55: Annual Planning: How I plan my revenue and offers for 2024

 Head over to leadfeeder.com and sign up for a 14-day (no strings attached) free trial!

Ever wonder what it takes to strategically plan your revenue and offers for the upcoming year? Join me, along with the insights of my stellar business coach, Pia Silva, as we unravel the financial targets that every entrepreneur needs to hit—not just to keep your head above water, but to swim in the sea of success. With a candid breakdown of expenses and the 'good,' 'better,' and 'best' scenarios that can help you prepare for any income fluctuations, we're talking real numbers and real strategies. Get ready to learn how to price your core offer using tools like Teamwork for effective time tracking, and how even a work-from-home mom can aim for that $100,000 goal by working just one day a week.

As we toast to the close of another year, it's time to reflect on the financial journey ahead. This episode is not just about making ends meet, it's about creating a life that includes the extra niceties—from vacations to debt repayment—while smartly accounting for taxes (think adding a 33% cushion to your planning). So, whether you're tuning in for some year-end motivation or looking for a financial compass, I've got you covered. Plus, don't miss out on an invitation to my tiny marketing community where weekly video advice and an AMA channel await to give your pressing questions the spotlight. Here's to a prosperous New Year and to crafting a 2024 that's financially sound and ambition-bound!

Resources:

Show Notes Page @ sarahnoelblock.com
No BS Agency
Join my free community :)
Listen to episode 42 for more financial fitness with Chrisy Bowie

Website: https://www.sarahnoelblock.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahnoelblock/
Newsletter: https://tinymarketing.me/newsletter
Tiny Marketing Community

Click here to ask a question about the episode

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Money. It is the most uncomfortable, taboo topic that exists in human nature, and I mean it makes sense too, because money is what makes us feel secure and that is what we all want is we want to feel safe. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We want to feel safe and money helps us feel safe. But how do you plan money when you're an entrepreneur and you have to deal with those busy weeks and then those months where next to nothing is coming in? Well, today I am going to go over my annual planning strategy and how I plan my revenue and offers for 2024. Now don't think that I'm a money genius, because I'm not. This is actually what I learned through my coaching program. My business coach is Pia Silva and she runs the no BS agency program. She is my coach. She's brilliant and I have taken her approach to annual planning and I'm going to dig into it and share the nitty gritty with you and how I use Pia's strategy for annual planning. So I know exactly how much money I'm going to make for the year, what I need to price my offers at. So stay tuned, blah blah, get into that.

Speaker 1: 1:38

The first thing you need to do is look at your money, look at 2023. How much money did you spend, personal and business? By looking at that, you'll know exactly what you need to make for the next year. So here's what you do Go to your bank and they will break it down for you At least, chase breaks it down for you and it'll tell you how much you're spending every single month on average and it'll break it down into categories so you can see okay, I'm spending an absurd amount of money on things that don't matter and only a small percentage of my income is actually going towards bills that have to be paid. So these are things that you'll want to look at and categorize it. Put it in a spreadsheet so you know how much money you need to make, and break it down into good, better, best. So all of the things that you actually need to pay for every single month personal and business, so like payroll taxes, your subcontractors those might be the I need to have these things category. Put those in the good category because that is a minimum of what you'll need to make. So in the better category, you'll want to add in things like vacations, savings goals, paying off debt. So include those expenses in there, maybe any extra spending that you tend to do but you don't need to do, can go in that better category and then, in the best category, also add in anything extra you want to do. Maybe you want to do a home renovation. Maybe you want to go on a safari in Africa that's totally Pia's goal that I'm using right there. I don't because that sounds scary, but um.

Speaker 1: 3:33

So break down your current financials into those categories Good, the things you absolutely need to pay for bare minimum. Better, what you want to do, so like paying off your debt. And then, best is extra things that you want vacations, concerts, whatever it might be. Maybe you want a new website, you want to launch a new website next year? All right. So category categorize it like that and you'll have a good idea the minimum that you need to make and the most you really need to make, because a lot of times we pick an arbitrary number. I know I picked an arbitrary number for three years. I picked my last salary. I just wanted to make up my last salary and that was it. That's all I cared about. But, uh, it turns out that that is not at all what I needed to make. So once I went through this exercise that Pia showed me, I realized that my goals were completely off compared to what I actually needed. So when you look at those numbers, you'll also want to add on 33% for taxes and um, start there. Start, there is your minimum, which is the good category. It would be that number that you see in that category and then plus 33%, and then, better, all of the numbers in that category plus 33% and then, best, all of the numbers in that category plus 33%. So that's an easy place to start on figuring out what your revenue goals should be for the year.

Speaker 1: 5:25

Okay, so next step you will want to look at how many hours you want to work in a year and start off with your core offer. What are people most often wanting from you? What is it that you do? That is an easy sell for people, and check out how many hours you spend on doing that. So for myself, I use teamwork. I'm sure I've talked about it on this podcast before, but teamwork is my project management tool and teamwork is what I use to track how much time I'm spending on different projects, and I've been doing that religiously for like four years, so I know exactly how much time it takes me to do absolutely everything, so I'm able to plan my projects and my offers accordingly. So we'll track it and see how much time it takes for your core offer, for you to produce your core offer and start with that. So that will help you figure out how many projects intensives, retainers you can do in a month. So look at those numbers and decide how many of those do you want to do in a month? Then the next step would be how much do you need to charge for those projects to make that all work?

Speaker 1: 6:59

So let's make it super simple. Let's say you are a work from home mom and you only really want to work one day week and you need to make $100,000. So I'm going to bust out my calculator right here and we're going to break down exactly what it should be. So you've done the good, better, best. You know exactly how much money you need to make and let's just make it easy. And we're going to say it's $100,000. Now you only want to work one day a week. So let's break that down and say so you would need to make $8,333 a month and you want one day of work week. So divide that by four so you could sell a VIP day at $2,083 and hit your goal. Now compare that to other VIP days and it's right on brand. Like VIP days can be anywhere from $1,500 to $5,000, depending on how much expertise you have, how much you can get done in that VIP day, what the value is of that VIP day. But it is super easy to plan like okay, in my better category I'm making $100,000. I only want to work about eight hours a week To do that. I can wrap up my offer into a VIP day at $2,083. Or you know the 95s. The 97s always do well, so maybe we'll say $2,097 and that would get you to your goal.

Speaker 1: 8:57

You have a clear offer, you know how much time it will take and you know how many you need to sell. So the next step would be how do you sell for VIP days a month? Because, like, let's do the math four times 12, that's 48 clients that you need to sell over the year and it's very likely you're not going to get all of those leads in an even cadence like you want to. So you need to be able to make it work. So let's figure out how much outreach you need to do or how many leads you need to get in order to reach your goal of closing 48 clients. Okay, so let's assume you have a 50% close rate on fit calls or discovery calls. So you would need to get about 96 exactly 96 fit calls or discovery calls a year to make your goal of 48 clients a year. So what do you need to do in order to get that many fit calls? Because that feels like a lot. You're like, oh wow, but you can actually orchestrate this, you can make it happen. So I'm going to give you a couple tips on how to bring in those leads so you can get more fit calls. That means you need to connect with a decent amount of people.

Speaker 1: 10:38

If you're incoming leads let's say workshops, that you have webinars, that you have connection calls, you have, let's say, 30% of those turn into fit calls. So for the example that I'm giving today, you would need 164 connections to get those fit calls, to get the amount of fit calls that you need in order to reach your goals. So how do we do this? 163 is not that crazy. So to do this, we're going to I'm gonna give you a couple different strategies. You can hold webinars let's say monthly webinars and if you had monthly webinars, let's just divide 164. You would only need 14 people to show up to your webinars to reach these numbers. Now let's say you did quarterly workshops. They're a little bit more intense. Let's go back to that 164 number. I have my calculator right here and we're doing them just quarterly. You would only need 41 people to participate in that workshop. For reference, my most recent workshop had 86 people at it, so not too crazy for this particular goal. To be able to reach your goal of 41 people participating in your workshop.

Speaker 1: 12:09

What's another way you can do it? You can own or host, facilitate a networking group or a referral group. So let's say you have a podcast and all of your guests on your podcast are people that would buy from you or they would. They have a close connection with your target audience. Everybody who is a guest on your podcast bring them into your community, invite them to a referral or a networking group so you can build a relationship with them, and you can create a referral like referrals on demand, basically by systematizing, bringing your podcast guests into a referral network so you can share each other's leads.

Speaker 1: 12:58

Sometimes something doesn't make sense for you and you wanna hand it off to someone else. Or a client asks for a service that you don't provide, but you need someone to give them that you feel comfortable and confident with, and a referral or a networking group is a great way to do that, and you can build it and fill it with a podcast. So let's see here some other ways to be able to do that would be joining someone else's networking group. You can go on Meetup and find tons of networking and referral groups that you can connect with. That already exist. You don't even have to be the host of it, but it'll get you in front of them.

Speaker 1: 13:37

But the easiest thing to when you know your numbers, is to own that process of connecting with people. So being the host of the referral or networking group would be more beneficial because you'll know exactly how many people you need in there in order to reach your numbers. You know exactly how many connections you need, what conversion rate you're getting to get fit calls, how many people are turning into clients. You have those numbers when you do annual planning this way. So those are some options Networking groups, referral groups, podcasting and creating a community around the people you're interviewing, events like workshops or webinars. So those are some fairly easy, low hanging fruit ways to get more connections with people.

Speaker 1: 14:38

To give you the number breakdown, and these are Pia's conversion rates that she does as a standard and they're also supposed to be like fairly bad, like you should be able to do better than this. So we're using this as a bare minimum. But outreaches the amount of people that you outreach to that turn into a connection call. That's about 40%. Connection calls the amount of people that you actually connect with on a phone call or a Zoom or a Google Meets that turns into a fit call 30%. And then fit calls that turn into a client. She has something called lead products, which is like a low entry product service strategy that you do as a first project for all clients. But fit calls that turn into a client is 50% at that rate. And when she says turn in, or when I say turn into a client for her, that's getting people to purchase the lead product, which is an initial strategy, a low cost product or service. It's something that introduces the client to the experience of working with you, gives them something tangible and valuable that they can use on their own or they can work with you to execute, and it's a way to build trust and give value before you officially start working with them as a client.

Speaker 1: 16:13

Okay, so those are the numbers, and now you have all of the numbers, so I'm gonna break it down really fast for you just to reiterate what you need to do to annual plan, to plan your revenue and your offers for 2024. First thing, look at your bank. It's uncomfortable, but do it and categorize it. All of the things I need to spend money on, go into the good category and then in the better category, it's all of those things plus paying off your debt, adding a savings account, things like that. And then all of those things plus in the best category vacations, a new website, whatever you wanna do with your, whatever good, better, best looks like for you. And those will give you the numbers that you need annually.

Speaker 1: 17:13

So start there and, remember, add 33% to each of those numbers for taxes. You don't wanna owe the IRS, all right, so start there. And then you wanna look at your offer. How much time do you spend on your core offer, the one that's getting purchased the most? How much time do you wanna work a month?

Speaker 1: 17:37

Now, using those numbers, break down what your offer should look like and how many you need to sell and what you need to price it at. So, looking at your profit goals, you can divide it out by the number of projects that you need to sell a month and then you'll know exactly how much you need to sell it for what you need to price it at. Compare it against others in the industry, so you know it's not wildly out of reach, that it makes sense and it's not just great for you but it also is valuable for your client. And then from there you need to look at how you're gonna actually feed, how you're gonna get those clients. So remember the number of people you reach out to about 44, sorry. About 40% will convert to a connection call, which is a one-on-one conversation, and then connections about 30% will turn into a fit call and then about 50% will turn into a client. So if you're trying to manufacture those connections, to do it at scale, you can do that with networking events, referral events, podcasting. You can do that with workshops and webinars. So all of those are options to be able to manufacture those connections and move them through to a fit call. And that's what I got for you today. That is exactly how I did my annual planning and how I planned my revenue and offers for 2024.

Speaker 1: 19:18

If you liked this episode, make sure to like, subscribe, comment, review wherever you're watching or listening to this and I have some homework for you I want you to sit down and actually go do the dirty work of going through your personal and business finances. Categorize them into good, better, best goals, including taxes, add that 33% and plan out your offers. I wanna hear all about them. And if you want to connect with me one-on-one, you can click on the link in the show notes description to join my tiny marketing community. I use the tools story prompt, so I will send out weekly video advice for you, and you can also put in your own questions.

Speaker 1: 20:09

Go in the AMA channel and ask questions. I'll answer them for you. I would love to connect with you, so head down there, join that tiny marketing community, ask me questions whenever you want and get weekly video advice. That's raw little filters. I usually look pretty in, yes of them, but you know, deal with it. All right. This comes out on New Year's Eve. So happy New Year's Eve. I hope you're having fun and celebrating and looking forward to the year and doing your annual planning. All right, here's to 2024.