249: Why Yearly Planning Doesn’t Work — And What to Do Instead

Foreign. Welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hi there friends and welcome back to the Creators MBA Podcast. Destiny here. And today I want to dig a little deeper into something that sits at the core of how I run my businesses and that is the creator's growth flywheel and specifically how it shapes the way I plan my quarters. Now, if you have listened to the show for a while, you know that I love a good funnel. Funnels absolutely have their place. They're helpful, they automate things, they give your business structure. But here's the thing I have learned after running digital product businesses for years. Funnels can only take you so far. Funnels are linear. They end. And funnels constantly make you feel like you're rebuilding or tweaking something. And if you sell digital products, especially if you have multiple offers, maybe a membership evergreen funnels, you have workshops, you have different things that you offer in your business. The funnel only approach eventually starts to feel heavy and unpredictable and quite frankly, tiring. The real momentum in my business came when I stopped looking at everything through funnels and started running my business like a growth flywheel. Because a flywheel isn't linear, it loops, it compounds, and it gets stronger every time that you turn it. And when I started planning around the growth flywheel instead of planning around funnels, everything clicked for me. And suddenly I knew exactly where my momentum was breaking down and I knew where to focus to get the biggest lift in my business. And my 90 day planning cycles finally started working the way that they were supposed to. So today we're going to start with the growth flywheel itself. I'm going to walk you through what it is, how it compares to funnels, why it matters so much for digital product entrepreneurs, and then I'm going to walk you through, step by step, how I turned all of that into a clear strategic 90 day plan using my creator's MBA playbook. Okay, so let's get into it. So first I want to talk about why I plan in 90 day cycles. Because yearly planning looks nice on paper. But what I have realized in the real world that we all live in here, everything changes. So doing that yearly planning, or even that five year planning is too long for our types of businesses because things are changing so quickly. Our offers change, our content changes, the audiences changes. There's things outside that is changing, especially with AI, that we don't control. So we need to be flexible. So when we are planning in these 90 day increment increments, it makes things manageable for us. It's long enough for us to get meaningful progress, but it's also short enough for us to stay flexible. And also what I've learned is eat 90 day cycle represents one full turn of your creator's growth flywheel. And if you're new to what I'm talking about, when I'm referencing the flywheel, here are the five stages. First is the attract stage. And that's where you are bringing new people into your world. You're doing that on a consistent basis when it comes to audience building. The next stage is the engage stage. And that's when you're turning that attention that you're getting, somebody's finding out about you, into connection. And there's various ways that you can do that. The next stage in the creator's growth flywheel is the nurture stage. And that's where you are building the trust, you're educating, you're warming people up to buying more from you, especially your higher price signature offers. And then in the retain stage, you are delivering what you have. You're delighting the people that have purchased from you, you are supporting customers after they buy, and you're even getting your existing customers to buy more from you. So you're increasing that long term customer value. And then you have that advocacy stage where you are encouraging referrals and customer success stories and promotion of your offers. And when each of these five stages get stronger, quarter after quarter, your business grows in a way that is production, predictable, sustainable and hopefully a lot less stressful there. So funnels give you tactics. The growth flywheel, I would say, gives you the full strategy. So step one in the planning process is to audit your growth flywheel. So inside the creators MBA playbook, that is always step one. And I would say that this step alone is where most business owners will see the biggest breakthroughs if they simply do it consistency consistently, quarter after quarter. So every quarter I want you to sit down and ask yourself, do I have a reliable way to attract new people? Do I have a clear path that moves them from attention to action? Do I have a weekly nurture rhythm? Do I have a customer experience that retains existing customers and gets people to buy more from me? And do I have a way to encourage referrals and advocacy? And then I rate Each one of them. This is your, what I would call your truth moment. This is where you figure out exactly where momentum is slipping in your business. And if I want to add an extra layer of clarity, I run this diagnostic through Harper. Harper is in the Creators MBA Playbook, and she is my AI business strategist. And she'll ask me the same questions that the Playbook asks and gives me a personalized bottleneck plan in just a few minutes. So either way, this audit that I'm doing becomes the foundation for everything else. Okay. And then in step two, I have the quarterly theme in focus. So once that audit's done, I move on to really trying to figure out, okay, this is what my theme is for the next quarter. This is what my focus, or what I think my focus is going to be. And here's the thing, all of us, and I'll put myself in this category, we are idea machines. We never have a problem coming up with things to do. Our problem is knowing which things to do right now. So before I set goals, I set direction. I asked myself, what's my top growth priority based on my audit? How do I want my business to feel over the next 90 days? And what would make this quarter a successful, even if nothing else happened? And then I choose a theme for the quarter. Maybe it's visibility, maybe it's automations, maybe it's simplifying things, maybe it's consistency. And that theme becomes my filter. And if a project aligns with the theme, it stays. If it doesn't, I put it off for the next quarter. And I would say that this step definitely prevents me from over committing, which I am prone to do, or, or over complicating itself or really just trying to fix everything at once. Okay. And then moving on to step three, this is where I am matching projects to systems. So once I'm clear on my theme, I go into map my flywheel pages in the creator's MBA Playbook. And I think this is where a lot of people go wrong in traditional planning. They make a huge list of things they could do and then they try to do all of it. So inside the Playbook, we do something different. We map projects to flywheel stages. And here's what that looks like in practice, right? You have the Attract stage. So in the attract stage, maybe you are updating your evergreen freebie, maybe you are pitching three podcasts that you want to get on some huge podcast out there. Or if you are focused on the Engage stage, maybe you're optimizing your tripwire funnel. Or if you're looking at the nurture stage, maybe you are doing some things in your newsletter to really nurture your audience and take them on a very specific journey there. If you're in the retain stage, maybe you're doing things like improving onboarding for new members to retain them or selling additional higher end offers to your current customers to increase their customer lifetime value. Or maybe if you're in the advocacy stage and you're like, I'm going to focus on this for the month, maybe you're focusing on getting testimonials or building out your affiliate program. Every project supports a system in the growth flywheel. And that's what makes your quarterly plan strategic instead of being scattered and all over the place. Okay, now step four is where you are prioritizing with what I call ICE scoring. So let me walk you through exactly what this means. ICE stands for impact, confidence and effort. So impact. How big could this win be? Confidence is how sure I can get it to work. Not everything that I'm working on do. I have a hundred percent confidence that I can get it to work. And then effort in ICE stands for how much time plus effort energy will it take. So low effort will get a high score, right? It doesn't take much effort on my part, but I might get a high impact for that. And that will help me choose the right three goals to focus on for the quarter. Not 10 things, not 20 things, not these 27 projects. I'm excited about just three because three projects that actually matter. Three projects will actually strengthen your growth flywheel if you can get them working. And three projects is something that you can realistically finish in 90 days. And those become your quarterly commitments. Okay, now step five is doing your monthly and quarterly reviews. And this is the final step where your growth compound. So every month I do a quick check in what worked, what felt like I was still stuck on something. What am I focusing on next? And then at the end of the quarter, you have your quarterly wrap up and your next quarter at a glance. We have those pages in the Growth in the Creators MBA playbook and that helps you capture your wins, your lessons, your numbers, your opportunities, but more importantly, your priorities for the next growth cycle. And that step helps you get that momentum. This step transforms planning into momentum. You're not going to have perfect quarters. None of us ever do. We want you to have complete quarters where you look at it. Okay, I implemented my plan. Here's what worked, here's what didn't. Here's what I'm going to change for the next quarter. So if you would like to start your own 90 day growth flywheel cycle, here's what I recommend it recommend for you. I want you to pick one system that needs strengthening. I want you to choose a theme for the quarter and then I want you to use the ICE scoring to help you pick your top three goals. And that is enough to create some real momentum and movement in your business. I want to invite you into the December CEO Growth Flywheel Planning Workshop that I am doing this month. When you purchase the Creator's MBA Playbook, get access to my live video December CEO Growth Planning Workshop or you can do the replay. If you cannot join live, we're going to do your audit. We're going to set your theme, we're going to map your projects, we're going to prioritize your projects with the I scoring and I want you to walk away with a complete 90 day plan. If you want ongoing support all year long, the Creators MBA Lab is the best place for that. We do monthly workshops, get it done type events, sprints. You get the strategic guidance, accountability in the community. I'm going to put all of these links in the show notes. All right friends, that's it for today's episode. I hope this helps you rethink how you structure your next quarter and honestly, how you think about your business as a whole. I'll see you next time on the Creators MBA Podcast. Bye for now. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.