What Does a 30-60-90 Day Business Plan Look Like?

A 30-60-90 business plan maps out the tasks and goals you'll tackle during the first 30, 60, and 90 days on the job – but it's not enough to create such a plan after you're hired. In some cases, hiring managers will expect you to have one during the interview process. The three-month plan lays out the actions you'll take during your first months on the job. Even if the hiring manager doesn't ask you for one, creating a 30-60-90-day plan on your own can help you impress him during the interview and start your new job on the right foot.

The first steps to developing a 30-60-90-day business plan involve researching the business and its goals. Use the company website, its social feeds and published news or business reports to find out as much as you can about the company, the products it produces, its competitors and the market in which it operates. Find out who its customers or clients are and how the company recruits them and handles their business. Get in touch with any current or former employees through LinkedIn to find out any additional details about the work flow. All of this research should give you a good idea of where you'll fit in and how you can contribute to the organization, which will be the crux of your plan.

The first 30 days on the job will be a time of learning your role and understanding in detail what the company is trying to achieve, suggests former hiring manager and career expert Heather H. Huhman on the Business Insider website. A 30-60-90 plan is typically one to four pages long. Use a half-page or first page to outline what you know of the company's objectives, its departments and projects, and how you'll try to understand more about them. Also mention that you'll start thinking about goals for the following 30 days and 60 days during this time. State that you'll use the "SMART" goal-setting model to create goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound.

The 60-day and 90-day plans will be vague at first, as you'll need to use the first 30 days as your information-gathering phase to determine where you'll go in the following periods. You can, however, mention that this will be the phase in which you begin to take more action, so you might title this part of your report the "Action Phase." Based on your research into the company's needs, you might state that during this phase, you'll begin to build new sales territory, increase revenue in your sales job, or take other actions to help the company move forward.

After the first two periods, you should have a good idea about what's working and which goals need to be realigned. At the start of this phase, talk about how you'll take a good look at your progress thus far and how you'll set new goals for the period as needed. Thus, this section can be titled the "Evaluation Phase." Ideally, your supervisor will meet with you on a regular basis throughout the 90-day probationary period, but in the "90-day" section, request a meeting to go over your progress.