Catch up on some related episodes:

How to feel confident in knowing what to focus on to grow your business (Path to Predictable Income Series)
The #1 strategy to ensure you're getting paid each & every month
The one thing holding you back from creating consistent income (Path to Predictable Income Series)

Today’s talking points:

2024 is just around the corner and I want to share with you exactly how you can boss it and have the most successful and profitable year yet.

You guessed it…it all starts with planning.

Download The 12 Month Boss Game Plan

Boss - we are in the home stretch of 2023 which means the Christmas season is just around the corner. For us business owners though, we are already thinking ahead to our big dreams for the new year.

So before you make those plans thought and start scribbling out your goals for 2024 over your morning coffee or your festive cocktail, it's important that you don't just look ahead, but that you also take some time to reflect on your progress this past year in your business.

I know that the last few years have been a challenge and so many of us just want to move forward and to have that fresh start already so we can stay focused on those big dreams, big goals, big plans.

But one of the reasons that so many business owners don't reach their goals is they come up against the same obstacles again and again that cause them to work harder than needed in order to break through to that next level of success in their business.

That is why I'm so excited because starting today, I'm going to share with you a 5 part series called Your 2024 Gameplan.

Over the next 5 episodes, we’re not only going to walk through the same strategic planning process that I personally have used for nearly a decade - but that I have also been sharing with hundreds of women entrepreneurs to help them create a solid and strategic action plan for the year ahead.

By the end of these five short episodes, you'll walk away with a 12 month gameplan that breaks down exactly what you need to be promoting in your business, what you need to be marketing, and what you need to be selling in order to have the profits that you're looking for each and every month.

It's time to turn those big business dreams into a profitable reality.

Let’s dive into part one.

planning is key

Now why is planning so important? Why do I go on about it so much? In over six years now that I've been working behind the scenes as a business mentor on strategic I've seen again and again that my clients who do the best are the ones who are consistently reaching their goals, who are consistently generating clients and cash flow, who are easily able to implement systems. They are able to course correct, they're able to continue growing each year, they're able to hit their goals and become more profitable, they're able to have the lifestyle that they want. Those people are the ones who have a plan.

On the other hand, the ones who struggle the most are the ones who feel like they're flying by the seat of their pants, and winging it. They struggle with that revenue rollercoaster with real inconsistency with where they're getting their clients and how they're going to get more cash flow in their business. They struggle with shiny objects feeling like they can't stay focused on the simple strategic things that will move their business forward. Or they get so lost in the day to day hustle that This in turn stalls out their business often slowing it down or even reversing their growth.

So over the next five episodes together, I want to walk you through this strategic planning process that I take my clients through, to ensure that the plan you have for the year ahead is 100% in alignment with the life and the business you want to create for yourself. I'm going to be sharing with you a challenge, or a little exercise to do in each of these five episodes. Because remember, business owners who plan grow twice as fast as those who don't. That is why doing the work is so important.

start with a yeARLY REVIEW

So now we're diving into a yearly review to bring clarity on what is and isn't working in your business. Now, you might be thinking, "Holly, why are we looking backward? Why not dive straight into setting those big, audacious goals for 2024?" Well, to be honest, there's a lot that this past year has to teach you. 2023 can tell you so much about what is and what is not working in your business. Understanding this can help you determine the best course of action as you shift your focus in the coming weeks of this series into the year ahead.

Think about it, professional athletes also do this, they know the value of reviewing their tapes. Many professional athletes are always recording themselves during practices, games, competitions and they'll spend just as much time in the gym, on the field practicing and getting better at their craft as they do viewing the tapes, looking at reels and reels of film, tearing it apart, pinpointing where they're doing well, what techniques they need to work on, and finding what's holding them back. By taking the time to review their film, they can see where they're making mistakes, face challenges, identify bad habits much more easily. So, they have a better idea of how they can get the most growth and improve overall performance.

This is exactly the same thing. We are basically going to review your tapes from 2023, business-wise. So what I want you to do is take some time and review month by month. What happened to your business this year? There's a reason why I like to go month by month in this year in review. If we skip this, what tends to happen is you remember the highest of the highs, you remember the lowest of the lows, but we get a little bit fuzzy about what happened in between. It's really easy to forget things that happened earlier on in the year compared to things that may have happened more recently in our year.

To help you do this month by month, it really helps to pull up my calendar, accounting software, marketing tools like your email marketing system or your social media, and if you have content you're producing like a podcast or a blog, it helps to go back through that. Look at your analytics or your tracking spreadsheet if you have one. Also, your camera roll - you can find so much gold in there.

If you start to review month by month, what you were working on each and every month, you'll start to see a fuller picture of what went on this past year. So you want to review each 90-day period in 2023 and ask yourself, "What was I marketing? What was I selling? Where was my time and energy focused?

review each month and ask yourself 3 questions

Now, as you look through each month of the last year, you want to ask yourself three key questions to really get clear about what was going on each month.

Question 1) what was your total revenue for the month?

So how much money came into your business each and every month? This is really an important question because as you start to look at it year, over year over year, you start to see patterns, you start to see the seasonality of your business and this is important information.

Total revenue, just to clarify, refers to the top line, encompassing all the sales that landed in your account. Once you're clear on the total revenue for the month, let's dive a bit deeper.

question 2) What drove that revenue?

Where did that revenue come from? Was there a specific offer a product programme or service that you were promoting that month? Did you take on more clients than you thought you would? Did you have a big launch?

You want to figure out and clearly understand what the reason was for that revenue in each month. This is invaluable to help you see what is and isn’t working in your business.

Question 3) What was your focus that month?

Finally, the third question you want to ask yourself is what was your focus that month? Specifically, we want to pinpoint your marketing focus. Was there something specific that you were doing that month that impacted the sales that you made?

You see how we're reverse engineering this to analyse each month’s revenue and where it came from and what marketing helped to rive it.

Now as you go through this month by month and ask yourself these questions, you are going to start to get a really good idea of what actually happened in your business this past year.

start to NOTICe PATTERNS

As you go through this exercise, patterns will emerge and you’ll want to ask yourself more questions.

So some of the types of questions you want to ask yourself are things like:

What worked in your business this year?
What offers were the most profitable?
What marketing strategies produced the best results?
What do you need to continue doing in your business next year?

Asking yourself these questions will show you what you should double down on to amplify those results.

You'll also start to see what didn't work. Maybe there was an offer that didn't really sell, a product programme or service that you tried to launch but it didn't make work and no one was that interested in it - maybe your marketing didn't work, maybe you were inconsistent with your marketing, or maybe you didn't follow through with the plan, or the plan you tried to implement didn't get the results you were hoping for. These are things you might have to determine if you want to prune out the dead weight in your business, which we all need to do. We all need to be looking at our businesses with a very critical eye and cutting out anything that is not truly working for us.

You'll also start to see what got in your way this past year. This is another huge question to ask yourself, and we have to be really honest here: Was there anything that held you back this year from achieving the goals that you may have set for yourself?

I want you to consider any major time or energy sucks - things that took up a lot more time and energy than you thought they would.
Think about mindset and if that held you back in any way - this is a huge thing I'm always talking about with clients. Maybe you had a major transition or a huge change in your life or your business. Some of us have had a really challenging past few years, you might have had a change in your family like I have with welcoming a new baby, you might have had some additional responsibilities, you might be grieving someone, all of those things, throw wrenches in our plans. We have to consider that and give ourselves some grace as we are looking at what we want to accomplish next year.

Now, as you answer all of these questions, as you consider these things, you will be able to clearly see that you need to double down on the things that are working and cut out the things that are not.

As you think through all of these questions, you will get very, very clear on what you want to invest your time, energy and money into for 2024.

So this yearly review is your first action step of your 2024 game plan. I hope it’s the perfect first step to help you think about what you want to be doing differently in the year ahead.

There is so much goodness headed your way in this series over the next few weeks in this 2024 game plan, so stay tuned!

In case you missed my last 5-part series, ‘The Path to Predictable Income’, here is the link to the first episode - How to feel confident in knowing what to focus on to grow your business