Part 2: What You’re Missing in Your 2025 Business Plan (I’ll Fix It)

Hey there and welcome back to On Your Terms. This is part two of planning for your business year. Last year we reflected on 2024 so that we could see what worked, what didn’t, how it all felt and then take all of what we’ve learned about how 2024 went and put it into our 2025 business plan because what I find is a lot of people tend to be missing things from their business plan that keep them from growing their business and we don’t want to do that. So let’s talk about what we might.

Let’s talk about what might be missing from your business plan in 2025 so we can see a more successful year, right? That’s what we all want. you wanted to go ahead and download in the show notes, my free annual planner guide, cause it’s a great companion to both this episode and last week’s episode. It’s my actual template of my business planner that I use every single year in my multi-seven figure business to plan out all of my launches, my promotions, my content and exactly how I want to feel as a CEO and how I my team to operate and everything in between. So go ahead and download my free annual planner guide and use it as we go along in this episode.

So I think that the best place to start when planning our next business year is to take a moment to check how we want to feel about it. What do we want our mindset to be going into 2025? How do you want to feel in your business? How do you want to feel as a CEO? Right? Do you want to feel hurried and busier? Do you want to feel calm and confident and empowered? I want you to think about how you’re going to feel because we’re going to take everything that we go ahead and plan and make sure that that’s consistent with how we want to feel.

I, for one, am somebody who will often say, I want to feel calm and chill and like not busy. And then I totally overload my schedule and I wonder why do I feel not calm and chill? Right? Well, it’s helpful to me to say every once in a while, hey, that’s not consistent with how I said I wanted to feel in my business. I also want you to think about what impact you want to make in 2025.

Do you want to have more, I don’t know, hands on like time with clients, right? Where you feel the impact more one-to-one of what you do. Do you want to feel like you have an impact on a wider audience? Like maybe you want to be more of a thought leader and you want to generate more of an audience around an idea or what you talk about. I think in order to answer this, can fill in the of the following question. To make this impact, I have to show up like, or to make this impact, I have to not show up like, right?

So for me, for example, like I would love to move more into the, I don’t know, I guess this is what we call it, but kind of thought leader-y space around marketing for online business. And so maybe mine would be like, to make this impact, I want to show up more like a thought leader in this space. I have to own my successes and be confident to expand what I talk about beyond legal stuff.

Like that’s kind of like my mantra going into 2025 is that yes, I always will and do sell legal templates and I’m a lawyer and that’s great and it’s super helpful. And I also am excited to talk about other things, especially as my book, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy comes out on April 15th, right? And leading up to that, I’m going to be talking about more marketing things because my book is about marketing your online business.

You can also, if you have people who work for you, you can also fill in the blank of, want my team to show up like in order for us to, and you can fill in those blanks as to how you have to show up in order to make the impact that you want to make. Now let’s get into goals. Last week we talked about goals, going back to the goals that we set for last year in case you didn’t set goals last year, this is going to be your opportunity this year so that next year, these will be the very things that you reflect on. So you want to save these somewhere.

First, I want you to answer where you want your business to be by December 31st, 2025. Some of this can be metrics-based, like you wanna have 40,000 followers, you wanna have 10,000 downloads, or it can be some metrics-based things, but I would also encourage you to think beyond the metrics of maybe how many clients you’ve worked with or how many offers you have by then or maybe that you’ve committed to or you finished your book proposal if you want to write a book one day. So I want you to think more about where you want your business to be, even the visibility of that business, maybe what stages you’re speaking on, podcasts that you’re featured on, things like that. What are three to five big goals that you want to achieve with your business this year?

Again, they could be metrics-based, they could be more business-based, they could be you know, outward kind of like media type base, like I want to be on this podcast or I want to speak on this stage. It can be something like that too. I also encourage you to list out three to five easy wins that align with the impact that you want to have and align with how you want to feel in your business. These are things that I’m like, okay, I’m working towards these. I feel like I’m close. These are very doable because I think it really helps to have some goals that are like I’m doing it and not just always feeling so lofty.

Also, you want to list out three to five ideas that you have right now that you want to explore in 2025 and get more curious about. I think sometimes it’s just a little bit of like future groundwork that you’re laying of like, this might not be something we’re necessarily putting on the launch calendar yet, but it might be something that you end up developing in 2025. And it’s something you at least want to commit to spending some time thinking about and having in the back of your mind.

For your goals, where are some areas that you could also use some more support and what are your goals around that? Like, my goal is to hire my first VA by June 1st or something like that. Or my goal is to hire my first full-time employee in 2025 or something like that. So where are some areas that you could use some more support and what’s your goal with that?

In terms of KPI goals, so these are more of the metric-y type of goals. I always recommend that you fill out what your overall revenue goal is, what your email list subscriber either how many email list subscribers on average you want to gain each month or what you want your total email list subscriber count to be by the end of the year. How many podcast listeners or downloads you have, you have a podcast, what your social media follower count is, the number of customers that you have, and then the number of each product you sell, like number of units sold or number of coaching clients you’ve had or something like that. So set all of those goals for 2025.

From there, we’re going to apply those goals to our sales plan because once we have the goals of like, you know, you want to sell a hundred widgets of whatever you sell. Now it’s like, well, how are we going to get there? Right. So if, if the goals are kind of the destination, I feel like the sales plan is the map of how to get there. So what big sales or promotions are you planning to have throughout the year? I want you to roughly map them out being way more specific with quarters one and maybe even two.

And then with quarters three and four being a little bit more like I’ll have a fall promotion and I’ll have a black Friday promotion, but you don’t necessarily know exactly when they’re going to be, or maybe exactly what they’re going to be. We need to put those on the calendar now, specifically with quarters one and two, we want to put the dates. I always say start with your marketing centerpiece. So for example, if you knew you were going to run a promotion at the beginning of the year, and that’s going to include some sort of live component, like a webinar or a live challenge or a video series.

What date is that thing going to start? And then we kind of reverse engineer the launch plan from there. So we put those dates on the calendar and we go back and we reverse engineer how much time do you need to invite people to sign up for that thing? Usually if like if it’s a webinar, for example, we kind of reverse engineer back about 10 days, maybe even two weeks to invite people to sign up for it for about two weeks before that. I start telling people that something’s coming that alive webinars may be even coming.

So I kind of reverse engineer all these dates and start building out my timeline because now my calendar starts to look pretty full when you back out all of these dates. And then if you have, let’s say one promo or sale per quarter, you then are looking at the rest of the time between that quarter as the ramp up until the next one. So when I run, for example, if I would run a sale in January and that sale, let’s say ends February 1st.

I would then consider from February 1st all the way until I run my next sale, maybe in June, just time where I am focused on lead generation. I’m trying to get new fresh eyes into the business, people who need what I have. I’m focused on a lot of email lists, lead generation of just getting more and more people onto the list, nurturing those people, providing a lot of value until I flip the switch again in June and go back into another sale. So this is kind of what I’m looking at when I’m planning out this sales plan on my calendar is like, am I giving myself enough time to have a proper ramp up to the sale? After the sale, I giving myself enough time to rebuild before I run another one? Because one of the, think the most common mistakes is when you go to plan your year, you have things planned too close together that has you in constant sale mode. And that doesn’t give you enough time to regenerate and get new leads, which is crucial. So that’s what we’re gonna do when it comes to our sales plan.

Next, you’re going to shift into your marketing plan because now we understand, okay, you want to sell a hundred things. This is where roughly the sales would come from, from these like four sales throughout the year. Now, how are we getting those leads into these sales or into your email list and all that kind of stuff? So we’re looking at your lead generation strategy. Where are you focusing your efforts? Where are you going to?

Ask them to go, right? So in terms of your efforts, are you spending your time and energy on a place like Instagram? Do you have a podcast, a YouTube channel, right? Wherever it is that you’re spending your marketing effort, where are you asking people to go? Are you asking them to go opt into your email list? How are you getting them there? What are you doing once they’re there, right? Do you have an email nurture sequence? Do you have a weekly email that goes out to them? Are you nurturing them properly?

Do you have good sales sequences going out when you run sales? Right? So how, what is your lead generation strategy to pull people in? That’s where are you finding people? How are you going to convert them? Where are you asking them to go? What’s the next step with you? For me, it’s usually my email list. And then how are we taking them along the journey once they’re there? I, in terms of breaking down each quarter, and you’ll see this in the annual planner guide. If you download it, it’s free down in the show notes.

But in terms of you know, mapping all this out, I’m always thinking as I go along for the quarter as well, what my focus is for that quarter. I like to think about what is my focus personally, because I think I mean, you should always do that. But also it does help you as a business owner to to have some of your own things going on that are outside of business. Also, what is your quarterly focus as a business? Right. So like I was giving the example earlier, maybe your quarterly folks or your monthly focus when you break down the quarter like for February, maybe your monthly focus is lead generation because in January you had a sale. And so your January focus is sale, right? So I like to have one of these kind of focuses for the generally for the quarter, but then break it down per month. And I like to have both personal and business focuses.

For business, I would pick like a marketing focus and a sales focus like I have a sale that quarter, so then what’s my lead generation strategy to get enough people onto my list to make those sales? So I kind of think of like, this is the focus that I’m doing for the marketing, but then I’m flipping into sales, and this is my sale, like this is the product, for example, that I’m focused on for quarter one. I hope that this breakdown of how to plan for your business year in 2025 was helpful. Hopefully I’ve helped you fix a little bit of what was missing from your business plan.

And if you don’t have any sort of planner for your online business yet, you definitely want to download my free annual planner guide in the show notes down below. Once you’ve listened to this episode, just give me a DM on Instagram and let me know if it was helpful, how you liked it, if the planner guide has been helpful to you. I hope also that you’ve liked having on your terms back. I’ve been really excited to be back with you.

Thank you so much for listening and I’ll chat with you soon.