Episode 104: Stupidly Simple Way To Strategically Plan 2022

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey everyone, it's Julie. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about strategic planning, big picture planning for your business for 2022, which we will ignore the fact that 2022 is just on our doorstep because holy heck, that was a fast year. However, if you are like me, you're probably sort of neck deep in planning mode for 2022, so I just kind of wanted to take you a little bit into my process. You may have heard me talk about this before, but this is really how I set intentions for the year. So first, I like to think in the context of three Ps, promotion, process and production. So I always start with promotion first because I know that they're going to be launches throughout the year or features or things that I'm going to want to be promoting or getting out there. So I start with the promotion category and I look at the 12 month calendar and think, okay, what am I going to promote in 2022 and where and when? And so for most business owners, anything more than four large promotions a year is probably going to be hella exhausting. Some people only do one big promotion, some do two, some do four. So at Funnel Gorgeous, we have two launches of our signature program Launch Gorgeous, a year that happens in the spring and the fall. So the first thing I do is I pick the date of the launch and I pick sort of the season of fulfillment, the season that we'll actively be coaching. I can't be in content creation mode if I'm actively coaching and so I pick those out. So for us it's April, September. Then I look at the season, I think, okay, well that's a spring and a fall promotion. What about a winter and a summer promotion? And this winter we have our Marketer's Heart event in February. So that's a pretty big promotion. Both selling the virtual tickets as well as selling the offer at the event, which is going to have some fulfillment. And then in summer, I don't usually do a big promotion in the summer. We do sometimes smaller promotions. So. So I think about, okay, what's going on? What have we just launched? What have we just finished? What hasn't gotten a lot of attention? And we plan out a promotion there. This doesn't mean that we're not actively promoting our products other times a year, but it gives us a really good focus to start with. Now here is the danger. If you are an entrepreneur who really likes to hustle and grind and set goals and do all that kind of stuff, you may go through this sort of exercise that I just took you through and feel like you're not doing anything. It's just very, you know, boring, right? Just four promotions. Like, what am I gonna do? Sit on my hands, eat bonbons all year? So this is why we need the other two P's. So the second P is process. And process is all the stuff that you have to continually do in your business. So if you're an agency, you're fulfilling for clients. If you're a coach, you're doing coaching calls, you know, customer service, social media marketing, your YouTube, your podcast. This is, this is a process in my business. And so you look at all of those processes and you go through the 12 months and you sort of block out time. So let's say, for example, you are a solopreneur and you really want to do YouTube. Okay, well, that means that either once a quarter or once a week or however you do, you're going to have to create your videos. So you got to build that process in. Maybe you also do a Q and A hour. Maybe you have clients, right? So start to block some of that in. Even if you don't actually have. Have the clients yet or you don't actually have the call, block the time. And again, I'm doing this all in my calendar. My calendar is really sort of my overarching planning tool. Google Calendar allows you to make a million different calendars, as many as you want. So I have one for Funnel Gorgeous. And I just start blocking this stuff out, blocking all the launch gorgeous calls, blocking out the Q and A hour, blocking out when I'm going to work on presentations for the Marketer's Heart event, right? So it's these process things that happen in the business day in and day out. So now once you do that, now you're getting a little bit more of a crystal clear picture. And if you are a content creator in your business, you should block out four or five hours a week just to create Content to start to show your brain. Hey, yes, maybe I only have four promotions a year, but look at all this other stuff that I'm doing, right? Do you want to block out time for admin stuff or email correspondence, et cetera, et cetera? Now I should mention before I keep going that if you are sort of a bootstrapping entrepreneur, you are a solopreneur, you may actually want to start with your family calendar first and block out when you're going to be away, when you're taking vacations so that you don't accidentally double book yourself. So you could do that first. So we've done promotion, we've done process and now we're going to look at project. Now project means it is a set period of time to create something. It's not like an ongoing process. So for example, Marketer's Heart event, we're going to have to create the content for the program we're selling. So that's a project. What I have to do is plan out where that project is going to go. Am I going to do it in February before the event or am I going to start working on it in March and pre sell it and fulfill it later? So I have to start blocking out that project. And if I'm launching in April for launch, gorgeous. Now I really just have one month to get that project out the door. If I'm doing it in March or I have to do it in January. Right. And then so you start to see that all of these promotions actually have a pretty significant project timeline both before the promotion and after the promotion if you're, if you're actually creating content. So by the time you get to the project P, you now see that your four promotions a year actually taking eight months because you're bookending the promotion with these projects and you're also trying to fit it around all the regular process stuff you do. And so I'm just going to add that fourth P, the personal, which is the first one, the personal vacations. What will happen is by the time you get to the end of this 30,000 foot view, you're going to realize that, you know, possibly four promotions is a lot and it will help keep you on the straight and narrow. If you start to get some idea and it happens, let's say in March of 2022 and you've got your whole year planned out. Well, you can totally do that new idea, but it has to display something else. And so that's the theory of time replacement instead of time stacking. And most of us who get in over our heads and have too much to do, we time stack. We just keep smushing the same multiple activities, multiple things to do in one time slot. Instead of saying, okay, well I want to do this cool thing, so I'm going to remove the time slot for meetings and I'm going to put in the time slot. Right there's the replacement. And so that is pretty much the basics of how I plan out an entire year. So I do it all on the calendar. Let's start with personal. Then we move to promotion, then we move to process because that's the day to day stuff. And then we look at where the project is going to, what projects are going to need to be built. Now some projects have nothing to do with your promotion. Some projects are very systems based, like, oh, I'm going to move to Google Drive or I'm going to create a new customer support, or I'm going to migrate from my Gmail inbox to help scout. Right. Those kind kinds of operational projects. You're going to look and say, all right, well maybe we don't want to do this during the launch. Maybe we want to do this on an off month. And so hopefully that helps. Hopefully that gives you a nice simple framework to plan out 2022. Appreciate you talk soon. If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started. Sam.