#18: Annual Planning for Your Best Year Yet

I didn't have anything on paper that proved that it was going to be okay, that it was going to keep showing up for itself. I just felt like, wow, I had a lucky month. Now what?

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny

town tucked in right inside the Smoky

Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

Hi everyone.

Welcome to this episode of the Professional Creative Podcast. I am back with my integrator, Lisa Jacobs. Hello, Lisa.

Hello, Bonnie. Such a pleasure to be here. I'm having so much fun with the podcast and you are doing a beautiful job. Who knew you would be my favorite podcast host of all time? You're like a natural here.

Who knew you would be my favorite podcast guest of all time?

Lisa,

we are kicking off a new year. Welcome 2023. And today we're going to be talking about annual planning. And so I've brought Lisa back. This is her third podcast with us. And so we want to make sure you are free to listen to this episode. But really before you implement what you learned today, we want to make sure that you've listened to it.

Really.

Part one and part two to this third part that we're going to be discussing today. Lisa, will you just recap quickly? The Daily Scramble, which was the first episode we want everyone to listen to?

Yes. And what we talked about during the Daily Scramble is just our natural inclination to wake up and toil and scramble and say, what am I going to do today to make this business work? What am I going to do today to make this business better? And it's very natural. It's human nature. You should go back and listen to the episode. You will love it. And so one of the things that we like to stress is that you have to know where you're going. You must put a landmark or a success path like Bonnie teaches, so that you know what you're working toward, but not only that, you have to keep it front and center, because our human nature, our human brains are wired to circle. So if you find yourself circling the drain, if you find yourself coming out of a week and saying, what did I produce? That's perfectly natural. And that's one of the things we love to constantly monitor, get more efficient at, and get better at all the time.

So this episode was episode number 13 that we're discussing. And then the second episode that we want to make sure that you listen to is number 17, which just dropped earlier this week. And it's all about strategic planning. And so we're really talking about the things that we do at the end of or the beginning of every year. And so it's perfect timing. And the reason that I want to talk about annual planning specifically with you, Lisa, is because you are who I learned it from. And I've shared this before, but there is literally a line in the sand for me. There is my business before I started annual planning and my business afterwards. And I learned it from you in2017, 2018. And it brought sense to what I was doing. It solved the daily scramble. It gave me a mission. It gave me a place for all of my thoughts and ideas, and it's really when my business began to take off. So set us up for the way you look at annual planning.

Yes. I think one of the things that we hear quite often is that to build your business, you really had to know yourself. You really have to understand yourself in a way that you might have never understood yourself before. What are your work habits? What are your creative rhythms? When does insight and inspiration come to you and when doesn't it? And I love, in the entrepreneur's world, making sense of all that. I love the human nature of all that. And so it was really fun to observe myself in my own business and say, what am I doing half the time? And why can't I get this going straight forward? And so I think I operated for at least a handful of years without an annual plan, without a strategy. I mean, I was just going. I was just going with the flow and flying by the seat of my pants. And I know everybody starting out can relate to that. It just felt like I felt lucky to be here because, you know, I was doing the right things, but I just happened to be doing some of the right things. I think around year five, I realized I could be doing so much more of the right things. And so without a plan, without an annual plan, without a strategy, the Things that I found myself falling into were panicked pitfalls. The slow seasons. I had no hold on the slow seasons. I didn't understand that a business would have naturally peaks and crests, that you would have high seasons and you would have low seasons. So when the high seasons would start to, you know, descent and you kind of fall into that crest, I would every year, year after year, go into a panic. Like, oh, no, the whole business is going under. And it's. The whole. This whole venture is full of uncertainty. It's full of just, you know, making it up as you go along. I used to love telling people I'm in my house, in these four walls, making an income out of ideas out of my head. And I'm, you know, I'm constantly just trusting that more ideas will come. And so after about five years, for the first time, I just sat down with a giant drawing pad and I started to actually track what had. Had been happening the years before. I saw for the first time on paper that every summer was a slow season. And unfortunately, you know, I have a family. That's when my kids at home, that all of the kids are at home to be there for me to enjoy. And rather than being able to fully immerse myself and really enjoy that, here I am panicking about where's all my income, My income is dwindling and what's happening. And so for the first time, I was able to see there's patterns here, there are patterns that I can capture. And then not only that, but when it goes into a high season, oh, my gosh, now that I know it's going to be a high season, I can build better runways. I can make them so much higher. And actually, I think that was one of the turning points where my income had gone from, you know, what's considered a good side business to I'm making money in this industry because I just started to understand it better. And the annual plan can help you do that.

I am so intimately close with what the. What it feels like without an annual plan. I remember it so well. And it's not a great feeling. It's first and foremost, that scrambling feeling, like, I've got an idea, but oops, I didn't build in, like a Runway for it. And so I don't have time to even implement it. I need money today. I need to pay my mortgage today. And then, you know, another feeling was distrust in my business. I didn't trust my business. It took me so long to get to where I trusted my business because I felt Just like you said, that it was running off of one idea to another, and that felt like it was running from one lucky break to another.

That's right.

I didn't have any thing on paper that proved that it was going to be okay, that it was going to keep showing up for itself. I just felt like, wow, I had a lucky month. Now what? And the other thing that it made me feel like was that I didn't have time to honor the ideas that I had. And I think everyone who's listening is a creative mind. And that means, like, our. Our superpower is ideas. But if you don't learn how to hone your ideas, you will have what we call, like, squirrel syndrome, right? Like, shiny objects. And you'll jump from one thing to the next and never fully see something through because you want to honor your ideas. And what annual planning does is give you the opportunity to put them in their own time and space, out of your brain, onto paper, and know that you'll come to them, but that you have to finish the idea that you're currently on first. That's what it made me feel like.

Oh, my gosh, I love it. And, you know, there was a time where I spent a lot of time of energy helping Etsy sellers. And what you just reminded me of is sometimes you would see the listing and they were trying to capture the SEO lead, so they would name their product Blue, Green, Independence Day. You know, they would just give all of these SEO strategic words inside of the title. And I always said, oh, my gosh, no, honor your product. Give that product a name. And when you said that, it reminded me of it's, this is what annual planning is. Honor your talent, give it direction, give it strategy, give it a plan to really thrive. It's almost like that, like, honor it, give it a name, and put some plans to paper.

Okay, so one of the things that I love about annual planning is that when you do it, you're like, that made so much sense, I can't believe I haven't done it before now. And so it's not a difficult concept. However, it does take intention. You're not going to accidentally create an annual plan. I have to stop. Like, I actually put it on my calendar. Annual plan. I stop for at least a day, but often two or three days at the end of the year or the beginning of the next one to put this on paper and make deadlines for myself and, and put everything there. So get to the, like, technical nitty gritty of, like, how do we actually do this, yes.

So like we've been saying, everything is in preparation for your success in honoring your talents. Everything that we're putting on paper is really meant to help your high seasons do better and your low seasons enjoy that. You can actually say, oh, I might have summers off because I have a very slow p. And it feels like when I'm putting, you know, work and offers out there, nobody's interested. And so that might become something sacred in your annual planning. It depends on how everything goes. But just like Bonnie is saying, you need to carve out the time to do it. I'm like you, I can't do it in one day. It usually spreads through, through the week. And also, I, I don't think that there is ever a stopping point. So if you were hearing this in June, you should still do the annual planning in June. I always love it to come with a blank calendar because, mainly because of the way I am and how obsessed I am with planning, I like to pull it out and do it any time of the year and reassess what's happening every 12 months in. In advance. Because I like to know what I'm working on and if it's making sense and if it's all landing. What you plan at the beginning of the year may not even make sense in three months, a new opportunity could present itself. You never want to hold your plan, so you don't want to white knuckle it. You always want to hold the vision loosely and be willing to readjust and reassess because you don't know what, you don't know about what's going to pop up for you this year. And it could be the best directions that you never saw coming. And so one of the things you'll just want to do whenever you're starting, you're looking at 12 months in advance. We often talk about Stephen Covey's big rocks method. And if you haven't heard it before, Stephen Covey himself didn't even come up with it. He wrote about it in his book because he went to a business seminar when he's 18 years old and he saw somebody do this presentation. Pulls out an empty vase, a giant empty vase, and then all the materials that he wants to put into it. And there's big rocks and there's sand, water, pebbles, all of this stuff. And he, he asks, he puts the big rocks in first, and he asks everybody, can we get any more in? And then he goes, materials smaller and smaller and smaller. At first they think like, no, those big rocks are filling Those jars, they don't see all the materials. And he pulls them out where nobody's looking. And then he adds smaller pebbles which all kind of fall in place next to the big rocks. Then he sand obviously is going to fit and water is going to fit. And so the point is there that the big rocks go first. And if you do it in the opposite order, if you put the sand and the pebbles and all the other smaller materials in, you'll never get the big rocks in. So we follow that methodology in all annual planning and the big rocks. The reason we're here, the reason you do what you do is to make your life more meaningful, to honor the people that matter most to you. So. So honestly, we will honor this. But life goes first. So what are the birthdays? What are the holidays? What are the absolute rituals and traditions? What are the seasons in your family's life that you want to be sure that they're priority? Because every other working human takes vacation and takes time off and puts that. So when you're planning your own plan, make sure that your life and your biggest opportunities, the people that matter most, the people that you're prioritizing in the life rituals that you're prioritizing are on the calendar because you'll find that you'll do that, you'll schedule a launch and it will be your favorite holiday, or you, you will be lost in the excitement and the explosion of something big and realize that was planned right over somebody's birthday. And that's not what we're doing this for. So life goes first.

Okay? So one thing that I'm super passionate about, Lisa, is that this is not done in a, in a small planner. It has to have big space. And so we have a couple of options for you that we want to talk through, but one of them is a free download that we're giving to you with this episode. I'm so obsessed with annual planning. You know, I have this huge acrylic calendar on my wall, so it's 4 foot by 8ft. It's an entire year at a glance and it's wipable. So I fill it out at the end of every year for the next year, and I just sit with my wall for days to create this entire map mapped out process for my entire year. And so you can do that too. If this is resonating with you. You can totally get your own acrylic calendar designed and printed. You can also find big paper versions to put up on your. But it does have to be a year at A glance. And so, like I said, we also have a Year at a Glance free download for you that you can print. But I wanted to go ahead and let everybody know that it has to be your entire year at one glance. And then you will work systematically to balance it and put your, you know, your different things on it.

Yeah, and I can't personally get messy on the wall. Mine always happens on the floor, because I can't. It's never just the calendar. It's the calend and journals and planners and books. And so I usually. I. In the drawing or the Crayola section of a store, you can typically find big drawing pads. Bonnie knows this about me because we'll go on work events and I'll be like, we need drawing pads. Everybody needs to get this big paper and spread out. And that's just me, too. I definitely am going to post the clean version on a wall somewhere because you really do need to see it front and center. You really will forget what's coming. It's. It's actually fascinating what our minds do if it's not front and center for us. However, that's my thing. I do the drawing pads, and it usually turns into six pages of drawing pads. It gets wild. It gets messy before it gets clean and tidy. But, yes, I totally agree. You need some big, giant space. And at the end of the day, you have to be able to. It has to be somewhere where you can see it all the time.

Okay, so talk to us about the very first thing that you put on your annual plan.

So the first thing is all that life stuff. It is honoring the birthdays, it's honoring the holidays and the special traditions, and it's making sure you know when you're. When your family or your life calls you to it, it's there. So even in my world, back to school is on there because that's a frantic week, actually. And so I need to remember that it's there, that it's coming, so that nothing else conflicts with the most important thing, which is all your life stuff.

Yeah, I always get our school calendar, and if it's not out yet, I'm like, where's the. Where's the next year's school calendar? I'm trying to do my annual plan. I need to know when our breaks are, when fall break is. And like you said, any travel, like, any vacations that we have in mind already, we put blackout dates, basically.

Yes. I love that. And then the next thing that you want to remember before anything else, after life and your birthdays, and your holidays is, are your seasonal highs and lows because you have a history. Or else you can look around you and find what is happening in the industry. You really want to know when you're going to be, when you might have a show coming up or a market coming up or a big launch. You want your very busy seasons on the calendar and then you want your very slow periods and you're again, you're gauging all of your busy seasons against your life happenings because you don't want them to conflict any more than they need to. So you're really trying to create some space. But at the same time, you know your industry, you know your market, and so you need to marry those things as well as you can. And then I love, and every year keep notes for myself where I hit burnout because there, there is a rhythm to the seasons in our bodies and our minds sort of follow that. Like we put things to rest in the winter, we wake them up again in the new year. And I love to make note of that to myself in my planners to say, I am so ramped with energy, I could conquer the world this month. And then there are other months where I'm saying I am like pretty close to resting on my laurels because I can't muster. Everything in me is wanting to rejuvenate, retreat, withdraw. And I love to make notes for that for myself throughout the year in my planner because that goes here on the calendar.

And you know, I'm laughing because, you know, for so many years, every time that happened to me, I would, I would be like, well, I guess it's over. I guess I'm done. I have, I will never have another idea ever again. I guess I'm just done with my business. Took me a minute. It took me years to realize that, to trust that as well, to, to instead of feel like, oh, well, it's over, I'm done. To just kind of monitor it and watch it and love it for what it is and know and trust that the energy will come back. And so now I actually delight in it. Every. It's usually June for me and I'm like, oh, there it's. There it is. I know that when August, September hits, I'm going to have this like, you know, upswelling of energy and new ideas. And I just know it, I recognize it, I give it a high five when it comes. But that took a long time to learn that it happens. It happens to all of us. And it's typically cyclical.

It is, it's such a cycle. I'm glad you said that because August is the same for me and I think a lot of people will relate. It is very easy to hit the ground running. January is another one and typically around your birthday you'll find that you're in a period of renewal. You're thinking about what is going to look differently and you're often in a period of reflection at the same time. But you know, just like you're saying, you're also going to come into lower energy, you're also going to feel disgruntled at times like you're just done. You're just fed up with it all. And those are so important to capture. Those seasons are so important to capture because there is good work you could be doing in those seasons that feels fun to you, but you're still getting something done. So if you are, you know, you just want to play maybe in those seasons and you can really bring that to life. And you can do great things with this annual plan. I mean, you can really carve out a wonderful life using it. You know what? This is also making me think of something we share in common, of the rituals of the day that we had a team question that said, what is your favorite time of day? And you or I both couldn't answer because there's a ritual to go with every part, morning, afternoon and night. Your year can do that too, and it makes for such a grateful existence because you're always looking forward to the next ritual or routine that's coming up for you.

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E. I can't wait to see what you create in class. I'll meet you there. Okay, so while you're giving this big picture, I'm. I'm going to try to pull it into my specific examples. And so by this point, I'm likely a couple of hours into my annual plan. And let me just say I have to hand D and there's something so ritualistic about that as well. Just put that in there. I have to hand date my entire year and it takes about an hour and it's silent and I'm just kind of in reflection. I. I've grown to love it so much. So by this point, I have all of our birthdays on the calendar. I've got all of our known breaks, like school breaks and going back to school and things like that. If you have children or anything else that would go like on there. I have all of our known family vacations. So we for sure have some of those planned already. And so those are going on next. And then I've got some other known things, like I've got, oh, my mastermind trips. So I've got those dates in advance for both my mastermind and the one that I'm a part of. So those are going on next. Any other work travel, like conferences that I know I want to go to, I have those on the calendar. Then I have some personal deadlines, like fabric collections. So there are three different dates in a given year that I know I can turn in a fabric collection. Those go on because I know probably the 30 days leading up to that are going to be heavily involved in designing. And then what?

Yes, I love how it's layering. I love how it's layering piece by piece. Then the next thing that you're really looking at are your, where your income is created. So your revenue generators. I call them money makers. There's often three to four a year that you know are going to make the business go round. And you know, even if it's new, even if you're in a new business, there's one, there's one offer, there's one big ask and then you're building on that year after year. And so when you are this, this will help you align the goals that you set for the year with the annual plan and the strategy that you have behind them. Because if you have, and this has happened to me, if you have a goal that I want to make this X amount of revenue in my business in the next 12 months, and then I look at the money makers or the revenue generators that I've just plopped into the calendar after the life, after the seasonal things that I need to be very aware of in my own creative rhythms. Now I have money makers in there where they make sense. Now I'm going to ask, does this align to the revenue goal that I've created? Can I accurately say that this, these revenue generators are going to meet that goal? And if they don't align, it's almost taking it back and saying, okay, what do I need to do differently so that my plan aligns with my goals business wise? Wise, because it can be really easy to get to just plop a goal on paper and then really have no. It's like almost plopping a destination on the map, but with no route to get there. And so it really helps you combine all the things you're thinking of and dreaming of for the year ahead.

Let me tell you that you're going to want to take a trip to the craft, you know, section of your favorite store because you have to have multi colors for this. And so I've got all the colors and dry erase markers because I like to put a little green dollar sign on the things that are my biggest money makers. And the first time that I did this was just the biggest aha moment for me because I stepped back from my calendar and I said, no wonder October is so hard. No wonder, because all my money makers are scrunched into Q1 and Q2. No wonder October always feels so hard. It seems so simple. But it's not until you step back that you can take an effort to average out your year. You're not going to have such highs and such lows because you can kind of inject, you can see in one glance where you. Where you need to maybe bring something new to the table and put it on the calendar.

I mean, that's so right. And you could apply that to anything that you're doing. What your example was so good because that happens to people. They have, they. They start out the new year with a big burst and those bursts are very vulnerable and they put things out there. But if you try to hit any goal by doing all the work in the first half of the year and then falling off toward the second half of the year or not having things to sustain, then no goal would come to fruition because it has to be consistent effort. So you'd be able to track that in your consistency. I always like to add this caveat when doing your annual planning. There's a phenomenon called planning fallacy, which states that we always underestimate the time that it will take for us to do things. And I. I call it a schedule with margin. But the best example is if I can get to work, if I can drive to work, and my. My commute is on an average time, 23 minutes. But one day I leave at the crack of dawn, it's still dark out, and all the lights are switched to green and there's not another car on the road. And that day I made it in 15 minutes forever. I will tell myself and everybody who asks that I'm 15 minutes away from work. And that's just something again, that's something we're wired to do. That's how we will think about time. So probably the first time you do an annual strategy, it might be a little too scrunched together. You might not realize you might be underestimating the time it takes. I always double what I think it will take me to produce, launch, and prepare. Because otherwise, it's like you've said earlier, that if you launch a big thing, you may have not created the Runway for it, you may have no time to promote it, it may go out in the world and fizzle because you just didn't have the space around it to make it really explode and make it really show itself off like it needs to do. So I always like to. I always like to double the time I think it will take. And, and I'm going to be honest with you, I should probably triple it because I'm still underestimating the time it takes to do things. But that's just our human nature.

If you should triplet, I should quadruple it. My husband David says that I'm a time optimist. And I'm like, yeah, yes, yes. So I think that this is going to be different for every business. So don't take my example and run with it until you really look at your business. But I know that given my typical. My typical work and creative duties, that I can kind of add one extra little thing every 30 days. Like, I can have one extra focus for a given month. And that's all. And so at this point, we have everything known to us on the calendar. And at this point I love to step back and see where I do have extra space and extra margin. And something that you've said before, Lisa, is rainstorm. What you think is available to you in the next year, what do you think is possible for you in the next year? And maybe they're, you know, bigger things that you might not achieve, but it's within the realm of possibility. And so at this point is when I love to kind of vision storm or dream about new things to bring to the table new ideas. So one of the best examples for me for this is the year that I wanted to design a planner for the very first time. And now this was something big because it was going to be for the following year. So I had, I was 12 months away from was in my heart. But it also felt really overwhelming because I knew that I was going to have to learn indesign in order to create the beast and research, you know, printers and get samples and all the things. But I kind of worked backwards from some deadlines and I knew that I didn't even need to think about it until I think it was June. And so I put the planner on June and what that did was get get this big desire, this big goal that I had. It got it out of my head and out of my heart and it put it on paper with a 30 day honor like honor system around it. And so January through May I didn't even have to think about it. It cleared up so much mental bandwidth for me because I had already made space for it. I knew that June 1st I was sitting down and starting to research courses on indesign and planner production stuff. But it cleared it up until the moment that I had to approach it. And then I didn't add anything else to June.

That's an excellent example and really well done you because actually it's something like we talked about in the daily scramble that could have led to false starts. You could have, you could have thrown the plans out the window and gone down the rabbit hole of researching all the things that you needed and that you were overwhelmed with. And I love that it came into that window so concisely that when it became time to make decisions and figure this out, that was all that there was was I. Everybody should do that plan. That is really a good, great idea.

Yeah.

You know, because when you, when you put it out of your head, out of your heart, you put it on paper, it gives you permission to not think about it again until the moment you have to start on It. And that frees you up so much for the other things that you're supposed to be focused on in this day. But if you don't have it on paper, you don't know when you're going to do that. And it will consume your false starts and your research. Yeah, yeah.

And you know what else it does too. This is such a great plan for anybody trying to tackle something big in the new year. Share. I love the six month lead on that. What else it does is if you ever have a tech problem, if you ever run it, you know, we all have had a tech problem where you are just in a grind and you spend 24, it feels like 24 hours with that tech problem. You get lost in it to a point where you're saying, even support can't help me. You have to go to sleep and wake up and then it solves itself. What I love about this six month lead is that you will, you will put it on your calendar and you'll know there's some big obstacles and some things you figure out. And that gives opportunity for information and resources and references to fall into your lap. Because you put it out there, it's a destination. And so you'll find yourself starting to get little routes and little bits of information and you can just collect those as you go. And it's not, it's never starting from scratch.

Okay, so I want to talk. We kind of started this whole episode with talking about how it felt to not have an annual plan. I have a couple of things I'd like to share about what it feels like to have an annual plan. One of my favorites is that At a Glance again, because it's plastered on my wall. At a Glance, I can look at my calendar and know whether I need to say yes or no to incoming requests and opportunities. Because if I have someone who invites me to speak at a conference or something like that, right. Well, I at a glance, look at my month because I've already had my annual plan and see, do I have margin? Do I have space for that? If so, yes. If not, no. And this is why I love that. Okay, another one that I love. I'm such a nerd about this. Another one that I love, and this is going to be talking about marketing, business and launching is that it will force you to put a date on paper and then it allows you to work backwards from that. And so it is so important to give a long Runway to everything that you launch in the world, whether it's a new fabric collection or a New art print collection or a new course. You have to have that long Runway so that you can build anticipation for it. You can announce it to the world and start talking about it. And when you don't have it on an annual plan, you oftentimes Right. Like, I think we've probably all done this. Has been, like, surprised I have this thing. Come buy it, and everybody's like, whoa, I didn't even know you were. You were working on that thing. I haven't. You know, I haven't planned for this. I haven't saved money for it. I haven't marked off my time to take your class or whatever. So it's so necessary to start talking about what you're doing weeks, if not months ahead of schedule. And you cannot do that unless you know the date. If you put the date on the calendar, then you will not only have a deadline to hold yourself accountable to, but you can start publicly sharing that date, which I know when you do that, you will not let your audience down. And so it's like this public way of holding yourself accountable.

Yeah, you're right. And that's how winning sales campaigns and affiliate programs and all the things that make whatever you're launching a success come to be. It's knowing it's coming and then really sitting down again and watching. What is the what? What's the market doing? What is the industry doing? You'll see a partner program pop up and you'll say, oh, my gosh, I could be doing this, too. If you give yourself that Runway and you understand how to make a good thing even better, you are just doing such a service to your life and your business.

Okay, the last thing I do on my annual planning. I don't know if you do this, Lisa. I know you do it in theory, but I don't know if you put it on your calendar is that after every big deadline, I put, like, a star on my annual plan for my reward, because I am not barrel rolling through one achievement to the next without stopping and appreciating the work that I did. And so I may not know what the reward is, but I know that if I meet the deadline, I'm honoring it with some kind of a reward for the next day.

Yes. And I always say it cannot be. You know, sometimes you think about why you're going to create or increase your revenue or all these other things, and we'll come up with logical, good, sound reasons, such as, oh, I'm going to save, and I'm going to invest in this thing over here or I'm going to buy everybody something that they need or we're going to fix our car. Like you do real world things with your income. It can't be that. It has to be something so luxuriously, just that you can get it and bask in it. It has to be just for you and just what you want. But a good, I don't want to call it selfish but like self loving, self full reward has to be there waiting for you at the finish line. It has to be something you can really bask in and it has to be just ridiculously just for you.

Yes. Oh my goodness. I love it. Okay, so we want to challenge you, our listeners, no matter what time of year it is to implement this annual plan. If you never have done it before, we fully believe that it's going to be a line in the sand for your business as well. We have resources over on the show notes for you. So I'm going to link up some of my favorite annual calendars that you can purchase. But we also have a free downloadable annual plan and Year at a glance download for you if you head over to professionalcreative.com Lisa, any parting words?

Just wishing you nothing but the best of success in everything that you do. It is your year. It is your time and it's there for you. It's out there for you. Like a destination on the map. Steps every day will get you toward it. No matter how big or overwhelming that goal makes you feel, it's out there for you. It wouldn't be on your heart if it wasn't out there for you.

You also absolutely cover this in your best year, correct?

Of course.

So tell everybody in case they missed the first few episodes with you about your best year and where they can find it.

Your best year Final Draft is a business or life. It's two editions workbook and it will walk you through all type of things from how to get your endurance up and running to how to tackle your year to how to face your biggest challenges. And one of the things in there is absolutely annual strategy. It is my all time favorite thing. This is my favorite time of year. It's. It's that season. So go have your best year yet.

Happy New Year. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Professional Creative Podcast. Thank you Lisa for joining us. We can't wait to see your annual plan.