A New Way to Plan 2021 That Actually Works

2021 is right around the corner, and last week we talked all about the never-ending cycle of being super super motivated to crush your goals in the new year, and then as the year goes on, momentum starts to fade ever so slowly.

We even talked about the importance of reflecting on your goals the week before and how doing so can help you plan strategically and intentionally, so you aren’t just writing down goals that aren’t realistic or reachable.

Now, what about the actual planning process? At the end of 2019, we tried a new technique that helped us plan for 2020 tremendously, and we’re going to break that down for you today.

Let’s Talk About the Numbers

It’s easy to decide a dollar amount for how much income you want to bring in, and it’s even easier to put all your eggs in one basket to work towards that number. What we tried instead was deciding what percentage of revenue we wanted each of our products to bring in and then worked our goals and launches around those percentages.

For example, if we wanted The Creative Template Shop to bring in 50% of our revenue, we would spend 50% of our time on it. If something was set to only bring in 10%, we’d only give it 10% of our time. We would then adjust the percentage as results actually came in and shifted our focus accordingly, and it gave us some really good foundations on where to put our time and attention.

We’re going to try this technique out again for 2021 because it helped really put things into perspective. It helped us make sure we weren’t wasting too much time on something that wasn’t set to bring in a large percentage of our revenue, at the same time making sure we spent enough time on the things that were.

Create a Rating System

We have three main products: Strategy Academy, The Creative Template Shop, and Trello for Business. At the beginning of 2020, we decided that if a product is going to take the majority of our focus because it’s bringing in the majority of our revenue, we gave it 3 stars (on a scale of 1-3, since we have 3 products).

At the beginning of 2020, we gave Strategy Academy 3 stars, The Shop 2 stars, and Trello for Biz 1 star. After one month of The Shop existing, we swapped it out to 3 stars because we realized it had the most opportunity for us and was probably going to be the frontrunner for the year, and it was! 

We see so many of our students putting in the time to research, stress, and just overall doing things that aren’t even going to bring in a ton of their revenue. For example, we have students who own service-based businesses, and in reality, their #1 driver of revenue is referrals. But then they go to plan their year thinking they need to grow more on social media, so they spend all this time cooking up and trying out different strategies.

This leads them to ignore the thing that actually brought them the most money last year, which were referrals, and they end up only giving 5% of their time towards that, whereas social media is getting 95%. Then, they’re frustrated throughout the year because they aren’t making the money they wanted to be, but the whole time, social media wasn’t what was making them 95% of their revenue last year.

So, take a look at what’s actually working, what will take you the least amount of time, and what will make you the most money. When all of those levers are functioning properly, that’s when your business will grow in a stable, predictable, consistent way. If you did the work we outlined last week that was all about reflecting on your year using our End of Year Reflection Journal, you should be able to take these tips and head into 2021 with a plan that will actually work.