Ep. 264 Planning for 2024: Your 12-month Business Blueprint

It’s that time again when we look ahead to next year and plan out our business goals and action steps for the next 12 months.

In this week’s episode, we’ll walk you through…

• An approach to annual planning that involves coming up with an overall theme and, of course, your personal definition of ‘success’
• A reflection on your goals not just for your business but for the other areas of your life that matter as well
• Setting ambitious but realistic financial targets for the year and breaking them into quarters
• Asking what you need to do in order to hit those targets, from business tasks to mindset
• And working out what support you’ll need to keep yourself on track.

Tune in for a high-level planning session and, if you want more of a deep-dive, then join us for our interactive workshop session over at onestepoutside.com/blueprint coming up on Thursday 16th November (and available on-demand after that).

*Resources mentioned during the episode*

The 12-month Business Blueprint – Set yourself up for success in 2024 with a compelling vision, specific goals, and the building blocks that will get you there in this 2-hour virtual workshop on Thursday 16th November 12.30-2.30pm GMT. Use the coupon EARLYBIRD for a 20% discount if you buy before Thursday 2nd November. www.onestepoutside.com/blueprint

Business planning for 2024

Hello, hello, and welcome back. As we continue on with the show in more ways than one, we are talking about planning for 2024. So, number one, if you haven’t already get your got your ticket, then please do join us over at one step outside.com forward slash blueprint, that’s a one step outside.com, forward slash blueprint, or message me on any social channel, if you can’t find it, for whatever reason, just message blueprint. And I’ll give you the details. For our live interactive workshop coming up this Thursday, the 16th of November, if you’re listening to this live, you can watch the recording after the fact as well. But we would love for you to join the energy. And of course, opportunity to ask any questions is much more powerful. If you’re able to join live, there will be the opportunity as well, I should say, to get a discounted one to one strategy session with me. So do watch out for that opportunity as well. But we’re coming together to plan out our 12 month business blueprint for 2024. And I know you might fall into one of two camps, I’m going to say I’m sure it’s more nuanced than that. But you may be a planning fiend. And I know some of you here in the community eat up from my templates and structures and worksheets. And so and you love it, I love a good template and worksheet and so on as well on a system that may be you.

Or you may be a creative who resists the kind of structure and, you know, all these are all quite, you know, masculine corporate goals and the language that we’re using, and so on, maybe doesn’t sit quite well with you, I would encourage you to keep an open mind either way, because I really do think it’s so powerful to reflect on what it is you want. And whether you do that through meditation and, you know, sitting on a rock somewhere, or you do with pen and paper with a worksheet, I’d argue ideally, you do both, I think a combination of a bit of rock setting.

And you know, sort of organic reflection is really powerful, alongside some more structured guided thinking, that can be so so important to highlight things that perhaps weren’t so obvious to you, to show you maybe some unfulfilled goals that are coming to the fore that you really would love to do something about, maybe there are some gaps in your knowledge, you need more support in particular areas. So it can be very enlightening to do this work. So again, I’d love to have you join us in the live session, Thursday, 16th of November, head on over to one step outside.com. Forward slash blueprint. Assuming that you have now got your ticket. If not, then pause, go on or wait to come back. I would love for you also, if you’ve missed it, to go back and listen to last week’s episode. And that’s whether you join the live session or not. Because last week, we did a bit of a reflection on the past year 2023, I hope I’m getting the years, right, because it’s always very confusing when there’s a change of you. So reflecting on 2023, how it’s gone so far. And then looking ahead to 2024. I do want to give you a little hint of my approach, though. So if you aren’t joining us, you’ll get much more of this on Thursday. If not, then at least you’ll get get some of the ingredients and sort of some guidance from me today as to how I recommend that you do this. And you may have come across my approach. And it’s not my approach from the beginning. It is something I learned many years ago from someone else. And apologies, I’m not sure how to correctly attribute it, I’ve seen quite a few people have started this approach. And the approach is to have an overall theme for the so it could be bold decisions.

You know, first things first, consolidation, balance growth, significance, I don’t know I’m coming up with it could be a value for you, it could be representative of the kind of courage courage, in fact, would be a good one for some of us.

You know, it could be visibility, it’s to guide your decisions for the year really give you that overall theme. And it’s a bit of a chicken and egg you can you could start with a theme and then your choices kind of cascade from that. Or you can build the detail building blocks. And then a theme might emerge from that. But that’s, that’s a big part of the work I like to do. Related to that. And perhaps more, more even more high level than theme is sort of your definition of success. So it could be your bigger picture definition, but it’s really you know, this time next year, if I’ve done X Y Zed, if I feel x y Zed, then I’ll be successful. That’s the whole point of having goals and a plan. If you don’t know what success looks like for you. You’ll feel pretty confused by the end of the year when you’re trying to decide if you’ve been successful or not. And again, that success could be and the more I’m you know, I’m 10 years in business now. I’ve got two young children, the more evolved I become if I can use such a sort of Yeah, that’s Sounds a little arrogant. Because I’m far from evolved. I’m sure I’m very imperfect still. But the more I go down this rabbit hole of personal development, the more nuanced things become. And it’s no longer as simple as you know, I wrote a bucket list of 100 things to do before I die. And that was quite an easy thing to check things off, just fly to this country and do this and do that. As you get deeper into it, it becomes more nuanced, and it could be being present. With your children, it could be you know, showing up as your best self, it’s much, much more philosophical and nuanced, potentially. But if we can, you know, and as far as we can be more specific, that does help us to check in. So even if it’s like an emotion, I want to be more confident, try to give yourself a score, you know, this year, I’m a six out of 10, on confidence showing up on video or on sales calls, or whatever it is. Next year, I want to be an eight out of 10 or something like that, right, you can find ways to quantify even the unquantifiable. Another part of my approach, of course, if you know me at all, by now is that I do look at this kind of holistic meaning of success.

That’s what we did when we look back on the previous year last week, and considered the what I call the five L. So live, health and well being and that’s the first L is really the foundation of everything else. love, relationships and belonging, learn development and growth, lead career and impact and laugh, fun and spontaneity. So, you know, my approach is very much not just focused on the lead, as it were with the business and the income and so on. But really considering those five different areas and, you know, as as perhaps frustrating as it is both for the individual and for me when I’m working with people, by definition, this means that I have clients who discovered that perhaps the business is not their priority, because they really want to conceive, and that’s been a big priority for them. And that becomes the focus or, or perhaps they do have a baby. And that then means that certainly for the foreseeable future, they can’t or don’t choose to often go all in on the business.

And that’s amazing, right, that’s the whole point for me is that you’re focusing on what really matters. And that may or may not be the business, it may be that you choose to focus on your health. And while that’s a part of the programs, I offer, I’m certainly not an expert in either mental or physical health. And so perhaps that would be them working with somebody else. But nonetheless, that’s the approach right to consider these different aspects of your life and always try to maintain what you would kind of call a balance insofar as that’s possible.

The next piece, though, is to consider your financial goals and really to have a target income.

And we do this in much more depth in the workshop and in my programs. But you know, my pendulum on money has swung in both directions over the years, it went very happy and Oh, money doesn’t matter to actually yes, it does matter when you build a big expensive house. And more importantly, money means that you are successful. And I mean that I’m doing quotation marks that you can’t see. What I mean by that is, if I am making money, that is a very tangible metric, measurement of the fact that I’m making a difference. Making money sustainably also means that I can continue to make a difference. If I’m so altruistic and pricing, my service is so low, and so gentle in my sales tactics, that I don’t make enough money to survive, then I’m going to have to take a job, I’m going to stop doing this business and I won’t be able to help any more people doing this, you know, work that I’m doing right? So you know, money really is a sign that you are successful helping other people, which means that you can then continue to help people so so try if you struggle with this, maybe you don’t, but if you do, then try to see it as something far more significant than simply money. Now, if money drives you, then by all means, that’s fine. But you know, certainly my naive abandonment of, of money for a period of my life, and wasn’t so helpful. And I think it’s important, you know, we are adults, after all, we have bills to pay now more so than ever. And it’s really important, that is a big consideration. And we’ve got our eyes open to taxes and expenses.

And ideally, not just getting by but actually I want to go for a massage once a month, I want to be able to go on holiday without really thinking about you know the money I want to be able to buy healthy choices in the supermarket and not have to buy the cheap processed stuff or whatever right so this is this can take all different forms for you. What money represents is far more important than money by itself but the financial goals are very important. We also look at and I think I’ll do a deep dive on this soon on the podcast as well but five different areas of the business. So we look at income, visibility, service, operations and legacy, income visibility, service operations and legacy and those may have five different categories of tasks if you will, that are really important. to prioritize in different orders, sometimes depending on what your goal is, and but certainly they all need to be considered considered in order to build a sustainable business, then we want to be thinking about what’s it going to take to get there. So okay, we’ve got our financial goals, we’ve got these different things need to do. And it might be some mindset work, some self sabotage, you know, you might need to get out of your comfort zone, you need a certain support system, you certainly need to develop resilience and have kind of a backup plan for when things don’t quite go, according to that plan.

And really thinking about, okay, and this is one of my, I’d like to think, quite unique spins on this, I really take the vision and the big picture goals and anchor them in very tangible, daily targets, right, really looking at how many hours days I want to be working, when don’t take time off, plan that in first. And then of course, looking at boundaries, you need to set things you need to say no to and so on. And so that’s really important to get that kind of work life balance, or as I call it work life integration. Right. And then because we’re talking about our business blueprint, and this is what we’ll be doing the work shall we will look at the whole year of sort of the the seasons, the quarters, understanding what the focus will be. And you know, we do kind of ebb and flow or energy does, there is a rhythm both from the day the week that the year. And that’s something to consider, I am going to, for the first time have my daughter of school the whole summer. That’s exciting. And that’s going to give my season’s a different dynamic, certainly. So that’s something to consider as well. And so that’s just a few of sort of the the elements to my approach, again, big picture theme, definition of success. And considering those five L’s that I’m always talking about, yes, looking at financial goals and your service offering and so on that will get you there, those five categories of business tasks, income, visibility, service, operations, and legacy.

And then really, what else is it going to take to get there, you know, mindset and productivity habits, all these things, right.

And sort of the quarterly milestones as well, monthly, weekly, daily. And in fact, in my business incubator, we really have that weekly check in. That’s one of the biggest, I think, again, unique factors of it, getting that support of really having and I was inspired for this by my personal trainer, who does a weekly check in, you know, every week to make sure that we’re, you know, how are you feeling about this? Where are you on that result. And that kind of support is just invaluable, and to really get you to where you need to be. So again, final reminder, Thursday 16th, we are doing the 12 month business blueprint workshop, so our planning for 2024. If you’re listening to this, before that date, you can still get tickets at one step outside.com forward slash blueprint, you can then get the recording in the month after. So if you’re late, don’t worry, you can still watch that. And there will be that opportunity as well to get a discounted strategy session with me. So look out for that as well. And but I hope that’s useful in terms of getting an idea of my approach, getting maybe some inspiration for how you might want to approach this yourself. And even better, I hope to see you on the live session, especially if you haven’t joined a workshop before. And you’re kind of curious about my approach. I think this will be a great baptism of fire to to join us and to get yourself set up for the year and either as a springboard then to join one of my programs or to set you up for success independently as well in the coming year. I’d love to see you there. One more time one step outside.com. Forward slash blueprint. And and yeah, hopefully see you in a few days. Bye for now.

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