3 Must-Do Plans Every Subscription Box Owner Should Make Before the New Year

Good morning, good morning! Happy Monday! Glad to be back for Monday Momentum. You know, I've been battling this cold a little bit and I missed last week, um, but I've got something I want to talk to you about today. Um, we're in mid-December, like it's, it's a little early, but it's December 8th. I call that mid-December because December really ends early for us because shipping deadlines, Christmas holidays. So we really end the month before we end the month. So I'm going to call this mid-December this morning. Um, if you're joining me, I would love for you to say hi, let me know that you're here. Now we're going to talk about 3 things that you must be thinking about for the new year today. And I don't want to stress you out in any way because I was thinking about this Monday Momentum this morning and I thought, they're in the— they're in the thick of it. Like, we're in the thick of it. You should see the stack of orders we have from the weekend. Um, and they in the thick of fulfilling orders this morning, but we can't wait until this time is over before we work on what's happening when the calendar year rolls around. So I want you to think about that. And there's 3 things that I want to put on your mind today as you're fulfilling orders, as you're selling your face off, whatever it is you're doing this week. There's 3 things that I want us to think about before it gets too late in the month. All right. Are you with me? Now, before I jump into that, let me just come over here. I've got my YouTubers with me this morning. I've got Tina here. Good morning, Tina. I've got Sierra here. Good morning. I've got Christina here. Good morning, everybody. Carrie's in the chat with us today. Let's— I want to share a couple wins with you this morning because there is just a lot going on over in our private community inside Launch Your Box, and there's wins big and small. And I feel like We need to hear that before, you know, we're in the rat race right now. We're in the rat race. We're tired. We're exhausted. I've been sick for 2 weeks. And so it's like we need to hear some wins. So I want to give some shoutouts to some of our members. So I want to shout out to Christina, Christina H. Inside LauncherBox. She is gaining momentum on her YouTube audience growth organically and she is getting 1,000 views a day on a new video. Christina, this is amazing. I don't get 1,000 views a day on my videos, so I'm pumped for you. I'm excited for you. I also want to give a shout out to Lori F., who launched her very first holiday box and she sold 27 boxes. If that's not momentum, I don't know what is. Also, I was talking to Julie H. over in Scale Your Box last week, and I have to give her a huge shout out. Excuse me, she's very quietly taken her subscription from 600 subscribers to 1,750 subscribers. And I've got to get her on the podcast because you're not going to believe the way that she's done it. We talked a little bit on Thursday. It's so light, it feels so easy, and she's just growing by 100 new subscribers every single month. And so gotta give Julie with the Pilot Wives Club a shout out. And then Edie— Edie sold 18 holiday boxes. And one more shout out to Jay. Jay launched and launched with 11 subscribers. So let's give a shout out today to Christina, Lori, Edie, Julie, and Jay for making progress. Um, I love sharing the wins, and making progress is a win. And so let's just start our Monday with a few wins. All right, all right, I can see people are joining us this morning. Rebecca's here. You know, I've got some 2026 encouragement for you, Rebecca. I'm excited. I just recorded a presentation for a summit that I'm doing, Rebecca, and I featured you in that presentation. And I'm just, I'm just so proud of you. Just keep going. Keep being consistent. Hi, Myra. Good to see you. Good morning, everybody. Hey, Brandy from Kentucky. Amanda, I just saw your day 8 deal drop on my Instagram notification, so keep going. Good morning, Jay. Good morning, Katie. Hey, Carolyn. Um, yeah, you need to go, uh, Lexi, go watch Skill Your Box call from last week, um, because we— I talked to her on there. So go check that out from Thursday. Um, yeah, let's— thank you for celebrating, everybody in the chat. Okay, now let's get into 3 things today, and I want you to just listen to me. I know you've got all the things going on But today we're going to talk about 3 things that, um, I want you to be thinking about before the new year comes. Okay, so I use my calendars to really plan out things. That's another thing, um, that I really wanted to share with you today. Over on Framed, on my retail business, we're doing our 12 Days of Deals right now, something we did training on inside Launch Your Box. But today's deal is half off my wall calendar set. And so they're $19 today. Just go ahead and snag one or two while you're at it. And they're $19 for my wall calendars. You can display them for 3 months at a time, 4 months, 6 months, or all 12, whatever, whatever you want. But you can grab those today. And here's the first thing I want you to be thinking about when we start looking at 2026, and your brain should be shifting. We should always be ahead. Yes, we're in the weeds right now, and that's okay. But before you do anything for 2026, I want you to block off some time for Q— in Q1. Okay, so block off some time in Q1. This is essential to your mental health, and it is essential to the burnout stage. And so what I want for you is to take a look. Is that January? Is that February? Is that March? Um, is it January and March? Like, what does this look like for you? This could be a long weekend. This could be spring break with the kids. This could be a staycation so you can stay home and reset your life. I want you to get that on the calendar right now because it's going to be so good for your mental health to be looking forward to that time off. We've been so in the weeds for the last month, we can't think about anything else but work. But I want you to block off something in Q1 because your energy is your biggest business asset and we have to protect it. So the first thing that I want you to do, I want you to think about this today because here's what happens. The calendar year rolls around and we keep going and there's more orders and there's more promotions and there's more things going on. And if we don't put it on the calendar now, it likely doesn't happen. And so what I want for you is to go ahead and block off time for Q1. Time off comes first. It comes first in this conversation because we've been working our faces off and we deserve some time off. And I need you to take some time off. Okay. Now, number 2, I'm just going to give you 3 things to plan. Okay. One is your time off. Number 2, I need you to have your first 3 to 4 months of the new year of your subscription boxes planned out. Like, if we're behind— let me just tell you, Sarah, 2017-18 Sarah, Sarah was so behind. It was like I was just getting through the holiday season and I couldn't even think about the next month. I couldn't even think about the next year because I was so in the weeds. And here, once the count— once I get the December boxes out, I don't have enough time. To plan January, February, March, April. And I need you to stop and I need you to plan those now because you're going to get yourself so far behind. Your costs are going to go up like crazy because you're going to be scrambling and it's not worth it. It's not worth waiting another week until you're caught up. You're not going to be caught up and you're going to be weary and you're going to make bad decisions for your business. And so I want you to think about what you need for the next 90 days for your subscription business. Go check on your packaging. Go check your packaging. Make sure you're set. Do you have your products curated for the first 3 months of the year? And here's a clue, like, a lot of our vendors are liquidating year-end stuff. So this is the perfect time to get on the phone or send some emails and say, I'm, I'm curating boxes for the first 4 months of next year. What can I take off. Um, like, what, what can you clear out? What do you need cleared out of your warehouse by year-end? This is the perfect time to grab some great discounts, um, pad your profit margins a little bit and get planned out. You don't have time to wait until December 26th to plan out your first quarter if you've not ready— if you've not done it. If you need supplies, if you need packaging, if you need products, now's the time to grab some year-end deals from those vendors before they go up on January 1st. Okay, let's, let's take some time today, tomorrow, map it out. If you've got a rough sketch of what this looks like, but you haven't really put your plans to the, you know, pen and paper to your plans, let's get it done so that you don't carry this stress into the next month. Okay, I did it for so long and it was so stressful. I'm surprised I have hair left, but I don't want you to do that. Okay, so Let's get out and make sure we've mapped out our first 90 days of the new year and that we have product and packaging on its way to us. The number 3, what I want you to be thinking about— hold, please. I'm going to get a drink of coffee. Okay. I want you to think about when is your first big promotion in the new year? This is something we talked about last week with my team. We can't wait to determine this in January because we're going to have to start working on those assets by January. So if we don't know what we're doing in the first quarter of next year, we're going to be behind on all the content and the assets that we need for a launch. So I don't want you to sneak— I don't want it to sneak up on you because that's where stress kicks into us. I want you, number one, to take some downtime. In January. So we have to have this planned out right now. Okay. So do you have a big Valentine's Day promotion going on? Valentine's is one of the biggest sales months for me. And it's not just gifts because I have women that buy— I don't have a lot of men that buy from me. It is seasonal items. It is Valentine's tees, Valentine's sweatshirts, Valentine's things. So do you have a Valentine's promo ready to rock and roll in the new year? Do you have a spring collection set up? Are you launching January, February, or March, let's get it on the calendar today. So if I'm sitting here and I'm listening right now and I'm looking at January, February, March, I would even put April there because, you know, April, April's going to come quickly after the new year. And for me, everything has to be manufactured overseas. And so there's Chinese New Year that I'm going to lose a whole month between mid-January and mid-February. So I got to be planned out pretty far ahead. But when I look at January, February, March, and April, the first thing I need to do is put some time on the calendar for me. When is that? I'm going to go to Jamaica for spring break and I'm going to take my kids. And so that is the first thing that I have on the calendar. I've had it on the calendar for months now, and I'm looking forward to that. And so that's on the calendar for March. That is my vacation time. I also have a mastermind that I'm attending. and I'm gonna stay 2 extra days at that mastermind. It's in a beautiful location. And so that's at the end of January. And so I've got those things mapped out on my calendar. So I have that January, February, March time off. I already have it written on my calendar on the wall. And so then when I look at, okay, when am I going to launch in the new year? If I've got it— my— I got a busy calendar in January. I'm going to take my kids on vacation in March, let's just launch at the end of February. Looking at where my time off is and what I need to build assets, I need to do a box launch in February. And so that's what I'm looking at on my calendar and that's where it fits in. If I wait till the new year, I am not thinking, you know, I don't have the stuff planned out. Now, if I'm planning a launch in February, What does that mean for my product quantities? Do I have enough quantity to launch in February? Do I need to stretch it to April because I don't have that product in yet? I have February here. So this is where I want you to line up what you need for the first quarter. And I need you to think about it now. I don't want you to wait until December 26th to start thinking about it. We have to be proactive. We make better business decisions when we are proactive versus reactive. I did many, many years being reactive to everything, and it cost me a lot. It cost me a lot of money because I paid quick shipping. I paid higher prices than I wanted to. It cost me a lot of stress. I wasn't prepared early on, and it cost me to burn out and not take vacations. There were years and years of me building my business that I never even took a weekend off. I never had 2 days off together. And that is such a burnout tactic for us. And it's something that I had to learn over and over throughout the years. So here's today's advice. Keep selling your face off this week. We have a small window. My shipping deadline is Monday, so I'm gonna kind of go dark after Monday because I won't have as many orders, because that's my cutoff for Christmas— guaranteed Christmas shipping, which nothing is really guaranteed in the real world. But that's what we're saying. We're going to continue to ship. I'm going to shift my focus to mystery boxes and clearing out whatever I want to clear out for the rest of the year. And I'm gonna be looking forward to January. So next week I'm going to start mapping out like all of our content for January because I have it on the calendar. I know what's happening January, February, March, and April. And so I know what I need to be doing and I'm not going to skip a beat on it. And I need you guys to be thinking ahead. I want you to think ahead and not react to the daily fires that you're putting out right now. And it feels hard. Because you're in the weeds. I'm in the weeds too. I worked all weekend trying to catch up because it was so far behind from last week. But it's okay because I'm here, I'm present. I'm going to continue to sell for the next 7 days and then I'm shifting over into my New Year's goals. We need to take this momentum that we're gaining through December and we need to roll it right into January. It's when we stop completely and completely reset ourselves that we lose the momentum. I want you to have the new year planned out so you don't lose the momentum. Okay. Questions? And Katie, if you've got your themes figured out, it's just sitting down and getting your content. Start with, start with January, get, get February, and then you're going to be rocking and rolling. Okay. And go grab my calendars today because I can see they're packing and shipping a ton of them right now. So if you need a calendar, these are 18 by 24. Let me shift my, let me shift my, my screen up a little bit so you can see my calendars if you haven't, if you haven't had a good look at them. But this is how we map out our year. We plan it, we get our days off on there and start with a quarter. You don't have to think about the whole year at once. Start with Q1, get your time off, get your promotions on there, and then let's get some stuff ready so that we're rolling into the new year with a great plan. All right. All right. This is your Monday Momentum. Also, go sell your face off. We got one more week to make it count. So I will talk to you very, very soon. I got to go over to my retail page and do my day 8 of deals just like Amanda did this morning on Instagram. So I'm gonna go do that. Jamie, the link is in right here. It's a very long link. It's not that long, honestly. Grab the link right here in the chat. I think we've got it over on YouTube. I've got— I think we've got a YouTube link. Carrie, go ahead and put a link over on YouTube as well because we have lots of viewers on YouTube. Go grab the link. They're shipping out now. You can have it on your wall by the end of the week. All right, let's go sell our face off. Let's wrap up 2025 solid and let's roll into 2026 like we didn't even skip a beat. All right, y'all have a great day.