Latest / Growing a Deeply Rooted Business: Launches, Funnels & Email Marketing with Intention / How to Plan Your Business Year for 2027: Our 3-Step Planning Process

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How to Plan Your Business Year for 2027: Our 3-Step Planning Process · Growing a Deeply Rooted Business: Launches, Funnels & Email Marketing with Intention

• 0:00
  Jess: Can you believe that it is already mid-October and it is time to start planning for twenty twenty-seven?
• 0:08
  Jess: And if you don't believe me that now is the time, now is the time, 'cause two things are about to happen.
• 0:14
  Jess: You're either going to do your planning now, be able to shut your computer, relax, take that last week of December where you just kinda do nothing but couch rot, and then open your computer to a fresh plan ready
• 0:26
  Jess: and raring to go in twenty twenty-seven, or you're going to procrastinate planning.
• 0:32
  Jess: The holidays are gonna come on, you're gonna get exhausted, still take that week off, but then when you open your computer in January, you're gonna be like, "What the heck am I supposed to be doing?"
• 0:42
  Jess: And you're gonna start already feeling behind before the year even starts.
• 0:48
  Jess: So today we're gonna be walking you through our signature annual planning process.
• 0:53
  Jess: The one in that is rooted in actual reality, not manifestations and dreams.
• 0:58
  Jess: We do leave space for a little bit of that too, but we wanna help you build a plan that is actually built around your life that gives you the best chance of execution and actually hitting your goals and
• 1:10
  Jess: has your real capacity in mind so that when twenty twenty-seven hits, you're ready to go.
• 1:16
  Jess: You're feeling confident, you're feeling grounded, you're feeling ready to take on the year.
• 1:22
  Jess: So today, again like I said, we're gonna walk you through our signature three-step planning process, which is assess, align, and act.
• 1:28
  Jess: And we're gonna be telling you how AI can help you kinda bring all of your data that you've gathered into this year and make next year's planning process better and bigger than ever
• 1:38
  Rachel: welcome back to Growing a Deeply Rooted Business, the show for women building businesses that support their actual lives versus swallowing them whole and leaving you burnt out, sad.
• 1:51
  Rachel: I'm Rachel, your marketing ecosystem strategist.
• 1:54
  Rachel: I'm here for the message, the audience, and making sure that the pieces of your business cohesively work together.
• 2:00
  Rachel: And I'm here with Jess, our sustainable systems strategist and resident plan translator.
• 2:06
  Rachel: Give her a annual goal and she will tell you exactly what needs to happen next Tuesday to make it actually reality.
• 2:14
  Rachel: So, this is our new series on planning your 2027 business year, and we always like to say, this is not the aspirational year that your most caffeinated self can achieve.
• 2:27
  Rachel: This is your most average self executing things that are possible in every week, day, month possibilities.
• 2:36
  Rachel: Before we get into this, we're gonna do a quick energy check, because I think that a lot of people feel this kind of anxious anticipation, this pressure to build the perfect plan, and we know that the plan itself
• 2:52
  Rachel: isn't necessarily gonna always execute at 100%.
• 2:56
  Rachel: We know that's not true.
• 2:58
  Rachel: But we wanna make sure that what we're not doing is putting so much pressure on this plan that once we build it, it goes into our Notion database or the bottom of our planner and just disappear.
• 3:10
  Rachel: So we're gonna release all of that.
• 3:12
  Rachel: We're gonna take a slow deep breath in and let it out.
• 3:17
  Rachel: We are not solving all of our 2027 problems in this episode.
• 3:22
  Rachel: We are just merely allowing the foundation to exist so that we can start when we are ready.
• 3:28
  Rachel: Let's get into it
• 3:30
  Jess: All right, so let's move into step one, which is assess.
• 3:34
  Jess: So this is the part where we look back, because you can't get to where you wanna go if you don't know where you're currently at or what currently got you here.
• 3:45
  Jess: So in our assess step, we're gonna really just take the time, take 90 minutes to two hours to kind of just look back at your past year and really dig into all of the bits and bobs that make
• 3:58
  Jess: your business run so that you're making your plan going forward, not just on intuition, not on guilt, not on guesses, not on some internet guru's template that they gave you, and they've got a 30-person team to execute in.
• 4:13
  Jess: We're gonna build it based on us.
• 4:15
  Jess: So before you choose what you want your next year to look like, you need to know what actually happened this year, and take a really honest assessment of where you are.
• 4:25
  Rachel: this is something that I feel like a lot of people, especially me, 'cause when I was planning and I was in the midst of burnout, I would just bury all of the things that I thought were happening, and
• 4:35
  Rachel: I would say, "Nope, whatever."
• 4:37
  Rachel: And so something I've been doing recently, 'cause I do feel like I'm trying to get into a new creative space of my business, is that I've been flow journaling, and this is flow journaling in just writing off of
• 4:48
  Rachel: a prompt.
• 4:49
  Rachel: So you can say, "How did 2026 feel?"
• 4:52
  Rachel: And you can essentially just set a timer for 15 minutes and start there.
• 4:57
  Rachel: Because honestly, I think the energy of the year is super important before you get into the tactics and the layers and the clients and all of that.
• 5:05
  Rachel: So, assessing, how did it actually feel?
• 5:08
  Rachel: Do we want this to move forward with us?
• 5:11
  Rachel: If we wanna start, stop, continue, what is the energy that we want to maintain?
• 5:17
  Rachel: And I do think that there's a lot of subconscious, gunk buried in there that flow state journaling or non-stop don't lift my pen up for 15 minutes kind of thing has really helped me recently get through a lot
• 5:31
  Rachel: of this decision-making of where I want my business to go and all of that.
• 5:35
  Rachel: So if you're into the woo, I say give that a try before you get into any of the pulling out the receipts, doing your client trackers, and getting into that.
• 5:44
  Jess: Yep.
• 5:45
  Jess: So I actually just got off a launch debrief call with one of the teams that I am helping run right now, and what I always say is that we need to look at both qualitative data and quantitative data.
• 5:56
  Jess: So quantitative data are all of the thing, all of those business numbers that you already track revenue, expenses, or hopefully already track.
• 6:03
  Jess: How many clients you have, how did they come in?
• 6:06
  Jess: How did your sales go?
• 6:08
  Jess: The indicators or KPIs that tell, how your business is actually performing.
• 6:12
  Jess: But then that qualitative data is just as important, like what Rachel said.
• 6:17
  Jess: Like, how did things feel?
• 6:18
  Jess: What felt good?
• 6:20
  Jess: What felt depleting?
• 6:21
  Jess: What do you wanna start doing?
• 6:23
  Jess: What do you wanna continue doing?
• 6:24
  Jess: What did you try that absolutely didn't work, and you're like, "Eh, I'm never gonna do that ever again"?
• 6:30
  Jess: All of those things are super important.
• 6:32
  Jess: So like I said, you wanna be looking at one, how did you feel?
• 6:35
  Jess: What offers did you love?
• 6:36
  Jess: Not only what offers sold, but what offers did you love delivering?
• 6:40
  Jess: What offers drained your soul?
• 6:42
  Jess: What offers did you procrastinate giving the deliverables to the very last second 'cause it's something you didn't like to do?
• 6:48
  Jess: Same thing with clients.
• 6:49
  Jess: We're looking at not only where did those clients come from, how did you attract them, but which clients did you actually, get it lit up working from?
• 6:56
  Jess: What did you fulfill, did you get fulfilled working from?
• 7:00
  Jess: 'Cause I think the key to building, the life-first business in the way that we think about it is, yes, we wanna protect our, profits, but we also wanna protect our peace of mind and our purpose and make sure
• 7:11
  Jess: that we're working into our purpose just as much, and that's why this assess step in our planner walks you through not only the reports that you need to pull to be able to get all the information you need
• 7:20
  Jess: to plan, but also it gives you those journaling prompts that we'll walk you through so you can really start to sort through all that year full of gunk that you went through.
• 7:30
  Jess: So you have a really clear and rooted in reality picture of where you're starting from in your business.
• 7:37
  Rachel: once you have those two, the quantitative and the qualitative areas reflected on, go through that list and do simple three groups, which is repeat, adjust, and stop entirely.
• 7:49
  Rachel: repeat what worked and what fit into your life.
• 7:52
  Rachel: Adjust what essentially had promise, can be adjusted in some way to fit better, and then stop all of the things that really just were completely out of alignment.
• 8:04
  Rachel: And then once you have that, then you can get into the next step, which is the align step.
• 8:10
  Rachel: This step is really bringing forward alignment with our business, our energy, and our life goals.
• 8:16
  Rachel: Jess is planning a wedding, right?
• 8:18
  Rachel: Her align is gonna be completely different than her align was this past year because her energy systems are gonna be different, her rhythms of her weekly cadence and everything is gonna be different.
• 8:31
  Rachel: So when you're in your align state, what you really wanna do is start by saying, "These are the dates that are blocked out from a life-first perspective."
• 8:40
  Rachel: My calendar, get that up to date.
• 8:42
  Rachel: Say commitments, family commitments, vacation commitments, client commitments, all of those things, get it visible.
• 8:50
  Rachel: And then start working forward towards what are we bringing up?
• 8:54
  Rachel: What launches are we pulling forward?
• 8:56
  Rachel: What do I truly, truly have capacity for in this state of what I'm bringing, what I want to do, and what is the reality of my calendar and my life?
• 9:08
  Rachel: I think that's the key of this second step.
• 9:11
  Jess: Yeah, I actually had AI checked me, Tober checked me the other day because basically I was telling it some career goals that I had.
• 9:18
  Jess: I always like to be like, "Oh, this is my future case study," or, "This is what I want my resume or my LinkedIn to look like in five years."
• 9:24
  Jess: And I was like, "What do I need to do to make this happen?"
• 9:26
  Jess: And he was like, "You need to stop spreading yourself so thin, because you're not gonna be able to achieve this type of result in that area if you keep saying yes to all of these things as well."
• 9:37
  Jess: And I think we like to think that we can do it all, but really everything that you say yes to is something you're gonna have to say no to something else too, to make that yes happen.
• 9:48
  Jess: So making sure that your yeses are aligning.
• 9:52
  Jess: For example, in my life, I am working towards becoming the director of marketing at this one company, but we also have this podcast and this brand we're starting to move.
• 10:01
  Jess: But I also have the Launch Collaborative, which is my own agency that I'm still trying too.
• 10:06
  Jess: And me trying to focus on all three of them this year has got me micro steps to where I Know if okay, for this one quarter I'm gonna push Launch Collaborative aside, 'cause that's not what's lighting me up
• 10:18
  Jess: right now.
• 10:19
  Jess: I wanna go all in on Deeply Rooted, and then I wanna sustain this director of marketing role that I have.
• 10:25
  Jess: That's my plan.
• 10:26
  Jess: But trying to go all three at one time?
• 10:29
  Jess: Impossible.
• 10:30
  Rachel: Yeah, I mean, and that's something I feel like we have to remind everybody every single time we do a planning episode, which is, our brains naturally overestimate what we think we can do, right?
• 10:40
  Rachel: In business year one, my annual plan probably had 15 business goals.
• 10:46
  Rachel: I wanted to do this, I wanted to do this, and do all of the things.
• 10:49
  Rachel: And like we always like to remind, which we get into this in the next step of act, is that one business goal is not a single task.
• 10:58
  Rachel: One business goal is a project of 15, 20 layers of things you have to do, of deep thinking, of action executing, and all of those various things.
• 11:09
  Rachel: So when you're sitting there and you're saying, Q1 I wanna launch this, I wanna build this, I wanna do this," that's overloading on top of client work, on top of family commitments, on top of general life.
• 11:21
  Rachel: My son has been sick the last month because of daycare, and I have now been sick the last month, and it has affected energies.
• 11:28
  Rachel: And these are things you can't necessarily always plan for.
• 11:31
  Rachel: So just making sure that when you're estimating your time, you're being real in top priority and project parking lot.
• 11:39
  Rachel: Happy to pull from the parking lot when I have time, but most of the time you will probably execute, what, two projects a quarter?
• 11:48
  Rachel: One to two?
• 11:49
  Jess: Yeah, I would say, yeah, maybe.
• 11:50
  Jess: It just depends on how much your client work is.
• 11:52
  Jess: So I think it's really first about setting, one, your revenue goal.
• 11:57
  Jess: I think as business owners, sometimes, even my clients are like, "Revenue goals?"
• 12:01
  Jess: But, no, that should be where you start, 'cause we're all in business to make money, to sell.
• 12:06
  Jess: So what is your revenue goal and then what are the offers that you have from your assess step that you both love doing, you have the proximity to people to sell it well, you're priced well, you have the
• 12:18
  Jess: passion to do it.
• 12:19
  Jess: Picking one or two of those offers, because every different offer is gonna come up with its own different set of projects and trackings.
• 12:26
  Jess: I'm setting up a metrics dashboard for a client who added a bunch of different offers on, and it's like we can't even manage the funnels to them because there's so many now, and we just don't have the team
• 12:36
  Jess: size to do that.
• 12:37
  Jess: So one or two offers.
• 12:39
  Jess: When are you gonna sell them?
• 12:41
  Jess: Plan your marketing calendar around your life.
• 12:44
  Jess: Obviously I'm not gonna sell anything around March 20th, 'cause that's when I'm getting married next year.
• 12:48
  Jess: Plan it around your life, and then reverse engineer all of the different other things, other little projects that need to go in to making that sales a success.
• 12:56
  Jess: So maybe if you know I need to sell this offer, I love doing it, I've had these people convert it, they've gotten good results, I just need to get more people into it.
• 13:06
  Jess: So now my project becomes how do I increase my top-of-funnel traffic to do that, and then how do I build my marketing rhythm around that?
• 13:13
  Jess: So really, the least amount of goals, the better.
• 13:16
  Jess: That's the hardest part picking what you want to focus on so you can really pull that lever.
• 13:21
  Rachel: Yeah, and I think too, where if you're a new baby business owner, it's super exciting to try to make as much year over year growth.
• 13:29
  Rachel: But in the long term, you should be planning three to five years out, and really saying, "Okay, this isn't a this year project.
• 13:37
  Rachel: That's a next year project."
• 13:38
  Jess: what did you tell me the other day when I was like, I had an idea about wanting to do something?
• 13:41
  Jess: You're like, "That'd be great, except we don't have the people to do that right now."
• 13:45
  Jess: So, you can have the ideas to do something, but there might be a bunch of other things you need to check off first in order to get there, especially if you're bootstrapping your business.
• 13:55
  Jess: You may have to work up the budget or even the revenue to be able to run ads, to be able to run a 1,000-person membership if that's what you wanna do.
• 14:03
  Jess: But, you can't go from A to B in a year, and that's just the reality of it.
• 14:08
  Jess: But you can still be really successful and grow year over year, 'cause we've done it
• 14:12
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 14:12
  Rachel: For real.
• 14:13
  Rachel: right, so then that brings us to the act step, which this is essentially trying to break down where you can have a good quarter of a time, like a quarterly project, and then you can then drill down into
• 14:25
  Rachel: weekly actions with owners and dates.
• 14:28
  Rachel: This is not my strongest suit because I hate looking that far out 'cause everything changes.
• 14:33
  Rachel: However, it is super helpful for those quarters that kind of go by a blur I think Q1 flew by so fast that we were in Q2 and I was like, what am I supposed to be working on right
• 14:45
  Rachel: now?"
• 14:46
  Rachel: But because we had already done our project planning for the year for both the podcast and then for our individual businesses as well, it was easy to open up and say, "Okay, this is my priority for the month.
• 14:56
  Rachel: Here are the projects that I'm working on," and get into it.
• 14:59
  Rachel: So a lot of this is saving future you from having to break down those details and really have to start at step zero, essentially
• 15:07
  Jess: Yep.
• 15:08
  Jess: And, we did an episode, I think it was one of our first episodes way, way back where we talked about all the meetings that you need to have even if you're just with yourself, and that's where this kind
• 15:16
  Jess: of act comes in.
• 15:17
  Jess: 'Cause once you have your annual plan, you wanna break it down into your 12-week plan where you're setting your goals for that quarter and then backing it out, and you're taking your monthly goals and what content needs to
• 15:28
  Jess: go out that month.
• 15:29
  Jess: And then you're kinda looking back at your weekly review to see what got done last week, what needs to get done next week, so that you're really starting to break it down into those chunks.
• 15:39
  Jess: I know people are like, "I love paper planners."
• 15:41
  Jess: You cannot run a business on a paper planner, I'm sorry.
• 15:44
  Jess: You can't especially if you wanna scale.
• 15:46
  Jess: I do have a paper planner.
• 15:47
  Jess: I use it for my own personal self and tasks that I need to do every day, but my business plan goes into my business management software or my business brain, which is Notion.
• 15:59
  Jess: So you have to take your annual plan, you need to put it into Notion so that if you want to delegate, you can onboard people.
• 16:06
  Jess: If you wanna use AI to help you get things done, you can, they can reference that.
• 16:11
  Jess: And then you need to break it down by quarter and by project so that you have all the steps laid out for you
• 16:17
  Rachel: Yeah, and then use our skill, Project Manager Paula, to take each project and actually break it into deliverables that tell you exactly the context of what you need to be doing, planning, all of those various components so that
• 16:31
  Rachel: when it's February, you know exactly what task you need to be working on and doing all of that.
• 16:36
  Rachel: And I think that's the part that gets you there.
• 16:38
  Rachel: And I do wanna go back to something that Jess said about the meetings, which if you are a solopreneur or a small team, those meetings should be treated like church.
• 16:47
  Rachel: It should be treated as your Bible.
• 16:49
  Jess: Put 'em on the calendar now.
• 16:51
  Rachel: Exactly.
• 16:51
  Rachel: You do not skip those meetings because that's the only time you're gonna have dedicated business time to show up and do the work.
• 17:01
  Rachel: And then once you build that habit and build the motion of putting your brain in pause mode, pause for client work, pause for all of the various things going on, you're gonna see so much progress happen because you're
• 17:13
  Rachel: showing up consistently versus looking at a plan once every six months
• 17:19
  Jess: Okay, so let's recap and bring all the steps together.
• 17:21
  Jess: Number one, you wanna assess.
• 17:23
  Jess: So looking qualitative and quantitatively at what happened that year.
• 17:28
  Jess: What worked, what didn't work, where your clients came from, what offers you loved delivering, what time would you like to take off next year that you didn't?
• 17:35
  Jess: What boundaries do you wanna put in place?
• 17:37
  Jess: Maybe it is protecting time for content creation in your weekly blueprint.
• 17:41
  Jess: Maybe it is protecting time for these quarterly plannings that you stay.
• 17:46
  Jess: Those are all the things that you wanna identify in that step one, assess.
• 17:49
  Jess: Number two, you wanna align.
• 17:51
  Jess: You wanna map your life rhythms first, and then you wanna map your promotions around them.
• 17:56
  Jess: How are you gonna fit your revenue goals, your launches, your marketing, and all the different little projects and initiatives around your actual capacity and around your actual life?
• 18:06
  Jess: And if you find that there's an imbalance here or you don't have the capacity to do things, then the decision becomes, am I gonna push this off into the idea parking lot, or is this something that I wanna
• 18:16
  Jess: invest in now, either by dedicating more time knowing that it's gonna be a short-term squeeze for long-term ease?
• 18:22
  Jess: Or do I wanna bring in another contractor to help me kinda get this done?
• 18:27
  Jess: And then number three is you wanna act.
• 18:29
  Jess: You wanna break that annual plan down into a 12-week.
• 18:32
  Jess: Just start with the first quarter 'cause I guarantee you that the first quarter probably is not gonna work out according to plan, and in quarter two you're gonna have to come back, review your quarterly plan, what actually happened
• 18:43
  Jess: against what you had planned, and then adjust your annual plan going forward into your quarterly plan.
• 18:48
  Jess: And then every month you're checking in with your month about what days do you need to be protected for content creation and marketing, and what am I selling this month, and what does my content messaging need to say?
• 18:58
  Jess: And then every week you're kinda looking back on the review.
• 19:00
  Jess: How did I do versus what I wanted to do this week, and what do I need to shift this week, and where do I need to kinda re configure?
• 19:06
  Jess: Like Rachel said, it's church, it's a doctor's appointment for your own business development.
• 19:11
  Jess: 'Cause I think as service providers or coaches or course creators, we can get so into providing for everybody else that we forget to do the same for our own business, and that's where we end up stalled out.
• 19:21
  Jess: And then when that client that we thought was gonna be with us forever, something happens and they get pregnant and have to let you go 'cause they're pulling back on your business, then you're in a panic because you
• 19:30
  Jess: poured all your stuff into them and you haven't saved anything for you.
• 19:34
  Jess: So I just want you to make a promise to yourself next year if you're a solopreneur or you have a tiny team, that you're going to protect your business first.
• 19:42
  Jess: If you'd like a workbook or a worksheet to walk you through this entire planning process, last year Rachel and I created the Rooted in Reality Business Planning Workbook, which will walk you through all of these steps.
• 19:56
  Jess: It'll tell you the exact reports to pull, the exact things to think about as you're working through each step, and it will give you AI prompts to help you assist you, so you can really have a brainstorming partner
• 20:07
  Jess: in this process with you.
• 20:09
  Jess: so Make sure you check that out.
• 20:10
  Rachel: if this episode helped you look at planning differently, share it with a business bestie whose annual plan is still sitting on that paper planner or that document that she hasn't looked at since January.
• 20:22
  Rachel: And tell us which part of assess you're starting with.
• 20:24
  Rachel: Is it gonna be the journaling, or are you diving straight into your numbers and your client sources?
• 20:29
  Rachel: DM us on Instagram, @deeplyrootedbusiness.
• 20:33
  Rachel: We read everything.
• 20:35
  Rachel: Or on TikTok, too.
• 20:36
  Jess: And until next week,
• 20:38
  Rachel: We're rooting for
• 20:40
  Jess: for you.