Is Your Plan Sustainable?

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie Chenell, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today I'm talking about Your long-term plans, are they sustainable? And when I say long-term, I don't mean your 5-year or your 10-year business plan. I mean your 6-month plan because let's face it, 6 months in 2026 is the equivalent of 10 years back in the 1950s. A little side note, I've started watching old episodes of The Brady Bunch with my son, and I cannot understate or overstate how much slower life was in 1970. Oh my goodness, Everything moved slow. When we are talking about long-term plans in online marketing in 2026, we're talking about 6 months, 12 months at the max. And if someone asked me, hey, what's your 5-year plan or your 10-year plan? I just feel like I would say, I don't know. And if anybody gives you their 5-year and 10-year plan with super confidence, it makes me think that they're not really paying close attention to the market and the world right now. Anyway, let's go back to the topic at hand. Is your long-term plan sustainable? This is a question that comes up over and over again with private clients because a plan on paper and a plan in real life are two entirely different things. You may be one of those people that love to plan. I think there are a lot of us actually that love a good whiteboard. We love an empty notebook. We love a CEO day. We love to organize and outline structure, and there is definitely a place for that. When we talk about brainstorming and the different parts of the brain, there's this analogy called the 6 hats, and there's different hats that we wear in business. This is the blue hat, okay? The blue hat is the hat that you wear when you're making plans. Sometimes you're also wearing a green hat—that is your creative energy and possibilities. You might also be using your yellow hat, which is about, you know, sort of the positive values. What are going to be the benefits to you, to your business, to your bank account, to your customers, to your clients, right? So when you do a plan on paper or on a whiteboard, you're using a lot of blue, green, and yellow. Unfortunately, some people love that season so much that the minute they hit resistance in real life, they go back to the thing that's most comfortable to them, which is planning, and they restructure. They restructure the offer, they restructure the funnel, they rejig the plan, they change course. The problem is that sometimes that is the right thing to do. And knowing when it's like, okay, I need to pivot and go back to my plan versus, hey, you are avoiding something difficult or, or uncomfortable over here is really hard. Then there is the plan in real life. The plan in real life is action. And some of you might be great action takers. You love to take action. You feel good when you're in motion and you actually feel scared and unsure when you're, when you're, uh, stationary. There's others of you where that's not your favorite part, and you just have to know your personality. I prefer to be in action. In fact, standing still makes me quite nervous. This can lead to burnout. This can lead to overworking, over-functioning. If you are the opposite and you get paralyzed, you might be the kind of person that likes to stay at the whiteboard, stay in learning, stay in planning, And it just, it depends. The point that I think a lot of people get tripped up on is the difference between a whiteboard plan and a real-life plan. And that gap is where I see most people fall down. And if you are hiring a coach or a consultant, or you're learning from a teacher that's really good at planning, they have real organized structures and frameworks. But they're not actually super capable or gifted at helping you walk through the plan, you may come away from that experience feeling like you're the problem or, you know, you failed the system. And not to take out any personal responsibility because you probably did do something that you shouldn't have done, but also people who give you great plans but don't actually test those plans in real life or walk you through those real-life plans, there is a gap there. Let's use a real-life example to talk about the difference between a plan on paper and a plan in real life. And the question I posed at the top of the hour is, is your plan sustainable? Really what I'm asking when I say that is, does your plan work in real life? It works on paper. Does it work in real life? And to answer that question is not easy to do unless you just go do it, right? And you're like, I think it works in real life, Some people, when they want to know, okay, is this plan going to work in real life, they look for standard expectations. Let's say that you are getting ready to do a launch and you want to run a 5-day challenge. It's going to be a free challenge, then you're going to launch a new program that's $1,000. If you've never actually taken this plan that's on paper and done it in real life, you are going to have to rely on standard benchmarks across your industry to say, Okay, if I get, you know, uh, 50% of people who register for the challenge to participate, and of those 50%, I get 10% of people to buy the program, that is standard. Okay, so let's just do quick math. You have 1,000 people register, you have 500 people participate, and you get 50 sales. Okay, though that would be like standard industry math. It's not quite exact, don't hold me to that, but just for the sake of example. Okay, now you're thinking to yourself, my plan on my whiteboard makes sense in real life. Now let me go execute. This is where people mess up. They underestimate time, money, and nervous system resources to actually execute the plan. And this is why plans fail in real life. Not because your plan was bad, not because your plan has to be redone 500 times, but because the natural constraints of who you are, what your bank account looks like, how your nervous system functions, and how much time you have available was not adequately measured. And that is really, really important, and that is the difference between someone who can put a plan on paper and a whiteboard and someone who can take a plan and put it in real life. Let's go ahead and use this example. You have the challenge and you have the $1,000 program. You know you're— you want to get 1,000 people registered for the challenge. Okay, now in order to get 1,000 people registered to a challenge, you probably need close to 10,000 people to actually see the registration page, maybe a little less, although opt-in rates right now fluctuate between 15 and 20%. I'm calculating 10%. I'm assuming you're a beginner and your opt-in rate isn't going to be amazing. Have you figured out how much money it would cost to get 10,000 people to that registration page? Okay, let's assume a dollar a click. We're going to just keep the math easy. That's $10,000. You're going to need $10,000 to get 10,000 people to that registration page. That is a question of the constraints on your bank account. Do you have $10,000? You might have $10,000 in your bank account, but you may not have $10,000 that you can throw at ads to get 10,000 people into a challenge. You might just have $10,000 period, and that's got to pay for your virtual assistant, that's got to pay your software, and that's got to pay you. When it all comes down to it, you really only have about $3,000 to spend. Okay, that's a classic example of making a plan on paper and then not taking into consideration your bank account. Okay, then the next one I said, which is time, right? Your bank account, which is your resources, your time. In order to spend $10,000 on ads, Right? We need a good amount of ad creative. We can't just roll out on Meta with one Facebook ad. And because it's a live challenge and it's a live launch, you probably need a good amount of creative because you're going to spend $10,000 in approximately 2 weeks. That means $5,000 a week. The more money you spend in Meta, the more ad creative the actual algorithm needs to be able to assess what's, you know, what's going to work. That means you've got to create, I don't know, let's say 5 to 10 Reels, 5 to 10 static images, maybe a couple of carousels, a couple of memes. You need a good amount of creative. And you're so busy working on the challenge content and you're so busy working on the course content and all the other things you have to do in your business, you have not set aside time to build, you know, 50 to 100, let's say, creatives. Maybe it's not quite that much. Maybe it's more like 20 or 25. Still, it's a fair amount of work. There is an example of a plan that you had on your whiteboard that doesn't match the actual time allotment in real life. And what happens? So you cut corners a little bit, okay? You decide, you know what, I don't have time. I'm going to do 5 or 6 ads. And then all of a sudden that $10,000 that you didn't really have, and you only gave it about 5 or 6 creatives instead of 25 to 30 creatives, now means you do not have 1,000 people registered for your webinar. You have 500. Now that means that at best you're gonna have 250 people paying attention. And if you can get 10% of those people to buy, 25. Okay, that's an example of how money and time in real life, not adequately measured, break a plan that looks good on paper. The third one, and the most underestimated one, and actually one of the most important ones, and why I coach the way I coach, is your nervous system. And people used to call this mindset, and I definitely think mindset is a part of it, you know, having the right expectations. But the nervous system is your, like, your threat detection system. And our— your brain is designed above all to conserve energy and keep you safe. And at any point in your plan, if you trigger or trip something that signals to the brain that you might be in danger— and remember, for a lot of us, danger isn't like a bear is chasing us. Danger is our bank account is down. Danger is we don't have time to take a shower or get a good night's sleep, right? Those are all going to trigger danger. There's also another type of danger that we, uh, we like recoil back from, and that is rejection, failure. I'm not good enough. Uh, I'm not capable. All of those things. If anything in that plan requires you to not be triggered by those things, and you are not prepared for that, you're not prepared to regulate your nervous system through the ups and downs, you will 100% sabotage. Not because you're stupid, not because you're not qualified, but because the nervous system in that part of the brain works independent of your prefrontal cortex. The part of your brain that says, "Here's our plan, here's the logic, here's how we're going to do it," does not come online when you are under threat. And it's not a matter of willpower or motivation or "I'm ADHD" or procrastinate, none of that. As long as your nervous system feels unsafe, it will rule your plan. If we take the example that I've just laid out here, which is the, you know, you didn't have enough money really, but you spent it anyway. Now you are in debt, let's say. So now there is a threat detection, right? There's alarm going off. There is adrenaline and cortisol in your body that is feeling like, I've got to make this money back or else, right? That feeling. If you did not have the time that it took to create those creatives, now you are watching as your cost per lead is higher and your ads person is saying, hey, this ad isn't working. And your threat detection system is going off saying, I'm a failure. Nobody cares. Why aren't my ads working? Why does this work for everybody else and not for me? Okay. So then. Your nervous system is now kind of running the show here and you end up with only 500 registered, let's say. Then maybe you only have 200 people that engage and then you have maybe 20 sales of your offer and you've still hit all the key benchmarks, right? The plan on paper worked, right? I mean, it didn't work on the traffic side, but on the engagement side and the conversion side, it worked. And I'm over here going, yay, it worked. And you're over here going, oh my God, I'm such a failure, right? Because now you've only made $20 grand, you've spent $10 you didn't have, so you have to actually use the rest of the money to pay for something else. You've got all these signals that are telling you you didn't do a good job, and then you're saying to yourself, man, I don't think the plan worked. Let's go back and make a new plan. And then you go back to the planning. You say, that challenge didn't work. I'm not sure that offer is going to work. You know what, maybe I should make that offer low ticket, because you know what, no one's paying $1,000 anymore because, you know, Amy Porterfield shut down her $2,000 course, right? And you go back to planning because planning is safe. Paper planning is safe. It's fun. It's organized. It's clean. And then the cycle repeats. That is what I see more than anything else in business over and over and over again. The accurate estimation of how much money you have, how much time you have, and how much nervous system bandwidth you have, how good you are at regulating your nervous system, are the 3 things that are going to make a plan on paper work with a plan in real life. There are some plans on paper that are really bad, but honestly, I'm just going to be honest, most of the plans, if you are working with a coach or consultant that knows half, 50% of what, you know, someone as an expert would know, most of the plans work with the right time, money, and nervous system. Not all of them. There are plenty of people who make plans that are completely unrealistic, or they worked in 2018, but they don't work now. But for the 50% of plans that do, if they're not working for you, something is failing on the expectation side of your time, money, and nervous system. Make sure you think about that when you're putting those plans together. And of course, if you need a coach, you need someone that understands all of this, you can reach out to me at any time. When I coach my clients, I have other coaches with me. And one of them, many of you know her, her name is Helen Henley. And she also works one-on-one with every single client that I take on, specifically around their nervous system, because I know how important that is. All right, hope you guys have a great day. Talk soon.

And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness harness your grit and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face.

I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.