Year End Planning: How to build your Plan To CRUSH it in the New Year For Digital Marketing Agencies

Hey guys, today I want to talk about year-end planning. This year's kind of zoomed by, it's, it's gone super quick. Hopefully it's been a great year, but it's really important that if you're going to want a world-class digital marketing agency that grows and scales, that you've got some great initiatives in place to really end the year strong and to plan to crush it in the new year. So if you're excited about crushing it in the year ahead, you're going to want to watch this video. All right guys, I hope it's been an amazing year. I really want to encourage you kind of as the year comes to a close, there's 4 things you want to do consciously and proactively as an organization, as an individual. Number 1 is you've got to review, right? This time of year, it's super important that you look back on the year that has just come to a close. I want you to look back and look at what goals and targets you set for yourself and really consciously recognize, did you hit those goals or not? It is super important that you've got personal accountability to say, hey, look, my goal was to grow to, you know, $93,000 in monthly recurring, but we only made it to $62,000, right? Or if you exceeded that, that you recognize that. Super important to Because if you start to set goals and you kind of like, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna like set this big goal," and you build a plan at the beginning of the year and you tail off and you never check in to see like, did we accomplish that or not? You start to lose confidence. You start, your own subconscious mind stops taking the necessary action. So failing to hit a goal, totally fine, but you have to hold yourself accountable. You have to recognize it. So this review process is really important. And I think as part of that review process, you wanna mentally check in and say, you know, if I did hit the goal, what was the plan? What were the activities? What did I learn? Right, there's always lessons that we can take forward into the next year. One of the worst things you can do is keep making the same mistakes, keep doing the same actions, and not recognizing them and not making the necessary course corrections. Now, if you exceed the goal, there's also positive lessons that have happened, right? There was things maybe that you did that worked really well, and you wanna make sure that you anchor in that learning and that you repeat that so that you can double down and get even better results into the next year. So super important that you review, and if you've got a team, whether that's a sales team, appointment setters, operations, account management, bring that team along. Let them know, hey, this was the goal for the year, this is what we accomplished, this was what we learned, these were some of the positives, And these were the places where, like, we learned lessons that we want to make sure we don't repeat. Super important that you review and that you celebrate regardless of how good or bad the year was, regardless of how much you crushed or maybe didn't crush it. There's always things to celebrate. There's accomplishments, there's things you implemented, there's results you got for clients. You're going to get more of what you celebrate. So take time during the end of this year and kind of going into the new year to celebrate. Celebrate your own accomplishments. Make sure the team knows. Throw some golden bricks. Send those Slack messages. Send those personal Loom videos letting the team know that you appreciate them and that they had an impact on whatever it is you accomplished throughout the course of this year. So we want to review. We want to celebrate. And then from there, we need to reset. It's really important going into the new year, you consciously reset your mind. You reset your thinking, you reset your goals, you reset your targets, and you rebuild your plan so that you can go into the new year hyper-focused. Really clear on, okay, this is where we're at, at the end of the year. Where do we want to be by the end of the next 12 months? And get super clear and super focused on that outcome. How many clients? How much recurring revenue? How much profitability? And then chunk that down. Break it down by quarter, break it down by month, and build a really cool action plan around it. I'll share some of those strategies and initiatives and some resources you can tap in on this video. But most importantly, right, you have to make sure that you're clear on what you're going to accomplish and that you've got it present. Like, one mistake I see a lot of agencies make is they will set goals for the year and they'll put them on a spreadsheet or they'll put them on a Google Doc somewhere. And that's good, but there's something powerful about having it present. Put it up, like write down what the goal is and put it on a whiteboard that way you have to see it every day. Put it on a printout that either is in your bathroom mirror or is in your closet so you're seeing it again and again and again. Make sure that you're completely focused on what you plan to accomplish going into the new year. So a couple of must-dos. Must-dos at the beginning of the year is you've gotta set new goals and targets, right? You absolutely need to say, "Here's where I'm gonna be by the end of the year." Call your shot and then break it down. Don't go into the new year without having laser-focused clarity on what you're gonna accomplish. Because if you don't, anywhere you go is gonna be okay, right? If you're at $70,000 a month right now in your business and you don't set a goal or target, maybe you wind up at 80, maybe you wind up at 90, and it is what it is because you never took conscious control and set a target or an outcome. If you had, who knows, maybe you could have grown to $150,000 or $160,000 in monthly recurring revenue. So set your goals and targets, be specific, right? Whatever that annual goal is for the next year, you've got to break that down. Break it down by quarter. There's 4 quarters in a year, right? So gives you something to sprint towards. Your mind can't really orient around an annual target. Yeah, that's where I wanna be by the end of the year, but it can around 90 days, and it can around the month. So make sure you chunk it down. That way you've got a great goal and a great trajectory that you're shooting for. Then you wanna reverse-engineer key performance indicators. So whatever the goal is, let's say you're at a million, the goal is to go to $5 million over the next year. That's great. Break that down by month, break that down by quarter. What would it take to make that happen? How many clients would you have to land? What would the average client have to be worth? How many appointments would you have to actually conduct, assuming a certain close ratio? You need to know what those key performance indicators are, because a goal without clear targets that you're shooting for, the actual activities is much harder to accomplish. So figure out what your key performance indicators are. Make sure you've got the right business model. And, um, and I really encourage you kind of reassess. Are you in a very specific niche? Do you have a program that you put in place? Are you charging at least $1,000 per month? Make sure that you don't have gaps in your business model. If you don't have the right model, you could do tons of activity throughout the course of here and wind up super frustrated. So make sure you kind of audit any gaps in your business model, and then plan out and calendarize your approach, right? A goal without a plan is just a dream, right? So you want to roll up your sleeves this time of year and build out that action plan. What are you going to do from a client acquisition perspective? What are you going to do from a client delivery perspective? What are you going to do from an account management and retention perspective? And then make sure you calendarize it, right? If it's not on your calendar with block time to do that activity or to get those things done, it's not going to happen. So these are the key things I really want to make sure you do going into the new year, closing out the previous year. Goals and targets. Again, great book by Brian Tracy, um, The Ultimate, uh, Goal Setting Program. Says success is goals, all else is commentary. So if you don't have goals, you're just going to wind up busy, right? You're going to get busy doing something, but it's going to be commentary. You know, it's like the latest thing happening in internet marketing, what's going on with AI, some new cold outreach system that you read about, some new fancy strategy. That's all commentary. What, what you want to be focused on is your goal. How many clients are you going to have? How much recurring revenue? Without that goal, you're just chasing your tail. And for me, I really believe that having clear goals creates the win within your within your sail. So you think about a boat that's kind of docked out at the ocean. If it doesn't have any wind, it's just kind of going with the— it's going with the current. And anytime I deal with an agency that's been stuck for some period of time, whether it's, you know, a year, 2 years, 5 years, whether they're at $10,000 a month or even $250,000 per month, when they're stuck, it's because they've stopped future casting their goals and they've just stopped creating their own wind and their own momentum. So don't understate the importance of investing the time and the energy to get super clear on your goals. And so they should be written down, and you have to have a plan associated with them. You need to set a minimum of an annual goal. What's the goal for the year? How much recurring revenue? How many clients? What's the quarterly goal, right, over the 3 months? There's 4 quarters in a year. And then you want to break that down by monthly. And you need to have some type of tracking mechanism so you're not guessing, but you've got— here's the goals, and you've got a mechanism where you're tracking against that. So at the end of each month, at the end of each quarter, and of course at the end of the year, you can clearly see either you hit the goal or you didn't, right? And you're going to take massive action to bring it into reality. And you need to make sure you have a stopping point. Right? If you set goals and you don't stop and say, okay, the end of this month, if you don't physically stop to check yourself, then you're setting goals and there's some action behind it and there's some power to it, but the real power happens when you set a goal, you take massive action, and then you stop to see if you accomplished or you didn't, and then you course correct, right? You look at that feedback and say, okay, now here's the new goal. And you're gonna take all of the learning that you had and you apply it towards that. Winners, people that build 7-figure, multiple 7-figure, 8-figure agencies do this. They do it well. They set goals, they take action, and they pause and they reflect and they hold themselves accountable and they make adjustments as they go. So I've got a great resource that I've used in my agency over the past decade, and now we've rolled out to our 7-Figure Agency members. I wanna offer it to you. It's what I call a sales retention tracking sheet that gives you the ability to cast your year and set goals and targets. How many clients per month? How many clients do we anticipate churning per month? What's our average churn rate? And you can easily plot and track this information and see at the end of every month, at the end of every quarter, if you're on track or off track. So if you want that, you can just type in the comments here, sales and retention tracking, or just type in tracking in the comments, and I'll get you a tracking sheet that you can use. A great example of this tracking mechanism and the power of goal setting within an agency is Brian Kaskavalsian. Brian runs G4 Marketing Group. It's a digital marketing agency serving the, the roofing and remodeling industry. And over the years, he'd grown to about $60,000 in monthly recurring revenue. So solid business, just shy of 7 figures. And it was probably 6, 7 years ago now And he had just been stuck at that level for quite some time. And he was like, hey, let's get together. Let's build some goals. Let's build out an action plan to make this year different. And so we sat down and we filled out the sales retention tracking sheet. And that helped to orient his activity through the year. It helped to kind of organize his entire team where they knew, like, here's where we want to be. And here's what we're striving for in terms of growth. And over the years, Brian grew that business. Last year he did over $5 million in revenue. He's actually recently sold G4 Marketing Group and has gone on to exit that business with a great, great exit. But he'll say, if you ask him, that was a change point in his business where he decided to make the right decisions in terms of how he was gonna set his goals, how he was gonna track his outcomes, and it just shot his business into the stratosphere. So I want you to fill out that sales retention tracking sheet, or at a minimum, just get really clear on where you are at the start of the year— how many clients, how much recurring revenue— and where you'll be at the end of the year— how many clients, how much recurring revenue. If you do that and you put it front and center, you're going to create energy that's going to propel you to the accomplishment of that goal going into the new year. Now, also super important is that you connect to why, right? Sometimes we set a goal like this and there's no passion behind it. Because it's like, oh, it's just a number, right? I'm at, I'm at $1 million and I want to go to $2 million. I want to go to $166,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And just that number might excite you at some level, but to accomplish a big goal, it takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of passion. And so you want to spend some time connecting back to why. Why is it important that you accomplish them? How will your life be different or better? And so I really want you to consciously spend some time working on this, thinking about it, and get clear. How will your life be better once this is achieved, right? Will you be able to buy something that you really want? Will you be able to do something for your family that you haven't been able to? Will you maybe be able to give more to a cause that's important to you, whether that's spiritual, whether that's charity. How will your life be better? And then what will you be able to do, have, or experience as a result, right? If you don't take the time to get clear and connect your why to your goal, chances are you're not going to take the necessary actions to accomplish it. Now, bonus points, I would really encourage you to do a little exercise that will help anchor this for you. So I'm gonna be doing a workshop for you guys on this topic, but if you come to the workshop, you can experience it live. But if you don't, well, really all I want you to do is take out your phone or use your screen recorder, whatever it is, and record a video for yourself to be played at the end of the year. And I want you to say, hey, hey future me, it's the end of the year. I'm at XYZ in monthly recurring revenue. We have this much profitability in the business. I'm so excited because now I'm able to do this, I'm able to do that. This is how my life is different. Record that video for yourself. And first of all, you'll be calling it out. You'll be subconsciously attracting the outcome that you're after, but you'll also have something that you can use as a reference point in the future. One of my favorite exercises to do. I really encourage you to do it. And the why is different for everybody. For some of us, it's to have a fancy car, to to live in the nice house, to take cool vacations. For me, it's all of that stuff, but also, most importantly, it's for my family, right? I've got 3 young boys and a beautiful wife that I love. And the reason I wanna grow my business, the reason I wanna be more successful is so that I can take care of them and we can take the travels and we can do the fun things and we can take trips and really enjoy an abundant life. And so I want you to be clear on why it's important for you and connect to that why for yourself. And do this vision exercise. Pause this video right now, spend 5 minutes and create that video for yourself, kinda telling yourself what the outcome is and kind of experience having accomplished it. And talk through why it's important and why life is different and better as a function of that. Again, I've got a great workbook that you can reference if you'd like to check out. The planning workbook, just type planning workbook into the comments. I'll get that for you. I do plan to do a couple of planning workshops that are going to be live on this. So if you're interested in doing this with me live, you come join one of these live workshops. So from there, we've got our goal. We've connected to a tracking mechanism where we're tracking the process. And we've really thought about why, why it's important. We've connected to that why. The next thing we want to do is start to figure out what the KPIs are. So again, using the example, if we want to go from $1 million to $2 million, well, what is that going to require? How many clients will we have to land? How many strategy sessions would we need? And you want to reverse engineer that. Don't just say, I'm going to land 6 clients per month and leave it at that, right? You need to know what the predecessor activity is that drives that outcome. And I've got a great tracking sheet. Again, if you just type tracking, I'll send you the link. That just helps you figure out whatever the number is. If you want to sell 5 new clients per month and you know what your average close ratio is from a sales appointment to a strategy, to a, to a sale, to a retainer-based client, how many strategy sessions will you need? Really important that you know that going into the new year. So if the goal is to sell 5 clients per month so we can wind up with 60 new clients by the end of the year, We need to have 20 strategy sessions per month. And that's potentially the KPI that we're driving for with our cold outreach, with our Facebook ads, with the promotion we do for our own agency. We know if we're not getting 20, then we're probably not gonna get our 5 clients, and we're probably not gonna get the, the goal that we're after. So really figure this out because you don't want to just set a goal and a target. You want to set a goal and a target with KPIs that you're actually going to do the work around to get the outcomes that you're after. I think as you're growing and scaling your agency, as you start to think about this new year, the minimum benchmark needs to be 15 strategy sessions per month. 15 strategy sessions per month is something like a, a great minimum benchmark. Whenever I deal with an agency that just isn't growing, they're not hitting their growth targets, Oftentimes, you know, they're getting like 5 or 6 appointments, if any, per month. And so they don't have a proactive client acquisition engine that's running. And when you get to 15, even if you don't have a tight sales process, even if you're not good at closing, you're going to be getting new clients every month. And that new client growth is going to help drive you to the accomplishment of your goals. Um, and then track, right? Make sure you track those KPIs. Make sure that you get something, whether it's digital or physical. And I really believe something powerful about a physical board that you look at and/or your sales team looks at, where you're talking— you're looking at how many strategy sessions did we have, how many clients did we ask for the business for, how many proposals, how many clients did we sell, and how much recurring revenue was created. And at the beginning of each month, I would really encourage you to write this down. All right, I wanna sell 5 new clients. I wanna generate $10,000 in new monthly recurring revenue. I'm gonna need to get at least 15 strategy sessions, right? And then track against that throughout the course of the month. What you focus on expands. What you track always improves. And so having your goal front and center and having a tracking mechanism where you're tracking that activity massively improves the outcome the probability of you getting the outcome that you're after. And then from there, I really want to encourage you to build an action plan. Again, a goal without a plan is, is just a dream, right? And it's better than nothing, right? At least if you're setting a goal, you're writing it down, and you're calling it out to the universe, you're doing something. But when you build an action plan backed up by KPIs, that's really how you can manifest the outcomes. You can create the outcomes that you, you want. And I'm going to encourage you as you build the plan that you work the growth system. I've got a number of different videos where I outline this growth system, but it just kind of talks about the things you want to be doing daily, the things you want to be doing monthly, the things you want to be doing quarterly to fill your strategy session calendar, right? We're looking for 15 strategy sessions per month. If you're doing this activity consistently and well, you'll have no issue getting 15 strategy sessions. And then you wanna make sure that you've got your client conversion mechanism dialed in. You've got an appointment funnel that warms prospects up. You've got a nice tight sales process shooting for a 30% close ratio. And then you've got a great strategy to retain those clients, to deliver great world-class results. So we want world-class onboarding. We wanna dial in that monthly communication rhythm. We wanna make sure we've got a strategy to grow our account management team so we can retain at 97% or churn no more than 3%. This growth system in and of itself can be your action plan. And so you just need to kind of go deep into what you're going to do with the cold outreach, how many you're going to send, what you're going to do with your monthly webinars and your podcasts, and what events and industry associations you're going to plug into. Um, I really want to encourage you, your cash flow is going to follow your calendar. So you think about when that cold outreach is going to happen, when those webinars are going to happen, if you don't have it blocked and time blocked onto your calendar, it's not gonna happen. So take out Google Calendar right now. Figure out when you're gonna do that monthly webinar, what that monthly webinar topic's gonna be on, who you're gonna interview for the podcast, what events you're gonna be at live and in person within your industry to fill the calendar and get the outcomes that you're after. And again, if you type in planning workbook here in the comments, I'll send you a workbook that can help you think this stuff through, help you get it onto the calendar. But it's really important that you do this work. I promise you, if you just do what we've talked about on this video, you spend some time thinking about last year, taking the lessons and bringing them forward, and then you get super clear on your goals, your targets, and you build an action plan, you can crush it in this new year. So be sure that you're clear on the goals and the targets for the year, you've broken them down by quarter, by month, you've got KPIs that you're shooting for, the key performance activities, you've got the right business model, and that you plan out and calendarize your approach. Can't wait to hear how you implement, how you crush it in the new year. If you've got follow-up questions, post them in the comments. If you'd like to participate in a workshop where we can roll up our sleeves and work on this together, type "live" in the comments. That'll trigger me to send you the invite to join me for one of the live planning workshops. And if you got value from this video, please press the like button and subscribe, because throughout the course of the next year, I'm gonna be posting every Monday at 10:30. So if you subscribe and hit the notifications bell, you'll be alerted as new videos are posted. That's it for now. Happy New Year! Hopefully it was an amazing year. Cannot wait to see what you accomplish in the year ahead. I'll talk to you soon.