Hello My Charmed Ones!
Today I to walk you through how I create my annual business plan for the new year to give you a sense of the process I go through and the tools I use.
Now before we get into the step by step process, I want to take a moment to discuss why business planing is so important and the achievements that are possible when you have a solid plan laid out ahead of time.
If you are an existing member of my community, you already know that planning is super important. Not only does it help you to remember what it is you want to get done, it also helps you get clear on details and generate strategies for how you will accomplish your bigger or longer term goals. Planning ahead gives you the ability to save time and effort because you can take the things you need to do, prioritize them and organize them in a way that makes accomplishing the tasks much more efficient. We waste so much time in our days just deciding what to do next. And if you are jumping from task to task without following a plan, you could be wasting up to 30 minutes of time in between each task that you switch to. Not to mention the procastination and perfectionism that can creep in when you get to work without a plan for what you are doing and why. Without a plan, it’s possible to spend a full day working, without seeing a clear impact or payoff for your effort, which I think has to be the worst feeling in the world!
But thankfully that’s not something I experience anymore. Especially when it comes to my business, I show up to work knowing exactly what I’ll be working on each day, and I can clearly see by the end of the day the fruits of my labor and the momentum I have built with my time and focus.
When you have a plan you get so much more done in less time!
In fact, in 2022 alone, thanks to my Business Planning System, I was able to:
• Write and self-publish a best selling book on planning
• Create the first season of a Podcast
• Film 40+ Youtube videos
• Publish 20+ Blog Articles
• Create 75+ Instagram Posts
• Write 70+ Marketing Emails
• Launch 2 New Business Programs
• Taught 12 Master Classes, 12 group coaching calls, and 12 more monthly planning classes
• Design dozens of new Planning and Productivity Tools
• Thrive in my business for the 8th year!
• Grew my savings and investment accounts
• Deepen my Personal Development
• Complete a Coaching Certification Program
• Read 25+ books
• Establish a Regular Self-Care Routine
• Spend plenty of time with people I care about
• Plus more things I don’t have the desire to catalogue for the public
Results like this aren’t achieved by accident.
They aren’t the results of luck or good timing.
Achieving your goals and creating the results you want to experience in life is something that takes careful consideration and planning.
So, that is what I am going to show you today, and to be honest, I think you are going to be surprised at how simple this process is.
Now, if you saw my 2023 planner setup video you know that I use a customizable planner system where I keep my business plans combined with my overall life plans and goals.
I have a dedicated section of inserts in my planner that come from the CEO Strategy Planner. The CEO Strategy Planner is a bundle of over 60 business planning inserts designed to help online entrepreneurs and creative business owners turn their big picture business goals into manageable daily tasks.
If you don’t have a copy of the CEO Strategy Planner yet, I’d highly recommend it, but just know that the process I am walking you through today is the process laid out in the CEO Strategy Planner. And if you’d like to see a video of me actually filling in my Business Plans for the year, I will also link you that video as well to watch.
The first part of the CEO Planner is the Executive Summary.
The Executive Summary includes foundational information about your business, your target market and your brand vision. Now, this information may seem really basic, but it’s actually very important that you set these parameters because it’s the framework that you build your business within. One of the major issues I see business owners experience is that they don’t set these parameters for themselves or aren’t clear on them, and then they end up going all over the place with their business.
So, it’s important to decide the following elements of your business.
First, Your business name, so what you call your business or brand, the name customers and followers will come to know you by.
Second, you need to decide your business values, so what values are important for you as you build your business, what are you committed to cultivating through your business and offers.
And the third element of your executive summary is the business manifesto- this is a statement for the purpose and direction of your business, essentially the why for your business and the impact you aim to achieve through your work.
So, that’s the basic identity of the business you are building.
From there you can decide your target market, and the following are the elements of deciding your target market that you need to decide at the state of the year.
First, what your business sells or how it earns income, what’s your plan for that, write it out. Next, who are your customers (this is also known as your ideal customer avatar), these are the people who need what you have to offer and who you will be pursuing through your marketing.
Then, what outcomes do you produce for your customers, so when your ideal customer buys what you are selling, what value are you brining to them, how is working with you benefiting them.
The final target market question you need to decide on and clarify is how do you market to your customers. So, what marketing strategies will you use, which platforms, how frequently will marketing happen, all that needs to be settled and decided at the outside of the year. This is huge because marketing is a key element to sales online, and without these guide-rails, it’s so easy for a business owner to go all over the place with their business and marketing, or fail to develop consistency with their marketing which is just as bad. I’ve seen it happen, unfortunately it happens very often, but getting clear on your target market is going to help you do a better job of marketing and selling for your business.
Next, we have the brand vision and this is meant to be a place where you can map out your business vision for the next 10 years.
So, where do you see your business in the next year, in the next 3 years, 5 years and 10 years? It may not seem important to have this mapped out, and you don’t need to go in depth with this, but it helps to see how your business can be evolving in the future over time. I think it helps you see that you don’t have to build out your perfect business this year, it doesn’t all have to be done immediately- it’s not really possible to do that, but often businesses fail because they try to do too much in a short period of time and it ends up sinking them. So, think about where you business going over time, think about what the logical evolution for your business might be and how you could be adding and layering things into your business over time to create a more sustainable business that lasts.
Now, you might be thinking- Alexis, you’ve been in business for years now, don’t you already have this information written out? Yes that’s true, but every year I like to repopulate this information fresh because it helps me create a clean slate or fresh start feeling with my business. It also helps me to get refocused on what I am building with my business because it’s so easy to get distracted by other things or think you want different things for your business and this executive summary or creative business plan as I call it, helps me choose and decide what direction i want to go for in the year and commit to it.
Next, we get to Yearly Business Planning and the first part of this is the yearly overview.
Here I will first lay out my income target for the year, which I will also break down into quarterly targets. I base this information off of some mathematical equations that I work through during my business goal setting process and all of the information I populate into my yearly business plan from this point on is information that I generated during that goal setting process. If you would like to set your business goals using my process, I will leave a link to the THIS IS YOUR YEAR BUNDLE which is a four part series of workshops that walk you through setting your personal and business goals and mapping them out into action plans across your year.
So, the next part of the yearly business plan is my quarterly objectives which are really more like milestones for my business goals. So I will list out three specific outcomes I want to reach by each quarter of the year.
Then I get to the yearly objective overview. So this is a list of what I am creating this year in four specific categories that I use to track all of my business objectives and tasks.
The four categories are Products or Offers, List Building, Marketing and Development.
So I will make a list of the new offers I want to create this year and/or any updates to existing products I want to complete.
Then I make a list of all the list building initiatives I want to undertake- so all the projects I want to complete this year to help grow my list, and that is mainly focused on my email list, but it can apply to growing any list technically- for instance your followers on Instagram are a form of your list in my opinion. So, what do you want to complete this year to grow your list, write your ideas out.
The next category is Marketing, where I will list out all the marketing related projects I want to work on- funnels, marketing campaigns, launches, content marketing etc, I list those.
And finally development- what business development do I want to do this year? This can be anything from web development, new technologies, growing a team, and even my own personal development as it applies to helping my business grow. I’m currently in the process of undergoing a Master Life Coaching Certification and I consider that a development project that impacts my business for instance.
Again, I want to reiterate, that the information I am populating in these categories is actually information that I mapped out during my annual business goal planning workshop. So, this is not just information I came up with on the fly, these are specific targets I developed during my business goal setting and planning process, and so it’s not information I’m brainstorming on the fly-I have deliberately chosen each of the projects I list out on this objective overview.
Finally, the last part of my yearly business planning process is that I assign each of those objectives I just listed out across the months of my year so that I know exactly when I will be working on each of the projects I laid out.
One of the reasons you want to do this is so you know what you are working on each month. But another big reason why you want to do this is to ensure you have enough time to do everything you anticipate. And I recommend and follow the rule that I focus on no more than three objectives. So, creating a new product or working on a marketing campaign or designing a new funnel-I can only do a total of three of those projects per month.
So, that is it- that is how I create my annual business plan. I hope this information helps guide you as you create your business plan for 2023. Please please please– don’t just start the year without a plan- take the time to do this essential work and I promise, you will get better results when you lay out a plan like this.
If you need more guidance and step by step instruction on setting your business goals and mapping out these plans, please checkout the THIS IS YOUR YEAR bundle and if you are a paper planner user who wants to organize your business plans and tasks inside your planner, check out my CEO Strategy Planner, it has been a game changer for my business organization and I really couldn’t run my business without it!
I hope it’s been helpful to you to see my process broken out and to understand how I use these yearly business planning inserts from the CEO Strategy Planner. Once I have these plains laid out, I break down my plans more specifically into actions for the current quarter so I have a 90 day plan made, but that is going to have to be a topic for another video so if you want to learn more about how I turn this yearly business plan into a 90 day quarterly action plan, let me know!
If you are a current or aspiring business owner and you are looking to find clarity on your business, in order to get started making better business plans- you need my FREE Business Planning Clarity Journal filled with prompts you can use to get in touch with your inner guidance to create that business plan that helps you reach the success you desire. The Journal is free, click here to download it now!
Watch the Video: How to Create Your 2023 Business Plan
xoxo,
