Your Annual Business Plan for 2024
It's the beginning of the year and if you haven't yet made a strategic plan for 2024, today is your day! This is the process that I use in Awake & Seek and the process I use with clients in Consulting Sessions.
What is Annual Planning?
Let's first get centered on what we're doing when we make plans and goals. This is not going to be another year where you're pulled in a million directions by every shiny object.
Do I launch a course?
Should I go all-in on TikTok?
Is that conference for me?
When we craft a strategic framework built on a clear vision of what you want your business to look like in 1 or 3 years, it becomes a lens through which we can view all other questions and curiosities. You'll know where your time and energy are going, you'll have clear metrics to review the progress you're making on that goal, and you'll be flexible enough to change course if necessary and hold up each new idea to the path you've outlined for yourself.
How to Create a 3-Year Vision for Your Small Business
Thanks to our pal Jess Connolly, I've adopted the 3-Year Vision model. We tend to both overestimate and underestimate what can be done in one year. By keeping our vision at 3 years, we both map out room for significant growth and give ourselves plenty of runway to get there.
Your vision is a big deal, and while I recommend relative speed and decisiveness with the rest of your planning, for the vision, it's worth it to set aside some real time to pray, play, and reflect from a place of care and calm.
However you can get into a mindset that is so much bigger than your usual activities, do it. And without distraction! No Instagramming to see "what else other people are doing," no keeping your regular mindset in a routine with your regular stuff and your regular activities. This is the time for asking God for big things.
Your vision will probably shake out to be 2-3 paragraphs. Mine covers myself as a leader, our team size, the kinds of clients we work with, how we're perceived by the world, how big our programs have gotten, and how much money we make.
Write it down. It's essential to build the rest of your 2024 strategy based on this vision, and you'll want to review it annually for adjustments and maybe even daily to give it to God and get some energy for the day (or maybe that's just me, cause I'm nerdy for my own biz).
Choosing Small Business Annual Goals for 2024
Thinking about your vision, your actual life, and your regular business activities, list 3-5 big priorities for the year. Goals that feel actually accomplishable. For one of our clients in 2023, she wanted to open a new location of her social club and coworking space (she did it by summer), book out her co-working space for the year with events, increase membership by 10%, and define her role as the CEO and build a team around that.
Once you've got your goals written down, now is a great time to do a sweep of your standard business practices. The time that you spend during an average day, week, and month...are those activities building the business you want to have?
Are the clients the ones you want to be working with?
Is your marketing making the sales you want it to make?
Do those course and program investments actually impact your bottom line?
Turning Your Annual Goals into SMART Goals
Evaluating your goals, put some boundaries around them.
When are you planning to accomplish this goal? If you can break goals down by quarter (which we'll explore in a moment), that's best. Otherwise, you might be stuck with 5 goals all "due" in December that you forget to even tackle until October (yikes.)
How will you know that you met this goal, what are the metrics? Dollars made, days you say "I felt peace today," people enrolled in a program, percentage of profits donated, etc.
Before we breakdown to the quarterly and monthly level, now is a good time to confirm that YES, these goals will bring you closer to your vision. At the end of the year, if you become the person required to meet these goals, you will be thrilled. Yes? Ok, let's move on.
Break Your Annual Goals into Quarterly Goals
From annual, we need to break down to quarterly. PAUSE AND LISTEN UP -- Quarterly Goals are going to the MOST EFFECTIVE GOALS THAT YOU SET. I use a version of the 12-week year system, which basically takes every quarter as seriously (if not more) than the year. But even without the 12 week year system, quarterly goals are it. They're distant enough to see real change (we recommend 90 days for every new marketing strategy to see if anything changes), but short-term enough that you can see results of your efforts without losing momentum. So looking at your annual goals, can you break those down into smaller quarterly goals that make sense?
For example, we have quarterly revenue targets that are supported by specific quarterly goals that relate to programs we have launching around the time. So our first quarter includes a goal surrounding the success of Press Publish, preparation for our Brand Camp launch in Q2, and so on. I then break those goals down into monthly efforts. Press Publish and new client bookings take up most of my January, and then February has an internal goal that I want to make 60% progress on completing. March is focused on the Brand Camp launch plan. All 3 months include specific revenue targets based on our previous 3 years of data of booking clients (January is way higher than Feb and March). Realism! So helpful.
Some Notes on Our Goal Planning System
Plan One Quarter at a Time
I really only plan one quarter at a time. I have my annual goals, then the next quarter focuses, and then I just really hone in on what's important for that month. Because I have a larger plan, I know that I can focus on the next stuff in front of me rather than getting distracted by what'll happen in June or October. I also find that if I plan more than 6 months out, I'm usually just plain wrong about what's going to be important or needle-moving for me at that time.
Create Rhythms of Execution, Reflection, and Adjustment
Reflection and adjustment are KEYYYYY, especially if you're setting big-time quarterly goals. Create daily and weekly preparation and reflection rhythms. It's important that we stay in one mode at a time. I don't want you wondering "does this marketing content work" while you're writing the post. I want you focused on the work, and do the evaluating at a different time.
Here's what I do for prep and reflection:
I read by vision and goals (annual and quarterly) daily, or at least a few times a week.
I make my daily plans when I close out of work the night before and check them with my goals the morning of.
At the end of every week, I go through the reflection process in my Full Focus Planner, which is a brief evaluation of what was accomplished, what worked, and what didn't. Then I'll plan out the next week's priorities based on my goals and what I learned during that reflection.
I check in on marketing metrics typically MONTHLY. Weekly is hard to see real trends, and quarterly is best for real trends, but monthly has to do for making agile change. Review social post metrics and trends, funnel conversion rates, and anything else that you noted in your goals as metrics for success. It's great if you can write these things down to see larger trends, like quarterly or annual, but this leads me to my next point:
Keep Your Planning System as Simple as Possible
Keep it as simple as you possibly can. Planning can turn into a procrastination tool like ASAP, so get exactly what you need and nothing more. My weekly reflections and planning take about 20 minutes total. Daily is like 10. If you know that you're going to drown yourself with spreadsheets and trackers and Notion templates just to create the illusion of progress, then remove those temptations for yourself.
In our Consulting Day Hike, where we typically do this planning with people, we do 2 of them a year and that's their primary space for reflection and evaluation. Everything else throughout the year is a simple check in -- did I do the activities I said I was going to do, yes or no? How much money did I bring in this month? Which 3 social posts did the best and which 3 did the worst? Everything else is just noise.
How to Make an Annual Plan for Your Faith-Based Small Business
From your 3-Year Vision for your business, determine what 3-5 goals you want to have for the year. These should be big, aligned, and realistic. Break those goals down into quarterly goals that when added up over 12 months get you to your annual goals. In all honesty, I only write down 1-2 quarters at a time because I need more information for the later quarters about where this path really leads. I then break down the next quarter in to 3 months of goals, and then I hone the heck in on those goals during my weekly and daily plans, which I make, review, and reflect against my goals on a daily and weekly basis.
Your daily actions will add up to something — planning like this will help your actions add up to the transformation you want to see.
Examples
Annual Goal: Make $100,000 in revenue in 2024
Q1: Make $20,000
M1: Launch group program with 10 participants at $997 pp.
M2: Create 50 new connections and convert 2 into clients at $2,500 pp.
M3: Book 3 more custom clients at $2,500
Q2: Make $30,000
Q3: Make $30,000
Q4: Make $20,000
Annual Goal: Grow collective marketing audience to 100,000 people
Q1: Grow email list from 20,000 to 30,000
M1: Create high-converting email freebie through live research
M2: Promote freebie on social channels and 3 other partner channels
M3: Set up evergreen funnel for freebie.
Q2: Grow Instagram following from 10,000 to 25,000
Q3: Grow Pinterest conversion rate from 7% to 10%
Q4: Grow podcast downloads from 10,000 to 25,000 a month
Annual Goal: Solidify role as CEO with a team of 3 (from team of 1)
Q1: Audit time and evaluate genius zone vs. outsourcing opportunities
Q2: Prepare for new hires by document SOPs
Q3: Hire COO
M7: Write role description and publish job description
M8: Hiring process
M9: Onboard COO
Q4: Hire social media coordinator
KEEP BUILDING YOUR BRAND WITH THESE POSTS:
Craft an impact-oriented and achievable business plan for 2024.