How to plan your business quarters to hit your income goals.

Welcome to The Empowered Edupreneur Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit, and I am an ex-teacher turned online business coach for Edupreneurs, the owner of Digiteach and a six-figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators, just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love.

If you are looking to uplevel your skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator. Then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you to play bigger with your life and go after your dreams. 

We are going to have so much fun together. So thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in. 

Hello. Hello. It is so good to be chatting to you again today. I am currently recording my podcast right now and looking at snow falling outside, which is literally making me the happiest person in the world. I love snow. And my cats are losing their mind right now, which is amazing. But what I wanted to share with you in this episode today, and I think this is going to be a really great one for business owners, I feel like you could probably apply this even if you didn't have a business, but this is really great for business owners. 

Who find themselves getting overwhelmed at the new year and they want to hit their goals. They just don't know exactly what to be focusing on. And they've got this endless list of stuff, but they're not really sure on what to prioritize and how they're going to hit their goals. And it's all just up in the air, right? 

So this episode is all about how to plan your business quarters to hit your income goals. So it's basically quarterly planning. And it's something that I think, if you have a business, this is something you should be doing. You should have your Q1, planned out. I do this at the end of the year. I sort of look at the year ahead and I plan Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.

I do change things along the way. That isn't to say that everything I plan for the year ahead is what happens. You know, life happens, things change, but I like to plan the quarters ahead and really see how am I going to hit my revenue goals in my business and reverse engineer everything, so I know what I'm doing. And this is what I want to help you do today.

And we're going to do this together. And I'm going to help you by using a method that comes from a book called traction. So, if you have a business and you want to learn more about this. The book traction is amazing. I recommend getting it. This method is basically from there and I'm just going to do a light version of it to help you plan your year ahead per quarter so that you can hit your income goals. Okay. 

So I'm going to walk through this method with you. I'll give you an example and then you can go and do it yourself. Let's look at Q1 for example. And we're just going to do Q1 and you would apply the same method for Q2, Q3, Q4 as well. But let's look at Q1. The first step you want to take is deciding what is your revenue goal for the year.

So I want you to ask yourself and decide, how much do I want to make in my business in Q1? So say for example, you want to hit 15,000 euros for Q1 for this quarter. Now, this is the revenue goal we've got, then you put that right at the top 15,000 euros or whatever it is for you. Once we know our revenue goal, we can then reverse engineer what we need to do in order to hit that revenue goal.

And then it's all about really chunking it down. So now we've got our goal, 15,000 euros or whatever your goal is. Now we want to chunk it down. We want to reverse engineer things. So then we need to ask, step two is, what needs to be done in order to hit that revenue goal. What do I need to do in order to actually hit that revenue goal?

How many offers at what price do I need to sell? And now your business will have, I don't know how many offers you are selling. Maybe you're selling one, maybe you're selling multiple, but let's keep it simple for now. Let's say you have one main. Core offer in your business. And this is like the main moneymaker.

This is the thing that you prioritize selling because it brings in the bulk of your revenue. Say it's like 80 percent of your business income comes from this offer. Let's say this is the one offer you have. That's the focus for you. And say for example, it is a course for 500 euros. So you've got a course, it's 500 euros.

This is the offer that you have been prioritizing selling for a while. If you need to hit 15,000 euros in revenue in Q1, then we can then look at, okay, how many of that offer do we have to sell to hit that goal? So let's say in this example, you've got a course, 500 euros. You want to make 15,000 euros. How many people need to buy that course in Q1?

You need 30 people to buy your course in Q1. So now you know, okay, I need 30 sales in Q1. Like that's what I need. I need 30 sales in my course for Q1. And this is just keeping it super simple. You may have multiple offers and then you could decide, okay, I want to sell five coaching or teaching packages at a thousand dollars.

And I want to sell 10 courses at 500. However you want to do it and however you plan on doing it, whatever's the path of least resistance and is the one that makes sense based on your business, you can do that. So let's just keep it simple, but I want you to now think about your offers, how much they are and how many you need to sell in order to hit that revenue goal for the quarter. 

Now, once you know how many offers you need to sell, you also want to think about, well, what else do you need to do to actually sell? How are you going to sell this stuff, right? How are you going to sell 30 spots in your course? You may then decide, okay, I'm going to host a live webinar. I'm going to do a live webinar launch in Q1 in order to hit this revenue goal.

So this is my main promotion for my quarter is a. Live webinar launch, you can decide whatever works for you. You could do a challenge, a bootcamp, you can do whatever launch style works for you, a video series, a free training week, but let's say in this example, we're choosing a live webinar launch.

I want you to think about what you want to do in Q1. What is your promotion style going to be? What's the main way in which you're going to promote your course? And then based on this, now we know we've got to do a webinar launch. We know that that means we have to be list building and building an email list through maybe organic and paid advertising.

We know that. Okay. In the last launch, you had maybe a 2 percent sales conversion in that same launch. Now you can base that and be like, okay, if I had a 2 percent sales conversion in my last launch. That means in order for me to sell 30 spots in this quarter, I need to have 1,500 people in my launch event. 

2 percent of 1, 500 is 30. And so now you've reverse engineered your list. Okay. I need to actually get 1,500 people into the event in order to hit that goal. And then based on that, you can be like, cool, how am I going to get people into that event? I'm going to use my Instagram. I'm going to use my podcast.

I'm going to use my YouTube. I'm going to use Facebook advertising. You decide whatever method of marketing you're going to choose and focus on in that quarter. And then you can even go as far as to say, how much are you going to pay for ads? How are you going to build your list? 

In this section, you really want to just say, what are you going to be doing and what do you need to do? So you need to sell 30 spots. You need to have 1500 people on your email list for your launch event, assuming that you hit a 2 percent sales conversion and you need to focus on organic methods of marketing, and maybe you want to do some paid advertising.

And also you want to make sure that you have a strong offer that you can sell. Make sure that you position your offer well, all of these things are, are things you want to, you want to do in order to hit that goal. So just brain dump the number of sales you need to make with the offers you have, what promotion events you're going to do, what kind of launch style you're going to do or how you're going to sell that offer.

Maybe you're doing it as an evergreen thing and you're just selling consistently in your Instagram stories. And that means you need to do more of an Instagram sales method, whatever method you want to do. Write it out, decide what you need to do. Try be specific. If you had a last launch and you had a sales conversion, figure out how many leads do you need on your list to hit the revenue goal you want. 

So go and do that. Now we know in general what needs to be done in order to hit the goal. We know we need X amount of people on the list. We know we need a certain sales conversion. We know we need this. We know we need that. We know we need to sell certain number of spots. We know we need to create content and build our email list or run ads.

If that's what you want to do. So now we know the next thing you want to ask is. What are the roadblocks to me hitting this revenue goal? So a roadblock block is almost a challenge that you need to overcome in order to hit that goal. For example, roadblock one in this case could be lead generation and list building for the launch.

That can be a challenge. It's a challenge to get that number of people onto your list, into your event to help you hit that goal. So that would be a roadblock example. So what I want you to think about, and we're looking at three main roadblocks. So one in this case is lead generation list building for launch, getting people onto the list, getting people into that event.

That's roadblock one, challenge one. Roadblock two. Is the actual sales conversion within the launch. So you've got your people in the email list. You've got the leads, you've got people in your event. The next challenge is, okay, how are you going to lead them into making a buying decision and joining your program? 

So that's a launch sales conversion. So how are you going to increase that conversion or make sure that conversion is that 2 percent that in itself is a challenge. And that's typically the next challenge that you'd need to focus on is really making sure that whatever thing you do converts and actually leads people to buying your program. 

And then roadblock number three could be, for example, if you're running a live webinar launch at another challenge could be actually getting webinar attendance. So getting people to actually show up to the webinar, because that makes a big difference. Your show up rates make a big difference in your launch results often.

So then the next challenge is, well, I've got these people in my event. How am I going to actually get them to show up to the event? And that shows you, okay, that's going to be a little challenge point that I know I need to focus on and prioritize. So I want you to think about three roadblocks within the next quarter, 90 days that are preventing you or challenging you to hit that revenue goal.

So like sticky points almost. Key challenges within the quarter that you need to overcome in order to hit that revenue goal. All right. Once we have our roadblocks, we now know, okay, these are the key challenges. So these are areas we need to focus on because they're, they're like obstacles to us hitting the goal. So we need to address them and work on them and prioritize them. 

Okay, the next thing we want to look at once we've got our roadblocks. Is we want to decide our main rocks. So, a rock is ultimately, it's a big task. It's a main big thing that we need to do. That's going to directly help us hit that goal. And we're going to look at three rocks.

Three main rocks. Now you can have four main rocks, that's fine. I think we'll be looking at potentially four actually. So it doesn't really matter, you can have three or four. And I want to explain what rocks mean essentially, and this is from the book Traction. So the idea is that you have this glass jar. And you have rocks, pebbles, and sand to fill the jar. 

Your goal is to fill the jar. Once you fill that jar, you're going to hit your revenue goal. As soon as that jar is filled. So, if you are trying to fill the jar up, are you going to prioritize rocks, pebbles, or sand? Okay? If you're trying to fill up a jar as fast as possible, you're going to want to focus on the rocks.

The bigger pieces. And the rocks are ultimately the tasks that move the needle in our business. Pebbles are smaller things that we must do to hit the goal, but they're less important. They do need to be done, but they're less important. And then we have sand, and sand are the tasks that are like busy work.

So they're just the things that people do to keep themselves busy and make them feel like they're being productive, but really they're not moving the needle in their business by focusing on them. So I can give you an example, and this is common, people often focus on the sand. They focus on the things that are not moving the needle.

So for example, working for hours on Canva for perfect images, that's an example of sand. That's not going to get you more sales. That's going to not going to help you hit your revenue goal. Spending hours writing one post that sand it's that one post isn't going to make or break your business. You need to consistently create the content and spending hours doing one post is just, it's busy work. Spending hours on a logo that's sand doesn't actually lead to you making sales or hitting the revenue goal, spending hours and hours on fancy webinar slides.

That's sand. That's not going to lead to you improving your sales conversion. Having a very fancy slide deck is not really going to make or break your webinar, and it's not going to lead to better sales conversion. Yet people focus many hours on these things, so they get sort of stuck in work that is just not the stuff you want to focus on. 

And then you end up spending all this time in the wrong areas, and then you don't hit the revenue goal. So the idea is we want to focus on rocks. The rocks are what moves the needle in the business. The rocks are what directly lead to you hitting that revenue goal, like complete correlation. 

And as soon as you start focusing on those rocks, you're going to fill that jar faster. You're going to hit that goal more easily. And we want to look at these three main rocks for the next 90 days. So for the next quarter, so say Q1. So let's look at it for, say you want to hit 15,000 euros in Q1.

And we know what we need to do in order to hit that. We know what our roadblocks are, but now let's look at our rocks. Rock number one is running a live webinar launch. That is like the promotion event for the quarter that is directly correlated you to you making that money is the entire launch, right?

And that's a big rock. Obviously, there's a ton of tasks that would go within that, but that is one big rock. Rock number two is lead generation. So a plan, ultimately to build the leads and build the email list so that you can hit that 15K and we looked at it as a 1500 leads. So that would be rock number two is actually focusing on lead generation.

That needs to be front of mind. So it almost like a list building lead generation plan. And then rock number three is a sales and messaging content plan. So how are you going to sell throughout all your content. And that includes even like promoting your offer, promoting your launch event all the way through to actually selling your paid program that all requires sales and messaging.

You would sell on Instagram. You would sell on emails. You would maybe sell on your YouTube or your podcast, not so much. But those are ways in which you could build up hype and anticipation for your offer. You could have a wait list, you're building up things. You've got selling on the webinar, but sales is something that directly correlates to making money, making offers and selling is what leads to making money.

So ultimately, if there's something to focus on, it is definitely sales and a sales content plan, almost like how you're going to sell that program over all your content areas. Or all your platforms, essentially. Because we know that's going to directly lead to money made. Sales equals money made.

So there we go in this situation. I've just actually decided three main rocks for the next 90 days. So I know I need to be running. I need to focus on a live webinar launch. That needs to be focused in my 90 days. I need to focus on list building and lead generation in the 90 days.

And I need to focus on building sales skills and tightening my sales throughout. All my content, my emails, improving my sale, my emails, improving my messaging, improving my sales skills, building confidence around sales. That's going to have a direct correlation to money made as well. So now we have the three rocks.

I want you to think about your main three rocks for the next 90 days and decide that now. And once you have those rocks, we are then going to look at three to four tasks within each rock to achieve. To actually hitting that rock to achieving the main thing, right? So for example, rock number one was okay.

A live webinar launch. What are the four key tasks I need to focus on in Q1 to make sure that I run this live webinar launch that does well, that converts. Task number one is you want to build a webinar opt in page and thank you page that converts at 30 percent at least. Task two, you want to build a high converting webinar that actually does what it needs to do to help people make a buying decision and shows your offer in a way that's going to really help people and all of those things because you want to have that sales conversion obviously, of 2 percent.

Task three is building a high converting email sequence. So you want to have a pre webinar sequence and you want to have a post webinar sales sequence, and you want to have both of them hitting the goals. So the pre webinar sequence is all about getting people to show up to the event. And the post webinar sequence is all about helping sell your offer. 

And then task four is. Build a high converting set sales page to actually sell the course. So those are four tasks that you need to do in order to run this live webinar launch. And those are things you'd need to focus on. And that's quite simple. Now, you know, this is my task list. Now I need to go execute it.

That's why it reduces overwhelm. Then rock number two, say it's lead generation. So you know you need to hit a 1500 leads in this quarter and in this launch. So what does that mean? So task number one means, I want to run some Facebook ads. I'm going to spend say 1,500 to hit a thousand leads. So that's my first task is building ads and running ads to hit that amount and the budget for that as well. 

And that means you just actually are going and creating ad copy and, and things like that. Task number two is building a social media content plan to actually promote your webinar and your offer. So that could be literally deciding, okay, I'm going to do three reels a week. I'm going to do two carousel posts a week.

I'm going to post five to seven stories every day. And my entire focus is this event that I'm running and the content around that event. So you can build organic leads as well. So hopefully you can get in about 500 people organically as well in that time. If you've got like a thousand from Facebook, maybe you could get 500 organically. 

And then task three could be your other marketing channel. So it could be like podcast or YouTube. Think about podcast episodes and YouTube episodes or whatever. Thing that you're doing and think about some of that, create content around your launch event in advance. So leading up to that launch event you can be dropping an episode a week.

And in that episode, you're building up hype anticipation. You're seeding your course. You're seeding your event. You're dropping breadcrumbs. You're building this excitement. You're driving people to your opt-in page. You're telling people to sign up. You're saying this thing's happening.

And you're getting people excited about it and you're excited about it. And that's something you want to do in advance of the launch. So, weeks leading up to launch, you want to be creating that content. And so maybe one of your rocks is deciding your podcast episode plan and your YouTube content plan. And actually building out episodes and content that is really intentional and strategically.

Building up hype and anticipation, curiosity, intrigue, and all of those good things for your course. And you could have a wait list running as well to keep people, sort of in anticipation for this thing coming, right? So that could be an example of rocks within sorry, of tasks within that rock to achieve that rock, to hit that 1,500 leads. 

And then rock number three is say it's so rock number three was all about sales, sales skills, sales content, sales messaging, just basically sales. Even getting on calls. If you want to get on calls, depends what your sales style is, but a task one could be crafting a sales and messaging plan within all your content. Or writing sales emails or writing sales posts or posts that are with the intention to sell an offer. Creating Canva slides that have the entire intention of selling your offer. 

Creating powerful copy that sells your offer. The messaging that you use, maybe doing some sales training, tightening your messaging. Really improving the way that you sell could be some tasks. It could even be reworking your offer and improving the messaging of that so that it can sell better. So that would be an example of some tasks. 

So now you have basically, you've got your rocks and you've got your tasks within the rock. And now ultimately this is what I need to focus on for Q1. And then you apply the same method for Q2, and you apply the same method for Q3. You do this for every quarter. You just focus on reverse engineering everything that needs to happen in order to hit that revenue goal.

And you always want to make sure that you're focusing on the rocks to fill the jar and not the sand. Of course, you're going to have to do certain work that's maybe the pebbles. But where you're spending your time needs to be spent on the things that are going to move the needle in your business.

And what I shared today are some examples of that. Obviously you may have a very different business model or style in which you sell. Maybe you're not going to do a live launch. Maybe you're doing more evergreen and consistent selling. But what does that mean? How many posts do you need to make?

How many people do you need to get on a call, if that's how you sell. What is your sales conversion on a call? How many people do work with you after hopping on a call with you? So just knowing that information, you can then reverse engineer.

Okay, I need to do this in order to get this number of calls a week in order to sell X number of spots a week. So it will look different for everyone, but this is a really helpful way to plan your year and to. Really reduce overwhelm. I use it all the time. It helps me with overwhelm. It helps me focus on the areas that I need to focus on and not the busy work.

So go ahead, go apply it in your own business. And I do guarantee it's going to help you just bring a lot of clarity and reduce the overwhelm that one feels, especially at the beginning of a year, because you've got this whole year ahead of you, which you can create so much magic, but it's all about being intentional and strategic.

So just looking at where is my energy being spent, and can I make sure that I'm spending it on the right things that are actually moving the needle in my business. That's going to lead me to hitting that revenue goal. 

Alrighty. So I hope you enjoyed this. Go enjoy planning your year and I will chat to you next week. Bye.

 Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. If you love what you heard today, then be sure to share it with me by leaving a five star review so I can continue delivering these goodies. If you aren't already following me on social media, then come tune into some daily inspiration on Instagram by following @_digiteach_ or visiting my website at digiteach.biz. 

I appreciate you so much, and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business and life you love.