How to make your 2023 planning process easy and effective

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, and yet many business owners don’t take the time to sit down and do a full planning session before they head into a new year. In today’s episode of the podcast, I share with you some of my favorite tips to make your 2023 planning process both easy and effective.

Hello and welcome to The Clare Wood Podcast. This is your weekly dose of all things money to help you intentionally create a profitable business and a life you love. I have the difficult conversations about money so you can make more money with ins each week. I share how you can use mindset and the practical foundations of finance to elevate your earnings without sacrificing the things that are important to you because you can and should be making more money.

If you want help with planning out your 2023, make sure you check out my course, the Profit Academy Foundations. Inside this course, I show you how to create your biggest goals for the new year, and importantly, I show you how to get there. This course is showing you all of the foundations of learning to master your money and using planning as a process for achieving your most amazing outcomes to grow your business profit. To find out more about the Profit Academy Foundations, click on the link in the show notes for today’s episode.

Why create a plan?

Before I dive into my tips around making your 2023 planning process easy and effective, we should first of all start with why you need a plan. The reason that we create a plan is that it gives clarity around where it is that you want to go. A lot of business owners just charge full steam ahead without really taking any time to stop, step back and think about what it is that they are wanting to achieve in business. Taking time out to do a planning process gives you absolute clarity in your goals, in where you want to be, in how you want to be doing business in 2023. The next thing that a planning process does is it gives you the opportunity to think about the strategy of how you are going to get to where you want to be. Again, it’s all well and good to have these big goals, but if you don’t actually know how you are going to get there, you’re probably just winging it.

Another reason why a planning process is really important is because it gives you clarity about where to invest in your business to achieve your goals. From my experience, a lot of business owners have a revenue target of where they want to be, but they don’t really think about the profitability of their business in trying to get there. When you undertake a planning process, you actually think about the areas of your business that you want to invest in so that you can achieve those revenue targets, and you are also able to see what that looks like in terms of profitability. There’s no point in building a six or a seven figure business if it’s not profitable and taking the time to intentionally work out the areas that you wish to invest in and then of course, make sure that the business is still going to be profitable is one of the best ways to make sure that you are building your business in a profitable way.

So these are the reasons why you need a plan. Let’s now talk about how to actually create your plan.

Carving out the time to work ON your business and 2023 planning

The first tip that I have is to carve out the time. Don’t do your planning on the fly, out and about, or one day you think I’d like to grow my Instagram following, or let’s make this my $200,000 year end business. I encourage you to create a specific time where it is all about planning. I personally love to actually get away from my office to do this. Most years, I rent out a hotel room and hub and I take a day, or we really map out all of our goals in our personal life and also in business. This is a really fantastic way to have a holistic look at everything it is that you want to achieve in the coming year, whether or not you have the opportunity to completely go and check into a hotel room or not, I really encourage you to carve out the time and to really take this process seriously and make sure that you do it properly.

Have a system or process to avoid distractions

The next tip that I’ve got for you is have a system or process. If you are anything like me, you might get quite easily distracted and let me share an example of how this can play out. When undertaking the planning process, I might map out that one of my goals for the year is to, this is one of my goals for next year is to go to Italy, and as soon as I write that goal down, I get super excited and I go, Ooh, I quickly Google and find out how much flights are or where I want to go in Italy. And then half an hour later, I’m down a rabbit Warren of booking.com, exploring all of the options of where I can go in Italy and where I want to stay. When undertaking your planning process, make sure you have a system or process in place so that you don’t get distracted.

And what I mean by that is that you carve out the time and the steps that you want to undertake in your planning process. This is something I map out very clearly inside my course, the Profit Academy Foundations. I say, first of all, we start with the big picture goals, and then we break it down into the steps to get there. And if you’re going to take the time to carve out time out of your calendar, away from your business to undertake this process, make sure that you do it in a meaningful and strategic way rather than just winging it.

Making a plan to stay on track 

Which leads me to my next point. When you are doing your planning, do an end to end process including a budget. It’s all well and good to have the big vision. I want to go to Italy but unless you actually take it to the place where you do work out, the costs involved and the plan of how you are going to make it happen, well, it’s just a dream, not a plan.

So make sure that you take all of those goals and convert them into an actual step by step process of how you are going to get there, aka, your action plan and what that looks like financially, AKA your budget. Your budget is your month by month framework for the revenue that you wish to bring into your business and the investments that you intend to make to get there, which then leads you to your month by month profit. So when you are doing your planning, make sure that you do an end to end process. Don’t just map out some sexy goals, work out how you’re going to get there, and the last step of the planning process is to put a plan in place to stay on track. Again, there’s no point in taking time out and creating this amazing plan a beautiful month by month budget if you don’t do anything with it.

Once you’ve created your plans, make sure that you put a plan in place to stay on track. This could look like creating accountability by joining a mastermind group or working with a coach. It could even look like having check in points throughout the year. This is something where hubby and I used to always do is that we would do quarterly check in points, and unfortunately this last year we didn’t undertake that process and it’s meant that we haven’t kept our goals front of mind. Specifically with your budget, I think it’s really important that you load your budget into your accounting program. This is something I did this year, <laugh>, but you make sure that you load your budget into your accounting program so that you can track how you are progressing against your financial plan or your budget for the year. So when you’ve gone to all the effort of creating plan, building out your budget, make sure that you put a plan in place to stay on track.

Many business owners don’t take the time to undertake your planning process because they think, what’s the point and what am I even going to do with it, and how is this actually going to help me be successful? The reason we do a plan is to get clear about exactly where it is that you want to be and how you’re going to get there. And then once you’ve got the plan, you use it to track your progress. Now, of course, you aren’t always going to stay on track towards your goals. Life happens, the economy goes up and down. But what you do when you are tracking your progress against your goals is that you use this information to course correct. So if perhaps you’ve spent more than you planned to one month, you can then adjust that for the next month. Or if something is going really well, you might decide to put even more money into that so that you can get a higher return on that.

Investment. Knowledge is power and using your plan as a guidepost, you can course correct throughout the year to make sure that you keep achieving your big goals and your most profitable business. As I shared at the start, if you want my help to build your most profitable business and make 2023 your most successful year yet through an effective and easy planning process, make sure you check out my course, the Profit Academy Foundations, all the details, including how you can join, will be available via the show notes for today’s episode. So make sure you go on and check that out.

Remember, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So take the time and undertake your 2023 planning process, and I really encourage you to do it now.

I hope you are feeling inspired and excited about what is possible for you when it comes to money. It takes a lot of time and energy to create a podcast, so I’d be very grateful if you could take the time to hit subscribe, write me a review and share any of your favorite episodes with your audience on social media. The more people that we can reach, the more people we can empower to earn more in their business because you can and should be earning more money.