316 My annual planning process

On today's episode of the podcast I'm walking you through my annual planning process as I prep for 2024. 

I love goal setting and business project planning so I'm excited for January planning. If you're familiar with the Strengths Finder assessment, Futuristic is my #1 and Strategic is always in my Top 5. When planning for the New Year rolls around, I always have to dial myself back a little and ask if I'm planning for the sake of planning, or am I mapping out something executable? 

I brainstorm all year long, but I created my 2024 planning Google Doc in October, did a lot of it last month, and then we do our company quiet weeks, end of December/early January, is when I generally wrap up my planning process. 

To start my planning I use the Vision Traction Organizer which comes from the book Traction by Gino Wickman. I've been using this since 2019 and I found it really useful for breaking down project management as an entrepreneur. You start with your core values, focus and goal setting. I also recently read Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz which has you come up with your Queen Bee role in your business which is what you hang your hat on, and also come up with your company promise. 

Our company promise is making things fun. I hear people tell me a lot that we make tax and legal stuff, a not very fun topic, as fun as possible and non-judgemental. Our core values are: 1) We make stuff fun. 2) We keep it simple. 3) We stay transparent. 4) We educate and empower. 5) We reserve judgement. 

Our purpose is making business fun again. What I mean by this one is that when we start our business it's an exciting idea and it's fun to work on our branding and website and getting our first clients but then we get weighed down with taxes and bureaucracy and the stuff you don't want to do. If we take the weight of that off your back, can we make business fun again? 

Our company promise is legal and tax solutions that don't suck. Clockwork also has you figure out your 10 year target, three year picture, one year goals so you're essentially reverse engineering your goals. This is something I share a lot about in my programs. 

In three years, my goal is to have $600k in revenue with roughly $330k in profit with about $25k in monthly recurring revenue. I think it's fairly doable based on the growth we've had over the last year. And this is what I need to hit to fund all my personal life goals. We also need to map out what this looks like. For example, if you're in the wedding industry how many weddings do you need to do to hit your goal? 

In Traction you also map out your marketing strategy. You create your three unique selling propositions, for us it's 1) Accessible for newbies because we have offers at all different price points, 2) Judgement free, 3) Fun for everyone. 

Most folks come to us through our lower ticket items or the podcast and eventually we want them to go on to join Unf*ck Your Biz and then they join Profit Rx or Legal Rx for monthly maintenance as we help them scale up a profitable business. 

Once we have our three year plan, we can move into our 2024 goal. For revenue, my Good goal is $300k, our Better Goal is $400k, Best $500k which may be a little extreme. Profit, my Profit goal is 60% and I have two specific measurables - 1) Get to $15k in MRR and 2) Book six stage speaking gigs for 2025. Then we ask ourselves what we need to do this year to hit our one year goals and set ourselves up for the three year goals and these tasks are called Rocks, which is modeled after this example.

Our rocks are the core things that are important to your business that are big picture. I like to map out one or two big ones per quarter for myself and then one for each of my team members. In my opinion it should take someone 2-3 full work weeks based on how many hours they work a week. 

Here are a few rocks for me and my team: 

- Migrate our email to @notavglaw.com

- Relaunch our Pinterest

- Finish a state-by-state sales tax blog 

- Build out a formal testimonial process

- Create speaking calendar and pitching timeline

- Create industry-specific keyword rich blog posts

Then we take theses and map them out my quarter. We also map out our launch calendar. In 2024 we want to stick with the programs that are working for us and just launch those instead of adding new stuff. I mapped out the months we're going to launch things, and I'm allowing myself to get creative with the way that we launch things. 

We've also mapped out our core offer structure and our company KPIs (more on that in next week's episode). If you're a regular listener, this offer structure is going to set up the structure of our Profit Report episodes for next year. 

Our core offers are: 

- Unf*ck Your Biz, our signature 1-on-1 service

- Contract Club

- Legally Launched (launching in a different format in the new year) 

- Profit Rx (revamping and opening the doors in February) 

- Legal Rx 

We'll keep some $10 offers on our site and we're getting rid of freebies because I find people don't really download them or care about them and we usually send more low ticket offers than get downloads of freebies anyway. 

With all this in mind, we created some big goals based on our brand promise of "making legal and tax solutions that don't suck." 

Our goals (you'll hear these at the start of every Profit Report)

1. $1500/month in low ticket sales

2. $5,000/month in monthly revenue (I want to this 1 & 2 each month) 

3. $15,000/month in monthly recurring revenue (I want to hit this by the end of the year)

In order to reach these goals we have lots of data points we need to track. One is focusing on getting 500 new follower contacts/month whether it's 100 people on TikTok, 100 people on Threads, 200 on Instagram, etc. We're tracking this now on Enji. Each person on our team has a KPI they'll be tracking around this. 

If you listened to today's episode, I would LOVE for you to hop into the Braden's Besties Facebook group (bradensbesties.com) and share what your 2024 goal is. What to do you hope to accomplish? Feel free to share some rocks as well. 

I'd love for you to leave a review of the podcast on the platform where you listen.