How I planned for 2024 in my small business
I’m done with chucking spaghetti at a wall and I’m rewriting my own damn rulebook and in this blog post I’m going to tell you how to do it too.
2023 was a big year for learning, pivoting, practicing and, frankly, f*cking up. I had goals and aspirations like every small business owner. I wanted to make money to fund my lifestyle and pay my new scary mortgage and I wanted to feel like my business was going forwards not backwards.
But had I spent time making action plans from my goals?
No.
Had I actually thought about what was achievable as a one woman band?
No.
Had I thought further than jumping from one comparison-prompted shiny new service to another?
Absolutely not.
My whole business was fuelled by doom-scrolling, self hatred and money fear. And, dear reader, I can promise you that that is NOT the way to run a business that makes you not want to have a mental breakdown. Although I did have some positive stuff happen too. You can read all about that here.
So this year I changed it up.
One of the good things I did last year was nurture my community. I put myself into spaces that forced me to interact with people. I found people that I truly liked to talk to, share ideas with and was inspired by and I found my colleagues. As a self employed photographer that is a GAME CHANGER. Having people to tell you to ‘chill the f*ck out and drink peppermint tea’ when you’re spiralling (genuine message I received one day after I had sent a friend about 18 minutes of panicky voice notes), or pull you up when something knocks you or even to just encourage you to keep going when showing up feels hard - you can’t pay money for that kind of connection. This gets you back on the right path so much quicker and makes you feel far better than if you tried to snap yourself into the right gear all alone.
So if you are struggling, the best piece of advice I can give you is go out and find your people. Invite people to coffee, set up online or in-person co-working. You don’t need a whole tribe necessarily, but a couple of really good business buddies can make you.
And drinking prosecco alone, celebrating your wins is no fun. Go find a pal and drag them to the pub instead.
With my new found community I wanted to head into 2024 prepared and stop jumping from raft to raft desperate to stay afloat and I’d heard about ‘CEO days’ that were generally being bandied about by people in marketing and business coaches. But something about it really appealed. One day where the email isn’t opened, no work IN the business is done and you get to look at the big picture landscape of the business itself. But it also terrified me. ‘Thinking big’, ‘daring to dream’ all those juicy cliches, sometimes it’s just not that easy.
So I turned to my community and my work wife and I booked a day in the diary to tackle it together and it was the best decision I have ever made.
Photos: The work wife in question. I will blog her branding shoot eventually…
This is how we did it:
Start the day slowly by moving your body and nourishing it in a way that brings you joy
We started off the day with a walk through the park to the London Fields Lido just to nourish our bodies and wake up our minds. Don’t skip this step. If you can feel calm and invigorated before you start, your energy level helps you tackle that big thinking that can really exhaust you. We then naturally warmed up after our swim with a coffee and Eggs Benedict which is my all time favourite breakfast on earth. So we were off to a good start.
Review your previous year
We had sort of done this before the CEO day itself. I had done some journalling, effectively written my own performance review (if you want to think of business in a more traditional, corporate way) and I had worked out my financial numbers so I knew my cost of doing business and all that jazz. My conclusion was, I basically didn’t track anything so I had limited data to actually make any sort of informed decisions so I sacked it all off and vowed to actually track the numbers in my business properly this year. But what I did take from my review was how it felt and how I wanted to work differently this year.
Define your long term vision
For me, that was being able to work with ‘hell yes’ clients that wanted to work with ME rather than a photographer in both the UK and abroad, whilst also travelling the world, trying new things (tasting all the wine) and living my best adventurous life. Life is there for living and although I don’t mind hard work and thrive off building a business for myself I don’t want to let go of what I’m actually trying to achieve which is ultimately financial freedom. I don’t need to be a millionaire, but those plane tickets aren’t cheap…
Create a yearly intention
To do this I picked a word for the year and 3 words (I actually have 4 - typical overachiever.) that describe how I want my year to FEEL. So my overall word is INTENTION. No prizes for creativity there. But it summed up exactly what I was trying to achieve and was the exact opposite to throwing spaghetti at the wall. Everything I do in my business needs to have an intention and be part of the overall feeling that I want to have in my business.
I want my business to feel: more streamlined, more profitable and full of much more adventure.
If you are struggling to get to words and feelings you are happy with I found these journalling prompts really helpful:
By the end of the year where would I like my business to be?
If I met my future self and I thought of them as ‘successful’ what would that look like?
What words would I love to be able to use to describe my business by the end of next year?
If my business looked the same at the end of the year as it does now what would I be most frustrated about?
What are the biggest changes I would like to see this year?
What would I be excited to happen in 2024?
Post-it note brain dump
Once I had my big picture stuff all noted down I went at the wall with a pack of post it notes and got EVERYTHING out of my brain. The swirling things you can’t quite grab hold of, the half thought out glimmers of inspiration. All of it. Each thought goes on a post-it note and gets to take up it’s own space. No thought is wrong, stupid or unachievable at this point…
Categorise your post-its
So once I had successfully downloaded everything from my brain onto all of these post-its I immediately began to panic. It’s a lot to be bombarded with the vivid yellow of the inside of your brain. So at this point Amy and I grabbed pastries and headed to the park. Going outside really calms me down and allows me to make space in my brain for more clear thinking.
Once back at the brain dump wall I started to cateogorise each of the ideas into processes or tasks that I wanted to maintain on a regular basis (like blogging once a week or networking twice a month). These are things I wanted to keep plugging away at all year in order to achieve my more streamlines, profitable and adventurous overarching goals. I put these into a ‘tasks to maintain’ category.
I then split the rest of the big ideas by income streams e.g wedding photography, branding photography, education etc.
Create mini projects from each of your big ideas and work out how much time each project will take
From here each big idea becomes a mini project. Just like university coursework or similar. You create a task list for each task, for example ‘Set up Meta ads’. The tasks would be: watch training video, create ad, decide on budget allocation etc (This is simplified but you get the idea!) Once you have your task list you can estimate the amount of time that mini task may take you.
Prioritise your tasks
Then put those tasks into order of priority so you can see where your time needs to be allocated first. If you’re doing the maths and there are just not enough hours in the day to do all of your big tasks this week/month/year then there is no shame in putting them into a ‘future’ category. I definitely had to put some of my big things on the back burner this year which feels weird when it’s only January!
Assign them to a month as that months focus
Then this is the good bit. Pick the mini projects that you want to make your primary focus per month (or quarter depending on how you prefer to work). By not having everything on one huge master to do list, you avoid overwhelm and it feels much more manageable.
Go for celebratory dinner (even though its dry jan and that sucks)
That’s it! I have all my post-its stuck to my office door so I can keep referring back and refining. I didn’t spend too much time making sure all the tasks on each mini project was completely perfect as I can do that when I get to that mini project but I did regret choosing to do dry January because a glass of fizz would have definitely gone down well.
Set a date for a check-in a couple of months later to see how it’s all going (and you can this time because it’s not January).
To be honest, setting a date for a couple of months later stemmed from me sulking about not being able to finish the day with wine. So Amy suggested we set a new date for dinner, to chat through how it’s all going, see what’s working and what isn’t and celebrate the wins of Q1 (with wine this time).
Let me know if you give your own CEO day a go and how you get on! You can always engage with me on Instagram, LinkedIn or send me an email!
I wish you a successful 2024, however that might look for you.
The business pals I couldn’t do without at an epic Christmas exhibition Amy put on.
Got ‘being more visible’ or branding photos/videos as a mini project for this year? I can help!
I am super passionate about making business owners feel seen, heard and highly amused on photoshoots to get the best, personality-filled images and footage to use within their businesses.
If you are looking to get a whole image bank of personalised stock photos and film footage then send me an email and let’s have a chat. I need you to get visible, stand out from the crowd and not want to die whilst you’re doing it.
Get in touch and let’s chat about exactly what you need and how I can help.
PS. My new VIP day contains coffee and prosecco. Ask me about it…
