Permission Slip to Skip Annual Planning in Your Business

This transcript has been automatically created and minimally edited/formatted. As such, there may be some errors in the text.
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[Episode preview]
Annual planning often when you’re not ready for, it reduces your willingness to experiment. Whereas if we only look one month ahead, then what that can end up doing is it can help us to actually experiment to try things. So what if instead of trying to plan this super complex launch that’s going to happen three months from now, you actually let yourself launch right now and three months from now. And what if you knew that selling right now actually was going to be the thing that would give you insight into how you might wish to shift things in the future and or deviate from this other person’s tried and true launch plan.
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[Podcast Intro]
Hey, welcome to the Sustainable Success podcast. This is your home for honest conversations about building and running an online business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue. I’m Carly Jo Bell, the Sustainable Success mentor and your guide on this journey with self trust as your North Star and foundations under your feet, you’ll be able to look external for ideas, internal, for answers and build your business your way. Let’s dive in.
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[Episode begins]when you get to the end of pretty much any year. As a business owner, you will almost certainly start to see content everywhere, inviting you to do annual planning. And yet I rarely encourage annual planning for most of my clients. In fact, I often discourage it. This episode is to talk about why and really to support those of you who are already doing so many things to skip out on one more should just because someone somewhere said that you had to do it in order to have a successful whatever your next year is now, I’m gonna be really clear. Well, I’m gonna try and be really clear throughout this episode about who I am talking to and who I’m not talking to. Because yes, annual planning does actually matter at a certain point in business. Often. That point is a revenue marker usually in the multi six figures, but really, it’s not even about the revenue marker per se because what it’s actually about the people who actually do need to be doing annual planning or not even need to be, but would benefit from doing annual planning are the people who already have foundations across their entire business solidly in place so that they can actually plan with a decent amount of certainty into the future. I wanna show you what I mean. Let’s go ahead and dive in though. And again, most of my clients, most of my clients, most of our people that we support here at HCO inside programs like expand et cetera. You are the people that I’m talking to that annual planning more than likely is not going to be supportive for you and instead is going to turn into a little bit of a strategy, Du Jour, a little bit of a shiny object. A little bit of a, something that is going to distract you from all sorts of other things. So let’s talk about it for the most part. I do not recommend annual planning to, again a lot of my clients because they are simply not ready for it. And I don’t say that in a way of like, you know, something is wrong with you or you’re not good enough because you aren’t at the place to do annual planning, whatever. I literally don’t say that at all. I say it more as a, just like, hey, this is a fact, you’re probably not actually ready for this and that’s ok. And in trying to do it, it is almost always going to lead to disappointment and a little bit of a dip in self trust trying to do annual planning before you are actually ready for. It is almost always going to lead to you while I can’t trust myself to follow through or I can’t trust myself to stay committed to what I say I’m going to do or I get to, you know, three months into the year and I’ve already changed the plan. How can I actually like keep going forward. Do I need to make a whole new plan, et cetera, et cetera? So how do you know if you’re actually ready for annual planning again to kind of reiterate this? Because I, I do want you to be really clear here is that you are ready when you have already tried most everything that you want to try over this next year, at least once, if not several times. And for the most part, you know what to expect with every single thing that you are planning to do and you know that every single one of them is for the most part in the format that you want it to be in. I’m gonna say that again. How do you know if you’re ready for annual petting? Number one, you have already tried most, everything that you will likely do over this next year, at least one time, if not several times and you know what to expect from that thing for the most part anyway. And number two, you know that every single thing that you are wanting to do in this next year for the most part is in the form that you want it to be in. I can’t tell you how many times over the past five plus years in business where I have mapped out a whole year in advance of what I would be selling, what I would be launching. I would do this, then I would do this then or whatever it is and then two or three months into the year, literally February March, I already am behind on schedule. I’ve already changed things and I already feel like the elements of that plan were no longer aligned. And every single time that I did, that was always a little bit of a confusing experience for me because on one hand, I knew my gut knew that I needed to do something different than what I had planned. But on the other hand, I felt like I was letting myself down once again by not following through on the plan. Now. Looking back, of course, I know that I just wasn’t ready to create an annual plan because things in business were shifting. So much offers were shifting formats of offers were shifting. Price, points were shifting, names of offers even were shifting marketing strategies, marketing platforms were shifting so much was shifting. Even things that I didn’t realize or wouldn’t even imagine would be shifting were shifting. Not only that, but I had these grand plans to accomplish things that I hadn’t ever really done before or that I’d done once, but I didn’t really love how I did it. So I needed to find a new way to do it. And therefore I didn’t actually know what to expect from any of those things. I would have this idea of, I’m gonna do a lunch in this way and I’m gonna plan it out for this time. But then what if that lunch doesn’t go according to plan or what if I do that lunch? I’m like, oh, I don’t actually like how I did that or whatever it is. And so then when I actually got there and I would try to do that launch, it would not feel right. Or I would do it. And then I’d be like, well, that actually took way longer than I thought it was going to take to make, prepare for the launch or whatever it was. And so now I’m behind schedule and now my whole annual plan has to change because I truly just didn’t know what to expect with those things. This is why I say that in order for you to actually be ready for annual planning, you need to have tried pretty much everything that you want to do over this next year, at least once, if not several times and for the most part, know what to expect with each of them. And you need to know that every single thing that you want to do for the most part is already in the form that you want it to be in. You gotta have both of those things or else you just end up creating an annual plan not following through on it because you actually can’t follow through on it. Because when you created the annual plan, you didn’t know what you didn’t know. And therefore it often can end up leading to a lot of disappointment and a lot of it, you know, those confusing moments, like I was saying, where part of, you knows, actually, I can’t follow through on this plan. But the other part of you feels like you’re letting yourself down because you’re not following through on this plan. Another reason why I don’t recommend annual planning for a lot of people for a lot of business owners is that annual planning tends to make experimentation and a lack of desired results feel wrong when in reality, experimentation is necessary to building solid foundations. And a side effect of experimentation is that sometimes the result of said experimentation will not be the result that you desire. This is completely normal, this is a normal and even necessary part of the business building journey. When you try to follow a strict plan for how things are supposed to go. For example, even like trying to revenue forecast at this level in business and say things like, well, I need to make this amount of money in the first three months of the year in order to reach my annual revenue goal, even that can begin to limit your experiments to only the things that you are sure will achieve that goal. Now, that’s all fine when you already have your solid foundations. When you’ve already done all the things that you’re planning on doing or most of the things that you’re planning on doing. When you already know what to expect of them, when you already know they’re in the form that you want them to be in. But when you are not there, when you are still building those solid foundations, when you’re still learning what results are expected of certain things, when you’re still trying to figure out, is this the right form? There’s not actually many things that you can be sure will achieve your goals. And so if you don’t actually know what can achieve, let’s say this revenue forecasting goal, then it’s going to limit a lot of what you can and can’t do because it feels like, well, I have to do things in this way to hopefully reach that goal. But you don’t actually know what is going to support you to reach that goal. There is a time in business though where you have experimented so much where you have experimented, you’ve done all sorts of different things. You have really refined how you do things you really are solid on how your offers are structured on how you sell and how you market. When you’re really solid on each of these foundations. At which point you can actually know. OK, well, I want to make X amount of money in the whole year. So I’m going to try and let’s do like a revenue forecast here. I need to actually make X amount of money in quarter one to know that I am on track. To reaching that ultimate annual goal. And I know exactly what I need to do to reach that. But most of our clients here at HCO are not in that place because again, almost always and again, revenue is just a kind of like signifier here. It’s not a hard and festival, but almost always. You are in the multi six figures. By the time that you get to that point where you are now able to accurately revenue forecast, where you have already experimented a bunch and where you already have things pretty solid to a place where you’re like, I can pretty much be certain that by the end of next year, these offers are gonna look almost exactly the same, the way that we market is gonna look almost exactly the same. Like you’re gonna have that certainty. But when you’re not there yet and you’re trying to create some sort of annual plan, you end up limiting your experimentation and you end up honestly, sometimes this is how we end up getting into the place where we’re just trying to find someone to tell us exactly what we need to do, to reach that certain thing, to reach that goal, to be able to accomplish this huge and lofty annual plan that we have designed for ourselves. And this is where we stop experimenting. This is also where we often outsource some of our self trust and we give our trust to other people instead of trusting ourselves first foremost, always. And so what ends up happening here is that by limiting experimentation, you are limiting your ability to build those solid foundations because experimentation is a necessary component of actually figuring out what is this business? What are my offers? How do I market actually figuring out each of those pieces, experimentation is required in all of them and in limiting your ability to build those solid foundations, you are also then often limiting the results that you are able to accomplish, which then creates the exact reality that you are trying to avoid. By creating the annual plan, you end up not getting the results that you desire. Experimentation is so necessary. And again, when you annual plan too early in business, it often has a side effect of you inadvertently limiting how much you experiment. The third and kind of I think biggest reason actually here that I do not recommend annual planning to most of our clients is that annual planning often becomes a distraction from what you actually need to do because it can feel like when you’re making that annual plan, you have control over this theoretical future. Whereas in the present, it often feels like you cannot control what is happening right now. And so it’s in this way that annual planning becomes a little bit of a shiny object that you end up trying to chase. And it’s like, well, right now, doesn’t feel so great right now. I’m not, maybe where I want my business to be right now, things aren’t going how I thought they would right now, whatever it is, but I can control the future more than I can control right now. A common example that I see of this is like when people plan a launch for three months in the future, when what they actually want and maybe even need is to begin making sales right now. And often they’ll say like, well, I’m planning this launch for these three months in the future because I need to get everything ready to which my response is, yes, you might have someone’s tried and true launching plan, but I will bet that you do not yet know what is going to work for you, your business and your audience. So even if you follow this to A T, which also let’s be real here, you’re limiting a little bit of experimentation in that. But even if you follow this to A T, you don’t actually know if it’s gonna work. And the only way to really find out if things are going to work is to try things and not just work in terms of results, but work in terms of. Did you enjoy doing that? Did it attract the right clients? Does this actually work in terms of the type of business you’re wanting to build? So what if instead of trying to plan this super complex launch that’s gonna happen? Three months from now, you actually let yourself launch right now and three months from now. What if you let yourself sell right now and in the future? And what if you knew that selling right now actually was going to be the thing that would give you insight into how you might wish to shift things in the future and, or deviate from this other person’s tried and true lunch plan. What if you let yourself experiment and try things right now and not get caught up in trying to make this perfectly laid plan? Because what if that was actually the way that you could figure out what works and become even more confident in what is going to work for you when we start getting into this mindset of, I need to, I need to have this annual plan and and if we get honest with ourselves and a lot of that motivation underneath trying to create this annual plan is wanting to control the outcomes of the future, then instead of annual planning, what if it is just a little invitation? What if you actually looked at, what am I trying to avoid right now in my present? By planning the future again with the launching example, what am I trying to avoid right now by planning this big long launch to happen in three months from now? More often than not, what you’re trying to avoid is selling right now and potentially not being successful. So really all that’s happening there is that you are delaying the potential for not being successful. And therefore it’s helping you feel like a little bit better right now because, well, I don’t know if it’s going to be successful in the future, but maybe if I get all of it perfect, then I will be, that’s not guaranteed, that is not guaranteed. And again, the only way to come to a point where you can be for the most part sure that something is going to work is to try a bunch of things to experiment and to ultimately discover what is gonna work, what isn’t gonna work through the things that do and don’t work. It is through the experience of the experimentation that we actually can come to a place where then creating more drawn out lengthier longer term plans actually begins to be in service rather than being a distraction from what needs to happen now. So those are the big reasons why I’m like, do we need to do annual planning? A lot of us do not? OK. But then what am I a fan of in place of annual planning? Because I don’t want to just leave you with, don’t do annual planning. I am a really big fan of doing big picture visioning and dreaming. Now what I really mean by this is really thinking about like, what do I actually want from my life? What are those kind of big things that I am going to keep working toward regardless of how long they take for me to get to that result. What are some of the qualities, the experience of my desired life, desired business, et cetera? What would it look like if I allowed myself to dream really big? Put logic aside and say this is what I really want. This is what I’m working toward. I love the big picture visioning and dreaming because what that often does is it helps us to set a direction. And so even if we’re not saying, well, this is what I’m going to accomplish in six months from today or by the end of this year, we are saying, I know what I’m working toward. I know what I’m ultimately working toward. And this might be very specific things like, you know, it might even be, I wanna have a million dollar business. Sure. But even beyond that, it’s the quality of the life that you want to live, the experience of running your business that you want to have. It’s more the experience, the experiential elements that really matter in this big picture, visioning and dreaming. It’s more who do I want to become as a leader? Who do I want to become in my business with my clients, in my marketing. It’s more understanding that vision, it’s more understanding that experience than it is trying to say like this has to happen in this certain timeline. So big picture visioning big picture dreaming huge fan of that. And then what that also does is it helps us to get clear on our values and therefore our longer term priorities. So this big picture visioning this big picture dreaming, this is what I ultimately want here. This is the contribution I want to be making to the world. This is how I want to be living my life. This is what I want my day to day experience of running my business to feel like really good and clear on those pieces. We can then look at our answers and look at what actually are my values here and what actually are my priorities here. Maybe my values and priorities are to be healthy and that, you know, shows up in so many different ways. I want to feel healthy in my body. So I want to actually take time to exercise and all of that. But I also want to feel healthy in terms of, you know, I have beautiful relationships and those are contributing to my health. And of course, I’m also contributing to their health or I want to feel really healthy in terms of I feel really safe being visible and it’s really safe being in the spotlight and really safe, leading all of which are going to be requirements if and when I do take my business to where I want it to go to that big vision to that big dream, what are those values? That show up when you allow yourself to vision, when you allow yourself to dream. And once we have both of those things that again, they really set the direction, the vision and the values man, those are two big things that really can set the direction of the journey that we are taking. But then once we have those what I love doing, and this is even something that we do monthly together inside of expand is goal setting goal and or priority setting. We actually just had a conversation a few months ago in one of the client exclusive goal setting and live Q and A sessions about the idea of a goal every month, we do this goal setting session together. But sometimes in a certain month, setting a goal maybe isn’t actually like the right thing. Sometimes setting a priority is the right thing. Sometimes setting a focus or an intention is the right thing. Sometimes setting some sort of challenge for yourself is the right thing. And all of these different words have slightly different meanings and it’s not always about, I’m gonna accomplish this one thing by the end of this month, I’m gonna get two new clients by the end of this month or whatever it is. It’s not always about that. Sometimes it’s about my intention for this month is to rest. And that can be the quote unquote goal of the month. Sometimes it can be, I’m gonna really challenge myself to post every single day, this month. Ok. Now we have a quote unquote goal for the month, but it’s not necessarily that I’m going to make X amount of money or get X amount of clients or whatever it is. Now, of course, there is also room to set goals like I wanna make X amount of money by this, the end of this month or I want to get X amount of clients or there’s also room for those kinds of goals. But even when we’re doing that, what I recommend to our clients and expand is that they set that goal, set, that intention, set that focus, set that challenge really just for the very next month. Because again, if we go back to why I don’t recommend that a lot of our expanders do annual planning and frankly, just also a lot of our clients do annual planning is because annual planning often when you’re not ready for, it reduces your willingness to experiment. Whereas if we only look one month ahead, then what that can end up doing is it can help us to actually experiment to try things. And yes, I know some people out there are gonna be like, well, how do you know where you’re going? If you’re only looking one month ahead, this is where the big picture visioning comes in. This is where getting clear on your values comes in. And so you can set a goal, you can set an intention, you can set a focus a challenge for the month and you can run it through the filter of does this thing align with the values that I hold, does this thing align with my longer term priorities and my big vision if it does great, allow it to be the focus of that month so that you can experiment in that month, try things see how it goes and then learn from that, come back to the next session the next month or we do our goal setting again together and now have an even more informed perspective on what kinds of things you can accomplish in a month, on what kinds of goals you want to set in a month, on how regularly it feels good to set a challenge versus just a simple intention or whatever it is. But we are allowing space for experimentation and we are allowing space for you to try something this month and then next month to try something different or to have learned from what you just learned in this previous month instead of trying to fit everything that you’re doing into this big perfectly laid plan that frankly you laid the plan before, you actually knew everything that was included in bringing that plan to life. So as we prepare to move into this new year together, my invitation to you is really to honor where you are in business right now. And if that means that creating some big annual plan isn’t actually right for you just yet. I invite you to let that be true. Let yourself off the annual planning hook or even if you have already created an annual plan, let yourself see it more as a dream rather than a rule book. It is allowed to change, your plan is allowed to change. In fact, it’s probably a sign that you are going in the right direction. If your plan does change, nothing is wrong with you. If you have to alter your course in the middle of the year or even in a couple of months from now. And in fact, I bet that as you move through this year, even if you have laid this perfectly laid plan, I bet that things are going to change and that the changes that do happen are necessary in you being able to come to the point in your business where it does now make sense to create an annual plan, but we have to start from where we are with what we have in order to get to where we desire to go.
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