Ep 26 - The CEO's Guide to Planning a Successful Year

CEOs and entrepreneurs get ready to transform your business game. In our upcoming episode, we're diving in to discover why planning as CEO is your secret weapon, unearthing the golden nuggets and reflecting on the past year learning from real life strategies how to propel your business forward. From profit plans to managing your most precious assets, your time, energy, and resources. This is the first in a series that is your roadmap to turning plans into profits. Tune in and let's amplify your success together. Are you a successful business owner who has a laundry list of ideas who struggles to achieve your big goals? Welcome to the CEO Amplify Podcast. I'm your host, Donna Dube, and my goal is to empower you to drive meaningful change and amplify your profits without the overwhelm. Join us as we provide actionable solutions for visionary CEOs like yourself to uplevel your CEO skills, to streamline operations and master strategic prioritization. Learn how to scale your business to new heights working smarter, not harder.

If you're ready to reclaim your time and accelerate your business growth, let's dive in and start this exciting adventure together. Remember, the only limit to your business growth is the one you set for yourself. Hello, and welcome back CEO. I hope you are all able to enjoy some quiet time over the day, time to spend with family and friends and just turn off from your business for a bit. Day, I'm so excited as we're marking the beginning of a very insightful series called the CEO's Guide to Planning a Successful Year. And in this series, we're not just scratching the surface. We're diving deep into how to plan for a successful year as a CEO, as a leader, done as an entrepreneur. Today, we'll be touching on the 1st crucial step, reflecting on the previous year.

Now I know for some of you, planning is not in your zone of genius and not something you typically want to do. And for some of you, plan for the upcoming year might actually seem like a monumental task, done especially with all the fun and all the excitement of what future possibilities are out there for 2024. This excitement and future really calls our name. And then having to go back and look at 2023 is not as exciting. But I want you to pause for a moment and recognize that the past is actually a rich a repository of lessons, just waiting to be discovered. How many of us find ourselves stuck in a cycle where we encounter the same hurdles, the same challenges in our business year after year. I know for myself I have, and for many of my clients, they're in the same situation where these challenges and hurdles keep coming up year after year.

And I want to help you break free from that pattern. Now, before we dive into the details, I wanna share a very compelling fact with you. According to a study by the Small Business Administration, those who engage in strategic planning grow 2 times faster than those who don't. So I'm challenging you here, my listeners. I'm not here just to share information that you only listen to. I challenge you to actively engage and implement these strategies because without action, the knowledge that you get just remains dormant potential. Okay.

So the question still remains. Planning is important. I can grow 2 times faster if I plan, but why is planning so pivotal? And the answer lies really in the progress that you wanna get to. If you desire to reach your goals, you need more than just aspirations and wishes and dreams, you need a detailed role map. Otherwise, it's like trying to fly without focus. It's like trying to drive your car, but you don't know where the destination is that you're headed to. And it's like chasing every shiny object that comes your way because you don't have a set plan of where you wanna go.

So at the center of planning for a successful year is really the strategic planning process. It's not just about crafting any plan. It's about creating a comprehensive roadmap that aligns with both your personal and your business aspirations. And your past year isn't just merely history. It's really a gold life of insights it helps us to know what's working and what's not. So when you start to reflect on the past day. I don't want you to just skim the surface.

I want you to dive deep into each month. So if you're listening to this and you're out doing something, you may have to pause or wait for another life, but I want you to get a piece of paper and draw some columns and some rows so that you have 12 boxes and label each of those boxes for the months, January to December. And then we're going to dig back into your memories. Some of them might have faded, but we're going to start from the beginning of the year of 2023. And we're gonna review your calendar and your bookkeeping software. And for each month, I want you to write down specific things.

So for each month, what was driving the revenue for each month? So for January, what did you sell in January that made you the most revenue. And for February March, keep going through the whole year, writing down what product, program, or service really drove your revenue for each month. And then the next piece of that is which products or services were you actively promoting each month? Now, if you're anything like me, what you did last month and the month before might be clear. But when we go all the way back to January, it gets a little blurry. So that's when you wanna take out your calendar and look at your bookkeeping software so that you can really get accurate answers to these questions. So what was driving your revenue for each month, and which products or services were you actively promoting each month? Life you find that you weren't promoting anything 1 month, just leave that blank.

By doing this, you're going to start to connect the dots between your actions and the outcomes, and this is where the real revelations lie. So as an example, let's say you to discover that a new offer that you tried out with your audience did better than you expected in the Q1 of last year. This is not just a coincidence. This is not just what you think. You have clear objective data, and this is a signal to allocate role resources to this strategy going forward. So this might involve doing more content around this offer, setting clearer goals for this particular offer, delegating more of your tea to your team specific tasks related to the promotion of this offer. Remember this isn't just hypothetical where I want to sell this. You have tangible evidence of what got results.

I know for me, I had a goal of getting in front of other people's audiences more for 2023. Role. And there were 2 strategies that I wanted to try out this past year. 1 was to host my own audio summit, and the other was to do several guest podcasting episodes. And when I reviewed and reflected, I learned that while the audio summit was fun to do and I enjoyed collaborating with the other entrepreneurs who had joined the summit. It didn't yield the results I was looking for. However, when I look at the podcasting, it certainly did.

So what I've decided is to try hosting a different online event again in 2024, but I'm gonna do this a little bit differently. And then when I looked at guest podcasting, this has been a strategy that certainly worked for me. I enjoy doing it. I like sharing my expertise, and I could see the results of this by expanding my audience and bringing new people into my world. So this is a strategy that I will continue to work on for 2024. Okay. So now we've kind of looked at what worked. Equally important is identifying what didn't work.

What should you be stopping? It's time to bid farewell to the should haves, and I know you all have should haves within your business. Over time, we end up learning about things and hearing about things that we should be doing and we start incorporating them into our business. But rarely do we take the time to review and reflect and actually see if that strategy is making a difference. Is it bringing new people into our world? Is it bringing us a return on investment? So as an example, I want you to take a critical look at your social media strategy. Is it truly worth the effort and time that you and your team are putting into it. What's the purpose of the strategy and which aspects are not delivering the results you expect. Taking the time to review and reflect makes a huge difference when you go to plan for what you wanna do for the next year. Alright.

The next piece of this is to look at your blood, sweat, and tears as the leader of this business. So your time, your energy, and your resources. As you all well know, these are not infinite. They're your most precious assets, and managing them effectively is the linchpin for a a successful plan. So going through month by month, I want you to review where your time, your energy and your resources as leader were going each month. Did you have some life scenarios that maybe crept up and took some more of your focus in certain months. Watch for the correlation between where you were spending your time and energy as a leader and your sales. And most of you will probably find a lag here often referred to as a sales cycle.

So know what your sales cycle looks like for certain offers and audiences. And as you go through your year and scrutinize month after month, you uncover instances where your time, your energy and your resources day be misaligned. Perhaps there were periods of burnout or almost burnout, times when you just wanted to shut the whole thing down, or maybe certain projects demanded more time, energy, and resources than you anticipated? This introspection is not just about learning from mistakes. It's about refining your strategy moving forward. And the final piece of this is you're gonna want to review and reflect on what you're going to stop and what you're going to do more of in the coming year. You see planning isn't just a static roadmap. It's a dynamic tool to help you be successful. So ask yourself, what did you learn worked well in the past year.

And what do you want to do more of? Right? We wanna double down on the strategies that are working. And on the contrary, what didn't work so well? And what do you want to adjust about the strategy or stop altogether? Because remember, this is your business and you have to do what's in alignment with you. Alright. I hope this has been helpful to begin to look to review and reflect on 2023 in terms of what happened month to month, what's working, what's not, and putting some insights forward into how you wanna approach 2024 role differently. Thanks for listening, and tune in next week for our 2nd episode of this series. Thank you for joining me on this episode of CEO Amplify. I appreciate you being part of our a thriving community of ambitious business owners. If you enjoy today's episode, kindly ask you to share this podcast with a friend and take a hot minute to rate and leave a review.

It would mean the world to me. Your feedback helps me reach more people and continue providing valuable content. Thanks so much for your support. Keep shining, and we'll catch you on the next episode.