Emma: [00:00:00] All right, beautiful people. You have asked, Emma, what is your planning process for a new year? Great question. I don't think you'd like my answer though, but I'm going to share it with you anyway. I find planning boring. Do you, anyone? Hands up. A little bit boring. It's like, ugh. Yes, you do. Without a plan, it's just a hope and a dream.
You've got to have a plan, but you've also got to keep it flexible. Now, how I start my planning, well, the month I start my planning is in July. Oh, I know you're like, Emma, that's so early. I know it kind of sucks for us. Basically, we run a program. You've heard me talk about it before. It's called thriving women.
when we go to sell that program, we start selling that program. We launched that program in September and we have to have all the bits figured out in the calendar because people want details. Don't they? If you're going to buy a program, you want to know when it's going to run, what's going to happen, et cetera, et cetera.
That means the Emma McQueen planning cycle starts in July. Sometimes it starts in August, but we have to make sure that we do that. So there's enough space for other things when they pop up. So the first thing I do
is I dive into the data. I take a look at the service. And it's a combination of all the resources that we have offered across the course of the year.
And I list all of those. I probably take a couple of days to do this, by the way, it's a meeting with myself. I take myself off and I have a meeting with myself and I print out all the data or the data is all in my fingertips. I look at zero. I look at our email list. I look at all the things I look at my gut instinct.
I look at the feedback that we get. I kind of have a few
different data points here. The very first question I ask myself though is, has this service or offering given me joy?
or has it stolen my joy? because if I don't love doing it, the chances are I don't give my clients the best possible experience.
And if something is stealing my joy,
we've got to get rid of it,
we've got to ditch it,
we've got to trash it because there'll be something else that will help me feel [00:02:00] more joyful. So if the answer is it's stolen my joy, I don't have too many years like this now, but when I was starting, I did roll out a lot of different things and some of them just took my energy, stole my joy, and I had to, in the end, ditch them.
Now, I will put a caveat on this. These things are hard to ditch if they're making you money. If they are making you money, and you feel like you still need to ditch it, just make sure you've got another revenue source to top it up. So a couple of years ago, a number of years ago now, I made a decision to cut out half a million dollars in our business through corporate programming.
I just, it didn't give me joy. I didn't love it anymore. I loved the people and I wanted to work with the people, just the organizations I didn't want to work with. Now, before I did that though, I went, okay, that's going to be half a million dollars
worth of a revenue stream
that I need to replace.
So then I started working on replacing that revenue stream before I started killing the first one. So let's be smart about how we do that, right? Just because it makes commercial sense
doesn't mean you need to keep doing it. But also, if it makes commercial sense, you need to make sure that you're happy to either cut that off or replace it with something.
So the first question, write it down. Does it give me joy or does it steal my joy? Because you know what? We have lots of joy and it can be stolen like that and your energy can be ruined. The second question I asked myself is about financials. So I dive a bit deeper than just the joy question.
So I want to look,
has the service done as well as I wanted it to?
Have I put in the effort that is necessary to make it work?
Is there something that was missing?
Was it not the right timing?
Would I change anything if I was to roll it out again?
And if the commercials are there and you got to work out what your commercials are, but if the commercials are there and you think, yes, I just need to dial up some marketing or I need to let more people know about it.
Or maybe I need to utilize my list a bit more. [00:04:00] Awesome. Make sure you're making those decisions. The other thing about starting this in July, ladies, the other thing about it is that you're not too tired yet. You start doing this in November, December, you probably don't give two craps about what's actually going on because you're tired.
So July or August is a great time to start planning. Please come on that bandwagon with me. That would be amazing. The third question has a few different parts in it. the things which is connected to joy, but also connected to energy and time. Do I want to keep doing this thing? So for instance, my Thriving Human program, that's going into its seventh year.
I love that program
with all my heart.
Yes I want to keep doing that. What do I want to trash? Now, this might be about service offerings. It might be about ads. It could be about marketing. It could be about all the things that make up your business sphere. Yeah. And then what do I want to start?
Now, this point is a particularly tough one for me because sometimes inspiration comes and it's not on the plan. That's where having space on the plan to be creative and get inspired kind of works. An example of this I have spoken about in a previous episode was our business development sprint that we did.
So I had this idea after Day with the Queen, we would take, uh, Group of women through an hour of power a day, business development. And then I expanded that out and we had like 60 women do that business development sprint. Now that couldn't have come at a worse time. I was in the middle of a launch for Thriving Women.
We were doing our planning and I had an event coming up. But we did it anyway,
because it felt right,
it felt aligned to me. And it was a happy, happy accident. In fact, I reckon one of the happiest accidents I've had in my whole business. See, after seven years, you can still have happy accidents. It was so energetically aligned to me.
I even had people solo poloing me. We use a system called Marco Polo. I even had people solo poloing me saying, you are glowing in this challenge. And you know what? I reckon I was, I was because I was
so in service to the group and
helping them get [00:06:00] their results. I was just in my element. of course I had already done my planning by the time we did this.
So I've snuck it in much to Serena's disgrace. The thing about being an entrepreneur and having lots of ideas is that someone has to implement them. And I am very lucky to have Serena, shout out to Serena, cause she does listen to this podcast. She is my sister. She's the smart one. And she lives in Western Australia and she's also my business manager.
And she cringes when I say something like, Hey, I've got an idea. She's like, Oh, how is this going to impact me? Anyway, she's beautiful and she does all the things that we need to do. But I was like, this business development sprint, this has legs on it. I think people need this. I think we need to do this.
And she's like, righto,
what do we need to do? So we've decided that we're going to run that three times a year, but actually, what that actually needs is that now we need to formalize some stuff. So the last one, and I like to experiment. So the last one was literally just a happy accident. I did it all very low tech and I was okay to experiment that way.
And I know that there are a lot of women who go,
Oh, I need my offer to be perfect,
the copy has to be right,
the landing page has to be up,
I need to make sure I've got all the bits before I hit go. No, no, no, no, you don't. Let's take imperfect action. I am the queen of it. So this challenge, I decided that I would talk about it on the Tuesday. We rolled it out on the Friday. We started the following Monday for two weeks. Yeah. We just moved really quickly and I can do that. I can do that in my business. My business is built to allow me to do that. Is your business built with space in it
so that if you had a creative idea,
you could outwork it really well.
You could test the market,
and then make it perfect. Um, I never make things perfect. Perfect to me is like 50%. Anyway, that's another story for another day. I went ahead and rolled this thing out I just kept this tech, super low. And once I tried it, I was like, Oh, okay, now we can make it a little bit more slick.
And so that's what we've done for next year.
So we've [00:08:00] incorporated in next year's calendar already. We've talked about it. It's going to be up on the website, et cetera, et cetera. But in the first instance, I just went low tech on it and everyone gets that. And it was fine because you know what I see women time and again, create an offer, create the perfect landing page.
Create the perfect copywriting, then they try and select and no one wants it. Don't do that. Go and talk about something. See if you can get some groundswell and then do something else. It's just experimenting. that's not how my whole business works, right? the whole year is planned. And this year I wanted to achieve some pretty big things for us.
Uh, for us, it was a focus on systems and making sure that we had the right systems in the right place with the right people. And that's taken a good year to get that sorted. I was very focused on registering thriving women. Um, and so we have been able to do that, and I was also very focused on creating an awesome experience for our current cohort of thriving women.
Now, I've managed to achieve those things,
and some are easy to be ticked off. So do we have the systems in place? Tick. Do we have the people in place? Tick. Do we have this in place? Tick, tick, tick. Is the registration sorted? Yes. The experience for our clients, well, only time will tell, right?
Proof is always in the pudding. But one thing I know, and it's a data point that I pulled, was we have an 85 percent retention rate from this year's Thriving Women to next year. 85 is pretty good. And 85 doesn't count the people that are in Thriving Women who are moving to one on one coaching.
Right? I've just done it from Thriving Women to Thriving Women. But from the 15%, there's been a couple who have moved To one-on-one coaching, so the retention is probably 95%. It's awesome,
but you've gotta know your data to do that. So you've gotta pull your financial data, you've gotta pull your email data.
You've, for me, I pull my podcast data. I pull all the data that I can find. I talk to people, I ask them what they want. Even my thriving women this year. I said to them, what do you want next year? What would you like to see? And if I can make that [00:10:00] work, then I will. Next year's thriving women. We have some amazing masterclasses coming up with special guests. We have an AI expert coming in. We've got a lawyer coming in. We've got a content creator coming in. There's so much cool stuff, which I haven't even advertised, but there's so much cool stuff based on what we need. for next year. Amazing. I wanted this episode to be a reflection episode for you.
I want you to think about what's giving you joy?
What is not giving you joy?
What do you need to ditch?
What do you need to keep?
What do you need to start doing?
And also what are the financials attached to that?
You have to have a plan,
but make sure you create
space in the plan. so I would love you to look back over the last year and look at how far you've come. When we look back, we realize how much progress we've actually made. When I think about the things that we bit off this year, Sorina was right. She probably gave me a hint that I may have bit off more.
Bitten off more than I could chew and I just had to chew real quick because I made that mistake. So we have to just get on with it. Next year has a little bit more space in it because I've said no to some other work, which has been amazing. And also we're creating space to have conversations with people to do some collaborations.
Collaboration is my next big word. You heard it here first. Serena collaborations. So we're going to collaborate with
a lot of different people next year.
Watch this space. Anyway, I realize it's not July anymore, but it's still a really good process to go through. If you can carve out a day or two and just look at your data, look at your financials, have a look at what gives you joy.
And I can't wait to see what you decide to cut out,
what you decide to keep
and what you might start. So exciting. Let me know how you go. Love to hear.
