You started the year with big goals, a beautiful plan, and every intention of sticking to it. Then life happened.

Maybe your schedule changed. Maybe your capacity looks completely different. Maybe your revenue isn't where you hoped it would be. Whatever the reason, it doesn't mean you've failed—it simply means it's time to realign.

In this episode, we're sharing our five-step planning process to help you adjust your goals, align your business with your current season of life, and create a plan that actually works for the rest of the year.

Because the plan you made in January was built for a version of you who couldn't predict what the year would bring. Instead of starting over, let's create a plan that's rooted in your reality today.

We Cover:

• How to evaluate your current capacity before setting new business goals.
• A simple five-step framework to reset your business plan for the rest of the year.
• How to align your revenue, sales, and marketing plans with your real-life schedule.
• Why adjusting your goals isn't giving up, it's creating a more sustainable path forward.

Ready for Your Midyear Reset?

The Rooted in Reality Business Planning Process walks you through the exact five-step framework we use to plan each quarter, complete with AI prompts, planning worksheets, and guided exercises to help you create a business plan that fits your life, not the other way around.

Grab your copy and start realigning the rest of your year with confidence: https://buy.stripe.com/eVqaEY0pC9v8cPl9F6d3i00

Meet Your Hosts

Jessica Walther is the founder and CEO of The Launch Collaborative and Sustainable Success Systems. As a launch strategist and systems consultant, Jess is dedicated to helping solo business owners and small-but-mighty teams build businesses that deliver both peace and profit. She specializes in creating sustainable growth strategies that align with her clients' values and lifestyles.

Rachel Lopez is the founder and CEO of Gal Marketing Agency, a boutique email marketing and strategy firm. With over a decade of experience, Rachel helps heart-driven entrepreneurs craft intentional marketing strategies that attract, nurture, and convert leads sustainably. Her human-first approach ensures that marketing efforts feel authentic and effective .

Together, Jess and Rachel blend systems, storytelling, and soulful strategy to help you grow a business that's deeply aligned with your life—not just your revenue goals.

Connect With Us:

• Jess Website
• Rachel's Website

Hang Out & Say Hi!

• Deeply Rooted Business Instagram
• Jess Instagram
• Rachel's Instagram

How in the world is it already July?

And I want to know, somewhere in your notion or your Google Docs, or in that wonderful, beautiful planner that you have, there is probably an annual plan with your name on it.

Be so real with us.

And I want to know when was the last time you looked at it?

Because, yep, if you're here with us and you're like, yeah, that beautiful plan, it's not the plan that we're working on right now.

And maybe you have a little bit of guilt from that, we just want to let you know you're in the right place.

Because here's the thing that probably nobody really wants to say out loud is that the plan that you made in December was written by a version of you that had no idea the twists and turns that this year was going to give you.

Instead of being, oh, the year's awash, whatever, let's get back on track.

We're not scrapping the plan entirely.

We're just going to do a mid year reset.

So with our five rooted in reality planning steps, we're going to build this reset around a life that we're actually living right now, not the one that we had imagined back in December.

So let's get into it.

Yeah, but before we do, let's do a quick little energy check in and kind of release the shame and the guilt that you have around either nothing going according to the plan that you plan, because you probably got farther by just writing that plan than you ever would have or not looking at the plan in a while because it's natural for this to happen.

Have you read the book the 12 week year?

It's like humans are conditioned, so we kind of need a Little restart every 12 weeks.

I know when I start to feel like my energy is going in all different places, it doesn't immediately set in like, oh, it's because we don't have a plan.

Even with my clients, we get out of our normal quarterly planning cadence and all of a sudden things feel chaotic.

And I just did a quarterly planning system with a client last week and it just felt so good.

I was like, oh, we just felt chaotic because we had planned.

It's normal.

So release that.

Take a deep breath in and let it out.

All right.

Last week we talked about how to assess your year to see where you've been.

So this year we're really going to talk about aligning the back half of the year, knowing where you need to go, and kind of the five steps that we take to make this plan have the best chance of actually working and executing ever, because we take a Life first business approach.

So step number one is really setting your Life first foundation.

It's not that calendar and marking down all the new commitments that you didn't have before.

For me, I'm engaged now, so now I need to figure out where am I going to fit showers and receptions and bachelorettes and all of this that I had zero idea in December that we'll be working, so I needed to work around.

So pull out that calendar and start marking out all of your commitments that you have.

Yeah.

And I want to note this comes before we start talking about any revenue.

I know in the assess section, we kind of talked heavily on clients and where they're coming from.

So we're still not in the results and the action steps still.

We're really kind of reassessing our energy levels and where we're putting our focus in.

I think that's the most important thing.

My whole rhythm's changed right now in the sense that my kid's going through a sleep regression.

I don't have my nap hour that I plan on.

And so we really have to be able to understand that.

The plan that we made in December, maybe it was built on hoping that your kid's gonna sleep through the night and you're gonna wake up every day refreshed.

That doesn't happen.

That's not happening.

I'm gonna be building now for the second half of the year on the receipts that I'm bringing to what's happening in reality right now.

So what we're gonna do is pull up our calendar.

I don't want you to spend too much time on this.

15, 20 Minutes max.

Pull up your calendar through now through December and block off the vacations.

When to scre school start.

What is the holidays?

What do those look like for you?

Are you launching?

When are you recovering after your launch?

We're going to block those off.

Then we're going to revisit that weekly blueprint.

Now, Jess and I have changed up our entire weekly blueprint where we're no longer recording on Fridays because it's the summer and we want to be in the pool.

So we had to reshift when we're actually putting the time in to record when we're putting our planning time.

So summerfying our weekly blueprint so that we can Feel better.

And then when school starts in the fall and all of that, we'll reset and do this again because it's a living, breathing existence of how we operate within our week.

And then third step is we're redeclaring our non negotiable.

So maybe in the spring we said offline at 4 was perfect.

Maybe we're saying Fridays were light.

Now it's a, oh, shoot.

I have vacations planned for the next week.

I have to get on Saturday and crank out some things so that I know I can be truly offline when I need to be offline and all of that.

So whatever those non negotiables are, shift them, rework them, make sure they work in your right now so that you can come back at this refreshed and that you're not taking any sacrifices in your life where you shouldn't have to.

Yeah, I know.

I mean, summer, the change always, no matter how prepared I feel like I am for it, the change from kid in school all day from eight to three to her being out of school, it always gets me.

I'm such a routines gal.

And while now I have added a very nice morning walk because I don't have to be driving carpool in the morning, I also need to try to get all my work done between 1:30 or 2 because that's when my teenage demon emerges from her room.

Demon.

She's an angel.

Teenage angel emerges from her room and she needs a little kind of interaction time, that sort of thing.

Time with mom.

So that has shifted a lot for me.

In summer, I almost tend to do a lot of shorter days because almost every day is a weekend for us because everyone's home.

So instead of trying to cram it all up into the work week, I try to expand it out a little bit more so that we're kind of just finding balance any way we can find it.

There's no right way to do it except the way that works for you.

Exactly.

If you've moved through those three steps, what you should end up with is your true right now capacity mapped out.

So then, now that we have that wrapped, we're going to go and do some math with it.

And while math may not be my strong point, as revealed in last week's episode, this is the fun part where we get to look at the kind of overlap of revenue needs and goals and our true capacity.

So what is realistic and how do those two things meet without sacrificing the summer fun happening right now and pushing us on a path of Burnout.

This is where we open the books.

Whatever the numbers say, we want to know we still have time to hit our goals this year.

If maybe first half of the year was not great, know that it's important to do this now because then we can properly plan for the second half of the year and all of that.

Looking at the last six months of data and saying, what is this telling me?

How do we attack this and really assessing it with right now versus the hopeful person that we were in December with all of that energy of the new year.

Yeah.

No.

So I think in the beginning of the year we had planned to do a launch cohort right now or something like that.

And right now our capacity is not there.

So sometimes it just means getting a little more creative on how you're going to bring that in.

One trick that I'm leaning into is past clients, they're always kind of easier to work with when you have less capacity because there's less of that upfront work that you have to do to learn their business.

So, you know, if you find you're not meeting your revenue goal, maybe reaching out to a few of them to help it.

And then I know when school gets back in and I get past these client launch seasons that I have, I'll have all the time in October, November, December to kind of do a more hour intensive offer.

Yeah.

And I think that's the fun part, right?

Is that the plan, you can always pivot.

And there's so many people talking about pivoting, whether it's your actual services and all of that.

But if you are somebody like Jess, who gets inspired with the drop of a hat, you can use this to say, oh, no, shame we can't fit a launch cohort.

As much as it would be so much fun to do, we physically cannot do that.

So let's try something else.

And looking at it, perspective is reality.

How do we shift our perspective to make it reality a little bit more easier to consume?

But the main thing you're trying to get out of step two is a plan, a revenue plan.

What are you selling and when are you selling it?

And when do you hope to bring in that revenue?

Because that will inform step three, which is building out your sales rhythm or your sales plan.

Because unless you have an amazingly big audience that known you for years, you're going to have to do a little ramp up, a little attraction, a little nurture before people want to buy from you.

So you want to make sure that you're kind of mapping those out for each of the different offers that you're trying to focus on selling, when you.

Are laying out your sales rhythm launch calendar for the next six months, you already drop in.

We already talked about the capacity, what we know we have capabilities for, what we know our energy seasons will be.

And then we want to align that with our revenue generating levers, tactics, all of those things.

So if you're like us and we support clients who do launch in the second half of the year with Black Friday holiday campaigns and all of that, you're probably not going to put a launch on your own to do because it's not going to be feasible.

So looking at what those things are and checking where it's the most optimized to do launching.

And just because you're not launching doesn't mean you're having to put a pause on your lead generation.

Launches are for those hairs that are craving your business right now.

But you can still, in a non launch period, work with those tortoise buyers.

I'm currently right now running a second half of the year email list reset in my emails right now and those are talking specifically to tortoises.

What I want them to do is take all of the actions that I'm telling them, do something with it, marinate with it.

And then when they realize back in September that they're like, okay, I really could possibly do this all on my own.

I've had a few ahas, but really what I want to do is for them to book strategy sessions with me or purchase align leads formula.

So what I'm trying to say is that you don't have to go to that big blown out launch.

You can really be taking actionable steps that are helping them fuel your pipeline full of tortoises that are ready to make decisions in a month, two months, or whatever the case may be, know that there are options here and that your rhythm, if you are in a heavy capacity time, doesn't have to mean go all out, host a workshop, do this, do that kind of thing, focus on this.

Now the point of this exercise and these steps is that you should really have more clarity and control on the second half of the year versus existing in panic come September 1st.

And you're like, oh my gosh, I slacked for the last couple of weeks, I need to do something now.

You're kind of just taking a little bit more control over that to give you better choices going forward right now.

Step four.

Once you know you have your campaign or promo periods laid out on your launch calendar, you know when you're ramping up, you know, when you're selling, the next part is to kind of back into a marketing or content rhythm.

So if you followed our assess in the last episode, you looked at your traffic sources and maybe you notice some things about your traffic.

Maybe you've been spending a lot of time, energy and effort in Instagram, but really TikTok is driving all of your revenue, so maybe you need to shift there.

And just finding a sustainable content rhythm is just about figuring out what channels do you want to show up on and how many pieces of content and what format those contents are for each one and do it in a way that you can commit to.

Or Rachel and I are actually flipping on this.

We are purposely going into an unsustainable marketing content rhythm.

Probably because we're both doing the YAP challenge.

We're sure you heard about it.

We're going to try to post on social every week.

Hold us accountable if you don't see our faces.

But this is kind of just a short term squeeze because we're going to hopefully build the muscles and the skills to be able to make this short form content creation a little more sustainable for us.

Yeah.

So whatever your engine is, and I think this is why it's so, so incredibly valuable to do a mid year reset versus waiting until your annual planning comes, is because now you have that data for the last six months of whatever that aspirational content marketing plan was to say it worked or it didn't work and now we can make the rest of the decisions going forward with better plans.

And so if you're saying back in our assessed section where we're talking about, okay, we had this many leads come through our lead magnet, or we had this many leads come through referrals, now we know we're trying to optimize for sales and we're trying to optimize for life how those two kind of blend over.

So if it was SEO was popping off, we lean heavier into that slower marketing those anchor contents.

Maybe it's a podcast or a blog, whatever the case may be, and we allow that to keep compounding.

If we realized in our assess plan that our top of funnel was our weakest and maybe middle funnel was doing great, how do we fuel that top of funnel?

Which is what Jess and I are trying to do right now with the app challenge.

So really understanding and looking at this in a diagnostic way of saying where's the gap happening?

And then we start to build up that rhythm so that you can show up a little bit more intentional than December you was hoping you would be.

And now that we're buried in client work, we can't be.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

All right.

And then step five, we're gonna go and revisit back annual goals.

Do your annual goals need to be adjusted?

That's okay.

Maybe you set a astronomical revenue goal because you thought you were just gonna pop off this year and it's not there.

You can still dream and manifest, but remember, we're always about rooted in reality rooted here.

So adjusting that goal so that you can adjust your expense expenses, maybe you're not going to hit the revenue.

You need to pull back on some expenses and then figuring out what those monthly priorities are projects are.

So you're going to launch.

There's a lot of tasks that go into launching.

You need a launch project.

If you want to launch a new program, there's a project for that.

If you want to launch a new lead magnet, there's a project for that.

And kind of laying those out month by month and doing high level milestone planning to where you can see, oh, I'm overloading myself.

Maybe I need to pull this out now so that I can execute on these even better.

We don't need to add anything else more to our plate right now.

So, yeah, just figuring out what those priority goals or projects are going to be.

Yeah.

I think this one's also a lot of fun too, to reflect back on.

And again, I'm going to keep saying this because I think people get in their heads about planning and they get in their heads about goal setting because they don't want to set up a goal because they're afraid to fail.

But you can always fail forward and not have it be a negative thing.

Right.

You can set an income goal and then have to change it because you understand your capacity more.

Or you will learn the lesson on burnout or things like that.

Everything that you are pulling forward here to look at and have more visibility on allows you to work forward.

But what happens when you aren't planning or not setting up these goals is that you're just operating in this constant state of guessing or spaghetti on the wall.

And if you've ever been there, you just know how exhausting and frustrating that is because every single time you have to have new idea, you're starting from scratch.

Right.

It's the same thing we talk about when we're talking about AI prompting, where you are essentially making it so much harder on yourself.

If you're not starting from a place that at least gets you 30% of the way there.

What are you talking about?

You can use this as the steps to still plan forward and just use whatever you've been doing for the last six months to attack the next six months and make it a little bit more structured so that you're not starting and throwing spaghetti at the wall constantly.

All right, so let's recap the steps.

So step one, you're going to want to build your life first foundation.

So block off all your life stuff, all your kids activities, the vacations you want to take, summer that you actually want to live so that you can protect that time first.

Step two, you're going to do revenue and capacity planning.

So figuring out what your actual capacity is based on what the calendar that you built out and then figuring out what offers or what spots or client roster or however you look at it, you need to fill based on that capacity and maybe where you might need to get a little bit creative because you need more revenue but your capacity might be lower.

So what offers can look like that.

Next you want to map out your sales or promotional period.

So everyone's like, I don't want to live launch, I don't want to live launch.

You're either selling during a live launch or you're selling all the time.

You still need to map out how you're going to sell your offers and your products.

So whether that be through a concentrated push like a live launch, or an everyday smaller push like something evergreen, you need to have a plan on how you're going to to attract new customers and convert them.

Number four, you're going to want to develop your content rhythm.

What channels are you showing up on?

What are these posts look like?

When are you creating editing?

If you do all of that scheduling, all the things that come along with marketing and content creation.

And then step five, you want to set your goals for your quarter so you can look back and have something that you're working towards and give every month at least one to two big priorities and then give yourself permission to park those other great ideas.

Talking to myself.

Park those other great ideas to a time when you may have more capacity if you don't.

And if you want a little help doing this, we have the rooted in reality business planning process.

It comes with AI prompts and it will walk you through this entire process.

We like to to revisit it ourselves every single quarter.

You can grab it in our episode show notes.

If this episode hit home for you, share it with your business bestie.

The one that has the January plan buried in that lovely, beautiful notion doc, but actually hasn't opened it since February.

She'll need this reset just as much as you do.

And we want to hear from you guys always.

Literally always.

Which of the five steps are you doing first?

And which one have you been avoiding?

DM us on Instagram TikTok.

Send us an email.

We read everything.

We really do.

So until next week, we're rooting for right now.