Catch up on some related episodes:

I haven't been honest with you: A pivot like no other

Today’s talking points:

The purpose of having a weekly CEO date in your business (plus how to carve out the time for it)
Two major parts of this weekly self-accountability session that mean you can work through this in 30 minutes or less
The only two metrics you need to track in your business (and how to identify them for you specifically)
All the steps we go through for the Weekly Prep Meeting, and what tasks and projects you need to be laying out for the week ahead

All the information you need about this new 1:1 program

Book a free 30-minute Strategy Session

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I hope that you are doing really well, taking care of yourself and ready to make things happen in your business today.

Summer Season and Its Challenges

So, it's officially the summer season, which can get a really bad rep in the online industry. There’s talk about summer of being slow for sales, there's a narrative around us being unproductive.

A question I want to ask you is, do you ever find yourself feeling frustrated and unfocused in your business to the point where you aren't doing the things that need to be done in order to get you to those business goals? You aren't doing those needle moving tasks to move the needle forward in your business? And I think this can especially be true in the summer.

So, instead of giving you a list of loads of things that you can do to quote unquote, keep up over the summer. In this episode, I want to share how you can balance work and time off. How you can take a break without falling behind and the one practice that I have put in place in my business that ensures that I am staying focused and staying on track each and every week, month, and year towards achieving those big business goals. Even during the summer.

So seriously, if you do nothing else for your business over the summer, apart from this, we are here to keep things simple and strategic. We are here to create success on your terms. You are here because you want more freedom, more flexibility, more impact. You want to be able to create success in your own way. Define what that means for you as well.

Overcoming Summer Productivity Hurdles

But one of the biggest challenges that I hear from you, is that we set those big dreams, we set those goals at the beginning of the year, but a few weeks, a few months in, we find ourselves off track. We find ourselves struggling with those shiny objects that keep asking and begging for our attention. As a result, we're not getting to where we need to go. Does anybody relate to that? Do you relate to that feeling of sitting down at your desk and just feeling completely unsure of where your time and energy should be focused each and every day?

Well, if that is you, you are in luck because I have got you covered in this episode. The one practice I have that helps me stay focused each and every week in my business is my weekly prep meeting. If you have been part of the podcast farm for any length of time, you'll have heard me talk about this. I also host this live every single week for my clients in the Make It Happen Mastermind, it's one of the favorite parts of the program, hands down.

Introducing: the Weekly Prep Meeting

My weekly prep meeting is a practice that I have had in my business since the very beginning. It is a meeting with myself, the CEO of the business, to make sure that I am not just planning for the week ahead or the month ahead, the quarter ahead and the year ahead, but also holding myself accountable to that plan because a plan isn't worth much if you're not holding yourself accountable in sticking to the plan. Right?

So, this has become a huge part of my regular business practice, the way that I run my business. And after years and years of having people ask me, ‘Holly, How do you actually plan to get everything done? How do you stay productive over the summer and specifically how do you get things done? Especially when the weather's nice and you don't want to work.’ That's where my weekly prep meeting comes in, and I want to walk you through it in this episode.

Now, If you're familiar with the weekly prep meeting. Hi. Hello. I see you. But if you've never planned your week like this before, and you say things to yourself like ‘oh, I really struggle with planning for my business. I feel like I'm getting pulled in all the directions by all the shiny objects. Then you are going to want to download the free weekly prep meeting checklist that I have created for you. So this weekly prep checklist is going to walk you through exactly how I do my weekly prep meeting. But for now, you can go to abranchofholly.com/week to get access to that because that's what I'm going to walk you through, is this weekly prep meeting.

I know how overwhelming it can feel to plan for a full year or even a full quarter. So, I find that breaking it down into smaller segments of time is what makes things so much easier because ultimately it's not just what you do today, it's what you do tomorrow. Something that I always say is that the work you do today, is creating your results three to six months down the line. So go ahead and go to abranchofholly.com/week to get the full checklist or just head to Instagram and message me with the word ‘week’ to get it straight to your inbox.

Reflecting and Planning in Your Weekly Prep Meeting

So, the weekly prep meeting, this is a time that I carve out in my calendar for the purposes of my weekly prep meeting. Now, like I said, I host this and do this live as a coaching and coworking combined session in the Make It Happen Mastermind. We have our weekly prep meetings every Thursday at 9:15 AM and then we all check in with our plan on Sunday before the new week officially starts.

As I'm going through the weekly prep checklist, I'm doing two things, reflect and prep. I am checking in against my plan, so I have my big picture plan of where I'm going, the projects I'm working on and I'm checking in on that to see how I'm doing. Am I on track? Am I off track? Am I getting where I need to go? Then we also reflect on our previous week, what we accomplished, what worked, what didn't work. Then the second part of this weekly prep is planning for the week ahead. So by having this dedicated time in my calendar. I'm always checking in, I'm always tracking my progress and I'm always planning the next step.

Athletes do exactly the same thing, they track their progress. Think about the most elite athletes, they're tracking their times, they're tracking their workouts, they're tracking the nutrition and then they plan. What do their next workouts look like? What is my next goal? What is the next thing I need to do? It's the combination of reflecting and planning that makes it so much easier to stay focused, because then the rest of the week, you're not spinning your wheels and wasting time trying to figure out what you need to do. You've already made a game plan for the rest of the week based on what you want to achieve in the next month and in the next 90 days.

Importance of Tracking Metrics

In our weekly prep meeting, we have six big action steps that we go through, and one of the things that we do as part of this is tracking. Tracking the numbers that are most important to your business, and in the business world, these are called your metrics. This is something that can become kind of a rabbit hole for a lot of people, but not in a good way. You know when you're on Pinterest and you go down a rabbit hole because you go into one thing and then it's something suggested for you and you keep going.

I remember one of our first weekly prep meetings that we had in the Make It Happen Mastermind, one of my clients actually asked me ‘do I need to track my metrics. Like, do I really need to do this? Because it always just ends up feeling like a chore for me’. You could track how many people go to your website, You could track how many people like you on Facebook. You could track your Facebook ads. You could track how many followers you have on Instagram. You could be tracking all sorts of things.

Again, we want to be simple and strategic. I want to make this super simple for you. There are really only two metrics that I want you to be paying attention to and tracking on a regular basis. And honestly, until your business is in the six-figure range (if that's even where you want it to be) you don't need a lot of complicated metrics to track. For most of you, two metrics are all you need because it's just going to become TMI (too much information). We want to track the things that are directly correlated to your results, that are directly correlated to your revenue. That means there are two metrics that we need to decide on for you and track them every single week.

Understanding Leading and Lagging Metrics

The first is your leading metric. Now, a leading metric is the metric that predicts your lagging metric. Let me explain. When most people think of what are you tracking in your business? They think I'm tracking my revenue, which is important. Do you track your revenue every single week? That is the lagging metric. It's the final metric. Okay? And if you track that, you're going to have some really good information about your business.

But we want to get a couple of steps ahead of revenue. We want to figure out what predicts revenue. And this is the one that you're really going to have to sit and think about. This is a big key to understanding what activities move the needle? What activities generate revenue for your business? What actions that you are taking that really result in more revenue for you.

One example would be, let's say that for one business, their leading metric is email subscribers. You could get even more specific with that and say, it's actually people who are opting into a free masterclass that I have. And then every single week you'd be looking to see how many new people signed up to watch this free masterclass. That predicts revenue, because let's say that you have a 2% conversion rate. That means if 100 people sign up for your free masterclass, two of those people will become paying clients. That is really powerful information. Because if you want to impact that lagging metric, AKA revenue, you know what you need to do. The thing that is going to increase that revenue, which is getting more people onto your email list, through a masterclass.

So I know this might sound a little bit complicated right now, but again, it's all about if your lagging metric is revenue, what predicts your revenue? What is on the front end of that sales process? Is it people joining a masterclass? Is it referrals? Is it people booking a discovery call? What are the things that are happening that then lead to people becoming clients? This is must-have information for any business owner and it's something that you really want to be tracking on a weekly basis.

We don't want to overwhelm ourselves on a weekly basis with all of the numbers because there's no point. On a weekly basis, that's when I recommend you check in more with the leading metric and the lagging metric. And on a monthly basis, that's when you can track more metrics in terms of how many Instagram followers do I have at the end of this month? How many people came to my website this month?

Planning Your Top Three Tasks

I track the bigger metrics on a monthly basis, just to see trends. But on a weekly basis. It's about getting laser-focused on what drives results? What moves the needle? What is driving results in your business? So once I track those pieces of information and I'm starting to review, then I can take a look and see. Am I on track? Am I off track? Specifically, with my revenue goals. And then, I want to start actually planning and the most important thing - my top three, every single week, I have three must-do activities. Three needle moving tasks that I highlight, I bold, I put a sticker by, and I say these are the three things that are going to move the needle for me in my business this week.

This is so incredibly helpful because it is very easy to get down an Instagram rabbit hole or to sit there and find yourself trying to do too many small, busy-work types of activities that you end up never making the time and energy for the activities that are actually going to move your business forward. So your top three for the week ahead are the most important and most impactful activities that you need to be focused on this week that are going to get you towards your goals.

This is the key thing, they are derived from your quarterly and your monthly goals. Usually they're going to be related to things like marketing, sales, business development, a project you've got going on. They are not going to be things like clear my emails. That would be marketing related, but it's not going to be sitting in your email inbox, trying to clear through that. It's not going to be anything that's admin related because those are not the big levers that move the needle forward.

But for me, for example, one of my top three tasks, the week that I'm recording this podcast episode is…record some podcast episodes. This is one of the most important things I can do to move the needle for my business, because it's my biggest marketing channel that I'm using. Mastermind in Q3. I needed to block out all the events coming up for the next 90 days. Our monthly strategy sessions. Our retreat for planning out Q4. And we're also introducing monthly journaling sessions at the start of each month, moving forward from August, which I'm so excited for! So I carved out time to get those done and put them on our shared calendar and share them with my clients in the Mastermind. I had three lessons I wanted to script and create slides for, so I can record them at a different time.

So you can see with this example, my top three wasn't anything to do with admin or emails or anything like that. They are the things that are really going to move the needle and make things happen in your business. They're going to be related to marketing. They're going to be related to sales. They are going to be related to business development, new client related things, new offers. And what I will say about your top three, is that these are the big rocks in your week and there's an analogy that I love around this and I've shared it before. It's around how you put your big rocks in the jar first. Your big rocks being your top three tasks for the day. And if you don't put those in first, then the small stuff gets in the way and you'll never make time for those big rocks.

So once you pick those big three, your top three needle moving tasks. You've got to make sure that we have time and energy in your calendar to make them happen, So I'll set my weekly top three tasks, and then I'll also plan out the marketing activities and sales activities for the week ahead. This is so important, and that's why it's part of this weekly prep meeting checklist. Again, you can get the checklist at abranchofholly.com/week

Attract, Engage, Nurture, Invite, Delight

If you have followed me for a while, you will know that I have a marketing framework that I use and that I teach. This is how I think about marketing. I think about it in terms of the journey people go through from the first minute they hear about me. Starting with attract, people who stumbled upon my podcast for the first time, or they heard me on a podcast interview, or they found one of my blog posts through Google.

From attract through to engage, to nurture, invite and delight every single week.I'm thinking to myself, what am I doing? In each one of those buckets, what am I doing to ensure that I'm constantly attracting, engaging, nurturing, inviting, and delighting clients, and potential clients in my business. It's one of those secrets to building a business that brings in predictable profits, is consistently marketing your business. Instead of having a big, huge times of marketing and then nothing for ages. This is more sustainable. This is about consistently showing up for you and your business.

What is your attract plan this week? Maybe it's ads? For me at the moment, it's a lot of pitching. So pitching myself, interview opportunities. Those are all attract strategies. Attract strategies, ideally get you in front of someone else's audience, that's the whole point of this attract piece. So what happens next? All of the attract work, it sends people in one direction. For you that might be a masterclass and all roads end up at that masterclass, you're sending everyone in the same direction, that's the engaged piece. And then when they've checked out that masterclass, you continue nurturing them with more great content. You create your podcast episodes, you send out an email to let people know what you're talking about in the podcast episode.

Now here, I just want to touch on social media because this is a question I get asked most often when I talk about this marketing strategy, where does social media fit in? And I would say for the most part, that social media is going to fall under the nurture category. People who know they can trust you are the ones who are seeing your social media updates. The exception for that is when you learn how to use social media to get in front of new audiences. So for example, if your Instagram reels are reaching more non-followers and attracting new people that would come under attract. And if your engaging on other people's accounts that might be attract as well. So Instagram, as an example, can both attract people into your business and nurture people who already know, like, and trust you. However, it usually happens at quite a slow pace. And that's why I usually put social media under the nurture category.

So once we've gone through nurture and again, in this example, it's showing up every week on your podcast, sending weekly emails. Then, you invite them to take the next step. You invite them into your one-to-one, or your group offer, or your service, whatever you're actively enrolling for. This is making sure every week, you know what your goals are when it comes to inviting new clients to work with you. And this is really important because if you don't have a plan to invite new clients to work with you, then you're not getting the sales that you could be getting. So it's about having that plan each and every week for - how are you going to invite those people into your business?

Now the aim with this is that you will get to a certain point in your business where some of these steps become pretty automated or simplified for you. Showing up for the podcast is a nurture piece, you are showing up live to record that. Maybe attract is more automated because you use ads and the engage piece is too because you're sending people to a prerecorded masterclass or a private podcast feed. The invite piece could be more automated too, because that's a part of what happens when someone watches a masterclass, at the end of that masterclass, they get an invitation to work with you.

So then the nurture piece is what becomes your prominent focus. And when you build out these systems that are automated for some of these pieces, you can spend more time on your main marketing channel, like your blog or your podcast or YouTube channel. Which is amazing, because it does take time to do things like create free resources and show up live and script and record podcasts, but I absolutely love it.

Ensuring Time for Top Priorities

The other thing that I make sure I have in my calendar every single week is the final part of this marketing strategy, which is - what am I doing to delight my existing clients? Which I think a lot of people forget about, but I want you to remember that you may have amazing revenue available to you. Not by going out and finding new clients, but by taking care of the clients you already have. I find that simply because I show up for my clients, I answer questions for my clients, I am there for my clients, I meet with my mastermind at least once a week, sometimes more. I have clients who will come in and purchase an additional intensive with me or a pack of intensives or who wants to continue on from the Mastermind and will scale up to a one-to-one client.

Over time, you become less focused on generating tons and tons and tons of new clients because you build opportunities for them to continue working with you again and again. Make sure you have your marketing strategies planned out every single week. And again, another question that I get from my clients in the Mastermind is ‘Holly, mine are the same every single week.’ That's actually good. These shouldn't change dramatically week to week. I tend to have a focus for my marketing each month. And then when I sit down each week, it's more, ‘okay, how many people am I trying to get onto my email list this week?’ For you, the question might be, how much am I going to be spending on ads this week? How many people am I trying to get into the Masterclass this week? What is the topic for this week's live show?

We've planned out quite a bit at this point, we've talked about your top three, those top three needle movers. They're going to make the biggest impact in your business. They're likely going to be marketing, sales, business development, goal related. And then we've also talked about marketing, knowing what your marketing strategies are in these different areas that you're focused on this week.

Next is blocking time in your calendar. This is so important. And again, if you followed me for a while, you know I've talked about having that model calendar, where I have very clear blocks of time in my calendar that I accomplish certain things. It gives me that outline of, ‘okay, this is what a week in my life looks like’. So you create what an average week in your life looks like, so your model calendar, or your weekly outline, becomes your template. Otherwise, you know how it goes, you don't lock things in, you say to yourself, ‘oh yeah, I'm going to do an Instagram live today’, but you don't actually schedule it.

In our weekly prep meeting, we take our top three tasks, we take our most important marketing activities and we actually block time in the calendar to make sure they get done that week. Because, if they don't get done that week, then I have not done the work that will move my business forward. So, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to block these big important tasks into your calendar and treat those times like real appointments.

So the method that we use when we do this together in the Mastermind is, we plug in our scheduled, time-bound tasks first. Then, we put in our non-negotiable priorities and habits. Then our top three tasks and our marketing activities and then our rest and everything else.

Updating Your Project Management System AND TEAM

The next thing that I do is update my project management system. So I have a business hub on Notion. This is where I keep all of my planning documents on the operating system that I run my business on, which I'll be sharing more with you about over the next few months.

You might not have all of this set up yet, but when you have multiple projects that you are working on and you want to run your business more effectively and more efficiently, and you want to plan to make things happen it's really helpful.

So I update this every week to see how things are in process. I have a content hub where all my content planning goes and that's something that I plan to share with my team. Updating your team is so important. It's so important to check in and ask each other questions. You can even record a loom video for them rather than having an actual meeting, you can record your screen and just say ‘I've updated our project management system, this is what I'm working on for this week, here are the podcast topics for the rest of the month, here's what I need your help with and just kind of give them an update.’

Personal Check-ins

I find, especially as your business grows, these last two steps - updating your project management tool and updating your team become even more important. My clients update me as their partner, as I am on their team in their business and they want to keep me in the loop. Because what tends to happen as business owners is we get so excited and we get fresh new ideas and sometimes we forget to communicate those ideas with the people who are trying to help us. And even before you have a team, I use this as a reminder to update my family, my husband, my parents who helped with childcare, to update anyone who is not just on Team Holly Bray the business, but team Holly Bray the human.

So every Sunday, my husband and I have a weekly check-in meeting so we can say, okay, what's on your calendar this week? When are you in the office this week? Have you got any appointments I need to be aware of? And then we talk about anything else that we need to do in order to support, not just me, but him and the kids as well.

So I check in with my weekly plan on a Sunday, and then once the kids are in bed, we have our weekly check-in meeting too, just to make sure that things continue to run as smoothly as they can. That is the one thing you can do over the summer to get out of the narrative that you are falling behind, okay? Your weekly prep meeting is what will keep you on track.

RE-CAP

I really hope you enjoyed this episode, I hope you get a chance to download the checklist. I call it my triple triple threat planning methods. So, my quarterly plan, my monthly plan, and then my weekly plan. But the weekly prep especially, this practice has made such a huge difference in my business, it is the one that ensures that my business is pretty steady and consistent without any huge swings, any highs or lows. And I have to tell you, that brings so much peace of mind, when your business is really, really consistently bringing you those clients that you were looking for. I hope this is helpful.

You've probably heard me talk about the Make It Happen Mastermind in this podcast episode. It was formerly known as the Embodied Boss Collective, I am going to be rebranding it to relaunch later in the year. You want to Make It Happen quicker. I would love to invite you to book and Make It Happen quicker for the ambitious business owner who wants to make the next goal happen so much quicker.

I know you want my brain in your business, you are ready to take the current goal that you are struggling with, or you're wanting to face and gain full clarity on how to move forward and make it happen.

Joining the Mastermind

We know that this goal is not going to reach itself. So why not make it happen together? This is for you if you are an ambitious business owner who has a big goal, you want to achieve in the next 90 days, but you are getting stuck with how to break it down and create a plan to actually make it happen.

In these 60 minute intensives, we will go over, first of all, choosing your next big goal. So you will fill out a questionnaire and tell me all about the big audacious goal that you have, and what's currently stopping you from achieving it. I will then dive into the questionnaire to get to know you, your business and your goals. We'll then come together for 60 minutes to discuss that goal and I will come prepared with ideas for how I can help you make it happen. And then together we will create your step-by-step plan.

So we will plot it out into monthly and weekly action steps so that you then walk away with a Notion or a Google Doc of the exact tasks and action steps you need to do to put the plan in place to make it happen.

Here are just some examples of goals we could work on together. Maybe you want to launch a podcast, book a speaking gig, increase your monthly income from 5k to 10k, onboard a new team member, plan out what the rest of the year is going to look like. We can do that together. Maybe you want to outsource a certain category of tasks in your business. Maybe you want to spend the hour creating your model calendar, your weekly outline. Maybe you want to map out your next launch, create systems in your business. So much we could do, but it's whatever goal is most important for you.

I know you've been waiting for the right time to make this goal happen, but there's never going to be a right time. How long has that goal been in your mind or on your vision board, waiting for you to get started on it? You will reach the goal when you start working towards it. And I want to help you make it happen quicker with these one-on-one intensives.

This session will change the whole trajectory of your business in just 60 minutes, and I'll tell you why. It's because you will end this session knowing exactly what to do each week to make your next big goal happen, which is leading you towards that big picture vision that you have. You want to be the one who looks back at the end of a 90 day plan and goes, WOW. But for some reason you keep not sticking to the plan, you're always playing catch up and you just feel like you need to take a really deep breath. So, breathe. You know you are good at what you do, achieving your goals will transform the future of your business and your life.

So let me tell you how I did it. The key was getting really good at knowing how to break down my big goals into tangible checkoff-able verbal action steps. Other people will tell you that you just need to use complicated funnels, be on all the social media platforms and use random productivity techniques that do not work.

Every win I've had in my business, I can trace back to setting the goal and creating a plan to make it happen. My biggest launches, my highest income months, launching my podcast introducing new offers, taking two maternity leaves. They've all happened because I created a plan and broke it down into action steps so I could make it happen. That's why people hire me, because I will give you the full clarity on what you need to do to hit your next big business goal. And break it down so you don't have to.

So, how about it?

If you want to jump on a 60 minute call with me so we can create an action plan to make your next big goal happen, so you can look back and say, wow, I actually did that. I have limited spots available for my Make It Happen Quicker intensives, you will walk away with a detailed action plan of how to make your next big goal happen.

So DM me on Instagram I'm @abranchofholly we can chat it through or just say - ‘Holly, I need an intensive, let's go’ I will book you in.

If you try the weekly prep checklist, let me know as well and I will see you in the next episode.