A Solopreneur's Guide to Planning For The Year Ahead
As a solopreneur, no one is holding you accountable to do, well… anything in your business.
No one is there to make sure that you don’t procrastinate. No one is there to make sure that you take action to reach your goals. And no one is there to encourage you to launch that thing you’ve been thinking about for months.
Most of the time, it’s all on you and while there are definitely some benefits to being your own boss and being a one man show, there are some trade offs as well – and I would personally say that this is one of them.
Since becoming a solopreneur myself, I’ve realized this and was lucky enough to find a business bestie that I 100% trust to chat through ideas with, ask questions, and act as an accountability partner.
So before I go any further, let me just say – if you’re a solopreneur and can find a person that you can count on for any and all biz convos, DO IT.
Seriously, Nicole is like an honorary team member for me and I’m so thankful.
Aside, let’s get back to what you’re here for.
Even before I had Nicole as someone to bounce ideas off of and chat through struggles with, I did my best to really commit to having meetings with myself to plan for things in my business strategically.
Again, as a solopreneur, no one is holding you accountable to do this. It’s on you to pick the date and time, block off your calendar, and set up a meeting itinerary to walk yourself through.
And while it might feel silly, it’s SO important!
But hearing that, you might be thinking – what kind of meeting?? How do I even go about that??
I hear you!
A few weeks ago Nicole and I had our 2024 yearly planning meeting (yes, we did it together even though we have separate businesses) and after talking about this on Instagram, quite a few people were interested in hearing about the process.
So, here ya have it – my solopreneur guide to planning for the year ahead.
This process is a mix of strategy I learned from the book Traction and what has worked for me specifically.
You can tailor each step (or add additional ones) to fit your business needs as well!
The Process I Use For Yearly Business Planning
Step 1 – Review last year's goals & celebrate wins (both personally and professionally)
Celebration is one of my top core values in life and in business, which means that many things start with a celebration of some kind, including my business planning meetings.
I’m a firm believer that reflection is a form of gratitude because you’re intentionally taking the time to recognize where you’ve been while simultaneously celebrating how far you’ve come.
So often in life, we let ourselves go through the motions and fail to look up and see what we’ve truly accomplished.
It’s for the reason I beg you: DON’T SKIP THIS STEP!
You truly can’t look ahead without first looking back.
For this step, you can be as simple or as complex as you want.
If you’re a journaler, you might take some time to journal about each month of the year and reflect on what you did, what you accomplished, mistakes you made, memories you have, what you learned, etc.
I like to keep it simple for this, so I chose to reflect on and celebrate 3 personal and 3 professional wins.
My professional list included:
Maintained a full done-for-you client load all of 2023
Raising my prices
Rebranding and launching my new website
Step 2 – Conduct a SWOT Analysis to assess current state of your business
I know, I know… SWOT feels so corporate, but don’t come at me for this, okay?
The goal with doing this for yourself and your business is to identify gaps and recognize what might need attention that you haven’t paid much attention to until now.
If you aren’t familiar with SWOT, here’s a quick breakdown of each component:
Strengths – these are internal factors that represent the positive attributes, resources, capabilities, or advantages of your business.
This list can include things like a strong brand reputation, unique products or services, efficient processes, etc.
Weaknesses – these are internal factors that represent areas that could use improvement or represent limitations within your business.
Your weakness list might include things like inefficient processes, slow lead growth, unpredictable sales, etc.
Opportunities – these are external factors that the business could potentially leverage to its advantage.
When identifying opportunities for your business, you can pay attention to market trends, changes in consumer behavior, emerging technologies, partnerships, or gaps in the market that your business can capitalize on.
Threats – these are external factors that could negatively impact the business.
Threats could include things like competition in the market, economic downturns, technology advances that could make your current offerings obsolete, or shifts in consumer preferences.
The reason you want to conduct a SWOT analysis before setting your goals and planning priorities is because your analysis will often inform both of those things.
For example, if you identify a weakness in your business, that weakness will likely become something that you choose to prioritize and focus on in the months ahead.
Same goes for the opportunities. If you identify a potential opportunity in your business, there’s a high chance that you will choose to take action on that.
One of my identified opportunities for 2024 was Pinterest.
It’s something that’s been on my list of to-do’s for quite some time, so recognizing it as an opportunity gave me the chance to prioritize it accordingly and take the necessary action to make it really happen in the new year.
Step 3 – Annual Goal Setting
Once you’ve conducted your SWOT analysis, it’s time for the fun part – annual goal setting.
This is where you create a master list of anything and everything that comes to mind that you want to focus on in the year ahead.
For me, this is truly a brain dump moment. Anything on my mind gets put on the list because I know it will get organized later.
You can choose to keep this section high level, but my brain works best when I get granular, so my list was a little all over the place.
Here’s what I mean:
From a high level point of view, I included “streamline internal business systems.”
From a granular point of view, I included “create branded thank you cards.”
Overall, the goal here is to give yourself a clear picture of where you want your focus to be for the year ahead!
Step 4 – Prioritize Annual Goals by Quarter
Finally, once you have your master list of focuses, it’s time to prioritize and get strategic!
This step is SUPER important because as a business owner it’s really easy to do the “fun” things first.
For example, for me it’s much more fun to create branded thank you cards than it is to learn the ins and outs of Honeybook, create client contract templates, and systemize my business.
But what’s more important? We both know the answer!
This step is sort of like a 3 in 1, so let’s break it down:
1. To help you truly prioritize the most important things from your master list, I encourage you to scan your list and put a star next to the things that hold the highest importance. ⭐️
Even if those are the things that you aren’t necessarily looking forward to – this is a time to be honest with yourself.
2. When you have your starred priority items, it’s then time to think strategically.
From your list, what are some things that need to happen BEFORE something else on your list can happen?
Here’s what I mean by that:
Last year, I had two big items on my priority list – rebranding / new website and marketing on Pinterest.
Two really important things, but you know what I realized?
It would almost be pointless if I started marketing on Pinterest BEFORE I had a well defined brand and new website with updated links.
If I wouldn’t have thought strategically about this, I could’ve found myself in a situation where I grew my Pinterest and then got left with a ton of broken links when I changed my website URL.
And that would NOT have been fun.
Thankfully, I chose to prioritize my rebrand and new website launch FIRST and can now focus on Pinterest for my business.
So, go through your list and think strategically – what needs your attention before something else on your list can successfully happen?
You’ll thank yourself later for this, I promise!
3. Organize your priorities by quarter
This is honestly my favorite part of the process because it gives you such a clear overview of your year ahead and takes the guessing game out of what to focus on first.
Start with your priority list first and start placing each goal or task item in a designated quarter – Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q4.
And don’t overdo it!
You want to give yourself plenty of time and space to actually focus on the goal, project, or task at hand.
My Q1 for 2024 looks like this:
A SURPRISE coming in January (I can’t say anymore about this quite yet!)
Start marketing on Pinterest (I’m doing the prep work in December thanks to Sarah Burk so I can hit the ground running with this right away)
Client prep for maternity leave
Implement Profit First (which also means watch and implement the course I bought from Val Marlene!)
Full Honeybook set up (this is a huge part of my internal system focus and has been on my mind for quite a while)
This might look like a lot, but it’s solely because my Q2 consists of at least 2 months off for maternity leave, so I intentionally planned to knock out a bunch of things before my schedule changes!
Yours might have fewer items and that’s OKAY.
You’re allowed to change and adjust your quarterly priorities as needed, but the point is that this gives you a place to start so that you aren’t just winging it come January.
Final note for this section: if you’re like me and treated the annual goal setting step as a massive brain dump moment, just know that some of your items will simply be classified as to-do’s and won’t fall into respective quarters!
For me, a few of those things include:
Random website edits thanks to an audit call with Sara at BTL Copy
Update IG highlights (which I’ll work with my social media manager for)
Create a branded email signature
These are just random things that I need to schedule time to do, but don’t necessarily need to be included in quarterly planning!
Ready To Plan For 2024?
And there ya have it – a soloprenuer’s guide to planning for the year ahead!
Even if you aren’t a planner by nature (I absolutely can’t relate, but I will happily be the Type A friend 😂), this process should allow you to easily step out of the day to day of your business and dedicate some time to be strategic and intentional with your business planning so you not only set goals, but you actually achieve them.
So often, we have a ton of goals and ideas in our head that would be “nice to do” but we never really get around to it.
Well my friend, THIS is how you get around to it.
If you’re the type that needs a visual guide for a process like this, I created one for you that you can download for free HERE!
Here’s to making 2024 everything you want it to be. 🥂