll find one or two other people. But yes, it is pretty unique. I'm lucky to that extent.
[00:02:52] Jason Barnard: Unlike my new friend, James Brown, who I interviewed earlier on. Then I looked to AI Mode, which is Google's new AI system to challenge ChatGPT and it, for some reason, kept repeating Growthink. It's obsessed by Growthink. It even thinks your education is Growthink.
No idea where that comes from, and that's one of the problems with AI right now. It gets itself into a little hole and it can't get out. And it keeps repeating things that just don't make sense. So this is a good example of hallucinations that AI often has because it doesn't really understand what it's saying.
[00:03:31] Dave Lavinsky: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:32] Jason Barnard: Whereas the Knowledge Graph and the Knowledge Panel here is fact. So we've gone from fact, which is really cool in Google search to, I'm not really sure. I might get my head stuck in a hole and I will repeat something that doesn't make sense. Despite the fact that it's obviously not logical. Education - Growthink.
It's not logical because Growthink is your company.
[00:03:56] Dave Lavinsky: Correct. Correct.
[00:03:59] Jason Barnard: So AI is still not quite there. So Dave having a unique name is a huge advantage. If you are called James Brown, you have a huge problem with the very famous James Brown.
[00:04:12] Dave Lavinsky: Yep.
[00:04:12] Jason Barnard: If you are called Dave Lavinsky, you don't need Kalicube®.
[00:04:17] Dave Lavinsky: Agreed. Except if everyone starts naming their child, Dave Lavinsky, then we have a problem in our hands. But most likely that's not gonna happen. So everyone does need Kalicube®.
[00:04:25] Jason Barnard: You're safe. Brilliant, wonderful. So let's get on to Start at the End. So you are saying at Kalicube®, I need to imagine where I want to be at the end.
Now the end could be 20 years, it could be 10 years, it could be five years.
[00:04:37] Dave Lavinsky: Correct, correct.
[00:04:38] Jason Barnard: How do I decide?
[00:04:41] Dave Lavinsky: So, for everyone, it's different. My background is business planning. So a lot of times I say, Hey, you're starting a company, or you have a company. And you have this company and today is today. And what do I want to do with this company?
What is the end game? I wanna take this company public. I want to grow the company to X million dollars in sales and sell it. But I think personally, maybe, it could be a longer term. But if you're a company, I think you have an idea in mind that I want to take it to this point. And if you're a young entrepreneur, you may have a 30, it may be 30 years.
Now if you're a little old, you may say, Hey, this is my five-year goal, or 10-year goal. But it's really just think about your company, what you want, what's the end game for that company. So let's say that Jason, you and I are starting a company and we're starting a hair salon.
[00:05:35] Jason Barnard: Thank you.
[00:05:37] Dave Lavinsky: And you and I started a hair salon.
[00:05:39] Jason Barnard: And some have more need than others.
[00:05:41] Dave Lavinsky: Well, we do everything. We don't just do top of the head, we do beards and everything else, and we're gonna start a chain of hair salons. We want to grow this business and we want to get to a hundred million dollars in sales. And we don't know. Let's say, we wanna get to a hundred million dollars in sales in seven years and we want to sell the company and retire and go off for the sunset.
So that's our end. That's the most important thing for, I think, for most entrepreneurs, for all entrepreneurs, is to understand what that end game is. Because if you don't, it's Yogi Berra, the baseball player said, if you don't know where you're going, you're not gonna get there.
[00:06:20] Jason Barnard: Right.
[00:06:21] Dave Lavinsky: And so a lot of entrepreneurs, they know at the beginning when they launched their business, a lot of times, they know where they wanna go. But once they start it, they deal with the fires of every day running a business. It's hard for them to, they lose sight of where they want to go. I'm sorry, did you wanna say something, Jason?
[00:06:36] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well, there are two things going on there. Number one is most entrepreneurs know where they want to go and then forget because they're fighting fires.
[00:06:45] Dave Lavinsky: Yes.
[00:06:46] Jason Barnard: I would've imagined most entrepreneurs don't know where they want to go and they just start it because it's fun. But that's because that's what I've always done.
[00:06:55] Dave Lavinsky: It's just start.
[00:06:56] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I start. Because I think, wow. I can solve brand problems in Google and now brand problems in AI.
[00:07:03] Dave Lavinsky: Mm-hmm.
[00:07:03] Jason Barnard: I can disambiguate and make you look like a superstar when you're not.
[00:07:06] Dave Lavinsky: Mm-hmm.
