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:

I’m sharing exactly why you need a game plan in business and how you can create one to make sure you earn predictable income over the next 12 months.

Download The 12 Month Boss Game Plan

Welcome to the fifth and final instalment of “The Path to Predictable Income” series!

Over the past few episodes, I have walked you through the first four steps to help you create steady, consistent income in your business, so you can get out of the feast or famine cycle for good.

Now we’re wrapping up the series with the final part of the puzzle.

If you're anything like me, there comes a point in your entrepreneurial journey where your business needs to support you, needs to support your family, needs to support your lifestyle, if you're going to stick with it.

We all go through those startup stages in our business where we knew it was going to be a learning curve. We knew it was gonna take a while to figure things out and to get those paying clients in the door.

But once you're further along and you know this is what you want to do full-time for a long time, your business needs to pay you a real salary.

No one loves to run a business that isn't actually supporting the entrepreneur running it.

That's why we're going to talk about how to create that game plan to make sure you have predictable income over the next 12 months.

We want to make sure you have a real game plan for how you're going to move forward and design that predictably profitable business and actually plan for predictable income.

Let’s dive in.

why predictable income is so important

So we want to ensure that you have a solid game plan for building a predictably profitable business and securing predictable income. This is especially important for female business owners as despite women representing nearly 50% of small businesses, they contribute only 4% of small business revenue. Shockingly, over 75% of women entrepreneurs earn less than $50,000 a year (around £40,000).

So if you are truly committed to making your business work for you, and work for your family, then we have to make sure that you have a real plan to ensure that financially this all makes sense. We want to make sure that if you're leaving whatever you've been doing before - whether it was working in corporate, working for another small business owner or being a stay at home parent or working part time.

We want to make sure that all that time and energy that you are putting into this business make sense and is worth it. So many women entrepreneurs start businesses because they want more flexibility. They want more flexibility in how they work, when they work, they want more freedom to make the decisions themselves more freedom to do the things that really light them up and to be their own boss. They want the opportunity to create real financial freedom, whether that's contributing to their families, and just being able to cover extras like going on holiday or swimming lessons for their kids or really being able to significantly contribute to your family's financial future - whatever it is for you.

To achieve this, you need a concrete plan that goes beyond revenue goals and clarifies your salary. Your paycheck isn't the same as your business's revenue, and this distinction can be puzzling. To take home a certain amount, your business will need to generate significantly more. It's not just about setting revenue goals; it's about developing a comprehensive plan that outlines what products or services you'll offer, how you'll market them, how many clients you need to reach, and how to manage all these moving parts while maintaining a consistent stream of clients and cash.

So if you feel like you don't have the answers to all the questions, I just want you to take a deep breath with me. Because it's okay. I've got you and we are going to create a game plan together. Many business owners struggle with this, resulting in last-minute hustle and anxiety when the end of the month approaches and you need to book a client quickly for the following month. This feast or famine cycle can leave you feeling like you're always putting out fires rather than proactively growing your business. The key is to move from a perpetual hustle to having a plan that consistently fills your calendar's spots and ensures steady income, even in seasonal fluctuations.

So, how do you begin creating a game plan for predictable profits?

planning comes first

I would say the first step is that your game plan really starts with a calendar. I am planning all the time, I always have to grab a calendar and put it in front of me.

So this game plan is all about planning out your sales, so that you can hit your revenue goals. So I want you to grab a piece of paper and map out a quick year. You want to make sure you have mapped out four rows, and then three columns so this way, you can have the entire year in front of you in quarters / 90 day chunks. We want to make sure we can look at it across one year.

Doing it this way where it's all on one page just makes it so much simpler doesn't have to be this really in depth 20 page business plan document, we just want a one page game plan with everything right in front of you.

We want to plan for predictable profits by starting with our baseline revenue. Your baseline revenue is usually your signature product, programme or service, or product collection. We want to start with this signature offering because it's really the bread and butter of your business and you want to make sure you're actively promoting it two to four times a year.

So for my service based businesses out there, often a signature offering is something that is going to be a high ticket offer to work with you in this particular way. The signature offering could easily be something that generates up to 80% of the revenue in your business.

next comes promotion

So we've got our little game plan mapped out in front of us and we're going to write in when we are actively promoting that signature offering. I might put down with my new signature offer that I am actively enrolling every quarter because the whole programme is built on a 90 day operating system. I am teaching a 90 day system, a lot of the strategy I teach is built around 90 days. So let's say I want to open it the month before the next quarter starts. So I might decide to open it in March, June, September, and December.

So one thing I want you to think is how are your clients engaging with your business at different times of the year. This determines and how and when you’re going to promote.

It’s helpful to keep this in mind as you're putting these dates into your calendar because seasonality is very important. There are certain times of the year where people are super excited to work with me - August or September is a great example of this for me. September always has those back to school vibes. We've always spent so much of our life going back to school in September and then if you become a parent, you spend so much of your kids lives with the September energy of a brand new school year and it really does feel like a fresh start.

So August/September has always been a great month for me in my business personally. Something else that I'm noticing is that end of November start of December is another great time to actively promote my products. The reason for that is for my community (AKA you) start thinking about their plan for the next year in November / December.

So, again in 2024, I am planning to open the doors to this signature offer for the first time in March, in June, and then in September, and then maybe in December. So it's right before the start of every quarter. This is how you can start to set up your game plan, for example.

We really want to make sure that we have marked in at least two to four times a year where we are actively promoting our signature offer then to think about that seasonality. For you, you might have certain times of the year where it makes the most sense for you to be promoting what you have - I want you to pay attention to what works for you.

The longer you're in this and the longer you implement this plan, the more you'll have your own trends, your own data, and you'll be able to make the right decisions based on that data.

this is how you make sure you’re getting paid every month

So you've got your signature offer, your money-maker. But how do you make sure that the business is bringing in revenue each and every month.

If your signature offers a higher value offering it becomes that foundation for that baseline revenue plan. There are some people who are going to pay you up front and there are some people who might take a payment plan and decide to pay you monthly for that signature offer. This is really where the magic starts to happen.

Usually I see 30% on average pay in full upfront, which is wonderful, because then you have those nice hits of revenue in those big months. But if everything is coming in upfront, it does start to create a little bit of a challenge as an entrepreneur because now it means you've got to manage your cash flow really, really well so that you can pay your monthly expenses and pay yourself until the next enrolment.

That's one of the reasons why I absolutely love payment plans because it creates that revenue that comes in month after month. A payment plan or even a subscription based model can create that recurring monthly revenue for you. Then if you are layering your promotions, your enrolments for your product programmes or services throughout your offer suite then you are actually stacking the payment plans.

So I'll walk you through an example of how this could look like for me, just because I think that these examples can really help you to see things visually.

So let's say I open the doors to my signature offer at the end of March, and there is a 12 month payment plan
Some people pay in full, but some people pay every month for 12 months. So their payments would be from March until the following February
Then I reopen again in June and again, some people pay in full some people go for the payment plan. Then I reopen in September and again, some people pay in full, some people go for the payment plan.
That means by the time I get from March to June my monthly payments coming in have increased and then it will increase again and stack in September.
Yes, at some point people will fall off unless they choose to stay with me, which is the whole point of this offer. But it starts to build up some momentum, and my monthly recurring revenue starts to grow.

When I set it up on the calendar like this, I can see it visually. Because I'm promoting four times a year for this offer, and there's a 12 month payment plan, it means that things will always be overlapping, there'll never be a month where I don't receive payments from this offer, which means I will always be able to pay my team, I will always be able to hire more mentors to continue supporting my clients, I'll be able to pay for the software I need. I have to make sure that I can cover all of these things if I'm going to continuously grow.

So making sure that your payment plans overlap with your promotions and stacking that income is one of the secrets to predictable revenue because then you're never finding yourself in a month where there's no revenue coming in the door. It really does take the pressure off.

the game plan works

With this game plan, you really can pay yourself a salary that you want.

I know it sounds so simple. And it is. It's incredibly practical. And that is my calling card, I want things to be simple for you, I want you to be practical, I want you to be productive, I want you to be profitable.

I've been the breadwinner of my family since 2017. I work four days a week, part time hours, so I can be a mum to my children. This is how we pay for our life. This is how we afford our mortgage. This is how we do things with the kids. This is how we're able to live off what the business generates and how we're able to live comfortably. We're not sitting here wondering if we're going to be able to cover the bills next month.

It makes such a difference to know that you've strategically mapped out your marketing and sales calendar so that you have revenue coming in each and every month by regularly promoting your offers. You're setting yourself up for a few big moments when those pay in full clients come in and when you accept payment plans, and you strategically map those out and start to stack them, you're setting yourself up for recurring revenue from those payment plans.

The best part is, it gets easier. You start to be able to rinse and repeat promotions, it gets easier to fill the offer when you know exactly when and how you're going to run that launch how you're going to market it and how you're going to invite people to take the next step. You're able to start doubling down on what's working instead of starting from scratch each and every time. when it's time to go out there and get clients you have assets built. And by assets. I mean, you have things like sales pages, emails, social media posts, you have things you've been creating. And you can add a little bit here, tweak a little bit there, but use 80% of what you have used previously. This is how we truly start to work smarter, not harder. We double down on what's working, we rinse and repeat. We make the system instead of starting over every single time.

That’s a wrap on the path to predictable income series

So now it's time for a virtual celebration. I hope you enjoyed the Path to Predictable Income series and I hope it was incredibly helpful as you are working towards consistent £3,000, £5,000, £7,000 and £10,000 months in your business!

Now it's your turn to get into action and implement these ideas!

In case you missed it, here is last weeks episode - Chapter 4 of ‘The Path to Predictable Income’ series: The one thing holding you back from creating consistent income