My Business Plan To Destroy 2026 (In a Good Way)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the YouTube channel. It is 2026, my friends. Happy New Year. And I am ready to attack this year with vigor and to make it an absolute banger. And so I thought today I would dive into my business plan to absolutely destroy 2026 and make it our best year yet. You see, my name's Elliot. For those who don't know. Hello. I'm the Chief Marketing officer here at Entrepreneurs Circle where we provide entrepreneurs the tools, the training, the help and support to grow their businesses and take it to new levels. We do this through a variety of different ways. We have a low ticket community, a software company and high ticket coaching program are fundamentally the main ones. And so we had a good year last year. So this is a little screenshot from our tracking software shows. All of last year we spent around £1.163 million on our own marketing, generated just shy of 100,000 leads, booked about 6,775 sales calls, and we made 68,000 sales, which looks amazing. But our business is all monthly recurring. And so that includes all of the rebills. And we had, you know, what was a very nice eight, eight figure year. Not going to disclose the precise revenue amount, but it was a very good year. And so we are now looking to build that in 2026. And we have got ambitious growth this year. Our growth targets are about 40%. And so this is the planning process that is going behind an eight figure business that wants to grow by about 40%. So I'm going to give you a little bit of insight into how we do it so that hopefully you can take this away and apply some of it to your business and ultimately make 2026 your best year in business yet. That is what it is all about, my friends. And so this was just very topical because at this time of year, and indeed before Christmas, myself and our leadership team, we sit down, we have a very swanky boardroom on the penthouse floor of our new office building and this ginormous table. And we sit down and we review numbers and we do our planning. We spend a lot, a lot of time, effort and energy on planning exactly how the next year is going to look. And so I thought I would share a little insight into our process. You see, I always, always struggled with planning. It was for whatever reason, something that didn't really come naturally to me because when I started my first business, my agency, about six years ago now, I did that. And in my early goals of starting that business, like a lot of small business owners, I just wanted to make some money. And in fact, I left my job at a big advertising agency where I was earning £25,000 per year. And my goal for the first year in business was, well, if I can just make £25,000 in my own business in year one, then boom, I've equaled my salary. That's going to be a massive win and then I can build it from there. You know, I never set out to necessarily have some crazy vision and, you know, save the world and all these, you know, virtuistic things. I just wanted to take the skills I had learned, apply them and kind of seize control of my life and see if I could just, you know, replace my salary with my own business kind of income. And so because of that, you know, that was the goal. And luckily, as it happened with my agency when I launched it, it was a roaring success to be fair. And we hit that goal in like two months, which is very good. And then we built it and built it from there. But as I built my agency, I never had thought ahead as to what I wanted this thing to become. I never had a big 3, 5, 10 year vision of the business. I was just kind of going along because for me, oh my God, actually having a business and making money, which is fucking magical. And I just wanted to keep that going as long as possible. And of course, you know, you want more, more, more, more, more. But I never really could sit down and go like, right, what do I want? What is my grand vision? And everyone tells you, read those books, you got to have your, your mission, your vision and all these big long term plans. And every time I tried to do that because I was being told from everyone that it was the right thing to do, I just kind of didn't know what to do. And so this is my antidote to that. So anyone else struggles with planning, I'm going to share how I was able to overcome that and all the lessons I've learned along the way and hopefully it'll be useful. So the reason I struggled with planning was not because I'm stupid, but it was because I didn't know how. And all the books and stuff I was reading weren't giving me a how that I could actually use and apply. They were too big, too corporate, all this mission, vision, bollocks kind of stuff. And fundamentally the other reason was that I didn't really set aside time to properly think about it because planning does require a lot of thinking to do it properly. And thinking can be quite hard. You know, we Think she's going to sit there and think about stuff. But actually, it can be quite tough, especially when you're trying to think about how this business, which is inherently complex and has moving parts, how that's going to grow and evolve from where do you want to take it to? Is that even feasible? And all this kind of stuff. And so my life without a plan in my business was, let's say, unpredictable, because we were just going through the motions. We wanted to do a good job, we wanted to get bigger, but we never had any clear plans. And as a result, we would just go through the motions. And our years were just kind of super jaggedy. We were lucky that we, you know, did a good service and we grew. So we had a steady trajectory, but without a proper plan in place, we had ups and downs. We had amazing months where clients would just appear almost out of nowhere. And then we'd have bad months where we might lose a few clients, and it would kind of reset us a little bit. And then all of a sudden we'd get new clients again. And now we're like, oh, my God, we need new team members. So we're scrambling, trying to hire new people. And so we were very reactive. And when you play life in reactive mode, it inherently delivers a pretty unpredictable result. And the big learning for me was that by having a proper plan in place, it's all about putting you in control. And when we have a business, we want to be in control. We started a business because we wanted control over our life, over our destiny. And a proper plan is the greatest tool in enabling you to have that. So the other big unlock for me, and why I suddenly became extremely pro planning, was that I realized that clarity creates energy. Clarity creates energy. I found that in all the most stressful periods of my business, that when I didn't have a proper plan of really where we were heading, and I had this amorphous goal of more, that when shit really got tough and we were dealt a few, you know, curveballs from life, that all of a sudden my motivation, my drive, my willingness to continue, it really got depleted. And you just start to think, oh, my God, what is this all for? And so by having a proper plan, it gives you clarity. And clarity is just such an underrated thing. Because when you have clarity over what you need to do and importantly, where you are going, and that place where you are going thoroughly excites you and invigorates you. That clarity, it creates energy. It creates energy. It creates the action potential for you to take action. And do stuff and move towards the goal. And fundamentally we have to accept if we're running a business, it is going to get tough, it's going to get very hard. And so we need to have clarity on the place we are going, which is our fundamental reason why we are putting all this effort and resource into the business. And without that, then when times get tough, things get very dark. They get very dark up here. And so having a good sense of clarity creates energy within you. And, and as we'll discuss within your team as well, everybody wants clarity. And if you don't have the map of where you're going, it's impossible to have true clarity. So here's how we planned 2026 and I'll talk about all the little lessons I learned along the way. So fundamentally, this is a six step method. And so we are going to start off. Step number one is you set. Number two is we then look at the year before. Set number three, we look at the months. Set number four, we get our targets. And then number five, interestingly, we look at our quarters. And then number six, we have our scorecards. This is the framework that we follow and it is in a very specific order, as you will see. Now look, when it comes to planning, there's many ways to skin a cat. This is what works for me. Maybe it will work for you, maybe it won't, but at least you will have a little bit of insight. So let's dive in. Number one, you, I'm looking at you right now on YouTube. So a plan should always start with the business owner. After all, you started this business and a business is a vessel to, to deliver you, the business owner, the lifestyle of your dreams. We must never lose sight of that. And so it's very important to try and get clarity on what you want. What do you want from your business at the end of the year? What does this business need to have generated for you to begin to live the life of your dreams? That is the whole entire purpose. And so of course, in the early stages of business, it's going to be smaller and as the business grows, it's going to get larger and larger and larger. But you have to get very clear on what you want because you need to build your wants and needs from this business into the plan. Otherwise, let me tell you, you're going to fucking hate the business. Because if you have a business that is consuming all of the cash and putting a massive strain on you, both financially but also energetically, then guess what, you're not going to like the business. And guess what you can do. If you don't like the business, you're going to sabotage it consciously or unconsciously. And this is how many, many businesses die. The business owners put too much into feeding the business, and they actually try and be selfless and remove their own wants and needs from the business. But as a result, create this environment that they no longer like. And I'm here to tell you, it's critically important you enjoy the majority of the process of your business. If you don't, then you are going to do things consciously or unconsciously that sabotage you. Because over the long term, of course you're going to go through some hard periods where, you know it's tough and you have to grind and work really hard and make sacrifices. That's entrepreneurship. But it doesn't mean you have to suffer all the time. Okay? You are allowed to enjoy your business now. For me, especially when I started my agency, I was 23 and I didn't know what the fuck I wanted. I wanted a bit more money, but, like, thinking, okay, what do I actually want this year was actually a very hard task. I was, you know, still, I was living at home. My parents at the time didn't really have, you know, didn't have. Girlfriend didn't have anything. I was just, you know, just chilling. And so this was really. I struggled with this. But there were two frameworks that I came across that actually began to really help me put into words and create a clear vision for what I wanted. The first one is called the life plan. So this is something we do with our clients here, and this is where we go, okay, let me just sit down and intentionally spend a couple of hours designing my dream life. So I'm just going to. I'm going to remove all barriers of what might be possible, and we're going to plan out what my perfect life would look like. So I'm going to plan where I want to live. What sort of property would it be and how much would that cost? What car do I want to drive? How many holidays do I want to go on? Every single year? Where do I want to go? Am I going to have some kids? Where am I going to send them to school? To some nice private schools maybe? What am I going to do on a weekly basis? Am I going to go out, eat at restaurants? Am I going to have people help me out around the house? Am I going to have gardeners? Am I going to do training? You know, for me, I was doing a lot of Muay Thai at the Time. So having my Muay Thai session with my trainer throughout the week was a very big thing. But also like, what do I want to be investing this year? Ideally, you know, I want to have investments spread across various different things. What's that going to look like? How much is it going to be? And this can be a really fun exercise because it gives you a clear vision of what you actually want to do. Now the challenge with this is just like surrendering to it. And no matter how ridiculous it sounds, just get it out there. A lot of people, they skimp on this because they only put in things that they think they can achieve. And as a result, you constrain your thinking and your whole life. So do a version of this where you just have no fucking constraints at all. And then you can begin to chip it down and make it more realistic if you need. But that is very good. And the art of thinking about, okay, what are the things? But ultimately, what do they cost? And you should do the research because ultimately, I promise you, for most of you, your ideal life probably doesn't cost quite as much as you think when you actually lay it all out there and cost it up. But that's the first exercise. The second one then is Terms. So this was created by Mr. Martin Norbury, who works with us here. He is one of the guys behind the master plan, which is our high ticket coaching program, which is absolutely legendary. And Terms stands for time, energy, resources, money and sanity. And this is thinking about again, how you going to spend your life? What sort of level of time commitment are you willing to put into your business? What level? What are the things that energize you and what are the things that really don't energize you because you want to do more of the good stuff or less of the bad stuff? What resources are you willing to commit to the business? How much money do you need? And he talks about money in two ways. Money now. So the income you need every single month to live your life, but also money future, the money you're going to put aside to invest so that it builds up your nest egg, and then also sanity, because we all have different phases of our life. And so for me, as I'm almost 30 now, I know, I know I. Look, young guys, don't worry. But you know, in my 20s, I was willing to hit it hard and absolutely sacrifice every ounce of my sanity to achieve success, because I was in that phase of my life where I had no dependence and I had much less responsibilities and all other aspects of My life, however, as you grow older, like me now, I have got a fiance, I've got a little Chihuahua. We're looking to buy a property and have some children. I'd like loads of children. And so all of a sudden my sanity, my ability to sacrifice everything and get up at 4 in the morning and work late into the evening is going to be gone because I have other responsibilities. And so you want to get clear on what this looks like. And so these two frameworks were immensely helpful for me. And these are the sorts of things that you revisit. Like, I do these every single year because they change, because we change. Life evolves. But it is the starting point of how you plan a good year. What do we want our life to look like? What do we actually need from this business? And then what are we willing to, you know, sacrifice or not sacrifice in order to achieve it? These are the initial guardrails that are going to make sure we build the business in a way that we like and that we enjoy and that is aligned with who we are and our deep purpose behind the whole reason we have this business in the first place. Got a deep question for you then, because once you understand what you want, you then need to ask yourself this. Who do you need to become in order to achieve that? We have a great saying here at Entrepreneur's Circle, where in order to grow a business, you must grow the business owner. And this is so fucking true. If any of you have read Cyber Psycho. Cybernetics, that's what it's called. That's what it's called. Great book. And it's all about this concept, because as humans, you know, we all do various actions. And New Year and New Year's resolutions are a great example of this, where people make a big list of all the things they want to achieve this year. And as we know, less than 1% of people ever actually do them. And the reason is because of this is because if you set yourself these targets and things you want to achieve, and normally they're going to be things you haven't achieved before, generally, then you most likely need to become someone else that is capable of achieving them. You need to develop your own personality traits, your own skills, your knowledge, your wisdom in order to actually become the person that is able to. To achieve those goals. And this is all like a bit deep psychology, but it is actually so fucking true. And so the idea is that, you know, we have our actions, which are all the things that we do, but beneath our actions in our minds, we have a Narrative. And the narrative is how we think, how we feel, and it's the stories we tell ourselves. So I'll be very honest. This morning I was meant to go to the gym and my alarm went off at half past five and I was so snuggled up in bed and it was fucking minus 2 degrees outside. And I thought, you know what, I went to the gym yesterday. I worked really hard this week. I'm gonna snooze, I'm gonna have a little rest and I'm guilty. And I did have a little snooze. And that was the narrative in my mind playing out. Okay? That is the narrative. It's the story we tell ourselves to justify our actions now, the narrative that comes from our identity. And this is why if you really want to make positive, serious change in your life, you have to look at who you want to become. And it's not all flipping woo woo. But it's like, who is the person, who is the business owner that is going to be capable of achieving these things that I have set out? Because obviously if you say bang, I want a mega mansion, I want a Ferrari, I want the Lambos, I want the watches and you just act in the same old little way, then you're probably not going to achieve them. You probably need to do something new in order to get a different result. And this all stems from who you are. And so spending time understanding who is the person that wants to do this is very, very key. And I have a little exercise where I write out every year the person that I want to be that is aligned with the person that would achieve these goals. Because, for example, you know, if I want to grow the business significantly whilst maintaining my health and maintaining my relationships and doing all sorts of stuff, I need to be the person capable of doing that. And therefore I need to be the person that gets up early in the morning. I need to be the person that doesn't snooze their training when they are all snuggled up in bed this morning. I need to be the person that doesn't get distracted. I need to be the person that focuses on the right things. I need to be the person that says no to things that do not align with the plan. I need to be the person that is able to switch off after work and invest time in, in the relationships with my partner and my little doggy and all that kind of stuff. You have to become this person. And so anyway, Psycho Cybernetics is a great book on that. But let's move on to the year because again, I have to go into that, because if you don't do that side of it, this stuff, you're just going to fail at it. So we have the year. Once we know what we want from the business, this is typically the best starting point. Because if we know, okay, I want to achieve that level of life on those terms, you're going to have an income figure that you need to hit that. And so once you've got that income figure, we can begin to break it down. Because if we know, as an example, I need £200,000 this year, personal income, then I can work out, okay, well, based on my business and my profit margins, how much profit does my business need to make to pay me that income? And if I know what that figure is, then I can go, okay, well, how much revenue does my business need to make in order to generate that amount of profit and pay me that amount of income? And then we work it through to the next layer, which is, okay, how many customers do I need to generate that amount of revenue to generate that amount of profit to generate that amount of income? And so all of a sudden, we reverse engineer our yearly business targets based around our income. Rather than just picking a random number or saying, we want to grow 20% this year for no flipping reason, okay, this is intentionally planning what the year is going to look like. Once we know what the year is going to look like, then we break it down into months. So this is a key stage. And we go, what needs to happen every single month in order for us to hit the annual goal? So this can be as simple as taking the annual goal and dividing it by 12. And we therefore know what we need to do every single month. But of course, businesses are very linear. And what is normally going to happen in a business is that you're going to start the year somewhere here, and it's going to grow over time. So this is where you have to use a bit of skill and judgment as to, okay, well, if I'm starting here, how much do I need to grow in order to achieve the annual goal? So this is where you use a little bit of skill and judgment. But ultimately, what we're looking at here is to create some kind of spreadsheet where we have all of our months along the top, and then we're going to put in our revenue for every single month. How much revenue do I need in this month? This month, this month, this month. And the sum total will be your annual goal. Then we're going to have things like overheads. Okay, what are my Business costs right now, as the business grows, are my costs going to grow? Am I going to need to hire new people? Am I going to need to make any investments? You know, again, this is where the planning comes in. Because once you understand the numbers, it starts to become obvious and evident what actions need to be taken in order for those numbers to exist. Because you might not be able to scale up all of and hit this new amount of customers with the same amount of people. So you're going to see how your overheads grow. Then of course you're going to get your profit. So if we grow revenue and we grow the overheads, is the profit growing? Is the profit staying flat? Because this is going to inform your decisions. Because if we say, great, I want to hit this revenue, but actually to do so I need to hire all these people, then actually your profit might be less in some cases than the year before. And then actually we go, okay, that's not a good plan. I'm not going to spend all that effort getting these new customers and hiring these new people to ultimately make less money. So we need to look at other things then, like our offers, our pricing, and it starts to spur these avenues for us to go down. But ultimately then a big one you want to look at is the number of customers that you need, the number of customers you need either bringing in and retaining in order to deliver these numbers. And you start to build this model of how it all works together. So I was having a little bit of fun. I found an old, little sheet from one of my old clients where we did this back, and this was back in 2022. And it's very, very simple. So this sheet pulls through the totals of, you know, the months, the revenue, the overheads, the salaries, and the EBITDA. And we had it for 2022 and then for 2023 as well. And so this gives you the top line view of the business that you're building. And it lets, you know, a bunch of things. Number one, is this going to hit my goals? Number two, is this sensible? Is this worth it? Number three, is this like even feasible? But. But it gives you very good clarity on what the year should look like. Now, behind this sheet would sit a separate sheet because we'd have a separate tab for revenue, which then breaks down the customers across our different product lines. How many we'd need each month, how many at what price, and ultimately the total revenue. If you're a subscription business like ours, what is the churn rate? How many customers are we going to lose? Every single month so that this then pulls through and you can begin to manipulate the figures and play with the scenarios. Same for overheads and salaries. So what are our costs? Are we going to incur more costs as we grow? Are we going to hire more people as you grow? Throughout the year, we have separate sheets that pull through. Okay, we're hiring someone in this month. We're going to pay them this amount. Therefore, costs go up by this. So all of this feeds through and it becomes interactive. So you can then play with it and have this thing where you're very malleable and you can just play with all these different scenarios and ultimately decide, does it make sense? Because what you're looking at here is the feasibility. Because a lot of people have these plans and ideas in their head that actually, when you look at the numbers like that are totally unfeasible, they just make no sense at all. So you want to build a plan that is very feasible and very reasonable. That just means it actually is achievable without us having to do anything. That is crazy, because the bedrock of a lot of the planning that I do is being conservative. And what I mean by that is I always want my plans to be, like, very reasonable and achievable. And we will always strive to overachieve. But what I absolutely don't want are plans that are like, so outrageously ambitious that my chance of hitting them are very slim. And the main reason for that is, is momentum. Momentum is a humongous thing in business. When you have momentum behind you, when you are a winning business, when you are on track and on target, that carries you, it carries you, it carries your team. It completely changes your views and perception of the business. And that translates into your energy, into your enthusiasm, into all of your other actions. On the flip side, if you are behind on your targets, you are not hitting them. It's the anti momentum. And all of a sudden you feel bad, you feel like a loser, you feel like this thing is dragging you down, it's not doing what it's supposed to do. And that leads to a completely different mindset. It leads to fear, and it leads to scarcity, and it leads to bad decision making. And so you want the momentum to be in your side. One of the hardest things in business as well, in my opinion, is managing a team when you're behind target. Because when you're behind target, you. You have to let the team know the implications of why you're behind target and why that is so very bad. And also you have to Keep them really boosted. You got to keep morale high. It's a very tricky spot to be in. And again, that will weigh on you as a business owner, and it can affect your energy and your decisions. So I want the plan to be reasonable and achievable. And I like to bake in some conservatism because I want there to be upside. I want us to overachieve so we absolutely crush it and, and have this culture of momentum and smashing it. So once we've got clear on our months, then we get into the targets. Because if we now know what revenue we need to hit every single month, we've looked at the overheads, we looked at any salaries we might need to grow. Now we can set the clear targets, targets around the key actions that need to happen. So, for example, we're gonna know how many customers we need to bring on in every single month. We also need to know how many we need to keep, because you're probably going to have some kind of retention targets as well. We're going to have our target customer acquisition cost, how much we're willing to spend to get one of these customers. And a key one is your actual marketing spend, because you should have an amount you need to spend in order to acquire this amount of customers at this customer acquisition cost. And this is then how we begin to break down this big annualized plan into the simple actions that are going to enable us to achieve it. So the targets are key, key for you because we need to know, and we need to be able to measure on a weekly basis, are we on track or off track. But also you need targets to give to your team because let me tell you, team members, they love targets. There's a fantastic book called the Truth About Employee Engagement by Patrick Lincione, one of my favorite business authors, and he talks exactly about this. It's critically important for anyone in any business to, to understand are they doing a good job or not. And as humans, we love having a number that tells us, boom, my number is above target, or fuck, it's below target, I need to fix it. And so trust me when I say your team members will be empowered and significantly more engaged if they have a number that they are responsible to, that they know feeds into the bigger plans for the business. No one wants a random target that doesn't mean anything. Everyone wants a good target that ties into achieving the broader mission of the business. And this is how you work it through and set targets that are reasonable, that are aligned with achieving the business goals, which are aligned with achieving your goals as the business owner, it's a beautiful sense of alignment. So we get clear on the targets. And again, if you have team members, you discuss this with them because they need to take ownership of the targets, and therefore they need to have an input as to what these targets should be and whether they believe they're achievable or not. And so you want to have those conversations as well. Right now we've got the big plan for the year. We broke it down into months. We even got our targets, so we know exactly what needs to happen. Now it's all about converting these targets into the tangible actions that we are going to do. And so the best flipping way I found to do this was when I was in Ryan Deiss's Mastermind a couple of years ago out in Austin, Texas, and he walked me through what's called the Big three Planning canvas. And this was a massive unlock to me. So shout out to you, Ryan. We use this all the time with our team. I'm going to walk you through it now. So the Big three Planning canvas is basically a big sheet of paper, and it's where we look at a quarter. And so the reason we look at a quarter is that 90 days is a big enough time for serious projects to take place and have an impact, but it's short enough of a time where we feel we can actually impact it and we can remember it. Because if you're in January and you're thinking about the whole year in December, it just feels like really far away. Whereas quarters are good. So quarters, we're going to break the year into four quarters. And these are going to be tactical sprints. And so we go through the big three Planning canvas. And so the first part of the big three Planning canvas is the big goal. So the big goal or theme for this quarter, and so this might be, we want to bring in 100 new customers by March 31st. You want to get really specific with what the goal is, what are we trying to achieve here and by what date, which, again, if we're doing this quarterly, should just be the end of the quarter. But you want to get very specific with the big goal. You then identify three or four metrics, and these metrics are what we call the needle movers. So if I want to bring in 100 new customers by the end of Q1, what do we need to do? Well, we need to spend on our marketing and actually spend enough to get these customers. We need our customer acquisition cost to be within a reasonable range. We will need our close rate from the calls to be X amount, and we'll need X amount of calls booked in the diary in the first place. And so we break down the big goal into three or four of the key significant metrics that if we hit these metrics, if we move them from where they are now to hitting the targets, then that will enable us to tick off the big goal, because that's very important, because that's how we measure success on the way to achieving the big goal. What we then do is identify the big three projects. So the big three projects, if we know this is our goal for the quarter, these are the needle movers, the metrics that we must move. What are therefore the three projects that if we just execute on these three projects and do nothing else, we will move these metrics and thus we will hit the big goal. And this is where your team really comes into play, because this is clarity and it's strategic thinking around how we achieve this big goal. We're turning these targets now into the physical actions. So each project must have an owner, one single person who is responsible for delivering it, not doing all the work, but taking ownership for delivering the outcome. And it must also have a deadline. When is this project going to be done by? Because again, we must have a deadline. Deadlines get shit done and we need to hold people accountable as well. And so we then brainstorm with the team and we come up with what are the big three projects. And so these could be new marketing campaigns, they could be hiring initiatives, because actually, to do that we're going to need more staff. It could be operational improvements, could be efficiency gains, whatever it might be. This is where you're going to know your business and you're going to empower yourself and your team to think about the specific actions that have the highest probability of moving these metrics, which, if you move the metrics, hit the big goal. And so this is how we create the frameworks, the guardrails, to think, think properly. And this is awesome. So we spend, you know, a whole afternoon doing this and then once we've got it locked in, we get this printed out in massive pieces of paper and it's stuck upon the wall in our office. And that is how we tackle the quarters. Once we have got the quarters all tackled, final piece is the scorecards. So the scorecards are where we now bring this all to life on a weekly basis for the business, for our team members. So in our business, we have a scorecard for every business unit and we also have a scorecard for every team member. And the scorecard, very simply is tracked on a week by week basis. And it has a collection of metrics. It's not tracking the whole business. It will have between five and 10 metrics max. And these are the most important metrics that if these metrics are on track, we know our goals for the year are going to be delivered. And so in this instance, we have calls booked, we have cost per book, call scheduled that week, live calls show up, rate offers made, offer rate closed. Because this is where we are doing a marketing funnel to drive calls and then obviously sell people stuff. And so we know every single week we have the gray numbers here, which are the targets for every single week. And then we have the actual numbers, which are what we have achieved. And so every number here has an owner. Someone is responsible for that number. And as you can see, every number is either green or red. So I've got a screenshot of a particularly red time here. But red means that number is below the target. Green means it's on target or above. Now, what this is all about is about influencing and driving behavior, because we look at this in our meeting every Monday morning and we discuss it. And obviously, if it's red, we're talking to the person who's responsible for that number. Why on earth is this red? And then our job is to help them make it green. And we allocate our resources, our time, our energy, our money, in some cases on initiatives that are going to drive these numbers red. And so this is how we then stay on track throughout the year with the big annual targets, because we've broken it down into these weeks. And again, we also, in that meeting, go through the big projects. How are you getting on with these? What is the status update? Because the worst thing you can do is do this and then never talk about it until the end of March. You need to talk about this every single week. In habits is almost every day we check in on these projects to make sure they get done, because these should be the single most important things. And then this scorecard is your health check in. Okay. Are the actions we're taking moving us in the right direction? Are we on track with all this stuff or are we off track? And by doing so, you enable yourself to stay on top of the year. You give yourself the opportunity to identify when things might not be working. And it gives you the ability to pivot. It gives you the ability to pivot, which, again, is very underrated, as we always find. We find the process of planning to be indispensable. But the plan rarely goes to plan. Okay, our year, we always get very close to our actual revenue number in the plan. But how we got there was normally not how we planned in January, because things happen. Businesses are complex, they're diverse, and new opportunities, new things come our way that we might choose to capitalize on. So the process that we go through here will give you a level of strategic thinking and clarity that will really empower you and your team to perform. But ultimately, it's not like you're locking it in forever, okay? It's going to be fluid, it's going to change. And that is absolutely okay. You just want to make sure you have the right measures in place, like these scorecards, so you can stay on top of it rather than waiting three or four months and realizing, damn, you've missed all your numbers, you're screwed. You're not going be able to pay yourself any much. And that is a bad scenario. Boom. So there you have it. That is our little six step method to planning. I hope you found it useful. I hope there's some nuggets in there for you to make 2026 your best year yet. Do you like these videos? Let me know. Drop a comment. Otherwise I'll see you in the next one. Over and out. Peace.