New Quarter. New You.

We go through a Quarterly ritual at the KC Brand that feels almost as symbolic of a fresh start as the moment the ball drops on NYE. It’s time to take stock of what’s worked, what’s ready for development, and most importantly → where it’s all leading you.

The real beauty of Quarterly planning is in your dedicated focus to your bigger vision, and reassessing your path there.

Because there’s no point in sitting down and listing out each and every goal you have rattling around in your mind, if they aren’t actually all aligned with where future YOU wants to end up in 12 months. 

In fact, one of the first things I do before diving into an analysis of the past quarter and looking at the next three months, is jump ahead — 10 years.

This is crucial to ensuring you don’t coast through each year toward goals you previously set that may have changed. And what you want for yourself in the next year might look vastly different to what you thought you wanted 6 months ago. 

STEP 1: Journal on your bigger vision

Where do you want your business to be in 1 year, and in 10 years? From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, what does your day look like? Get clear on things like the type of projects you’re working on and what kind of clients you’re working with, so that you can build the intention to work smarter, not harder.

Now that you’re clear on the direction you want to move, it’s time to work backwards.

Something I always tell my mentorship clients is this,

“If you want to grow a micro-agency and pass work off to Jr. Staffers in 6-12 months, you need to lay the groundwork for that growth – now.”

But even if building an agency isn’t one of your goals, the logic still applies to every aspect of business planning:

Every stage of your internal business development takes time and careful preparation – 

From the candidate searches to onboarding your Jr. Support, to training, and developing their skillset, autonomy, and responsibilities, to marketing for a new quantity of clients, etc.

And if you have big aspirations (which I’m sure you do) then as a founder, you need to be realistic about the time and work-hours it’ll take to put these pieces in place.

The great thing is, once you’ve identified that next big goal (aka grow a micro-agency, if that’s your thing), it’s a clear path to reverse engineering that evolution.

STEP 2: Do a life and business audit

Assess the previous quarter. Get specific on both the broad view and the small details of What Worked Well, and then What Needs Development or Ditching for the following categories.

Consider what can be further automated to cut down on time spent. What can be taken off your plate and delegated to free up your day-to-day?

(If you have a team, review this together during your quarterly planning meeting.)

• Self-Care
• Team
• Systems + Operations
• Client Happiness
• Marketing
• PR
• Campaigns
• Funnels
• Sales Process

STEP 3: Reverse engineer your quarter

Identify, based on your next big goal, where do you want to be when this quarter comes to a close? Laying the foundations for your agency growth? Launching a new offer? Rebranding for your next level? Think about the following categories and get specific on target metrics:

• Team Growth
• Sales
• Marketing Metrics
  • Email List
  • Social Media
• PR
• Campaigns
  

STEP 4: Outline your internal business plan

It’s time to zoom in even more and break down those overview metrics from Step 3 for each month of the next quarter. 

I.e. How many sales do we want for each offer in April, May, June?

Outline monthly focus areas for your internal growth to ensure you don’t take on too much at once.

Take our micro-agency goal for example – 

Instead of focusing on hiring three staff right away, you could hire your first Jr. Staffer this quarter and solidify processes for hiring, orientation, and continued professional development and training, allowing you to have a more refined process for future hires next quarter AND enabling you to slowly grow the agency and avoid the stress that rapid expansion can put on the founder.

The next step is to take these focus areas and create workflows for each one:

If hiring is on the list, what needs to be done first, next, after that, and last to complete this process? My team and I create realistic deadlines and put these tasks in our project management platform (we love ClickUp!) and ensure no goal will be overlooked as it already holds space on our calendar.

STEP 5: Strategize your external marketing plan

After prioritizing internal growth first (because without systems, where the hell are we?!), we reverse engineer our marketing plan following the same process as Step 3. 

Review overview metrics for each month, outline overview strategies and methods as to how we’re going to reach those goals, and put workflows on our calendar.

——-

One of my personal focuses in the last months has been to lay even more foundations off of social media.

You know I’m already email obsessed (if you haven’t joined the list for highly-entertaining stories and free copywriting and business advice, grab three free email templates here to join the party) but over the last year we’ve been LOVING the results of marketing off IG.

Places like Instagram rely a lot on showing up every day, and that can be a significant energy drain.

If you’re wanting alternatives to IG, look into strategic, long-term marketing plans and funnels that will bring in leads and passive income streams – without you having to show up so much. (Hello automated email systems 👋🏽). 

In summary, remember just how much clarity and direction you can get from this quarterly review process.

Set aside an hour to reflect on the last quarter and make solid, actionable steps for growth in the next. Future you is already grateful!