Five Minute Friday: How to Maximize Your 2025 Boutique Boss Planner

Foreign. Business can be a lonely game. But it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat, where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys, it's you and me and I wanted to come to you really quick to help you jumpstart your year using your planner. Now, I know so many of you purchased the Boutique Boss Planner, which is the planner that we built and developed just for small business owners here at the Boutique Hub. Maybe you use a different type of planner and that's totally fine. We have a couple of Boutique Bus planners left if you want to switch over. But if you're interested in how to use this planner to really make the most of your year, I just wanted to show you around and answer some of the most commonly asked questions and show you my favorite tools to get to planning effectively inside. All right, so let's take a look at this year's Boutique Boss Planner. First things first, I am all about not just the planning process, but how to plan better. What are the tips, the strategies, the to dos, the things that I should know along the way. We're an education company, right? So part of the things that we've built into the planner, several pages we built into the planner are actual tip sheets on social media, on planning, on the four part to do list on content strategy. Because this planner is not just a planner, but it's also a content planner where you can lay out all of your marketing and social media in one place for the week. So first things first, this quick little guide to creating great content and then several collection ideas, social content ideas, marketing campaigns and events for your retail business are all listed at the very beginning of the planner so we can work smarter and not harder. All right, second thing I love about this planner, I'm a big goal setter and I think in order to set great goals going forward, you have to be able to take an effective look back. And sometimes I, maybe not even sometimes, I think this is all the time. I think this is probably true for a lot of us when we look back on the year we just finished it. It's really easy just to focus on the negative. It's really easy just to see the glaring things that we didn't like or that didn't work, but we lose sight of what actually did work and really what should we be doing more of and focusing on? And so there's a full self assessment for you as you're setting your new goals for 2025 to really take an effective look back at the last year, what worked, what didn't, and where are you going to go from here? And once you do that, then we've broken down all the goal categories for you, of course, personal business all the way through all the different areas of your life because they're so intertwined. Now, the next part of goal planning for us, I've just, I don't like the idea of setting a goal for the year and then just chasing it all year long. I'm a big fan of breaking it down. So we've been an EOS company, entrepreneurial operating system for the past about four years. And that comes from a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. And one of the most important parts of this process is, yes, you set the annual goal, right, the one year plan, but then you break it down into quarterly rocks. So you've got to be able to say, all right, I want this much in sales, right? That's pretty generic, basic goal, well, what is that a month? What is that, a quarter? And how am I going to get there? And then you can start to really create objectives below all those goals. So here at the Hub, we plan everything out by quarter. So we've laid everything out in quarters for you and months so that you can start to break down those annual goals section by section. All right, now this is the meat and potatoes of why I created this planner is because I feel like I want all my business data in one place. Yes, I have QuickBooks and yes, we have Shopify, and yes, we have other reporting tools and mechanisms, Google Analytics, everything. But we kind of wanted like a business bible where we could pull all that data. And for me, when I read something on a report and then I physically write it out with my hand, it just sticks like I understand it better. It's two different types of learning as they combine. And so in this planner, we have all kinds of business tracking so you can get more familiar and more comfortable with your numbers from all types on a daily basis. So right here, the first part of the tracking that we have, this is all inventory and sales tracking. So we look at not just sales, but what were your sales with the inventory that you had on hand, was it higher or lower than normal? Was it more aged, less aged? We really try to Analyze is your inventory really working for you inside of this tracking sheet? We also do tracking month by month on social media so that you can actually see your social media growth, your email list growth. Because you know, I always tell you guys only attract number grows. So we've got to really focus on, on that tracking. All right. Oh, I got to jump forward. I want to come back to this now. All the year end tracking has to come from somewhere. So this is an exercise that I really love to do personally. It's at the end of every month, not only do we look back at the number numbers and the data, but I want to have a real deep look at like what worked, what didn't, how was the weather, what promotions did I run, what should I remember for next year, what staff was performing, like just what was happening that affected the number of the month. Right. There's such a difference in like the information and the data. So at the end of every month there's tracking sheets where all the numbers are here for daily sales performance, but then all of this introspective data as well so that in 2026 you can just pull out this planner and look at every month in review from 2025 and have a more effective plan for what you're going to do month by month for promotions, inventory, all that stuff. Okay, here's the next thing I have a lot of to do lists, a lot of checklists, a lot of reminders, all the things. And in retail there's a lot of very specific things you need to be reminded not to do on a weekly basis, but quarterly, annually, seasonally, so on and so forth. So we took all of these little reminders, checklists, annual checklists, quarterly checklists, monthly, and we put them in the planner for you so that you can get all those little reminders for yourself or for your manager all in one spot. Okay. This is the last thing and this is the decision that I think a lot of people need to make when they're purchasing and choosing a planner for them. And that's how are the days laid out. There's so many opinions on what works, what doesn't. I'm just going to show you. This is my current week here. I'm going to show you a couple of dates that I've already planned. So a week is a double spread. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see the planner that I'm holding. So a week is a double spread where you can put hours of the day in here and track by the hour and then we have daily top three priorities at the top. Because I'm a big believer in a long massive to do list is not how you get stuff done. It's not how we're being effective because we fill it with busy work. So, so I want you to focus on the three biggest rocks, the three biggest to dos, the 20% of your list that gets you 80% of the results, right? The income generating activity. That's what I want to be on your daily three. And then there's plenty of room at the bottom of the page for notes and reminders and those quick errands that we have to run. So then if you turn the page from that week, the corresponding week is there for social media and marketing planning. So you'll see all the days of the week down the first column and then all of the other columns are the channels that you're marketing on most commonly. So Facebook, Facebook group, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, email, text and your app. And so here's where you can come in and really start to plan out what's the content that I'm going to be posting on a weekly basis and then cross it off when you're done. We have a lot of retailers who use this strategy with their manager or with a content creator on their team. So, so everyone like they have a morning meeting with their planner, they can go through the to dos, they can go through the checklist, they can look at what content's planned and then someone can go on and execute from there. So it's a great tool to get your team all on the same page. So I hope that was helpful. Cheers to planning 2025. I hope you went to Target and got all the colorful pens, the stickers, the things that make you not Write like a 12 year old boy like I do. Best of luck. It's one of my favorite times of the year. I hope you're enjoying it as well. Cheers to an amazing 2025 and to everybody who purchased a planner already. Thank you. We appreciate you. We hope you love it and if you haven't, we hope you'll give it a try. Thanks for listening guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show and head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.