The Entrepreneur's Guide to Strategic Planning

Welcome to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. In this podcast, we're going to be talking about some amazing things to help you get over overgiving. Hi and welcome to this episode of the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. I'm your host, Angela Mondor, and today I'm going to talk to you about strategic planning. In fact, I'm going to give you some hints and tips on how— let's call it the entrepreneur's guide to strategic planning. At the end of the day, there's going to be a few things along the way here that are going to help you to see strategic planning maybe in a little bit of a different view than you had thought before. I hope that it gives you a bit of an open eye. Now, I want you to understand, this is not corporatey. This is not gooey. This is not like, oh, I don't know, really cringy. I used to hate strategic planning. I used to think, oh my God, that is like so boring. But I want you to think about this from your entrepreneur's mindset. Okay, we're going to think about this maybe even— I mean, we all know that we got a little neurodiverse spicy going on over here. So there's going to be a different way of looking at this than you may have seen from a corporate perspective. So hang tight. I got you. I got your 6. Okay, look at this. It's important for us to plan yearly and to look at that whole year. Now, just because you lay out a plan doesn't mean that plan is going to come true. Doesn't mean to say that that plan is going to be exactly as it needs to be, and there's never going to be a deviation because that's just not true. We have no idea what's going to happen. The most important lesson we learned back in 2020 was that the first quarter we never could have predicted. There was no way that we had that as a predictive text in 2019. So whatever we planned in 2019 for 2020 totally needed to be revamped and changed. That's just the truth of the matter. So don't think about your strategic plan for the year as being the end-all be-all, or I have to accomplish these things or else I failed, because that's just bollocks. Okay. But it is important to plan strategically for the year ahead because you have opportunities bubbling up every day. You get things on Facebook that's like, hey, buy this thing. There's Instagram that says, hey, there's this thing. Maybe even seen things on Pinterest and on TikTok, and there's all these other things that are coming at you, and there's maybe these programs that you think maybe you should be part of, and it could be exhausting. Okay, however, if you've put a plan in place and you're saying, here's where I want to take the business next year, here's the things that I want to accomplish, here's the pieces that I want to simply be held accountable for, basically these are the ideas. This— and a long-term vision can be hard to wrap your head around, and I get that, but when you think about you know, just the trajectory. Like maybe you're, I'm gonna write a book this year. Or maybe it's, I'm going to work more one-on-one. Or maybe it's, I'm gonna sell more courses than work one-on-one. Whatever the case is in your business, you just need a yearly trajectory. And then when all these other things are popping up all over social media, it's really easy to go, oh, that doesn't make sense. No, that's not where I'm going. I'm not going there. No, I'm not going there. Ah, this is the diamond in the rough. All of these things, your decisions become way easier. You think about decision fatigue. Right? Having too many decisions and not being able to make a decision. When you make no decision, you're still making a decision, right? You've said no to everything. And somebody else maybe is coming in to give you a yes. And you don't even know that it's happening until it's too late. But we get decision fatigue very quickly because we have no idea whether all of these opportunities are right or wrong. But if you do say, hey, you know what? This is the trajectory I want to take my business on in the next year. Here's the pieces I want to focus on. It doesn't have to be detailed. It just has to be a direction. Here's the things I'm going to do. We do this every year in the yearly planning party for the Rockstar Success Circle. And it's very valuable to be able to create this entire story for your business moving forward. The decision fatigue gets so less. What's the right word for it? It just doesn't. It isn't as prominent. The way to go with that one. It's easier to say no to so many things because they just don't fit the overall trajectory of where you're heading. So it actually saves you time. It saves you mental energy. It saves your sanity to be able to create this. And it doesn't take long to put this together so that you can then say, that's the direction I'm headed. Now, here's the deal. Strategic planning isn't a one-time thing. You have to review things. You have to go through them over and over again. Quarterly planning is a great way to do that. So before every quarter starts, it's important for you to look at what's happening. You want to keep that business agile. You want to be able to move and change. Things happen. Without quarterly planning, 2020 was a nightmare. But if, if you looked at 2020 and you said, oh, here's where I thought I was going to go there, but this is what happened in the world. Well, that doesn't match. Okay, I need to adjust. Okay. So during that quarterly planning, it gives you the ability to be able to break down those yearly goals, figure out what's happening in the next 3 months. Now we're taking it smaller, right? So Oh, a year. That's a lot of things. Okay, what can I do in this next 3 months? And you bring it a little tighter. Now we're starting to say, okay, well, we have this and that and this that we're going to be working on the next 3 weeks, 3 months. And it allows you to respond to market changes. So the same way we did in 2020, if something else happens, maybe something happens in your life, your personal life that impacts the things that are going on inside your business, you are able to make these changes and be more agile in your business if you're doing this on a quarterly basis. Okay. We also do this inside the Rockstar Success Circle every quarter as well. And it's helpful to have a group of people as well, because you can hear what other people are doing. And you can, you know, provide your value as well as they provide value to you as well. When you're talking about the different avenues in which you want to move through. We talk about SMART goals all the time. And SMART goals are a little different in my world than they are in everybody else's world. Because we talk about Specific, measurable, actionable is where I like to change it up, and relevant and time-bound. It's important for these goals to be specific so that we know where we're heading. They need to be measurable so that we can see whether we got there. They need to be actionable because that's all we can control. We can only control what we do. We can't control the results. And so that's why I changed it to actionable. And then they have to be relevant, relevant to that yearly plan that we've created, and time-bound because we've got— is this going to happen in the next week? Is it going to be a 3-week thing? Is it going to be a 12-week thing? How long is it going to take us to get to this particular goal? Doing these things is really important on a quarterly basis so that you can keep moving towards that overall big goal without having to be overwhelmed by, oh, that's such a big goal. Now we've broken it down into quarters, which makes it a way easier task to accomplish instead of thinking about that massive goal that's weighing heavily in your mind. Now we do that every quarter, so 4 times a year. And then there's the monthly check-ins. You want to stay on track. Again, we do this in the Rockstar Success Circle where we're checking in every single month. Okay, so in that last quarterly planning session, I chose to do X, Y, and Z inside my quarterly plan, and therefore I have 3 months to accomplish it. In this month, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. You're always looking back. So when you, when you plan a month, you're looking back. What was the month before? What was the quarter? Am I still moving in the direction towards my goal for year, always revisiting these things so that you can roll them up and make sure that you're focusing on smaller things. It's hard to focus on, oh, there's this massive yearly goal, but you break it down into quarters, which makes it a little smaller. And then you break it down into monthlies, and it becomes way easier to actually accomplish the things that you've put on that yearly goal. And knowing that every single day you're working towards something that you know is working towards that bigger goal, that overall goal, you know that every day that you're putting in the work, you're working towards that. It's empowering and it's exciting. So, you know, breaking those down into those monthlies is really important. You get to look at the different, you know, elements that you are working towards, the things that are, you know, these goals, the SMART goals. You're able to measure them. You're able to see, did I take the actions I want? Lots of people talk about KPIs. That is a very corporatey kind of way of looking at it, but it's true. They're key performance indicators, which simply means These are the things that I'm going to work on. And they're specific, they're measurable, they're actionable, they're relevant, and they're time-bound. That's all it means. These are the little sort of pebbles, for lack of a better, that I'm using to build up to make that rock work, that boulder, right? So, you're moving towards that larger thing but just by these smaller pieces that you're doing on a monthly basis. So, you want doing these things monthly, quarterly. It helps you to stay accountable throughout the year. But it also helps you to stay motivated. in the direction that you're heading as well. You have the ability to pivot or to be more agile in the decisions that you're making inside your business because you are checking in on a regular basis. It's really important. We are always asking the question, do your actions, or are the actions you're taking in the business still aligning with the goals and the vision of your business? Are these still relevant? It's a question I ask Every single time. Are you still working towards the same goal? Because here's the deal. You could make a goal in your business for the year and say, this is where I want to head. And you start taking all the actions and maybe 3 months in the year, you're like, this doesn't feel good. I thought I wanted to work more with one-on-one. But really, I really enjoy the coursework more. I need to pivot. You need to be more agile in the way that you do it. And so that's that question. Are they still aligning? If they're not, then hey, what do you need to do to make the pivot to change rather than just plugging through the year going, I'm just going to do it, I'm just going to do it? I mean, you might hate that year in business rather than say, oh, you know what, this just isn't the right fit and I need to make a change. So checking in on a regular basis will give you that ability to make that change. So you want to make sure that you have the framework so that you can evaluate whether or not your goals are still relevant, which of course is being is the checking in on a regular basis. Okay. Also within the Rockstar Success Circle, we have the Rockstar Planner. So that allows us to put everything inside one place so that we're able to see those things and make those changes. Always, of course, using pencils so that you can erase things and make changes along the way. So there are some challenges to strategic planning. And some of those challenges is that it feels too big for people. Maybe you're one of those people. You're like, I don't like strategic planning. One year is too long of a time frame for me to think of. I can't think past tomorrow. I've got too much on my plate, and strategic planning overwhelms me. I understand where you're at. I totally get it. And sometimes it's because we're stuck with that mindset of how it's done corporately rather than how it can be done from a neurodiverse or that is something that we solve very quickly and easily inside the Rockstar Success Circle because we spend time with you doing it with you. You're not alone in the process. It's not like we go here's your homework. Homework. Bye, have a good day. We do it live together on a call. And so that can be helpful. You know, when you're not sure whether or not you have the right data to make a decision, we discuss it together. It's possible you don't have the data and you don't even know how to get it. And that's okay because we can discuss how we can make that happen too. I've been doing this for so many years now, it's comfortable for me. It comes second nature to me, and it can for you as well. I have clients now who When they first started with me, they thought, oh God, this is like so overwhelming. And now it's really easy for them. And their businesses are changing in the direction that they want them to go. So these are some things that, yes, it can be difficult to understand whether or not a pivot makes sense. You know, sometimes they might say, ah, I don't know, this doesn't feel right, but I want to move this way. And then we have a conversation about it and help them to move through the ideas of what that looks like. So if you're in that position, you might want to consider being part of this amazing group of people who are definitely making making waves in their businesses to change those ideas. But when you are planning your strategy on your own, I used to actually, when I did it on my own, I would actually rent a hotel room for the weekend. I'd have a staycation in town and I would bring only my strategic planning stuff with me to vacation. I would block out everything else. I didn't have to worry about the family or any of the other things. Some years I could only afford to go for just one night and sometimes I spent the weekend. So, it depends on where you're at in your business. But find a way to isolate yourself for a few hours at least, at the very least. Whether that means you need to just jump over and go to a coffee shop and put your earbuds in or whatever it is. But get yourself away from the day-to-day. Get yourself away from all the hustle and bustle that's happening around you. Or you could just come join the Rockstar Success Circle and we could do it together. So, I hope you have a fantastic day, a wonderful week, and I look forward to talking to you next time. Have a great day. Thank you so much, Angela. Thank you so much for listening to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. Your support means the world to me. You can find show notes for this episode and other goodies at overgiversanonymous.ca. And if you enjoyed this episode or you enjoy the podcast in general, why not join us in the Overgivers Anonymous Facebook group where you can connect with overgivers from all over the world? Head on over to geekygirl.ca/group. Thank you so much for listening to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast.