How I do my Business Planning
And if you are finding it hard to find your groove so far, don’t worry, the astrology is creating a feeling of stuckness and lack of momentum – but all this is going to shift forward when we move into the Chinese New Year on 17th February – the Year of the Horse, with all it’s achievement energy and momentum!
My Vision & Planning Process
As always at this time of year, my main focus is on business planning for the year ahead – I always do mine at the beginning of January when I’m rested after my Christmas break. It’s a great way to get myself back in the groove and get excited and motivated about my business – I do tend to lose a bit of “mojo” after a long break.
For my planning, I follow the same vision & planning process that I teach members of my Business from the Heart membership.
In the spirit of a new year, I thought I’d share the 8 steps to this vision and planning process with you. If you haven’t yet looked ahead to 2026, or you have done but would benefit from a boost of renewed motivation, then you’ll find this planning process powerful.
I always find that having a clear plan for the year ahead helps to focus and motivates me. Have your post-its at the ready!
Here’s my Planning Process:
Watch the video below or scroll down to read the blog:
Let me share with you the steps that I follow to do my own planning every year.
Before you do this you might find it useful to…
Read The One Thing by Gary Keller
When I first read it, it wasn’t so much an eye-opener as a reinforcement of what I’ve always instinctively known — that trying to do too much and focusing on too many projects at once leads to doing none of them well, a huge amount of frustration, a feeling of lack of progress, and eventually burn out. This is why my planning process is built around having just “One core Thing” to focus on at any time.
A key question in that book:
“What is the one thing that would make everything else either easier or unnecessary?”
Step 1: Get your Post-its ready!
Next, gather together what you’ll need to get into planning and creative mode. For me, this is a very large sheet of card (A1 or A2), a bunch of small and large post-it notes and some blu-tack to stick it to the wall (but you can do the same thing with a sheet of A4 and some small size post-its if that’s easier to get your hands on). You’ll also need a journal or notebook to hand to create your vision and capture your many ideas. Divide the large card up into 12 squares, 3 months per row to represent each quarter and leave some space along the bottom (see the image further down). Then you’re good to go.
Step 2: Get clear on your Vision
When I take my members through this process I always begin with a visioning process to help them to tune into their vision for their life and business 2-3 years from now. This is important to guide the direction of the year to come. For me, planning is a combination of having a big vision for what I want to achieve, then tapping into my intuition about what feels right for me, and also understanding the very practical steps that I need to take if I’m going to get there.
And of course, it’s important to set clear milestones along the way so you can measure (and celebrate!) your progress – even the small steps. Taking time to get clear on where you are going is an important part of the process.
Step 3: Decide your Overall One Thing
The overall focus is a clear business goal that you want to achieve. This gets written across the top of the sheet. This is your ‘One Thing’ for the whole year. This One Thing will guide all of your other decisions. This is the One Thing that if you were to achieve it, will make all of your efforts worthwhile, and that also by pursuing it, you will see knock-on benefits across your business as a whole.
It might be achieve consistent £5k months, it might be get your business foundations in place and prove to yourself you have a business that works by enrolling your first few clients, or it might be to grow your membership to 500 members
Knowing that One Thing that you are working towards helps to focus your other activities and helps you know what opportunities and ideas are genuinely good ones and what to say no to because they are really distractions.
Step 4: Post-It note Braindump
The next step is to brain dump all of your goals and ideas — and I mean all of them.
ALL the things you want to achieve in the coming year.
ALL the things you know you “should” be doing but are not.
ALL the things you want to do because you know they’ll impact your business positively in the long term but you are not getting around to them.
ALL the crazy and inspiring ideas for new projects.
Get it all down, a post-it note for each one.
Yes, there will be a lot, but that’s the point – you want to get this spaghetti out of your head so you can use the process to untangle, organise and prioritise.
Step 5: Add your One Thing items to your Planner
Add your post-it notes to your planner, allocating each one to a particular month. The challenge here is to have just one key focus per month!
This bit is NOT easy. It needs a lot of thought and a lot of time and takes discipline.
Here are some guidelines for doing this:
Put your Holidays in first
Because these will slip if I don’t plan them in advance – even when I do plan them they slip!
Then put your most important or fixed projects
For example, I always do the annual launch of my Get More Clients Saying Yes! course in September – so my “one thing” for September becomes the launch, and then my “one thing” for July and August is audience growth ahead of the launch and my “one thing” for October is delivering on that programme. These get fixed into the plan in advance.
The aim is to have JUST ONE key focus per month.
There is a discipline to this, but this allows you to see that you can’t fit everything that belongs in your “ideas bank” in by next Tuesday! This is what leads to overwhelm and spinning your wheels. Instead, you can see visually that you have a whole year ahead of you so it doesn’t all have to be done at once.
This process also allows you to see where you are taking on and committing to too much — which is where you hit overwhelm and ultimately frustration at your lack of progress.
By doing it this way, I know what my core focus is every month and it helps me to protect those things that are the highest priority in achieving my long-term vision. Then if an “unmissable” opportunity comes along, or I realise I want to change tack, or a “life curveball” hits, rather than trying to fit in too much I can reassess.
Step 6: Create your Heartbeat
The heartbeat or “rhythm” of your business is the stuff that needs to happen regularly all year round to keep your business on track. These don’t go into particular months because they are happening all the time, so I leave space for the heartbeat at the bottom left of my sheet.
Your heartbeat might include:
Weekly sales calls & direct reach out
Daily time on Social Media
Reaching out for speaking opportunities
One of mine is creating these YT videos and releasing one weekly.
This becomes the rhythm and heartbeat that you do all year round that keeps the business alive.
As an example, if you want to start using LinkedIn as a key marketing strategy, you might make it your One Thing for the coming month to set up your profile and establish your strategy and routine. Once the routine is up and running it will continue to happen one month after the next, so in that case it moves to your Heartbeat.
Step 7: The Futurelog
This might be the best part of the plan!
We all have a zillion ideas for all the amazing things we want to do in our business and it can all get very exciting. But if we are not careful we end up totally overcommitting to things with the result that we take on too much. What then invariably happens is that other areas of our life start to suffer and yet for all the sacrifice, none of our projects actually get off the ground.
So the Futurelog is a series of post-it notes that goes at the bottom right of your sheet. (I normally have my Heartbeat bottom left and the Futurelog bottom right). These are the things you REALLY want to do but you can’t fit in now without impacting the success of the things you’ve decided ARE your highest priorities. They go in the Futurelog because they are not being “thrown out” or ignored. They are just waiting for the right time. And there’s nothing you stopping you moving one up into your monthly One Thing area and moving something else down.
This type of “One Thing” planning helps you to create a realistic plan that will actually move you forward based on your immediate highest priorities and allows you time to focus on the tasks that are most important.
Step 8: Accountability
The next important piece of course is accountability. How can you be held accountable to actually sticking with and completing that all important One Thing each month?
In the Business from the Heart Membership we have small accountability pods to keep each other on track *and* a thread in the Facebook Group every month where our members publicly share their One Thing, and then report back at the end of the month.
How can you create something like this for yourself? Maybe with a friend?
I hope you’ve found it useful to see how myself and our members plan out our year. If you’ve got a different system that works for you do post in the comments below. And if you haven’t yet got a plan for the next 3-6 or 12 months, why not schedule out some blocks of time for the next few days – it will pay dividends in renewed clarity and focus – not to mention the sense of progress from seeing your business move forwards.
Want to follow this Vision & Planning process in more detail?
If you feel you’d like to be guided through this process in more detail – including deciding what to focus on first and in what order – you can do that via Vision & Planning process embedded in the membership. I’ve sneakily opened a joining page just for the next few of days. (and if after the first month you decide it’s not for you, just let us know within 30 days and we’ll refund your first payment).
So if I’ve inspired you, go ahead you can jump in now and get started with your plan: www.businessfromtheheart.com/join
