As a former teacher, I know the importance of planning. We did it constantly and consistently every school year.
We knew the targets we needed to hit by the end of the year and worked backward to plan our years. The vision of where our kiddos would be by May allowed us to pace out and plan our lessons for the year.
We were always planning… for the week ahead, planning each lesson down to the minute, planning each transition throughout the school day, planning for absences, and planning for parent-teacher conferences… yeah, teaching involves a massive amount of planning.
So I’m no stranger to the reality that being unprepared and not planning for something can easily cause a huge headache, failed lessons, and complete chaos.
We also did a lot of reflecting in the classroom. After each lesson, we’d reflect on how the lesson went, if the kids understood the concept we were trying to teach, how each student performed, who needed extra help, if we could repeat the lesson or tweak it a bit for the next time, and on and on.
Together, this planning and reflection process gave us crucial insights into what was going on in the day-to-day of our classroom and allowed us to see the successful areas of our teaching and the parts that had room for growth.
Now, before you start wondering how you accidentally landed on an educator’s blog, let’s bring it back to online business.😉
The vision you have curated and dreamed up for your business is your anchor for what your business will look like (not sure how to define your vision, head here or here to learn more)!
Once you know your vision for the next 6=12 months, it’s time to get into the weeds and figure out the steps it’s going to take to get there.
This is where annual (we’ll save annual planning for another time!) and quarterly planning enters the conversation.
90-day planning gives us the structure to be able to take steps to reach our vision for our business.
As business owners, we have to carve out time to look back at what we’ve been doing, notice how it went and how it felt, and then plan out the next chunk of time to either try something new, continue with what we’ve been doing, or loop in projects from our “sticky note stack” (aka the backlog of “to-do’s” and good ideas that never get done).
But it can be hard to know how or where to begin.
You’re already short on time and energy, so who has time to add one extra thing to your plate?
That’s where a strategic partner can come in and support you in this process.
Certified Directors of Operations (👋hi, it’s me!) are the perfect strategic partners to complete full business and quarterly planning with. We help you think deeply about your business mission, vision, values, and boundaries, but then we can immediately shift into the weeds of your business, identifying, with you, what is working, what is causing bottlenecks, and even better, we can develop a plan to get things back on track.
We ask the right questions to make you think about your bottom line, your goals, what’s currently in motion, and what needs to be created. After prioritizing your ideas and the departments in your business, you get to walk away with complete clarity, a solid direction, and a plan to move your business forward for the next 90 days and beyond!
It’s like having a decluttering, spring cleaning, reorganizing moment for your business. *yes, pleaseeee!*
The way I personally structure this dreamy planning session is through a VIP week.
We spend the week recalibrating your mission, vision, values, and boundaries, dive into each “department” in your business to identify the bottlenecks and pull out new ideas, work through sales planning, marketing efforts, and operational tweaks, and then get granular on the actual to do’s. By Friday, you have a roadmap for the next 3 months to get you that much closer to your vision.
We start our week with a 90-minute planning meeting, then we chat over Voxer to reflect on how business feels in real-time. Then, mid-week we meet again to wrap up day 2 of our planning session and by Friday, I put together your plan and give you the structure to hold yourself accountable!
Ready to get started? Click here to fill out a quick form and book a free discovery call and see if a Business Planning VIP Week is right for you!
