Where Boss Project is Headed in 2022
Episode 602: Show Notes
The new year is fast approaching, and with it comes excitement, planning, and a whole of strategizing! We want to take all the things that worked so well in 2021, and carry it over into 2022. One of the biggest changes we’ve experienced in the last 12 months, is taking on a host of new full-time employees and growing our team! Soon, our full-time employees will even outnumber our regular contractors! It’s been really exciting expanding our business family, and we’ve learned a lot in the process.
To prepare for 2022 we’ve brain dumped all our anxieties and aspirations for the coming year onto paper, and blocked out our calendar accordingly. This is the biggest team we’ve ever worked with and we’re excited to take a far more structured approach to scheduling time-off, holidays, and blackout days. We’re taking everything we’ve integrated into our lives about how we run our business and are passing it on to the team. To learn more about our trajectory for 2022 and how we’ll be growing our business, tune in today!
How We Planned Out Our Entire Year in Less Than 30 Minutes
Have you ever tried getting all your ideas and anxieties down on paper? It’s a fantastic method for gaining perspective and calming down your stressful thoughts. You can think of it as a kind of ‘brain dump’ exercise, and we love using it, especially when we’re feeling overwhelmed. The exercise entails putting to paper everything you want, and need, to get done before a deadline and then prioritizing the most important ones. Once you have everything on paper, you can begin to categorize your goals according to their urgency. To prepare for the new year, we prioritized our goals by asking ourselves when they needed to be done; what would be nice to get done, but not urgent; and what could be moved to the following year.
Initially, we’ve used this method on a much smaller scale. We had even asked our team to do it with their specific tasks at the time in order to give us insight into what was going on in their brains. It was a great way for us to get on the same page and help them evaluate whether their priorities were aligned with ours. The exercise was so effective that we decided to institute it on a much larger scale and use it to plan for 2022! At the end of November 2021, we wrote out major things we wanted to accomplish and pay attention to in 2022. It’s important to note that this wasn’t granular planning, but rather major marketing events and milestones that we wanted to focus on. These were definitely things that we knew we had to put on a calendar! So we could back up, and get a broad view of how we needed to plan to effectively accomplish those things.
The Thing We Added to Our Calendar Before Anything Else
When we did our planning for 2022, we put things in a couple of categories. First, we wanted to map out time off, before moving on to major events, and then finally schedule prompts to remind us to work on new projects. This will no doubt look different for you, depending on what stage your business is at, but you should plan according to what feels right to you! One of the most important things to do first when laying out your calendar is to plan your boundaries. We’re finding it very useful to become more intentional about our planning, especially since our team has grown so much this year! In our experience, it’s been extremely beneficial when we're leading up to a launch, as well as during a launch, to have our whole team here and focused while working on that particular event.
We assessed that if we’re going to be asking our team to commit to our launch dates then we need to communicate that. And if we’re asking our team for that type of commitment, then we need to find ways to surprise and delight throughout the year and create space for rest and recovery. To address this, we decided to pull up the calendar for the entire year and prioritize the scheduling of breaks, long weekends, and extended breaks for the whole company, before mapping out anything else. This is very different from how we’ve done things in the past, but we’re excited to see how it all turns out! We want our team to be in sync, and laying out a plan for the year with a substantial amount of scheduled breaks feels like an excellent way to empower them to do just that.
How We Communicate Expectations With the Team for the Year
Communication is a game-changer in getting the results that you want, while also having fun while you're doing it! Because we want our entire team to be present when we’re doing a launch, we instituted a ‘no time off request’ during those times, namely leading up to a launch, the launch itself, and then a couple of days after the launch. For some events that will mean five days, and for others, it might be fourteen days. These brief periods are sprinkled throughout the year with plenty of advance notice. We thought it would be fair to give our team a heads up on when we’d be doing big promotions because they’d want to be here for those things too. We want to make sure that we give our team plenty of warning so that they don’t schedule anything else during those times. We’ve also used our employee handbook to communicate that we plan to do our scheduling in quarterly installments.
All of this is very new to us, because we’ve never had a team this size, and we’ve never been quite this structured in our planning and scheduling days off. So this year we’re going to be presenting the team with a one-page PDF about important dates, blackout dates, launch dates, and time off. We’ve outlined all those dates on a handy one-page printout, that they can take in at a glance and reference throughout the year.
Should You Schedule a Summer Break?
For years we’ve talked about taking an intentional summer break and scheduling time off, and this year it’s finally happening! It is on the calendar! It's a team-wide office closure for approximately two weeks. It feels like a very grown-up decision to be making, but with the right preparation, we believe it’ll prove to be a wonderful and regenerative decision for us and our team. Even though the thought of taking intentional time off during the middle of the year feels like a bold and nerve-racking decision, there’s actually a lot of logic to it. It’s a slow spot in the year anyway, especially when you think about the fact that most people tend to travel during this time and take time off before the kids go back to school. We figured that instead of trying to force something, we should just lean into it! We’ve taken everything we’ve integrated into our lives regarding how we run our business, and attempted to pass it on to our team as a gift.
How to Plan a Retreat for a Team of Introverts
Our team is made up almost entirely of introverts. And this will play a big role in how we structure the team retreat we’re planning this year! We want to be sure to give people time to recharge afterward and also include activities that folks can all enjoy together and bond over, like having a chef come over and teaching everyone how to make a delicious, challenging, and exciting new meal! While we have no idea what exactly we’ll be doing for the team retreat this year, we knew we had to schedule it on our calendar to ensure that we actually do it!
How to Plan for Onboarding and New Hires
One of the things we love about how 2022 is panning out, is the fact that we have super clear revenue goals. We know exactly what steps we need to take to reach them, and we’re fully aware of the conversion metrics we need to hit in order to get there. We’re also proud of how we’ve integrated seasons of rest with seasons of more intense, intentional work. We’ve noticed that the part of the coming year that we’re most excited about, but also intimidated by, is being aware of the trajectory we’re on, while also strategically growing the team. What we’ve learned so far from the hiring process, is that it takes somewhere between 60 and 90 days to fully onboard a new hire. This means we need to factor in at least two months of adjustment when we take on a new hire.
Quote This
Communication is like the game-changer in getting the results that you want, and having fun while you're doing it.
Highlights
How We Planned Out Our Entire Year in Less Than 30 Minutes. [0:01:34]
The Thing We Added to Our Calendar Before Anything Else. [0:04:53]
How We Communicate Expectations With the Team for the Year. [0:13:23]
Should You Schedule a Summer Break? [0:17:43]
How to Plan a Retreat for a Team of Introverts [0:20:55]
How to Plan for Onboarding and New Hires [0:23:58]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Business Planning, Calendar, Yearly Planning, Onboarding, Seasons, Scheduling, Time off, Holidays
