Business Strategy 2024 || Efficient Year Planning || The Blueprint to Success

Foreign in last week's video, I shared how 2023 did not go as expected for me. And if you want to see something really funny, go back and watch my video at the end of 2022 to tell you what I was planning to do in 20. And then watch last week's video to see the drastic difference that happened in just one year. But I have learned quite a lot this year and I feel like that's because I finally hit a breaking point in 2023. And that breaking point was not only in my business, but also personally, like mental and physical health. If I really want to be honest, probably all eight years I've been going pedal to the metal in my business, checking off all the boxes, doing everything that I'm supposed to be doing, constantly launching. Which eventually got me to this summ in 2023 where I realize I kind of need to start taking better care of myself. And that whole self care thing that people talk about, I'm in desperate need of it. And when I did start doing that after this summer, I saw big changes in my business. Now during the summer this year, it was also the time we officially shut down our agency. So we were losing almost 50 to 60% of our reoccurring revenue. And now that we are finally on the other side of this massive PIV in the business, this massive realization, I want to share with you how you could design your 2024 to have the best business year yet. Based on all the things that I've learned in the last eight years and having this pretty much a pivoting moment this year. I know we all want to make money in our business. That's kind of important if we want to keep the lights on. We want to pay ourselves, pay our employees, our contractors. But you can't be constantly working with no boundaries. Now I do have pretty good daily boundaries. I work pretty much from 8:30 in the morning till 3:30 in the evening because that's when the school bus comes. And I don't typically pick up work after 3:30. But what I'm really terrible at is actually taking a day off in my business or taking a day every week just for my brain to breathe and for me as a CEO to have creative space to think about new ideas and new promotions and new ways to help my clients get better results. And that includes incorporating days where I have zero calls on my calendar. And I know when we hear the word self care we all think the same thing. And more self care. Taking care of myself more has probably been on My goals list for at least the last five years, if not more. But what can we, myself and you included, do in 2024 to actually make our self care a priority? Because this is going to be a major piece of designing your 2024 to have the best business year yet. Because your health, your mental health, taking care of yourself will affect your business results. The last three months I've made some really big changes in my daily routine and what I'm doing. And I've seen changes in my business. My business doesn't stress me out as well. We are almost at our January 2024 goal here at the middle of December 2023 and I just feel better. I'm more excited, I'm more motivated. I don't feel so overwhelmed about all of my tasks. So here's what I've been doing. I have automatically booked monthly sessions with my mindset coach. I always wanted to talk to my mindset coach, but I never put it on my calendar. Therefore it didn't happen for over two years. I've also booked out massages in advance. This is another thing that I wanted to do as a way to force myself to leave my house during a work day and take care of myself. So I already have massages booked in 2024 and I've incorporated slower morning. So once the kids get on the bus, I would typically come in here and start working. But now I'm actually with my mindset coach working through this app right here that is like a sound therapy type exercise that I do for anywhere between five to ten minutes every morning. And I'm really enjoying this because I just kind of had a hard time with meditation. But really enjoy this experience. So what I want you to do for your action step, your very first action step in designing your 2024 is get started something on your calendar for you. Like look at your calendar right now whether that is going to be slower morning. So you aren't going to be taking calls until later in the day. Maybe you're going to say this is the time I'm going to be reading a book. Maybe you are going to book that massage and I'm just booking monthly massages. These things aren't happening every week because I think I've been clear so far that if you aren't taking care of yourself, your business is going to suffer. And I'm, I've seen it firsthand not only in myself, but quite a few of my peers as well. When we tend to, I don't want to say, let ourselves go because it's not that we're letting ourselves go just when we don't make ourselves a priority. Kind of like when they tell you on an airplane, if you are a parent, put your oxygen mask on first. We need to think about that when it comes to our business too. Because yes, we have tasks, lists, yes, we have social, we need to post, yes, we have YouTube videos, we need to post clients, we need to serve all of that stuff. But if you aren't in the best health, physically and mentally, that stuff is going to drain you and you're not going to be able to give your best self to that to get the best results. What I experienced when I had this epiphany is like I said, for eight years I've been pedal to the metal and I never took time between launches, took time to just take a break. Yes, I have vacations in there and trips with my family, but that is still being a mom and not just having time during a day to be myself, let my brain breathe and not have kids, not have clients, not have employees, and just be alone with myself. I could feel the stress constantly weighing on my shoulders every day, every week, every month, every year. But I wasn't doing things consistently to take care of it. I even had gone to the doctors to talk about like, how can I get better sleep and how can I not feel so exhausted? And it really came down to the amount of cortisone level in my body. Body from putting so much stress on. It was ridiculous even when I went to massage. Finally, after years of putting it off, he asked me what I did for a living because he said my shoulders were pretty tight. And when I told him I ran my own business, he said, oh. And then he was done a little bit of work on the one shoulder and there was this giant like release or pop. The masseuse actually said, oh, wow. That's when I knew, yes, I've got a stress problem. But while that was all happening physically, mentally, my confidence was all over the place because my cortisone levels were just keeping me in this ping pong. Oh, I feel really good about what I'm doing. Oh, no, I'm second guessing what I'm doing. Oh, this is a really great idea. Oh, we need to do these five other ideas, otherwise I'm going to fail. Oh, I know what I'm doing here. Oh my gosh, why am I doing this? I need to quit my business because I have no idea what I'm doing. And I honestly contribute that to not giving my Mental health, the priority that it needed, not being able to sleep well, it has really affected kind of my consistency and my confidence. I also had a problem for a long time losing weight because of the cortisone levels and I would work out and I would eat right and I actually gained weight until I realized my body was in this so high strung state that I couldn't put more stress on my body with workouts. So I started walking thanks to my friend Tish who introduced this to me. Yes, walking, I get it Trina. But as an athlete I assume working out is getting sweaty like hardcore heart rate up. But when I started working every day I started to lose weight and I wasn't doing these hardcore workouts but my body just couldn't handle more stress in addition to what I was putting it through. So I think I've convinced you. Let me know in the comments if you're putting something self care related on your calendar right now and let me know potentially what it is. Is it just going to be time to read every single morning? Time to go for a walk, time to stretch, maybe book a massage once a month? Let me know once you've added self care to your calendar. I would recommend at least one of those self care pieces be something you do every day. For me it's the sound therapy and as I start January I want to start reading more because I've just not had time and so I want to kind of go into a cycle of get the kids on the bus, do my sound therapy, read a book for 20 minutes and have this buffer zone before I become CEO Trina. So I need this buffer zone. From mom Trina Trina to CEO Trina. That is the very first priority in designing a better 2024. All right, the second thing that I want you to do is you've got to reflect on how 2023 went. When you're reflecting on this past year, you've got to celebrate the wins. Look, it was a hard year for a lot of people here in 2023 and just getting to today is a win. But if we constantly think about all the negatives, we're not going to really have that hope going into the new year. And I know that sounds kind of woo woo, but trust me, you need to look at the wins that you had in 2023. That yes, you've got this. You can do this and get yourself excited for the new year. I'd love to hear any of your wins down in the comments. Some of you have been with me for a while and we've never really shared our wins so let me know down in the comments so I can celebrate with you. And then I want you to reflect after you've got your wins on things that you loved doing this year and things that you hated doing this year. This is again going to help us start to design having the best year in 2024. Because when we look at the things that we hate, do you really need to do those? As I was reflecting last year, one of the things I didn't hate it, it was just not my favorite thing to do was my agency. And then we finally got to the point where we decided we are not taking it into 2024 with us. I also don't love maintenancing my courses. I don't love it because I can't get the best results for my clients in a self paced course. So I probably won't be releasing any self paced courses in 2024 to add that stress and on me to think about, okay, how do I get people through the course? How do I make it better? I'm just going to work one on one with my coaching clients for 2024 to see how it feels at the end of next year. And I don't love being on calls every day. So as I'm planning out my Google Calendar for 2024, there are definitely going to be specific days that I do not take calls and the days that I will take calls. Now. Something unexpected that I have loved in the past couple of months is doing reels. You may hate doing creating content and you may want to leave that behind in 2024, but you've got to be creating content to grow your audience, get your audience to know, like and trust you. So you can't necessarily leave it behind. But you can pick and choose which content that you love to do and take that into 2024 with you. I also love spending time with my mastermind clients and my coaching clients inside a 10K replay in the YouTube coaching experience. So I am also formulating my calendar in 2024 to be able to take more hot seat calls with them and to be able to have more check in time with them more than I already have because they're so inspiring that that's where I want to be spending my time with those clients and so I'm going to make sure I adjust my calendar to put more time in that group. You also want to get down to the nitty gritty as well and think daily. What are the daily things you do every day that you hate and that you actually like to do. Then start making a plan. Just like overall, what you hate to do and what you like to do to see how you can pull out those things that you hate doing. Maybe you don't need to do them anymore. Just take a look. Think, how can I remove these things on my list that I hate doing? And if I have to move them into 2024, how can I formulate them or restructure them or look at them in a way that you don't hate them anymore? One of my friends, Lynette, at my Mastermind back in November, was talking about Instagram and a lot of people there just hate Instagram. And what she said was pretty amazing. She said, you can hate doing Instagram stories, but you can continue to stay broke. Now, that was a paraphrase. But she said you need to. And also my friend Erin Blackwell, she said you need to be thinking about how to make something positive. So I'm going to show up on Instagram reels because I'm going to make money today. That's how you need to be thinking about that kind of content that you maybe are hating. The next piece in designing your year is you've got to get really honest with yourself and think about what are you really struggling with and what have you struggled with this year. Since we're talking about business here and I love being transparent, one of my biggest struggles has been email marketing and understanding the best way to use my email list. Yes, I email you all every single week. But I want to create a deeper relationship and we've tried different things throughout 2023 to get it to that point, but I just haven't fallen in love yet with what we're doing. I also have to stop saying yes to so many things. I love to do guest expert sessions and summits and participate in everybody's things, but that then takes away from what my routine is and then I fall behind and then I get stressed out. So I just really got to evaluate every opportunity that I have better and think that through. Another thing that I do struggle with because again, we're being transparent is supporting my team. Now, they may say something different, they may say, no, you're great. But I personally feel I could be a better leader to my team and provide them better support. Quarterly performance appraisals, checking in with them, having one on ones more often. And so that's something I want to focus on. I also want to educate myself more as a leader so I can give my team that support. So they can be the best person possible in their role. And of course, I've always struggled with mental health and filling my mental health cup up. So that is something I need to lean into in 2024 as well. So once you've done these exercises, mental health scheduled in reflected thought about you know what you love, what you don't, and you really struggle with the next part in designing your 2024. Some people may say vision boarding, but here's the problem with vision boarding when it comes to your business. If you want to get better results in your business next year, you need actual data and numbers to plan for that success. Yes, it's great to search Pinterest and cut out magazine clippings to envision this great year, but that's going to do nothing for you to plan in your business for 2024. So you've got to take the time right now before we go into 2024 and dig into some very important numbers. Like how much did your email list grow this year? What about social media accounts that you are on? This is to see if you're actively growing your audience. Because if you aren't growing your audience, you're going to have a hard time getting more clients. Right? You also want to be looking at if you had a launch or you have a sales page for something, how much traffic did you actually get to that sales page this year? How many sales did you get from that sales page to see what the conversion rate of that sales page is? Now, when I work with my clients, usually their conversion rates are pretty good. Anywhere between 2 to 5% is great and that's generally where they fall. Sometimes they fall even higher than that. The problem comes in is traffic. Getting enough people to that page to get the sales that they want. This is what will make the biggest difference for you in your business. This is what I make all of my clients do inside my coaching program and as we look at 2024, are going to lean into this even more. We're going to have either weekly or monthly meetings about their numbers because when you make a decision in your business, it shouldn't just because how you're feeling or you think that's the good idea. You want to make a confident decision and what your next step is going to be in your business based on data and numbers. The bonus about doing this as well is it's actually going to limit the amount of things that you will be working on because you're going to see better results when you can focus on improving yourself. One thing first Getting more traffic to one thing means you're going to get more sales, or improving your sales page conversion rate means you're going to improve your sales. And we talked about needing that. Money is how we keep our lights on. And that way you can just really focus on one thing first to start getting consistent sales before you add all these other things onto your plate that you don't really need to do that aren't going to drive consistent money to your business. Right now. This is exactly why I've purposely purple labeled with Funnel Gorgeous. Basically meaning that any single client that I have, I can provide them a specific bundle from Funnel Gorgeous for free. And inside that bundle is very specifically a Funnel metrics tracker that I make my clients fill out and a marketer's KPI workbook which allows us to do backwards calculators and launch calculators to see if this is what you want to make in this launch and this is how many people you have on your list. This is realistically what you are going to make. Now we can move the numbers around and test different numbers to see how do we get to the number that they really want for those sales. And usually that means we're going to need to get more traffic to that page, which means you've got to spend a lot of time in your business growing your audience. Whether that's on social, whether that's Facebook ads, whether that's here on YouTube, you've got to be constantly focusing on growing your audience. Once you have your numbers and you have your self care scheduled into your calendar, you can start making goals for your business. And these don't have to be specific. I need to grow my email list 40%. I need to make 75 sales of this course. That is absolutely important. But I think first goals you should be setting before you move over to those metrics. Goals are things you're going to set a goal to do every day to help you feel better. So for me one of those goals is to get 11,000 steps in every single day to again just keep my activity level up, keep my mind clear. Slower mornings like I mentioned earlier in this video, massages every single month. And I also want to get to the point where I can block two days every single week where I have nothing on my calendar, just a totally blank calendar to give myself this space to be creative again. From there I'll dive into the nitty gritties because that self care piece is going to affect the numbers. Because if you aren't adding that self care goals, the numbers are going to suffer. Now there is a exercise that I go through to block time off in my Google Calendar to really ensure I have enough time every day to get done the things I need to get done. Let me know in the comments if you would like me to do a couple videos about how I set up my Google Calendar. Or would you be more interested in my time management and what I do to manage what I'm working on when I'm working on it? Or are there any other topics you would like to see from me here on my channel as I start to build out my content plan for 2024? Let me know your suggestions below.