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Today’s talking point:

In today’s episode, I’m going to be walking you through how to reflect on the first half of the year and plan your next six months in your business.

We’re almost halfway through the year so now is the perfect time to pause and assess and reset. Something that I love doing in my business and with my own clients is a six-month planning party. And this is really a time for you to assess your goals to make sure that they still align with your vision and the season of life that you are in and to schedule which goals you are going to focus on over the next six months.

As always, the goal here is for you to take this framework and adapt it in a way that makes sense for your life.

The main purpose of putting a plan in place for the next six months of your business is to assess your goals by reflecting on them, and the methods that you are using to approach them. We want to intentionally plan for the next half of the year.

There are five steps in this process: reflection, income goals, planning, the Quarterly Boss Planning System and calendar mapping.

So let’s dive into what you need to do…

1: Reflection

We start with this first because this is where you are checking in to make sure that your goals and how you're working towards them still align with your vision for the rest of this year.

It’s normal for our years to change unexpectedly so we need to update our plans and habits to account for that.

We want to reflect on things like…

What came true and what didn’t?
How do you feel when you look back at the last six months?
What did you struggle with the most?
If you didn’t hit a goal, what progress did you make?

This is not meant to make you feel bad. It’s meant to be helpful so you can move forward and make the rest of the year even better.

So if it feels like you haven't accomplished anything, really look back at your year in detail and celebrate any steps that you took in the right direction.

This is all about celebrating what you have accomplished, no matter how big or small that is. And it's fine. If your goals need to move to the next half of the year, it's no big deal.

We also want to dream big for the rest of the year. Ask yourself: what would be wild for you to achieve. Because your life is allowed to be better than you could ever imagine.

2: Set your income goals

Oh, yes, we're going to talk money: I want you to pick a revenue goal. And we want this to be exciting and stretch you, but also not feel impossible.

Setting one sales target will help you channel your energy like a laser beam.

And trying to hit a sales target should something completely detached. You want to neutralise your emotional response to that number. I know it's hard. But I really want you to work on this practice. Because this honestly, is just math.

It doesn't matter if you ‘fail’. It doesn't matter if you don't hit your sales target that month. That has nothing to do with you. And you want to always try to feel really good about yourself, no matter if you hit a sales target or not.

Don't put pressure on whatever revenue number you are trying to create in your life. And I see people do this all the time when they don't hit a goal. It's like this trap they fall into where they go, ‘Oh, well, no, I'm stuck’. Don't do that: you are preventing yourself from moving forward at that point.

So part of what we do with the income goal is we take it and multiply it by three. Scary, I know. But the point of this is that then we can ask ourselves, ‘if I had to achieve triple the results that I was originally thinking, what would I do? How would I make that happen? What difference In actions from what you did in the first half of this year, what different actions do you need to take for the rest of this year to hit this goal?’

I want you to think about what different actions you think you'd need to do in order to achieve that goal. It's not even just about hitting our goals, it's who we become in the process of trying to hit our goals. And it's growing, it's striving, it's moving forward, it's keeping things interesting, it's not staying stagnant.

And the number one thing that we need to do is to show up each day, for the rest of the year, and beyond, as this person. When I first learned this and wrapped my head around this, it just made so much sense because I always used to act the same way, but expect different results. When you say it out loud, it doesn't make any sense. But it's a really common issue.

3: Planning

Now we’re getting into strategy. And before we start circling, launch dates and things like that on our calendar, we've got to reverse engineer.

A big reminder I want to give at this point is: no one can do what you do. If you don't know what is working in your business, or what your priorities are, we can't really expect to know if it's working or not if it's actually moving the needle on your sales or not. And that's the entire purpose of your marketing system.

So we're gonna get into some more numbers. I have five numbers right here that I want to encourage you to know and be aware of in your business:

Total sales over the last six months
Sales you want to achieve by the end of the year
Total expenses
Your profit
Marketing metric goals (eg. Instagram followers, email subscribers)

This is going to help us know what we want to work towards.

4: Quarterly Boss Planning System

In the Busy to Boss Academy, we work in 90-day sprints. The six-month review is a big part of that, but we break it down into shorter chunks.

The first thing to do is get everything out of your head. Write a list of all the things that you want to do all of the projects that you want to complete, and then realistically, look at your months for the rest of the year and what you can fit in.

Now is also the time to think about the big chunks of time you want to take off. For example, when will you take time off over Christmas and New Years?

When it comes to mapping out launches, I recommend trying to plan no more than one big launch per quarter. You can launch smaller things in between, but launching every month will end up feeling so tiring and it’s unrealistic.

The best thing about this method is that it's going to give you enough time to ramp up with the pre-launch period and then come down and have that post-launch period. That's when you're able to spend your weeks off serving your people providing for them staying active and continuing to give away stuff for free. Plus, personally you get to rest a little bit and I don't know about you but I absolutely need time off and we need to not be wearing busy as a badge of honour.

Once you’ve got all your ideas out, you need to take a look at how this may look in your calendar. You should consider:

The pre-launch phase where you will clarify your message, tease and talk about your offer and start to remove barriers for people working with you
Hype-piece phase where you will have a signature event (maybe a workshop, training or even a sale)
Sales period where it’s clear how people can work with you
Post-launch period where you focus on serving and gathering feedback on the launch

That’s a very top-level overview of how we can plan out our sales periods. And you can make it work for you and tweak it to fit in with what you want to do in business.

Thinking about the next six months, there are two quarters so think of two big promotional or launch periods. What two big marketing campaigns do you want to create for your business? Once you dial those in, we can start to build your content and editorial calendar off of these.

5: calendar mapping

So first of all, I usually sit down on the floor, with all my coloured pens, pieces of paper, and usually my laptop. And the first thing we want to look at first is any ‘big rocks’ like planned time off. Pick a colour for that that really, really stands out.

This is going to help you see what is maybe going to be a quieter month. And it also helps you see months where maybe you're going to be really removed from your office, which probably isn't going to be a great time for a launch.

Next, go through and mark any holidays or awareness days where you could do a little extra promotion or PR. Don't forget to highlight things like bank holidays.

Once you've done that, the third step then is to look for opportunities for your launches. Now, I suggest that you have at least a week of pre-launch before your launch period, and then give yourself some buffer time with at least a week after your launch in that post-launch period to kind of calm down.

So technically, the shortest launch period that you could have could be four weeks, one week of pre-launch, launch week, post-launch week, and then a week's break before you start again. But for the launch itself, five to 10 days is a big enough window for that. You can even colour code it based on the different sections as well.

Keep in mind that your pre-launch period, especially the week before a launch, it's tough. You're finishing whatever it is that you are getting ready for, it's a heavy content creation time you're working on your mindset. Block that off like you would block out your launch week. And hopefully, after you've done this, you can start to see where your heavy months are.

Then you can start to see in the other months where you could maybe do a mini product drop or another marketing campaign or talk up some affiliate programme or host a £50 workshop. But you need to see where your big launches are going to land first before you put the smaller ones in.

Now, as I've said, I love planning. But I do think that there can be danger in planning. Sometimes when we think of our big plans for the rest of the year, a lot of times we're just tweaking what went really well this year so far this year. And while there is a lot of truth in that, sometimes over-planning and over-anticipating can allow us to miss out on some of the fun and excitement in it or some of the magic.

This is a sketch. We're doing it with sticky notes, wipeable markers and pencils for a reason. We keep it loose because magic happens in the margins. We want to be able to move things around. Or if you get an opportunity to travel somewhere or life happens, you don't have to worry too much about when your next launch is going to be because you can already see it laid out on your calendar, you just have to move some things around.

Your next steps

I encourage you to spend some time mapping out what your next six months could look like and what you want it to look like. How do you want to spend your time?

Your calendar could actually be a really good way for you to set some boundaries.

As you're doing this, I really want you to see windows of opportunity where you can just rest because your business should support your life, not take over it.

The final thing I want to say with this is that sketching out this plan can be tough. If you're a perfectionist, you may find yourself wondering if you can move things around want this is once this is locked in. If you feel overwhelmed at any point, I highly recommend stepping away. Even if you're unsure. I highly recommend giving this a try because I have worked with lots of different people. And this method means it's not cookie cutter.

You get to do this in your way, in a way that works best for you. We can build out a holistic plan that doesn't wear your audience out, doesn't wear you out and allows you to really enjoy serving people.