Written by: Kathy Grassett, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Attention new and aspiring coaches, consultants, and expert online service providers who feel like they were totally winging their business plan this year and are now freaking out because they made little to no progress on their goals this year! Give me five minutes and I will share the five simple strategies you should include in your plan for your business next year, so you will head into the new year focused, clear, and confident that you know exactly what to do to start or grow your business and your income exponentially and not find yourself one year from now looking back wondering what the hell went wrong. Plus, I will tell you one of the biggest mistakes I see people encounter when trying to plan out future business activities and the battle-tested approach I use when developing a business plan that will forever change the way you look at yours.
I’m Kathy Grassett and I have spent over 25 years planning and executing multi-year, multi-million-dollar strategies and projects first in my corporate career, and now as a business coach for women coming out of long corporate careers who are ready to monetize their expertise but are frustrated and struggling to create a lucrative online service business. But what I’m about to share applies to all online service business owners.
When you’re just starting out and even if you’ve been doing this for a while, planning your business activities can be a daunting task. I mean, planning isn’t a sexy activity to start with so it can be difficult to get motivated to do it. Then, some people just aren’t planners. And, if you’re like many emerging entrepreneurs, you just don’t know what to plan for. What you end up with is one of the most often neglected, but critical, activities in your business.
So, if you fall into any of these categories and want to make next year THE year you break through, I’m going to help kickstart your plan for next year. Here are five areas I want you to plan for to make next year the most productive and profitable yet.
Attraction
First, identify your ATTRACTION activities. This is all about how you intend to bring people into your world. Because if people don’t know about you, they can’t fall in love with you and become your client. So, plan for things like lead magnets, speaking engagements, podcast guesting, joint ventures, advertising, networking, and webinars.
Engagement
Second, identify your ENGAGEMENT activities. Once your potential clients come into your world, if they’re not immediate buyers, you must keep engaging with them and let them get to know you, to turn them into paying clients. This is also called nurturing. There is likely some overlap between the attraction plan and the engagement plan because the things you do to engage with potential clients may also attract new ones, and that’s okay. So, plan for things like community, free training, workshops, blogging, promotions, and direct outreach.
Enrollment
Third, identify your ENROLLMENT activities. This is all about converting potential clients into paying clients and the programs you’re enrolling them into. So, plan for things like creating new programs, packaging up new offers, launches, and marketing campaigns.
These first three areas align with what I tell my clients are the only three systems you really need to run a 6-figure business. They represent the client journey ‒ attraction, engagement, and enrollment. Plan for how you’re going to execute that journey for your clients.
Revenue
Fourth, identify your REVENUE plan. How much money do you want to bring in for the year? Identify the mix of offers that can achieve that amount. For example, if you only sell one thing ‒ say a 6-month program for $5,000, how many of those would you need to sell to get to the revenue number you want? If you have multiple offers, play around with the math, and determine how many of each you’d need to sell to make your revenue number. Then break it out by month. Seeing it broken out at this level of detail makes it feel a lot less intimidating than blindly trying to achieve a yearly total.
Operations
Lastly, identify your OPERATIONS activities. These are the back-of-house activities that are needed to support everything else, whether to create new assets or strengthen what you already have in place. These are generally not revenue-producing activities but are important to plan, nonetheless. So, plan for things related to startup, your website, technology (email and scheduling functionality for example), hiring a VA, documenting procedures and processes, and upgrading your office.
Now, picture yourself sitting at your computer or with a big notebook in front of you to focus on planning your future business activities. Your launches, new programs, marketing campaigns, business improvements, the whole works. It’s so exciting. There’s so much possibility. You have something you know you need to get done or have a great idea for something new you’d like to try and then, suddenly, you think to yourself, “But how in the hell would I even do that?!” And then what happens? The must-have thing and the exciting new thing become these big black holes and you push them far out if you even put them in your plan at all.
One of the biggest mistakes many people make when putting together big, bold business plans is that they start thinking of all the things they don’t yet have in place to pull off the things they want to include in their plan, so they shy away from including them. They’ll think, “I’ll include that next year after I have some testimonials.” Or “Maybe I can pull that off once I’m further along.” And big, bold business plans become small, wimpy business plans that cause you to play it safe and repeat the same activities over and over. And you’ve heard the saying, “Current actions only get you current results.”
So, the best strategy is to tell yourself, “I do not need to know how to do what I’m planning to do.” Want to put a new webinar into rotation but don’t have a clue about the topic? Plan it anyway. Want to try a Black Friday promotion but haven’t the faintest idea about where or what to promote? Plan it anyway. Need to create and launch a signature system but don’t know where to start? Plan it anyway. Include the big, exciting things you need and want to do in your plan even if you’re not quite sure how you’re going to pull it all off yet.
You need to see these things all laid out in front of you to motivate you, energize you, to guide you. And the things you’re resisting putting in your plan are probably the things that are going to propel you to your next level. You are resourceful and you can figure hard things out, you just don’t have to figure it all out right now.
Because one of the most powerful and profitable things you can do to close out the year is to plan for the next year, I don’t want the year to end without you getting fully organized, prepared, and confident to hit the ground running in January, so you can finally reach those goals and achieve your most productive and profitable year in business. So, stop winging it and missing the mark. Allow me to customize this strategy for your business and co-create your business plan with you, so you can confidently ring in the new year knowing you are ready to make a lot more money with a lot less effort, in a way that is powerfully authentic to you. Contact me via my website, the link to which is below. I assure you, waking up on New Year’s Day bursting with clarity and confidence about the year ahead is just too good to pass up!
Kathy Grassett, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Kathy Grassett is a business coach, speaker, and leader specializing in career reinvention, business growth, and money mastery after a life in corporate. After a successful 20-year corporate career in IT, she had trouble adjusting to life as an entrepreneur and realized her lingering corporate identity was limiting her potential. Kathy now teaches clients her strategies for shedding the corporate layers that are holding them back and creating a simple but lucrative business model that will power them into exciting new levels of impact & income. Kathy’s mission is to help her clients surpass their corporate success by making a lot more money with a lot less effort in a way that is powerfully authentic to them.
