277: Business Planning Done Right

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Episode 277 • 19th December 2024 • Burnout To All Out Podcast • Melissa Henault

Melissa Henault:

Hello, Burn Out to All Out Family. It is that time of year where we are setting goals and making plans to achieve them. Now some of you are listening to this and you haven't built your business plan. Or perhaps you're like, Melissa, how will you create a business plan every year? Here's the deal. I am bringing you all the goods today. In this podcast episode, I am walking you through a workshop that I did for my community on planning a business planning retreat. I do this every single year. If you've listened to a podcast of Vine maybe 2 years ago, I also did a recording on planning a business retreat.

Melissa Henault:

Here's the thing. I've learned as I've gone. And this is your updated version of real time, how I plan and map out multiple 7 figure years in my business. So I hope you guys enjoy this episode. Need some effective tactical advice that actually helps you get results and makes a real difference in your life and business? You've come to the right place. If you're finding yourself here today, it means you're getting ready to gain serious traction in your business, rapidly multiply your income and impact, and you're ready to make it happen while living all out. Guys, I'm Melissa Hanault, your trustworthy corporate dropout turned 6 figure business burnout turned happy and healthy CEO of a multimillion dollar online business. And you're listening to the Burnout to All Out podcast.

Melissa Henault:

On this show, we're serving up innovative growth strategies, simple implementation methods to put them into practice, and action stimulating inspiration tailored specifically for the modern entrepreneur. Let's dive in. Okay. Here's the thing. This is what I've come to grips with realizing. I became an entrepreneur a number of years ago. I exited corporate, but what I realized was I brought with me from corporate a pretty valuable practice, and that was as a leader in corporate, we had to plan our business every year. As a leader, you were given a budget, and I would spend an entire week an entire week in a boardroom with my leaders and build a plan for the following year with KPIs, keep forming indicators for everyone.

Melissa Henault:

I would have financial plan. Right? Somehow, I think that many folks enter the entrepreneurial world and, like, all of that just goes to the hell in a handbasket. People forget that it's like, it's a legitimate business that you need to do the same thing with or you're just running a really expensive hobby, like a really expensive hobby, right? And I know the 1st year or 2, like, let's be honest, it's about every crumb is a meal. I'm trying to get this bad boy off the ground. I will set goals. I will set milestones and strategy, but I'm really just, like, on the journey to, like, make this thing happen, and I totally get that. I actually, for the 1st 2 years, didn't do a business plan. So what, quite frankly, wasn't sure, like, whether it was even gonna work or not, right? I was like, let me just give it 2 years, and let me see if I can match my income.

Melissa Henault:

And then a couple years in, I was like, holy shit. There's people who work for me that are depending on the revenue in this company. It's not just me, and I need to be really responsible with the budget, and I need a plan and a road map. Right? So that's kinda where I am today and the reason I start there is because 2 years into my entrepreneurial world, I realized I said to my husband, because he still works for a medium sized business and they do their business planning. I looked at him and I said, you know what? Back in corporate, I would leave the house on an airplane and go somewhere to do strategic planning for a week. And I think that's a big thing that's missing with what I'm doing in my own business today. I am not removing myself from the day to day, and I'm not protecting and creating time over a week to, like, strategically plan for the year, even if it's just me. How many of you it's just you? Okay.

Melissa Henault:

to a: 100000

Melissa Henault:

Right? All of this to say, I've come to the realization that not all entrepreneurs come from a decade plus of a Fortune 500 who have the luxury of have been trained on business planning and managing a budget and creating key performing indicators for people on your team. And it just dawned on me a couple weeks ago, I was like, you know, I'm just gonna, like, this is my gift in November to my community, to the people who are on my email list. I wanna run a workshop with them because I realized that some of you are highly gifted in your gifts. You're highly gifted in service. You're highly gifted in coming up with your product or service, but you have no experience in business. You've gotten some momentum in your business because you have found a gap and a need in the economy, and you're driving a business, but maybe you went from an idea to, like, generating revenue to, like, hiring 1 contractor to maybe another contractor part time and before you know it, you've got a little bit of duct tape and you've got, like, all of a sudden you got kind of this, like, small company running. Right? And it's like, holy cow. How do I lead and strategize? So all that to say, this format I'm gonna share with you guys tonight, I have been using in refining for the past 6 years.

Melissa Henault:

My goal tonight is I wanna walk you through my business planning retreat strategy. And in a perfect world, you would do this over a 3 day period totally isolated by yourself somewhere with no distractions. Okay? You can do this at home, but I'm telling you, and I work from home, there's something about getting in the zone and allowing the creativity to just go. Right? Like, I put myself in a cabin a couple weeks ago. And, I mean, I had like 14 hour days, and they didn't feel stressful at all. It was me in my pajamas and these huge flip charts just on energy of vision and excitement and, like, moving from one flip chart to the next and just mapping it out with breaks in between with, like hikes and walks and movement and all those things. But when you're in the day to day and you're at home, you're going to be distracted. So, you can take this document, you can do it at home, but you're gonna need more than 3 to 4 days.

Melissa Henault:

I promise you that. The dishes are gonna call, the kids are gonna call, the contractors are gonna call, the laundry is gonna call you. You are gonna be distracted. So you're gonna wanna take more than 3 days. But if you take this template and you go out on a retreat on your own, I promise you, you can get it done in 3 days. My team, I think they probably are terrified of me going on retreats because the amount of actions that come out of me during those 3 days is insane, and the questions. Right? So what I'm gonna do tonight, my whole purpose is to walk you through a 3 day business planning strategy, foolproof. Some of you, there's gonna be things that you can fill in all the way.

Melissa Henault:

Some of you, it's gonna be your 1st year and you're gonna be, like, I I don't even know where to start with this. Awesome. Use this as your blueprint to fill in as you're getting started. Come back to it each year. How many of you guys have read the book Traction? No? Okay. If you haven't, buy it today. Okay. It will change your life.

Melissa Henault:

I bought the book Traction 6 years ago, and one of the things that challenges you to do in one of the first chapters is to, like, build out your org chart, and it was, like, me and 2 people. And by, like, the 3rd or 4th page of team planning, it shows this, like, massive chart, and I laughed. Like, I was like, whatever. Right? Okay. 6 years later, I'm back to the book, and I'm, like, refreshing the team, and it's blowing my mind how much the company has grown and how many people work for us. Right? But if you build a really strong foundation, it makes a huge difference. Okay? What I'm gonna do tonight is I'm just going to explain to you how I go through these 3 days. Okay? You take notes, and then it's gonna be up to you to go spend this time working on the document yourself.

Melissa Henault:

I'm just gonna give you some application of how I use it. The first thing I will say is there's pre work. I learned this early on. I give you pre work before you start your retreat, so that for those of you with children in busy lives, you don't spend that precious retreat retrieving data that you could have gotten before you got to your retreat. Okay. I learned that the hard way. The 1st year I went on my retreat, I was reaching out to my CFO. I was trying to get all my numbers, all my data, and I realized in hindsight, gosh, if I had done this part beforehand, when I got to my actual retreat, I could dive into the meat.

Melissa Henault:

Okay? For those of you who are, like, organizational freaks like I am. So this is what I encourage you to do with prework. First of all, do a post mortem before you ever even go on your retreat. What do I mean by that? Look at your year and ask yourself what worked well, and what do you need to improve. Right? What worked well? What do you need to improve? So, like, for our company, we drove revenue. We grew, but we actually cut into our margins. So it was like, well, we made more money, but I didn't make any more money. So that's a problem.

Melissa Henault:

So, like, look at your business and ask yourself, like, what worked well? What do you need to improve on? The other thing is revisit your why. How many of you have been in business for more than a year? So every year your why is gonna evolve, and some of us lose our luster and motivation because you actually obtain your initial whys in business, and then you get lost. Because then you, like, are like, why am I doing this? Right? You start to lose purpose. So, like, when I first got started, my goal was just to match my corporate income. Well, then I did. So, then what drove me to the multimillion dollar a year business? I had to go back to the drinking well and ask myself, okay, well, why am I doing it this year? So, some of you met your goals this year and you need to revisit with new goals. This past year, it was about funding for investment in this new luxury Airbnb. You have to revisit.

Melissa Henault:

I highly recommend again, this is a great preread. The first couple of chapters is traction and looking at your your mission and your core values. Okay. I wrote my core values 5 years ago and it was wild going back and looking at them and how much we've evolved as a company and how much I've evolved as a CEO and how I want to establish culture in my company. Right? And so, if you can come to your business retreat, if you come with core values and a mission and a mission statement, that makes a huge difference, and you can even go a whole another level to build your 10 year and 3 year plan. Big picture, not like details. Big picture. If you can go into your retreat with a vision of where you wanna be in 10 years, by the time you sit down at your business retreat, you already have the long game in mind, you have your core values to inform all the decisions you make, and you have your why.

Melissa Henault:

Now the other thing I highly encourage is that you bring your p and l. Bring your p and l for the year. I wasn't done with my year when I went, but I could project it. I hope most of you can project your final revenue for the year by November. Bring your numbers to date, and bring your numbers from the previous year. How do I know we've grown 30% since last year? I literally have my numbers compared in QuickBooks from last year to this year up until November 1st. So when I went on my retreat, I could literally see apples to apples where we were revenue wise last year versus this year and how we're pacing. And then the last thing I want you to do pre work wise is have your your revenue broken down by offer for those of you that sell more than one thing.

Melissa Henault:

Have your revenue broken down by offer so that you know going into your business retreat how much money you made with each individual offer. Now again, why am I telling you to do this all ahead of time? Because these are energy draining administrative things, well, some of them are, that you can do before you ever come to your retreat. I want the magic to happen at the retreat. I want all of these documents to be at your fingertips for analysis whenever you get to your retreat. Right? Don't spend your 1st day trying to dig for all that. So the last thing I will say is build your theme for the year. Okay? Some of you need to decide next year is my girlfriend and I some of you go know Miriam. She's one of my best friends.

Melissa Henault:

She's gonna close out over 5,000,000 of revenue this year, And we were just chatting about this, like, does she go for 10,000,000 next year or does she not? And we were talking about base camp years versus recovery years and, growth years. Right? Every year doesn't have to be this wild aggressive growth year. Some of you are in seasons where maybe it's the last year you have a child home before college, or maybe you got your ass kicked with hyper growth this year and you're just trying to recalibrate. Right? Hypergrowth creates mass disruption. Some of you are in a place where you are like, let's fucking go. Next year is gonna be super aggressive. My nervous system is ready for it. I'm mentally ready for it.

Melissa Henault:

I'm gonna clear my calendar for it. Right? But what I'm trying to say is that you know in your soul what you need to pursue next year and what is in alignment with your life and your goals and make sure it feels good. Because there can be years where you're like, I know I could go for 10,000,000, I could. But, like, emotionally, physically, energetically, maybe it's not a place you wanna go next year, and that's okay. Right? So you need a reality check there before you go on your business retreat. So, you know, I like to say, are you in a base camp year, a ramp up year, or a regroup and recover year. Right? My next year, I'm not worried about achieving more than about 10% growth next year. I've, like, experienced enough growth for a number of years.

Melissa Henault:

I actually am just looking at fine tuning and optimizing what we're doing, and I'm really excited about it. So, you decide. My goal for next year is to reduce waste, increase profitability, and stay stable. Right? What's yours? Right? These are things you can think about. Okay? Day 1, we're gonna bring all of this with you. Day 1 is about first and foremost prioritizing your life. Okay? We have to remember why we got into business for ourselves. Some of you, if you're honest, are maybe a little bit burnt out right now.

Melissa Henault:

Some of you, you've traded your 9 to 5 for a 5 to 9, And it started out fun and exciting, and now you're really exhausted. And you say that you've gone for this for freedom, and you keep telling your friends, I'll do that girls trip next year. I'll make time for my friends to play pickleball, but it's not happening. Like, you're not showing up for the fun things in life because your business has literally taken over your calendar. Anybody in that space right now? Even a bit of regret that you're not even available for your family the way you wanna be. Right? This was my biggest, not regret, but learning in the 1st couple of years of being an online business owner was that I didn't know how to manage my calendar, and I ended up it took over everything and I started to get burnout. And I'm here to tell you your your business isn't burning you out, you've just lost the power and prioritizing joy first. Okay? So hear me now that before the year starts and you start your business plans for next year, prioritize joy first.

Melissa Henault:

Okay? So some of you guys are gonna think this is wild, but I do this before I do anything anything else in my business planning. Right? Okay. So we're gonna get into that in a second. What I really do is I start with revisiting that why that we talked about. You've already brainstormed it before you went on on your retreat, why you're in business as a business owner this year and then this is where we're gonna talk about dreaming. This is the opportunity for a dream budget and a dream calendar. These are the first two things you're gonna do before you start your business strategy. Okay? So before we get into the dream budget, this is why we pulled our p and l, you need to know a, how much are you financially responsible for contributing to your family household? What's the pressure on you right now at home with your business? What's that number? And then number 2 is what is it currently costing you to run your business? So it's two numbers.

Melissa Henault:

What are the operating expenses at home that you're responsible for? What are the operating expenses in your business? Okay. So, you should know the threshold that a minimum that you have to meet next year. What I want you to do after that is now we're gonna go to the why. This is where we expand the budgets. So if we have our current operating expenses at home, we have our current business operating budget, and we wanna go back to our why, some of you, your why has a financial tie, does it not? For some of you, it may be putting your kids into college, for some of you, it may be doing another investment, Some of you may be renovating your home. Like, what is stretching you to make more money next year? Maybe it's paying off debt. Right? It could be one of many things. What is the revenue that's feeding that why to your business and your household budget? And this is where you start to go to the dream budget.

Melissa Henault:

So for example, this past year, I had specific revenue goals wrapped around the 100 of 1,000 of dollars needed to invest in the mountain property I was building. I knew down to the dollar what I needed to earn on top of my household commitment and the company budget, my dream budget? Over top of that, what did I need to make to fund the why? This is going to drive you all year long. Okay? We're gonna get into this in a minute. But if you know down to the dollar, the gap that you need to achieve, and then we can reverse engineer your business plan down to the dollar, how it's gonna fund it, now all of a sudden, it's not a dream, it's not a vision board, it's not a hope, it's not a wish, it's down to the damn dollar exactly how you're going to achieve it. So we have our current budget, and then we're going to match that against our dream budget. If you've got your current revenue and you wanna invest $40,000 in a kitchen renovation, add that to the dream budget and revenue for the business, add the 40,000 on top. So, we're just dreaming right now, okay? The second dream that we're gonna dream up, because remember, hopefully, it's a clean slate next year with your calendar. Maybe your calendar kicked your ass this year because you let it just take you over, and it's time to take control.

Melissa Henault:

So what do you desire more of this coming year in your calendar that you didn't have control of this year? This is your chance to rewrite boundaries, to create change. So, for me boundaries no calls on Fridays that's a boundary for me for next year. There's a million things I can use it for I can go into a rabbit hole on that but that's a boundary. What are some things you can look at post mortem with your calendar and ask yourself, what can I do differently? One of the things I noticed this year, I tried to cram everything into Mondays as far as CEO, like, team calls, but then also, like, our big client calls, which we call strategic advisory where I'm addressing the whole community and I'm hot seating. What I found this year was that by the time my Monday was done, I had, like, a 150 emails in my inbox because I haven't been in it all day because I've been coaching all day. I'm white, and I, like, haven't eaten. Right? And I'm, like, I thought I was being efficient cramming this all in on this day, but the lifestyle of it sucks, and the anxiety of it being done with a day and being so far behind in my inbox before I hit Tuesday doesn't feel good. So, I rewrote my calendar.

Melissa Henault:

Next year, there's no client calls on Mondays at all. I've been very strategic in my calendar and said client calls on Tuesdays Thursdays so that I can recover and recharge. I am actually doing my creative days on Wednesdays. So I can go hard all day on Tuesday with coaching and know that I have a reprieve on Wednesday where I don't have to put my hair or makeup on, I'm in my pajamas, and I am, like, creating content. I'm writing, I'm creating, but I'm not actively coaching on screen. For me, it gives me the energy I need to get back to Thursday and be on screen coaching again. Your cadence can look however you want, but you need to think about owning your calendar. Okay? I want you to start your calendar with your big rocks.

Melissa Henault:

So, we've talked about your dream schedule. We've talked about your dream budget. Now, the next thing you're going to do, and this is something I have been doing since the 1st year entrepreneurship kicked my ass, and I realized that my kids were annoying me. It was annoying me that they didn't have school, and I didn't plan for it, and they were in my house. Anybody been there before? I was annoyed as shit that my husband got to walk out the door, go to work, and somehow just landed on me to juggle all these kids and try to work at the same time. I'm frustrated. They're frustrated. And then I was like, finally, I have a look in the mirror and say, wait a minute.

Melissa Henault:

Why did I get into this? I got into this business because I wanted the time freedom and to own my calendar, yet somehow I haven't owned my calendar. And my kids are being shushed and pushed out the door and ignored on a day that they're out of school. It's my fault. Right? So I was like, not a mas. So on my business planning retreat this past week, and I encourage you to do this, plan your big rocks first. I actually have all of my children's days off in my calendar so that I'm not overbooking myself. They have half days. If you look at my calendar on half days, I don't have calls in the afternoon.

Melissa Henault:

I'm here to receive them and exercise the right of the flexibility of being an entrepreneur. That will fill your cup back up and keep you from being frustrated with your business because you took the reins. Right? Vacations, birthdays, y'all are gonna think I'm crazy. My kids' birthday parties are scheduled a year out, conveniently when it makes the best sense, right? So, for instance, my son's birthday is it's the day it's like the 30th. It's right after Thanksgiving. We've learned it's like the worst time to have a birthday party. A, all of his friends come home sick from visiting families. B, it's like a it's like squishing so much between the holidays.

Melissa Henault:

Right? And so I have learned to strategically plan his birthday before Thanksgiving, and I plan it a year in advance. Right? You can do this, too, and then you don't screw it up with your family when you're, oh, like, booked over somebody's birthday because you didn't think about it. Right? Plan the big rocks first. Vacations. Even if you're not buying the plane ticket yet, this is going to motivate you. I planned to go to Bali a year before I went and it was a 10 day trip and I blocked my calendar for 10 days, but I told myself the company had to hit a certain amount of revenue before I'd actually book the trip. But here's the thing, if you don't create the space for the miracle, the miracle will never happen. But what I saw on my calendar month over month was this big void in August of this protected time.

Melissa Henault:

Just because you own your calendar and say you're gonna go on vacation, doesn't mean you have to go spend a ton of money and book the trips yet. It just means you need to create the space for it. Right? 8 days before the Bali trip was supposed to happen, I pulled the trigger on a first class flight all the way there and back because I had earned the right to do it and I created the space to manifest it. This year, I went to Ireland. My husband and I, I planned the trip, like, 8 or 9 months before we ever went. We booked the tickets about 4 weeks before we went. I'm here to tell you my husband and I never would have been able to coordinate our schedules 4 weeks beforehand to make a trip like that happen. So, we put the big rocks in first, called it in, and then when the time was right, give yourself revenue goals when you hit it, reward yourself, book the damn trip.

Melissa Henault:

You made the space for it. Right? Those are the big rocks. The other big rocks that many of you forget about, and this is not overrated, it's self care. And when I say self care, it could mean anything from mental to physical. When the CEO is in adrenal crisis, this is good for no one, Right? So for some of you, it looks like for me, it's a deep tissue massage every Wednesday at 3:30. I'm not sorry about it when I my team's still working, and I'm getting a massage. What are you committing to for your social and mental and physical well-being and making it a priority because we have to train like athletes as CEOs. Right? Because when you're sick, it's not good for business.

Melissa Henault:

want you to, like this year,: 2024

Melissa Henault:

gap between: 305100

Melissa Henault:

Some of you have an offer that when you step back and you look at it, it's nauseating. Some of you step back and you look at something you've worked on this year and it's been life sucking, soul sucking. You have not enjoyed it. When I stood back and I looked at it, like, the one thing I looked at that just made me feel nauseating to think about was that damn agency. So before you move forward with gusto with your business plan, gut check what you've done this year. Energetically, is it aligned? And then also, you have to think about how much time did I spend on it and what was the return on it? And was it worth it? Some of us need to pull up our big girl panties and do something that's very revenue generating right now, whether we love it or not, because we need to be good stewards of the company's money, make sure we're not cutting off our nose to spite our face. But there is a tipping point where you're working on something that is energy sucking and soul sucking. When we pulled the agency off, it gave us capacity to be better at the other things we do, and our business grew exponentially.

Melissa Henault:

. Now, again, this can look a: 100000

Melissa Henault:

I'm gonna give you a couple of ideas. And for all of you, it's gonna be up to you and your own individual businesses how you close the gap in the growth of your revenue goals. Okay? So, again, for instance, let's say we wanted to not change the price of the Lead Gen Academy, which is currently $5,500 But let's say we wanted it to generate more revenue for the company this coming year. Maybe our goal goes from 4,000,000 of revenue to 5,000,000 revenue. Well, we need another 1,000,000. So if we don't wanna raise the price, what do we need to do? We need to sell more. Right? So you have to come up with a strategic business plan around that. Either I do another launch or we start selling in between launches.

Melissa Henault:

Right? But there has to be a close in the gap in that number. It's simple math. Or you go back to the drawing board and you say, oh, that sounds like a lot of work. I think I'd rather just raise the price. You get to decide when you start playing with the equation. Right? We're increasing revenue by 300,000 next year by raising the price of our mastermind. Our mastermind right now is $30,000. I have a capacity on the number of clients we'll take.

Melissa Henault:

I'll never take more than that because it kills the intimacy of the room, but I can raise the price of it to 40,000. When I do that, and I sell the same number of seats next year, I just brought in 300,000 more in revenue for the company. So, you get to choose where those numbers come in, whether you wanna increase number of sales, increase the number of conversions, if you want to raise your price, maybe a little bit of both. Right? The other place that you could look at creating more revenue is what is your client retention process. Are you keeping your clients? Are you ascending them? Are you chasing after new clients every month? Right? So, there's different ways to create more revenue in your company. Okay? So, the bottom line is before I get to the next step in the business plan is we want to assess our offers from the previous year, commit to what we're gonna move forward with, kill what we're not gonna move forward with, come up with a birthing plan of anything new, and then we need to look at our new revenue goal and find the gaps in our offers and how we're gonna meet it. Right? So I'm just gonna share with you arbitrarily if our goal next year is 5,000,000 in revenue, and we wanna do 1,000,000 from a mastermind and 4,000,000 from the lead gen academy. Right? I'm just giving you some easy math.

Melissa Henault:

Then you have to reverse engineer from there. Okay. Well, how many sales do I need in each one of those to hit those numbers? How frequently do I need to sell it? What do I need to price it at? So we're just working backwards. Then it gets really exciting. I remember 2 years ago, I was sitting at the beach, and I'd run all the numbers. We'd done a 1,000,000 the year before, and I ran all the numbers based off our launches and the price of our programs. I was like, I think we can do 3,000,000 next year. And I remember my husband looking at me and being like, what? Like, he looked at me like I had 3 heads.

Melissa Henault:

And it was so cool to so confidently be able to just hold the paper up with the math and be like, no. I mean, I'm fucking serious. Like, the math works out. Like, as long as we do this, we can hit these numbers. And, by golly, we did. And it feels so good to know where you're headed and have a plan and track it and be like, we are on our way. I confidently know how I'm hitting this instead of just saying, oh, I'm gonna make a $1,000,000 this year. I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but it's gonna happen.

Melissa Henault:

I'm just gonna cross my fingers and pray to God it all comes in. That plan will help you sleep really well at night and get your spouse on board, right? Because he was like, wow, okay, And he saw what happened. So let's get into the how. So design your business plan for the year to meet your goals. So these are the 3 categories I wanna talk about next that are really important with your business planning. Okay? There's 3 areas. There's build, your top of funnel strategies for the year. We don't have leads, we don't have sales.

Melissa Henault:

And then there's grow. So this is your customer journey to conversion. So once you have them in the top of funnel, how are you converting them to a sale? So you need to do this with every single one of your offers. You need a very strategic plan. And the 3rd category, and we're gonna talk through these, is the scale. How do you scale that offer? Right? How do you optimize the offer? Client retention, client ascension. And these are the 3 most important business plan actions that you need to wrap around each offer to have a clear plan and strategy in place to hit your numbers. So let's start with build.

Melissa Henault:

Right? So build is your top of funnel strategies. Where are your leads coming from? Where is your traffic coming in to see your offers? So, for instance, with us, each offer is very different. Our traffic is very different for every offer. Okay? So for instance, with the lead gen Academy, it is very much a strategic split between organic traffic on my social channels, podcasts and email marketing, and ads, paid ads. I have a specific strategic plan with what I pay for ads, with a very specific calculated goal of number of registrations from that, and the typical conversion rate I get from ads. Same thing with organic lead generation. We know the average conversion rate of an organic lead upon registering for a masterclass for Lead Gen Academy. Now, again, top of funnel strategy.

Melissa Henault:

Our strategy for all the eyeballs for that funnel are very different than our other offers. And how we calculate, how we get to that math is very different than our other offers. The customer journey to purchase is very different than our other offers. Right? So let's just walk through Lead Gen Academy with build, grow, and then scale, and then we'll go back to some other things that we sell to help you guys think about how you're doing this. With the Lead Gen Academy, our top of funnel is very much a hybrid of organic leads across socials and email, podcast, and ads, but the customer journey to conversion up until this year has always been the same. Some of you have participated in it. Anybody been in my Lead Gen Academy Master Class? That is one conversion strategy. Herd them all into one room for 9 days, give them a deadline, and slam the door shut.

Melissa Henault:

So you're hurting all the traffic, all of it. Right? And then boom, done. See you in a couple months. Close the doors, off we go. That is one type of conversion strategy. 1. Now and then let's talk about ascension. Right? Those clients then have the opportunity to ascend and, like, move up the ladder into our higher level business coaching from that base level.

Melissa Henault:

We have a strategic plan, mentorship, concierge inside to keep track of them, communicate with them, support them, track them along their progression. And then when the time is right, introduce them to our higher level offers. Do you have that structure in your company? Or are you letting them fall off and go on to find new clients? Okay. So that's one. Let me share with you another one. So, build, grow, scale. Build, grow, scale is a completely different beast. We don't run ads for it.

Melissa Henault:

And it is very much organic and internal. And so, what I mean by that is it's an organic invitation that we have where we invite people in to our mini mastermind. It's a business mastermind. It's 6 months long, where we teach people how to build and grow and scale their business online, but we also have a very methodical and strategic plan inside of our company to invite our graduating cohorts in the academy into that program. So we're not running ads for that. Right? We're not running launches for that. So what I wanna underscore is the customer journey to convert to purchase looks very different. So for you all, your offers, the customer journey to conversion can look very different.

Melissa Henault:

We've had an evergreen little micro offer that's just run 24 hours before, 365 days a a year, right, for a couple $100 that just literally runs evergreen with ads. Anybody doing that? You've just got something running on ads. It's a, like, a a short webinar people clip into. Right? Some of you are selling every single day your services in the DMs. The 3rd example I'll give you top of funnel for us is our mastermind. Okay? Totally different. Again, conversion strategy. It only opens its doors once a year.

Melissa Henault:

Once a year. So you can imagine my business plan for the sales of my mastermind look vastly different than my business plan for something that I'm selling through launches or through a daily weekly strategy. Right? And it's high ticket. It's $30,000 once a year. So our sales strategy for it is a short lifespan and then it's done and the doors are shut. And that starts with selling it from a stage. So again, totally different sales strategy all together customer journey to conversion completely different. So, what I want you thinking about with all of your individual offers is where the eyeballs coming from for my offer? Is it through, like, what is your top of funnel strategy? Are you building an email list and nurturing them? Is it podcast? Is it social media? Is it launch style webinars? Is it live speaking engagements? But you need a top of funnel.

Melissa Henault:

And then, who's responsible? This is the big one. Write this down. Who's responsible for tracking the effectiveness of that top of funnel? How do you know your top of funnel is working? So, there has to be metrics in place, and we're gonna talk about this. How are you tracking it? And is it being tracked weekly, monthly, quarterly? Right? How do you know your own pace? I was on a coaching call with one of my mastermind clients. We work with them 1 on 1, and she had hired a social media agency to manage her LinkedIn. And I was, like, awesome. How are they performing? And she's, like, well, they're they're posting, you know, every every day, and and they're in the comments, and and I was, like, okay. And what what are you measuring? What's the impact? How are you measuring the value of what you're investing in? How are you seeing your return on your investment? It should be 4 x.

Melissa Henault:

What you're investing in them, they should be bringing sales in for you. Are you tracking that? So, how are you tracking your top of funnel, whether you're doing it or someone else is doing it? And how are you measuring that it's progressing? Okay. And then that brings me to the grower piece, right? The customer journey to conversion. Once you have them in that top of funnel, once you have them in that top of funnel, how do you convert them to that sale? I gave you a lot of different examples, but what is your sales strategy? Is it in the DMs? Is it by appointment only? Is it through webinar? Is it a one day webinar? Is it a 90 minute webinar? Is it a 5 day webinar? Is it a 9 day webinar? Are you crazy like me? How are you selling your products and services? Some of you are stuck there. You've got a great top of funnel and you even have a great product or service, but your sales strategy is broken. Your sales strategy is broken. So how are you getting eyeballs to see your offer and know the value that creates your desired sales? Is it optimized? Is your offer Is it priced right? Have you done your market research on this? Do you know that it's priced right? If it's not selling, is it potentially priced wrong, or is it a visibility issue? What is the customer's journey to purchase? Here's something we learned. We changed the company we do our checkout cart with.

Melissa Henault:

We moved from Thrivecart to Ontraport. And for a number of different technical reasons that we really loved, but what we found, the conversion rate to sales went down by 50 fucking percent. Yeah. Because it's not user friendly. People can't really find what they want, and then they're out. So have you looked at your customer journey to conversion? That was a huge red flag in our post mortem of our recent launch was like, what row? Like, this isn't good. Right? So what does the customer journey look like prior to hitting the purchase button? Is it optimized? What's their experience once they purchase? Are you surprising and delighting them in the first 24 hours to reaffirm their investment and getting them excited about where they're headed? When the first 72 hours, clients, customers make a decision about their purchase. It was either a waste of money, they can't believe they did it, they've got major buyers remorse, or they feel so loved and supported and held and so glad they made the investment.

Melissa Henault:

You wanna start off on the right foot. So, many of you need to start thinking about how many eyeballs need to get on your offer to meet your conversion rate goals. I'm not gonna get into the weeds of this right now. It's like a whole another workshop. But, so, for instance, we know that conversion rates on ads are significantly lower than conversion rates on organic. So, if we're gonna run a campaign for a master class where we wanna sell a 100 people in and the average conversion rate is, like, 1 a half percent for an ad and 3% for an organic, I'm just throwing some numbers out there, then you have to start reverse engineering how many actual eyeballs need to get on your content to purchase. Some of you, that's where you're just flying blind, and some of you are beating yourselves up because you think that no one wants what you have, but you actually just haven't built a large enough aggregate group to pitch to to get the conversion you're looking for. Okay? So we get 1,000.

Melissa Henault:

Some of you may be looking at my launches and being, like, oh, my gosh, that's wild and so unattainable. We didn't start there. But I will tell you that I started with a foundational goal of never having less than 300 people register for a master class, ever. Because if you get below that, the conversion rates are dismal, no matter how good you are, depending on your revenue goals. And so if you're not getting at least 300 people showing up to the things you're doing virtually, don't base your judgment on your offer until you have a large enough number to get there. If you're not getting sales, you need to go back to the top of your funnel because you don't have enough eyeballs to convert the number that you want. Like, Mandy and I know with laser precision exactly how many people we need to register to meet our revenue goals, like, within a pretty decent margin. Like, we can tell before the launch even starts, oh, boy, Like, we know.

Melissa Henault:

And then, who's responsible for tracking that? Is it you? Are you tracking it? Are you at the end of each, if you're doing live webinars, are you tracking how many showed up? How many converted? What was the conversion rate? What were the objections? Are you getting feedback from people and why they didn't hold the trigger? Are we taking the feedback so we can come back and do better? How are you tracking it? I mean, we're getting down to like anal levels of tracking now, like it's insane. But you don't want to fly blind because if you don't know, then it's just an expensive hobby. It's an expensive hobby. Okay. So then there's scale. So the last piece here is your offer ladder. So, when you look at your offers, what are you and it's not just offer ladder, when I say scale, it's about optimization and like in scaling. So, scale could be what are you offering to retain your clients? Every offer past the Legion Academy was birthed based on client feedback.

Melissa Henault:

So, some of you are like, I don't know what to offer my clients next. I don't know how to keep them on board. Ask them. You guys will be surprised. The way build, grow, scale was born, our mini mastermind, we asked our clients, hey, what do you guys want more of from us? We took a survey and out of like the top 40 things they listed, we pitched, we turned around, ran a little webinar, and pitched them this program called build, grow, scale that had the 10 things that were on their wish list for us to teach them and the conversion rate was insane. Everybody bought it because it was what they told us they wanted. Instead of us trying to go into a vacuum and try to create something we would hope that our clients would want, just ask them. And then sell it to them, and be humble in saying, I'm building this as I go, you are my first cohort, give me feedback, what can I do better? Our mastermind was born that way.

Melissa Henault:

What do you guys want more of? Okay. So that's a little bit and then scale can also mean back end operations. So last year for us it was a CRM. We actually did a huge shift to HubSpot which was a huge pain in the ass, wildly expensive and I'm pretty sure it didn't do anything for us, and then we moved over to ActiveCampaign. So we made 2 big moves on CRMs. Now, we're finding the ActiveCampaign is like it's got a really nice data trail all the way back to the origination of where we found the client, potential client. And I know Mandy's loving it. The whole team is loving the data behind it.

Melissa Henault:

So scale can be systems too. Scale can be systems. It doesn't have to be ascension. Okay. So then the next thing is really looking at, once you've looked at your offers, you've built your revenue goals around your offers, you know exactly how you're gonna get there, and give yourself permission to step away and make it a puzzle piece. You might start out being wildly aggressive and being like, I'm gonna do I'm just gonna throw it out. I'm gonna do a $1,000,000 with my mastermind and I'm gonna do 5,000,000 and and this, and then you step back and you start running the numbers and reality hits and you're like, woah, okay. I'm so glad I ran these numbers because this is not realistic.

Melissa Henault:

Now, I'm gonna pump the brakes and kind of redesign and go back to slightly different revenue goals and slightly different numbers that are more realistic. I can have my stretch goals, but let me be realistic. Okay. So then you wanna take a step back, and this is really important, I do this every year, is analyze the gaps in your knowledge to get you to the next level, and gaps in support to get you to the next level. So up until 2 years ago, I didn't have anyone leading my sales team at all. I took a step back and I was like, oh my gosh, I cannot lead the sales team anymore and be the CEO and be the face of the company and do all the coaching and be finance. So guess what? I delegated leading the sales team to my executive assistant. Okay? That's where it started.

Melissa Henault:

But what I did was I was able to step back and identify, okay, someone needs to be held accountable for this. And for some of you, the growth in your company is being inhibited by your unwillingness to hire and delegate. You're the bottleneck and you're not the expert in what your business needs with those gaps. So, Jackie's a great example. Like, one of the reasons my business has taken off is our brains are wildly different and the technical stuff that she knows on the back end, I will never know ever. There were years I paid Jackie more than I paid myself. And it's paid itself back in dividends because I saw the gaps in my company that I was never going to be an expert in. And for those of you who don't know Jackie, she's my chief integration officer.

Melissa Henault:

She came in as a real technical person helping me on the back end. Some of you are trying to duct tape and bootstrap a lot of this stuff that your business would take off if you would delegate it out and you'd be willing to pay out. You'd be willing to cut into your margins for a little while to be a slingshot backwards, to be a rocket ship forwards. So when you step back and you look at your business plan, and you're like, man, my top, for instance, my top of funnel is like drip dripping, and I don't have the leads that I need, but I'm really busy running everything else, and I really need to hire, for instance, a media team, but you're not willing to invest. Well, now you're doing the manual labor of that at, like, your hourly rate versus hiring out someone else to do it for you, freeing you up for your money maker. Whatever your face, your voice, and your mind cannot be replaced for, that's where you wanna spend your time. So every year, I step back and ask myself, what new players do I need? So for me right now, it is a full time staff member who specializes in live events. Okay? Because when I step back from my business plan this year, as much as I love my event manager, she's fractional, she's contract, And she quoted me like 88 ks for the project this year.

Melissa Henault:

And I'm like, that's somebody's salary with the company. So why not go find someone who can specialize in this and bring them in in a much larger full scope role in my company? So, all of you are gonna find gaps in your business that need hiring, and then the gaps in your own knowledge. What do you not know that is self it is slowing you down in the growth of your company? What lack of knowledge or expertise? How are you leading your business? Are you leading from just your experience? And are you in a place you've never been before? Because what you guys will know about me, if you don't, is that I'm constantly investing in mentorship for people who are one step above me. So, I recently worked with the same mentor for 3 years. And finally, this year, I was like, my company's gotten really big, and he's amazing, but he's never done this before. And if I don't wanna plateau, I need to go find someone running a 15 to $20,000,000 a year business. And so, some of you are plateaued because you're not willing to invest in the mentorship that's where you need to go. So your ceiling is where you are, and you're never gonna think your way out of it.

Melissa Henault:

So there's identifying the knowledge gap, there's identifying the team gap, and the investments in both to take you to the next level should always be part of your business plan. Okay. And then, the last piece here is the so, let's talk about the small rocks in the sand, The small rocks in the sand. This is where we map out your initiatives for the year. You map out your initiatives for the year. Okay? And I call these the small rocks in the sand because guess what? If you put the big rocks in first, which was everything we talked about in the beginning, you can fit all the sand and all the little rocks in. But if you put all the little rocks in the sand in first, you wouldn't be able to get all the big rocks in. But the big rocks are what's most important to most of us why we got into business in the first place.

Melissa Henault:

Okay? So, what are the little rocks in the sand? Well, let's start with the rocks. For those of you who run a business on a cadence, like for me, if you're in any of my programs, I have different coaching programs that are in different calendars throughout the week. Those are rocks in my calendar. So I have a program calendar for everything that I do, and it's locked up like Fort Knox, very specific cadence on date and time throughout the year. Okay? Same thing for your sales calendar. You know how we just talked about your top of funnel and your sales strategy, your journey to conversion for each offer likely looks different. Okay? This takes planning. So, for instance, our lead gen academy masterclass happens 5 times a year.

Melissa Henault:

So, the marketing and the sales in my calendar kind of go like this all year, my marketing calendar. Now, who remembers? How often do I sell my Mastermind? So, in the calendar, the push for that, it looks like this. This is all year long. And then at the end of the year, it's like, woah. So the marketing for that looks very different. Okay? For our build, grow, scale, our mini mastermind, which is more of an organic sell, we don't push, we don't do these huge pushes publicly. It's an ascension model inside of our program. It's an organic absorption where people come in and ask for business mentorship.

Melissa Henault:

It just kind of goes like this all year long. So you need a sales calendar, and you need to align your marketing calendar to your sales calendar. Okay? But this is why so many businesses fail because people don't think about this shit. And the thing is, here's what's so cool. I don't want you guys to feel overwhelmed. The beauty of all of this is the Internet is free. Like building a brand online, it's free, but most people don't know how to leverage it like a business. We're not just posting on a well, we have a cadence of our plan.

Melissa Henault:

Our live event, burnout to all out live. We intermingle sales of those tickets in our marketing campaign outside of selling all the other shit. So we actually market our live events when we're not marketing other things because the lead gen academy masterclass takes up huge chunks of marketing throughout the year and then we got the mastermind that takes up a chunk and then we're sprinkling in build gross scale and then when we're done with all of that in the calendar we can step back and say okay where's the space where we're not marketing that we can sprinkle in come to our live event? Because we can sell that all year long. But if we don't remember to do it, we get like 3 months from the event and we're like, oh, shit, nobody's registered for the event because we haven't been talking about it and we haven't been marketing it. And you can get really strategic like we have and make it a cart bump. So, now we sell 10 to 20 live event tickets with every masterclass because people add it to their cart when they join the academy. So, how can you step back from your business plan and get strategic and how you're layering some of the things that you're selling to? Is this making sense? Great analogy. It's more like I don't want to do that not my zone of genius.

Melissa Henault:

Yeah. Okay. So, you have your marketing calendar. I love it because you can look, we planned our Black Friday specials last year. Our Black Friday specials for next year are already in my marketing calendar. My team and I are gonna talk about it next week. Think about that. Next week, we're talking about next November.

Melissa Henault:

How many of you guys have a Black Friday special running or a Cyber Monday special running? Right? Awesome. These are the things you can plan in advance. You can plan them in advance and that's part of your sales calendar and your program calendar and you get to do it around life. How did I get to travel to Ireland, to Bali? How was I able to literally travel 14 weeks last year? Because I put the rocks in first and all the important stuff in business filled around it. Okay. So, now, the sand. So, that was the rocks, the program calendar and the sales calendar. The sand is the administrative calendar.

Melissa Henault:

Okay. The sand is the administrative calendar. So where are you gonna take care of business outside of running business, being in your business? So on Mondays, for me now, it's team calls, core team calls, contractor calls, focus group calls with coaches, live event planning. Here's my thing I've learned. I don't like switching what I'm doing. If I'm in the zone of being with the burnout to all out team or contractors, being in my CEO role, let's just do that all day long versus switching from that to coaching my clients and then back to a contractor, back to finance. So for me, Mondays are administrative days. Tuesdays, Thursdays, client coaching days.

Melissa Henault:

Wednesdays, creative days. Many of you are not blocking time for creatives, whether it's your social media, it's podcast, email nurture, working on new programs, and you're burning yourself out, like, trying to do it when it doesn't fit into your calendar on the weekends. So for me, I know being an online business owner, create content creation is a part of my job. As the CEO and the face of the company and the brand, I have to treat it like it's part of my job by blocking out in my calendar once a week creative days, and like I said in the beginning, it's actually a reprieve from all the active coaching for me. Some of you may enjoy creation, some of you may not. I love my troll cave days. I love sitting on this little white couch behind me with a good cup of coffee and my essential oils and writing podcast topics, writing and working on curriculum, writing what I'm gonna be coaching in the community, and I'm in the zone, and it's uninterrupted. And the last thing for me is making space for fire drills and miracles.

Melissa Henault:

Write that down. Make space for fire drills and miracles. Okay? This is why I don't take calls on Fridays. Okay? And here's why. Because if your calendar is chock full every day, you don't have time for miracles and you don't have time for fire drills. Okay? My team knows I run a rule of principle. You cannot book a call with me on Fridays. I can book a call with you, but I won't until the week of.

Melissa Henault:

That is my rule. If it's before the week, nothing can drive me into putting anything in the calendar on Friday. That is my rule. I cannot book anything more than a week in advance that is saved for fire drills and miracles. Okay? Because the shit hit the fan in business every now and again? Yes. We need to anticipate the fire drills and have space to breathe over them and solve them. We also need space for miracles when people ask you for something really cool and collaborate an opportunity. You need to be available to make that call and if you're completely booked up, you're blocking the miracles in your life too.

Melissa Henault:

Okay. So, that is my own personal practice is I do not my team can't book calls to me on Fridays. They're not gonna hear from me on Fridays unless it's the week off and it's we're in a time crunch, and then I'm gonna put things in the call on the calls on Fridays. The other thing that's really nice about that and my team because I have a team that works with me is we all it's kind of a flex day. Like, Fridays, because I don't book calls on Fridays, it's typically when I'm gonna get my roots done. It's typically when I'm gonna get my teeth cleaned or my kids' doctor's appointments. If I consistently keep the calendar clean on Fridays, it can be a routine administrative day for my health or my children's health as well, and it doesn't interrupt my weekends. I'm not going to get my hair done on a Saturday.

Melissa Henault:

I'm spending time with my family on a Saturday. Okay. You control your calendar if you take control of it now. Okay. Now that you've done all of that, you wanna finalize your marketing map. And this is where I talked earlier about your conversion plan for your marketing map like my team's gonna see ours next week I'm gonna present it to them basically, let me sum up a marketing map for you. On an Excel spreadsheet, I have all the milestone dates of everything we are going to sell and when we're going to sell it starting in January through December of next year. Every launch like every master class when the doors open to the mastermind, the live event sales, the modern entrepreneur, everything is in the calendar, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, things that we're going to do with the summit, they're all in the calendar.

Melissa Henault:

And then once you have those dates, you begin to reverse engineer. So, for example, if let's say, I have my first launch the 3rd week in January. K? That's my sales date. The marketing calendar is gonna say, okay, if you're opening if you're running this launch the 3rd week in January, we need a 3 week runway of marketing up to that to drive traffic, eyeballs to the master class. And I need a 5 week runway for organic traffic. 3 for paid, 5 for organic. Some of you, the reasons your workshops are not converting sales is you're not giving yourself a long enough runway to market it and drive traffic into it. You're just showing up a couple days beforehand or you're half assing it and thinking about it 2 weeks in advance, and you're just not getting enough eyeballs.

Melissa Henault:

But if you have a strategic marketing map, if this is happening on this date, 5 weeks previous, I need to start folding in my marketing, my strategies into this. So that's your marketing map. And then on the final day, what I like to do because in my business planning retreat, I tend to have lots of huge pieces of paper where I've drawn. I do, like, my whole calendar on a huge Post it, and each program is a different color on the map, like, each month. It also helps me get a visual of how busy that month is. Okay? So, what I'll do on a huge post it is January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, all the way down and then color coordinate where all the LGA, where our LinkedIn launches are, where my live events are with clients, where my travel is for the masterminds I'm invested in, and I can step back and visually see, woah, that month is really heavy with travel and launching, woah, this one's kind of light, That one doesn't have anything going on. Maybe I should take this heavy month and move some things. So I like a big macro of the state of the union of what's going on.

Melissa Henault:

Because my individual Google Calendar, it's difficult to get that big picture. So you can ease the burden of your calendar if you can get a global view of it before you get running. I even have my family vacations on there because you need to be sensitive to that. I don't wanna come off a 10 day trip from Iceland and go into a launch the next day. Basically, that wouldn't feel good. So you wanna map that stuff out. And then you fine tune and organize when I've mapped everything. The thing I really like to do for those of you that have teams is to really be sure to bring it back to them, share with them the big vision, and how they contribute to the goal.

Melissa Henault:

So like I said earlier, for me this coming year, a huge focus is reduce waste, increase efficiency, and improve profit margin. So, that they're the 3 profitable pursuits that everyone in the company is gonna be very clear on how their activities are either reducing waste, increasing efficiency, or contributing to the bottom line profit margin. And I can share with them the financial plan, like Mandy knows to the dollar now exactly how we're gonna do $5,200,000 next year. And she knows exactly how we can do 6.78, if that's what we wanna do. Like down to the sale, down to the dollar. And I share with the marketing plan too. And this right now for where you are, this might be you sharing it with you. And that's okay.

Melissa Henault:

It still needs to make sense to you so you can check back in on it. Okay, so that was a lot. That was a mouthful. The one thing I did want to put an invitation out to you guys is we do, speaking of our 2 business coaching programs, we do have our doors open right now to build growth scale, which is our mini mastermind where we work with our clients for 6 months at a clip, and help them fine tune their top of funnel strategy, fine tune their customer journey to conversion, calculating their offer strategy and exactly how they're gonna convert their clients over all the way to the back end of scaling to back end optimization, ascension strategies, all the things. Our clients inside of build, grow, scale get coaching and mentorship by me and my leadership team, but they also get all the tools and resources and blueprints that we use back there. So the doors are open. 2 left in our high level mastermind. For those of you who really are interested in taking a whole another level, you're listening to this, and you're like, man, if I could get 1 on 1 coaching with Melissa and her CIO and have her look at our business plan, and I could work with them all year long in, like, a high level mastermind with live events and all the things.

Melissa Henault:

ting to your business plan in: 2025

Melissa Henault:

Remember the big rocks. Put the big rocks in first, and you will thank yourself. Last thing I will say, when you plan your calendar this year for next year, go ahead. If you're kicking yourself that you didn't create space to work on your business plan this year and you're just so behind, go ahead and block it in your calendar next year. November of next year, I already have 4 days blocked. Business planning. K? I even have my team's mid year and quarterly and end of year reviews in the calendar. Go ahead and put it in there.

Melissa Henault:

Alright, guys, have a wonderful evening. And for those of you inside of our programs, we'll see you on the other side. It was great to see you all. Bye bye. Thanks guys so much for listening in on today's podcast episode. And I can't wait for you to see my upcoming guest in the next episode. You are going to love this keynote speaker. Hey, here's the deal.

Melissa Henault:

-: 2285

Melissa Henault:

So again, come find me, melissa_henault over on Instagram, melissahenault over on LinkedIn and Facebook. Can't wait to see you guys over there.

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