Planning For The New Year

Hey everyone. I hope you are having a fantastic week. Now, before we jump into this week's episode of the podcast, I just want to share with you some really exciting news as we head towards episode 100. Can you believe that we are now nearly at 100 episodes? That's something I'm really proud of. When I started out in my podcasting journey, I'd read that the average number of episodes a podcaster records before they give up is set seven. So I was absolutely determined that if I was going to go on this journey with you guys, I was going to keep doing it. And here we are nearly two years later and we are approaching episode 100. And I have something really exciting in store for you to kick off the new year, which is when we'll be releasing episode 100. So you don't want to miss out on that. It's taken us a ton of work to put this episode together and I'm super excited about it and I know it's going to be really valuable for you. So make sure you have hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out on that. And talking of as we head into the New year, I wanted to share with you on this episode a few ideas to make sure that you start your new Year in your agency or your freelance business on the right foot and ensure that you have a robust plan. So that's what today's episode of the podcast is all about. And let's get on with the show. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DeCoster. Now, I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions. It strikes me that they are things that we create to fail at. But I am really keen that we have a clear plan for our business and that we have some really clear goals that we can measure and we can celebrate our successes along the journey. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. Today in the podcast. Now, every business, it doesn't matter whether you are a one person business like myself who works with a few freelance people or you run a 20 person agency, you need to have a plan because you need to have a sense of where your business is headed. And I always liken a vision to a journey. We need to make sure that we all agree where the destination is. So let's imagine that we want to go to the south of France. That is our vision and, and then our strategy is how we're going to get there. We're going to take a boat and a train and so on, and then our plan is exactly which boat we're going to catch, have we booked the tickets? Where are we going to stay overnight, where do we need to eat? And so on and so on. But if you don't have clarity on where you're trying to get to, in other words, in this case the south of France, that destination which is the longer term vision for your business, then you're just going to go round and round in circles and maybe you'll get to the south of France, but maybe you'll end up in Skegness instead. And not everybody in your business will be aligned with you to get to the south of France. If you haven't clearly explained that that's where we're headed and sold it to them and got them excited about that journey as well. So you really want to make sure that you start with a longer term vision, which is the south of France, and then you break it down into your year plan and then your quarterly plan, and then you break that down into your month plan, and then you take your month plan and you put it into your diary. That is exactly the way a vision gets delivered. Rather than creating that looks great and sounds exciting, but no one's got really any idea of how you're going to get there. If you want to turn that vision into practical actions that mean that you actually get to the south of France, then you have to take this concept of big vision, break it down into years, break that years into quarters, break the quarter into month, and then take the monthly goals and translate them into your diary to make sure that you have achieved this. Now, as I said, you should be doing this whether you're a one person business like me or you run a 20 or 200 person agency. And kind of what spurred me on to record this episode is that I'm knee deep in doing this for myself so that I've got some sense of where I'm headed and some excitement about that direction. Now on that note, you want to make sure that the goals that you're setting for yourself or for your business are goals that you really want to achieve, rather than kind of judging that a business like yours, this is the next step it should take. And you're sort of judging that. I've done this work a number of times with private clients where they've gone away and they've reflected on what they said they wanted for the longer term and then they've come back to me in the next coaching session and Said, hey Rob, I'm really sorry we wasted our time last time because I said I want to go to A, but in fact I thought about it and actually want to go to B. And I say, no, no, of course we didn't waste our time because sometimes you have to say you want to go to A to realise that you want to go to B, if that makes sense. So make sure to your vision is something that really excites you and also make sure that you connect your personal aspirations and your personal goals into your business vision. Because, you know, we are entrepreneurs, we run our business and that's one asset of our life or one aspect of our life rather. But we need to tie in all of our personal aspirations as well. So I'll give you an example of that. One of my goals this year was to start working four days a week. Now, if all I did was, was have that as a kind of a dream that I'd like to work four days a week, it was never going to happen. So I needed to have a strategy to getting there, which meant getting more efficient, focusing on the things that move the needle for me and stopping doing other things. And most importantly, know why I only want to work four days a week. And the reason why is because I've got a kind of a side project which is all to do with my camper van and creating a YouTube channel and a new website. And I wanted to have a day a week to focus on that. And that's what I've managed to do. But it was only because I put a plan in place. And that gives you an example of how I've tied my personal aspirations and my personal vision into my business vision. Now, when you create your plan for next year, which hopefully you're thinking about doing at the moment, remember that a plan is much more than just a finance plan or a people plan. And I think most of us get used to doing that because our accountants tell us to do that or banks tell us to do that. So we might be quite good at creating a financial forecasts for the next year and estimating our costs and looking at our profitability and working on margin percentages of 20, 30, 40%, whatever. Great, that's really good. But it's not the only thing that goes into making up a business plan. So yes, you want to have a finance plan and you want to have a people plan, but actually you need some things before that. You need to have clarity on what your core products and services are going to be for next year. How are they Evolving. You want to have clarity on who your target market is and who your ideal client is. And again, how is that evolving? You want to get your pricing right for those products and services. Then you want to have a sales and marketing plan in place so that you understand how you're going to win that business. And then you can take all of that and then, and only then turn that into a finance plan and start considering what kind of resources do I need to serve this level of client, this level of product, this level of revenue. And then you're thinking about your team. Whether that be an in house team, a remote team, or a virtual team, you've done this work, you can start to figure all of that out. Now that sounds overly complicated. It isn't. And I would really encourage you to keep it simple. In fact, when I do vision work with my private clients, we get the whole project done within probably two to three coaching sessions. And we create a thing called a three page plan, where page one captures that longer term vision, which might be five years and three years. Page two captures the one year vision and the quarterly plan, and then the third page is the monthly plan. And you really want to work on keeping it simple. You don't want to make this a massive list, and I'm going to give you one tip here that you should never have more than seven projects. So seven projects for the year, or seven projects for the quarter, or seven projects for the month. Seven is your magic number. You might only have two or three, but you certainly can't have more than seven. So if you're finding that you're creating a massive to do list, then you really have to start grading these tasks and deciding which are the seven that are going to move the needle forward. So make sure you adopt a keep it simple strategy and approach to doing all of your planning for the year. But I would really encourage you to sit down and kind of visualize yourself in a year's time and say, where do I want to be personally? Where do I want to be with my business? What would great. What would success look like for me? What do I want? And the reason you want to do that is because you want to make sure that you are in control of the direction that your business is heading, rather than letting external factors dictate your course of travel. And trust me, if you don't create a plan and if you don't have a vision for the year, and if you're not constantly reviewing that plan, then you will be letting external factors dictate your direction. And of course sometimes those external factors are massive, such as a pandemic or a recession. But most of the time they're smaller external factors that if we don't have a plan, they will have a bigger impact on the direction that we head. It might be simply that you take on completely the wrong client because you don't have clarity of who your ideal target client is and that client takes your business in a different direction. They're really difficult to service. You have to invest an inordinate amount of time managing them. So have a plan. And on the note of external factors, you want to make sure that your plan is dynamic so that you can look at it every month and say what do we know today that we didn't know last month? And then you should be willing to change your plan accordingly. That doesn't mean you're failing, it just means that your plan is reflecting the reality of now as opposed to creating this beautiful plan, a three day away day with order of your senior team, casting it in stone and, and then using it to beat yourself up as it becomes more and more out of date because you're not willing to keep it up to date. So make sure that you get into the rhythm of allocating some time every month to spend in the strategy space, which is looking at your plan and saying, how do we need to amend it now? If you have a team, then that's great. At your senior leadership team meeting, you should be using this plan as the basis of your conversations. But if it's just you, then just simply allocate an hour in your diary once a month where you're getting all of your kind of tactical now distractions away and you're just looking at your plan and saying, where are we? What do I know today that I didn't know last month? How did I do with the goals I set for last month and what goals do I need to set for this month? Now if you keep finding the fact that you, the tasks and goals that you set for last month keep getting transferred into this month, then you are overestimating how much you can get done. So you need to be much more practical and honest and realistic with yourself and say, based on my kind of client service day to day workload, how much of these working on the business projects can I do this month? And like I said, it could just be one or two projects, but it definitely can't be more than seven projects. And so use the number seven as a way to filter what you should do and what you shouldn't. Do what sits on your waiting list until you've got those other seven projects completed. Now, it often helps to do this work both in terms of actually setting the vision for the year, but also reviewing the vision by getting away from your desk. So try and either if you work at home, find a different room to work in, or even go to a coffee shop or a hotel, or if you're in the office, try and get out of the office and be somewhere inspirational so that you can literally remove yourself from the day to day as well as mentally removing yourself from from the day to day. And that gives you the sort of space to think longer term and actually put yourself in the position of where will we be in a year's time? What would great look like and what do I want to achieve? And how does that tie into all of my other personal stuff that's happening outside of my work as well? So that's just a few tips and reminders of what you should be doing as you head into the New year. If you want any help with this or you've got any questions, please do reach out to me. I always get back to people who do reach out, so my email address is in the show notes today, and if you've got any questions about your vision or about the process, then do reach out to me. I'm also going to share a link to one of my free guides called Creating a Sustainable and Profitable Agency and this digs into what we've talked about today in more detail. So again, I'll put the links to that in the show notes and go take a look, download that, and use that to help you guide your planning for the next year. But other than that, I hope you have a brilliant rest of the week. As ever, if you've enjoyed this episode, please please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. That helps the algorithm show more people just like you this podcast and that helps me reach and help more people. Other than that, have a brilliant weekend and I will see you next week as we head towards episode 100 of the agency Accelerator podcast. Sam.