A PSA For Your 2022 Plan

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED [00:00:00] Hey, Hey, so this week I'm popping in with a little 20, 22 planning PSA . It's that time of year, it's starting to get closer. The holiday season kicks off next week. People are starting to think more about family time than their business, and they're still starting to dream about 20, 22, because it's getting really real for us. But what I'm also seeing at the moment is a lot of burnout. I'm hearing from a lot of people, how tired they are, how much they need a break, how they need the holiday season, et cetera, to try and recover from burnout. And. I want you to think about that as you're planning for next year. So there were a few things that I want you to think about as you're building that plan, or if you've already done your planning, like high five well-prepared. I want you to go back and have a look at your plan with this new lens. So the first one is boundaries now. Usually we're pretty good at working out what our boundaries with our clients needs to be. We might not be great at holding those boundaries. So I guess the first question is, are you actually holding your client boundaries? And if you're struggling with that, what can you put in place that can help do that automatically for you? So I'm thinking things like if clients are contacting you outside of working hours,[00:02:00] where in your onboarding process, are you making sure that they're very aware of your working hours that will allow you to stand firm when they contact you on a Sunday morning? But I think more importantly, what I see a lot of business owners doing is not having great boundaries with themselves, not sticking to those working hours for themselves, but also allowing themselves to be pulled out of their superpower, pulled out of their zone of genius for other people's needs or one. Whether that's agreeing to do things that you wouldn't normally do, because this person is such a good client, whether that's interrupting some work time, focus, time that you really need, because your partner is working from home and they want to have coffee together. Really thinking about where you show up best for yourself and for your business and asking yourself where you're letting yourself off the hook, where are you letting yourself off the hook? Where are you allowing yourself to step out or be pulled out of their zone of genius? Then I want you to think about what you could put in place. Is there a system, is there a person, is there a way that you can hold yourself accountable? Not just yourself, but to something external as well, to really kind of double that willpower. When those boundaries come up in 2022. Second, I want you to audit your offers. And what I mean by this is, is there something that needs to change in 2022? Is there a particular offer that you have out there that does not fill you with excitement? Now I want to be clear that just because you put something on that list of things that you need to consider or tweak or change a bit in 2022, Doesn't mean you have to stop that offer in 2022. And now you have this huge gap in your financial situation. No. What I want you to look at us, is there a way that you can delegate or automate the parts of it that you find draining so that you could focus on the exciting part? Is there a way that you can tweak it so that how you offer it changes a little bit. I really want you to be excited to deliver your offers because that will help you be excited to sell [00:04:00] them. And when you're excited to sell them, that helps you make sales. Then I want you to review your clients. A lot of us talk about how our sales call is us interviewing the client . We know there's an element of the client showing up to see if we're a right fit. But what we, if we're responsible business owners and service providers should be doing is checking that that client is really for us. It's going to be a good fit for us. It's going to allow us to shop at our best . And a lot of us are doing that, but here's the problem. Once that client is in, we now feel like we are beholden to them forever. The same way that you would recruit and interview an employee. If that employee then did not perform and was a Royal pain in the behind every single time you had to interact with them, you would find that. You can fire those clients as well. Just because they're in, it doesn't mean they're in forever now, again, not suggesting that you go and fire the clients that you don't enjoy working with and have a huge gaping hole starting off in 2022 and your financials, but having that list of, Hey, these people are really not working for. We'll allow you to see who you might want to replace. We'll allow you to see what conversations need to happen, or boundaries need to be reinforced starting 20, 22. You've got that great fresh start of the year to be like, Hey, here's how I'm working in 2022. If you're happy to continue. Great. If not, it's been lovely knowing you. It's a really, noncontroversial point to have that conversation with. But you need to get really honest with yourself about when you've let non-ideal clients sneak in, not we all do this, there are times when you have an unexpected revenue gap and you need to let someone in who, if everything was going swimmingly, you probably wouldn't say no to. That's totally fine. There is no judgment around that, but it doesn't mean that you now have to continue working with that. Forever. If you have a short term contract, it's a question of asking yourself whether or not it's feasible to carry on to the end of that contract, and then just don't offer a renewal. If it's an ongoing contract, it's whether you need to have a conversation about [00:06:00] boundaries or about parting ways, but just because they're in doesn't mean they get to stay. If they're not behaving. The full thing I want you to think about is do you need a price bump and a client drop? This is usually one of the first questions I ask when somebody tells me that they're burning out. Usually they're burning out. They're fully booked they're at capacity. They have a lot of clients. Now, when you increase your prices, you are naturally going to drop some clients. but it's important to remember that you could double your prices and lose half your clients and be in the same financial situation. No, I'm not suggesting that you double your prices, but that's a really good image to keep in your head is that you could go that's significant and increase and that significant drop. And you would still be where you are today. Now, if you increase your prices a bit and simply bought yourself some breathing room, maybe didn't need to bring on an additional client immediately. In 2022, you could potentially buy yourself some breathing room and John's is all, it's been awhile since you've increased those prices. So you're probably due for one anyway. So do you need a price bump? And finally, I want to remind you that the more you track in your plan, the more you track, how you spend your time, how it felt, how much money it generated, the more you're going to find those tipping points, those points, where you start to feel the burnout, those points, where things start to chafe and feel uncomfortable. Okay. So that you can then take action on them before you get to burnout. Also, this is really important because when you do have to have a conversation around potentially firing a client or enforcing a bad. This is going to really help you feel like you have the data to back up what you're asking for. And that's going to take some of that emotion out of it. It's going to make it less personal for you, and it's going to make it easier when that person tries to negotiate to really just hold your ground . So for 2022, I'm really asking you to go back, look at your plan and ask yourself if that entire plan is around how your clients want you to show up and what your clients need from you. If you don't make sure that your business is serving you first, you're going to be on a path to burnout in 2022 again. And when you burn out, you can [00:08:00] serve no one.