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My business planning follows the school year! 

A lot of people do their planning at the beginning of the year.  

I don’t.

I use the school year.

Because I’m a mom of school-age children and it just makes more sense for me.  

I used to do the yearly thing but then every summer it seemed that my plan got hijacked by the kids, vacations, etc.

So I switched to have my work calendar to follow the school year.  

Now, I feel more ready for the summer when it comes around and I don’t feel so guilty or like I have to work my ass off to keep up.

I enjoy my summers a whole lot more.

Here’s how I do it. My business planning process.

The 1st week of school, when the kids are out of the house… I sit down for an hour or two and plan.

I pull up my Google Calendar, you know…where my life is.

And I also print a yearly calendar.  It’s just one of those calendars that have the entire year on one page.

Then I grab some highlighters.

First, I download my kids’ school calendar and I insert all of their holidays and days off into my Google calendar.

Plus, I share them with my husband too so he knows when we can take mini trips or long weekends.

And then mark them off on my yearly printed calendar with a color that I choose for the kids.

Afterward, I mark off any vacations, trips or conferences that I will be away for in another color.

Now that I have all of my days off clearly marked and put into my Google calendar, I can start the planning.

I am a firm believer in 90-day goals.  

I did Todd Herman’s 90 Day Year and I’ve been a believer ever since.

He teaches that you should go big picture and then work backward to what you can accomplish in the 90-day chunk.

90 days is a reasonable amount of time to really make an impact on your business/life.

Then I set goals.

I set good, better and best goals.  

That means that I set a goal that is like knock it out of the park amazing like I’m crazy for thinking I could accomplish that goal.  

That’s my best goal.

Then, I scale it back a bit and make a better goal.  Something still amazing but seems more realistic.

Finally, I make a good goal that is basically what absolutely has to happen.

I don’t attach any personal feeling to these goals.  They are just outcomes of the work that I put in.

From this point, I have a good idea of how long it will take me to get to my big goals and I start planning the calendar.

I’ll have special focuses for each 90 day period.  

Keep in mind that this allows your plans to be more fluid and can pivot or change.

For example:  Say I want to set a goal to generate $100,000 in revenue in the next year.

Well, what has to happen to make that happen.

Currently, I only offer coaching. So if that was all I was going to offer I would need to work backward from the $100k to see how many clients I needed to work with.

From there, I would be able to set 90-day goals that help get me to that bigger goal.  

Like promotions or launches or webinars or list building funnels.

Once I decide what I need to do in that 90-day period, I work backward again and plan in 2-week sprints.  

Sprints are usually 2 weeks and I plan each task that needs to happen in that 2 weeks to move me forward.  

Once I’ve done that all of this, I feel great about my new year and know that I’m going to knock it out of the park.

This is how I plan out my year and it has helped relieve some of the pressure and guilt that come with business planning and kids.

 

Accountability = Success

If you do have big goals and dreams for your online business and you want to set up a solid strategy to get you there don’t forget I have strategy calls and accountability packages.  

You can check them out over at MommysHomeOffice.com. Have a great week and I’ll catch you in the next episode.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Thanks for Listening!

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Special thanks to Carson Baker for being an awesome sound engineer.  Until next time!

 

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