060 | The CEOs Blueprint – How to Plan Your Best Year Yet

Welcome to another episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies podcast. We’re excited to kick off another year of weekly episodes where we help you minimize your taxes, master wealth, and optimize your life. In today’s episode, we’re going to give you a framework to use for planning. It can be tough as an entrepreneur fighting the fires that pop up daily.
We’re going to take some time today to work on the business not in it. We think this is crucial for long term success. It may not seem like it’s possible to step outside of the business to work on it, but when we look at our most successful clients that are making 2 to 15 million dollars per year, they’re strategically positioning themselves out of the day to day operations.
Even if you’re making those dollars, these concepts will help you get to the next levels that you have your sights set on. Success doesn’t happen on accident. We’re going to give you the tools today to start growing. We have developed free resources that you can download to help you craft a vision for where you want to go with your life, as well as the tools that you can use to plan for the year quarter, all the way down to your top priorities for each day, you’ll want to stay to the end to see how all of these pieces come together.
And how we reset those limiting beliefs that are holding you back. So let’s dive in now on how to construct an effective plan for your business and your life. I’d like to start off by asking you to spend a considerable amount of time on your planning. It’s really important. My suggestion would be to carve out two to three mornings to spend a few hours each day working on your planning.
Then give yourself time to go for a long walk, to work on a hobby where you can let your subconscious mind continue to work on the issues that you’ve identified in your planning sessions. You’ll be surprised at the revelations that come to you when you give your mind the freedom to just work on its own.
The first place we need to start is your vision. This vision is for where you’re planning on going in the next three to five years. I believe that you should have a vision for your business and every area of life that matters to you. That can be your marriage, your parenting, your health, etc. You can go to vitalstrategies.
com forward slash planning to download the free tools to help you construct a compelling vision for the future. If you did this exercise last year, it’s good to review your vision and make updates based on your current situation. It may be the case that you’ve realized much of your previous vision.
It’s good to review annually and make sure your vision is always set three to five years from today. Again, if you haven’t yet, go to vitalstrategies. com forward slash planning to download your free resources. Here are the key components to a compelling vision. First, let’s start with clarity. The vision needs to be clear to whomever reads it.
It also needs to be inspiring. It creates a life that you’re excited to pursue. Vision boards are great, but when you close your eyes, I want you to be able to see the motion picture in full color. Smell it, taste it, the whole nine yards. Be immersed in your vision. It also needs to be future oriented, needs to draw you into the future.
It also needs to be ambitious, so it won’t be easy. There are great books out there on happiness, and they all seem to point to the fact that when we work towards some things that require hard work, we’re most satisfied in life. Let your vision be an ambitious challenge you’re willing to work for.
Feasibility. This needs to be feasible. Now, while ambitious, it also needs to be realistic and achievable. A vision that’s too far fetched can be demotivating because it feels unattainable. Alignment. The vision should align with the core values and the people that are involved in achieving it. Next, we have detail.
Provide enough detail to guide decision making and strategy, but be broad enough to allow for flexibility and adaptation as circumstances change. A great example of this is Netflix and Blockbuster. Blockbuster had a vision for being the best in store video rental service. Netflix had a vision for delivering convenient, in home entertainment.
We know how those stories played out. Next, communication. You need to be able to effectively communicate a story that gets people excited with your vision. Finally, commitment. This needs to be something that you are committed to. If it just sounds nice, start over with something that you’re excited about pursuing, even when it’s difficult.
When decisions are made, the vision is referred to as the guide to point you in the right direction. Now that we have crafted our vision, we’re also going to identify our core values. In the free resources available at vitalstrategies. com forward slash planning, we have a great exercise that will help you identify your core values.
Our vision and core values are essential when we start crafting meaningful long term goals. We’re going to establish five year and one year goals. Generally, these goals are revenue and profit focused. They may also reflect the size of the team and the type of clients you’re serving. Let’s start by breaking down what a good goal looks like.
I like goals. They set our intention and help us create excitement for what is possible. First, let’s define a good goal. A good goal is a SMART goal. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, realistic, and time bound. A poorly designed goal is, I want more revenue. A slightly better goal is, I want to increase revenue by 10 percent and maintain a 15 percent profit margin.
A good goal is, I want to increase revenue by 10 percent from 6. 7 million to 7. 4 million, and maintain a 15 percent profit margin that nets at least 1. 1 million profit. By December 31st, 2025. I really like goals, but a goal without a system isn’t nearly as effective. Here’s what I mean by this. If I want to increase revenue by 10%, I need to create a system that will help me get these results.
For example, we have grown new business by speaking at two to three conferences a year. If we want to hit our target, we have decided that by speaking at at least six industry conferences for our ideal client out of the 18 that are held each year, we should easily be able to hit those targets. At those speaking events, I’ll have a call to action for new clients and free resources available to attendees that are on the fence.
Then we’ll have an email marketing campaign that follows up with the new prospects every week with quarterly sales calls to see if we can get the prospect to convert. All of this will be scheduled on the calendar and automated through the contact management software that we use. A critical part of our five year and one year goal planning will be to identify the limiting beliefs that have been holding us back.
The majority of the time we don’t even realize our belief system is shaping our lives. There are concepts that we’re holding on to that are limiting our ability to make tremendous forward progress. When we list out our limiting beliefs, it brings them to light and begins to take away their power. This might be an area that you want to pursue counseling or coaching on to help you move forward.
I go to counseling every week. And I have a business coach through C12. I don’t know if there’s a better investment than working on your mindset and mental health. You can download the goal sheet we use to plan our businesses and our lives at vitalstrategies. com forward slash planning. Once we have those goals outlined, we’re going to establish a primary objective for the different areas of our life.
The primary objective is the first project we need to complete to get us towards that goal. It might take a short period of time to accomplish, or all year, but we’re going to have, it is a primary focus. I don’t know if I can overstate the importance of focus. If we go back to the Latin root of priority, it is prioritas.
Prioritas means first in rank. There can only be one thing that is first. Having multiple priorities is intellectually lazy. We should decide what is the most important thing. What is that one domino, if we kick that down, it will set everything else in motion. And we need to give that thing our attention before we move on to the next thing on the project list.
The way that we’re going to determine our priority is create a list of all of the projects that need to be considered. I love this quote by Tim Ferriss. Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. By deciding to do less, we can do things that are essential and more valuable, but more challenging.
It’s easier to respond to 50 emails than it is to create a new product for your business. The new product has the potential to create tremendous value for your business. The emails could have waited or been delegated. I love the Stephen Covey paradigm shift of putting the big rocks in first. The big rocks symbolize the most important things in our lives.
Then there are the small tasks that we have to do every day. If we do all the small tasks first, and then try to fit the important things in, there won’t be enough room. If we do the important things first, and then the small tasks of the day, everything seems to get done, and we have much more fulfilled lives.
I shape my day to day activities around this principle. You can check out the show notes for a link to the video of the Stephen Covey demonstration of this concept. Looking at business planning, there are four areas of your business to consider. The first is revenue generation. Next is operations management, organizational development, and then finally financial management.
Revenue generation, this might be the most important of them all. If you don’t have money coming into the business on a regular basis, you’ll soon be out of business. Operations management. How good are you at delivering your product or service? If you’re a service business that doesn’t have a consistent client experience, you need to make adjustments here so you can build systems around your offering and scale it up.
The same is true if you’re a product based business. If there are problems with your supply chain and fulfillment, you need to dig in and sort out those bottlenecks. Something to consider is looking into lean processes, which is a management approach that helps reduce resource waste and defects.
Organizational development. This is building and developing your team. Often there is a question of what if I pay to develop my team and they leave. The flip side of that is what if you don’t develop your team and they stay? Our approach has always been to develop our people and be the best place for them to work.
If they aren’t, they’re obligated to find a place that’s better for them. Next financial management. You need to have great books, reporting, controls built into your finances and cash management tools. They are critical to running an effective business. If you don’t know how you’re performing, what is working and what isn’t, how are you supposed to run an effective business?
So I want you to look at these four areas of your business and outline what is an extremely healthy business look like in each of these areas. These areas of business health should all be measurable for each category. For this next year, when you do your quarterly planning, I want you to be able to identify if you’re on target, ahead of target, or behind target in each of these areas.
When you look at these areas, which one needs the most attention? That will be our primary objective for this quarter. Here is how we suggest you handle the primary objective. Have a weekly team meeting. If you follow EOS, this would be your L10 meeting. With the key people that can help you move this along and delegate items to the team.
You can work on the primary objective as a team and then for the last five minutes of the meeting, make sure everyone knows who is responsible for what by when. It is good to send out a follow up email to have all of the details in writing so there isn’t any confusion. This will help the project move along nicely.
I like setting quarterly primary objectives because that gives you 12 weeks to work on the project and one week to plan for the next quarter. Some great resources to dig deeper into this type of work are 7 Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen Covey. The 12 week year by Brian Moran, deep work by Cal Newport, essentialism by Greg McCown, and traction by Gino Wickman.
I also recommend developing internal rhythm of blocking out time on the calendar for important tasks. I generally schedule my calendar from most important items to least important. We look at the calendar three weeks out and schedule the following spiritual disciplines in church, along with family items go on first, then self care.
This includes working out, counseling, and free time. Then deep work sessions. Mornings are shown to be the best time to get work done on important projects. So find time every day to make progress. Then I schedule internal team meetings. And then external meetings can be scheduled around all of those other activities.
I also recommend leaving 30 minutes between meetings. Allows you to take notes and do follow up tasks when they’re fresh. It also gives you a moment to collect your thoughts before the next meeting. Lastly, I start my day when I get into the office by using our daily productivity planner. I always have a printed stack on my desk and I like writing directly on them.
There’s something about the analog that seems to help my thinking. It also gives me a place to capture items throughout the day that need to be delegated or go on the to do list. You can download our daily productivity planner at vitalstrategies. com forward slash planning. Now, we’ve given you a system to plan your work from a macro perspective all the way down to your days and your weeks.
Now let’s dig into planning your personal life. Fill out the Vital Success Journal. Start by creating your vision for your personal life. Consider looking at the core values exercise again and make sure these align with your personal life as well. You will rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 in each of the following areas.
Under Relationships, Marriage and Family. Experiences, Hobby and Travel. Advancement, Personal Development as well as Professional Development. Next, Contribution, Time, Skills and Ability, and Finances. And finally, our Health. That’s Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual. Now again, you can find this resource at vitalstrategies.
com forward slash planning. And it’ll be easy for you to understand how you can score yourself once you see this, this resource. This will give you an opportunity to see what your low points are. You’re better served to take a 2 to a 5 than you are a 5 to an 8. Look at your lowest areas, pick your top 3, and put them in order from most important to address.
Complete the goal sheet for your 3 areas that need improvement. Once you are done with the goals, start working on building a process for each goal that you can implement. Systems are going to be more challenging than just setting the goal. Once they are in place, they make the goal much more likely to be successful.
Let’s take a look at opportunities to build a system for each area of your life that matters. Starting with relationships. If you are married, it is your most important relationship. It’s more important than your kids, your friendships, your extended family, because there isn’t another person that you are closely connected to.
Your marriage affects nearly all of your other relationships. If you don’t have a healthy marriage, it’s nearly impossible to have healthy relationships. I have a few recommendations. First, I think marriage counseling is great. Relationships are hard. I saw this quote somewhere that you’re gonna like 70 percent of who your spouse is and 30 percent is going to drive you crazy.
And that’s okay. Oftentimes counseling can help us with that 30%. Now, my wife and I, we both done joint and individual counseling and absolutely think it’s worth it. For experiences, the value of rest can’t be overstated. Burnout isn’t it. Our experiences give us an opportunity to refresh. An example of that is taking a long vacation with your spouse, leaving your phone in your computer behind.
Gives you an opportunity to reconnect with the people that you love. See this amazing creation that we live on and also get some rest. A couple of systems that might help you do this are have an account where the dollars get set aside for you to take the trip, set up automatic payments for when you get paid to have those dollars go into a savings account that you can’t easily access.
Also book the vacation on your calendar. Even if you don’t have the details sorted out, meetings won’t get scheduled during that time. So you can still take it when the time comes. The other experiences we like to spend on our time on our hobbies. I have a number of hobbies, but my most unique is probably building with Lego.
I almost always have a set going in my office that I work on when I need a break. If you want to learn how to play the guitar, the system you need to set up is get some guitar lessons. Three or four months in advance, pay for those, and you’ll be off to a great start. Going back to how we manage our calendars, make sure that the time goes on and nothing gets scheduled over those lessons.
The same could be said of dance classes, cooking classes, or anything else you want to learn and enjoy. The next area is advancement. This is where we grow and we help people around us grow. When you think about personal development, one thing that I’ve done that has helped me is I stopped listening to music and started listening to audio books and podcasts in the car.
I usually complete about a book a week. I have an annual subscription of 24 books from audible. com, and I usually renew that before my 12 months is up. Now I’m unusual and listen to my books at at least two times, if not two and a half to three times speed. My kids make fun of me, but that’s okay. I also listened to a number of podcasts that helped me grow and develop in different ways.
This is an easy system to employ to help you develop and grow both your knowledge and your wisdom. I also invest in my professional development by spending money on coaching conferences and seminars. This goes back to my mindset being the most valuable asset I have. My suggestion for both your personal and professional development is to set a budget, find the areas you want to improve, and seek out experts in those arenas.
Then make the time and the financial investment. When it comes to contribution, most of you listening to this podcast can make a tremendous impact through your time, but more likely your skills and your financial resources. This is an area where I think focus also matters. It can be easy to get involved in five different charities or causes that you’re excited about and not really have much of an impact on any one of them.
My preference is to get involved in one charity and use my abilities to really move the needle. When it comes to a system for making financial contribution, we handle this a couple different ways. We take regular distributions out of the business and we give at least 10 percent to our local church. At the end of the year, we’re not always sure how the profit numbers will shake out, so we’ll make another contribution to the church to make sure we’re at least 10 percent of net income.
I feel like 10 percent is the minimum standard. Now there aren’t too many places in the Bible where God calls us to test him, but tithing is one of those. So, I believe that the Lord can do more with me and my 90 percent than I can on my own with 100%. Next is our health. When we look at our physical health, there’s generally two areas people want to make improvements.
The first is diet, and the second is exercise. There are a few systems to consider around diet. For me, All of the self control happens at the grocery store. If we have junk in our house, I eat it. So we don’t let the junk in our house. Also, I’m very good at meal prepping the meals that I’m responsible for.
I eat the same thing every day for lunch and it gives me very healthy outcomes. If you want a pro tip for healthy eating, here it is. If it has a nutrition label, don’t eat it. Your meats, fruits, and vegetables are where it’s at. If you really want to lose weight, skip the fad diets and track your macros, and have some accountability around it.
Find a friend to do it with. The next thing to look at is exercise. If we were to build a system around exercise, the data supports that if you work out with someone, you’re 80 percent likely to stick with it. Versus working out by yourself, there’s a 20 percent chance you’ll keep showing up. My suggestion would be, find a friend, sign up for a class, and go 5 days a week.
Not 4, not 3, but 5. It’s amazing how when you start working out, your diet will also start to fall in line because you want to see the results from the work you’re putting in. For your emotional health, there are some great books out there. I’d start with the Bible. Research found when you read your Bible four days a week or more, feeling lonely drops by 30%, anger issues drop by 32%, bitterness in relationships drops 40%, alcoholism drops 57%, and sex outside of marriage drops 68%.
I also have found value in Brene Brown’s book, Atlas of the Heart, and books on mindfulness and meditation to be good for my mental health. Also, I’ve mentioned it a few times, but I’ll say it again, I think regular counseling sessions are valuable for maintaining mental health. We have coaches for our business and our golf game, why not have one for our mental game?
Lastly, our spiritual health. Depending on where you land on this, you may not believe in God. I’m not asking you to believe anything that I share with you, from tax strategy to faith in Jesus. My suggestion is to test the things we talk about here for yourself. If you don’t know about this whole spirituality thing, my suggestion is pray.
Ask the Lord, if he’s real, see if he shows up in your life. We did an episode on this last week. Feel free to go back and listen. There’s more context there, but open your Bible. And read the book of Luke. I have a few spiritual disciplines that have helped me. I read through the Bible in a year, every year.
I also take time to journal my prayers daily. It’d be easy to skip these on busy days, but those are the days that I take extra time because I’ll take any wisdom the creator of the universe has for me on those days. Lastly, I host a weekly men’s group that has been tremendous for my spiritual and emotional health.
These are all things you can consider implementing. We’ve covered a lot of topics today when it comes to planning. I want to remind you. That this is a process and you should spend time working on these things over the course of the next week or two. Use the free resources at vitalstrategies. com forward slash planning as your tools to guide you through the process.
So you can have 2025 be one of the best years yet. You’ll be in a position to do the hard things that will lead you to a great life. I’m proud of you. Keep up the good work. Thank you for listening to the Vital Wealth Strategies podcast. For links to the resources mentioned in today’s episode, you can check out the show notes at vitalstrategies.
com. Now take action today and download all the free resources we discussed at vitalstrategies. com forward slash planning. Don’t have another year of mediocre results. These tools will set you on the path to the best year yet. Make sure you listen next week when we have a great discussion with Kenny Rose.
We discuss how you can make passive investments into franchise opportunities. It will definitely be a conversation that will get you thinking about how to master wealth. Thank you for listening and for being a vital entrepreneur. You’re vital because you’re the backbone of our economy, creating opportunities for your employees and driving growth.
You’re vital to your family, fostering abundance, not only financially, but in all aspects of life that matter. Finally, you’re vital to me because you strive to build wealth and make an impact through your business and live a great life.