Planning Ahead for 2024 with the Boutique Boss Planner

Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works, from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub, and I can't wait to chat.

Hey, guys, welcome back to the podcast. It's you and me this week talking about, oh, I'm just gonna cut to the chase of it. How many of you listening feel like a total hamster on a wheel from time to time, right? Are you running your business or is your business running you is really the question. And I think every time January rolls around, I get all excited. I'm like, okay, this is the year I'm going to get everything back on track. I get out my old Lisa Frank stationery, my colorful pens, and I'm like, okay, this is my new definition of how I'm going to make lists, right? I think we all do that with our New Year's resolutions, but we fall into a couple of really critical mistakes that get us off track throughout the year with our planning and organization. You know, we might bust out that brand new day planner, but maybe we don't use it very long, or maybe we don't use it correctly, or maybe we just find out that the planner that we're using only is telling part of the story and it becomes overwhelming because there's the planner for your life, there's the planner for your content, and there's the planner for your business, and then there's the spreadsheets you're tracking, and then there's all of your kids information that you're tracking and it just seems to fall into all these different buckets and it's so much to keep up with. So if you follow the Hub for any period of time, you know, myself as a mom of three busy kids who are wildly into sports and a busy husband who has his own thing going on many times too. I too have fallen that trap of like, how do I get all this done? How do I stay organized? So along the way, there's been a couple of different tools and strategies that I've really, really dove deep into. Things like the four part to do list and time blocking or understanding daily that we cannot operate with a long to do list. How many of you guys do that? You have a long old to do list and you just want the endorphin release of crossing things off the to do list. Take a shower. Check. Check the mail. Done. Right? We put things on our list just so we can cross them off, but it feels good and it makes us feel, feel organized the second we make that to do list. But then what happens? We get to the end of the day and we're like, oh, gosh, I maybe did four things on this list of 30. And you get to the end of the day and you wonder, man, was I really effective? What did I really do right? Am I, am I really moving the needle? Or look at how much I did right? But then when you reflect on how much you still have to do, it creates this period of lack. Like, it creates a gap between where you are and where you want to be because we continue to pile on our to do list all the time. So knowing that, that's been my life too. There's again been some big changes that I know I've had to make. And we talk about these in Retail Bootcamp, we've talked about these on the podcast, and I can go into them in more detail, but here's really the biggest tool that I feel like we've been able to come up with to, to address so many of these struggles, and that is the Boutique Boss Planner. So many of you. Several years ago when we started, the planner jumped on board with us when we created a six month version. It was our very first toe in the water. We didn't know anything about creating planners, you guys, literally nothing. We were like, this is what it should look like. This is how we want it to function. Hire a graphic designer manufacturer in the United States, like, done right. And we sent that little puppy out, got your guys feedback, and then built out the full year long version of the planner, which we've just been able to evolve every single year. So I'm coming to you today because I want to talk about 2024. I want to talk about the Boutique Boss Planner. In case you don't know what it is, but also what's new and what strategies you can use with this planner or with any planner to help you to be more successful and feel like you can put your head on your pillow at night. You're not the hamster on the wheel, you're not struggling, but you really do have it all done. Not just in January when it looks cool and your pens are full of ink, but in August and in September and in October when the year is waning on you. Right? Maybe not going the way you want. And you just plain feel burnt out or overwhelmed. I want to prevent you from getting there. So here's what's inside the planner. Let's start there first. What is a boutique boss Planner? Well, if you're catching this on YouTube, you're going to get a visual for what 2024 looks like. So the boutique Boss Planner is the only day planner built for the boutique owner by the boutique owner. So, so, so many of your guys, ideas and input, everything is in this. Plus the boutique owners on our team at the Boutique Hub helped build this from their real life experiences. So you're going to see a lot of boutique owner blood, sweat and tears inside of the planner. Not only is it a day planner, but it's also a content creator. This year it has strategies and ideas for you to help optimize your business. It comes with some buying guides and collection ideas and social media ideas along with all of the inventory tracking that you could need. Inventory tracking, sales tracking, social media tracking, buying tracking. Right. All the numbers that you're hopefully, hopefully tracking on a weekly basis. But it feels like a squirrel, like you got to build your own spreadsheet to manage all of it. We put all the tracking inside the planner. So if you want a pencil to paper and sit down and think through those numbers every week, you can do it in your planner. But it's also really helpful, like one single snapshot where you can look back at the last year, at the last month, at the last quarter, as you're planning what's happening now and you're planning what's going to happen ahead. Because it's all in one spot. It's not on endless sheets of paper from QuickBooks. Right? So there's strategy, there's inventory tracking, all kinds of tracking. There's also checklists. So because it's built by boutique owners, it comes with annual checklists, quarterly checklists and monthly checklists. The little things that you might not think about, they might not make it to the top of your priority list. We've put them inside the planner just to help keep you on track. But also if you're someone who has employees, the checklists are really good for your team. So if your manager is using this planner or anyone on your team, you can keep this open on your desk and you can empower your team to go through those checklists on a regular basis. So besides the strategy, the checklist, the, the tracking, it is a day planner. It comes with a full week layout. Let me just show you. So if you're watching on YouTube you can see it comes with a full week layout. So you can put every hour of the day what you've got planned, and then at the top of every day, I'm a big advocate for only three big rocks go on your list. Only three big rocks. Everything else is sand, right? You can work the sand in. But only three daily priorities come at the top. So it is a traditional planner. It also has the full, like, month view, month by month, month. But it's also a content planner, so that is new for us in 2024. Many of you are probably familiar with the two products. We used to have the planner, but then the content creator. And the content creator was your way. This is much like a spreadsheet that I built for our company and now translated it to paper. But it's our way to say, all right, here's all the days of the week, here's all the channels we're marketing on. Let's just lay out as a whole, what does our week look like in terms of content? What emails are we sending? When are we going live? What collections are we dropping? When do I need to post on social? What do I need to do with this TikTok that I'm going to repurpose and make it into a reel and a YouTube short and drop to Pinterest. How can I keep all of that straight? So, again, you can do it in a spreadsheet version or inside of the 2024 planner. We combined the content planner plus the day planner. So if you're again checking this out on YouTube, you can see what the layout looks like. Days of the week, channels that we're marketing on. Again, if you have a team, this is a really good place for you and your team to get on the same page to map out all the things that you're creating. Now, something else that I really love, and I'm just going to show you again really quick. If you're looking at these tabs. So there's tabs by month in the planner, but then all your checklists and things, they're all in the pink tabs. Something neat about these pink tabs, if I can switch to this page, are. My gosh, where is it? All right, this is one of my favorite things about the planner. So monthly reviews. How many of you have been in a situation where, let's just say you're planning an event, I'll say Pink Friday, and you're like, okay, now what did I do last year? When did I start marketing that? Last year? How successful was that last Year, Right. And you're going based on memory. Well, eventually that doesn't work, right? We forget things. We're human. So every month in our checklist, not only do you have here's all of our cash, here's our sales, here's how the month performed, KPI wise. But I also want you just to talk about your month. What worked, what didn't work, what worked for your personal goals and your health goals. What worked for your business goals, what was your website conversion rate? What was your average order value? What were notes about new and returning customers? What was your website traffic like? What was your maintained margin? How did you meet your daily sales goals? And then just trend reports. What were customers buying? What was working? What were the biggest and best promotions that you ran? What was the flop that you ran? How were the weather patterns affecting your sales? Right. And then just notes on supplies or things to remember for next year, things that you're going to need to buy into as well as this I think is really important is a debt tracker. Right? How am I paying down on my debt this month? So just another way to like slice and dice and review. How's it really going in my business? Besides planning ahead, I want you to have a piece that you can always come back and reflect on as well. So all kinds of things inside of the boutique boss planner. You guys, I really hope you have an opportunity to snag one for 2024 this year. Again I'm going to show you what this package looks like. So there's the planner. But when you buy the entire planning pack the entire bundle right of goods, couple other things. We have a custom notebook for boutique owners that comes along with it. Our tear off sheets which are always fun for your desktop. They're sticky this year which is new. But let's dig into this. The four part to do list. I think I have an entire podcast episode you guys dedicated to. This you can go back and listen to. But it's important that you also grab this four part to do list. It might be something that you do every single week. That's how I do it. Anyway, this came from me going, I'm overwhelmed. I'm sick of a really long to do list. It's making me crazy. I need a better way to schedule my life so that I can also be a wife and I can be a mom. Maybe I could have a hobby of my own besides my kids expensive horse hobby. Like what is it that I'm gonna get to do? So the four part to do list was really Just a brainchild that I had a few years ago to help me digest all of this. So here's how it works in the four part to do list list, number one, every week I think about this. What do I have to get done every week, right? These are things that are not negotiable for me. It's the marketing, it's team, it's KPIs and reports, it's photo shoots, it's ordering inventory, it's working with vendors, right? It's all these things. So put those down in one bucket. This is my every single week list. If you have a team, it's really important that you do this for your team as well so that you can make sure you're synchronizing your team schedules. And I'll tell you how to do that in just a second. The second list is what is my this week list? Right? Not next week, not if I get to it later, not that list, but it is priority this week. Okay? So this is not customer service, this is not answering emails because emails are a holding place for other people's agendas, right? So emails are not the first thing we do every day, they're the last. So what is it really? What is a 20% of my to do list that is going to get me 80% of the results? And it's probably the thing that you've been putting off the most. So making changes to your website, really understanding your inventory reports, or making a buying plan, working to optimize your email flows and structure, really understanding what is working with the SEO. And the back end of my website, right? These are big rocks. So what is my this week list from those big rocks? And then what's the urgent sand that's going to fill in around it? Oh, I've got to order this and I've got to remember to tell so and so that. Right, that stuff too. So I've got my every week list. I've got my this week list. The third list is my later list. So these are the things that keep us up at night. They remind us that at some point we're going to die and we should write a will, right? Oh, do I need to do it this week? Oh, I keep putting it off till next week. Well, that's called my later list. It's I need to come back to it next week, next month, next quarter, next year. But I need to assign a deadline to that. It needs to have an active deadline. Now, your later list might just come a page in your notebook or a page in the planner, it might come on this four part to do list tear off. Or what we also do as a company is we use Trello boards. And I love putting my later list and my brainiac ideas. I say brainiac ideas, it's really just wild squirrel ideas. It's wild squirrel ideas that don't make sense to anyone else but me. Those are my later list ideas. They all go on to Trello. All right, then my list number four every week is what can I say no to? Or what can I outsource? Or where do I need help? Right? As entrepreneurs, we are typically control freaks and we want to do everything ourselves. We say things like, oh, yeah, I really should get some help where I could hire for that, but I don't want to because of blah, blah, blah, and we insert excuse here. But the truth is, no matter how big or small we are, if we want to scale, at some point, we're going to need some sort of help. So if you're brand new, it's maybe help watching the kids or it's maybe help packaging orders for a couple hours or help in the storefront for a couple hours a week. You can start small. It's an intern. But as you scale, right, that list becomes bigger and more dynamic. But that outsourced list and how do I ask for help is also what do I need to say no to? So I'm going to pick on all the ladies listening, right? Sometimes for us, women are typically, like, more guilty of this than men, but sometimes we assign our worth to our helpfulness. And so when someone says, hey, can you please, you know, join the pto, can you please lead this Girl Scout troop? Or can you please volunteer to bring, you know, cookies to the school concert? Whatever it is, we think that we are not worthy or we're a bad person or we're a bad parent if we say no to those things. But the truth is, as an entrepreneur facing burnout, sometimes it's a hard no. Sometimes it's a thank you for thinking of me. I'm so honored you would think of me. But unfortunately, that's not going to be a priority for me right now. I've got too many irons in the fire. It eventually becomes really liberating to be able to say no. Because, you know, if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no, right? You can't be half in, half out. So I think it's a challenge, and it's definitely become a challenge for me to look at my calendar every single week. Every month and go, okay, where am I spreading myself too thin and what do I need to say no to? And those of you who have, you know, followed what we talked about when it comes to CEO versus entrepreneur mindset, this is really the power of the CEO to set a boundary and stick to it, right? No, I will not work past 5:30, right? My kids have basketball games tonight or my kids have whatever or I just need a time when I could watch Netflix and I can take a break, right? You have to be able to fill your own bucket before you can fill anybody else's. So what is your boundary? What's your hard stop? Where can you say no? Where can you outsource? That comes on your list number four every week. So again, for me, I fill this out every single week just to kind of put my head back on straight. But then here's what I do next. The list number one becomes my theme days. So my theme days typically change maybe with the seasons. So when kids are out of school for the summer and kids go back to school, that just works for me personally. Might be totally different for you, but how I work theme days is like this. Okay, I know on Mondays it's marketing. On Tuesdays it's all team related things and financial related things. On Wednesday for me it's all content related things. Right? For you it might be on Thursdays it's photo shoots, it's your live sale, it's new inventory release. And on Friday it's your financial Friday. Rather than thinking about time blocking hour by hour and minute by minute, which is really hard to keep up with and feels a little defeating to me personally. That's just my personality type. I feel like shit, I missed it. I didn't do it today, right? Instead of that, I can just devote blocks of time. Like this is what I do on these days, right? I've got these three main priorities from my list and then I can synchronize whoever's on my team to work at the same pace. So if Monday is my marketing day, Monday is my team's marketing day as well. So all those conversations happen on Mondays, Tuesday, same thing. I can go throughout the week. Alright, now here's the last tidbit I will tell you and that is if you heard me talk about the four part to do list and time blocking, you've also heard me talk about tiger time. So I'm totally giving Amy Porterfield credit. I heard this on her podcast many years ago. But tiger time is when am I performing at my best? When is My brain really working. And for me, it's 8 to 10 in the morning. That's my sweet spot. So I don't book any meetings. I'm not with the team. Like nothing is going on except for me working on my list number two, my this week list. Every morning from 8 to 10am nothing else gets scheduled in that spot. So I block that out on my calendar first and foremost. And then outside of those times, then I can go back to whatever else is scheduled for the day. So quick insight into how I plan my days and things that have just, I don't know, help me feel sane at the end of it all. But for me, having an actual planner and having everything in one spot, both my personal life and my business life in one spot has become really, really important. And I know it has for many of you guys as well. So many of you have bought the planner of you every have bought the planner every year. So thank you for that. Thank you for supporting this product. Thank you for your input and ideas in making this planner the best it can possibly be. Now, a couple questions. I know we get asked a lot about a digital planner and that is definitely something we tried really hard to explore this year. But frankly, like the digital programs that we were finding to deliver you a digital planner, they weren't very good. We did not come up with a great solution that I felt like I really wanted to stamp my name on and send to you guys. The other tricky part with a digital planner is we've had this with a number of our things at the Hub is it's really easy for someone to copy it and to reproduce it and to sell it under their own name. Just like you guys with your pictures stolen all the time on the Internet. Some of those digital products that we sell, the same thing happens. Someone else takes it, they copy it, they reword it slightly and then slap their name on it. And suddenly everyone has a boutique product. So we try to avoid that by keeping this planner just a little bit more paper. And someday when I find a good digital version that does not allow that to happen, I will get you guys a digital version. I promise. Okay. One last thing I wanted to tell you. This is new, this is big. This is for this year. So many of you in the past several years have been a part of our small business marketing handbook. Now, if you're not familiar with what that is, you guys, this is when I see the question, what should I post on social media today? What collection should I launch this month? What should I be buying for this month, what promotions, what events should I host? How do I drive more traffic? How do I get more excitement? How do I get more engagement? All those things. Our team, I feel like we have a lot of creative people on our team. So we have put our heads together and put all of our ideas into one little package called the Small Business Marketing Handbook. And it is 75 plus pages of every idea you could run for social media. So all the daily social media holidays are in there. Like thousands of engagement questions. So one of my favorites, Brussels sprouts, question mark. Watch people lose their minds when you ask them about brussels sprouts. But we've got engagement questions for every single month, month of the year. We have discounts and games that you can run on social media. We have TikTok ideas. We have all kinds of ideas in the Small Business Marketing Handbook. So for us, that's an information product, is a digital product that you can get instantly to your email inbox. Print it off if you so if you think it would be helpful and tuck it inside your planner. If we printed all that and put it in the planner, this puppy would be even thicker. So we did not combine those. Instead we combined the planner with the content creator. So you had blank space to plan out your content and then you can use the handbook if you so choose to supplement. So the handbook, the Small Business Marketing Handbook is brand new this year. We had made like a non dated, kind of evergreen version two years ago. You guys didn't love that. You wanted something that was I want 20, 24, I want to know the exact dates, how it's going to work. I want ideas. I want new ideas and fresh ideas. So that is coming this year as well. So that's it. That is what's happening in Plannerland, you guys. If you have any questions about the Planner, it has its very own Instagram account. So please follow Boutique Boss Planner on Instagram. And if you do snag the Planner this year, I hope you love the funky colors. I would call it like chocolate meets strawberry mint ice cream. I don't know, it's kind of edgy and different and fun, has a happy vibe to it. So if you do snag the Planner, as always, we'd love to share your content. So tag Boutique Boss Planner as well. We would love to repost you get some good Internet juju going and send some love back to your Instagram and TikTok and Facebook accounts as well. So that's it. You guys. Check out more on the Planner at boutique boss planner.com leave us a comment, leave us a review, drop a question. We're more than happy to answer. All the links, of course, will also be in the show notes this week. So with that, you guys have an awesome rest of your week. Thanks for hanging out with me. I know so many of you do every single week. I always love hearing your stories of where you're at when you're listening your kids, soccer field practice, you putting your makeup on, driving with your spouse, driving with your kids. Hi kids. All the things. So shoot me a message anytime. AJ Alderson on Instagram. Let me know where you're listening to the podcast and if you ever have guest or topic ideas. I always love those too. So that's it. Have an awesome week. I will talk to you guys soon.

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