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:

It’s time to take control and design a business of your dreams. Let me share with you the strategic planning process so you can start designing a business that works FOR you in 2024.

Download The 12 Month Boss Game Plan

What would it look like if 2024 was the year that you outsmarted the hustle? The year you didn't have to work 24/7 in order to have a successful business.

I hear from so many women business owners who are just working crazy long hours.

They're doing everything behind the scenes themselves, and then it feels like they're always putting out fires because there's always another emergency they have to deal with.

Boss - panic is not a business strategy.

If your business is constantly in emergency mode, it might be because you're running it by default instead of by design. You're always reactive instead of being proactive.

When you learn to run your business by design, everything changes. Things begin to run like clockwork.

That’s why in part three of the Your 2024 Gameplan series, we're going to consciously design a business that works FOR you in 2024.

Let’s dive in.

putting the time into planning is key

I know you know the drill by now but as a reminder, I know how easy it is to get into a series like this and get so much clarity. However, if you don’t sit down to actually create and document the plan, all of those ideas and insights are going to fly away.

I want you to remember that every 10 minutes that you spend creating your plan will save you an hour in implementation.

Even though it takes time upfront, planning in the long term saves so much time and energy when it comes to actually getting things done. If you spend an hour or two with me over the five episodes in this series during the actual planning, you are going to save 10/20 hours in implementation. Every little bit makes a massive difference when it comes to your business running more smoothly without working harder.

This topic is so important because we want to make sure that your business is working for you, instead of you working yourself to the bone for your business in 2024. We want to make sure that your business is 100% aligned with what you want to experience next year. We are moving on to designing your business because amazing businesses aren't created by default, they are created by design.

your 2024 gameplan series recap

So far in this series, we’ve covered how to review 2023 in episode 1, and how to design your dream life in 2024 in episode 2.
You might be wondering why we're tackling business design after lifestyle design. Why now? Life before business is one of my strongest values, it’s hugely important part of my methodology.

So often I hear from female business owners who are burnt out, working long hours and feeling drained. This approach isn't sustainable. By years two or three in their businesses, they've lost inspiration and motivation, and their dream venture feels more like a nightmare.

How do we avoid this? By designing our business to match our life. Once you've painted your picture for 2024, as discussed in our last episode, it's time to put on your boss hat and delve into strategic planning.

the strategic planning process

The strategic planning process I want to walk you through is the same one that I've shared with all of my private clients to ensure that their business is aligned with their version of success —not mine, not someone else's, not their parent’s or colleagues, or societies’. It's about their unique vision of success.

This is so crucial because as entrepreneurs, we often get excited about all the ideas, and sometimes those ideas can turn into shiny objects that distract us and keep us from focusing our time, our energy, and our resources on the things that will move our business forward.

So let's dive into this strategic planning process.

Part 1 - your personal definition of success

Part one of this exercise is looking into your personal definition of success—a foundation for ensuring your business aligns with your life desires. Without this alignment, chasing professional accolades might leave us with a hollow personal life. We don’t want that, boss.

Picture what success means to you personally. What signifies success in your relationships with family, friends, partner, and kids? How do you recognise success in your lifestyle? Does it involve the freedom to travel, flexible work hours, or a specific living arrangement?

Considering health and wellness, it's not about crash diets or intense workout routines. Rather, it's about nurturing yourself. How are you taking care of yourself? How do you maintain your overall well-being and energy to engage fully in life? Then there are hobbies and interests beyond business. Yes, boss, you can have other passions! I find the more that we allow ourselves to have interests outside of our business, the more creative and inspired we are in our business. So how are you making time and space for those things in your life?

Reflect on defining success in your spiritual, emotional, or personal growth journey. What does success look like for you in these areas? Remember, you are the only person who can define success in any of these areas in your life. Without this clarity, it's easy to sideline these aspects and not prioritise them, this will ultimately lead to a lack of fulfilment in our lives.

So, create your own personal definition of success first, then we delve into your professional one.

your professional definition of success

Defining your professional definition of success is where you want to be thinking about the clients you want to be working with and what success look like in your creativity. Or the type of content you're creating? Or in the visibility you're creating for your business? What does success look like in your support system or your team? And how you're showing up as a leader for your business? What does success look like in your overall business growth?

I highly encourage you to take your time with each of these areas and make sure you've taken some notes down in each of these areas, each of these prompts and it will get you so much clarity about the business you want to be growing into.

Now, once you have that clarity, then we can move on to part two of this exercise.

part 2 - your dream clients in the new year

Who are your dream clients and customers that you really want to focus on next year?

This is an important one. When we start our business, we tend to say yes to anyone and everyone and then over time, we notice that there are clients we love working with and clients we don't love working with.

Nothing can make your business feel more stressed than clients who aren't a good fit. So as you build your confidence in yourself and your skills in your business, you really want to be aligned with the type of clients who are going to get the best results and who you love working with.

So who are your dream clients? What are their top attributes? What are the similarities that they have? What are the qualities that they have that make them so great to work with? Make sure that you're thinking clearly about who you want to be attracting and bringing into your business next year.

part 3 - financial planning

Then in part three of this exercise, we are going to shift into money mode. We want to have a real income plan here.

I know it can be so easy to just pluck a revenue goal out of thin air but we are not doing that, boss. We want a profitable, sustainable business where we are going to live our dream life from the earnings of our business. So we're gonna do a little bit of number crunching.

Business Costs: Calculate your business expenses and what it costs to run your business.
Paying Yourself: Determine your salary—this should match your lifestyle needs.

For example, if your goal is to pay yourself $50,000 a year in take-home pay or pounds, it might look like this:

Goal: £50,000/year salary

Business Revenue Goal: £100,000/year
Goal: £100,000/year salary
Business Revenue Goal: £200,000 - £250,000/year

In really really simple terms your revenue goal is usually two times your boss pay (your personal salary).

Once you understand what you want to pay yourself and what your revenue goal needs to be, we need to reverse engineer that revenue goal.

By analysing last year's sales—what you sold, how much, and at what price—you'll map out your offerings and adjust prices or quantities in the calculator to align with your revenue goal. This exercise ensures your offerings and their pricing match your financial targets.

part 4 - a marketing review

The final part we want to look at is our marketing to see if it’s actually working for us. This is crucial as what works for someone else might not be the best strategy for you.

How do you know if your marketing is effective? Well personally, I analyse my last 10 paying clients or 10 sales to pinpoint their source. Tracking data across emails, sales records, and intake forms provides insights.

For instance, I noticed an uptick in clients from my podcast, prompting me to focus more on it this past year. This approach helps us strengthen what works and leave behind what doesn't.

let’s recap

This process will bring you so much clarity about what truly works for your business.

Go ahead and dive into the prompts and exercises above to find the strategies that best fit your business as you look ahead to 2024. I know it’s a big step, but it’s important when thinking about your business’s future and it’ll often give you “aha” moments when you realise you’ve been investing time and energy that didn’t yield the results you wanted.

It's all about optimising your success based on what aligns best with your business, not just following the trendiest advice. This clarity is crucial because your business must align with how you operate best. So take this stage seriously, crunch those numbers, and identify what will make the most sense moving forward. You’ve got this, boss.

Here is last weeks episode, part 2 of the ‘Your 2024 Gameplan’ series, in case you missed it - How to design your dream life for 2024