Get More Done in Your Small Business with Intentional Monthly Goals

Feb 1

Raise your hand if more than half of the things on your to-do list are left over from last month. Okay, now keep ‘em raised if half of THOSE things have been on your list for over a year.

I imagine many of you still have your hands raised! Which BTW, you can put down now!

Listen, I totally understand where you are sitting right now because for years, I was that way too. But entrepreneurship has taught me a hard lesson about staying focused and the value of intentional monthly planning. If you never get intentional about what you put on your plate, your to-do list will look the same for years.

And by intentional, I mean working ON stuff in your business, not just working in it. To keep that needle moving forward, you need to know how to discern what to focus on and what to keep on your list of things that will never see the light of day.

Today, I’m going to give you a peek into how I plan out each month and stay focused on what’s most important. Let’s dig in!

Reflect on the past month

The first thing you need to do to make the month ahead more productive is to reflect on how the previous one went. It’s really easy to say that last month was “a flop” or “not a good month,” but you’re not going to get anywhere if you can’t pinpoint why.

When it’s time to sit down and plan, you can use these prompts to help guide you:

What are three wins from the previous month?
What worked well? Any improvements made?
What didn’t work so well? Where did you find yourself struggling the most?

This can also work to your advantage even if you had a good month. You can see what’s doing well and can try to replicate that process.

And whether you like these types of “journaling” prompts or not, they can help you get into the right headspace and set better goals each month.

Those monthly goals eventually give way to the quarterly ones, then yearly, until finally, you celebrate a big win!

HTrack your metrics

I don’t live and die by my metrics. Instead of using them to set the standard, I use them to help me stay on track. They’re a tool, not the goal itself. And I check them (for both social media and my website) every 90 days.

Checking on product revenue

As you can imagine, this one is pretty important. I want to make sure the numbers reflect how it feels like we’re doing in business, not just rely on what seems like a good month or two.

When I look at the total number of sales for products (like the lower price-point digital products in my agency), I look for how much profit we did or didn’t make, and the number of order bumps added when we have promos going.

If the numbers are down, then my team and I will start planning on how we can test out a new order bump or upsell to shake things up, and circle back a month from when that goes live.

How are those courses looking?

Next, I’m looking at my evergreen funnel for Video Strategy Academy. When we promo this, we have a webinar that warms our audience up, and from the webinar sign-ups, we see how many people decided to join.

For my agency, this is one of our lowest maintenance offers to keep up with. It takes the least amount of time to tweak to increase conversions when they’re low (a lot of that falls on our marketing strategy, anyway). If there’s an issue, it doesn’t take us long to sort it out and get back on track.

Checking on your coaching programs or masterminds

The last thing we assess when looking at metrics is how our application funnel for 10K on Replay is looking. We look at how many people landed on the application page, how many people actually applied, how many people were approved, and finally, how many enrolled.

All of this information lets us know if our content plan for each month was effective — so it’s super important to make sure you track these numbers!

Seeing how content is performing

Along with revenue, content is another thing you need to be keeping your eyes on — it’s what sends people to your offers. Without a good strategy, it’s a lot harder to pull off those revenue goals.

Now, I don’t pay attention to followers when I do this…on any platform. Or subscribers either. At the end of the day, they’re just a vanity metric and don’t really help you get a feel for how your content is performing. People subscribe or follow for all kinds of reasons, and they aren’t always people who are going to end up buying from you.

Here’s what I look at instead…

YouTube: Impressions, new viewers, and total views

Instagram: People reached, profile visits, and website clicks

From there, I try to go in and see if there’s any particular piece of content that caused the numbers to go up or down. What was the topic? What was the conversation being had in the comments? Is this something I need to create more of?

All of these numbers are important for my overall goal — to get more eyeballs on my offers so I can keep running a profitable business!

Be intentional with your goals

I like to brain-dump everything that’s on my mind when planning the month ahead. As an entrepreneur and Enneagram 3, I always have so many things I want to do. But I know I can’t do them all.

So, I’m pretty ruthless when it comes to putting things on the chopping block. If it’s not helping me drive traffic to my offers, I don’t want it!

Use your calendar

One of the things I love about using digital calendars is how easy they are to use with other people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a biiiiiig sticky notes and paper planner girl, but when I’ve got meetings with my team, clients, and dentists appointments all going on at the same time, sharing my calendar makes it a lot easier to do it all.

My team, my husband, and my clients can see when I’m free without having to ask — it makes life easier for them AND for me.

Give each week a theme

I like to theme my weeks. Maybe it’s because I was the kid who was way too into wacky sock day during spirit week, but it’s something I absolutely do not miss out on. But I’m not talking about that kind of theme here.

I mean theming the content topics for everything I make, whether that’s YouTube, Instagram, emails, or blogs. It helps me stay on track and batch like tasks together so I can get them knocked out faster.

Week 1 and 3

These weeks are dedicated to content creation. Mondays and Tuesdays, I script videos because I want to create four to five videos a week to keep up with my posting schedule on YouTube. That means Wednesday and Thursday are for filming (since Fridays are blocked off for playing catch with everything else in my biz).

It’s also helpful to do it like this so I know when I need to wash my hair and do my makeup (as a mom, this is BEYOND helpful!).

Week 2 and Week 4

These weeks I keep open for other projects like new content creation for 10k On Replay, behind the scene projects, like working on new offers, client work, etc. I also take this time to tap into what my team is saying and focus on helping them too.

The goal is to always (or for the most part, nobody is perfect!) be working on things that are moving the needle forward in your business, not just things that are keeping you busy.