Ep 27 - What Does Your Dream Year Look Like, CEO?

Get ready entrepreneurs! In this episode, part 2 of our series on how to successfully plan your year. We're taking the plunge and doing some dreaming into both our personal lives and our business. Imagine upgrading both simultaneously: being intentional with your time and energy while strategically boosting your business. It's not just about dreams. It's about architecting a future where success in your personal and professional realms converge. Join us on this journey as we unveil the secrets to orchestrating a life and business that resonate with us. Stay tuned for actionable insights and real life examples to have a life and business that fully aligns with you. Are you a successful business owner who has a laundry list of ideas and 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 yourself to uplevel your CEO skills, 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 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. Are you working around the clock, throwing every possible strategy at the wall hoping something will stick in your quest to build a sustainable business and reach your goals? I've been there, friends, feeling the frustration, the uncertainty, wondering if the hard work would ever pay off.

But now, armed with a proven process that I've used in my own journey and shared with countless clients, I want to share it with you. Imagine having a personalized 12 month profit plan, a role map specifically designed for your business, tailored to your vision and goals. No more generic solutions. No more guesswork. This is about crafting a strategy that aligns with your unique journey. I want to invite you to join me for the sustainable business blueprint, a 3 day workshop where we'll work together to create your roadmap for success. This isn't just any event.

It's a transformative experience where you'll gain real clarity on the steps to take each month in 2024 to make your business not just survive, but thrive. So if you're tired of the constant hustle without the results, years. If you crave a sustainable and prosperous business, join me in March for the Sustainable Business Blueprint. Year. Let's turn your dreams into a plan and that plan into reality. Visit ceoamplify.ca/sustainable to preserve your spot. Can't wait to see you there.

That's ceoamplify.ca/sustainable. Hello, visionary CEOs and entrepreneurs. Welcome back. As we step into part 2 of our series, I wanna dive deeper into how CEOs can plan their year for success. Now as entrepreneurs, our lives and businesses ebb and flow and are so, so, so interconnected. I like to try and imagine it like a dance.

2 people moving back and forth, and one has to know what the other one's doing. And sometimes 1 leads and sometimes the other follows. And today we're going to spend some time dreaming of where we would like to be 1 year from now in both our life and our business, and how the upgrades we envision for our life will seamlessly mesh with the strategic update upgrades in our business. This simple exercise that I use frequently with my clients has been inspired by Cameron Herold's painted picture exercise. And it's from his book Double Double. If you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it. It's not about merely dreaming.

We're actually going to architect a future where personal and professional success converge. Now some of these upgrades are about being intentional with our time and our energy. Year, while others we may find require more financial investment. For instance, being intentional with your time game might involve establishing a dedicated time for self self care or having focused work blocks throughout your week. But on the financial side, upgrading your business might mean investing in more technology or hiring additional personnel for increased efficiency. It's about envisioning your life and your business a year from now. Picture the growth, the achievements, the upgraded lifestyle.

What does it look life, and how do we get from here to there? So what upgrades do you envision for your life? I want you to think about this in bigger categories makes it easier to identify where we might want changes. So as an example, these bigger could be our health, our relationships, our hobbies, and even, you know, our material desires, things that we might desire. So possibly you'd like a new car or a dream vacation that you want to take your family on. I want you to spend a few minutes and dive into the details of what upgrades you would like for your relationships. Perhaps you want to incorporate regular date nights, make more time for friendships, or maybe keep, or even add on new hobbies or passion projects. And maybe you want to make some changes in the category of health as well to upgrade your current life. Maybe you want to incorporate a regular exercise routine or change your regular exercise routine if you're already doing one. Perhaps you want to have a meal plan surface to ensure that you're eating a balanced diet year.

Or maybe you even want to set aside some time for exploring mindfulness practices like meditation or prayer. I remember working with a client once who had decided to invest more time in her hobbies. And her hobby was actually dancing. Years ago, before she started her business, she used to dance quite often. But over time, this hobby became less and less prevalent in her life. And her current partner was not a dancer.

And so she had kind of let this pastime go. I'm sure we all have those circumstances where something we used to enjoy has kind of fallen off. So when she decided to bring dancing back into her regular routine, it really brightened her up. She was excited again and actually looked forward to attending her weekly salsa dance class. And this seemingly simple upgrade not only brought joy and balance, year, but of also really impacted in a positive way her overall well-being. And this certainly aligns with the data that shows a healthy work life balance leading to increased productivity and overall job satisfaction. So I want you to ask yourself what upgrades do you want to make in your life 1 year from now? Get in your time machine or your fake time machine and travel 1 year from now and then sit with it.

What comes to mind? What would you like to see changed or upgraded in your life? Grab a piece of paper or a Google Doc and jot down what's coming to your mind for what you would like to see, both in your health, your relationships, your hobbies, and maybe some material desires as well. Alright. Now that we've kind of explored the life side of things, let's switch gears and look at the business side of things. What upgrades would you like to see in your business 1 year from now? I think this quote by Steve Jobs really sets it up well. He says your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. So I want you to let that quote kind of inspire you as you think about the business upgrades you would like and the choices that align with your passion and your purpose.

So for some of us life management is a concern and we may want to look at upgrading our workflow systems use or adopting some productivity tools that could really make a difference for us. Financially, we might want to explore diversifying revenue streams. Maybe investing in some professional development for ourselves or for someone on our team. Or upgrading our current office space for a more conducive work environment. You can see the ideas will flow here, but take the time to do this exercise and actually write out what upgrades you want 1 year from now in your business and in your life. I know it sounds like such a simple exercise, but it's so so powerful when we do this ahead of where we wanna go. And it really is a testament to the interconnectedness, this dance between year, the visionary upgrades in our business, and the tangible impact on our bottom line. Maybe you dream of traveling more for leisure and for family time. And you have to know what the financial implications of that desire is going to be, and that helps you weekly plan your business goals to accommodate those increased expenses.

So now you're taking it just from a dream and from an idea, but to an actual attainable reality. So now that you have both business and life upgrades you would like to attain 1 year from now, I want to put some numbers to these dreams. This again does not need to be complicated and not scary. But we need to have some reality about what those increased expenses will look like in order for us to reach our goals. So to help you with this exercise, I want you to hop over to ceoamplify.ca/getpaid and download the Get Paid Like A CEO calculator. We're just going to use the 1st part of this resource today where you're gonna list your current personal expenses and then your estimate for your future expenses 1 year from now.

Based on those upgrades for your life and your business that you just wrote down. So as an example, let's say as part of my upgrade, I want to incorporate a cleaning service to help with weekly house cleaning. Or maybe I want to incorporate a meal plan service that year. Will bring nutritious foods right to my front door. Cut down on the time I have to spend cooking and in the grocery store. So both of those 2 things are going to increase my current personal expenses, and I'm going to need to account for that increase. Year. Now for many of us, we may not have an idea what that cost would be.

And if you don't know the cost of something that you want to add to your expenses, use. For sure, go ahead and do a little bit of research. But I want to emphasize here a little bit. Friends, don't get stuck in the weeds and go down several rabbit holes to find the exact cost of the cleaning service and the exact cost of the meal plan or of the trip that you want to take. This is just an estimate to help us get started projecting. We're not actually purchasing any of these upgrades at this time. Okay.

So it's just a quick, if I wanted to do this, what's a rough estimate of the cost. If you feel that this might set you down some rabbit holes, get a quick timer and set a timer for 10 to 15 minutes and be done. When that timer beeps, whatever information you found is what you put down. Right? So you're gonna map out all of your current personal expenses and what you envision for the future 1 year from now. And I hope this exercise really engages you and makes you feel excited about strategically planning. Because remember as an entrepreneur role life and your business are not separate entities.

They are threads woven together. So by taking some time to dream about where you want your life and your business 1 year from now, and then putting some actual numbers to it really helps you strategically plan for the year ahead. All right. I hope you're still with me. If you are growth, I want you to get to a total at the bottom of that page of what your future expenses will look like.

And then next week, we're gonna dive even deeper. We're gonna start reverse engineering your total salary and decoding what your revenue needs to be to be able to support this upgraded lifestyle that you would like. So we're role orchestrating the financial harmony that allows you to conduct both your life and your business with purpose. Alrighty friends, I hope this helps you see how to strategically plan and how to dream and make it real. Until next week, take care. Thank you for joining me on this episode of CEO Amplify. I appreciate you being part of our thriving community of ambitious business owners. If you enjoy today's episode, I 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 role people and continue providing valuable content. Thanks so much for your support. Keep shining, and we'll catch you on the next episode.