Episode #049: Planning Your 2023 Revenue & Goals
Planning Your 2023 Revenue & Goals
On this episode of the podcast Zach breaks down the process he uses to plan and execute his 2023 goals - including the EXACT process he walks his clients through to create their quarterly roadmaps.
When you tune into this week's episode you're going to discover...
The value of creating a revenue plan (and how to do it)
The step-by-step process to determining what your goals should be, and how to approach them
How to chunk your BIG goals into monthly and quarterly plans
And so much more.
So tune in, listen up, and get ready for an epic 2023.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing podcast episode number 49. And in this episode we're talking about how to plan for a successful 2023. So let's get into it.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, I'm really stoked for this week's episode because I think that a lot of us struggle with planning, and I think that's normal. I think that planning in terms of business planning, yearly planning, goal setting, it's not something that we're just taught in school or we're taught in our upbringing, is like, how do you set and create achievable and successful goals?
And so I wanted to talk today about how we plan our year out and give you some insight into what we do to create a really tactical yearly plan that I can bring back to my team that I can reference throughout the year, and that I have to really be my guidepost through the entire year of 2023, 2024, 2025. It doesn't matter. It's a process that we've been refining over the past several years, and I think every year it gets a little bit better.
I want to talk to you about what you have to do first, and that is that you really need to analyze your previous year. Now, for the sake of this podcast, I'm going to keep it high level, but remember, you can always go deeper. You can always go a step beyond what we talk about today. For example, what I look at at the beginning of my planning session for the year is I say, "What was my revenue goal for the year and what was my actual revenue?" And then I like to ask questions. "Why did we come up short? Why did we go over? Did we underestimate our goal? Did we overestimate our goal? How do I feel about these numbers?"
You can always, in this example, go deeper, ask questions, journal, explore, figure out why, how, what, when, where, who, all that good stuff. But I simply like to start by looking at what was my goal compared to my actual revenue? Then what I like to do is I like to look at where did that revenue come from? And I think this is a really overlooked step that people take or don't take, I should say, when they're looking at planning their next year. Because what I like to do is say, what percentage of revenue is coming from each of my products?
Because I'm somebody who has a multiple offer business, I have offers around my membership, my coaching program, my agency, small pop-up classes, low ticket offers. I've got all of these products. And so looking at where the revenue is actually coming from is really, really powerful because it's going to help me see where should I focus my effort. To give you a really specific example, our membership, we want that to be a big focus of 2023, and we looked at what percentage of revenue it attributed to our 2022 revenue, and it was about 29%. About 29% of our money that came in was from our membership.
And that membership is just over a year old, like a year and three months. Really it's just in its first full year of iteration, and it accounted for nearly 30% of the revenue. That is an indicator that we should really be focusing effort and energy into the membership next year. We also looked at how much our agency played into that, and it played about 33% of our revenue. Even if I want to downsize or not downsize the agency, it's good to know how much revenue is there.
For example, let's say I said in 2023, I want to take on a few less agency clients. Well, it's helpful to know that a third of my revenue came from the agency, so I shouldn't just kind of turn that faucet off. I shouldn't be like, "Well, I don't want to do agency anymore, so I'm going to go all in on the membership." I have to pay attention to where revenue is coming from, and I'm of the mindset that you should start tapering within the years. I'm going to taper the membership up and I can taper the agency down so that I don't lose my revenue while I'm going through this process.
Now, once I've done that and I know that that's a really, really important part of this, I want to really stress this. That to me is the bare minimum. Actual revenue versus revenue goal, products breakdown, personal analysis. You can go deeper. You can look at how did I feel personally? How did I feel professionally? But at a minimum from a business planning perspective, revenue goal, actual revenue, product suite analysis, and then any questions that you want to explore around that.
What I then do is I like to do a brain dump. I like to look at everything in 2023 from my product suite analysis that I want to bring back or that I want to continue to promote. I'll make a list of everything that's going to be a returning product. I can also make a list of new product ideas, and I like to give myself creative freedom here to basically say, I can put any idea that I have on this list of new product, program, offer ideas, and I don't have to commit to doing any of them.
I think the big thing is we sometimes as business owners feel like, oh, if I have this big product idea, if I have this idea for an offer or a coaching program or a business model that I have to act on it. But just having the bank of potential ideas can be really helpful. And then I'll also brainstorm what was not worth my time or what is something that is not worth it to repeat, or potentially what might be worth it to repeat, but didn't generate enough revenue in the previous year to justify continuing it if I don't scale it. What I'm doing is I'm really just saying, what do I know I want to keep doing? What are my new ideas and what are the things where it's like maybe yes, maybe no, maybe this needs to be discontinued.
Then what I do is I like to choose three to five products, offers, programs, that kind of thing, and I just list them out and I estimate about how much revenue I want them to do in the next year. You don't need to be perfect. And I'm going to talk about this a little more in a second, but basically what I'm doing is I'm saying, okay, what are the three to five products that I want to focus on over the next 12 months? Five is going to spread you out. Three is going to be a bit of work, and one or two is going to really let you focus in on one thing.
I think every business is different. I don't think you have to have one single offer to be successful. We're going to close between 480 and $500,000 in revenue, and we have seven different offers. I'm not going to sit here and be like, you can only have one offer and you have to do this, and you have to do that. What I will say is, the more offers you have, the more of a balancing act it is. So that's why I like to say three to five offers. And I just break down how much revenue I want to bring in from them over the year, and about how many units that would require me to sell over the next 12 months.
For example, I have the nacho average membership, and in order to hit a revenue of 300,000, which is our goal for 2023, we need to get about 500 new people into the membership to stay at the current retention and current annual take rate over the next 12 months. I also like to look at what my revenue goal for the year is, based on the top three to five products. What I then do is I just total that up. I total that up. For example, we have five products. We have the membership, we have our coaching program, we have our agency, we have what I call pop-up programs, which are things like our podcast, masterclass, our membership masterclass, and then we have our low ticket offers, the Facebook ads Bootcamp, the Challenge Launch Toolkit, and I'm clumping those together. And basically we want all of those collectively to generate about $700,000 in revenue from these calculations and our revenue goal for the year, I've set at $750,000 for 2023.
What that means is that if I look at these top five products and they're going to generate about 700,000 based on my rough estimates, and I want to make 750,000, then there's this $50,000 gap here. And this is what I refer to as the room for magic. And this is not my creation. This was taught to me by a coach a while ago. But basically what it means is that you have to account for the fact that things are going to happen that you're not prepared for. Someone's going to promote your product. Last year we had somebody write a blog about us and our challenge toolkit, and it generated like $4,000 unexpectedly in revenue that we hadn't accounted for. People are going to share your stuff. You're going to get people who buy your thing and tell their friend, and you sell an extra one.
So room for magic is just this concept that no matter how intentionally you plan, you're never really going to predict down to the dollar how things are going to shake out. It's okay to leave five to 10% of your revenue up to whatever you believe in, God, the universe, or just the way that circumstances play out. You're going to have additional revenue that you can't account for upfront. That's where I start. I analyze my year, I look at what I want the next year to look at what I want that to be for my revenue goal, and then I start breaking it down by month and quarter.
We have this kind of rule that we teach to our clients and our students, which is that every quarter you want to have a launch, a promotion, and a source of content or development in your business. What that means is that you don't want to be launching five times in a quarter, and a launch to me is a big webinar, a challenge, a video series, a big focused advertising effort. You need a team, you need the structure, you need all those pieces in place to make it happen. That to me is a launch. A promotion is like you rely on your internal audience, it's smaller, not necessarily in revenue, but in energy or effort output. It is based on resources that you already have available to you.
And then content or development is essentially when you have something that you're building that may lead to your bottom line, but doesn't directly create revenue when you're getting started. For example, this could be developing a funnel, creating a YouTube channel, starting a podcast. Those are things that are ultimately going to build the business, but don't necessarily contribute to your bottom line directly. And what I do is I look at one quarter at a time. For example, in quarter one, we want to launch our membership program. We want to do a promotion for our membership to upgrade people to annual, and we want to do a small content development, which is refine our Incubator application and intake process and bring the Incubator application into the world to enroll people in our Q2 coaching.
What that means is that I can look at what is the revenue that comes in for those promotions, or what is my goal revenue for each of those individual promotions. For example, in January, we want to do $20,000 in a membership launch. That's going to require a lot of energy, effort, focused activity, advertising, but that's our goal; $20,000 in revenue from the launch itself. I always look at what's the new revenue coming in? Then I look at what is my anticipated revenue that's already going to be collected that month from other things. For us, that would be our agency, that would be our recurring subscriptions for people in the coaching program who are on monthly payments. It might be low ticket offers based on our average revenue month to month. Those are things that we want to account for.
And then what it's like recurring revenue that we have in our business, so that would be our membership. I always look at what's the new revenue, what's recurring revenue I have built into my business, and then what's anticipated income based on activities or products that I've already created, developed, or services that I offer. For us, that means in January we want to generate about $10,000 from our agency, 15,000 from our membership, 5,000 from low ticket offers, 5,000 from recurring subscriptions of our coaching program, and 20,000 in the membership launch, which means we want to have a $55,000 January.
I'll repeat that process for February. Our goal for February is a promotion, which is an upgrade call to our existing members, and I already know the recurring numbers, and I want to do $10,000 in upgrade revenue, people who upgrade to the membership. And then in March is my content development for the Incubator, plus we release applications. And you might say like, well, isn't that a promotion if you're promoting the Incubator? In a sense, yes, but we have it so refined and dialed in that really it's about developing the best intake process possible. That's our focus. We just open the doors and allow people to enroll.
I'm looking at that every quarter, and I like to start with just one quarter. Now, I will repeat this process for quarter two, three, and four at a high level just to see what my estimated revenue for the year is. And then once I've done this quarter by quarter, I'll get my total revenue and I'll compare it to my revenue goal. If it's coming in higher, I may increase my goal. If it's coming in lower, I may move my goal down, or if it's coming in right around where I expected, I might leave my goal alone.
But the point of this is that it's this kind of cyclical back and forth process. You're not going to say, my goal for the year is 500,000 and no matter what, I'm going to make that 500 and I will change these numbers until it works. No. It's to be in between this kind of gray area of what is realistic and reasonable in terms of your resources and what's going to stretch you to the point of this is your next level. I think that sometimes people that I work with are like, "I made $10,000 last year and I'm going to make a million this year." And I say, "I love the tenacity, but you've got to also have an element of realism to your goals." Because if you set these pie in the sky goals that you can't actually achieve, what ends up happening is that you don't hit them and then you feel let down, and that's not what we want. We don't want you to feel let down by your goals.
I do this quarter by quarter. I look at my estimated yearly revenue, and then I also look at what I call my high level yearly goals and KPIs. KPI stands for key performance indicator, and in the simplest way to put it's basically the data points that you want to track for the health of your business. For us, that's email list, podcast downloads, Instagram followers. It'll be YouTube subscribers in 2023. But I like to look at where am I at currently, where do I want to end the year at, and what does that mean my growth needs to be over the next 12 months?
And you can even go a step further and say your average monthly breakdown, and you can take the number that you come up with and divide it by 12 just to figure out how many new whatever you need each month. For example, if I'm currently at 16,000 email subscribers and I want to get to 24,000, that means that I need to grow my subscriber base by 8,000, which if I divide by 12 means that I need to add each month to my email list... See if I can get that number to pull up for me, about 650 to 700 people to my email list month over month. You can do that math to get those numbers and just have a sense of what's going on.
Once I've done that, once I've looked at my high level monthly focus for the next 12 months, I then look at one quarter at a time, and what I do is I look at the previous quarter and say, what are the key metrics that I want to track this quarter, and what were they the previous quarter? For example, for us, we look at our revenue. In Q4 of 2022, our revenue was around 110,000. And I'm just rounding just to keep numbers simple, but was around 110,000, which means I averaged around $36,600 per month over the last quarter of the year.
I also look at things like podcast downloads. We had around 12,000 downloads, which is about 4,000 a month. List size. We're around 16,800. We added 800 people per month to the list. And I'll also look at the churn rate of our membership, which is essentially what percentage of people come and go month over month, and that will end around 11% for the quarter, and we'd like to see that decrease as the year progresses next year. I'm looking at these numbers and I'm just saying, what are my key metrics? And then I make notes around my key metrics. Based on my key metrics, what are the big things here?
For us in January, we anticipate our list will actually go down because we want to do a big list cleaning, list scrub campaign. We missed a few podcast episodes in the last quarter. You guys have heard me talk about this before if you've been on the show or with the show for a while. Consistency is a struggle for me. It's one of the big things that I'm working on being even better at in 2023. And so with that being said, it costs us around 1,500 to 2,500 downloads because we missed shows. I also wrote down that my churn rate doesn't include our trial promotion. We did a $7 trial promo of the membership, and we didn't include that in our churn rate calculations.
What I do then is I look at the products or services that I'm going to end up promoting that quarter, and I just estimate how many I want to sell and what that revenue looks like. And then I compare that revenue that I come up with to the revenue I estimated in the previous step, which was the high level monthly focus compared to one quarter. Again, I can kind of look and say like, okay, if I think I can only sell X number of memberships, then that means I need to reduce my goal for the quarter. Or maybe you're like, "Oh, wow, if I sell what I'm expecting to sell, it's going to be an even higher revenue, so I should adjust my monthly revenue goals and my quarterly revenue goal."
Again, the point of this is just to be analyzing back and forth, back and forth, looking forward, looking backwards, looking forwards, looking backwards. And then what I like to do is I like to split my months into halves. I've got my quarterly revenue goal and the things that I want to focus on. What I'll do is I'll look at first half of January, second half of January, first half of February, second half of February, first half of March, second half of March. And for each of my products or focuses or metrics, whatever is most important for me to focus on that quarter, I will say, what do I need to do in this 15 or so day period to get results? What do I need to focus on?
To give you a really specific example, if I was saying I want to get my YouTube channel up in quarter one, I would say first half of January is come up with ideas and build the workflow. Second half of January is start filming the videos, set the filming date, have a batch record day. First half of February is find an editor. Second half of February is launch the first video, first half of March is the second video, and second half of March is the third video. And I would make a note that I'm trying to launch one to two episodes of the YouTube channel per month.
And then I make any notes about dates. For us, February 4th through the 10th, I'm going to be in Arizona, potentially, so I'll block those dates off. I won't remove any activity from them, but I will say, okay, I don't want any massive activity happening in that first half of February that travel is going to throw me off of. And then I also, this is where I start to look at my big vision goals, my next 12-month goals. What do I want my impact, income, and personal goals to be? This is where I bring it all together in one or two sentences.
And I say, I want to impact by having a list of 25,000 people and have 500 to 600 people in our membership. I want to make $750,000 over the next year, and I want to lose 90 pounds over the next 12 months. And just for the record, I have lost 30 pounds last year. I'm trying to lose 60 this year, so I just want to lose another 60 pounds. And then I also look at what's my goal over the next three to five years? And for us, it's to buy a second home so we can snowbird out of Ohio in the winters.
My last step is to just review everything. Review my yearly evaluation, my year at a glance, my quarterly samples or my quarterly focus and quarterly goals. And then I create this really visual one-page view. And we have this inside of our membership as a full spreadsheet, but I create a one-page sample view of what the quarter's going to look like. Basically, up at the top, I say my next 90 days, and then I have my primary focus, which in this case would be growing the membership, my secondary focus, which would be launching the YouTube channel. And then I have a section where I'm tracking my targets like revenue, podcast downloads, email list, YouTube subscribers for each month, and a space that I can actually fill in what the goal is and what the actual is at the end of each month.
And then I put a little section, what is my monthly one thing? What is the one thing that I'm focusing on each month? For example, month one is the launch of our membership. Month two is the launch of our YouTube channel, and month three is our coaching program intake. And then I just have a section for notes and required resources. What things should I be aware of for this plan? What required resources do I need for this plan and how do I bring this plan to life? That's my planning process. I know it's an undertaking and it takes time. And really, I gave myself a few hours to do this. I just carve out a four to eight hour block on a weekend if I'm working full-time during the week or I take a day of minimal calls if that's possible, or no calls if that's possible, and I focus on this.
Now, I want to throw this out there. If you're listening to this and you're like, this sounds great in theory, but I want help. I want help creating this plan. I want help putting this plan into action. Then I want to invite you to apply to join our group coaching program, the Incubator. And inside the Incubator you get to work with me to build your quarterly plan. We do a monthly one-on-one coaching call with you for 30 minutes, me and you. A weekly group coaching and training call. And you also get, during the time you're in the coaching program, access to our membership at no additional cost.
What happens is each week we host a live call where we take you behind the scenes of our launches or promotions and give you personalized insights to what you can apply to your businesses, training based on the needs of the group. So we develop a custom curriculum. Everybody fills out an intake form and tells us where they want support. And then on every weekly call, you get a laser coaching time with me where you can ask any questions about what you're currently working on and get my eyes on your business. That's in addition to a monthly one-on-one call that's just you and me to get your support.
We've worked with a variety of niches and industries in this program. We have a quilting membership owner who's done some really incredible launches, an artist mentor who's closed 20,000 plus in their launches, a travel agent specialist who's taken their business to multiple five figures and four X'd their revenue from the previous year, a career coach who had their first $10,000 month and so many more people. If you're interested in this and you have a proven offer, meaning you've sold your digital offer before, you have a basic understanding of Facebook ads, or you're willing to spend a few hours going through some training that I'll provide, and you're open to coaching, then I'd love to invite you to apply for the Incubator.
You can go to heartsoulhustle.com/incubator to fill out an application. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/incubator, and you can fill out an application there. Three things to know. Number one, we only take 12 people so it is a limited group. There's not going to be a hundred people in the room trying to get my attention, so we get to know your business personally. Two, the investment is $2,500 and we do have installment plans available. And number three, we don't accept every application.
Don't take it personally if you apply and don't get in. We just want to create an experience where we know we can support you, everyone's at a comparable level, and you're at a point where you're ready to scale your business. If you want to apply heartsoulhustle.com/incubator. If you go to that page and it's not available, that means we filled up and we will redirect that eventually to a wait list where you can apply to be in the incubator in Q2 of 2023.
I hope you got massive value from this episode. I know it's a little longer than usual, but I wanted to share and give you insight and support you in planning your 2023. Now, if you want a recap of the show notes and the full transcript of this episode, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap049. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap049, for not your average podcast episode number 49. Get out there, plan your 2023. It's so important to take the time to do this. It's only going to make you a stronger business owner, and I cannot wait to talk to you next week on the Not Your Average Online Marketing podcast.
