Creating Your Profit Plan with Haley Burkhead of Profit Planner
Episode 253: Show Notes
Welcome back to the Strategy Hour Podcast, all you beautiful creatures! We have a great show in store for you today, and we cannot wait for you to hear it. We have an extra special unicorn joining us in the form of Haley Burkhead, and she is here to tell us all about her business and her company called Profit Planner. Now, we say this all the time on The Strategy Hour, but it’s worth repeating: your profits really should be your highest priority. The money is what drives your business, and you need to put that in the front seat!
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In our chat with Haley, we talk all about the way in which she has laid out her planner and how it can massively improve the way all of you run your businesses! Haley has so much energy and so many great ideas that we know you will be able to use immediately and will probably make you want to dig deeper into your planning methods. Haley gives us the whole breakdown on how the different levels of her framework and how each of these levels supports the next. Plus it is so fun and inspiring that we are pretty darn sure that after this episode you will not be able to wait to get started on optimizing everything you do! Throughout the episode Haley gives us steady reminders to keep you eyes on the profit prize and let everything fall into place around that. Great advice and something we urge you all to take to heart!
How and Why Haley Puts The Primary Emphasis on Profit
According to Haley and many other smart business owners, money is the oxygen that keeps your business running. With that in mind, it is easy to see why she has named her company Profit Planner. For a lot of creative entrepreneurs, ideas and energy are the going currency but a steady aim on the profit target is what Hayley thinks we can all use a little bit more of. The profit planning method Hayley teaches you covers what you need to be doing and what should be at the top of your list. Hayley, like us, is a firm believer in clever strategy, good planning and reducing the amount of unnecessary work you put into your business. Once you have made this adjustment you will notice how much faster and more efficiently you can work, you might even find yourself working half days and having a free afternoon for your favorite coffee shop or a picnic in the park. For Hayley, this is all about surrounding yourself with the right people and then streamlining your process to the absolute necessaries.
The Important Processes that Make Up Haley’s Work
The first step in Hayley’s plan is to identify your dream goal or your end mission. If you know what you want and need to accomplish then you can start from there. Then you need to look at your income sources and see how much each stream of your business is bringing in. This is the first big step that Hayley stresses repeatedly and you need to eliminate needless expenses and branches of your business that are not serving you well. You have to be ruthless! We know it can difficult to say goodbye to certain products or services but if you want to take things as seriously as Hayley, it is a must. Cut the fat! Once you have a clearer picture of your revenue streams and matched this against your current earnings, you need to do the math and work out where you need to get to if you want to hit your revenue goal each month. You really have to make sure each part of your business is doing what it needs to and pulling its weight towards the bigger goals. If this means hiring a VA or a PA or building a small-ish team, so be it, but with the help of Hayley’s method you can do it in the best way possible! Do not let your income sources get clogged up and get in the way of your goal.
Build, Develop, Grow, Scale
Hayley shared her pathway to success and profit with us, and it goes build, develop, grow, scale. If you run everything through this funnel you’ll see growth and yes, profit, at every turn. This means sticking to your focused goal, shelving any new ideas and maintaining the plan. Hayley says it is often best to keep a Trello board of new ideas to use at a later stage rather than always being lost in a sea of new and emerging thoughts that could be integrated at any point. Once a new area has been stabilized and automated then you can think about adding another one. In this way, you can build your business, dimension by dimension at a rate that is putting your profits at the top of the list. Then when you have new projects that come up you can have a monthly management plan and really stick to it, knowing exactly what its purpose and goal is. Having this level of clarity offers peace of mind. The next step is assign due dates to each task from every level of each pillar. Hayley uses Asana as her way to keep track of the timeline and the color coding makes it so easy, fun and energizing! This method will slice your hours spent working by a huge amount and knowing exactly what it is you need to do on any given day will make your life so much easier.
Making More Time For Your Business Through Better Planning
Lots of the people Hayley works with, like many of our listeners, still have full time jobs or their businesses are not fully fledged as of yet. This is where self awareness becomes critical, knowing what your goal is and then aiming for it is what will save you! So once all this is laid out and planned, how do you go about implementing and making sure that you and your team stick to the script and follow through.? One way to do this is have a rewards system and this can vary in whichever ways suit you. It might be buying yourself a present at the end of every successfully completed week; it might be having a piece of candy when you reach a goal, but positive reinforcement around actualizing your plans is a great way to make the process more fun. You can put a fun spin on rewards by making them about self-care and treating yourself to healthy and enriching experiences. Just an idea! Anyway, keep it simple and find what works for you.
Analyzing Profits, Decompressing and Recapping Your Progress
So after you have experienced a few cycles of this process and have automated a few of your new layers of your business how do you gauge your successes and failures? How do you decompress and move on, taking into account your profits? Hayley reminds us that you do not need to be especially detail-oriented to manage these tasks. If you are not that type of person then find the person who is and give them this job. If it is looking over spreadsheets and creating monthly reviews, you know you can find the right person and make it all work for you. Don’t struggle with areas of the business that are not your passion. For some of us numbers can be fun so just find the right fit and get that train rolling!
Quote This
No one is teaching people what to do on a day to day basis and that’s where people get hung up.
Highlights
Why Haley Puts The Primary Emphasis on Profit. [0:03:14.2]
The Important Processes that Make Up Haley’s Work. [0:06:21.3]
Build, Develop, Grow, Scale. [0:12:39.1]
Making More Time For Your Business Through Better Planning. [0:22:26.4]
Analyzing Profits, Decompressing and Recapping Your Progress. [0:28:51.3]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:45:10.6]
Do not endlessly work!
Tasks push projects.
Projects push pillars.
Pillars push income sources.
Income sources push the profit plan.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Haley Burkhead
Profit Planner
Haley Burkhead is the Founder of Profit Planner and host of the Profit Planner Podcast. She helps emotionally drained, workaholic women find which tasks drive profit so they can transform the hamster wheel they call their business into something simple and automated. Haley is a consultant, podcaster, speaker and educator who has been featured in the Huffington Post, Thrive Global Magazine and Radiant CEO. Find free productivity and profit secrets at profitplanner.co.
KEY TOPICS
Planning, Profit, Pillars, Color Coding, Asana, Tasks, Implementation
