Download the Rooted In Reality Annual Planning Guide here : https://buy.stripe.com/eVqaEY0pC9v8cPl9F6d3i00

We take you behind the scenes of the planning process we use for ourselves and our clients a process that’s helped us ditch hustle-mode and actually achieve the goals we set.

If you’ve ever mapped out a dreamy business plan only to find yourself overwhelmed halfway through the year (or in burnout by February), this episode is for you. We’re breaking down our three-step planning process that helps us create sustainable momentum: assess, align, and act.

In this episode, we cover:

• 00:48 That time we used to “manifest” our way into burnout
• 03:15 Step 1: Assess what’s actually working (and what’s draining you)
• 12:05 Step 2: Align your goals with your real life and energy
• 19:02 Step 3: Act with an actual project plan
• 24:10 Why your annual plan won’t happen without a strategy

Links and resources mentioned:

• Episode 56: Planning Fallacies & Business Burnout: https://player.captivate.fm/episode/627e49be-e51a-46a8-a2dc-c61b67fa3b62/

Welcome back to Growing a Deeply Rooted Business, the podcast where intentional strategy meets sustainable systems.

We are so glad you're here.

I'm Jess, your systems architect and notion obsessed strategist who truly believes that systems are self care.

And I'm Rachel, your email marketing mastermind.

I'm all about building marketing ecosystems that actually work with the intentional strategy and you guessed it, all things email at the heart of it.

Together, we're on a mission to help women entrepreneurs like you build businesses that are both profitable and purpose driven.

We know you want success, but not at the cost of your health, relationships or personal joy.

Exactly.

And that's why every episode we're diving into intentional marketing strategies, sustainable systems, and a really good launch strategy that doesn't leave you burned out.

Whether you're refining your operations, planning your next launch, or figuring out how to make your marketing work smart, smarter, not harder, we've got you covered.

So grab your favorite drink, get cozy, and let's grow something deeply rooted together.

So the other day I was taking a walk down memory lane as I was in my reflect, part of my planning process.

And I was just kind of laughing at baby business owner Rachel in year one and year two and just the audacity of the lack of planning that she had in her business at that time.

And now I really look at it as the essential backbone to my business so that I can like, you know, reverse engineer the success that I'm looking towards making in my business.

So I think it's a little funny.

I don't know if you had that experience.

Yeah, I feel like I have such a more scientific approach to planning now instead of just planning on vibes.

And I take that approach with my clients too.

I actually had a client who I've been working with long term and around like the first annual planning session we did.

I was like, okay, so like, what's your revenue goal?

And she was like, $500,000.

And I, I did the math at the time and I was like, well, you'd have to work 120 hours a week based on your offer and how it's set up right now, if that's what you wanted to do.

So I think what I do now, she does make over $500,000, but it's because we refined her offer suite, brought on more team, all of that, all of that kind of good things.

But I think when I first started planning, like, I was kind of the same, just like her, like just planning on vibes and, you know, taking the I'm going to manifest this approach a little too seriously.

I totally feel that.

And I think like, with a lot of the businesses that I work with, it really is evident to see, see the ones who have these huge, massive goals and they're exhausted and overwhelmed, but like, their goals are not.

They may be like sustainable and intentional for their like plans that they're shooting for, but they're still at the end of the day, like super burnt out and exhausted because they're planning their businesses backwards.

They're missing some like really crucial components in their planning process.

So today we're going to be sharing a planning process that we have found and use with our clients.

And it actually works.

It's going to be three steps, three very intentional steps to make sure that your plans are rooted in your capacity and what you can realistically accomplish in the next year.

So let's get into it.

So step is assess.

I think this one is the stuff that pretty much everyone skips over.

And I think this is the probably the main reason why a lot of plans fall apart.

So we're talking about reflection before your action.

And this means we're looking at what's actually happened to build upon in your actual planning process.

So we're not like really in the planning mode yet.

We're building that foundation to give us the tools so that come time to like actually plan ahead.

We're able to like refer to things, we're able to look and pull validated data.

I think a lot of people skip this step because it's really tedious and people think like, oh, I could just pull it off the top of your head.

But in our assess step, we're really getting like.

I think when I did this for my business, I had probably about like 15 tabs open.

I had my Google Analytics, I had my email marketing, I had Google Search Console, I had all of the different components, my dubsado, every single thing that I can sit there and reflect upon and kind of like tear apart.

That's what we're trying to make sure are like just everything's at the tip of your fingers.

So that when you're coming to actually like audit and like break everything down, you're not basing it off of assumptions, you're really basing it off of validated facts.

In your business.

Yeah.

I mean, and there's really five different areas that we recommend that you look at in your business.

And one is that is your clients.

Because you're going to want to know the demographic that you are attracting and then you're going to want to reflect if it actually aligns with who you want to be attracting.

One of the key exercises I like to do is like, pull out your, like, favorite client and like, figure out, like, what you love about them and why you love to work with them.

You know, what stage of business are they in?

What is their niche?

What shared values do they have with you so that you can figure out, like, how to attract more of those people.

Second spot we like to look at is traffic.

So, like, where did these clients find you?

Because a lot of the times what I will find is that where we are putting the most effort into our traffic generation, we are not getting the most out of.

I think a lot of people default to Instagram and put a lot of pressure on themselves to show up daily on Instagram.

And in reality, most of their traffic is coming from either search or referrals.

Yeah.

Add an extra layer into this too.

With traffic of looking at the quality of clients that are coming through each traffic source.

Using your network as a traffic source is one way to say that the people that come through from referrals or from your network are like, way better quality than the ones that maybe find you quick react, book a discovery call and then end up becoming a client.

And then they're the ones that typically, like, scope, creep, and do all of those things.

Like, when I was doing my traffic audit, I layered that in and I was like, it's very evident there's a quality layer in my traffic sources that some people that come from Instagram or social, like, need a ton more qualifying before I can bring them on to onboarding or else.

It's a nightmare for myself.

So this is the visibility that you're bringing to yourself.

Yeah.

So I actually have like, kind of the same similar story that I've seen in one of my clients businesses.

She started TikTok last year and her funnel is like straight to strategy call and then, you know, pitches the offer.

And as soon as she started TikTok, it was.

She got flooded with new leads.

We had.

She had 40 discovery calls booked in one month.

And she was very excited.

But.

And I was like, I don't want to burst your bubble, but I have a hunch that these people are not going to be the ones that are going to be ready to invest in your $5,000 offer.

So we really wanted to make sure that we're like, looking at her conversion of those people.

And you.

What we found was that I was.

My hunch was correct and that those people needed a little bit more nurturing.

And education and all of that.

They, all of that before we got them onto the call with her.

So what we did is we kind of like layered in, you know, a service, guidance and nurture emails prior to booking so that those people could, you know, know her pricing model, know what they were getting themselves into.

And a lot of them, even though they would book the lead call, they would end up like self canceling and not kind of wasting her time and their time on the call because they realized that they weren't ready for this type of offer.

So then the next audit area is your offers.

So what made you money?

What took the most time, what drained you?

What did you enjoy?

Really looking at these in a way that like you can say, oh, my retainer services made 90% of my revenue, but I hated every single side of it.

And that's not something you want to plan for, for growth in your next year or quarter.

So I think that's really important too.

Yeah, I think the key piece here too is like looking at your offer, your revenue and how much you're charging for your offer and how many, how much of your hours are going towards that offer and making sure that it aligns with the hourly rate you want to be providing for that offer so that it all makes sense from a business back end kind of aspect.

I know for me personally, like my revenue jumped the moment that I figured out like, oh, the number of hours you're actually putting in, you're only getting paid $30 an hour.

And I wanted my rate to be, you know, closer to $100 an hour.

So I had to go back and like raise my rates.

But I wasn't doing it like just willy nilly, like charge your worth.

It was based in like science about what I needed to take home and what my ideal client can afford at their stage of business.

Totally.

The next one is we looking at clients, we're looking at traffic, we're looking at our offers.

We are doing kind of just a business systems assessment.

So going through each piece of your business and kind of like figuring out where are the bottlenecks, you know, where is there friction where you need to maybe bring on additional support team or where do you need to kind of sit down with the current process and kind of work out some of the kinks in it?

And then always kind of just reflecting about like what, what are you enjoying your business?

What lights you up?

What do you hate doing?

What do you never want to do again?

Because I mean, you do have to eat a lot of shit sandwiches in business sometimes.

But, like, not everything.

Like, if you really don't like to do it, you can say no because.

You'Re the boss 100%.

Yeah.

And I think that, you know, you may be, you know, thinking about this and you haven't done this planning process yet.

You might be thinking like that just seems like, get me to the actual planning part.

Like, I want to start calculating my revenue for next year.

This isn't fluff.

Like, this is super strategic.

Because where you get burned out is literally written in your data.

Like, where you have resentment in your business is written in your data.

So it's really, really important to like, look and pay attention to this so that as we move into the next step, which is align, you can now say, I hated this and I will not be planning for this by default in my business and move forward in a in a more like, you know, I guess, aligned way.

Yeah.

Before we move on though, we did miss one, and I can't believe we missed this one.

But our marketing bridge funnel.

Yes, Marketing bridge audits.

I was like, wow, this is what we do.

But yeah, looking at each piece of your customer journey and figuring out the conversions for each step so you can notice where the people are dropping off, that's going to give you so much data on where to focus your next project in your business.

Because if your lead magnet registration page is converting great, then maybe you don't need a new lead magnet.

It's the nurtures part that goes after it.

People are dropping off, so really zeroing in.

That can save a lot of time and effort and you just doing projects just for the fun of it.

We're in step two of a line, so we're really focusing on what the picture of our life and our business need to look like.

So that as we go into planning, we're not doing it in a way that puts your business first.

We're putting your life first.

Because most of us started businesses in order to have that freedom that gives us, you know, those Fridays off, the two, three weeks off in the summer, taking all of December off.

And that happens when you plan life first and your business then around it.

So really important to kind of lean into that and know that that's kind of how we design this planning process as well.

So after you map out and protect all of your life things, you're gonna also then want to look at your offers and how much time it takes you to deliver those offers.

One thing that's part of like, that life planning process, which I just did this in my business yesterday is making your weekly BluePR can map out the actual.

And what I did was like 30 minute increments of my entire week of when I actually wanted to be working and started like filling in like, okay, if I want to spend three hours all week on content creation, where does that go?

If I want to spend a couple of weeks like working on products for my business, where did that go?

How does all my client delivery hours fit in here?

Where's my admin time go?

Once I had that mapped out, I was like realized I was like, okay, with my current offer suite that I have and me operating as like the sole implementer, like I can't add anymore.

There's nowhere else for me to go.

You know, my next step becomes like, how can I start to like free up some of this time?

Either by outsourcing parts of my marketing or content in my business or starting to bring on subcontractors and building that out that team so that some of my implementation hours are taken care of.

Because I think that if I had to think of like the one, one issue that why people's plans fail, it's because they're not matching their actual capacity with their goals and their dreams and the projects that they want to do.

Because even when I did that, I mapped everything out and I was like, oh wait, there's no time on this for me to work on projects in my business, for me to develop new offers, for me to like do all of these other little things that I want to do.

So it's going to be a trade off.

It's like, okay, maybe for these there is a season where I'm going to make a little less revenue.

But I know I'm developing all of these like self and I you kind of did this this year is like all these digital products so that I'm able to not have as much of that like client load.

Totally.

And I do think that it's important to note that like you don't plan.

And I said this last episode, I'm going to say it again because it's so important.

You do not plan for your most hydrated, caffeinated, like fresh out of bed self.

You plan for your most average self.

For the person who, you know, in my case, if my son is teething and I can only get a 30 minute nap window that I consider that to be my power hour where headphones come on and I crank some stuff out.

You have to plan for your real capacity because it is not like you're going to Just one, be down on yourself when you can't actually accomplish the things that you need to accomplish.

Second, I think my favorite part of the align process and the stage is the non negotiables is that you get to be firm in your boundaries of what you allow your business to push you around in and what you allow like you to push back on.

And like, as business owners, like Jess said, like, sometimes we literally have to do not so much fun stuff like onboarding 20 clients at once.

Like, obviously that's a tedious, chaotic process kind of thing.

But when you have non negotiables, you can say I need to be offline at 4 because that's when, you know, I get to start dinner and I get to go on my afternoon walk and all of these things.

And that makes me show up as a better business owner the next day.

So those are important to establish what those non negotiables are and work them into your weekly blueprint.

Yeah.

And small little plug for our rooted in reality business planner, there is an AI prompt for helping you come out with your weekly blueprint that does exactly what I just said.

And that's what I use to kind of create mine.

And it was very interesting because it was like, you know, Claude was like pushing back on me, like, can you really do this?

Or you forgot about this and like it it.

Even though I used the prompt, it was still about, you know, a 30 minute process of me going back and forth with it.

I'm like, let's rearrange this and move this here and all those sort of things.

So it's definitely was one of my favorite, most useful things.

So after you've got your blueprint squared away, we're going to kind of like zoom back out and start planning out our different promotional or launch seasons.

So that we know if we say we want to make $100,000 in revenue this year, then we know the client capacity we have.

And then, okay, so the month before that we need to kind of be filling up those or month or months leading up to that we need to be filling up those spots.

Yeah.

And I'll put a real life use case in this situation.

My clients launch Q2 to Q3 and I am so in the weeds of my clients launches that if I even dared to plan a launch for myself in that window, my stuff's gonna get dropped.

So in my life seasons and in my like energy capacity, my need to align my promotions to that so that I know Q1 and Q4 are kind of like my prime spot for.

For launching for my own business, because my clients and my capacity are taken up pretty much entirely in Q2 and Q3.

So then the next part we move into is just content cadence, which I really like it here in this spot because you've got your weekly blueprint now, so you know how many hours you can spend creating content.

So it's not some.

Like, I'm going to post seven times a week or two times on TikTok, and I'm going to make a YouTube video each week.

If you don't have that number of hours in there, you're really like, okay, how long does it take me to create, you know, one social media post?

If you're the one doing it.

And, okay, I only have two hours, so maybe that only means I can do, you know, one email newsletter and four posts.

But then I'm not feeling bad or guilty every time I get on Instagram and know that there's no post ready or I didn't post as much as I wanted to because I was realistic and, like, knew that that was my capacity.

Totally, totally.

All right, are we ready to move on to our last one?

Yeah, you take us through this one.

This is your zone of genius.

All right, so then the next one.

And this is something that you're going to.

Well, you're going to do it annually.

First is from all of that that you just did.

You're going to set some, like, really realistic goals with yourself.

So we always want to make sure that we're having, like, our income goals, our impact goals, and then our sustainable systems goals that we kind of want to implement.

Those are the three main areas that I would look at.

So making sure that you, you know, set your revenue goal, set your impact goal, maybe, and that impact really means, like, visibility.

How do you want to get visible?

So maybe it's appearing on so many podcasts or, you know, creating this many YouTubes or growing your Instagram following to this.

And then once you have those big goals, you're going to decide.

And there's some great prompts in Inside the Planner that'll help you do this as well.

Decide what quarter it makes sense to kind of, like, slot those in based on everything that we've already, like, assessed and aligned on.

Then you'll have your quarterly goals.

So then once you have your quarterly goals, a goal without a plan is just a wish.

You're going to move into project planning.

And not to toot my AI prompts, too, but, like, these are the actual prompts that I use to Plan million dollar launches that I put into this.

I was like, should I even put these in here?

Because like, people won't hire me anymore.

Yes, please, literally do it all for you.

But basically you're going to take your, your projects for that quarter and chunk it down.

And what you're looking for is like each individual step that you're going to have to do and figuring out the sequential order that they need to be done.

And I kind of give you, we give you some guidance on how to do that and then assigning time estimates to each of those items.

And then if you are a solo implementer based on your project time block that you have on your blueprint, you'll know how many hours you have each week to work on that project.

So you can kind of back into, okay, if I want to launch it on this date and you start to slot it in, you realize I'm going to need eight hours and I've only got four hours.

You're going to have to decide, you know, a project management triangle.

Do you want to reduce the scope?

Do you want to push the timeline out?

Do you want to hire somebody else on to support you?

Because based on when you want to launch this and how much your actual capacity is, you're not going to be able to do that.

But this planning is going to show you that before you get into it.

So you're not just like, I'm going to launch this in one month and then, you know, you start doing it and you're either going to push yourself to get it done and completely burn yourself out, or you're going to get into it and get really frustrated because you're not making the progress that you, you thought.

So yeah, I think this is also where you start to really, really suss out the priorities of what you want to accomplish.

And what is just going back into the idea parking lot.

Because when you start to like break all of these projects down or all these goals down into the projects and then into the task, you realize just how limited your time really is.

And so if you're over here overestimating and thinking, I can knock out these three goals in quarter one and quarter one is completely booked out, that's when Jess says it starts to get pushed to Q2, and then you're like, ah, but my clients are chaos in Q2, okay, then Q3.

And then that's when you like, you have to be realistic with this.

And knowing the breakdown of each goal to project to task is crucial to understand if it's actually Going to get done or not.

Yeah.

And it's not wasted time to go through your projects and break them out and then realize, oh, this is the actual implementation time and put it in the ideal parking lot.

All that work will still be waiting for you, like, once you have the time.

But you're not going to know unless you do this, this step.

And I think a lot of people move from like, oh, this is what I want to do.

Okay, I'm just going to start doing it without mapping everything out first.

And there's going to be a lot of wasted time because you're going to realize it's just not possible and it's going to have to get pushed or abandoned or canceled.

And now you just wasted a bunch of time on stuff that you know might not have been your best use based on your priorities and your goals at that point.

All right, so our three step planning process.

Step one is assess.

We're going to reflect before action that this is your foundation.

We're going to be using all of this information, all of this data in step two, which is, well, in step two and three in align, where we're putting our life priorities in alignment first and then building the business goals around it.

So this is a little bit backwards in the way that other people might be, you know, teaching you how to plan.

But we're really are creating a business or a life plan with our business so that it gets done in a real realistic way.

So this then brings us to the last step, which is act, where then we're taking all of the goals that we just planned and aligned everything that we know we can actually get done and then breaking it down, putting it on the calendar, implementing in a way that is getting it ready so that when we are, it is time for this moment to, you know, this goal to shine.

We're ready to go.

We have the project plan.

We can look at this and say, great, I don't actually have any time for this.

Back to the idea.

Parking lot it goes.

Or let's crush this and let's get this knocked out.

So these three steps are very intentional in the order that we've put them in so that you can kind of whittle down to that final plan that is really rooted in reality and not these kind of like hopes and wishes and unrealistic expectations that will never get done and leave you sad at the end of the year.

All right, so we want to know, which step do you usually skip?

Which one are you guilty of skipping?

If you are watching this on YouTube.

You can put it down in the comments.

If you are listening to us on the podcast DM us on Instagram and let us know, we would love to hear from you.

Well no guilt, we might just offer a little support on how to overcome that skippage.

And if you want a tried true, you know, planning process that includes every single number that we look metric that we look at, every single step that we do to implement this into our business and our clients business, we do have our Rooted in Reality business planner up for sale.

The link will be down below and it is a notion kind of worksheet that'll walk you through each step and each kind of area.

Rachel and I are do a video to kind of walk you through how to use that and then there are some amazing AI prompts that you can use to help you reflect and make sure that you are staying grounded in reality and that you actually have a plan that you're going to be able to execute and kill next year so you can have the best.

We're not asking for an arm and a leg here.

It's four to seven dollars.

Really no brainer.

Price to get your annual plan locked in before you.

I like to say unplug for December, but you can get started in January as well.

So if you found this episode helpful, please share it with a biz bestie.

If you know somebody that's usually kind of spinning their plates and you're dropping their glass plates because they haven't done their annual planning, share this with them.

If you haven't already, please follow and leave a review on whatever your preferred podcast platform is.

It really, really does help us reach more people.

And until next week, we're we're rooting here.