Today’s episode isn’t going to have one specific theme as there are a couple of different things I want to talk to you about. I love creating episodes that give you actionable steps to take and that’s exactly what this week’s podcast will do.

First of all, I talk about something planning for the year ahead. As business owners it can be hard to look at our businesses with and outside perspective and in order to look ahead, that’s what you need to do. Secondly, I look at how you can market your business a little better when it comes to encouraging people to invest in you.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Planning for the year ahead is incredibly important as a business owner and in order to create an effective plan, you need to take yourself out of the business to ‘see’ what you’re doing and where you want to go.
• In order to plan your 2020, you also need to review 2019. This means looking at the aspects of what went well and what didn’t, looking at your growth, focusing on what you have achieved and looking at your finances.
• Once you have reviewed your year, you can start to think about what you want to achieve in 2020 and how you’re going to reach your goals. You need to think about what you need in order to succeed.
• Think about when you last mapped out all of your marketing channels, which ones are the most successful? What do you need to do more of in 2020?

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

If you want to plan for the year ahead, you need to think how your customers see your business. Although it’s important to be ‘in’ your business, it’s also important to take a step back and think of things from a customer point of view.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Planning for the year ahead - 07:11
• Marketing your business in 2020 - 17:53

Transcript below

Speaker 1: (00:32)

Hello, hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. Happy Monday! If you are listening on a Monday. Otherwise, I hope you're having a lovely day, whatever day it is. So today I want to talk about a few different things. I'm trying to like work out in my head what the theme of this podcast episode is or what the main focus is. But there were so many little different things I want to talk about that I kind of think that it probably hasn't got one main theme today. Obviously it's a solo episode, so normally I like to do some teaching or I like to talk about business or that sort of thing. And it's just a really, I like the solo ones because it's a really nice way of just kind of like giving you some real actionable stuff to do. Whereas although the interviews are amazing and honestly I love them so much, it's just sometimes you don't get those actionable steps or you don't get those things that you can do in your business.

Speaker 1: (01:27)

So for me, I think today is going to be a little bit about that. It's going to be a few different things that I want you to think about and it might just be a little bit all over the place. So I apologise. But one thing is I'm glad my voice has come back because I've had a lot of trouble over the last few weeks because we're nearing the end of the year. And to be honest, I've had a really busy few weeks in terms of speaking, in terms of interviews, in terms of just trying to cram in a lot of stuff before the end of the year and it took its toll. It had its effect on me and obviously I got unwell, I got a cough and a cold and not being able to take some time out has really, really affected me. And the other thing is that I'm not very good at is when I travel.

Speaker 1: (02:12)

I'm really not very good at looking after myself. So I do tend to burn the candle at both ends. I do tend to spend too much time on the social side as well as the business side. I don't get early nights. I don't do my morning routine and although I do very little exercise, I have been much better. I have been doing, I think, I don't think I've mentioned this on the podcast, I might mention that on an interview I can't remember. And then I interview at all different, I'm so batched up in terms of interviews. I can't remember whether you've heard that one or not. But anyway, let's go with it and pretend I haven't talked about it. I started working with a personal trainer because I knew that the one thing that I was really bad at was looking after myself and moving. So as you well know, I work from home.

Speaker 1: (02:55)

I love working from home. Obviously we do a lot of travelling as well, so it's actually really nice to be in home when I'm not in travelling mode and I don't move a lot. I literally walk from my bedroom. I might occasionally go downstairs, make a drink, but I sit up in my office and just literally sit at a computer all day. I don't do very many meetings in person. I do have some clients from the agency that we still have that I very occasionally meet, but to be totally honest, pretty much everything I do is on a screen. So in terms of moving and looking after myself, I don't do a lot of it. You know, the other thing that's really interesting is I have an app on my phone called Live 360 and it tracks us all. It sounds really kind of stalker-y, I promise it's not. Obviously, my husband did a lot of travelling and was away and it was useful for me to know when he landed in a country or whatever and when he was back online, we have a teenage stepson, right? Is my stepson, is my husband's son. My daughter's just turned 10 and no doubt at some point in the next few years she'll be getting a phone and it's just good to know that we know where each other are and you know when they're heading home and that sort of thing. But what's really interesting with me is it obviously shows the last time I left the house and some days I don't even, or some weeks, I don't even realise that actually I was in the house for four solid days and I didn't physically leave it. The other thing this means is that don't even get any sunshine or outside space.

Speaker 1: (04:28)

I'm a nightmare. So anyway, I decided that I needed to move more and I got a personal trainer so I have been doing once a week in the gym. I initially started off doing it at home because in total honesty, the resistance to having this at all or doing anything at all was a massive, like I didn't want to do it. I still don't want to do it. If I'm honest, I do feel better about it. But initially that's why I did it at home. I had the personal trainer at home because I didn't want to walk into a gym. I didn't want to be in front of these other people. I didn't want to see other people doing exercise. Honestly, so much resistance. So anyway as it is, like I said, we're doing it once a week. I am now in the gym, which is nice and obviously when I'm away I haven't done any of that.

Speaker 1: (05:13)

I haven't actually been for quite a few weeks now, which is probably the most since I started, which is frustrating because time and busy-ness and like I said, it took its toll so I'm feeling much better, which is great. Although I still am trying to be very gentle on myself, very considerate to myself and this week I'm really trying to make a concerted effort of going to bed early, not drinking wine in the evening, trying to eat some vegetables and at some point, hopefully this week I might actually go to the gym again, which would be lovely. I say lovely. I don't mean that at all. I mean it'd be horrible, but I mean it will be lovely for my body to go to the gym. But the other thing is I never get out. Do you? If you work from home, do you find that like you literally have days and days in the house and you don't even realise you actually haven't stepped outside the front door?

Speaker 1: (06:03)

Because honestly it doesn't feel like that sometimes. Maybe I'm just so focused on what I'm doing, but it genuinely doesn't feel like, gosh, I haven't been out for days and days. So anyway, glad to say I am feeling better. So this week I want to talk, one of the things I want to talk about is something I've got coming up, which I'm really excited about and I always get a bit funny when people get online and go, I'm so excited. I've got this thing to share with you because it's their thing and therefore I am excited if you want to come and join in and what I think it can do for you. But I do find it a little bit irritating if I'm totally honest, this sounds like a bit, a bit of a grump today. I'm not, I promise it's just, I guess I see a lot of it.

Planning for the year ahead

Speaker 1: (06:43)

I see a lot of people promoting and selling online and when they're like, I've got this big announcement, I'm super excited. Sometimes it just gets a little bit samey. So anyway, I've put together, I did it last year and I'm doing it again this year, but even better. Last year I did an episode episode 42 where I talked about how I review my year and how I plan for the following year. And I decided to put together a workbook which went down really well. Lots of you downloaded it and really liked it. So this year I wanted to up my game because honestly, let me just talk on a little bit about why this review and planning is so good. We in our businesses often are just in it all the time. We're fighting through our to do list, we're getting everything done and I've done exactly the same today.

Speaker 1: (07:32)

You know, make sure you email that person back, but make sure you order those things, make sure you organise that thing and you're just literally fire-fighting some of those things. And it's very rare that we step fully out of our business. And I think in the early days, I didn't do this at all. And now almost six years into my business on, I realised the importance of this. And now I make a really concerted effort to make sure I'm doing this kind of thing more often, but we don't often step out of our business to look at it as a whole because we're fighting in it every day. And I've just got a couple of new people on my 90 day programme and one of the very first things we do is our first one to one call is two hours. And we literally, while I make them feel like this humongous questionnaire and then we go through the questionnaire and we'd talk about their business as a whole.

Speaker 1: (08:25)

And what's great for me is I get to understand their business, but what's great for them is that they actually get to talk about it in a much bigger, wider way. And suddenly you can see kind of like little sparks of like, Oh my goodness, I never thought of it that way. Or I've never actually stopped and thought how that looks altogether or how that looks to my customers because we are in it so, so much. And I find it really hard to do my own business. I need someone to help me do this. So I am going to a 2020 planning day in Nashville, which I'm really excited about. Obviously I don't expect you all to just jump on a plane and go somewhere. Amazing. Great if you can, but I'm doing this because my very good friend Mary Hyatt is doing a very small personal planning day and her dad, Michael Hyatt, it was on the podcast a few weeks back, is going to be there and doing some sessions and so is his daughter who actually his other daughter who runs Michael Hyatt and company.

Speaker 1: (09:22)

So this is like an amazing opportunity to sit in a room with some super smart people and think about the business. But I want to to kind of get as many of you doing this as possible, which is why we're going to be focusing on this thing again, where we're going to be doing, reviewing this year and looking at next year. So I've put together a new and improved workbook. It looks more beautiful and it's got all the bits on there that I go through and that I address in my business. So we start off with reviewing 2018 no, not 2018 2019 I don't even know what year it is. So we reviewed 2019 and we look at all the aspects of what went well, what didn't go well. I've got some other kind of tricky interesting questions in there too. We also look at like what are our numbers at.

Speaker 1: (10:11)

So I love looking at like my email list and my podcast downloads because obviously I did this last year. So what's lovely this year is I've got all those stats from last year so I can see the growth. The other thing we do in this section is we review things like what have we achieved? Cause you know what? A year is, although it goes incredibly credibly, quickly, it actually is a really long time. And it's not until you kind of go back and go, Oh hang on a minute, I did this and this and this and this. And then you can give yourself a massive Pat on the back because of that. So that's what we do. We start by reviewing it and the workbook. We'll show you how to do that or it'll give you some of those steps through that. And then the next bit we do is in the workbook is we look at how do we then plan what's coming up, what are our goals, what do you want to achieve?

Speaker 1: (11:05)

What actions and steps do we need to take in order to achieve them? And what do we need in place? Because you know, it's no good saying, I want to take on 20 more clients or 50 new customers if you don't have the resources in place. So what might you need in place? And it just enables you to take that time out and think about it. So, like I said, last year we did a workbook and it was great and I got great feedback and lots of people downloaded it. But you know what, I thought I am one of those people that will download something and think, Oh yeah, I'm definitely gonna do that. And then I don't, or then I think to myself, Oh yeah, yeah, I'll get right into it and the time never comes or I never make the time. So I wanted to work out a way on how I can make you guys actually step out of your business for an hour or two hours tops to go through this and do this exercise.

Speaker 1: (11:56)

Cause I promise you it will make so much difference. So what I've done, when you download the workbook on the thank you page, you're going to be invited to join me for a really special one-off workshop and coaching call. Now let me just explain what I mean by that. So when I do a coaching call in the Academy, everybody gets on screen. They don't have to be on screen, if you don't want to. But they're bought into a zoom room that isn't like a webinar. It's not like the masterclasses I've done before. So it's not like you are kind of just watching and observing. This is actually a group conversation, so you'll come into the room. I will be sat there live saying hello to you. You can be onscreen, you can have your mic on, we'll have a bit of a chat and an introduction and then what we'll do is we're going to take that time out together and we're going to work through the workbook and obviously I've got lots of other added extras that I'm going to chip in and talk about that.

Speaker 1: (12:54)

It's going to help you do that really successfully. And then we're going to review a year before and we're going to plan the year coming. And then what's going to happen is not only is this a workshop, but actually we're going to have a coaching call. So what you're going to be able to do is when you sit there and you're trying to plan your year and you sit and think, actually I'm struggling about what is it I'm trying to achieve or how do I achieve that thing, that goal that I've just set myself or what first steps I need to take. And that's when you're going to be able to come on camera or just come on with your voice and ask me those questions and we're going to be able to have a group discussion. And honestly, the kind of breakthroughs we've had in the coaching calls in the Academy have been phenomenal because you can hear what other people have to say.

Speaker 1: (13:39)

You can hear what they're doing, what their challenges were, what they should be paid off. And it really helps you remember and think and get clarity on your business and you and what you can do going forward. So I am really, really, again, when you use the word excited, but I am excited about it because I know what it can do and I can't wait to get you guys in there and give you guys the opportunity to do that with me because at the moment the...