Business Goals Planner: A FREE Printable Workbook for 2024
It’s December - less than a month until the new year, and the perfect time to reflect and start planning goals for your business.
Whether you’re just starting your business, or you’re several years in, dedicating time to looking back over the previous 12 months, refreshing yourself on your overall vision, and setting goals / creating a plan for the year ahead is ALWAYS a good idea!
Each year, Olivia (my business bestie) and I set aside a whole day in December to get together and plan out our next year in our businesses. It’s always so much fun and the perfect way to focus, plus doing this has honestly been one of the best things I’ve ever done for my business! It makes me so focused throughout the year.
I get a lot of questions about how I set goals and our planning process, so I’ve created an annual goals planner template for you to download and follow along with here:
What’s in the workbook and how do I plan for the year ahead?
Let’s take a look inside the planner…
Step 1: Your Vision for the decade
In this step of the process, you’re going to write your vision for the next 10 years, or refresh yourself on your existing 10 year plan. Imagine it’s 10 years in the future and you’re looking around you; write down what you’re feeling and experiencing, and what your ideal life looks like. If 10 years is too long for you, feel free to ignore and just think about 5 years or 3 years instead.
Step 2: annual Goals
Bearing in mind your ultimate vision for the decade, what goals are you going to set for this coming year that align with this? What things do you want to achieve this year and what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
Step 4: Financial analysis + Planning
In this step we analyse your business income and expenditure from the last 12 months and use it to plan out what you need to make financially in the coming year.
Step 5: Reflection
It’s not possible to look forward and make a plan until you have looked backwards to evaluate everything you did in the last year. What went well and what didn’t work so well? What were the highlights?
Step 6: the action plan
Here’s the step where you’ll write down every activity and action that needs to be done in order to reach your goals for the year.
Step 7: Goal tracking
A visual way of writing each of your goals out with a clear purpose and action plan of exactly what activities are going to help move you towards it.
Step 8: Put it all in your diary/calendar
This step isn’t in the workbook, but once you’ve written down all your activities and when they need to be done by, you can start planning these into your calendar or diary. My preference is a huge wall calendar pinned up on my office wall, where I write in all my important launch dates and activity planning.
I also like to do a more thorough plan for each quarter, splitting my year out into ‘90 day sprints’ - these days it’s good to be flexible, and I’m finding this is better than every 6 months. If you’d like to do the same, check out my 90 Day Planner workbook to go alongside this!
Top Tip:
Last year we were inspired by Amy Porterfield’s 2019 podcast episode where she suggested that you should dedicate a whole day to this and take yourself away from your usual office & home. Whether that’s setting up in a co-working space or hiring a hotel room; being in a totally different space is necessary for getting inspired.
This year we’ve done the same thing; we’ve booked in a date in December to work through this workbook in a self catered holiday cottage just like we did last year. Doing it with a business friend also means you can thrash out ideas together while you’re brainstorming.
