MBA1831 How To Keep Your Product Fresh Every Year

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Foreign. Welcome to the $100 MBA show where your business is our business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014. And in today's episode you will learn how to keep your product fresh every year. One of the challenges of having a business, having a product, having a service, is keeping it fresh, keeping it new, keeping it relevant year after year. But how do you do that? How do you make sure that your business, your brand, is always innovating, is always coming out with something new and has something to talk about when you're marketing, this doesn't happen by accident. There's a system, there's a plan that I want to share with you. All the major companies out there do this. This is why you'll see them always giving keynotes, releasing new products, releasing new things, new features, always looking cool. Whether it's Apple or Tesla or Dollar Shave Club, they're always keeping it fresh. And I want to show you how you can do the same with your business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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The February 2025 Nielsen report. Here's the reality of the marketplace. You have to always be improving, you have to be innovating, you have to coming out with something to talk about. Sometimes it's going to be something big, sometimes it's going to be something small, sometimes it's going to be aesthetics. Maybe it's just a new refresh of branding, but it's got to be something. And you just can't wait until December and say, you know what, I got to think of something to launch with come 2022. That's how you fall behind. So today I want to give you a strategy that is going to allow you to stay ahead and always have something new to talk about. Whether your product is a physical product, whether you sell courses or training, you're a coach, whether you have a software business or you're an author, you can use this strategy. All right, let's jump into it. And it's very simple. You're going to create a Google Doc called your strategic plan. Every year will have a strategic plan. If you've never done this and you're going to start today, it's okay. You can do the rest of 2021. You still have about two quarters left, Q3 and Q4. Every strategic plan is split into four sections and that is, you guessed it, the four quarters of the year. You can literally just start with a blank piece of paper and divide it in half, vertically and horizontally. And that way you have four quadrants for four quarters. And basically you're going to write down in these four boxes what are all the things you wish your product, your service could do. Don't look at the competition. Just think about ways you can serve your customers better. This could be the product itself. This could be the way you serve your customers. Maybe you want to move from just email support to chat support. It could be a branding refresh where you change your logo or refresh it. It could be a new feature in your software. It could be a workbook that is a companion to the actual book you wrote as an author. The point here is you need to do some short and long term planning. Our minds are not really good at planning things for the long term. So it's important for us to break it up into four quadrants. We could see three months from now. Usually we plan a holiday or a vacation with three months notice at least. And it's kind of like we can plan it because we see it on the horizon. This is why the quarter system works really well. So you're going to look at quarter one, what do you want to put in there? Or if you're starting now, look at quarter three. What are some of the things you can get done by the end of the three months? I like to actually split things into two categories in each quarter. What are the two categories? Short term additions or improvements and long term additions. Long term additions may take more than one quarter, but in our team we've really tried to keep long term additions within the three month limit. Quarter limit. So for example, in Q3 we have three short term goals or three short term additions or improvements and one long term. Another way to look at long term is bigger projects. Short term means that I'm probably going to get that done within one month and long term means it's probably going to take the whole quarter for me to finish that big project. What's cool about this is that not every year, but every three months I have something to talk about. I have new features, I have new updates, I have new things to market. Once you have a plan for every quarter, three short term, one long term for each quarter, you're going to take this document, you're going to sit down with anybody who's a leader in your business management, somebody who is leading a team, and you're going to discuss, hey, here's our strategic plan for the next year. The reason why you want to sit with everybody on the team is because other people on your team will have insights on timeline. Maybe something's going to take longer than you think, or maybe it's going to take less time. 2. Resources. Maybe you require money or time or a hire to get this done. 3. Prioritization. Maybe you need certain things to go out before the other. Some improvements are urgent or will impact your business at a greater scale than others. So get those out sooner than later. And with the team you can help each other prioritize them. Because you can speak to the customer support team, you can talk to their product manager, you can talk to the person. The point here is that a good 90 minute session discussing your strategic plan with everybody who leads a team or is a leader or manager in your team is well worth it because you're going to get a wealth of knowledge to structure your plan properly. Once you have that all worked out, you're going to come up with a final copy of the strategic plan and you're going to share with everybody who leads a team in your organization. And what you're going to do is refer to your strategic plan at least once a week. So you're going to refer to it when you meet in your departments, in your teams and say, hey, this is what we're working on. Are we on track? You got to remind yourself and hold yourself accountable to making sure you're doing what you set out to do so you can have fresh new ideas, fresh new releases for your business. Now, if you have a small team, if it's just you, you're a solopreneur. This is obviously a lot easier to communicate because you're just communicating with yourself. But it's just important for you to review your strategic plan every week, even if you have no one to review with. Just yourself is fine. Every Monday morning, for example. And what this does is this allows you to create a roadmap. You can literally put in your Google Calendar all the things you're going to be releasing in the coming weeks. You can then schedule your marketing activities around that, whether you need marketing, copier images, or you want to do some social media marketing. The point here is that now you know what's coming down the line and how to prepare. This eliminates a whole lot of stress because you're not scrambling. You're not saying, oh, we got something new, we forgot to tell the world. You already have planned it out and you know exactly when it's coming out because you're following your strategic plan. Now, there might be some delays, there might be some hiccups or some changes along the way. I've experienced them myself. But it's better for you to have a plan and adjust than to have no plan at all.

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When you.

Implement your strategic plan and have new features and new updates, new services, new things being released to your customers, to your potential customers, to your marketplace, you just look like you are on top of things. You look like the leader in your marketplace. I know this firsthand because when we started doing this a couple years ago, all our customers would be like, man, this product is always improving. This product is always getting better. And what it does is it builds trust. Because when I meet with my customers, we have a members webinar every single month. We actually tell them, hey, this is what's coming out next month. And guess what? Next month it comes out. And what this does is that it builds trust with your customers. Your customers think, wow, this business is really credible. They actually have a plan. They have it together. I can trust them with my business and use them for the long term. So there's so many benefits to this on top of the fact it's allowing you to have something to talk about and to market on a regular basis. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe and leave us a rating and review. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes as creators, as business owners, as innovators, we don't like the planning part. We don't want to write documentation. We don't want to create a strategic plan because we just want to create. And I felt like that early on in my entrepreneurial career. But what I realized is when you do all that planning, all that documentation, it makes that creation process so much easier, so much fun, and allows you just to focus on making the best improvement possible without questioning if this is important or when I should do it or maybe I should do something else. Instead. You made those decisions already and now you can just focus on implementation. Love it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the courseroom to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.