Feeling overwhelmed by planning next year when your business still feels a bit messy beneath the surface? In this episode, Anna Lundberg shares why rushing headlong into goal-setting without strong business foundations is a recipe for frustration, and lays out a practical, simple approach to set yourself up for success in 2026. If you’re craving more clarity, smarter strategy, and a business that actually suits your life, this episode is tailor-made for you.
Key moments:
[00:00] Introduction: Anna explains why planning for next year can feel tough when the basics aren’t solid.
[03:18 ] Importance of Alignment: Discussing why strategic planning falls flat with a messy business model underneath.
[04:56] Stop, Start, Continue Framework: Practical exercise for auditing and streamlining your business activities.
[06:32] Checking Your Income and The 80/20 Principle: The value of knowing where your revenue and energy returns actually come from.
[09:13] Designing How You Work: Tools for reviewing your ideal workweek and recalibrating your time and delivery.
[10:39] Introducing the Groundwork Programme: Details and structure of the two-week business reset, and how it can transform your planning for 2026.
[14:09] How to Join Groundwork: Sign-up information and support details for those interested in the next round.
Resources mentioned:
- Ready to reset before the year ends? Join Groundwork – a 10-day guided sprint to step back, get clear on what’s working, and make intentional decisions for 2026.
Short daily videos, focused prompts, and the option to join a WhatsApp group and live coaching call. Sign up at onestepoutside.com/groundwork.
We start Monday 17th November.
1:1 Coaching & Mentoring
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Year-end planning for solopreneurs
This episode is for you if you’ve set aside time to plan for next year, but you’re realising it’s quite hard to make decisions when the foundations still feel messy or off track. You’re not looking for more goals or a colour coded calendar, but you want a simpler, smarter way to figure out what your business actually needs in 2026. So if you’ve been craving a plan that reflects your real priorities, capacity and direction, this one’s for you. 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 Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach, and mom 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.
Okay, so we’re heading into mid November, if you’re like me and my clients are probably starting to think about 2026, although there’s also a whole lot of stuff going on before then. In my side, we’ve had half term and Halloween and my son’s fifth birthday party, a ninja skate party. And then now Christmas is looming with everything that, that ent skills as well. So, you know, it’s easy to kind of go, oh, I’ll visit this. You know, that’s the January 2026 problem. But if you’re anything like me and my clients as well, then you also love thinking about these big picture strategy things. It’s really exciting, right? Thinking, wow, this is my really bold and ambitious vision for next year, for the future.
The income goal that perhaps you didn’t hit this year suddenly becomes very feasible because it’s a new year. You’re starting sort of with a blank slate and, and there’s an opportunity to do things that perh, we didn’t make time for this year. But of course the, the fear is, or the, the risk is that we don’t make time for that, especially if we now go, oh, yeah, I know what I’m doing, it’s fine. Christmas then comes and then, you know, before we know it, January’s there. The other piece, of course, is that there’s a bit of a lag, especially with things like B2B, but with any kind of marketing and sales, we can’t just you know, post one day and say, hey, this is my new thing. Join today. It does take a bit of warming up, so you need to be clear on what you’re doing and then start taking the actions and the results will probably come, you know, one, two, three months further down the line. So again, if we wait until January, not to be the bearer of bad news, we’ve, we’ve really lost an opportunity.
So hopefully you are doing these things now and perhaps you’re even super busy with delivery to the point that, you know, you’re trying to just get all those last things done and you don’t have capacity. Maybe you’ve planned, you know, a sort of CEO day, a strategy day in your calendar, or you have a notion board that you haven’t quite opened yet and you just think, okay, I really need to sit down and do this. But either it gets a bit murky or you just don’t get round to it because so much is going on. And I think I said last week that, you know, having that external sounding board is so valuable. I’ve been doing this for years. I love a strategy. I’ve done other people’s strategic reviews and quarterly reviews and annual reviews. I do it.
My accelerator members, I do my own. And I’m, I’m. I don’t say always, but I am continually evolving and tweaking how I do it to make it really work. But here’s the thing. I suppose planning doesn’t work if the model underneath is misaligned. You know, if the business model fundamentally isn’t delivering on the targets, let’s say that you’re setting yourself. It doesn’t matter if you set new targets and new to do lists and things. You know, you just can’t set meaningful goals and make the right decisions for you and your business.
If you don’t know, okay, what are the things that are actually working here that I should be keeping, that I should be continuing? What are the things that perhaps are working but feel too heavy? What are the things that aren’t working? And then within all of that, what do you want to keep versus what do you want to change? So a framework we used to use in my old corporate marketing days and something I do with the accelerator clients quite a bit, is that we look at, stop, start, continue. So what are the sort of red traffic lightspace, what are the things you want to stop doing that aren’t bringing ROI? It could be spending three hours on a LinkedIn post. It could be tweaking your website for the umpteenth time it could be, you know, chasing sort of low ticket offers that just aren’t, you know, aren’t paying you enough and so on. Right. So there’s what you want to stop doing. Very importantly, there are things we need to continue doing because they are working and, or we don’t yet know if they’re working or not. We need to see, need to give them enough time to, to percolate and actually potentially bring results. We need to continue doing those and then finally what do we want to start? And that’s kind of shiny object syndrome.
It’s easy to say lots of things but the reality is we can’t just add lots of things without taking off some of the things that are feeling heavy already. Right. That’s the issue. If we keep adding things, that’s when we get into a spot of trouble. If your offers, you know, are feeling a bit Frankenstein, as I say, you know, there’s just so many things or if your time stretch really thin and it’s not just a time management problem, you know, as much as I am such a fan of productivity, I wouldn’t say hacks but at least strategies and I’m always hungry for ways to better manage my time and energy. It’s not just about the calendar, right. It really goes deeper down into sort of the foundations, the, the blueprint that you have for your business model essentially. So you know, you might go and I’ve had clients who’ve done this in the past, you might go oh yes and you know, do a perfectly beautiful colour coded so spreadsheet or canva design or arty farty strategy, like one page or an A3, whatever it is, or you have a really sort of complex technical system.
You know, I use Asana for my project management, maybe that’s kind of what you’re doing. Some people when they start, you know, do a whole deck obviously for a solopreneur kind of light business we don’t really need. And in fact even if you are going for investment, most VC firms and things don’t want like a hundred page deck, right. That they’re a one page business plans. Then there are a couple of famous ones. There’s a lean startup one, there’s, there’s a couple of business model canvases. I have my own intentional business model blueprint that I use in my clients and that’s kind of the underlying strategy. So that is useful.
But to get there we need to have space to look at okay income. Are you where you want to be? And even if you Are, you know, it’s always important to look at this, what is profitable? Where’s that coming from? And you may have heard the 80, 20 Pareto principle. So it’s been proven that, you know, often 20% of your clients bring in 80% of your income. 20% of the effort you’re putting in is giving 80% of the reward. So what is that 20%? That, my friend, is the hard part. Right, so what’s actually driving that profit and how can we lean in there? And what’s draining on the other side too? And of course, what’s not, you know, taking far too much time and not bringing the ROI effectively, the return on investment in terms of delivery. I think this is a bit. People forget.
I’ve done a few more in person things recently. I love them, they bring so much energy. I have visibility, obviously, then if you’re lucky, you get footage and pictures and obviously payments, hopefully, and other opportunities that come from that and a great buzz, but they also take a lot of energy. So I want a sprinkling of those in person talks, but I can’t. At least at this season of my life, I’m not going for the. I don’t know what it would be, I guess two, three keynotes a week, even 50 keynotes a year, that’s just not what I’m going. I then have my group mentoring programmes, which is zoom calls. I have my coaching and, you know, looking at the different ways in which you’re delivering your offers and what’s sustainable and feels good with your current energy and season.
We can’t not revisit our message, I think, I mean, any programme that I’ve led or been in, that’s something we’re all, I’m not saying struggling with, but we’re continually evolving and trying to improve, really getting more and more granular and clear on what do we actually want to be known for again, in such a cluttered market with all the AI clutter online with more and more people, and I’m sure it’s the bubble of the algorithm, but I see more and more people talking about sort of things that I talk about more in the B2B space. It might be sustainable productivity and human first leadership and that’s amazing, but it’s also, oh gosh, there are other people doing kind of what I want to be doing here. So how can I make sure that I’m really standing out and not kind of just competing as a commodity on price, but really building the authority and credibility that gets people coming to me? But Also, you know, doing the outbound activities that are going to make sure I get those opportunities and then I win. And of course there’s an attitude of abundance, there’s plenty to go around and we all need more human first work places. So I think there’s, it’s not that there’s not enough work, but it can feel like that when everyone around you seems to be doing the same kind of coaching stuff. They’re all trying to go for the same speaking engagements and so on. So you know, income, model, delivery, message and time thinking about how you work. Yes.
How much you work, but also how your week kind of feels. I use different tools like designing your ideal week and then seeing of course time, boxing time, blocking is something you’ve probably heard of to really block your week and then tweaking as you go. Of course, your ideal week is never going to 100% match where you are and you might want the variety each week. But it’s really important to know. Okay, again, I use the example, but it’s because it’s a real one. I can’t, you know, I’ve been talking about the four hour workday, for example. I can’t do four hour work day if I spend three of those hours writing a LinkedIn post, for example. Unless my business is completely based on LinkedIn posts.
And I know that those three hours on LinkedIn are going to generate my 100k or whatever it is that I want for the year. 100k, 200k, whatever. Okay, so I mentioned last week I’m doing a two week. I hesitate to use the word sprint, but I suppose it is a sprint because it’s 10 days, it’s Monday to Friday for two weeks. We start on Monday the 17th. So coming up quite soon now it’s what I’m calling the groundwork business recalibration. So week one is going to be and it’s all little videos and prompts, reflection prompts, an optional workbook that you can do and really asking some of these questions that I’ve mentioned. Now in terms of looking back on this year and just looking overall at the business model in terms of the income that clients you’re working with, not just, you know, are they the right calibre and so on, but also do they respect your boundaries, are they aligned with your values and so on.
There’s all sorts of things we can unpick there. Delivery, as I said, in terms of, you know that for me, the speaking versus workshops versus online versus offline coaching, mentoring, writing. And so On I had a client who said, you know, I really want to write. And yet there was no time in his calendar for writing. And that’s not great, if that’s what we want to be doing. The hours we’re working, of course, pricing comes in there. And then also, how much are we enjoying the work we’re doing? So. So week one, it’s going to be five days, Monday to Friday, really guiding you through.
Okay, what is it you actually want? Where are the gaps between where you want to be and where you are looking at? Kind of, what have we tried so far? What happens if you don’t fill those gaps? Because that’s an important question. And then kind of, what’s the timeline as well? You know, are we talking. I need. This needs to be fixed the next three months, or are we rather, you know, it’s a year or even a longer. I’m slowly shifting the boat, the ship, whatever, in the new direction and I’m happy for that to take, you know, three to five years. But I’m really going for a big more elevated positioning, you know, leap up in terms of income and so on. And then week two of this groundwork programme and I should say1stepoutside.com groundwork as you can find the details. So that’s one step outside.com groundwork and we start on Monday the 17th.
You will then in week two, walk through, I want to say, a light rebuild. We’re not, we’re not ripping everything up and starting again, but it’s just coming back to basics to some extent and understanding, you know, aligning pricing with capacity and reworking that week. So it really supports you. Yes. Sharpening your message to make sure, you know, that we have that positioning that’s going to take us to where we’re heading, not just where we are, where we’ve come from. And then probably picking one or two key shifts to focus on for Q1. Right. For the first few months of next year.
Because we don’t want to come out of this with a list of like 100 things we need to change. So I know that you’re not starting from scratch here. You have so much expertise, experience, you know, things that have been working, things that perhaps have been more draining and you don’t need more kind of knowledge at this stage. But I do think it’s really valuable to have space to get that clarity. And again, we’re not going to be doing sort of a day by day plan for the whole year, but it’s more kind of a reset for your direction, where we want to go from here and laying that foundation really for what we’re building in the new year. So you’ll leave having a clear understanding of what’s working, what’s not, a smarter, simpler plan for how to shape 2026 and also really importantly, a kind of inner confidence that you know what you’re building next and why and you’re beginning to, you know, shape up the things that you need to do to again to sort of and I’m gesturing but you can’t see me because this is an audio podcast, but you’re sort of turning the ship in that new direction. So again, if you want to walk into 2026 with more clarity and less, join us for groundwork and you can sign up there@onestepoutside.com groundwork and you have the two options. One is sort of the core reset where you have access to the self paced.
Well, I say self paced but there’ll be a new video released every day, but you have access for a month afterwards. So it is self paced. If you want to slow things down, little video, little prompt workbook to bring it all together. And you can also upgrade for access to a private WhatsApp community. I always think that’s so valuable to have other people around you going through the same things to share perhaps your message, get some feedback and if you want my feedback as well. And you then have the option to join a live group coaching call after we finish the two weeks and so again we start on Friday 17th of November. All the links in the show notes but you can go to one step outside.com forward/workwork to join us very, very soon. I’ll hopefully see you there. Bye for now.
Groundwork, your 10-day business recalibration starts on Monday 17th November and you can still join us. It is a two-week business reset designed to help you step back, get clear on what’s working, and make intentional decisions about what’s next. You’ll get short daily videos, simple prompts, and a guided workbook with the option to upgrade for a WhatsApp group and a live coaching call the following week. Head to onestepoutside.com/groundwork to join and I would love to have you in there. That’s onestepoutside.com/groundwork.
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