In this week’s episode, Anna guides you through her approach to planning business goals for 2025, with actionable steps to plan and set yourself up for success. We’ll explore planning your big-picture vision and setting specific goals for the new year, moving beyond vague resolutions and, instead, creating a meaningful theme to steer your decisions. From defining what success looks like for you to mapping out financial targets and preparing for potential roadblocks, this episode provides a structured framework to ensure you’re on the right path. Grab a pen and paper, and get ready to transform your planning approach for the upcoming year.
Resources mentioned:
- The 5Ls Balanced Success Assessment
- The-12 Month Business Blueprint
- Invest in a Half-Day Strategy Session
Key moments:
[00:00] Introduction and Overview
[01:14] Reflect on Last Year’s Achievements
[03:18] Creating a Theme Instead of Resolutions
[04:52] Defining Your Personal Success
[07:45] The 5Ls Assessment and Goal Setting
[10:06] Financial Planning for 2025
[15:04] Overcoming Roadblocks
[16:07] Balancing Work and Personal Life
[17:46] Conclusion and Call to Action
Business goals 2025
Reimagining success, episode 319 and I have a pretty comprehensive episode for you this week to help you set yourself up for success in 2025. So grab a pen and some paper, be prepared to listen a couple of times, pause, go back, and don’t worry, there will be more support for you as well. But I hope you find this really useful in planning out your business and your life priorities for next year. Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lumbog, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility and the fulfilment you’re looking for, ready to redefine success and build a business that you love. Let’s get started. Last week I walked you through a review of your business results, but also how you feel generally about how this past year has gone and hopefully that has set you up to this week.
Look ahead to the new year. Think about your big picture vision for New Year, as well as some really specific goals for your business. Now, why is this important? Well, look, if you just kind of stumble through, I suppose, go with the flow, that sounds great, but you may not end up where you want to be. If you don’t know where it is you want to be, then certainly you’re not going to be able to steer the ship in that direction. And unfortunately the bigger achievements like books and new revenue streams and whatever else do require intentional action steps, not just kind of going with the flow and responding to whatever tasks and emails happen to come into your inbox. So we’re looking at planning ahead for 2025. Now where do we start? Well, hopefully again you will have walked through with me the steps of reviewing last year. If not, do go back and have a listen to last week’s episode and I’d love to hear how you’re getting on, by the way.
So do cheque in with me at Anna Selenberg, perhaps on Instagram or if you’re in the Facebook group, or you can email me@podcastepoutside.com but one of the I would say unique, but probably not so unique anymore, but it was unique when I did it 10 years ago or so. Aspects of my planning for the new year is coming up with a theme. So by now I’ve seen again and again the statistic touted that 8% of New Year’s resolutions are actually upheld, achieved. You know, writing down a goal does help a little bit, but most of us come up with such, you know, mundane, general, vague, generic resolutions like I want to lose weight and get fit and earn more money. It’s, it’s just not helpful. So we don’t do resolutions. Instead we come up with a theme. And so themes for me, and I have to think back now in the past were, you know, making a bigger impact or bold decisions or focusing on what matters.
It could be a word, it could be a little phrase and it may just come to you organically and somewhere and I’ll find it for the show notes I have an article for actually coming up with it in a more strategic way. Or it may just come from having done this whole exercise. You’ll kind of see a red thread through it all. It could be impact or visibility or calm. Maybe if it’s been a really stressful year for you, it could be intention being more intentional about the work that you’re doing and what you’re putting out there. Right. So very open to whatever it is for you. The only criterion I suppose is that it is helpful.
It gives you a direction to guide decisions. So generally it gives you kind of a mood, an attitude, an approach to take whenever you’re looking at work or life as a whole, to think, well, I’m making bigger impact this year, so what does that mean in practical terms? So that’s the overall theme for the year. And the second thing is your definition of success. Now it doesn’t have to be a pithy quote that somebody will put on a beautiful graphic and share on LinkedIn. Probably won’t be mine certainly isn’t. But really thinking of, look, success means to me, you know, does it mean that you have a best selling book and millions of followers and blah, blah, blah, or is it, I can be present with my family, I am earning enough to live a comfortable life so I can travel. You know, I’m not stressed about my work to the point that I have to take on every client. I have simplified things.
That feels enjoyable and fun. You know, what does success look like for you? And again, it can just be a list or a few keywords, criteria and then another framework that a coach gave me many years ago was do behave. So thinking of by this time next year when you hopefully join me in the accelerator, quick plug and do the actual full on annual planning review with me, then I will have done what I will have published A book. I will have launched my new website. I will have established a new income stream. I will have hired my first assistant. Right so. Or expanded my team, wherever you are in the process.
I will have taken a sabbatical with my family. I will have done this. The second one is I will be. I will be maybe not famous or something like that that you don’t have control over, but I will be confident in showing up on camera. I will be posting consistently on LinkedIn. I will be feeling better about da da da, more clear on my niche. I will be in a position to. It’s all grammar, isn’t it? And then finally I will have so not doing or being but having.
And that could be, you know, X number of clients, followers. But again, I would suggest that you think of more meaningful things that you will have. You know, it could be a general, a thriving business with da da da or I will have the foundations in place too. So this time next year will do be. I will have done, I will be and I will have. And then again, if you listened to last week’s episode, I talked about the 5L’s assessment which you can get@onestepoutside.com success one step outside.com success. And of course we reviewed where you were in each of these five areas last week. Now want to look ahead.
So what are your goals? And again, please don’t just put get fit, blah blah, blah blah blah, but be really tangible. It could be I want to follow the Zero to 5K programme of running or I want to go to the gym three times a week. I want to make sure I do a nature walk every day, get 12,000 steps, you know, whatever. It can ideally be very measurable but also very meaningful for you and something that you know is important to you. It can be mental health related, physical health, emotional health, the next one love. Relationships are belonging. What do you want to set yourself as goals there learn. Is there a particular course or certification? But also, you know, is there an area of your business you want to learn more about making authentic sales in your business or how to show up confidently on camera, whatever that may be.
Lead. That’s where you’re getting tangible about your business goals, which we’ll get into in a moment as well. And then laugh the fun and spontaneity. And I know it’s hard to set goals around spontaneity, but it could be blocking space in your calendar for this. Yes, because sometimes you do need to organise spontaneity and to leave that space and not Just, you know, allow everything else to flow in. Or is it a girls trip or a, you know, golfing trip or whatever that you want to organise, you know, so five Ls for next year. Now we’re getting serious because we’re looking at financial goals and to be honest, I asked my accountant if we could come up with a calculator for this and it just got far too complicated. Complicated with different targets.
What I’ve done with her is I’ve done sort of a, you can do a good, better best. And again, if you’re just starting out, don’t get too complex. But most people starting out go, oh, I just want to earn, you know, 2,000amonth or whatever it may be. And that’s great, but why not at least give yourself a stretch? Probably you want to have a business model in place that could get you more because inevitably you might not get as much as you plan for, in which case better to shoot a little bit bigger, to think bigger. And worst case, you’ve sold more than you wanted to. Right. That’s not a bad situation to be in. So the key sort of numbers to think about are your target income.
But and this will be obvious to those of you who’ve been business for a while, so apologies if you’ve leaving your corporate job, you know, you are not just going for your salary and I always use the round number. If your salary was 100,000, you can’t just have 100,000 in sales because you’re going to have all your expenses, you’re going to pay tax. If you’re a limited company, there’s corporation tax. If you’re registered for vat, that’s another piece. And then of course your personal income tax as well. So I’m not a financial advisor, please sit down and map this out. But what you want to look at is, you know, okay, given, let’s say my expenses this year are 20k or 50k or whatever, they might be my target income after tax and expenses then, you know, needs to be added on to the expenses, to the tax to give you a gross sales target. That makes sense.
Obviously it’s easier if you see this and again I mentioned last week, but I’ve got a recorded version of the 12 month business blueprint from last year. Put it in the show notes. It’s not expensive at all, you can work through it yourself. And again we do this every November with the business accelerator. So although the doors are closed right now, we’ll be opening again in February and probably every quarter as we go forwards. So let’s say you have a gross sales target of 2000-002500-00100,000, whatever it is, then look at your building blocks. What’s going to make up that target? And if you’re anything like most of us, we have a lot of different products and services. And again, I sat down and did the most comprehensive, complex Google sheet that you will ever have seen, which I was very proud of.
But it’s got way too complicated because if you start putting every bespoke thing in there and this little thing there and, oh, someone’s bought the, this $10 thing and so on for me, at least with a small audience, that doesn’t make sense. So I treat my little things more as sort of extra little sprinkling, icing on top and more as ways to market my business. And then you need to at least look at the bigger, more substantial things like corporate workshops and keynotes, the business accelerator membership, things like that, the Academy sales, that’s the more substantial number that will get me to my sales target. So, you know, this is your overview. And a lot of you have asked me, you know, oh, should I do this for, you know, both B2C, B2B, do a separate one for all my different streams? Yes. Ideally this is overall, right, because it’s your life, your income. So ideally you’ve got kind of, and you’ve got a really clear focus on. I know that it makes more sense to spend my time getting a keynote if I can get £6,000 for that than it does to sell, I don’t know, a six pound sales tracker that I put together for something or whatever it is, right, Which I don’t have, unfortunately, because it ended up being too complicated.
And so you want to really see. Okay, well I want to focus this year on my one to one package, this or this group programme or this corporate thing, whatever it is. And then what we do is actually break it, break those overall targets into how many you want of each of the products. Right? So if, again, a simple example, if I’ve only got one programme, let’s say this is by no means what you should do. I’m just saying mathematically it’s going to make it easier off the cuff. If Your target is 100,000, you’ve got one programme, it costs 10,000 each, you need 10 of those, right? So okay, I need 10 for that service, obviously. Then if you’ve got multiple services and you can play around with the numbers, I need 10 of this, I need 50 of those and you’ll also see if it’s, oh, my gosh, I would need 10,000 of those to make it viable, then, you know, maybe this is not the best price or service for me. So then you’ve got kind of your total sales and then you can break it down into weekly, monthly, quarterly targets.
And that’s again, where my tracker got very complicated. It’s hard to set targets like that. But if I want to, ideally have, you know, three people, five people, 10 people, whatever it is, joining my group programme every quarter, then I can translate that overall annual figure into those weekly, monthly, quarterly targets. It sounds so much more manageable as well, if you’re like, oh, I only need one client a week or one a month or whatever it is, three a month, five per quarter, ten per quarter, then if you’ve got this big number for the year, so I hope that makes sense again, you can go to the Show Notes, cheque out the business blueprint. You should also be able to find it on the website. One step outside.com and otherwise. This is walking you through the sort of bare bones of it, of looking at your gross sales target, breaking that up into building blocks. How many of each service are you looking to sell and then what does that mean in terms of weekly, monthly, quarterly? I’m not going to go now into the details.
I feel like that’s already a bit too much for this. Just for an audio with the accelerator team, we go through five different buckets, five different categories of activities that are going to help us to get to those goals. So the question really to ask yourself, high level, is what it’s going to take to get there, right? What do you need to do in terms of creating new products and services, getting your visibility up there, getting in front of the right people? Do you need to improve, tweak your current programmes, create new materials, look at your onboarding processes for clients, anything about your processes, streamlining your operations, expanding your team, updating your website, that kind of thing. And then anything around kind of your ip, your intellectual property, books, podcasts, that kind of thing. So really thinking about what’s it going to take to get you to those targets. And then perhaps more useful, a couple of questions to reflect on before we wrap up. What might get in the way of those goals? Right, so is it something around self belief, Is it time, is it knowledge? We asked that question last week about what got in the way of success last year. So maybe look back on your notes for that to see, oh, what could get in the way and how can I set myself up.
Do I need that accountability of a group, the support, the structure, the kind of pathway to know how to work on my goals? Do I need the community or is it about. I know I really need to work on this particular skill set because I just, I just could not do that very well last time. And then. Yeah, what support system do you need to put in place to overcome, to anticipate and address those possible roadblocks, I suppose. And then final question, really important is how are you going to get the balance right? So really think about how do you want to be working, how much hours per day, days per week, weeks per year, months per year and so on. What time do you want to take off already? I’ve got now this perpetual year planner on the wall where I’m putting in, you know, okay, there’s this summer holiday, there’s the half term for me, the school holidays and things. There might be trips you want to do. Last year I took this year, I suppose still I took a trip Geneva to see my friends where I used to live, you know.
When do you want to take off? What boundaries are you going to need to set and yeah, how are you going to make sure that you’re focusing on the right things? I suppose then of course again, much more detail. You can break this into quarterly focuses for, you know, a sort of 90 day sprint I always think is really good in terms of kind of whether you call it 12 weeks, 90 days, three months for a quarter. Look ahead to what we used to in my corporate days called jfm, January, February, March, you know, at least for the first three months of the year. What’s your sort of one programme you’re going to really focus on, you know, the most lucrative hopefully. What do you need to create for that? How are you going to promote that? What’s your messaging, what do you need to, you know, content wise, build out and so on. So more so than last week, this was a pretty heavy episode. Again, do listen again, pause, go back, let me know if you have any questions. Do cheque out the business plan blueprint or again if you do want to have my one to one support on this, then cheque out my strategy sessions.
You can just get in touch with me. You can also always book a call as well. Onestepoutside.com call but that’s it for today. Looking ahead, planning for 2025 and I hope you found that not too off putting. And I hope and I know that you will see the benefits of doing this if you don’t already have your own framework for planning and reviewing and so on. Especially if you start following the same framework each year and you can really start looking back on your results from last year, it becomes just almost second nature and it doesn’t take very long at all. So I hope you found that valuable and I’ll see you back here next week. Bye for now.
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