Jade Boyd: When you’re really clear on what your quarterly goals are and you’re committed to those actions that are going to help you make progress towards those goals and how much time you have to invest in them, then you can make really smart investment decisions time wise or financially, to know how to invest in your goals, to reach them faster, quarter by quarter.

The phrase, this is overwhelming is something that I hear really often as a business coach, but most of the time it’s not the actual situation or the project itself. That’s overwhelming. It’s the need to make big decisions and not knowing what to focus on first. Sometimes I think about this, like looking at one of those old paper maps that fold out to this gigantic poster size map. And when you’re looking at the big picture all at once, it feels overwhelming. It feels complicated, but when you narrow down the route that you’re taking and are able to focus on one road, one city. One turn at a time, it gets a lot less overwhelming.

And one of the reasons why I think so many business owners struggle when it comes to hitting their annual goals, especially their financial goals, is because they don’t take the time to break them down into more bite sized chunks that do not feel overwhelming. At the beginning of the year, everyone gets really excited and motivated and we create the big pretty map, the pretty vision board, right?

But then oftentimes business owners will shove that plan or that map in the drawer and not take it out because actually taking action on those goals feels hard. It can feel overwhelming. And this is why I am so passionate about quarterly planning. Focusing on one quarter at a time as a business owner can really help you break down your big goals into more manageable bite sized chunks and be honestly more realistic about how much time you have and what you can actually accomplish during the next 90 days.

It also eliminates the procrastination trap that many business owners fall into when they’re constantly reassessing what they should be focused on each month, each week, each day. If you look at a huge list of projects and goals every day, it can feel absolutely paralyzing. It makes sense why that would be overwhelming.

And it makes it way easier for you to tell yourself, I’ll get to that later. There’s plenty of time left this year. But in reality, the only way to make progress on your goals is one tiny baby step at a time, one day at a time. And if you can separate deciding what to do. From the time and place that you actually do those things, it will be a lot easier for you to slide into like the execution, getting things done mode and stop overthinking things and just get things done.

So today I’m sharing a simple five step process that you can use each and every quarter to have a mini business reset and get clear on the projects and tasks that you need to prioritize, get clear on your plan for the quarter so that you can reach your annual business goals faster. And before I dive into this episode, I want to let you know that I’ll be offering a live five day in depth quarterly business reset challenge, March 18th through 22nd, 2024.

And if you’re listening to this in the future, the same link is going to go to future workshops. If I offer this again, so you can always hop on the wait list for future ones. If you missed this first one and this is really going to be just in time this quarter to help you reset your strategy and your plan for Q2.

So in the five day challenge, you’ll get access to live trainings for me on each of these five steps, as well as the step by step plug and play templates to help you move through this process quickly and make decisions and make strategic decisions. And not only that, you’re also going to get access to a private Slack community where you’ll also get direct access to me outside of the trainings for one on one coaching to help you overcome any obstacles or challenges that get in your way and truly make this the week that you do a full reset in your business and dive into Q2 prepared. So to learn more about the quarterly business reset, you can visit www.jadeboyd.co/quarterlyreset to learn more, and I’ll make sure to link that in the show notes as well.

So diving into this five step process, the first step, of course, is to start by clarifying your goals. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast, I probably sounds like a broken record, but productivity starts with clarity. And so the first step to planning your quarter is to really get clear on your goals.

And if there have been changes over this past quarter where you do need to adjust your goals or things aren’t feeling in alignment anymore, then let’s do that first before we try and break down a plan. So this step really has two parts. First, clarifying where you’re at right now. And then second, clarifying where you want to go.

And there’s two main things for service providers that I want you to focus on while you’re doing these two steps. First, how much you’re paying yourself. And second, How many hours you’re working each week. So start by getting clear on your financial metrics and where your business is currently sitting.

The numbers will not lie. They will tell you a true story. And I want you to pay special attention again to how profitable your business is and how much you’re paying yourself each month, because that’s the metric that really matters. We’re not building this business just to build it. Ultimately you want to make money from this, right?

That’s why you left your nine to five or that’s why you picked up the side hustle and are taking time away from the other things in your life that matter to you to focus on business because you’re hoping that it’s actually going to pay you. So let’s get clear on how much you’re actually paying yourself each month, and I say this all the time, but revenue doesn’t matter. If you’re not able to pay yourself specifically, right? So I really want you to focus on that metric. And then next, think about how many hours and if you do time tracking, then that makes this even easier. But review how many hours you’re working each week and whether or not that’s really sustainable.

Do you feel rushed every week? Do you always feel like you’re falling behind or dropping the ball? Do you have Way too many meetings on your calendar. Do you have more clients than you can serve? Well, at this point, get clear on how you’re spending your time right now and whether or not changes need to be made to your strategy and to your plan in order to cut back on hours or make the hours that you’re working feel more reasonable.

And after you get clear on exactly where you’re at right now, it will get that much easier to decide what needs to change and where you need to go moving forward. And again, we’re going to focus on profit and your schedule primarily. For your financial goals, you need to be forecasting out month by month, how much money your business is bringing in and what you’re going to focus on launching or selling month by month to hit your revenue and your profit goals.

Basically, nobody does this in business. And it honestly blows my mind, even from like a financial software perspective. There are very few budgeting or, accounting softwares that allow business owners to project their. finances going forward. They’re just recording what happened in the past. And again, it blows my mind because this is such an important part of growing your business, having financial projections, which is not complicated.

Honestly, most business owners are just like posting and praying, right? That’s the phrase and hoping that somebody books one of their services. And that’s not a sustainable strategy. And in order to make progress on your business goals, each month, you really have to know what you’re focused on. And selling is part of being a business owner.

And having clear revenue goals and breaking them down month by month so that you know what you need to be booking and you know what you need to be marketing and you know what you need to be selling, that’s going to make your job and every other area of your business just that much easier. And it also gives you that double check of making sure that your booking goals and your financial goals are actually aligned to your capacity and how much time you have to show up and give to your business each month.

So this is ideally something that you would forecast at the beginning of the year, but each quarter you’re going to have to update the numbers showing what you actually booked and made in the last quarter, right? And maybe last quarter was amazing and you’ve already booked out most of your Q2 calendar, but maybe it was a slow quarter and you need to adjust your financial projections and your goals accordingly to make up for that.

Either way, you want to be really clear in the next 90 days what your financial goals are and what you need to sell in order to hit those goals. And again, making sure that you have the capacity time wise to actually do the things that are going to help you show up and sell and deliver those services to your clients.

Okay, after step one, you have really clear quarterly goals, and then step two is to create your strategic plan. And again, ideally, at the beginning of the year, you have an overall strategic plan, and we’re just updating this quarter by quarter. But if not, it’s never too late to create a strategic plan.

And this might sound super fancy, but it’s actually, again, really simple. Basically, you’re just going to review your quarterly goals and break them down into bite sized projects and tasks. So, for example, you might have the goal in April to build your email list by 100 subscribers, so you’re ready to launch a new offer the next month in May. If your goal in April is to build your email list by 100 subscribers, you may have projects and tasks related to that goal that need to be prioritized.

So maybe you need to create a new lead generator or update your email welcome sequence or pitch some podcasts so you can guest interview and promote your lead generator. Looking at the goal to gain a hundred subscribers when you enter the month is definitely overwhelming, but looking at the task of find five podcasts to pitch to is a lot easier, less overwhelming, and more manageable.

And I recently launched printable quarterly wall calendars that can help you map out your strategic plan if you’re a visual person and see that big picture plan at a glance. There are annual and quarterly templates that have space for you to write down your overall goals for the quarter for the year, and then break them down into those projects month by month that you need to focus on in order to hit your goals.

So I will also link those in the show notes, if you’re a visual person and want to throw a big calendar up on the wall and create your strategic plan for Q2, if you haven’t already.

Okay, we have our goals, we have our strategic plan, and then step three is to adjust your marketing plan. So when it comes to selling your offers or building your brand, marketing your business, the number one thing that you can do to simplify your life is to build a repeatable monthly marketing plan.

And this is a template plan that you should be able to rinse and repeat month after month and tailor to your monthly booking goals. It should include all of the marketing channels you’re using to market your business. As well as content pillars for the types of topics you’re going to show up and talk about regularly.

For example, how often do you want to promote your lead generators? How often do you want to give tips or tutorials? How often do you want to share client testimonials? Look at the types of content that have performed the best for you and create that repeatable marketing plan that will build your audience and drive people into your sales funnel every single week.

And again, ideally, this is something that you have created already that you’re already doing and now we’re just refreshing it and updating it and adjusting based on what we learned last quarter, if any topics or content types need to change based on what’s performing best, that’s what we’re doing here.

And again, the majority of business owners will not take the time to do this, even though it’s incredibly simple and helpful. Does it take a little bit of time up front? Absolutely, but it’s going to save you so much more time on the back end when you’re staring at your task to like write an email or post on Instagram and you have no idea what to say.

And again, we want to separate deciding what to do from the actual doing of that thing. And don’t get me wrong. Every month this plan is going to look a little bit different and that’s okay. The goal isn’t to stick to this plan exactly month after month after month. The goal is to have a really strategic template to start from so that you can take that template plan that you know is aligned to your brand and adjust it to help you meet your monthly goals each and every month.

And the last thing I want to say about your marketing plan is that it doesn’t necessarily have to involve creating content, even though content I believe is still king in 2024. And most of you are probably creating content. There are so many other strategies that you can use to build your audience and generate leads for your services.

And I call these business minimalist marketing strategies, like less, but better marketing strategies. And I coach my clients to rotate these strategies into monthly marketing plans to work smarter and not harder. So for example, guest podcasting is one of my favorite business minimalist marketing strategies because you can get in front of an engaged audience of your ideal clients, let someone else promote your episode, and then use the episode to build your email list.

There are so many strategies like that, that you can use month after month after month that won’t involve creating content. So you don’t have to go out and individually reach every single lead for your business. I just want you to think outside the box a little bit in terms of creating your monthly marketing plan and choosing strategies that are going to work for you based on where you’re at.

Okay, now we have our goals. We have our strategic plan. We’ve updated our template marketing plan. Step four is to actually map out your quarter and create your quarterly plan.

And I want to point out that I always suggest planning your marketing activities a quarter out at a time, but you don’t necessarily have to batch it a month or a quarter at a time. I’m obviously a huge proponent of batching, but how you decide to batch, if at all, is totally up to you. Right now, I batch my podcasts and blogs about a month at a time and then I batch my other content about a week or two at a time and in different seasons this looks different for me, but we want to plan it out a quarter in advance so that we can see the big picture and again, decide once what the plan is so that we’re showing up month by month, week by week, we know what we’re supposed to be doing, we know what we need to be prioritizing and then we’re just showing up and doing it.

And then the last step here that I want to point out is to invest in your goals. You might have heard it said before that if you want to know what’s important to someone, you just have to look at their bank account and their calendar. Having the perfect plan in place for Q2 will not help you reach your goals unless you’re willing to invest the time and the energy and maybe even finances into reaching your goals.

So an example of this last year, Caleb and I decided that we really wanted to focus on our marriage and building a stronger relationship because we were thinking about getting pregnant and having kids. And it kind of seemed to us, this is the last year as no kid married people. And so we really wanted to focus on investing in our marriage and strengthening that relationship as much as we could before kids came into play.

And if you looked at our calendar last year, you would see that we took several trips together. We had regular date nights. We went to a marriage conference in Chicago. We also went to quarterly Marriage conferences that was through like a local organization. And if you look at our bank account, you would see that we invested quite a bit of money into prioritizing those things.

And if we would have gone about our year as usual, not investing time or money into things that would strengthen our relationship, not being intentional about the way we spent our time, we wouldn’t have made nearly as much progress or grown nearly as much as a married couple.

And sometimes it can be really difficult to know what to do or what to invest in to reach your goals. If you’re staring at a piece of paper that says, again, like, book five new clients in April and realizing that you have no idea what you have to do to actually reach that goal, you don’t have to Google yourself to death to figure it out.

Investing in your goals will only help you reach them faster without wasting time and money making all of the avoidable mistakes along the way. And I also, again, I want to differentiate between spending and investing because I think overspending and again, not focusing on profitability in your business is a huge problem for service providers.

And so we’re not talking about spending needlessly, we’re talking about really investing. And there are a lot of business owners who are not profitable because they’re only spending, not investing. So when you’re spending, the money is gone. It doesn’t come back to you. It’s just out the door. If you buy a digital course that you don’t watch, you don’t implement, that is not investing that is spending. But when you’re investing, you’re making your money back and then some, right? You expect a return on whatever money you’re putting down or whatever time you’re putting down towards your goal. And the good news is that when you’re really clear on what your quarterly goals are and you’re committed to those actions that are going to help you make progress towards those goals and how much time you have to invest in them, then you can make really smart investment decisions time wise or financially, to know how to invest in your goals, to reach them faster, quarter by quarter.

And I just want to close by saying this quarterly business reset process is simple, but it’s a process that will really change the trajectory of your business if you master it and you’re able to do it well. So if you do want to reach your goals faster and get coached step by step on what you need to do to reach your quarterly business goals, make sure you visit the URL in the show notes to check out the quarterly business reset. Again, we’re going to do a live one in March, but I’m planning to do this in the future as well. So make sure you join the wait list if you missed this first round and come talk to me on Instagram. If you love this episode or want to share your takeaways, I would love to hear them.

I’m on Instagram at jadeboyd.co and I love chatting with podcast listeners. So I would love to hear your thoughts on this. And if you do quarterly planning and what that process looks like for you too. So, until next time business minimalists take what you learned today and get 1 percent better this week.