How to Create Your Ideal Business Year (Without Burnout-y Goals)

So it’s time to plan for a fresh start, a new year is almost here. You’d love to go into 2026 knowing exactly what you’re doing, what to focus on, what to plan for, exactly what steps you need to take to achieve your goals. That is, if we even know what our goals are yet.

If we don’t sit down and answer a few key questions first about what we want next year to look like, all that planning and plotting for 2026 will never come to fruition.

In this episode, I’ll walk you through a reflection exercise that I do at the end of every single year, one that helps me to get in touch with how I’m actually feeling, what I really need, and the steps I need to take to get there in 2026.

I am so excited for this episode, it’s a companion episode, the follow up to last week’s episode, episode 267 all about reflecting on 2025, so if you haven’t done that exercise yet, I highly recommend that you do that as well, so that we reflect on how this year went, which is really going to inform what your answers are to all of my questions that I have waiting for you in today’s episode.

Speaking of the questions that I have waiting for you in today’s episode, I’ve created a free annual planner guide for you that you can download down in the show notes. It gives you all of the questions I’m about to ask you in this episode with places to fill in the blanks, reflect and even keep track of the data that you wanna set goals for in 2026. So before you go, make sure you grab that guide.

Okay, so before we get into today’s episode, I hope you don’t mind, I sort of had an idea, here’s the backstory. So I went to Mexico last month for, uh, a mastermind retreat with like a hundred other entrepreneurs and one of the days of the retreat there was this like game that we all had to play at these tables where we each had to share a strategy, a business strategy, that’s working for us. And, and then everybody at the table voted for who had the best strategy at their table. I won that vote. And then we had to present our strategy to the whole room, and there was a vote around who had the best strategy in the entire room and I was one of the people who won, uh, a prize for sharing my strategy. And so I got these really cool connection cards, these like, uh, question conversation cards called more, Tell Me More. And I thought it might be a fun little segment on the show and I’m gonna test it out today if I randomly pull one of these cards, so I will not have looked, I feel like a magician, but I have not seen these cards ahead of time.

I have not reviewed these cards in advance. I’ve never seen these cards before. So I’m gonna randomly pull a card from this deck, answer it, and I’m gonna invite you to answer it as well. Write it down, journal about it. I would love it obviously if you dmd me or, or sent me an email and let me know what your answer was to it, or if just something kind of cool came up for it.

I thought these questions were really cool at the retreat, so let’s do it. Okay, so just for proof, we are shuffling. I have not seen these cards before, we are shuffling, we are gonna pick a random card. Okay. Here goes nothing.

First card, by the way, after I pick this card and I answer it, I need you to write to me and tell me whether you want me to keep doing this segment. ‘Cause I’m not gonna do it in January unless you write to me and be like, yeah, I like this. All right. Here’s the first card. What conversation or encounter with a stranger will you never forget? Okay, I’m just gonna say the first thing that came to mind for me. The encounter with a stranger that I will never forget is that Ryan, my husband and I were walking through a neighborhood in Amman, Jordan, and we were lost. We were looking for a mosque that we wanted to go see, a really famous mosque, and we were in this like very hilly mountainy neighborhood and we couldn’t find our way and we’re walking through this neighborhood and I see a man standing on the porch of his house and just the Philadelphian, now New Yorker lady that I am, I see this guy and I’m like, Hey, how do you get to the mosque?

You know? And that’s all I say, right? Like, hi, nice to meet you. Like, no, I just said, hi, how do you get to the mosque? And he looks at me and he says, that’s not how you do it. And I was like, no, I know I can’t get there like, I can’t figure it out. That’s what I, that’s why I’m asking you. He said, that’s not how you ask a stranger a question.

And I was just so like stunned and immediately he followed it up with, when you meet somebody for the first time, you have a conversation with them, you ask them a question, you don’t just get what you want. That’s such an American thing. And I was like, so, uh, embarrassed in a good way where it was just like, whoa, that is so true.

Where I come from, you know, you’re just like, where’s the bathroom? Where is this? What is that? You know, gimme this, gimme that. It’s, there’s no pleasantries, right? This is a lesson that I’ve carried with me ever since this happened. But the other thing that ended up happening from this is that he said, he said after he told me that you don’t, you don’t just ask like that.

He said, come inside and I was like, oh boy. This is the end of it. Like, I’m, I’m gonna get killed. This guy’s gonna kill me now because he is mad that I. Didn’t ask a question. He invites us inside. He go and gets, he goes and gets his wife, he asks his wife to come out, introduces us to his wife, and then his wife proceeds to make us incredible mint tea.

She made hummus from scratch. She had pita, like technically pita- type bread that she had baked that day. She like cut up all these vegetables for us. We ended up sitting around and talking to him and his wife for hours. They were amazing. We never went to the mosque. We ended up going to dinner with them later that night and they then took us to a bar in Amman, Jordan called um, uncle Sam’s because you can’t drink alcohol there.

And this bar is like a kind of this speakeasy underground bar that they took us to. And they just thought that was so funny. And they wanted to watch Arab Idol with us, which we did, yeah. And we still email him. And keep in touch. So that is the best stranger interaction I’ve ever had in my life, and I don’t know that I’ll ever beat it.

Okay. That’s my answer. I wanna know what’s your answer to what conversation or encounter with a stranger will you never forget? I also wanna know if you want me to keep doing this segment, ’cause I don’t know. I think it sounds pretty fun, but you tell me.

All right, let’s get into the meat of today’s episode and I wanna know, what we’re all thinking about 2026. I know that there’s like so much pressure this time of year to have it, I don’t know, to like plan, plan, plan, have everything together and you’re kind of like, this year’s not even over yet or maybe you feel like this year was just a lot. I went to that retreat in Mexico that I was talking about where, where I won the cards and you know, so many people, very open, like, and vulnerably shared that this year was brutal for them. Um, that this year didn’t go as expected. A lot of people talked about how their businesses didn’t do as well this year that they just felt, or like, whether it was financially or they just feel like disconnected or people wanna get off social media.

Like, I just feel like this has been a very, very disruptive year in many, many ways. So all that being said, I’m not doing this or doing this episode to say like, you have to have a perfect plan and execute exactly on this plan, or I’m definitely not putting you down.

If there’s some ambiguity or confusion on your part as to what really you wanna do or how things go, or if you reflect and you’re like, this year was shit, actually, like this year wasn’t very good. It didn’t go as planned. A bunch of stuff happened. A bunch of things didn’t happen that were supposed to happen, and it sucks like that, that’s okay. That happens. I think it’s really helpful though to take a moment and pause and honor that, regardless of whether it was a super positive year or whether it was like, uh, it could have been better, you know?

So if I was able to take some sort of magic wand for you and ask you to think about 2026 to close your eyes for a moment, unless you’re driving or something, or walking in a busy area. But close your eyes for a moment and think about how you want to feel next year. Like what are the first things that come to mind?

Just the feelings, not the like, I wanna have 50,000 Instagram followers. Like what are the feelings that you wanna have? Sometimes this helps me to think about like, what are the feelings I wanna have more of next year? What do I wanna feel less like next year? But how do you wanna feel?

One of the things that also helps me to take the semen deeper when it comes to my business is imagining what a typical day looks like for me. Both in terms of like the structure and like, oh, okay, I wake up, I do this, I do that. Like this is how my workday is structured. This is how I wind down. This is what I do at night. Like you can do that, and I think that is super helpful. But I would encourage you also to think about what that all feels like.

When you imagine that ideal morning routine, for example, whether it’s five minutes or five hours or whatever, I’m not here to judge, but what does it feel like? Like why do you want that kind of routine? Do you want a more peaceful morning? Do you want a more peaceful transition from your workday to your personal day, like at the end of the day? What do you imagine yourself doing? Do you imagine yourself being in community and connection more? Maybe that looks like getting out of the house sometimes for your workday. I know that’s something that really helps me and something that comes up a lot for me when I imagine this. And I know that most of our lives are essentially centered around work, but I would encourage you to follow this all the way through to like, what does this look like after work? Are you eating as a family at the table? You know, are you cooking meals? Are you taking walks every day after work? Are you getting outside every morning? You know, are we having a nice wind down routine? Like, what are we doing for the whole day? How does that all feel?

Like I said at the top of the episode, I have created that free annual planner guide for you that has all of these questions in them. So if you just wanna listen during this episode and kind of get the wheels turning, but make sure you go and click that link down in the show notes to actually download the guide so you have a place to write these all down and you know, officially reflect.

The next thing I like to think about is what kind of impact I want to make next year. So sometimes this impact can be with my team or like the people who are around me. Sometimes it can be my impact in my community, it can be my impact with my current customers. It can be impact with building a new audience.

It can be an impact with turning that audience into clients that you then impact in a different way. There are so many different ways to think about impact. And when you think about that impact you wanna make, how does that require you to show up? So in order to make that kind of impact, what does that mean for you?

I know one of the things that came up for me when I was doing my own reflection document, which is the same exact one that I’m gifting to you, when I thought about the impact I wanna make next year, one of the things that came up for me was that I wanna show you what’s possible after grief. Like all the grief that I’ve been through with losing both of my parents recently.

The impact of what’s possible if you are yourself, if you show up as authentically you. What happens when you pivot topics or expand what you want to talk about and let yourself be seen. What happens on the other side of having been through as much trauma as I have in my life. What happens when you wanna rebuild your life or kind of like reinvent yourself? This kind of rising from the Phoenix era that I, you know, kind of think of my, my life as being in, in terms of what I’ve all been through and how I, I really have to work to pull myself up and out of it, it’s an active thing for me every day. So the impact that I want to make next year that’s coming up for me is like showing you, it’s like walking the walk content as I call it.

Like just showing you what I’m doing. Not from a place of expertise, not of like, Hey, I’m doing this perfectly and I’m doing it right and you should do it like this too. I guess it’s more just authentically sharing it in real time and showing people that it’s possible to keep going. I, I feel really passionately about that, maybe because that’s also what I want, you know, I wanna see and I wanna know like, Hey, it’s possible to come back from all this.

It’s possible, to have a full rich life after you’ve been through as much trauma as I’ve been through in my life and that there’s something that’s waiting on the other side or something that’s, I don’t know, something that’s possible for me. So that’s sort of what came up for me in terms of the impact.

In order to make that impact, I have to, in my opinion, kind of keep my head down and not take in so much like I took in this year. It’s really hard to tap into like what you authentically want to share and to be really creative and like expressive when you’re taking in everybody else’s stuff because it will automatically make you start to question like, is this right? Is this good? But somebody else already said that. And especially after the year that I’ve had this year with so much outward facing stuff, so many like speaking gigs and book stuff and all that. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve gotten a lot of outward like opinions and feelings and thoughts about what I should do and who I am, and what it means, and blah, blah, blah.

So I think that for me, like in order to make an impact that’s more authentically me, more creative, like true, true for my heart and my soul, I need to, I don’t know, be careful about who I’m around, what I take in the kind of support, right? Making sure that I’m getting support, asking for support, receiving support.

I need my team to be on their A game, you know, as they always are. But like, I need my team to be on their A game in order for me to be able to release some control of like what I, want to release, what I say I want to release in the business, in order for me to have this like white space to be more creative, right? So that’s just like an example of one, then you can have many different like. You, you might have many different bullet points under this one, about the different kind of impact you want to make. Maybe there’s an impact with your customers, an impact with your community, an impact with your, like your community online and your community in person.

And then maybe there’s a, to make this impact, I want to show up like line for each one of those things.

After I think about impact, I, I also reflect on like, in order to make this impact I wanna show up: like, or I want my team to show up like: or I need my team to show up: like some of that can be helpful.

I sort of move into a big goals section. So this is where I want you to dream big and think about some big goals that align with that impact.

So, you know, for me, based on what I just shared, like one of the ways that I want to share all of this stuff and what I’m going through and expand the topics I talk about is on this podcast, right?

And I want this podcast, um, monthly downloads to increase, which it has been now for this year, big time. But I, I want it to keep going and so that’s like kind of how I then take like, okay, this is the impact I wanna make, this is what that looks like. Okay. Now here’s a goal. That aligns with that impact.

So what are some goals that you want that align with your impact? They can be things like how many monthly downloads you want or how many subscribers you want, or something like that.

I also encourage you to have personal goals, like one of mine is to participate in my first sprint triathlon, I originally thought I would probably do another Hyrox, probably a solo, Hyrox, but I already did one Hyrox, but I thought I would do one, but I think with everything I’m focusing on with my health, it’s not necessarily the best for women’s like hormones, cortisol, stress levels, inflammation. So, um, based on that, I’m thinking a sprint-tri ’cause I feel like other than learning how to swim, I could do that tomorrow. Um, so that’s like, that’s a goal that I have for myself.

I also have a goal of going on a solo travel trip. Even within my business, like a hybrid business personal goal is that as part of my 2026 plan, I’m sitting down and blocking off at least one week per quarter for a quote unquote vacation. Now, obviously I’m not going on a vacation four times next year, but I’m going to block off that time and I’m going to take it whether I am actually away or not. So whether it’s a staycation and I’m just home or that then becomes the week that Ryan and I go somewhere, that would be great. But this year I did so much travel for work and I kind of mentally just kept being like, oh, well that’s fun or like, it’s a cool city that I get to go to and it’s such a great opportunity and I would do little things on these trips to try to make it fun, it is fun, but it’s also for work. And a lot of these trips that were for work this year were also like very, very outward, like giving talks and being on podcasts and things like that and so I would often come home so exhausted that it would like wipe me out, especially with what I’m going through with my health.

It would just like wipe me out for days when I would come home. So that’s why even for one of my big goals this year is like take one week off. Per quarter. Like it can even be stuff like that.

Now from there, are there any micro steps that you need to hit those goals? So like for example, if you wanted to hit 5,000 monthly downloads on your podcast, what do you need to get there? I mean, if you know the average number of podcast downloads you have already, for example, you might say, in order for me to get there, I probably need to post consistently once per week and email my list about it. Once per week and share about it on social media once per week in order to start seeing this increase in downloads, and then in six months send a reminder to check in and see how that goal is going.

Now in this big goals section, I really do encourage you to dream and kind of strip away all the like self-judgment that’s going to come up of like, wait, but that’s not possible. That seems too big. I should probably make this more realistic, right? Let yourself dream a little bit in the big goals section. Where I do want you to be a bit more specific and, and definitely like very clear, you know, setting those smart goals is when it comes to quarter one.

So I want you to sit down and think about in quarter one, realistically, what are we focused on? Typically what I do is, you know, in every quarter you sort of have one main focus in terms of a promotion. So are you going to be running a big sale, hosting a live webinar that goes to a sale? Are you just gonna be focusing on like, I’m pushing people to my private coaching, I am pushing people to my course. I’m trying to fill my course, like start out by making one focus for quarter one.

If you pick something that has a specific date, like a sale or a live webinar, a live launch of some sort, put that date, you know, plop that date on the calendar because then that’s going to be the date that we reverse engineer and work backwards from for the rest of your planning.

I talk about this a lot in my book, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy but I actually have like the exact outline of how I plan live launches and launches in general, and how I create a calendar by reverse engineering and backdating, so if you haven’t read my book yet, or if you have my book. Make sure you go to that section and look at my reverse engineering plan for the live launch.

Now it’s great in quarter one to set those specific goals in terms of like what’s on sale and all that. But then that should kind of dictate to you what you all need to focus on when it comes to the rest of your marketing strategy. So if we know that we’re pushing people to your course sales, for example, your content then should relate to your course and it really helps to just take a moment to even just set this intention and make this goal because it’s going to give you a lot of focus.

If you’re somebody who finds themselves like bouncing around and bopping around and trying different tools and you know, posting consistently for a week or two and then ghosting it for a month, emailing your list consistently, and then ghosting it for six months, this is a helpful way to go about it.

It’s just say, how about I give myself quarter one? Just to focus on talking about my course. Now, of course, when you’re creating content related to this course or insert the thing that you’re promoting here, when I say that, I don’t mean that you’re sending sales emails for a quarter. I mean that whatever your course is about, we’re sending content about that thing, and then the course is the natural call to action at the end of your content saying, this is one of the things I teach in the Ultimate Bundle®, or whatever the thing is that you sell. I want you to get really specific about quarter one since you know it’s approaching just here in a couple of weeks.

The next thing I want you to do is write down three ideas that you want to explore or research in 2026. Now, notice I said ideas and I said explore or research. These are not deep rabbit holes we’re talking shallow rabbit holes, things that you’re just like, i’m curious about that. I don’t know what that one looked like. Like I’ve heard a lot about Substack, but I don’t know if I like it. Well, maybe pencil in some time to just play around a little bit with something like Substack.

It can even be pretty abstract. You know, like one of the things on my three ideas I wanna explore in 2026 is an idea for a future book. This is not something I plan to like, I’m not gonna sit down at a desk with a sheet of paper that says like, what is my next book about? And then just stare at it until I come up with an idea. I’m just even opening my mind to that possibility that as I’m out and about, as I’m seeing things, hearing things, writing, doing work, traveling, I want to be thinking about that, that’s an idea that I wanna explore. What do I want to write another book about? Not what’s the best idea, the best strategy, the thing that everybody else wants. What do I want to do?

I also already have a substack called Beyond Business. I’ll link to it down below, but I already have a substack. But I’ve also, you know, thought about the idea of making a paid substack, keeping my weekly essays, but is there something that I could add there that would be of value to people that if it was, you know, five, six bucks a month, would people pay for that? That’s something I’m curious about, but not something that I’ve really sat down and thought. So these are just some ideas that you could get going for 2026.

We’re not necessarily running off in like, you know, putting all, implementing all these things or like running down and getting a whole thing set up. We’re just, we’re just exploring. We’re Dora the exploring these ideas right now. Basically that’s, I want you to stay in Dora mode.

Last, but certainly not least, I want you to think about where you can use more support in 2026. Maybe this is support like literally in your business where you need to hire someone or you need to offload bookkeeping, or you need to have somebody help you with your Facebook ads. It can be something like that, maybe it’s time to explore hiring a VA or a OBM, an online business manager. That’s all possible.

It could also be areas of support you need in your life, right? Maybe. Maybe one of the things that comes up for you is that you realize you need support in terms of being surrounded by other people who are doing similar things to you in your life. That you wanna be surrounded by people who have similar values and goals, and they’re ambitious, or they care about the environment or animals, or whatever it is, right? So these are things that you know, might all come up for you as you’re thinking about support.

Last but not least, we’re gonna chat about some KPI goals. So some key performance indicator goals that I want you to spend some time noodling on and I’m gonna give you a little tip about kind of how I make sure these are somewhere in the middle of realistic and a bit of a reach.

Now, like I said, in that free planner guide that I have linked for you down in the show notes, there is an entire section with these prompts in it where you can write these all down, so it gives you something to keep coming back to throughout the year.

So when it comes to your KPI goals, there of course are some things that are more, I would say, like logistical, and then some things that are maybe more like fun, feeling type things that I want you to keep track of both.

So first things first, we wanna pin down what is your ideal gross revenue in 2026? So that’s the overall revenue that you make. This is one of those where you have to sit with somewhere between reach and practical, because of course, you know, we could all sit down and say, I want my gross revenue next year to be a hundred million dollars.

Like, okay, but that’s not happening. So we have to look at like the cost of your product or service that you sell. For example, the number of leads that you would then need to have in your business in order to convert. Like if we took a one to 3% conversion rate, for example, on your email list, how are we making those sales?

Or if you get sales in some other way. How many people do you need to have to then convert a small percentage of them in order to make that revenue goal? So that’s sort of how you back it out. Of course, you know, I’m going to encourage you to make a goal for your email list subscribers. I would make a, a goal of what the total is of like a number of email list subscribers you wanna have by the end of the year, and then let’s start breaking that down by quarter so that we can break it into smaller chunks and say, if your goal is to add 2000 email list subscribers in quarter one, then what are we doing in quarter one to get that?

Of course, I just did an entire four part how to build an email list series, all throughout the month of November. So you can go back to a couple episodes ago and check that out to learn that part.

Of course, if you want to include the number of social media followers that you want by the end of the year, knock yourself out. I will transparently tell you that on my KPI goal sheet and that I already filled out, it says social media goal, and I wrote, don’t give a shit. LOL, maybe 70 k question mark. That’s what mine says, so if that makes you feel any better, it’s just not really my priority in terms of like what I care about, what that number is, per se.

I would care more about moving those people to my email list. And I essentially, uh, have the same exact number of Instagram followers right now as I do email list subscribers, as I record this, which is about 55,000. So I don’t think that’s by accident, but that’s like my bigger goal is like making sure that those numbers essentially match up. That I wanna, I wanna like move everybody from that party over to my email list party.

You could also set a goal for the number of products that you want to sell, the number of customers you wanna work with, either for the entire year or every month, the number of clients that you want to work with, depending on what you do. But I think that that can be really helpful too.

There can also be some other fun ones, like the number of Fridays that you take completely off, or the number of weeks of total vacation that you take, or the number of weekends that you don’t log on to social media, like you could gamify it and keep track of that too.

Okay, so that is my planning for 2026. I hope that this was helpful. I hope you grabbed the guides, that you can fill this all out in a more official way. If you liked this episode, it would help me so much. If you go ahead and text it to a friend, text a link, make sure you send the reflection episode as well.

But helping me to spread the word about On Your Terms® is so, so helpful. So I really appreciate it and you better be reaching out to me about this episode. I’ve been talking about this in my episodes lately, but. This is not a one way street. I wanna hear from you. I wanna know what came up for you. What was your biggest aha with planning in this episode?

As I said at the top of the episode, I need to hear from you about whether you want me to do that reflection card prompt thing. I thought it was really fun, but you tell me. With that, I hope you have a great rest of your week, and I will chat with you next Monday.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.