I love plans: whether they’re formal and detailed or quickly scribbled on a napkin during a moment of inspiration. However, I know my love of planning puts me in the minority. Let’s be honest, most companies and managers say they plan….but it’s one of those things that doesn’t actually happen regularly and is usually ineffective.

Plans get made and then put on the shelf to collect dust. Plans are formulated that are ridiculously too detailed and don’t leave room for change, agility, and learning. Plans are created that are nothing more than a list of goals with no actual steps to attain the goals.

Planning is flawed, and often sporadic and ineffective.

To build, and sustain, a culture of planning AND execution you need a simple way to go about it that is low-maintenance and easy for all types of planning styles.

Here’s a super simple framework for laying out quarterly plans. To create this go-to guide, I got down to the most important health metrics for my Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company with a list of fill-in-the-blank statements. They are so drop-dead simple they will work for any type of business, not just a SaaS.

Just focus on the fundamentals: Acquisition. Retention. Expansion.

A.R.E has substantial legs outside of the planning process itself and can extend to the day-to-day running of the company. Everything you are considering doing can be passed through this lens.

Your A.R.E plan can be done on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis (although, if you do it annually, it should be updated quarterly and monthly — not left to gather dust on a shelf!).

My recommendation is to have annual A.R.E. goals and a plan that gets updated quarterly and reviewed monthly. But there’s an easy way to get started. Here are a few bullet points for getting your A.R.E. act together.

Acquisition Goal

Of course, one of the biggest priorities for any business is finding new customers, but for SaaS companies, it’s absolutely critical. In fact, according to a study by McKinsey, even if a software company grows 20% per year, it still has a 92% chance of folding. Those stats are pretty sobering, which is probably why 89% of SaaS businesses report new customer acquisition as their top priority.

Planning your approach to new customer acquisition doesn’t have to be a pages long process. Setting a course of action for acquisition can be as simple as filling in the blanks to the following two statements:

Here’s how we are going to acquire more customers

List the key initiatives to execute to reach the acquisition goal (about 3-5 per quarter)

Retention Goal

And while acquiring new customers is paramount to keeping a SaaS company afloat, keeping customers is also crucial. Retaining customers just makes financial sense. According to For Entrepreneurs, it’s actually nine times cheaper for SaaS companies to retain customers than to acquire new ones. Stats like this make it clear that plans for retention should be just as well-laid as plans for acquisition.

Sometimes the best-laid plans are the simplest. Every great retention plan comes back to these key ideas. Finish these sentences,