Episode #001: How to Create a 90-Day Plan
Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast
Episode #001: How to Create a 90-Day Plan
Today’s Episode:
Welcome to the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast! We are going to teach you how to craft a 90-day plan for your business. This episode is all about how to craft a 90-day plan for your business and it comes out just in time for you to plan quarter four in September and get ready for the last quarter of the year.
Show Notes:
[01:15] Every quarter we meet and craft the next 90-day quarter.
[01:42] You want to be proactive in your business, not reactive. We often react based on what we see, but planning means we get to be proactive.
[02:42] As an online course business, a lot of us run on a launch model. That means we get peaks and valleys in our revenue.
[03:27] The other big reason to plan is that you can actually lead your team and your audience more efficiently.
[04:12] Planning gives you so many advantages.
[04:26] In 2021 and beyond, being a leader in this space is going to become more and more important. Leaders plan.
[04:49] We have a six-step plan that we use with our clients and customers to help them plan out a 90-day period in their business.
[05:38] Step One: Map out our product sweep and figure out what we can offer over the next 90 days.
[06:01] Make a list of every offer that you have. Look at the price of each offer and then look at the current customers or clients for each offer. Where is the majority of your revenue actually coming from?
[06:46] Set quarterly goals for all of the offers. What value does that bring to the business?
[07:55] Step Two: We choose the one or two offers that we are going to focus on for the next 90 days.
[08:18] By narrowing your focus to one thing at a time you are going to get better results.
[09:07] Evaluate which offers have the most potential for your business and then focus on one or two things that promote that offer. Then describe how you are going to promote it to your audience.
[10:16] Step Three: We determine our high-level monthly metrics.
[10:30] Track on a weekly or monthly basis your revenue, list size, and reader or listenership. These need to be tangible numbers that you can track down to the month.
[11:44] Set goals that stretch you. Set metrics that push you.
[12:39] Step Four: We create monthly action plans.
[13:15] Break each week into your core metrics. You want to track your GAN: goal for that week, actions it takes to get to that goal, and then any notes.
[14:44] Step Five: We answer key questions about our plan.
[16:23] Step Six: We let it sit and revisit it tomorrow. Give it some time to rest and come back and slash the nonessentials.
[17:14] As important as it is to plan, it is also important to remove things from the plan that don’t serve you.
[18:18] Now you can personally or with your team check-in on a weekly basis on the action plan, metrics, and answers to your questions. Now the work is checking in on the plan, working the plan, and making pivots in real-time.
[18:40] It is about evaluating on a regular basis and sometimes you have to pivot.
[19:25] A weekly meeting will be a game-changer for you.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
Welcome. This is Not Your Online Marketing Podcast, episode number one, where we're going to teach you how to craft a 90 day plan for your business. Let's get into it.
Hello, hello, and welcome to the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast with your host, Zach Spuckler, that's me, where we're going to teach you how to be a not so average marketer and excel in your online business. Now, I'm really stoked for this week's episode because this is the first episode of the show. And if you didn't listen to episode zero, I recommend you go back and listen to it to learn a little bit about why we rebranded, why we changed from the Heart, Soul & Hustle Podcast and what we're doing differently to help this podcast support you as an online business owner to get amazing results in your business.
Now, this episode is all about how to craft a 90 day plan for your business, and it comes out just in time for you to kind of start planning Q4 in September and get ready for the last quarter of the year. Now, my team and I have a small but robust team who I love working with. Shout out to you guys if you're listening. But every quarter, we meet and we craft the next 90 day quarter. So actually at the time that I'm recording this, we actually met this morning and we mapped out a lot of different stuff that we're going to use over the next several months to kind of crush it in our online business together.
So, why do we do this? What is the point of a 90 day plan? Well, the biggest thing is that I learned early in my online business career that you want to be proactive in your business, not reactive. And what happens is a lot of us as marketers, and I'm guilty of this myself, we look at our revenue or we look at our list or we look at our sales and we go, oh my gosh, I need more or I'm doing amazing, and then we react based on what we see. Planning means you get to be proactive. So you're planning ahead for what you want your revenue to look like, what you want your list to look like. It also gives you more time for preparation for some of these bigger things.
We'll be revealing next week on the podcast something really big that we've been working on behind the scenes. And because we had a quarterly planning session, we know what needs to be done. Literally my team, as I'm recording this episode, are putting the essential things that need to get done into our project management software. We're prepping for it so that when the big day rolls around, we're not going, oh my gosh, are we ready? Are we ready? Are we ready? We have everything with due dates already mapped out.
The other big thing is that as an online course business, a lot of us run on a launch model. We have a course or a program. We open it for enrollment, we close it. And then we continue our marketing efforts down the road. What that means is that we get peaks and valleys in our revenue. We can be really stressed by that because there's months where there's little happening, there's months where there's lots happening. But if we can predict and plan for those peaks and valleys, we can kind of offset the emotions that come with them. That fear of like, oh my gosh, it's a low month. Or that hype of like, oh my gosh, it's a big month. We can offset that so that we're able to get better results in the overall lifetime of our business.
And the other big reason to plan is that you can actually lead your team and your audience more efficiently. I'm not real talk. When I had the Heart, Soul and Hustle Podcast, we would kind of come up with ideas on the fly. Now we're planning, with this podcast, the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, we're planning weeks in advance. We're planning a long time in advance and we're really making it so that we're not just coming up with an idea on the fly, which means we can coincide our episodes with promotions. We can make sure our episodes are sequential and make sense to our audience. And we're never flying by the seat of our pants trying to figure out what to do next. We're simply following and executing on the plan.
You just have to realize that planning gives you all of these advantages. You get to be proactive. You get to have prep time. You get to offset the peaks and valleys and you get to lead. You get to be a leader. And I truly believe that in 2021 and beyond, being a leader in this space is going to become more and more important. Whether you teach hypnosis, clean eating, Instagram, Facebook ads, you want to step up as a leader and leaders plan.
Now the big question is, how do you actually create a 90 day plan for your business? We have a six step process that we use with our clients and customers to help them plan out a 90 day period in their business. Let me just walk you through what it is that we do, the high level six steps, and then we'll take you into each step individually. The first thing we do, step number one, is we map out our product suite and we figure out what we can offer over the next 90 days. The second step is we choose the one or two offers that we're going to focus on for the next 90 days. We'll talk about why that's important. We then determine our high level monthly metrics, what it is that we want to be keeping track of. Step four, we create monthly action plans. Step five, we answer key questions about our plan. And step six, we let it sit and revisit it tomorrow.
Let's dive into each of these steps. The first thing that we do is we map out our product suite. We want to figure out what we even have on the table. What I find with a lot of people who are in the early stages of business is that they might have 1, 2, 3, 4, even 5 offers that they're playing with. And that's us. We have multiple offers that we play within our business, and we're actually looking to condense that down to fewer offers. The first thing you want to do is just make a list of every offer that you have. The second thing is look at the price of each offer. Map out the price. And then look at the current number of customers or clients for each offer. I typically look over the last three to 12 months, depending on how much I've been promoting it. But what you're really trying to do is see that over the last 90 days to 12 months, how much revenue has this generated?
The reason that we do that is a lot of times we have multiple offers out there, but we don't actually sit down and look at which one is bringing the most value or revenue to the business. And that's what I want you to do. Where is the majority of the revenue actually coming from? Then I set quarterly goals for a couple of or all of the offers. And what I mean by that is if I have like let's say I have my challenge launch toolkit, which sells for a $60 average order value, and I want to sell 100 of them, my quarterly goal would be $6,000. So I break it down into number of units I want to sell and revenue that would generate. I do that for every offer even though I'm only going to choose a couple in a minute and I look at what value that brings to the business.
You may not end up using every offer or hitting every goal. But the important thing here is that you're looking at what is the value of this offer to my business historically and what could the value of this offer be to my business in the future? So you're not doing anything yet except saying like how much money do I want to make on these offers in the next 90 days, map it out in either like an Excel spreadsheet, a piece of paper, it doesn't matter, however you plan most effectively. I'm a digital planner. I like everything to be in a Google doc or a Google sheet, but you can absolutely do it on paper and then move it into a one-page document online.
Once you have your product suite mapped out, step two is to choose just one or two offers that you're going to focus on in the next 90 days. Now, this is where I find that most people struggle because they might have three or four offers and they're like, I want to scale everything. I want to push this. I want to go big. But what you will find is that by narrowing your focus to one thing at a time, you're going to get better results. Let me say that again. By narrowing your focus to one or two things maximum allows you to create more revenue on that offer.
Why is that? Because when you're trying to do a ton of different things, when you're trying to promote your low ticket offer and your high ticket course and your coaching program and your membership, and you're doing it all at once, what ends up happening is that you split your attention and there's something called context switching, which basically means the more you switch everything up, the more you switch from one project to another, the less you get done. So it's really important that you do two things here. Evaluate which of these offers have the most potential for your business and focus on one or two things that promote that offer.
Now, ideally you'll choose one offer for the quarter and focus in on it completely. But we understand that sometimes business has components. Maybe you have a backend offer, a coaching program that leads out of your course. And so that's why I say one to two, but then I also want you to take those one or two offers and decide how you're going to promote it to your audience. Are you going to do organic promotion, Instagram, Facebook, Instagram Reels? Are you going to do paid promotion? Facebook ads, Google ads, YouTube ads. And are you going to do affiliate or referrals? Are you going to have people promote the product for you?
So just take a second. And what I've always done is I just highlight the ones that I'm going to focus on. And then I add a new line to my page or a new section to my paper and I just write out the two that I'm going to focus on. And then I write under that the primary methods for selling it.
What you now have is we can move into step three, which is determine your high level monthly metrics. Now that you know the focus or two focuses of the quarter, you can pay attention to what you're going to track. I suggest that you track on a weekly basis or a monthly basis your revenue, your list size and your reader or listenership if you have a blog or a podcast. The big thing is that your high-level monthly metrics need to be tangible numbers you can track down to the month. Let me say that one more time. These should be tangible numbers. So your metrics are not like I want to get more reviews on the podcast. It should be I want 15 reviews on the podcast by this date.
What I do is I make a chart of each month, each metric, and I check in every two to four weeks. Realistically, I'd like to get to a point where I check in every one week, but at the Not So Average Marketer Podcast, we talk about what we're actually doing and our goals. So I actually check in on my numbers maybe every two to four weeks, but it would be really great to check in on them on a weekly or monthly basis. Monthly is fine if you have like one big launch. I would say every one to two weeks if you have two things that you're focusing on.
Now, the big question is how do you determine these metrics? We'll do another episode on like calculating launch metrics and breaking that kind of thing down, but for now just know that you should set goals that stretch you, set metrics that push you. So if you're getting 100 downloads a month on your podcast, maybe your next goal is to double that to 200 in the first and then maybe double it again to 400 in the month after, and think about what that means for your other metrics. Does that mean that you need to triple the size of your list? Does it mean you need to spend more money on advertising? Does it mean you need to generate more revenue to pay for the ads? So make a chart, set the monthly metrics and go from there. And just to really clarify, when I say monthly metrics, yes, you're going to track them every one to two weeks, but the monthly metric is the goal for the month.
Now we go into step four. Just to recap, we looked at our product suite. We chose one or two offers that we're going to focus on. We determine the core metrics that bring us towards those goals. And now we set what I call the monthly action plans. What I do is I break each month into four weeks and I do this in a spreadsheet or a Google doc where I literally create a table that's four columns long, and then each row is one of your monthly metrics. So basically if you're looking at, for example, the month of October, it would be week one, week two, week three, week four across the top, and then my metrics down the side would be revenue, list side, podcast downloads.
What you want to do is break each week into your core metrics. Are you looking to increase your core metric week over week? Are you looking to stabilize your core metric and spread it out over the month? Get clarity on how you want to hit the goal. For example, if my goal is 1,000 podcast downloads in the month of September, do I want 250 a week or do I want 200, then 300, then 400, and then ultimately the last hundred come in the final week. What you want to do is track your GAN, your goal for that week, which is your metric, the actions you plan to take that week to get you closer to that goal, and then any notes.
Basically I have each square inside my chart breaks down my goal for that week, the action I'll take to get that goal, and then any notes that I feel are relevant. Maybe that's people I need to consult, things I need to do outside of the action items, people I want to email, people I invite to my podcast, special emails I'm going to send out to promote. I'm basically taking my high level metrics, breaking them down even further and creating an action plan for the four weeks of the month. Now, I know that some months have five weeks, some months have four weeks. I just keep it really simple and break it into four weeks. You could break it down week to week if you wanted to. But I find that anything I can do to simplify this process makes me taking action easier.
Once you have your monthly action plan, I think it's really important, and please don't skip this step. I know it's so easy to do, but I want you to evaluate what I call key questions. And so these key questions basically force you to look at your action plans for the week and answer what do I need to make this happen? I have five key questions that I write down and answer either in a journal, online in my doc. Number one is, who do I need on my team to make this happen? For us, we're getting back into the podcast game, we need an editor. Who do I need to be to make this happen? For me, it's a planner and a leader. If I want this podcast to go smoothly, I need to be a planner, I need to be a leader and I need to be consistent.
Now, what needs to change for this plan to be a success? For me, that is I need to not record podcasts episodes last minute. So we're planning three months in advance. Another thing that needs to change is we need to have monthly planning meetings with my team where we plan out the continuation of the podcast and we plan out our key dates for the month. What big fear do I have about this plan? For me, it's that I'll drop the ball, that'll mess up, that I won't be consistent, that I'll miss important meetings. And so just addressing those fears lets you know where you're going to hold yourself back and what you can do better.
And then the last one is more of a prompt and it's I'm committed to this plan because. And for me, I'm committed to my next quarterly plan because we want to make an impact in this space. We want to change the way people think about marketing. We want to push the boundaries of what's considered normal marketing and give people the opportunity to think differently about their marketing plan and strategies.
The last thing that we do is step six, we let it sit and revisit it tomorrow. Tomorrow is really subjective. You could come back to your plan in a week, in a month. I would probably recommend a week since if you go a month, you might end up behind on your plan. But give your plan some time to kind of rest. Let what you've done marinade in your brain. Give it some time to kind of process and then come back with your red pen and slash the non-essentials. Interestingly enough, one of our words for 2021 was ease and flow. What we found in the first few quarters of the year is that we made things complicated. We made new offers and new trainings and new Facebook groups and new bonuses and new pitches and new emails. A lot of it was non-essential and we probably would have had similar growth in revenue numbers if we would have hacked and slashed those non-essentials.
So, as important as it is to plan, it's also important to remove things from the plan that don't serve you. So, what you've done now is you've basically created a map of your products, chosen which offers you're going to focus on, determined the monthly metrics, broken those down into a weekly action plan. You've evaluated from a qualitative perspective what are the key things I need to think about? Who do I need on my team? Who do I need to be? What do I need to change? What do I fear? And why am I committed? And then you've set your plan aside, you've waited for a period of time and you've revisited it to kind of edit it down to the essentials.
Now, this is where it gets fun. Now that you have a plan on a piece of paper and literally, if you followed along, you can quite literally have this inside of a piece of paper, I recommend that if you listen to this while you are walking or driving that you come back and relisten to it with a pen and paper or a Google doc open because now you can personally or with your team check in on a weekly basis on the action plan, the metrics and your answers to the questions; because now the work is simply checking in on the plan, working the plan and making pivots in real time.
I really want to touch on this for just a moment before we wrap up. And that is that it is about evaluating on a regular basis and sometimes you have to pivot. Sometimes you have to change what you're offering. Sometimes you have to change the goal for the month. Sometimes you have to push the goal higher. Sometimes you miss the goal and you have to evaluate what that means for the following month, and that's okay. This plan is a working living document. You have to give it space to breathe. You have to check in on it. You have to check in with your team. I know that this can be like, wow, this is a lot, but a weekly meeting with either yourself to review your goals or your team if you've got people there is a game changer.
When we started doing regular meetings with our team, everything got more efficient and now we meet regularly every single week. And then we also meet a couple other times a week because we have agency clients. It's important that we check in with clients, but a weekly meeting will be a game changer for you. There you have it. Now you have the plan. All that's left to do is do the thing. So get out there, make your plan and do it.
Now, real quick. If you are listening to this episode and you got a ton of value, I would super appreciate it if you headed over to the podcast app on your phone or the Stitcher app on your Android and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you. We want to know that you're getting value out of these episodes. We want to hear from you. And if you listen to this on your smartphone and you want to take a screenshot and tag us on Instagram stories, I am still @heartsoulhustle on Instagram. So feel free to give me a tag there. We'll probably be changing that soon, but for now it stands. And we'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. There you have it, how to create your 90 day plan. Get out there, make your plan, and we'll see you next time on the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast.
