On Annual Planning - A Guide to 2026

Hey everyone. Well, in place of our normal scheduled Monday interviews, I wanted to record this podcast today, which is a solo episode that I'm calling On Annual Planning. It is 2 weeks from the time that this episode is going to be dropped that we're going to be a few days post-Thanksgiving. And on December 2nd, Tuesday, December 2nd, we're going to be hosting our annual planning workshop. And so this episode has two functions. Number one is to let you know about our annual planning workshop. It is totally free to register and to be able to join us on Tuesday, December 2nd at 10:00 AM or starting at 10:00 AM Central Time. Now we're probably going to go in the 3 to 4 hour range. We used to do the annual planning workshop over two days, but after surveying our clients, which by the way is always good to be able to do in business, is to actually speak to your clients and customers. We found out that most people would rather have been able to do it in one day. And so on Tuesday, December 2nd, we're going to be doing our 2026 Annual Planning Workshop. This is, I believe, the 4th year in a row that we've done an Annual Planning Workshop. And I think this one is going to be the best, most concise one that we've ever done before. Now, the second outcome of this episode is not just to talk about coming to the Annual Planning Workshop, but I'm going to talk in general about some of the things if you're not able to join us on the 2nd. How should we think about annual planning as business owners? Like, what are some of the elements that make for successful annual planning? And what are some of the things that don't make for successful planning? So, uh, number one is, in my own, uh, history of planning, I really didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know how to go about planning. I didn't have tools. I was just kind of making it up. I was, had some generalized ideas of what I wanted to try to accomplish in the year, but I really did not know. And the second big mistake that I made when it came to annual planning is I really didn't start annual planning until January or February. I remember even being close to March, the end of Q1, before I had ever really gotten into planning for the year. The third big mistake that I made when it came to annual planning is that I did not invite the team. It was only myself, me, myself, and I coming up and dreaming up these pie-in-the-sky aspirations, which I'll get to that mistake in a second. These pie-in-the-sky aspirations that had no bearing in logic or reason. Even having a specific plan to be able to do it. But I did it all myself and did it all myself. And then, of course, the next mistake— so I didn't invite my team, but the next mistake is I really and truly had no basis for the justification. The nobody was checking my assumptions that I had in place. They were just kind of my dreams without any type of actual functional logic. There was no math behind them. There was just a big dream. So number one, I was very late in the planning process. I did not start in December. I would wait until January, February, maybe even sometimes later. I did not involve my team in any of the planning process. My assumptions had no basis whatsoever in logic, reason, and just just math. So I didn't involve the team. I had no logic. I, I waited too late into the process. And then probably one of the biggest mistakes that I made— even if you start making some of those— there just was no plan. There was no plan to execute on it. It was just like, this is what I want us to be able to accomplish, but I didn't actually then say, okay, then here's how we're going to go about doing that. And I would even say if I was going to give a bonus mistake that I made, it was just too complicated. Just too complicated, which kind of comes when you are late to the game in planning. You don't involve your team. You don't check your assumptions. You don't have a plan in place. I mean, honestly, is it not just logical that it would then get very complicated? There would be so many numbers and so many graphs. So if you found yourself in any of those type of mistakes that you've made during your, you know, time as a business owner, just know you're not alone. And I would make those mistakes year after year after year, and I never had a framework to go about how to approach the planning. So I'm going to give you a handful of print frameworks today. Now, if you want to obviously execute on some of these frameworks, then we'd love to, you know, invite you to our annual planning workshop. By the way, the way you get to that is if you go to blueprintos.com, blueprintos.com, you navigate to my homepage, you'll go there and then you'll click on the resources tab. Then that will take you to a webpage and you'll be able to scroll there and find the link to register for the annual planning workshop. Or if you just want to go directly to that link, it is blueprintos.com. Assets, blueprintos.com/assets, you'll be able to register and we'll share with you where you'll get the workbook that we're going to be working off of, as well as obviously the replay, etc. So blueprintos.com/assets. Okay, so now I've shared some of the common mistakes of annual planning. Well, what are the things that we, that actually do make sense? I think number one, it comes before we even get into the actionable frameworks. I think it also really comes from a place of understanding that the value is not just in the plan, but it's actually in the planning process. It really is that the fact that you, you begin to learn how to think about the year, not just what the actual things are going to be. Okay. Number one framework is to understand that the first place that we need to look at this is we need to look at it in the terms of our clarity or Organizer. Now, the Clarity Organizer is what we use with our members, and you'll get access to this in the workbook, that helps us to think about like the vision that we have for the business. And so the one of the very first things that we're going to do is we're going to make sure that in our planning process, we're going to reference our 3-year vision. We're going to reference our 3-year vision. Where are we trying to go again? When does my 3-year vision end? 2026, 2027. If I've never set one, then I'm going to set a 2028 3-year vision. So number 1 is we're going to kind of orientate ourselves about, wait, what are we trying to accomplish again? Oh, that's right. I'm trying to get this company to $1 million. I'm trying to get this company to $3 million. I'm trying to get this company to $10 million, whatever that is. So we're going to orientate ourselves around the big vision that we have for this business. Then we're going to take a step back from that completely. And we're going to reflect on the year. We're going to reflect on the year. We've got to be able to see what are the things that went well in 2025? And what are the things that didn't, did not go well? What are the things that we can learn that we did, some of the wins and progress that we made, and how can we pull some of that stuff into 2026? Secondly, what are the things that absolutely did not go well at all? and that we need to make some changes on. We need to stop doing maybe some of those things. There's oftentimes, you know, hard-fought lessons learned that we learn in a year. So we want to pull the wins that we had for the year. We want to obviously recognize the lessons and the mistakes and the challenges that we had in the year as well. So we're going to kind of close out the year. We're going to reflect back on 2025. So number one, step number one is we're going to reorient it, reorientate ourselves to our big 3-year vision that we have for our company. Step number 2 is we're going to look back and we're going to say, all right, well, what worked and what did not work this year? Well, then in step number 3, now that we have some of those things in place, we're going to then begin to look at, all right, well, what do I want to accomplish in this next year? I mean, at this point, the world is my oyster. The year is my oyster. What do I actually really want? Accomplish in this year. And so to do that, we want to actually start from a place of kind of some math. And one of the tools that we use is the Rule of 40. So I'm going to put everybody back into orientating around numbers, revenue and profitability specifically. What's my top line revenue number I want to hit? What's my bottom line profitability number I want to hit? How much do I want to grow top line? And then what do I want my bottom line to be? So how do we actually balance that? So what, before we get into, I want to grow my team and I want to increase this and I want to increase that, I want to go to a new office. Sure. But at the end of the day, I want to know what my growth is and what my profitability is. So that's step number 3. Step number 1, we're going to reorientate ourselves to our 3-year vision. Step number 2, we're going to reflect back on 2025. What went well? What didn't go well? Step number 3. Is we're going to then look at our Rule of 40 tool that we have. If you are not familiar with the Rule of 40 tool, you're definitely going to join us on December 2nd. Go to blueprintos.com/assets. You'll get access to the Rule of 40 template. It is, along with Clarity Organizer, two of my absolute favorite tools to be able to use in my own businesses, but definitely in working with clients. So we're going to use our Rule of 40. Then we're going to start— now that we have some revenue and our profitability targets, we're going to then start to look at what are some of the big objectives that we want to accomplish. Accomplish. I don't use the word goals. We use objectives. And we want to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 5 big objectives that we want to accomplish in the year. And we've already set one of them, which is our revenue and our profitability targets. But what else do you want to accomplish? Maybe there's some systems you want to build. Maybe there's some, you know, team members that you want to be able to hire. Maybe there is, you know, some marketing targets that you have that you want to be able to hit. Whatever that is. But we first want to start really with brass tacks, which is that revenue and profitability number. And then every other decision that we make, every other objective, really at the end of the day, kind of supports our revenue and profitability target. So beyond that, what we also do in annual planning is we kind of reflect back on to like, what are some of the personal things that we want to accomplish? Like, what are What, maybe what's some personal income targets that you want to be able to hit? Did you make $10,000 a month this past year and you want to make $15,000? Did you make $25,000 a month? You'd love to be able to make $30,000, whatever that number is for you. But it seems almost taboo to talk about those things, but we want to set them. We want to set some personal income targets. Also, I think it's cool to set a word of the year. What do you really want the word, you know, the word to define your 2026 to be about? So that's High level, those are the steps that we go through to be able to put together an annual plan that actually works. We're going to, we're going to first, we're going to reorientate ourselves to our 3-year vision. Step number 2, we're going to look back what went well, what did not go well this year. Step number 3, once we have some of those, we're going to then start to look at, okay, well, wait, where's my, what's my revenue and my profitability targets going to be this year? And we're going to use the rule of 40. From there, we're going to start to set some of our big major objectives. We call those objectives and key results, or OKRs, for this past year. Next, we're then going to go in and we're going to say, all right, well, what do we want? What do I want the year to be defined at from me, from a personal income perspective, but also my word of the year? What does that actually look like for me? And there's obviously some surprises here and there. Look, I don't know what kind of year that you had. This past year. 2025 could have been absolutely killer. But maybe you're concerned about going into the next year, or maybe this year wasn't great and you're looking for a complete reset. Whether you want to build on momentum that you built, you had in 2025 and carry that into 2026, or maybe it's time for you to completely flip the script. Maybe you are so done and ready for this year to be over that you are so excited to go into 2026. I'd love for you to join us. We got a special guest that's going to be, um, kind of our keynote speaker for the event as well. Go to blueprintos.com/assets. You can register for the event. We're going to be together for about 4 hours, and, and my clear outcome at that event is to get you about 75-80% of the way done for your 2026 annual plan. I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday, December the 2nd. And till next time, next episode, lead well and go be great.