My Ultimate Business & Marketing Plan for 2023 (Swipe This Template)

I'm going to show you how to business plan, and this is my plan for 2023. It's a business and a marketing plan. It's a template that you can use to swipe for your business. Doesn't matter what type of business you have, you can take this and then you can most importantly focus for the rest of the year. This is something I actually borrowed from one of our Mastermind members, Sam Ovens. He has a great template that you can use, and this is a modification of that template. So let's go ahead and jump into it over here. And if we take a look at it, this is the high level. Basically, I start at the top columns over here for traffic, websites, products, funnels, executive team, goals, and more. And so I'm going to walk through each and every one of these, but I just want to show you when you are building a business, at the end of the day, you want to be thinking about, okay, if you have these goals that you're trying to hit, A, how are you going to get the traffic for that? And then also what assets do you have to help convert that traffic? And then what products do you have? And then what are your funnels? And then what does your team look like? When I look at traffic, the squares that are in green, so we have SEO, podcast, YouTube newsletter. These are the channels that are working well for us already. All right. Now, when I look at the ones that are in yellow, so LinkedIn and Twitter, these are in yellow because they have a lot of potential, but we need to put in a little more effort to make sure that they work. And then for the red areas, you can see LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, and Google search. And Google search is probably more retargeting. If we start at a high level, basically think about it from red, yellow, green. We want to really double and triple down on what's already working in the green areas. So the thing to think about here is how do we go about converting this traffic better? You know, that's something that we hope to be able to do You know, especially considering that 2023 is going into a down market right now. Podcasting, that's been good over the years because I've been podcasting for about 10 years now. You know, we have 3 podcasts, right? We have the Marketing School Podcast, there's the Leveling Up Podcast, and then there's the Creators of Web3 Podcast. So the Leveling Up one, I've been doing that one the longest and that one gets, I want to say, about $70,000 to $80,000 a month. Now, if I focus on that one more, I think we can probably get it to a couple hundred thousand or so. So I have a couple of ideas on how we can go about doing that. The good news is we're thinking about working with Spotify and Spotify actually has a setup where they allow us to use their studios and be able to use those and bring cool people in and be able to film those. I think it's going to be huge because we're going to also be able to repurpose those onto YouTube. Now, the Marketing School Podcast, we're at 1.7, 1.8 million downloads a month. And then the Creators of Web3 one, that's brand new. So maybe that one's getting like, I want to say like 500 downloads a month right now. You know, there's room to grow. You know, I would say 2 of those are green, one is yellow. And if we come back to my screen over here, YouTube, I believe YouTube is a huge opportunity right now. I want to say, you know, for Marketing School, as of this recording, we're maybe getting 30,000 views a month, which is very modest. We just brought the channel back less than a month ago. Now the other side of things for YouTube is the Leveling Up channel, and that one has about 74,000 subs as of this recording. I believe the subs is not that big of a deal. It's more so how many views we're getting per month. So I want to say maybe the views we're getting per month right now, about 150,000 or so. There's a lot of room to go up, and it scales exponentially. So the question is, how do we scale this to 500,000 views a month? How do we scale this to a million views a month and start to really ramp up from there. And I believe we can do that by creating higher quality videos, longer videos, where instead of going for 2 minutes, maybe I go for longer. I just go more in depth, right? And this is also a plan that I plan to distribute to my team because this is basically the template we can execute on. You know, how do we do more live podcasts with influential people that are influential YouTubers or influential podcasters? Because we're going to throw it on YouTube. You know, if we're doing an interview with someone that's popular or controversial figure, then it's going to do well with YouTube because people are searching for that stuff on YouTube. If I come back up here on the SEO side, okay, if we get some good nuggets from people, maybe we can record some of those nuggets and write longer form pieces from an SEO standpoint, right? And then also from an SEO standpoint, the plan is how do we go about upgrading the content we have? How do we leverage the power of AI to upgrade content? How do we make sure the content isn't being flagged by duplicate content tools? Because, you know, Google is actually pretty good at flagging, you know, what content they consider fake or duplicate by these AI writers. So there's a lot of things to consider here, right? But I know we have strong domain authority there. We have a lot of room to grow with the podcast. And then YouTube, we have a lot of room to grow as well. And so that's why those are green right now. The newsletter— we have a newsletter that has about 30,000 people or so on it called the Growth Weekly Newsletter. And that's where we just share content and we share some insights. And we want to think about how we can grow that newsletter because the stuff isn't exactly cheap, right? It's higher ticket stuff. And so we want to be able to nurture a relationship with these people and build a community. So that's what it is. LinkedIn and Twitter. If you think about this, Marketing School is a daily podcast. My Leveling Up interviews, I have maybe 1 or 2 that come out every single week, and I do videos like this. And so there's a lot of thoughts that I have already. We just need someone that's able to repurpose and rewrite in my voice to LinkedIn and to Twitter, but they have to write natively for those platforms. So for Twitter, you probably have to do Threads, right? If there's interesting insights from Marketing School, you from on there, or interesting conversation I had, maybe summarize parts of it in a thread and maybe link to YouTube afterwards, or, you know, link to a subscription to subscribe, you know, to the newsletter. LinkedIn, I mean, the organic reach is just crazy right now. Why wouldn't we do it? And then post something really good and then also ask people to subscribe to the newsletter, right? That's how we're thinking about attacking all this. And then, you know, we would have the paid media team kind of figure out how to layer on these ads. I would just say for these ads, we probably want to go retarget people that are fairly engaged on our site, whether it's people that have viewed YouTube videos or people that are— have visited middle of the funnel or bottom funnel pages on the site. So that's So that's just the first part of this plan over here. So let's zoom out a little bit. I want to talk about the websites, right? So, you know, if you have funnels, the next step is where are you driving the traffic to, right? So if you have traffic coming in, where's the traffic going to go to? So we have 3 websites here. One is Single Grain. So this is the ad agency that I have. And you can see the type of clientele that we work with, you know, the Ubers, the Amazons, the Lyfts of the world, mostly focused on SaaS, e-commerce, and Web3. So in the world of Web3, we work with clients like Immutable or ENS or, you know, exchanges like Bittrex. And we want to continue to establish a foothold in that space. The next thing over here is we have this Leveling Up Founders Group. This is a group of 7 to 9 figure founders. It's only 100 people, so the group is capped. And then we have this group over here called Leveling Up Accelerator. It's basically how to grow like a consulting business. And, you know, that's for people that are looking to grow like an agency type of business or a client services type of business, just because I've been there, done that, right? And there's a lot of people on our list that follow us. And, you know, we get a lot of leads and, you know, we like to pass some of our leads to these people and then train these people up and hopefully maybe someday, you know, partner up with these people, right? But these are kind of the 3 things that we have that are available. I would say it's more than I like, but it's a lot more focused than it's been before. And the next step over here is on the product. So this Leveling Up Accelerator piece, this is $10,000. We're probably going to cap the group at 200 people and it is people doing under 7 figures trying to grow their services business, whether it's like an agency business, like a coaching business or a yoga service, you know, whatever it is exactly. If you're working with clients, you know, our goal here is to kind of fast-track people and you can basically see in the description the links for each of these. So if you're interested in Leveling Up Accelerator, you can apply for that. There's an online community for that. And then all the course material I have for, you know, growing your agency. And then also there's like weekly calls and, you know, I might potentially hop on some calls every now and then as well, just to help out. So it's basically not just a course, right? It's what are you going to get to scale your business up? Our goal is not to say, oh, just sell these, it's to make sure that people are being more successful with this stuff. So that's Leveling Up Accelerator. And you can click on the link below to learn more about that. And then Leveling Up Founders, again, it's not cheap. It's 7 to 9 bigger founders looking to hang out with the best in media, in business, in marketing. You know, my podcast co-host Neil Patel comes to the event. The last event we did in Beverly Hills, Leila Hormozi come speak, Alex Hormozi, Patrick Campbell, Sam Ovens, who's actually a member of the group, Vanessa Lau, who's a member of the group as well. And so we have a lot of great people that come through and, you know, there's just a lot to learn from these people, right? You know, it's about keeping the quality of the group high and then, you know, having great speakers and then just doing fun things with people. You know, ultimately people can work with each other and help each other out, right? And then Single Grain Marketing Agency, that one is variable. So that's, you know, typical paid media, SEO, CRO. You know, we're adding in organic social. You know, there's creative that we're adding in and kind of data analytics. So that's that. In terms of our funnels, it's actually very simple. And so the idea is that we drive traffic and they either go to the Single Grain website, they book a call there, or they go to the front in Mastermind, they book a call there. Back in Mastermind, they book a call there. We'll probably add a VSL for the number 2 and number 3 here. But the whole idea here is that they're booking a call and, you know, from there we're trying to see if it's a good fit. We're trying to understand what your goals are and also if we can help you hit those goals. And if we can't, if it's not a good mutual fit, maybe we can refer you somewhere else. But not necessarily everyone's a fit for this stuff, right? Because again, front end, you know, we're probably capping it at 200 people. Back in Mastermind, which is the 7 to 9 figure group, it's only at 100 people. That's that. And then Single Grain, it's not like we can take on all the clients in the world and we're actually very selective there. Now you look at the executive team over here, there's really 6 things to take a look at. So one is the CEO, and that's a role that I hold currently, but I'm hoping I can again vacate that role and, you know, we can hire someone in next year to take that on. 2 is the marketing lead, right? It's someone that can, you know, really understand everything I'm doing from a branding perspective and also like all the assets that I have and all the things I talked about earlier with traffic. It's just like taking that plan and making it happen and also pointing out the problems, finding solutions, and then volunteering to solve the problem. We're looking for a very strategic person that can handle that, right? You know, honestly, that's the best slot for me to, you know, hold on to while we get this person in, right? And so operations lead, we already have that. Sales lead, we already have that. Client services lead, that is something that we are looking to add on another layer for the next year. And then also finance, we're pretty good there, right? So something's looking to shift in 2023, which is CEO role. Marketing leads, really it's more so someone that kind of works side by side with me on top of all initiatives that I'm pushing. Now let's move on to the single grain goals over here. So single grain goals, these are again for 2023, is to grow free consultations by 50%. So right now, give or take, we're maybe getting around 300, 350 leads a month on the Single Grain side. What we want to do is we want to figure out, okay, if we're able to double that, then we're able to hit our goals, right? Basically work backwards for our targets as a business. And we're like, okay, well, what needs to happen is we actually need to grow our free consultations, right? And so could that be through SEO? Could that be through YouTube? Could that be through ads? Could it be a combination of things to actually get there? Number 2 is to grow the Leveling Up YouTube channel. So at least one long video per week, something like this, right? And let me know in the comments below what videos, what other videos you'd like to see me make because I think I'm actually enjoying these long videos right now. And what I might just do is if you're enjoying this where I'm mapping out my thought process, I'll show how our funnels work, you know, what's worked for us. I'll just throw them up on YouTube like this. So let me know in the comments if you'd like to see that. Just say like yes or no, we'd like to see that more, or specific topics that you'd like to see. That'd be very helpful. Now 3 is to grow the Marketing School YouTube channel. So that's 7 videos per week because it's a daily marketing podcast. But what I want to do is have one long combined video each week where it's basically, it's a masterclass, right? So you might batch a bunch of our SEO videos together. You might batch a bunch of our predictions for 2023, right? It might batch a bunch of our CRO videos together or content together. Ideally, maybe it's more evergreen stuff, right? Number 4 is we want to level up the culture. So even since the pandemic, we haven't had a chance to have everyone meet up, right? And that's something I've really been trying to push more. So at least one in-person meetup with everyone and 4 leadership in-person meetings. So the leadership team has been meeting, but I'd like to see more of that. You know, that is a goal for 2023. Now, number 5 is generate 20% profit margin with $250K revenue per employee. We're trying to shoot very high on these things right now. I mean, I'll be honest, like, you know, 2021, 2022, it wasn't exactly where we thought things would turn out. And so we want to push harder to make sure that we can kind of, you know, meet and exceed expectations. Number 6 is fill out the executive team. I kind of talked about, you know, positions that we're looking to kind of move around a little bit. And number 7 is to master LinkedIn, whether that is hiring the right person and then that person just repurposing content and just writing 5 posts per week. You know, hopefully we're getting, you know, hundreds of thousands of impressions a month, if not over a million a month, that would be a nice target to go after. And so all this to say, I know I've talked very quickly, maybe you have to watch this on 0.5x, but you now have a much better sense for, you know, what we're going for here, right? Maybe you work backwards from your goals first, and then you can work into like what you actually need to do. What are the inputs to actually get there? And that's going to make things a lot easier. What funnels are actually available to you? And do you need to make new funnels? What products are actually available to you? Do you actually have product market fit there where people actually are satisfied with what you're delivering? Websites, what's actually available for people to land on? And can you optimize conversions there? And then traffic, what's actually working? So do green, yellow, and red. You know, hopefully you have a couple greens, maybe you have at least one green and just go all in on that. Maybe you test out some other channels. By the way, like I'll say one more thing, you don't need to necessarily have every channel, right? Again, traffic, websites, products, funnels, executive team, goals, but you don't need to try everything under the sun. And so for us, if I come back to this one, like the website property, I've had that for like almost 10 years. And the podcast, I guess almost been doing it for 10 years. Marketing school for maybe 5 years or so. YouTube, I've actually been doing that for almost 10 years, but kind of sporadically. I went hard in like maybe like 2016 and I stopped for a while and then I kind of, you know, was haphazard about it and now I'm focused on it again. And the newsletter, that's fairly new, but it seems to be working and it's just, you know, kind of curating the content that we have, right? And so hopefully this gives you a couple of ideas. And then I've been testing LinkedIn and Twitter and I've seen some success with it. That's why it's yellow. And then this other stuff I'm fairly confident will work. We just haven't put someone on it for a while. And so, you know, we'll put one of our paid media managers on it. And then, you know, websites, we might need to redesign some stuff to help with conversion rates, products. We might have to tweak some things over here, funnels we might have to tweak a little bit. Executive team, I think once we get the right pieces in place for 2023, you know, we'll be in a good spot. And then coming back to the goals again, then you can see that, hey, like, you know, all this stuff is very achievable and you want to make sure that you're setting SMART goals, right? So specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound, right? So SMART goals, you know, don't leave home without them. You want to quantify ideally where you're going at the end of the day. And, you know, that's ultimately going to help you hit your goals. So here's one final thing I'll say. Look, if you're a founder, you're doing 7 to 9 figures You know, click on the link below. You can apply to the Leveling Up Founders group. You can learn more about it on that page. Leveling Up Accelerator, that's if you're doing under 7 figures and if you're in the services type of business, that's for you to help you grow there. There's a lot of resources in there. There's coaching in there. There's ongoing support. And then you need help with marketing, you just go to Single Grain Marketing Agency. So just go to singlegrain.com. Again, feel free to take this template, right? It's something that I think will be very helpful for you all. Also talk this through and then show this to your team and then they'll understand where you're trying to go. And for you as a leader, you have to continue to communicate this. You have to overcommunicate this because people tend to forget. And, you know, you should be able to be successful. Obviously, there's a lot of other stuff. There's your mission, there's your vision, there's your values. Maybe I'll talk about it in another video, but click on the links below for the 3 things that I just talked about. Hope you enjoyed this video. I guess we will catch you later. Thank you.