My Annual Planning & Reset System
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I’ve done annual planning in my business every year… but these days my business planning is totally different than when I started my business 8 years ago and this year’s is going to be even stranger than it ever was before. If you caught my post on new years planning last year - you’ll see how much things change year on year!
I used to plan by setting number goals, revenue goals & planning which products would make what revenue
Now, I plan much more by thinking about how I want my year to feel - I still think about revenue numbers of course, but in an “enough” kind of way.
I figure out what we expect expenses to be and what I need to cover my life expenses and therefore what we need to make at minimum, of course we like to make more than the minimum but I find it brings a lot of peace of mind to know “we’ve hit what we need, everything else is just gravy”.
I also think about my non-negotiables. The stuff I am absolutely not willing to accept in order to build the business.
Do I want constant calls & appointments - no!
Do I want to manage a massive team? no!
Do I want to have to show up on social media daily? no no no!
My answer to all of that is a hard no (in case it wasn’t clear 😉
How I plan my year now is that I like to get out of my normal environment ….
And go to a lovely hotel.
I start with a long list of questions to help me reflect on the past year. What we made, what goals we hit, what we didn’t hit, what did we spend our time on
Every year I didn’t meet my goals I start by looking at what went wrong.
Consistently I found that what I said I wanted (more email subscribers for example) didn’t align with what I spent my time on (creating new products, updating copy on sales pages, hiring new team members, etc.)
This is a massive culprit of business flops.
I can’t tell you the number of coaching calls I did with business owners who are struggling to meet their goals. To hit their revenue goals or growth goals. And when this happens, I don’t sit and provide solutions, I start asking questions.
What was their goal?
What is the activity that directly feeds getting to that goal?
What is the measurement of output?
For example, if someone wants to generate more revenue in their business and they have a solid offering in place and a great conversion rate, then leads are the problem.
And if leads are the problem, they need to work on their marketing strategy.
And if their marketing strategy of choice is Instagram for example, I ask how many times they’ve posted in the past month.
That’s the metric of output that’s important in this case.
And let me tell you, without fail, that’s when the obstacles, excuses and what else they spent their time on comes tumbling out.
Then it’s about looking at those excuses, those things you did instead of posting to Instagram and determining, how can I overcome these obstacles?
THIS is exactly what you need to do with yourself in your annual planning. As if I were sitting there asking you those questions.
So that’s your reflection, using the questions in the annual planning doc linked below to really coach yourself and figure out what happened last year, the good the bad and the ugly and assessing where you’re at and why.
Next I look towards the future.
What do I want?
What needs to be different this year?
What do I want to do next year?
Are there any products or services I’m excited to create?
Is there anything my audience has been asking for consistently?
How do I want to make the revenue I’ve determined I want to make?
What are my estimations on my sales numbers for the year?
How many sales do I want to have?
Are there any product or services I don’t sell which my audience wants where I should then find someone who does offer that and affiliate for them?
Again, all the questions I actually ask are in the doc linked below.
I then plan out my full year. It has the potential to change, I’m not married to stuff 12 months out, but I do pencil in dates.
I need to space out my sales and I need to determine…
are there any projects we need to complete?
How long will they take?
When should we do those?
What is my marketing strategy?
Do I want to keep with my current strategy?
Do I want to add another?
Here’s what an annual plan might look like for me:
Jan: SS sale - Expected Revenue: XXX
Feb: Me: Create content. Helen: Pitch more affiliates. Vicky: Create a new quiz lead magnet.
March: Create content. Helen: Rewrite copy for a sale. Vicky: Make a course evergreen.
April: SSB sale - Expected Revenue: XXX
May: Create content. Helen: Pitch more affiliates. Vicky: Redo sales page.
June: Create content. Helen: Pitch more affiliates. Vicky: Redo a funnel.
July: CLA sale. - Expected Revenue: XXX
August: Create content. Helen: TBD Vicky: TBD
Sept: Create content. Helen: TBD Vicky: TBD
Oct: SSB sale - Expected Revenue: XXX
Nov: Create content. Helen: TBD Vicky: TBD
Dec: Create content. Helen: TBD Vicky: TBD
Let’s talk about my annual plan for next year.
I’m not changing anything that’s working.
Next year we’re going to sell my same 3 courses, I’m going to do…
2 sales of my big course, Square Secrets Business™,
at least one of Square Secrets™ and
one of my Content & List Academy.
That’s our 4 major launches of the year.
I might throw one more in, but I’m not sure on that yet.
That depends on 1 other decision I’m making right now which I’ll tell you about in a moment.
In terms of marketing, we’re sticking with our 3 major strategies which have done super well for us, YouTube, the blog & affiliates.
I know saying we’re doing the same thing sounds like we’re not doing anything, but that’s not the case at all.
We plan on doing these strategies even better in the New Year.
We’re not simply rinsing and repeating we’re looking at how can we implement these strategies even better?
We see a lot of growth potential in our blog and affiliates and YouTube.
I’m still as obsessed with studying how to grow on YouTube as I was a year or two ago, and my team member Helen who is on our affiliate program has a lot of potential opportunity there too.
The one thing I’m debating is if we add a new product offering or if we simply scale what we currently have.
In terms of determining if we create the new offering, my first question is, what does our audience say they want?
Is there anything they want that I’m not offering?
And if not, can we affiliate for someone who has that thing already?
Is there someone I already trust and would get behind them teaching my people?
If not, that’s when I consider adding offers.
Other changes for next year:
Making the Youtube channel a bit more behind the business and what I’m learning and not just straight educational content and tutorials.
I think a lot about not just building a wide audience but a deep audience.
I think focusing just on vanity metrics of “this video idea will get 20,000 views” isn’t as important as “I want to 500 people to buy my product this year, what do they need to hear from me to do that?
What relationship do I need to have with them for that to happen?
How can I serve and continue the relationship I have with my current customers and fans?”
I think one thing I didn’t do so well last year was to go deeper with my audience.
I did a few videos with the intention to go deeper but I don’t think it was enough.
I think back in the day just on the blog I’d do this better and I want to get back to that.
The videos I do that are intended to go deeper never are the best-performing videos, they often get the least views, but to me, that’s irrelevant.
Those videos have a much deeper purpose than getting a click from the home page or racking up views long-term in search on YouTube.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs who are just focused on vanity metrics might not appreciate the value of a video that doesn’t get the broadest reach or the most views, but is a real relationship builder.
Those have immense value.
Another thing I’ve thought a lot about is subscribers to views ratio. For example, entertainment channels, personal brands, like Eamon & Bec for example, that’s a channel with a million subscribers, and they also get fantastic views on every video.
They’ve changed topics from van life to cabin renovations to a cancer journey to having a baby.
Their audience has a deep relationship with them, and that’s typical in the entertainment industry, but not so much in the educational content space.
If you look at a lot of educational-only channels and tutorial channels, there’s no relationship with that audience, they might have half a million subscribers or a million subscribers, but they can release a video and get a few hundred or thousand views versus 100,000 almost guaranteed views that Eamon & Bec would get if they released literally anything, because the relationship is there.
So my focus isn’t just on growing the channel with educational content, but also growing the relationship too.
Growing deep not just wide if that makes sense.
I think a lot about the YouTube algorithm these days, and I was listening to an interview yesterday with the CEO of YouTube and an interview with a guy named Todd who made and tweaks the YT algorithm and he said when you think about “how do I create content the algorithm would want” to actually think about “how do I create content my audience would want?” because the algorithm shows what the audience wants.
And so, even 8 years into business, it’s important that I again think of who is my ideal client and what do they want to see from me?
Last night I studied my own watching habits, I looked at 3 YT creators I watch and I legit made a list of every video of theirs I watched and I made a tick list to categorise, what do I watch?
It’s not just tutorials - I only search for those when I need to learn something specific.
But how do I keep that relationship past the tutorial someone needed?
Or how do I get the audience from that tutorial which I made who are at the point of needing that onto more of my content?
What is next to build that relationship and how do I get them from a viewer of 1 piece of content to binging all my content?
Something that I notice I watch is people’s lessons in business. I did X and learned this.
It’s the end of the year, here’s what I learned.
Also people’s life & business updates.
I’m nosy, as I think we all are and I dunno why, but life & business updates are always so interesting.
The other thing I love is long-form interviews and conversations with other entrepreneurs on their area of expertise.
So I’d love to bring more of that to the channel.
So yeah… that’s my gameplay for the year.
I do have to say I’m filming this in the beginning of November, this will probably go out in a month… Sometimes I feel like these more behind-the-scenes videos come out way too late to real time… but in a way that’s kinda a good thing.
The later they come out from when they happened, just shows how ahead I am with content.
I hate doing things last minute, it massively stresses me out, and because I have two people who help me with content, I need to film well in advance to give them time to do their jobs, editing and prepping a blog post and scheduling an email and all the rest.
So I actually have yet to do my annual planning for 2024 at this moment, BUT by the time you see this in early December, I’ll likely have done it.
I tend to do it sometime in December. I just pick a free weekend or few days where I don’t have anything and find a nice hotel nearby and book it.
So that should be interesting, I’ll need to do a good bit of research on what’s a nice hotel near here as we’ve moved so I have no idea!
Which if by the way you want the down-low on that move… we moved to Switzerland this summer, I explain the why behind the move and my first impressions of the country (spoiler alert: really impressed by this place!) in a life update video I did… see what I did there, creating more life & business update content for ya as I know that’s what I’d want to watch!
Oh & don’t forget the workbook before you go!