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If you're someone who loves creating memories or maybe you've been looking for a fun side hustle, you've got to check this out. Head to photoboothsupplyco.com/goldicker to get your free access and my special promo code. This is your chance to work smarter, create more freedom, and build something truly amazing. That's photoboothsupplyco.com/goldicker. I know constant change feels exhilarating. I know that a lot of entrepreneurs crave chaos and create chaos, especially when they have consistency. And so I want to challenge you to really look at how can you stay consistent and make minor tweaks and not try to overhaul everything in your business every single year. I'm Jenna Kutcher, your host of the Gold Digger Podcast. I escaped the corporate world at the age of 23 with nothing more than a $300 camera from Craigslist and a dream. Now I'm running a seven-figure online business that feels even better than it looks all from my house in small town, Minnesota with my family. Here, we value time as our currency. We mix the woo and the work, and we are in the pursuit of building businesses that give us the freedom to live lives that we love. I've always loved turning big goals into reality, and I'm here to help you do the same. This isn't just a peek behind the curtain. Come along with me and my guests as we tear the whole curtain down. Every week we tackle practical, no-fluff marketing strategies and host honest discussions on what works and what doesn't. Join me and my expert guests for actionable insights to help you grow your dream business with confidence, pull up a seat, and get ready to be challenged, inspired, and empowered. This is the Gold Digger Podcast. You know those people in your life that start decorating for holidays months before they actually come? Well, I feel like this is that for me, which is annual planning. I get so excited to do it. I feel like the older I get, the earlier I want to start. This is the time of year when I get so excited. I'm thinking about the fresh opportunities. I'm thinking about the things I want to do next year. I'm thinking about the vision I want to hold for the coming year, and maybe you're the same way. But before you get lost in a sea of ideas, I want to talk about how to create a rock solid plan that actually works that you can actually follow through on and execute. Now, if you're asking questions like, "Should I plan annually or quarter by quarter?" Or "What do I do about the things that aren't working? Should I double down or pivot?" Or "How do I actually audit this year to know exactly what is driving my results?" Then this episode is for you. This episode will be the encouragement to lay the foundation well for your year, and it will totally change the way you annual plan for the better. So if you are ready to set yourself up for a year of growth and balance, then grab your notebook and get ready to get nerdy with me because this episode is going to give you the blueprint to annual plan like a boss. Let's dive on in. With smaller budgets, shorter timelines, and sky-high expectations, growth is feeling really painful right now. But HubSpot is here to help. They just announce more than 150 major product updates that will make impossible business growth feel impossibly easy. Like Breeze, HubSpot's suite of new AI tools that will help you say goodbye to busy work and hello to better work. There's Breeze Co-pilot, a sidekick to assist with all your tasks and boost productivity. Breeze agents to automate manual time-consuming work and add expertise, and Breeze Intelligence to give you the richest, most comprehensive picture of your prospects, so you know which are most likely to become loyal customers. They've also reimagined their marketing and content hubs with new ways to create breakthrough content, updated features to generate better leads, and lots more to up-level your marketing and your revenue forecast. Get ready for growth without the growing pains. Visit hubspot.com/spotlight to see them all and demo for yourself. That's hubspot.com/spotlight. I recently did and asked me anything on Instagram and somebody asked like, "What is something you are excited about right now?" and I'm going to tell you, I am a nerd when it comes to annual planning. I love annual planning, and this is crazy because I am someone who even just a few years ago hated any type of plan, systems, structures. It felt too confining for me, and now that I understand that I've ADHD and I'm this really wild and creative person, and I am a visionary, I get it, but I think having kids invited me to bring more structure and systems into my life, not only are they required, but they help me show up in the ways that I want to show up, especially in this stage of life. I absolutely adore the annual planning process, and I think now is an incredible time to start digging in. If you are someone who, historically, you leave annual planning till December 31st, this is your invitation to bring it into your life and business earlier this year because not only is there still time to finish this year strong, but you are coming at it from a place with this renewed energy, this back-to-school vibes, which has scientifically been proven to be an incredible time for people to achieve their goals, but it is also a beautiful time where you are not overwhelmed with the holidays, you're not stressed, you're not on a sugar high or a sugar crash, this is a really beautiful time so that you kind of know here is the picture that we are painting for the upcoming year, here's what I see. So where do we begin? I was recently doing a coaching call with someone that I'm coaching, and we talked about annual planning for her for next year, and she said, "Well, where do you even begin?" I don't even know where to start, I just stare at a blank calendar, and what I told her is start from what you know. So if you have already been in business even just one year, you want to take the time to review your last year's numbers or this current year's numbers and the plans that you had and kind of how everything shook out. Now if you do not have a business yet, understand that the annual planning that you're going to do for this coming year is going to help lay the foundation for future years. So you actually want to spend some time doing this because what you do today or this month or this coming year is going to be what you're going to be working off of for future years. So basically your future self is already thanking you. So here's what you need to understand. You do not need to start from scratch, in fact I'd argue do not start from scratch. Build off of last year's numbers and plans and results. And so you really want to take a historic look at how this last year has gone, how it's shaken out, and this is also where I invite you to bring in any data into the equation. So if you're a solopreneur, this is where you want to look at your month by month numbers and any other results. If you have say an accountant or a bookkeeper, this is also where you want to lean on them for your numbers or any insight from them. So back in the day, when I was a wedding photographer, I kept track of all of my books. So I did all my finances. I had accountants help me with taxes, but I basically took track every single month. Okay, here's how much I'm bringing in, here's what this looks like. Now I have a bookkeeper and an accountant and they are running my numbers every single month. So every single month we can see profit and loss. We can see how many sales revenue. We can see all of those numbers, expenses. And so it's super helpful to have the month by month landscape, because a lot of times we're not really paying attention to money in, money out and understanding the bigger picture. And so for example, this year, I sent an email to my accountants and said, Hey, every month, can you just tell me three things you're seeing just from looking at our books? So they are not people that are intimately inside of our business every single day, day and a day out. And so every month they've sent me just three bullet points of what they're seeing. So, you know, Hey, this month your expenses were up. Is this like a one time thing or did you add a new contractor? What is happening here or why is this happening or this month? Holy cow, your revenue crushed last year's numbers. What happened? How do you do this again? And what do you account for that? And so it's been really helpful month by month having just even three bullet points from someone outside of my business that's looking at the numbers. And so I also leaned on my accountants and said, Hey, I'm about to do my annual planning. Can you just kind of give me a snapshot based off of this past year, what we've seen so far? What kind of things should I be looking at? What should I look for? What were our top performing months? What was happening during them? And so they were just pulling basically out of the numbers things for me to be aware of. So if payroll expenses are up, are we aware of that? Yes, things like that. So we do not reinvent the wheel each year. In fact, I would say for the last six years, essentially, since I became a mother, our business and our plan has looked pretty similar on an annual basis. So year by year, not a ton has changed annually. And so we're looking at timing. We're looking at what launches we did. We're looking at what our goals were. And most importantly, we're looking at what the actual results turned out to be. Now, I did an entire episode about measurement and data. And so if this is something where you're like, I don't even know how to report on any of these things or I don't even know what my numbers are. I don't even know where to look for my numbers. Go back to episode 726. It's called if you want bigger results, you have to do this. I'm going to link the episode in the show notes for you to listen to you. But this is where I break down what we measure in my business, why we measure it, and how you can start measuring your results right away. And this is a really great episode for people that are kind of at that next stage of business, where you want to get more nitty gritty, you want to have a more raised awareness and you want to dig deeper into the data. This is like where it gets really fun. So essentially, when we start annual planning, we start first by reviewing last year's plans. And so we're looking at what worked, what didn't work, what do we want to optimize and we're not recreating anything. And we also want to note important KPIs, which are key performance indicators. These are things like revenue conversion rates, lead generations. We're looking at all of those digits overall for this holistic look at how did last year go or how was this year going and what should we be aiming for next year. So the second thing that we really focus on is consistency over constant change. This is something that I see so frequently with small business owners is that they are seeking constant change and they are not doubling down on consistency. And so we're talking about minor tweaks, not overhauls. And so one thing that I have really had to focus in on and make fun for me, again, this like creative multi-passionate visionary is making it fun to have a rhythm in my business. Understanding that predictability isn't boring. And again, this is something I've had to learn over the years and I think that this stage of life having two young kids and being in this stage where like, I want to work part-time, I have to understand that like consistency is sexy right now. Like constant change, yes, thrilling, I understand it, but it is not the time or stage of life for me to do this and there is so much power in consistency. And so when we are working off of our last year's or the current year's plan, we are able to just do minor adjustment. So for example, we had a big affiliate launch and then one of our own internal launches that fell really close together this year and the timeline was condensed because of the election. And we wanted to just make sure that we were planning things out and, you know, not having to fight through all the media noise and all the things that come with an election year. And so for next year, we're like, we do not want those two launches to be backed back again. That was really rushed. It felt like a heavier workload. We want to be able to space things out. So again, we're just looking at minor tweaks and adjustments, we're not overhauling everything. Now two years ago, I remember I was in this stage of life of like, what is next? My book had come out, it hit the New York Times bestseller list. I was on this high of creating something new and putting it out into the world. And I remember thinking, okay, now what? Now what? And a really wise friend of mine. I remember sitting down with her and I was like, well, I don't know what to do next. But as we went on in the discussion, she said something to me. She said, the rinse and repeat nature of your business is the gift, not the burden. And I think that often entrepreneurs are always onto the next thing or chasing the excitement. I am putting myself in that camp. I can get just as guilty with that. And so instead of constantly creating new, creating fresh, starting from scratch, getting really excited about the creation piece, how can we make what we're doing or what's working well, exciting again? How can we add that excitement in? I was just talking to a dear friend of mine, she was three kids. We have literally like come up in business together. And she messaged me the other day. And she's like, do you have her daydream about just like shutting it all down, like burning it all down? And I was like, oh, yeah, I've done like full podcast episodes about this topic. Yes. Absolutely. We were talking and she's like, you know, I just, I can't find my mojo. Like I don't know. I don't want to talk about the same things anymore. I've been talking about them for a long time. And I said, now is not the time to scrap what you've spent years building, what's actually working. Now is the time to find ways to make the old feel exciting again. And so how do you add that excitement in? Maybe it is changing up your marketing strategy. Maybe it is changing up your communication. Maybe it is doing something you've never done before doing something different. And so how do you make it exciting again? For me, and this is very nerdy, but going back to point number one, when we started really getting deep in our data, that started to almost gamify the business again and make it really fun where we were setting these goals and then we could see how our efforts were actually tying to the results. And it took out the feeling of like, I have been talking about this topic for five years straight and it made it fun again of like, what is a new way we can do this? What is a new way we can get to that result? What does that look like? And so for us, the rinse and the repeat of our business has been such a gift. When I look at my journey as a mom and the work that went in while we were in our season of waiting before I became a mom, I have so much gratitude because I would not be able to be the kind of mom that I want to be and show up in the way that I want to show up without having this rinse and repeat nature that we built intentionally in my business. So for us, a lot of the things repeat from year to year. So we have this rhythm and this flow and we know when certain things are going to land better than others. And so different times of the year we know. And so we don't change our major launches or our promotions drastically. We just basically tweak based on last year's learnings. So in this last year, one of the things that was new that we did, which was basically a small tweak from the year prior is I said, I do not want to do any launches June, July and August. I want to be off with my kids. I don't want to be focused on the work. And so we had to move around and scoot around other promotions to make that happen, which meant we had a bit of a heavier spring and a bit of a heavier fall in order to give us a lighter summer. And so again, it's just wiggling things around and looking at the year at a glance in order to keep the rinse and repeat nature of the business with just minor tweaks and adjustments. So I know constant change feels exhilarating. I know that a lot of entrepreneurs crave chaos and create chaos, especially when they have consistency. And so I want to challenge you to really look at how can you stay consistent and make minor tweaks and not try to overhaul everything in your business every single year. It is so beneficial for you, for your mental health, for your business to stay on a consistent schedule and just make small changes in order to improve efficiency or in order to match your vision better. The next thing that we really focus on, this might be a little bit surprising, is subtraction instead of addition. We are not trying to add more to our plates. I don't know about you, but even as I go less and less and less, I still feel busy, right? And so how do we do this? How do we remove things that no longer serve us or no longer fit the vision instead of adding more? And the way that we do this is through a calendar audit. So years ago, I learned about John Maxwell's calendar auditing process and it's all about evaluating how you spend your time in order to make sure it aligns with your goals, your values and your priorities. So here's kind of an overview of what the process is. Obviously, John Maxwell teaches this in an incredible way. And so if you want to learn more about it, go seek this out. But basically what he teaches is that you start with reviewing your calendar. So you literally pull up your Google calendar or if you do pen and paper calendar and you look back at your schedule from the past year or if you do this on a quarterly basis, which I highly recommend, you can see where your time went. Now, something that's really interesting about this is even a few years ago, I did not really use my Google calendar. I wasn't someone who like kept track of everything. And over the last few years, I've been really cognizant of adding in basically everything to my calendar. Not only does it keep me on track, especially with an ADHD brain that can very easily lose track of time and appointments and meetings, but it allows me to do these calendar audits so that I can see. And so you want to review your calendar and look at what activities or events took up most of your time and what results did they produce. So I have meetings on there. I have appointments on there. I have self care on my calendar. Like I have it all mapped out and I even color coded it, which is a little bit next level, but it allows me to really quickly look at each month and see like, ooh, we were really heavy in meetings this month or man. I did a ton of recording this month. How did that feel? And so reviewing your calendars where you start, then you evaluate what worked. And so you want to identify what activities were productive, which ones brought you joy and which ones aligned with your business and your personal goals. And so the goal here is to ask yourself like, what should I continue doing because it's working well? And I love and this is why I think I really was attracted to John Maxwell's idea on this is that it's not just a calendar audit for the sake of productivity. It's also looking at like, what brought you joy and what was in alignment with what you say is most important, whether it's business or personal. And so evaluating what worked is such a beautiful step. And it also allows you to say, okay, what can I continue because it worked well? Now the next part of this is eliminating what didn't work. And so looking at your calendar and pinpointing the tasks, the meetings, the commitments that were either unproductive, stressful or didn't yield significant results. I have been someone and I've shared about this on the podcast this year where I have gotten really specific about how I want the rhythm of my weeks ago. And I recognize I am so wildly fortunate to be able to say like, Hey, I don't want to have meetings on Mondays. Not many people can do that. But if you are in a place of entrepreneurship where you are the boss, you are also in control of your rhythm. And so I have done a lot of restructuring over this last year. When I was realizing like, Oh my gosh, every single day I have like two meetings, would it work better? If I could just have one day that's super meeting heavy, but then that would free up the other days of the week. And so you want to look at like, what is not actually working or what are you dreading that's on your calendar? And John Maxwell emphasizes removing the time wasting activities so that you can make space for more meaningful work. And we're focusing on subtraction, not adding more to your plate. And so what can we cut out? And a lot of times we're the ones responsible for the things that we hate, right? Like sometimes I'll see something on my calendar and I'm like, who agreed to this? And I'm like, ah, I agreed to this. Why am I saying yes to these things? And so eliminating what didn't work or figuring out different ways to approach something that isn't productive or isn't worth your time lately. When people ask me to do a meeting and it's some initial consult call or something that I'm not even sure I'm fully invested in, instead I'll ask them, hey, can you record a quick loom or a five minute video or an audio note telling me about this opportunity so that I don't waste either of our times trying to coordinate our calendars and get on for a meeting. That way I can listen at my leisure, which is really helpful, especially as a mom because some days I'm like running in to help put Quinn down for her nap where I get sucked in the lunchtime with my family, which I love and I don't want to be missing those things because of meetings. And so I've been asking people and just saying, hey, this is a boundary of mine before we dive any deeper. Is there any way that we could just eliminate this initial meeting and get that information shared so that we can make those next decisions? The next thing that you want to do is make space for priorities. And this is something I've also really learned from Marie Forleo in her program Time Genius. She talks about like the big rocks. Like what are the big things in your life because there's that whole story of like if you fill a jar with sand verse and you try to stick your big rocks on top, they're not going to fit. But if you put your big rocks, AKA your big priorities, your values in first, all the little sand pieces will fit around it. I probably just put your that analogy, but you get the picture. And so after cutting out what's unnecessary, this is where we want to refocus our calendar around the high priority test that align with your goals and bring value to your life in your business. And so this is how having no meetings on Mondays makes space for priorities like deep work, like Mondays are the days where I'm excited to get back into the work. I'm putting my head down. This is where I do a lot of writing, a lot of creating, a lot of ideating. And so if I had, you know, a random call at 10 30 and random call at 1 p.m., like that would totally eat into that big priority of doing deep work in my business. And so when you do this calendar on it and you start to subtract and you start to see what is adding value, it also allows you to make space for your priorities. And then the last piece, which I think is so, so, so important is focusing on rest and renewal. So John Maxwell, while I love that he also focuses on joy, he really prioritizes the importance of rest. And so he suggests creating more space in your calendar for personal time and rest to avoid burnout and maintain productivity. And I think this is so powerful and especially if you are someone who's listening to this who is a caretaker and you are someone, whether you're chasing around kids or you're taking care of your partner or your parents or whatever that is, setting a side time that is very specific for you and your rest and your renewal, where you're not getting sucked into chores or tasks and you are actually just focused on renewing your spirit. I think that is so powerful. It is easier said than done, absolutely. But when you do a calendar audit, you can really see like, what does that look like for me? And when do I recharge? Last Friday, I brought Coco to school and I went to yoga with one of my friends. And then I went to the nail salon. I had not gotten my nails done in months and months and months. And I just had this like two hour window to myself. And I felt like a brand new human being. And so looking at like, how can you steal in little time? It could literally be just to sit outside or go on a walk. But what does that look like? And the entire goal of this auditing process is just to create more awareness and intentionality around how you allocate your time and your energy. It's about subtracting what is unnecessary and amplifying what matters the most to you. And so doing a calendar audit and I would recommend doing it quarterly just because it gives you time to course correct before the years over helps to give you actionable steps, helps for you to identify like high stress periods, cut out things, get more renewal, rest, enjoy on your calendar before you finish the year and you're like, I have no idea what just happened. So if you do not have a calendar audit process, I highly recommend adding that to your plates. I know this is about subtracting, but in adding this one piece, even if it's just one hour every quarter, it can really help you stay in alignment and reassess like are the goals that I set months ago still in alignment with what is most important in my life right now. The next thing that we focus on is analyzing results. So we talked a little bit about data and I think data is so powerful, but really looking at okay, what worked, what didn't and what felt good. And so this is a holistic view of your year by examining your numbers. Yes, but also considering how did you feel in the process like, did this actually feel good to you? One of my friends is in a launch right now and she sent me a message and she said, I am not doing this again next year. I'm not doing it like this and I had to laugh because I was like, every single year you say this, every year you say this to me, she said, no, no, no, next year, I am totally switching this up. I am not doing it in this way. I can't handle all this pressure and this stress, this is just too much. And I just smiled to myself and I told her, I said, record a voicemail right now to the future you and I want you to tell her how you feel right now and why you are committed to not doing it this way again. And sometimes we need to literally document the stressful periods or the really hard times or the times where we're too overwhelmed to keep going so that we remember them because a lot of times we have deja vu, especially if we are only looking at results because a lot of times our intense efforts yield really great results. But if it doesn't feel good, I would challenge you that it is not the way forward. It is not meant for you. Even when I think about like this summer and how June, July and August, we didn't launch it all like I loved that and I wrote a note to myself saying, I want to make sure that next year I prioritize that same freedom for family time, for our team. And this was a test, right? It was something that we hadn't done. It was with a few small tweaks from the prior year saying, we're going to move this June launch into May and I know it's going to pack in our spring a little bit, but it's going to be worth it for June, July and August and it totally was. And so again, if you are someone who is prone to forget stress or you keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, even after swearing that you wouldn't record voice memos for yourself, save them so that you can viscerally remember how certain things felt. And so leave these memos for yourself so that when you go to plan and you start setting things up again, you are reminded and also do it for the joyful times, like the times where you feel free and expansive and you're excited and you're enlightened, like record voice memos for that too. I just know that often we are prone to forget the pain and so we continue to put ourselves through that. And we forget about it. And I remember when I was a wedding photographer, the first year I shot 25 weddings, the next year I did 27, the next year I did 30 and I was just climbing up. And I remember during the wedding season, it was such a grind. But then in the off season, I would totally forget about it and I would just book myself up to the max again for the next year and I was like, wait a minute, I can't keep doing this because when I'm in it, it is so hard and it is so stressful and so intense. When I'm out of it, I forget about all of that. And so I keep doing that to myself and kept myself on that cycle until I finally broke it. And so you want to review again, both quantitative like numbers and results and qualitative personal satisfaction, energy, joy and look at all of that in a holistic way. The next thing that we focus on is deciding what we want to rework and deciding what we want to double down on. And so when reviewing past results, something that I think a lot of people don't do enough is identifying what is worth improving and what you should focus on scaling. And now it is easy to want to throw energy into making something work that didn't work that you thought would work. But a lot of times your efforts might be better spent on focusing and doubling down on what is already working. And so a lot of times as entrepreneurs, when we have an idea or when we put something out there and we think it's going to hit and it doesn't hit like we should, we decide we are going to rework this, we're going to make it work. I don't know why it didn't work, but we're going to figure it out. And we have all been there. I've been there a million times. But one thing that I've recognized is instead of wasting time, money and resources on things that maybe didn't work as well as we thought they were going to, look at what did work and double down on that. And so I like to pull numbers and again, going back to data to see what efforts gave us the best results. And it's really interesting. We had this launch earlier this year as kind of a micro launch and we thought it was totally going to crush it. And it just didn't. And it was interesting because in that time we brought on a new team member and she was really dead set on figuring out, okay, how do we get this to pick up? And I loved it because I was like, I thought this was going to land different too. We were all in, we're like, okay, let's try it from the single. Let's try it from the single. What if we include it here? And finally, I was like, you know what? What if we just let this go? It didn't work as well as we thought it would. It didn't land the way we thought it would. But let's shift our gaze to what is already working, what has already worked in the past. What if we put all of these same efforts that we were just to prove ourselves right that this should have landed better than it did and we put it on what's already working? What would that look like? And I think that this is a powerful pivot for a lot of entrepreneurs because Pareto's principle is often at play where it says 80% of your results usually come from 20% of your efforts. And a lot of times we get that flipped and so we're doing 80% of our efforts on things and we're scattered and we're doing too much at once to get 20% of our results. And when I think of Pareto's principle, it really reminds me that there are just a few things that work really well. And if we focus our energy and efforts on those things that already work really well, we can definitely double down and amplify our results with less work. And so when you are spread too thin or your ego is saying, I've got to figure out how to make this land. It should have done better than it did. You might be missing opportunities to just focus in on what is already working for you or what has already worked in the past. The last thing that I think is so important when it comes to annual planning and something that I think you should consider inviting into your life is planning out one quarter at a time, avoiding overwhelm by including just one big focus per quarter. So what we like to do is I like to plan the entire year at a glance. And when I do that, I break the year up into quarters and each quarter has one big focus. So for us, since our business is the digital online space, we do one big online launch per quarter. And so I love breaking it down into the annual, but I hold those annual plans loosely, right? There's room for flexibility. There's room for change, but overall, we know what's coming. We know what that year is going to look like, but when we do it down quarter by quarter, it gives us more of a nitty gritty timeline of what needs to happen. This was when I was telling my coaching client the other day, as I said, let's go quarter by quarter and plan out one big project or initiative per quarter. Not only does it give your team, if you have a team time to do all of the other things beyond just the big launch, but it allows you to have this shared focus and big goals that you are actually actively tracking and making sure that you are following through on. So for us, we break our year into quarters. We plan one large, high impact project per quarter. And that gives us more space for personal life, for rest, for the behind the scenes work that we all love doing. And so plan one quarter at a time, avoid overwhelm and really look because you'll be able to see when you look at this focus of one big thing per quarter, you can see where you probably need to subtract things, where you need to evaluate, okay, what will move the needle the most here. And that can oftentimes help you get clarity on what is this quarter's big goal? What is the initiative here? What is this going to look like? It also helps from an annual planning standpoint when it comes to accounting because you can kind of know what to expect having that sort of rhythm. And so we do one quarter at a time and that's where we get really nitty gritty. So for example, I was just mapping out our entire blog calendar for the next quarter, as well as our email marketing plan for the next quarter. So when we get to that quarter, that's where we get into the minutia, the like little decisions that we need, but we know, okay, here's the overarching one big goal for this quarter. Here's how we're going to plan everything around it. So again, big annual plan, doing the calendar audit, getting clarity using past information to guide your decisions forward. When you do the calendar audit, looking for opportunities for joy, looking for opportunities to subtract, looking for opportunities to focus on rest and renewal and making space for what you say is most important to you, analyzing your results. So looking at what worked, what didn't work, and also what felt good, what brought joy, and then deciding what you should rework and what you should double down on. So seeing if Pareto's principle is at play, which you will see very clearly if you get into your numbers and data. And then lastly, planning one quarter at a time. So yes, you have your year at a glance mapped out, but what is that quarter one going to look like? What is that one big thing that you're setting out to achieve? All right, that is a whole recap of how we approach annual planning. Again, this is something I get so excited about. For us, we do our annual planning in a Google Doc. So this is a shared document with my team. And what I do is I map out every single month with the big focus, again, of each quarter at play, really highlighted, I map out different spaces where we have kind of slower months and what we want to be focusing on behind the scenes. And then I map out the different campaigns and the timing of those campaigns so that we can kind of see each person in their position understands when their big time to shine is within the brand. And we hold these plans loosely with room for flexibility given life is constantly changing before us. Your annual plan is about building off of what you know, whether it's last year's successes or the failures and making minor adjustments. I think the biggest thing that I want to encourage you to do is to protect time for what matters most for you. Of course, do not overhaul every single thing. You do not need to scrap it and start fresh. Sometimes a few small tweaks can make all of the difference. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you loved this nerdy annual planning episode as much as I did. I cannot wait to see how you make the upcoming year your best year yet. And thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Thank you for letting me pour into you this year. I can't wait to see what this new year will bring. I know we've still got some time to crush this year. So until next time, gold diggers, keep on jigging your biggest goals. Thanks for pulling up a seat for another episode of the gold digger podcast. I hope today's episode fueled you with inspiration gave you information that you can turn into action and realign you with your true north in life and business. If you've enjoyed today's episode, head on over to golddiggerpodcast.com for today's show notes, discount codes for our sponsors, freebies to fuel your results, and so much more. And if you haven't yet, make sure you're subscribed so that you never miss a future show. We'll see you next time gold diggers. [MUSIC]
