313: Yearly Planning For Entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur, do you ever feel caught up in the daily hustle, sometimes losing sight of your bigger business vision?

We've all been there. It's easy to get bogged down in the details and forget to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Explore the transformative power of yearly planning in this episode of the Superabound podcast. Hosts Erin Aquin and Steve Haase reveal how taking time to step back and strategize can revolutionize your business and reignite your entrepreneurial spirit.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why yearly planning is crucial for entrepreneurs, even if you're a solopreneur or have a small team
• How to create a luxurious, high-level experience for your planning retreat
• The magic that happens when you give yourself space to think big
• Strategies for turning past "failures" into future wins
• How to incorporate AI and new technologies into your business planning

Join us as we share our personal experiences and proven techniques for yearly planning that will help you align with your vision, foster creativity, and set the stage for your most successful year yet. Don't let another year slip by without giving your business the strategic attention it deserves!

You will also learn about the upcoming Lucrative Lifestyle Business Mastermind, starting in January 2025, which includes a guided Business Review process to help you stay on track to light your next lantern.

Learn more and apply for the mastermind here

Full transcript:

Steve Haase  0:00  
Welcome to the Superabound podcast with master coaches Erin Aquin and Steve Haase, where vision led entrepreneurs learn to build a generous business without sacrificing what matters most. You are listening to episode 313, yearly planning for entrepreneurs. Hello, everybody. This is kind of a weird topic, because entrepreneurs are usually just working in their business, right? They don't take a lot of time to step back, especially if it's just you, maybe you and a business partner. You know, having a yearly planning event or a yearly planning retreat is usually not on the calendar.

Erin Aquin  0:40  
Well, it is for our clients. It is for our

Steve Haase  0:42  
clients, it is for our business. But when we tell people, Hey, we you know, we just booked our space for our yearly retreat, for yearly planning, they're like, What just the two of you like? Can't you do that anytime? And the answer is no, because taking that time to step back does wonders for your business, and most people miss it. So we're going to talk about what that yearly planning looks like, how it can benefit you, and why you should do it.

Erin Aquin  1:10  
We started doing this actually because our clients were asking us to lead retreats for them. So most of our larger clients have yearly planning meetings with their whole team. But even for some of our clients who are solo entrepreneurs or have very lean teams, wanted to have kind of a CEO retreat where they could think big about their life, their business. Sometimes they do this with their their team members. Sometimes it's just a solo thing. And Steve has a really amazing sort of format that he has developed over the last several years with his clients. So a few years ago, I said, I want to do one of these yearly planning things with you. I had, you know, I was always doing something kind of solo, but I thought, gee, it would be really nice to be led through this process, through kind of what Steve had developed as the Superabound process of having having done this. So our little tradition has been for the last several years. Is around the end of the year, sometimes earlier, we book a nice hotel somewhere. We get a suite in a, usually a pretty cute place. We've been going the same place for a couple of years, but we go and we take our whiteboard, we take our computers, we have all the reports, all the metrics, all the things, and we really kind of lock ourselves in and start going through a year in review, year end review, and then how that's going to inform the next year ahead. And we go through this whole process. There's always amazing food involved, because I need to eat in order to think, I need to eat beautiful food in order to eat, we take lots of breaks for walks and sometimes, sometimes a spa treatment or two, but it really feels like a luxurious, high level experience. And I kind of feel like I get to be on the receiving end of this, because Steve does all the planning for it. So he's going to share some of his process with everyone today, but I just want to highly recommend that even if you do some sort of yearly planning for yourself. It is so nice to be guided. It is something we have really limited spots for being able to do this with folks in the next year, but we do have virtual sessions where we can walk you through this process. But I know what the experience is like firsthand for myself, but also for my own clients who I've worked with for years, and we do this as a yearly session. It is just so nice to be able to do it with a lot of space, a lot of time, over a full day or two. There is just a magic that happens when you don't have your yearly planning meeting squished between the regular flow of the week or in between sessions, there's just something magical that can happen. And I would say some of our most profitable and best loved business ideas have come out of that yearly planning meeting. So that's what I will say. I will just endorse you as a as a leader. I mean me too. I do it as well, but I don't get to receive my own coaching the way I get to receive yours.

Steve Haase  4:51  
Well, one of our business values is we expect magic, and that yearly planning meeting really gives us a chance to practice that. Yeah, because what's even happening, right? You're sitting there talking about what happened the year before, like you've already talked about it with each in our case, we do a monthly review as well, so we've kind of talked about month after month, and you're talking about the year ahead. How much can you really know about the year ahead? Right? Things are going to happen. You're going to have to adjust. God, I was doing some research for this. And I saw a podcast that said, planning for 2020 it was like some kind of a post we had done, you know, in the end of 2019 how to plan for 2020 and I was like, okay, that went according to plan, right? You can't know what the future is going to throw your way so, so why even bother. But really, what this deliberate setting aside of time does for you is it makes an opening for magic in your business. Some of like you said, some of our favorite insights or product offerings have come from this time because we create the container for value, the Create, Create the container for understanding and really just having that intention going into this time. And part of that container is the beautiful space, the location, the spaciousness, of course, the food, the spaciousness of of the the calendar around it, as you invest in that moment, all of it adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. It is an expression of care for your business, for your own growth, it's a chance to really question, am I heading in the direction that I want to right? A big part of what we teach is being aligned with your vision, and making sure that your lanterns are a reflection of that vision, and in the day to day, you know, making ends meet, chasing growth, it can be very easy to lose track of that, and so the chance to sit back with yourself, with a business partner, with a coach, and go through this process is absolutely invaluable. It's kind of funny to think about because, again, as entrepreneurs, we're usually just responding to the moment we're trying to get the next customer, trying to get the next product out the door. How sitting there and thinking for a couple of days about big ideas and reflecting on larger timescales, how could that be valuable? Doesn't really come to mind as the first first idea, but that's what we're sharing in this episode, is how, how unexpectedly valuable that time is.

Erin Aquin  7:52  
Yeah. I mean, I'm sitting here, I'm like, yeah, no, I thinking big is always amazing. It's a huge topic of our book. We we we do spend a considerable amount of time with our visionary selves, thinking about the future, thinking about these different things, but there's different energy to going away. And I think what what you pointed to first is really setting the space. So I love mystical things. I love ritual I love anything that involves all of my senses, all the parts and layers of the self. So anytime you have to sort of go out of your way to create specialness. Specialness is probably not a word, but it's the word, it's fine. It's like to create the special, the special, it does kind of align your maybe less mental parts. So we live in a really beautiful space. I mean, we have clients that come to our home for retreats. We have pretty sweet setup here, but for our yearly planning, we always go away because we don't want to be in our familiar space. We will, as I said, we try to book a suite somewhere in beautiful place that's not our day to day environment, because it creates the sense of something special. We have activities and events surrounding that time that prepare us and like for me, a big part of it is I want to feel like the CEO. I want to feel really well cared for, so that that's the food part for me. I know that's something I value, is like a really fancy, wonderful days of meals in that environment, because that sets the space for me to. Feel fancy, for me to feel professional, for me to feel like the high level thinker, instead of just like going and hanging out in our living room, which is beautiful, but I could hang out my living room in my pajamas and really not feel like the CEO of my company. So setting the space is like the very first thing, something that Steve and I both find a lot of value in, is thinking about the year that we have, we are leaving the things that went really well, the lessons that we learned, the experiments that we tried that you know didn't yield the results we wanted, but that taught us something, and the way that we do this for ourselves, but the way we also do it with our clients, is to position that from every experience is valuable and welcome, even the things that didn't turn out, even the places where we invested a lot of time and energy and money, it did not yield the result we wanted. We don't ever get into a space of being like, oh, that year was was bad because of blah blah blah, or that experiment was bad because of blah blah blah. This is where the Superabound tools really come in handy, where we get to look at any static we have about the year behind and and receive the wisdom. Yeah, and learning from that. No

Steve Haase  11:24  
scolding allowed,

Erin Aquin  11:25  
no scolding, even

Steve Haase  11:26  
subtle scolding, you know, we'll go through and we're like, okay, so that sucked. You're like, no, no. You don't say sucked, okay, that totally fell flat. You're like, no, no. And it can be a challenge sometimes to see it as objectively as possible, and then really to ask, what is the learning here? What is the wisdom? As we like to say, what's the $10,000 learning? It takes a degree of optimism and belief to not get down on yourself, especially on things that that didn't work. But one of the most powerful qualities in a successful leader is optimism, belief that the future will work out, almost despite the evidence to the contrary. Right? You may be looking at things that your brain will say, Well, this is evidence of the contrary, the ability to see, nope. These are just steps on the path, just experiments that we learned something from. Let's keep going. Can feel like you're almost tricking yourself, but as long as you are acknowledging them, you are allowing space for all of those things, but then seeing them in a frame of ultimate success, you are not tricking yourself. It is not a trick to say you will succeed. It is a trick. If you say nothing went wrong, if you say that there was nothing that didn't perfectly succeed in the past, that's a trick. But if you say, look from these things that we found disappointing, or however you want to frame it, these are the learnings, and we are going somewhere Great. That's also part of having a beautiful space. Having an intentional space is you're not just accepting reality. You are creating your reality. The yearly planning is not just all right, here's what we hope to do. And you know, let's hope a pandemic doesn't derail it, like in our 2020 post,

Erin Aquin  13:23  
we didn't even know there was a pandemic happening.

Steve Haase  13:29  
This is your chance to sit down and bring your full energy, bring your magical intention, to bear on the moment and say this is the year that we want to create. What's our what's our most possible path? What are some, you know, potential routes to this glorious future that we believe we can create? It's an act of belief. It's an act of hope, in a way, but, but like hope grounded in action, which is the essence of great entrepreneurship and

Erin Aquin  14:04  
being a leader and a visionary leader in your company. I'll offer this idea because it is one of my favorite personal inventions. I frame these as the future wins in disguise. So as you are looking at your year in review, it's really tempting sometimes to say, Okay, this is all the stuff that happened last year. Now let's switch our brains into like what we want to create next year, and we kind of sort of divorce them, as though the past year is not really informing what's happening in the future. But let's say you had something that didn't go the way you wanted it to go, and it was, it's really eating at you. And you're like, Okay, I'm trying to see the $10,000 learning here. I'm trying to, like, think of this as raw material for something good in the future. Oh, I just want to. Throw it out the window and, like, start fresh and like fresh Canvas 2025 it's actually missing an opportunity to say, to feel out what the win in disguise is. If there's something that you really wanted to create, but it just didn't hit the mark, maybe it didn't make the kind of revenue you wanted it to make. Maybe you were testing out something with your team, and they never really quite got it, and they never really quite finished it in a way that made it an integral part of your business. There's a possibility that there's a win in disguise and a mindset shift you can have and give yourself around that is brainstorming some of the winds in disguise that it could be like, kind of thinking of it as a puzzle that has yet to be solved, and figuring out if there's pieces of that that want to come into your next year, one of those for us that we will definitely be talking about at our planning meeting, is how we are taking the essence of one of our favorite programs that not a lot of people have gone through, but we know could be helpful for hundreds and hundreds of our clients, is bringing In the AI component to support folks in that process. So we are in 2025 transforming this program and including it in our mastermind, lucrative Lifestyle Business Mastermind, so that people can benefit from it. And the win in disguise is that program didn't like perform and get the results we had hoped for. But because of that, it's caused us to get more creative and say, what do we think was missing? And we think what was missing is bringing in all of these new tools that are amazing, these AI tools that are amazing, but most people are not utilizing them in ways that are actually helpful. Most of the people who are using them feel like they're wasting time because they don't understand how to use the prompts or what ways the tools are actually going to be most supportive. And it is totally an untapped resource that most of our clients could really use, especially as they want to build businesses without overworking and burning out. So that thing that didn't quite work, that we couldn't quite figure out, becomes a future win in disguise, because now we have this incredible program and all of these new tools that are going to help people in our mastermind,

Steve Haase  17:47  
that's right. And so one of the ideas for that is including the AI component, but also including the group components that we can learn from each other, having in person guidance or real time guidance from Erin and me, so that you know, it's not just learn on your own, but it's actually,

Erin Aquin  18:06  
let's do it right. Let's

Steve Haase  18:08  
transform your business for you, with us week after week. And so that is, yeah, one of the fails that we're turning into our next big experiment, that we are a win in disguise. Our win in disguise exactly, right, exactly that we're very excited about. And it's actually going to kick off with a business review. So we'll be walking you through not this process in the way that we would do it over the course of the day, like if we were to be on a retreat together, something like that, but walking through a process using AI to get kind of similar results, where it's what are we bringing forward? What kind of future do we want to create? What else is possible with this technology and with this shift in mindset? So if that sounds like something that will juice up your business the way that you want for 25

Erin Aquin  19:01  
even if it doesn't sound like it, it will mess up your business. Yeah,

Steve Haase  19:04  
it's trust

Erin Aquin  19:06  
us here a little bit, because it's pretty powerful. It's

Steve Haase  19:10  
going to be great. We invite you to learn more and apply for the program. There are just a few seats available so that we can give the most attention to everyone who's going to be there, and you can learn more at besuperabound.com/mastermind

Erin Aquin  19:27  
so that's really cool, too. So if you are looking for a year in review process, this is going to be sort of a mini version of that that's just included in the mastermind. It's a great deal. If you're looking for your 2025 support program, and if you want something that's a little bit more custom made, if it's something you want to do, maybe in person or virtually with one of us. We do have spots for doing those year end reviews with you that you can reach out to our team, hello@besuperrabound.com, if that's something that you're curious about. That also brings me to, you know, we won't go into every detail of the whole entire process that we use, but one thing we always do at our yearly planning is talk about the kind of support that we're going to need for the year ahead. So this includes who we are going to be working with, as our coaches. We have our coaches and our coaching programs, coaching support, mentorship support, planned out. We figure out what we're going to invest in, for our own mindset, work for our own skill set, any programs, certifications that we're going to take that gets talked about, as well as what kind of team support we might need. Are we happy with all of our contractors? We talked about this on Instagram just a couple of weeks ago, but making sure that the people supporting our business are authentically in it with us. Are they excited about us, about the business? Are they excited about the vision? They don't. They're never going to be at the level of excitement as we are as founders, but for you and your business, you do need to make sure that you feel like the people whose job it is to support you actually support you. I cannot tell you how many entrepreneurs I've talked to not my clients, because my clients usually are pretty good about this, and if they're not, we coach about it a lot. You cannot have people connected to your business who are naysayers, who are diminishing or not working in alignment with your vision and values. So many entrepreneurs grow and stretch and become more visionary, but they don't always check in with you know, are my contractors actually doing the things that they're supposed to be doing? Are they really supporting me? Am I getting my investment value out of this particular relationship. And if you haven't done that assessment the year, the yearly review or the yearly planning meeting is a great time to look at who is on your team and are they dynamically helping your team win.

Steve Haase  22:20  
Another thing that is really effective for these planning meetings is deciding on the lanterns that you want to light. Saying, where are we going, what are the lanterns? How does that reflect our big vision? How are we feeling about the big vision? How have we been expressing it in the year past? How do we plan on expressing it in the year forward? Forward? We always say that vision is a practice. In this yearly planning meeting is a amazing chance to practice that vision. Another element that you want to bring into this for an effective session is data, numbers, systems. What is it that let you know you are succeeding? Another one of our values is revenue reflects impact, and so for us, it's going to be the revenue numbers, but we're also going to see the number of people that we have reached with our programs, with our book sales, with, you know, new contacts created in the CRM, all of those kind of standard business metrics, but we frame it within our business values, within the lanterns that we want to light, and so use that time to uncover the most valuable data for your business. Spend the prep time collecting that data or understanding what you may or may not have available to you, and then put it to use, so that in your monthly meetings after and kind of the way that you manage your business moving forward, you can see the numbers that matter most for you, being able to light your lanterns and ultimately express your vision In the world.

Erin Aquin  24:01  
So we hope that this helps you get the wheels turning, and maybe supported you to really make sure you get one of these meetings on the books for yourself, whether you're doing it with your own coach, whether you are going to reach out to us to have us facilitate this for you, or whether you're going to join our Mastermind and help you do kind of a mini version of this, alongside some other incredible business owners. The most important thing is you do it. So if we can help in any way, please be sure to reach out to us. If you're interested in the mastermind, you can find out more about that and apply for this very small group, mastermind at besuperabound.com/mastermind do that soon, because when we sell out, we are sold out. We are not going to be hacking a bunch of people into this. This is something that is going to be very customized, very personal, and we can't wait to help you over there.