Plan Your Best Year on Your Timeline

So as we roll into a new year, you have the opportunity to leverage this New Year energy. If that feels good for you, set those intentions and take actions that align with your personal and professional goals. Or you can just choose to maintain your status quo. And if that is what intention looks like for you right now, staying steady, you already know what works. That's great.

This is the Entrepreneur School podcast, where we believe you can run a thriving business and still make your family a priority. This show is all about supporting you the emerging or early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO, while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is Kelly Sinclair, and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who started a business with two kids under three. I'm a corporate PR girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life is too short to waste doing things that burn you out on this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business owners on their journey and learn strategies to help you grow a profitable business while making it all fit into the life that you want. Welcome to entrepreneur school.

So I will say that it's really important when you're going through the process of reflecting, to give yourself some space. One of the main things that I find works well is to actually get out of your normal space, like, don't do this in your office, do this somewhere else. I had, historically, for a few years, taken myself on a little business retreat where I would like book a cabin in the woods for two nights and just take all my sticky notes and all my dreams and get really excited, and just like, order great takeout, take a bottle of wine, and just like, have the best kick off to the new year doing that, and that's something that I've loved to do in the past. I'm not doing that this year. While I'm going to Mexico, my husband's coming, and I'll probably spend a little bit of time doing this kind of thing, but it's not going to be an intense, structured process like it may have been in the past. Because really, I think what you need in order to reflect into set goals is some quiet space. So moving yourself out of your normal situation can be really helpful for that. Another couple of questions to ask yourself when it comes to reflecting on the year is what brought you the most joy. So this is actually in my workbook that goes along with my workshop that I've done, what brought you the most joy. And make sure you're always thinking about your business and your personal life, because you're building a business around your life. It's like life first business not what was that fun work thing that I did? Sometimes it is that for me, I'm not going to ever stop talking about that. I went to national and I spoke at a conference, so awesome, so cool, and I got to travel, and traveling is one thing that I super love doing, and that's the lifestyle that I want to create. So what is the business that I need that creates that for me? So what brought you the most joy? What are you most proud of? What were the biggest money makers? This is something you do have to actually look at. If you have goals to increase your revenue, you need to look at what was actually working for your last year and what did not work so that we don't spend time doing things that maybe didn't do. You know, have the ROI for you, even if they were kind of fun. So sometimes we have to let go of things. And then what generated the most leads? Because this is always something you need to be constantly doing for your business, is creating leads like visibility comes in here, right?

So of course, when your vision is, I don't know, I can't even think of an example, but there's multiple elements to this. And part of when I'm doing planning and guiding through the workshop that I teach, it's about your personal goals. I break it up into three sections, personal goals, self goals and business goals. Personal is like all of the you. Uh, like your relationship stuff, things that you want to do. I want to travel. I want to do things with my kids. Want to make sure that I'm seeing my friends regularly. Like those kinds of things, because if you're like me, it has to be on the list. It has to be written down as a goal in order for you to actually prioritize it, and if all we do is just put down business goals, then we're only going to think about our business and the rest of the stuff will fall by the wayside. And I'm not okay with that for me, so just think about whether you need to make that intention as well. The self goals are like self care health goals. I like to get my nails done every month. I want to make sure that I use all my benefits from my husband's company to get massages and all that kind of stuff. Maybe I like to get a facial every now and then try new things, like I wouldn't got my eyelashes lifted and tinted the other day. So if you're watching this on video, I don't have any makeup on, but it kind of looks like I still have some, which is kind of cool. I don't know. It's just something I wanted to try. So like allowing myself to do that. And then the business goals, of course, are money making activities, things you want to do, and what that looks like. And so one cohesive vision, breaking it down into those sort of three parts, and thinking about how those all come together to to give you like to kick you on that path. So it's a moving target, but you have to have one, right? So it is frustrating to go into a year or to just be completely unclear about what you're working towards, like, if you don't have a goal at all, or a vision, let's just broaden it to vision, then you may feel very disjointed, you may feel unclear, that may create frustration. So this is why it's so valuable to actually go through a process like this and to set some sort of a target for yourself for the time frame ahead, whatever that is, whether that's a year, five years, if you're big picture, 10 years, looking out, I'm starting to think, like, next 10 to 15 years I might want to retire, which is crazy. I haven't actually thought about the act of doing that ever. It's like, yeah, we put money away to save for this, whatever retirement looks like. But maybe that's a thing that's actually in my mind now, and I can think about what that might look like. So anyhow, I hope you've enjoyed this live rambling of how to plan and strategize, but also just give yourself some grace and space to have the clarity to create the vision for the year that you want on your own timeline, however you want to do it, that's the best way that's going to work for you.