Episode 17: Strategic Planning for the Professional Creative

See the show notes for this Episode here.

This transcript has been automatically generated.

A good goal to me is always something that's within the realm of possibility, but also very likely that we will fall short. It means that it's gonna require a huge commitment and company wide focus. Whether you're a company of one or a company of 20, it's gonna require everyone to pitch in and everyone to focus on the goal.

I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things, creativity, design, business, and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town, tucked right inside the Smokey Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. When I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer.

Fast forward to today, I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want and is wildly profitable.

Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast. Hello and happy New Year. It is 2023. We are starting a new year, and that is always so exciting. I have some things planned for you this week that I do every single year in order to prepare for my success in the upcoming year, and so I'm inviting you to do it with me. Today we're gonna be talking about strategic planning for the professional creative,
and on Thursday we're gonna have Ms. Lisa Jacobs back to discuss annual planning, and you'll see how these two episodes really come together and make for a beautiful plan. So in order to fully work through this episode, you are going to want to go over to the show notes and grab the workbook For today, I made a workbook for you called Strategic Planning for the Professional Creative, and it's the exact workbook that my team worked through just a few weeks ago, and it's gonna be a incredible opportunity for you to really take a snapshot of what's working, what's not working, and where you're moving and how you're gonna do it over the upcoming year. The perfect addition to this is the annual plan, which we'll be focused on on Thursday.

So head on over to professional creative.com. We'll also put the link in the notes beneath this episode so that you can go grab this workbook. I am going to walk you through it, and then I'm also gonna share with you five things that worked for us this year and five things that didn't work for us this year and how we are going to adjust those.

Okay, so the very beginning of this workbook is going to walk you through identifying all of your product details. So if you are selling a physical product or you have an offer or a service like coaching or a course or a membership, basically you're gonna take every part of your products and describe them. So describe the program, describe the product, and then you're also going to describe the customer.

Your ideal customer is so important to get your head wrapped around, to know them intimately, to understand their language, to understand why you're the perfect fit for their need. And so you're gonna describe what the customer is for each product that you had. The next part is I want you to take a snapshot of the scope of this product and the upcoming goals.

And so the scope. For instance, if you are selling art prints, maybe you sold 1500 art prints in 2022, so that was the scope. And then you have a spot for your 2023 goals. So maybe your goals this year is to do 2000 art prints, or if you have a course or a membership, maybe you had 500 people and your course in 2022.

So that is the scope and your goal for 2023 is a thousand. So that's a scope, scope and goals. And then the next part is total revenue. So I want you to put down the total revenue of that product that you had in 2022, and then your goal revenue for 2023. So let's say you made $15,000 selling planners and 2022, and you want to make $25,000 and 2023, you're gonna take a snapshot of that and put it onto paper. Let me reiterate that. Really just pausing to get this stuff on paper will in turn bring so much clarity to what you're doing, who you're doing it for, and why you're doing it. So it's something that we pause to do at the end or the beginning of every single year. I have a spot for four products.

You can print off as many as you need, fill out every one for every different product that you have. The next two pages are dedicated to what worked and what didn't work. You know, if you're like me, we often find ourselves doing things simply because we've always done them right, simply because we've always done them. So why would we do anything different?

Or we do them for the sake of doing them. Like maybe you're posting every day on Facebook for the sake of posting on Facebook to say that you've done it. But when you look at it, is it really making a difference? It could be, and it does for a lot of people, but for a lot of people it doesn't. And so take a snapshot of what are you doing and then what worked and what didn't work.

So in other words, what will you keep from 2022? What worked well that you're gonna keep as you go into 2023? And then what didn't work in 2022? In other words, what are you gonna let go of or what are you gonna streamline or change for 2023? So there are two big, beautiful blank pages for you to just get quiet and think about these things and so you can really understand what is serving you well and what is not serving your overall purpose.

So we'll come back to this one because I'm gonna share those five things that worked for us in five things that didn't work for us at the end of this episode. The next part of this strategic plan is all about your team. And now I know some of you have a team, some of you don't. Some of you only have you yourself, but I want you to fill this part out because I think that you may be looking to get help in the next year if you don't have some already.

And so what you're gonna do is take a snapshot, so a current description of your team, your employees, and your contractors. So if you have any employees, write their rolls down what they're doing, if you have any contractors. Contractors are usually people who do things like edit your videos or work on your Facebook ads or something like that. Put those down as well.

You may have nothing there. But the next part is a description of your goal team. And so by the end of 2023, do you aspire to have any employees or any additional employees to what you already have? Do you aspire to have any contractors or any additional contractors to what you already have? The next page is possibly gonna help you really iron this out because it's asking you to list 10 things that you could outsource.

Now, I don't want you to get into the weeds here. You don't have to think about, well, how am I gonna pay them or how am I gonna find them? Or who am I gonna hire or how am I gonna hire them? None of that yet. Just list. Just look at the things that you yourself are doing and think about this.

Is there anything that you're doing that you don't actually have to be the one doing it? If so, write it down. I have a spot for 10 things. You could probably write down a hundred things, so don't stop. If you get on a roll, keep writing them down. You could start with things that you're doing maybe in your personal life that you could possibly use help with.

Oftentimes when you're just getting started, having some help in your home life is the easiest place to start. And so maybe you could have a little bit of help with your children, or maybe you could have a little bit of help with your house or your lawn care or your grocery shopping or your meal prep or your meal delivery. And so that's one place to start.

And then you can move into thinking about what are some things that I'm doing in my business that I don't personally have to be the one doing? So oftentimes these are things like video editing or doing transcriptions for videos or uploading them into your program or writing emails or scheduling social media posts or editing photos for your shop or writing photo descriptions or posting all of those.

One of my favorites is shipping. Do you have to be the one to package and ship everything? So anything that you're doing that doesn't necessarily have to be done by you, I just want you to write it down and keep it on this page. You're not committing to hiring any help, you're not committing to absolutely giving it away, but at least you are recognizing that you are doing more than is absolutely necessary because where this is going is that eventually you could clear up your plate to do more of the things that only you can do.

And when you can do more of the things that only you can do, it's kind of this magic sauce to growing your business and really taking it to a whole nother level because all of a sudden you're able to really bring more of the things that are uniquely you. Okay, once you've done that, we're gonna move into goals. And so this probably feels like a lot and it should.

I am calling you. I'm actually begging you to step away from your day-to-day actions, step away from your technology, step away from your to-do list, take this strategic planning workbook, sit down and get quiet with it. Dedicate 60 or 90 minutes to really pouring yourself into where you are right now, what's been working, what's not been working, and where you wanna go in the following year.

This along with annual planning that's coming in the next episode, is such a vital part to growing your business successfully and letting go of the daily scramble annual planning. Actually, the thing we're gonna talk about in the next episode is the thing that changed my business more than anything else, meaning there's like a line in the sand of me before annual planning and me afterwards, and this strategic planning is part of that as well. So this next part is really begging you to be a visionary to think about the upcoming year. When you think about your goals for the upcoming year, they should involve a substantial stretch, meaning they should feel risky. A good goal to me is always something that's within the realm of possibility, but also very likely that we will fall short.

It means that it's gonna require a huge commitment and company wide focus, whether you're a company of one or a company of 20, it's gonna require everyone to pitch in and everyone to focus on the goal. Again, I don't want you to get into the weeds, so your vision should be the destination, not necessarily all the directions on how to get there.

So feel free to dream big and don't get lost in the weeds, don't get lost in the house, and the butts just dream big. We'll decide the destination now and we'll figure out the route later. So I love to use the Smarter Goals framework, and this is included in your workbook for today. Again, you can go download [email protected]. The Smarter goals framework is an acronym and it stands for specific, measurable, actionable, risky, time-bound, exciting and relevant. So S for specific means identifying a exact goal. So identifying exactly what you want to accomplish. The more specific you can be, the more you'll be able to achieve that goal. M stands for measurable, so it has to be measurable, meaning, could you put milestones and goals on a map and really quantify the results and check them off as you go?

A stands for actionable, so this should start with an action word, like create something or hire someone or you know, get started doing something so you can take action on it right away. Risky R stands for risky. This is causing you to stretch. It's not too much, it's within the realm of possibility, but it is going to require you to step just outside of your comfort zone.

T stands for it time bound. So it should have a hard deadline to deliver by. So this could be the year mark, it could be the six month mark, but time bound means put a date on the calendar so that you have something to measure against. E sounds exciting because a goal should be exciting, it should be designed to motivate you.

It should feel like you are excited to hit your feet on the ground every morning in order to work on this goal. And finally, R stands for relevant. It should be relevant to your other goals, to your bigger purpose, to your bigger mission. It should be relevant. That one I think is probably going to come pretty easy. So I have just a couple of questions for you to consider that help when I'm looking at goals for the upcoming year.

Number one is what do I want for my business? What do I want for my business next year? The next one is, what do I want for my life next year? Those are really important to marry together. What do you want for your business? What do you want for your life? The next one is, does anything need to change in order to avoid burnout?

I think it's really important to build and rest and rejuvenation in your annual plan so that you can make sure to avoid reaching burnout. I love this question. What is the biggest hope that I have for my consumer, my customer, or my audience? What is my biggest hope for them? What do I really want them to walk away with after they interact with something that we've put into the world?

The next one is, how can I increase the size of my audience? There's a saying that says, if you're not growing, you are dying. And so our goal is to just consistently grow, even if it's by one or two people a day. If we're not growing, we're dying. So we're always growing. So how am I gonna do that?

And also, how will I reach them? So am I gonna focus on reaching them through the podcast or through Instagram or through the email list? How do I wanna focus on reaching them? And the last three questions have to do with impact. And we're gonna start with what's nearest and dearest to you? What do you want your business? How do you want your business to impact your immediate family?

And it's okay to be selfish here. Maybe you want to get out of debt, maybe you want to buy a new house. Maybe you want to pay off student loans. Maybe you want to start a retirement fund or set your kids up for success in college, or something along those lines. You want to take care of your family. The next one is, how do you want your business to impact your community? And so I would beg you, even from the very beginning, if you are making $100 a month, can you give $10 to your community in some way? Can you find a cause or maybe your church or somewhere that really helps you feel and know that you are contributing to making a bigger difference in the world?

This is gonna help you grow your business and love it with every extra dollar that comes in. Finally, what impact do you want your business to have on the world? As important as it is to turn around and pour into your family and your community, I think it's equally important to really turn around and pour into the world, into entire industries, into bigger worldwide issues.

And so we give to that quite a lot as well. So what do you want your impact to have on the world? This could be financial, but it could also be mission or purpose driven. With that, you are going to sit down and really brainstorm, heart Storm, vision storm your new ideas for 2023. Now, if you're working in real time, if you bring your new ideas to Thursday's episode on annual planning, you will have everything you need to get up and running. Before we sign off though, I promised that I would share with you five things that have really worked for us this year and five things that didn't. Some of these are little tech things that didn't work or did work. Some of them are kind of bigger philosophical.

So let's just dive in. This episode is sponsored by my very own guide called Start Simple in Surface Pattern Design. Have you ever wanted to see your artwork on products or work for yourself and use your creativity to build a career that you love? If so, I made this guide just for you. I created it as a way to help creatives take the overwhelm out of getting started in surface pattern design and begin learning how to design their own fabric and wallpaper gift wrap and stationary.

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So hop on over to bonnie christine.com/guide to download your copy today. Again, that's bonnie christine.com/guide. I'll meet you there. The very first thing that worked so well for us is using a app called Ad Event. It's called Ad Event. We will link this up in the show notes. Ad event is this really cool piece of tech that basically allows you to build out a custom calendar and let people subscribe to it.

And so we created a private calendar for the students in our surface design immersion course, and they could subscribe to the calendar and it put every live call, every module drop at the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony, it put everything on their calendar and it syncs with anything. It syncs with like Google, Cal, apple Outlook, Yahoo, like all of the calendars, it's one click and it adds everything to their calendar and it also works in their time zone. So we have a huge international audience and it's so important, so tricky to communicate a time for a live call because you know, 3:00 PM Eastern is I think like 9:00 PM in Europe and 6:00 AM in Australia. Don't, don't check my time on that, but it's all over the place.

And so having this on their calendar helps them keep in line with what we're doing and when we're doing it. The other way that we've utilized this is that we've actually made a public calendar that you can subscribe to. So anytime we have a public facing launch or a release or a live call or a workshop or something like that, we put it on what we call our studio calendar and it'll just pop up on your calendar.

It'll give you an alert if you want it, and it has a link to join. So we'll link that up in the show notes as well. The other way that we've used this is we've made an internal private calendar for the team's use only. And so the team subscribes to this calendar and we've got all of our team stuff on it. So our weekly momentum meeting and all, we actually use it kind of as a syllabus for our programs so we can all see what's coming out in the membership on Friday and when Bonnie's going live for the course and all of that kind of stuff. And so it's been a really cool way to just get everything in one place for everyone. Number two is creating a voice guide. Now, this is something that's really cool, if you can imagine, it feels really funny to have been the only person working in my business for 10 years and then all of a sudden have people answering emails on behalf of the brand and answering questions in the community as our community manager and things like that. And it's a little bit uncomfortable at first to think about because you really feel like it's your voice that has built the business that you've built.

And so to me, I thought maybe this is something that I could never pass off. So this year we developed a voice or a brand guide, which means that anyone who is interacting inside our brand has some rules to follow. So these are things like our values, our approved emojis, things that we say, things that we don't say. For instance, we have a G-rated policy. So nothing that is beyond G-rated is ever in any of our content. And one reason we do that is because we always invite parents to bring their childrens to our live calls or to watch our courses with us and things like that. So we have a strict G-rated policy, so we've got things we would say, things that we wouldn't say.

We also have just a plethora of email examples and how we handle each email. And so that just means that you know, everyone is speaking in their own voice and as their own person, meaning no one is pretending to be me. That's part of our integrity. Like no one is writing an email and signing it, Bonnie, if it's not really me.

But it does give them guidelines to speak on behalf of our brand as Kylie and as Ashley who are our customer service team. And so the voice guide has been incredible, and I could see how you might be more interested in that. I'd be happy to do a full episode on our voice guide if that's something that interests you. Just hit me up, maybe Instagram, DME and let me know. Just tell me. I wanna hear more about the voice guide and I'll do an episode on it. Number three is a internal course for the team and our SOPs. And so let me, let me talk to you about this. And so P is a standardized operating procedure. It's basically how we do what we do.

It's basically just tutorials on how we do things like upload a video to our membership platform and things like that. So we use a platform called Kajabi for our membership and our course. And so we actually developed a course just for our team called Team Bonnie Systems. And every person has their own module and we add lessons to our module based on any task that we do.

So if someone is doing transcripts for the podcast, they create an s o P for it and put it in their module. This is such an incredible thing because it means that we have all of our processes documented. And so if someone's going on vacation or if they're out sick or we're hiring someone new, we have this library of trainings and they can just say, yeah, I have it all in my s o P library. Now you don't have to create a course and have Kajabi in order to do this. You can literally just hit record, use your screen recorder or your iPhone, create a tutorial, and then keep them maybe in Dropbox or in a Google Doc. And that way you have your systems in place.

This is, by the way, the easiest and best way to start hiring is just slowing down long enough to document what it is you're doing and then have those trainings to pass off to someone else. Okay, number four is that we moved our membership to an alumni only membership. And this was a big question mark for us whether this was gonna be the right move or not.

And I'll explain it a little bit. My membership is 10 years old and the, our course is only four or five years old. And so the membership came first, which means that we had people coming into it as their introduction to us. And then they would take the course and then they would leave the course and go back to the membership. And so it was split about 50 50 alumni and not alumni.

And so we have an exit survey in place, and what we were finding is that the majority of people were leaving either because the content was not advanced enough or it was too advanced, which just means that I didn't have clarity on who I was speaking to because the experience level was all over the board. And so we decided to move it this spring to a alumni only membership, meaning we won't open it to the public ever again. It's only for those who come through the course and then they're invited to join the membership as well. This was one of the best decisions we've ever made, honestly. It has brought so much clarity to who it is I'm speaking to and and how I'm trying to develop them. It was also such a community driver.

Like everyone in the membership now knows that they have this whole course experience in common with each other, and so we can use that information and build on it. So we've been able to really elevate the content and elevate the experience there. And so it was something that we weren't really sure was the best thing. We ended up doing it. We've been thinking about doing it for years, and it turned out to be amazing. Number five is this very podcast. You know, I've shared with you, I have wanted to do this podcast for two years and finally hit the big red button on November 16th. And so this has been one of the most incredible things we've ever done. The feedback from you all has been incredible. The reviews have been incredible.

I read them every single day. In fact, I would love to ask you if you haven't left a review yet and you've enjoyed this podcast, it only takes like 30 seconds If you just hop on over to Apple, leave us a review. This helps keep me going. It makes me smile every day, but it also really helps boost the podcast.

And just the first six weeks, we have over 70,000 downloads, which is mind blowing to me. You all are enjoying it. I'm enjoying it. I'm having so much fun, and it's just been, it's been really, really incredible. I'm so proud of us for making it happen. All right, now we have to move on to some things that didn't work.

The first thing that did not work well in 2022 for us was shipping. We very much hands on ship everything out of my studio. So this year we sent out 4,500 student packets that we hand packed ourselves. We send out all of the planners and everything from our shop ourselves. We sent out like 800 swag boxes for immersion live. That's super intense on the just production side.

Also, my studio's small, so it gets taken over by inventory and boxes, but we also had issues with label printing and duplicates and all this stuff. It was just, whew, not my favorite part of 2022. And so we've decided to work with a new company in order to fulfill our products, not our products, but our shipping. So they will actually pack and ship and handle all of the labeling for us.

One of the things that we are really passionate about though is the quality of our materials. And so we found a great company that is allowing us to have that very high touch involvement, meaning we get to approve and look and see and touch and feel. Everything we get to design everything. We get to approve everything. And their primary role is just packing and shipping it for us, which is gonna be incredible. The next thing that really didn't work is something that happened in early 2022, and we had a couple of people on the team who worked too much. And this was a result of me needing to hire. And I've actually probably hired about a year or two late for almost every position that I've hired for. And so this meant that we had a couple of people just putting in too much.

They were getting close to burnout, they were getting really tired and we couldn't hire quickly enough. And so it's been really important for us to get ahead of this, which we did in the spring and summer of this past year. And then we did a bunch of training on time boundaries and managing, being in control of our schedules and making sure that no one is working too much or getting close to burnout.

So I'm so happy to say that now we're in a really, really good place with the number of people that we have on our team. But at the beginning of the year, it was too much. The next one is, I have on my notes this app called Voxer. You might be familiar with Voxer, maybe not. It's an app that very much works like a walkie-talkie.

And so we use this for team communication. And I actually used to love it when we were a small team, cuz we could just chat at each other all day and assign different tasks to each other. But as the team grew, it really became more and more difficult to keep track of it all. And so we had so many different channels. We had a team wide channel, and then just me and Lisa and just me and Kylie, and then we had me, Lisa and Kylie, and you know, it was just so much. And so what we did was move over to Slack. We decided on a date and a time, we shut down the Voxer channels and we moved everything over to Slack. And I honestly can't believe we didn't do this sooner.

We love Slack. We have everybody's channels where everyone can see them, and we can also voice back and forth. And so that's really important to me in a virtual team setting that we can hear each other's voice and hear the inflection in each other's voice. And so this was a huge one for us. And we have voice capability on Slack. It's also highly searchable.

We've got eyes on everything and we have control on everything. But this has also helped with our time boundaries because Voxer very much felt almost like social media for the team. And so we had people, you know, tuning in in real time and checking as soon as they woke up in the morning. And Slack feels more team and business oriented, like it's something you have open while you work and not when you're with your family.

So that's helped us set boundaries as well. The next one are the planners. Some of you might know that for the last couple of years I've developed a planner called the Flourish Planner, and it just stopped working this year and it has to do with supply chain issues. There was a feature in the planner that had to be developed overseas. And in 2021 the planners ended up getting stuck on freight in the ocean for six months longer than they should have been.

So they arrived late, which was just not the world class experience that I like to offer. And so we decided to not produce them again for 2023. I don't know if we'll do them again, but if we do, we will absolutely be using a printer that is inside the United States and is sustainable and you know, easier to work with. So we've just halted on that for now.

They just didn't work. Manufacturing in the problems that they're facing today was just a bit of a nightmare. And so it's something that we released as Lisa was say, my integrator, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. And so as much as I love the planner, we had to say goodbye to it. The last thing that really did not work this year, and it's all fixed now, was something that happened in November. And in the height and the excitement of releasing this podcast, I decided to develop an entirely new website. And so you can see that [email protected]. And the other thing I did was bring my primary website over to cajabi. So I wanted to leave the platform that we were on and just see if I could redesign the whole website to be on cajabi and I did it.

And so you can go see [email protected] and I'd love to know what you think about it because I don't think a lot of people are using cajabi to host their primary website. But I find it so important to feel nimble in my website. I need to be able to run in there and design a new page or pop up an announcement. And I just wasn't feeling that way.

And I do feel that way in cajabi, and so I'm loving having it all over there. And so you can go, you can go see it. But anyways, what I did in my excitement was change the url. It used to be surface pattern designers.com. I changed it to bonnie christine.com because I was actually finally freeing up that URL from the other platform.

And so I could use it on this platform now. So I'm not gonna get into all of the tech, but just know that I thought I knew what I was doing. I've done this a bunch of times before. I'm pretty confident in the backend of this, you know, DNS records and stuff like that. But something went awry and I ended up breaking a bazillion links and I also even managed to get our email shut down for like 20 hours one day.

And it was such, it was such a nightmare. It took me three days to get it all ironed out. And I told my team, if I ever tell you that I'm gonna do something like this again, you punch me and tell me no. And so we all had a good laugh about it, but really it was pretty stressful because having broken links for my audience is not the experience I want them to have.

And so lesson learned, anytime we're gonna do something super techy like that, again, we're gonna outsource it, make sure it's in someone else's genius hands and not mine. Okay, so that's a wrap of what worked and what didn't work. I hope that gives you an idea of the types of things that you can be thinking about as you do this exercise.

Again, head on over to the show notes for today's episode. You'll find [email protected]. You'll be able to work through your strategic plan and vision storm your ideas for 2023. And you are not going to want to miss our next episode with Lisa on annual planning. It's gonna radically change your business and help you find more success this year. Happy New Year.

I will see you on Thursday for our next episode. See you then.