Plan Your MONTH with ME! Business planning for solopreneurs

As you're getting ready to plan your month, you're probably looking at last month and how much that is still on your to do list. Am I right? Listen, I totally understand where you are right now. When I was trying to build my business to six figures, it felt like the list of things I needed to do in my business and then in my life would be never ending. But going through that a few years ago and finally getting into this planning process, this monthly planning process, is what allowed me to really free up some time to look at my business and figure out what are the pieces I needed to actually be doing every single month to get me to 10k months and ultimately to a 6 figure year. I'm going to share with you that process in this video, so hopefully you can see how you can take some of those things off your to do list and not carry them into the next month and give you more time to focus on the things that are going to drive more money into your business. Go ahead and hit that like button or that thumbs up button, whatever they're calling it, if you want to start eliminating things on your to do list and start making more money in your business. Hey there, I'm Trina. If you're brand new to my channel and I dedicated to helping solo entrepreneurs like yourself get to consistent 10k months in your business without falling victim to the hustle culture. As I walk through this planning process with you, literally get out the stuff you need to start planning your month with me and you can actually come back to this video every single month to do this process. So here's exactly what you're going to need to plan your month. Paper and pen. What I like to call a scratch calendar. Seriously, I use this as a way to just look at my month so I'm not over loading myself with tasks and I've created an entire year of these that you can grab. There's a link down below for you to get this calendar from me. It's super simple. I usually just make it myself, but I went into Canva, made this nice template for you and you can grab it in the link below this video. You also need a digital calendar, whether that is your I calendar, your Google Calendar, maybe it's your whiteboard, but however you're keeping all your appointments saved, I like to use Google Calendar. In fact, a few weeks ago I did an entire breakdown of how I use Google Calendar. If you want to check that video out next, I will link it up here for you to watch. I literally can't live without my Google Calendar. Now, if you do have a paper planner as well, go ahead and grab that. And if you have a project management tool, something like Monday.com, asana Trello, whatever it is, for you to really break down projects into smaller tasks, that's what we're going to be working with here today. All, all of these things. Now, if you're anything like me, you're always super excited to just get in and start planning. But what I learned back when I was trying to get my business to consistent six figures every single year is I ended up doing the same thing every single month because I wasn't reflecting on the previous month to figure out what was working, what wasn't working, what was I hating so that I could make a change. I went too many months, probably years, ultimately doing things I hated because I didn't take time during this monthly planning process to reflect on the previous this month. So, paper and pen in hand and you can pause this video once I share with you these prompts so that you can write these down. But here are three questions I want you to ask yourself. And write it out. Yes, I suggest writing it out. I understand journaling all of that. You love it, you hate it. But trust me on this process. This is what allowed me to get me to where I'm at in my business. What are three wins that you're celebrating from this past month? Yes, you need to celebrate a win. If it was showing up every single day in your job, that is a win. If it was getting up and brushing your teeth every day, that is a win. I don't want you to think like you literally had no wins if your month didn't go as expected. We need to make sure we're looking at the positive in our business, in our life. Otherwise it's just a downhill trajectory. If we constantly thinking about the things we didn't get done. Like I said, even if it was you showing up on Instagram stories once this month, that is a win. So I really, really want you to sit down and celebrate at least three wins from month next. I want you to reflect on things that went really well. Odds are there's something that's working well in your business, even if it's your morning routine or your social media schedule. I don't know. But pick something that's working really well in your business right now. Go ahead and write that out. You could also reflect on this as what is something that you really love in your business right now? This is something that I realized in this process that I really love, coaching and teaching people, which ultimately led to me creating a program, 10K on replay, where I can help more of my clients build that six figure business that they've been dreaming of by having my assistance and my feedback and my guidance to do that. I wouldn't have really figured that I loved that process until going through this monthly process and reflecting on the things I was doing in my business that I was loving then. The last thing I want you to reflect on is what are the things that didn't go so well in your business? Maybe you had a great social media plan and then by week two you were overwhelmed and exhausted. That's something we're going to need to look at because if you are overwhelming yourself with social media, we need to figure out how to resolve that problem. Maybe it's posting less, maybe it's eliminating a platform, but we don't know what we can adjust or what we can shift or change if we don't know what's working in your business. For me, one of the big things that I came to a realization was my agency process. So I have it done for you. YouTube production agency. And what wasn't working in that part of my business was a flow to onboard new leads. So I would have leads literally sitting in my inbox for weeks before I got back to them because I was just so busy with other things. So by going through this process, I was really able to identify this and make a game plan to fix it moving forward. Now I know going through these steps seems like something extra. It's going to take more of your time, which is going to pile up more of your to do list while you focus on this. But I'm telling you, being in kind of this brain space and thinking about these things, making this reflection is serious, seriously going to help you planning your month ahead. Because if you didn't like the way your past month went, we need to do something different for your upcoming month. All right. If you hit pause and took the time to reflect on those three questions. Welcome back. The next thing in my process after getting myself into this headspace is I look at the goals that I set this month as I go into the new month. Now, my monthly goals aren't something that I just come up with every single month. It's part of a bigger plan and it comes into play when I do my quarterly planning process. So every 90 days I have a much bigger planning process that takes me a few hours to make these monthly planning processes a lot quicker. If you would like to see me do a detailed video on how I plan my quarters or how I plan every 90 days. Type in the comments below. 90 days. So I know you want to see that and I can make that video for you. It is important to know what are the smaller goals you're going to be doing every single month to get you to those 90 day goals that get you to your year goals. Because if you're wanting to launch a new course or you're wanting to sell more digital products, there's a bigger strategy behind that than what you can accomplish in one month. Trust me, you cannot launch an entire program in a month. You are going to put yourself into overwhelm and stress and it's not a good thing. So knowing if this quarter you want to launch a course, then you can break down the smaller steps that you can do each month so when you're looking back on your wins, you can celebrate the smaller steps that you took to ultimately get to this bigger win that you want to have at the end of 90 days. So because I do this process, I'm able to know what my monthly goals are going to be as soon as a new quarter starts. So a new quarter is, you know, January through March, April through June, July through September, October through December. That's how we're really planning out our business. And then I'm chunking it down into month to week today. So what I'm just looking at is the goals I set from last month and did I achieve them? Where am I at? Is there something that I haven't accomplished yet that I need to possibly move into this new month? I'm not setting these goals yet. I'm just looking at how far along did I get in my goals from this past month. Now the reason I'm not setting these goals yet is because my new monthly goals could be affected by my business metrics, which is what I'm going to dive into in this next part of planning your month. And listen, I do not live and die by my monthly metrics. Being an online business owner, be an entrepreneur, a course creator, a coach, your monthly metrics are going to influx every single month. I know that January is always a low month for me. I know that April is always a high month for me. I know that July and August are always low months for me. So if I were to reflect every single month at the end of January, at the end of July, I may start freaking out because my income isn't as high during those month because I have the trends to see that's what I can expect. That's why I really like to do a deeper dive every quarter. But I need to have a sense of how we are doing each month. So here are the business metrics that I look at but I don't freak out over and I don't make any major decisions over the monthly metrics until I see the overall quarterly metrics. So that first metric is my revenue. So what I do is I look at all the products, services that I've sold that month and what is the number? So for me, how many students bought Video Strategy Academy this month? How many students bought Going Video this month? How many clients did I enroll into 10k on replay? How many paying clients do we have in our agency? And I'm just getting an overview of what those numbers are. Now I have an entire spreadsheet to track my monthly metrics. This is something that I share inside of my coaching program, 10k on replay. If you are ready to get more serious with tracking your numbers and making sure that you're making the decisions in your business and setting the goals in your business that are going to move you to 10k months, even if you're a solo entrepreneur to get you to that first six figure year, make sure you apply to 10K on replay. Because this is my sole purpose inside of this program is to help solo entrepreneurs make sure they are making decisions based on data, based on the numbers that they're creating. This monthly plan that you're creating these goals around getting to the numbers that you want. And if you don't know the data, you won't know if the choices that you are making are the right ones. So go to trina little.com 10k to apply. Now this is a small group. We have around 30 clients inside and this is my sole focus inside of that program. So once we have the number of sales that we had, we also like to look at how many people went to the landing page for each of these programs because this is a key piece that so many people don't understand and not enough people are talking about. If you want to sell something, if you want to sell more courses, if you want to sell more digital products, you need to get traffic to this page. Eyeballs, right? You need to get people there. And if you aren't creating content like YouTube videos or podcasts or Instagram and you aren't spending ads to get people to your page, how are you getting traffic? Because without traffic, nobody's going to know that exists. And that's probably why you aren't making consistent income yet because you don't have a consistent traffic plan. So what I like to look at every single month is what were the amount of eyeballs on my Going video sales page, on my video Strategy Academy sales page, on my 10k on replay application page. What is that metric? How many people saw it? How many people bought? So I have a conversion rate that allows me to know, was the content that I created that month effective? Did the content that I create that month drive people to this page? Or is my traffic down? Or is my traffic really high because I created some piece of content that was really good and a lot of people went to it? Listen, I'm not creating YouTube videos for fun. I love creating YouTube videos and I love showing up here and teaching you about getting your business to 10k months and beyond. But I run a business and I'm ultimately creating this content to get people to buy. The systems and the processes that I've created that have helped me get to here along the way that I want you to use too, to get you to where I'm at. But if I'm not creating the content for you to realize this exists, what's the point Right now? There are a lot of other metrics that you could track, but when you are a solo entrepreneur by yourself and you are carving out time to plan your month, you probably don't have a whole lot of time. You can't dedicate an entire day to do this. So the metrics that I highly recommend that you track every single month is how many sales you got in your products or services, the traffic that those pages saw, and what is the conversion rate? Because you can can start to make tweaks and changes that make a big difference. It's not going to be posting another post on Instagram that's going to make a huge difference in your business. It's going to be looking at the traffic, the purchase and the conversion rate and making a headline change and seeing your, your conversion rates going up, meaning more sales. Those are the little things that are going to make a difference. When you're planning out what you're going to work on the following month, then deciding, okay, I'm going to post five more times on Instagram a day because, you know, my Instagram's not growing. That's not what we want to focus on. We want to focus on the numbers that actually matter. So I don't even necessarily look at my subscriber growth on Instagram or YouTube or my followers on Instagram. The metrics that I do look on social media are impressions. So how many eyeballs are seeing my content and is there content that I'm creating this particular month that got in front of more people? So there's something about that content that people want to see. So for YouTube, more impressions, is my content being pushed out to more people? The next thing I'm Looking at on YouTube for metrics, new viewers. So when you go into your analytics, you can actually see, are your new viewers increasing? This little blue line right here, if that blue line isn't increasing, you're not getting in front of new people. And if you're not getting in front of new people, how are you going to get new traffic over to your offers, your services? Right, so I'm tracking, am I increasing my new viewers? And lastly, I, I am tracking views overall. Not particular video, but views for my channel for that entire month. Because again, more views means more people watching my content with the opportunity for them to go over to my landing pages, sales paces to increase the traffic on those pages to increase the sales of those products and services. Same thing with Instagram. I look at people reach for that particular month. Did it go up or down from the previous month? Month? Why did it, what was the content change that I did? Important here. Not likes, not post, but profile visits and website clicks. Again, we are creating content to get traffic to our offers, right? To make sales in our post, but profile visits and website clicks. Again, we are creating content to get traffic to our offers, right? To make sales in our business. I'm not here to be an influencer or to be a celebrity. I'm here to help people get to six figure years. And if I can't get them to my landing pages, my sales pages that are going to help them get there, my goal is not going to be reached. Okay? I don't need tens of thousands of followers to do this. I just need to make sure I'm getting people to my pages. So those are the three metrics that I look inside of Instagram. All right, so we have a good idea of how this last month went, okay? Whether it was good, whether it was bad, not a problem. Right now. This is also just the month look, right? We want to look at a bigger view like every quarter because businesses go up and down. Especially if you're in a launch cycle and you launch every quarter. When you're not launching, obviously numbers may be low and when you are launching, numbers are high. So it's just easier to balance it out quarterly. Now time to get out your Paper and pen and just brain dump literally everything in your head right now that you've got to do in your business. Now, I said business. We want to do that one first. So what are the things that you didn't get done last month that you think you need to carry forward to the new month and anything else that's on your head? Trust me, this process, it's changed my life because I feel like there's always so much stuff in my head. If you feel like there's always so much stuff in your head, you're feeling always overwhelmed. Spewing it out on paper is basically like cleaning out the closet in my head for me. And I think this will help you as well. And so I literally do this every single week as well as part of my weekly routine. And I'll be sharing with you how I plan my week in my next video. So make sure you are subscribed because I'm going to get down into my weekly process. But being able to get it all out on on paper allows me to see everything that I think I need to do, and then we can start prioritizing. So if you want to go ahead and do a brain dump, hit pause now and just dump everything that's on your head right now that you think you need to get done in your business. The next brain dump that you need to do is, of course, we have a life. So go ahead and bring them everything that you have coming up this month in your life. Do you have a dance recital with your kids? Do you have a PTO meeting? Do you have soccer practice? Do you have dentist appointments? Do you need to book your dentist appointment? Dump all those things down right now in your family brain dump list because we have to account for those things as well. Especially if you're a mom. We've got to account for these things when we are planning our month. Okay. Now, once you have your list, you need to read through it and decide what can go. Now you're probably like, Petrina, I wrote these all down, but they need to be done. Nine times out of 10, there's going to be a few things that you can let go because I want you to think through the lens. Will this help me with my ultimate goal? If your ultimate goal is to book more clients, will that task on your to do list help you book more clients? Is updating your website homepage going to help you book a new client? Probably not. I don't know about you, but for me, a lot of my clients come word of mouth instead of Trying to update all these things I may add on my to do list. I may cross four things out that I think are going to help me get in front of more of my clients, cross those all out, and just say, say reach out to my current clients with a gift if they send me a referral, it's that simple. Because that's going to move the needle a lot more in your business than trying to do all of these other things. Because what I've learned through my coach, and you've probably heard this somewhere else before, but fancy fails simple scales. Keep everything in your business simple, because you can scale simple. You can get more sales, you can get more clients. When things are simple, the more fancy that you make it. And you make. Make this funnel into this funnel, and this link goes to here, and this is automated to there. Things can fail. And you, when you make it fancy, that's what happens. So make things super simple, go through your list, see what you can remove, and really simplify. At the beginning of this year, I'm going to tell you, when I did this process, I actually cut out posting to Instagram. We created this entire plan at the end of 2022 on how I was going to post five days a week, sometimes six, and reels and all this other stuff. And. And after looking at my to do list for this coming month and seeing, okay, I've got to write this amount of more posts and I got to write this amount of more reels, I realized fancy fails. I was making this Instagram process too fancy. And for me, it was limiting my creativity. So I decided to just say, look, I'm not creating any more extra Instagram content. We have a content writer who turns these YouTube videos into three Instagram posts. Which. Which three posts a week? Yeah. But I wanted to not stifle my creativity input, less pressure on myself to do reels. So going through this process, I realized what I'm going to do is reels. When I feel good about it. I took reels off my list. It honestly took so much off my chest when it came to overwhelm. So I'm telling you, there are things on your list that you can eliminate that are going to free you up to focus on things that are really going to make a difference in your business. The other thing, you might find that you need some help. And I know it gets scary to think about outsourcing. And when I started my business and I was hardly making 40k my first year, and I thought about outsourcing and how it would never be possible. When I was able to just get a Pinterest strategy, that's the very first person I outsourced to because Pinterest was a huge traffic sender to my website. Remember traffic? I think she charged me like $300 a month. But the amount of time that that saved me to focus on the other things that were revenue to my business was game changer. So don't ever think that you're not going to be able to outsource. You have to do all of these things by yourself. Look at the things that you could give to somebody else to help. Even with a virtual assistant. You could get a virtual assistant a few hours a week for 300 to $500. We do have to let go of the things that are taking us more time than what it would cost for us to give it to somebody who that's their specialty. So you can focus on your specialty. You've got to get ruthless with this list. All right, one thing that I forgot was we need some highlighters, a couple colors here because this is the part where I start batching tasks together so I can have batch days. What I want you to do with your to do list is go through there and see if there are similar tasks. Let's say you are writing an email newsletter and you're writing Instagram posts. Those can be grouped together on a writing day. Good news with a writing day, no hair and makeup needed. Let's say you are doing YouTube videos and you want to be doing reels or stories that day you could be doing the YouTube videos and also pre recording the story. So again, hair and makeup already done. Try to do those filming things on the same day because I don't want to show up and do my hair makeup every single day. You're going to take this time right now to go through that list and see what are the things that you can batch together. Because when you have similar tasks batched together and you keep your brain in that kind of wave, you're able to get things done than to go from writing to video recording to phone calls to proposals for clients. That is going to eliminate so much productivity in your life. You want to figure out ways to batch similar tasks together right now. Okay, now it's time to grab your batch calendar and start taking those highlighted similar colors and plopping them into days. I've seriously done this for years. Before I created these in Canva, I just got printer paper and made a calendar for myself and I would just write in the things that were on my my to do list on this calendar to see if I started adding more than three tasks. That's the key. You do not want to add more than three tasks to your day. So this is the most recent one that I did and you can see I listed all my top priorities right up here that needed to get done and then I started to plug them into this day. Before you start plugging those into those days, remember those family things. If you want to take Fridays off, make sure you're checking Fridays off. If you want to take Wednesdays off, or if you have a dance recital or your volunteering at your kids school, those are the things you need to add to your calendar first. Those things matter more than your business always, right? So add those in first and then start figuring out where your tasks go on your scratch calendar. It's also really important to understand here that when you start adding all these things in, you're adding calls and the client work that you need to do. Most of the time you only have about two hours in your day, if that, to focus on some of these tasks. Realistically for me, it takes about two hours for me to script two to three videos. So that is one task for one day. Because I only have the mornings from about 9:30 to 11:30 to focus on these business tasks. Because in the afternoon I have calls, whether they are coaching calls, whether they are podcast interviews, whether they are guest coaching for other friends of mine. But in the afternoon it's mostly phone calls. So I get about two hours every single day to focus on these tasks. But I'm also only working six hours a day. I'm working from 8:30 to 3:30. So you need to be realistic about the amount of tasks you're adding to your day. Again, realistically for me to film two to three YouTube videos, it's going to be about two hours. I also spend about 30 to 40 minutes of my day, the beginning of my day starting at 8:30, journaling, going through my inbox and also replying to any Slack messages and catching up on Slack messages with my team and with my 10 count replay clients. And then I do that same process in the evening, the last 30 to 40 minutes of my day starting at 3 o', clock, sometimes a little bit before going through my inbox and replying to all my Slack messages. So you can start to see how your time and the amount of tasks on your to do list really need to be prioritized here. The one little trick that I do have is I try to keep Friday free as much as possible, I would like to have Fridays off. But what generally happens is that any of those extra tasks from out the week that didn't get done, hopefully there's only like one or two. Two. They fall into Friday. So I have Friday open for those tasks that don't tend to get done. So again, I'm not adding too much on my plate that week one's tasks move into week two and then week one and week two's has move into week three. I try to leave Friday open as much as possible to catch any of those extra tasks. Now the other secret that I have here as well when I'm planning my week is I like to theme my weeks. My number one role in my business is to create content. Content. Because guess what, my content drives traffic to my funnels, to my email list, to my agency, to my coaching program. Right? So I have a huge amount of to dos on creating content. So what I do is every other week for me is a content creation theme week. Meaning typically on Mondays I'm researching and scripting my YouTube videos. I may research and script YouTube videos again on Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursdays are for recording and Fridays are usually for me grabbing any additional B roll or providing feedback to my video editor. I do that every other week then. So that'd be like week one and week three. Week two and week four are for those other tasks that I need to get done. Outlining a new program, outlining a new lesson for 10k, replay clients, setting up any processes or SOPs. Having meetings with my team, that's really important as well. We have one on one meetings with every team member and I will do those on alternating weeks as well. I just really want you to understand realistically, basically the amount you can get done in one day is going to be about two to three tasks per day. That's why it is so important to understand what are the tasks that you need to be doing that are going to move the needle in your business. Most likely posting more on Instagram isn't going to be doing that. That's why I also have that process at the beginning of my monthly planning routine is looking at the numbers. How are they? How did they change from last month to this month? And what can you do based on that data? The data will help you decide what to focus on. All right. Now once you know all the things you're going to be working on this particular month, then you can start to set your goals. I don't like to set these pie in the sky goals because for me that makes me have a toxic relationship with goals. If I say I want to go to my YouTube channel, 10,000 subscribers this month and I don't do it, then I feel like a failure. So I really based my goals around the things that I have to get done to move the needle in my business. So let me show you how I set this up inside of my Asana. Here is my goals board and as I've mentioned a hundred times out this video, it's broken down into quarters. Because it's so hard to get things done in one month, we want to look at a bigger time period. So we have our revenue goals for quarter one. When we come in here, we have it broken down how many we want to sell each of these and we will check these at the end of the month. And we have a due date scheduled for us, usually like the first of the next month. So we can ensure all of our number are correct. You can see that we also have our email list growth. We also have certain biz statistics that we are tracking as well. And then down here are our January goals. Now we did get consistent with Instagram posting and like I told you, we decided to pull that back. This is going to be being pushed to the next month, so I know I'm going to need to do that. But this goal was also accomplished during this the last month. So when I go into the next month right here, I'm going to add over the goal that I mentioned that we didn't get to done here. So I'm going to go ahead and copy this and pop it into February goals. Another goal that we have set is again to publish eight videos a week. Goal number three is to onboard a marketing assistant, finalize our launch plan for vsa. I keep these realistic but ensure that all of these goals are tying back into my quarterly goals that I've set. And I have all of those goals set and mapped up in our At a Glance board right here, which is something I plan to share with you later in the next couple of weeks. The other thing that I do as well, because I like to keep everything tracked inside of asana is at the end of my planning session I will go into my Asana board, create a card for this particular month and write down all the tasks that I just put on my scratch calendar and give them dates. That way when I sit down in the morning, I pull up my asana, my tasks are all right there and I can easily check mark them. If Monday's tasks I fall behind, I can change the due date to Friday because that's my catch all day, right? But I like to have that so I'm not wasting any time in the morning. As soon as my day starts at 8:30, I can dig in. I can start my startup routine and then start working on my tasks without needing to think about what was it that I was supposed to do today. Now once I have my monthly plan, I do go deeper yet into my weekly plan and my daily plan. I'm going to be sharing those videos with you in the next couple of weeks. I know this process, the first time you go through it may seem a little bit difficult or you may have some questions. So any questions that you have, leave them in the comments below so I can help you out. Because I'm telling you, this planning process is what really allowed me to focus on the right things in my business. That got me to six figures. That got me above half a million dollars working six hours a week with two little kids at home. I'm telling you, if you are a solo entrepreneur, this is the planning process that's really going to allow you to move out of that hustle feeling, the overwhelm feeling, and really start to simplify your business so you can can get to those 10k months. And if you really want me to help you along the way, I do have 10k on replay where I deep dive into this process along with giving you the templates. And we have quarterly planning sessions as well. Go check it out@trina little.com forward/10k.