The Power of Vision
Who else loves a vision? Oh my gosh, I love a good vision. I just love. Dreaming and ideating and checking back in and saying, how can I keep doing this thing with intention, my business, my life? Like, how can I make sure that I'm moving towards the version of myself and my business and my life that I want to be creating?
It feels so freaking empowering because there's something so magical about setting a big, bold vision, reverse engineering it, Taking those steps and making it happen or something better or something different like letting magic pop up and see what happens as well along the way. But going great places that are intentional, that are on purpose, that are moving you in the right direction.
It's essential for me. I find it difficult to get motivated enough to work on something when I just can't see the link to the big picture. Whereas it could be the most menial task, and if I can see the role it's playing in creating my dream life for myself I'm across it. I love building visions in empire era.
We build out three year business visions for this reason and reverse engineer them right down to a 12 month business roadmap. And then the specific goals for the program. Like it's so essential to see how the effort, the energy, the time that you are investing into this thing, how it all makes sense. And it's how it's all going to be worth it.
Creating Your 2025 Vision
So let's talk about how I am creating my 2025 business vision, and hopefully it can help to inspire you to create your own 2025 vision for life and business as well. So we're going to walk through the actual steps that I take and why, and I guess my approach to Making the goals mean something and putting the things in place so that they actually become my reality.
2025, bring it on. How are we going to create a vision that drives us and Keeps pulling us forward towards an unthinkable life with so much financial overflow and freedom in terms of time, in terms of schedule, in terms of choosing what you work on, who you work with, like it's juicy, right? But sometimes there's so much cognitive dissonance between where you are right now and that.
reality that it can feel so intangible or so far away that it's like, where do I start? How does this start happening for me? What comes first and in what order? And not only that, but because it can feel too good to be true or like fairy tale fantasy land. When things feel tough and hard and you're tired and you didn't find the time this week or something didn't go the way you planned, rather than having something feel so far away that it's easy to be like, Oh, you know what?
Leave it. This is not gonna work for me. This isn't possible. I can't keep going. I'm not seeing the results as fast as I hoped for. Instead of going to that place, Where these things definitely won't come true, definitely won't come to fruition. Being able to hold the vision that actually feels visceral.
That you actually, that's you're already there. And you're already operating as that version of yourself. And it's of course it's gonna happen, it's just a question of time. It allows you to push through and work towards something that you don't have yet, because you know it's yet. And so that also really helps with the emotional rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship.
Because it's a journey. It is a massive professional, personal development growth journey. And you do get tested, and things do surprise you. And Again, why would you keep going? Why would your brain let you spend precious time and energy and resources on something that it doesn't actually think is going to happen?
Okay. So we also need to make sure that vision feels nice and real without it not yet being real at all. So let me walk you through my process and that's going to enable us. To figure out how to start creating a vision that can feel real or feel big enough and important enough and visceral enough that it's like it's so clear you can taste it and so it does pull you forward and it does drive you and it does keep you showing up for yourself and your dreams.
Retrospective and Future Planning
So the first thing that I do, and I don't spend a lot of time here to be honest I'm very future focused, I'm very into what's next, but I typically do a retrospective in my business. If you haven't started your business yet, you might want to make this more focused in terms of your life, but I will do a retrospective for both my business and my life.
Because at the end of the day, most of us are creating these businesses, these lifestyle businesses, to facilitate a bigger, more purposeful, more profitable, more freeing life with options and with choice and with purpose. With well being mental physical well being like at the end of the day it's often about that and so both business and life coexist and They should both ways create a sense of some kind of frame some kind of constraints some kind of Rules of the game.
So for both business and life, I just go through a quick retrospective. What have been my wins? What are the big things that I'm celebrating in terms of my transformation, my growth, my business's transformation and growth? What are the big wins? What's been working for me and what's not working for me anymore?
What are maybe some old ways or old approaches or just same old shit, same old patterns that just aren't serving me anymore? I'll check in and do a retrospective. It's nice to know where you're starting from. But very quickly, because that's where I like to play, I start looking towards the future. And I start with a simple question that actually provokes a lot of response in me anyway, when I'm journaling on this, when I'm writing it out, when I'm doodling, when I'm just stream of consciousness, getting this out of my head.
Which is, how do I want business and life to feel this year? Really describing it. How will I feel in myself? How will it all feel? This whole operating system, how will it feel to navigate my life this year? What are the emotions I want to feel? What are the states I want to experience and feel like? What is this going to feel like for me?
Because that can evoke quite a lot of values clashes that have been going on, like I definitely don't want to feel like this anymore, I want to feel more like this, or this has changed in me, and I really want to feel this way, and that wasn't necessarily a feeling that used to be important for me.
Simple question, but it goes deep.
The Pie of Life
So I start there, and then to build on this line of self questioning, I'll often draw out like the wheel of life, but it's more so a pie of life. So in the wheel of life, classic life coaching tool, you have a wheel with eight different segments, and they're labeled with the different areas of life, career, finance, family, friends, romantic love, physical wellbeing, health emotional, spiritual, energetic wellbeing, You get it.
The different slices of the pie, right? Except, what kind of bothers me about the Wheel of Life is that every segment is the same size. Indicating the same level of proportionality. As if, to have a balanced life, They need to each be there in equal measure, and I reject that entirely. I'm a big believer in the fact that you can have it all, but usually only like a couple of major things at one time in terms of focus.
And you can have it all on your terms, but it's about dosage. So I prefer to draw out a pie of life. Which has different sized segments. And what I'll do is I'll look at last year and say, okay, realistically, when it comes to my time and energy, how big of a chunk did work business take up? And how big of a chunk did friends take up?
And how big of a chunk did health take up? And this in terms of where I was spending my time and my energy. And I'll look at that. And then I'll draw out my ideal pie of life for the next year. And see if there are any significant changes. And often there are, because in my opinion, there is absolutely nothing wrong with your pie of life being significantly focused on, for example, business and money for that year, because it's an important year for you because you've got a very specific goal, because that's the year you're starting up, like for whatever reason.
And it's okay. I want to give you this permission it is okay if in different phases of life for different reasons, as long as it's intentional, you are quote unquote underachieving in different areas of life. We've only got so much time, energy, focus, attention. We've only got so much in us. So as long as it's intentional, there'll be a reason for having a different proportion of life be more important to you right now.
Maybe you have established really wonderful friendships with three beautiful close friends. And you've got that trust and that dynamic with your friends that if this year is the year where you're working on your business and you're seeing your beautiful friends just, once per month each, this year, it's enough.
And you can have that conversation with them, of course, and enroll them on your vision and on your journey. I recommend it. But stop trying to overachieve in every freaking area of life. It's too hard. To be the perfect friend who's messaging back all day every day, sending memes and messages all day every day, plus booking out your weekends, plus running a business, plus full time work, plus having kids, plus having a dog it's too much.
It's too much. So I draw out my pie of life, how it has been, how it's been looking, and How I'd like it to look next year. Knowing that usually I've only got a couple of major chunks, maybe a medium chunk and the rest cool, something's got to give what's my minimum viable product in that area?
Like my physical health, right? Like sports, working out, moving my body. If that's super important to me, which of course it is, but it's going to go from being five to six hours per week, important to three hours per week, important. You've got to understand the why. And that also, what's the minimum that you can do your thing, move your body, et cetera, and you'll still feel good about it?
It's not about feeling miserable in any area, but it's what's the minimum that would still keep me satisfied? Given that, these areas require a bit more focus. And being able to compare those two pies of life. I'm able to ask myself, cool, so looking at this, what would I like to change?
What will the impact be? And how will that feel? Again, triggering those emotions. The impact of making these decisions, of setting these priorities, of having this focus, and I don't even know what that looks like yet, it's just a feeling on the areas of life where I want to spend the most time and energy.
That's all I know for now. How is it going to make me feel? So I've asked myself a lot of questions already around the emotions and the feelings and just making sure that we're going in the right direction.
Setting Goals and KPIs
And then based on this very high level for now direction, I already set a tentative word of the year.
It can be for life. It can be for business. It can be for both. My word of the year for my business in 2025 is buffer. The feeling of having buffer. The feeling of having spaciousness. The feeling that someone could get sick we could spontaneously book a trip away Like one of my best friends might decide to have a baby or get married and I could really be involved in the planning and the, and that experience, like whatever it is, but like things can happen in business and life.
And I'm always good. Cause I'm always running ahead. Things feel spacious. I don't have too much on my plate. I can handle the unexpected. I can handle the spontaneous. I have buffer. Okay? I like to hold this word as a bit of a north star as I go through the rest of the process. Because, rather than keeping in mind all of the detail and everything that I've already evoked, it's just a nice way to sum up where we're going.
What you want to feel giving the main emotions that's evoking a bit of a label. Now from there, what I typically do is using the same process that we have inside Empire era. I check in with my three year business vision and I'm always running on a three year vision and I check in with it because as Each year is completed, obviously, it may tweak, when we're planning three years out, there's just a lot of guesstimates, a lot of feelings based that would be good, or maybe we should aim for this, and you change, and goals change, and your business change, so I like to tweak it, I like to just make sure are we still on This track, have things changed, other things that I, thought that I wanted that I no longer want, all of those kinds of questions.
And typically when I'm looking at my three year vision from a very high level simplistic standpoint, my goals typically across four major categories. I've got revenue goals, money goals. I've got team goals. Which is very closely related to business model are we expanding, are we shrinking, does it feel more like a bit of a solopreneur year, like what's going on in terms of the people I have around me, in terms of support there, what am I selling, so my offers.
Because, there's a big difference between doubling down and streamlining and getting better and better and better at selling your core offer versus developing and launching a whole new thing and suddenly dealing with potentially two different kinds of audiences in your audience, two different kinds of message, like messaging lines or sales mechanisms.
Like it's a lot, right? So am I adding to this? Am I. Am I retiring any offers? What are we doing in terms of what we're actually selling? And then social media, the size of the footprint, the size of that digital impact in terms of your audience size. So across your social footprint, that could be your email list, plus your Instagram, plus your podcast or whatever it is, but ish, what kind of footprint are we talking about?
If a hundred thousand people are in your world right now, between your email list, between your YouTube subscribers, between TikTok followers, are we wanting to significantly expand that or is that less the priority as we just, make it even more? Intimate and cozy and highly engaged your community.
Or is that something that you significantly want to expand? Because with your business goals, having that visibility and that massive footprint would be good for the speaker and the PR like public relations, like interviewing Thought leaders and gurus kind of route that you want to go down.
So again, this is all linked to your, the idea of where you want your business to go. But those are typically the four main things I'm looking at high level, the revenue, the team, the offers, the products, the services and the community, the social footprint, essentially how many followers or people in my community, in my world.
And then for each year. For the three years to come, I'll pretty intuitively just map out where I think I want to go. And within that, there's a good, better, and best. So I like to set ranges or spectrums when it comes to goals. So if I intuitively say to myself, look, I think we're scaling up to 1.
2 million in revenue this year. I note down like one to 1. 4 and then just give myself a general direction across each of those areas, are we going to be hiring more and more people? Are we going to be changing things up? Are we going to be, not replacing people if they leave and scaling down the team?
Can I see myself changing what I'm selling, what I'm offering and so on. So I typically work through that. And then, rather than seeing those as fixed goals that I must attain, what I really try to do here is acknowledge that I want this and acknowledge that based on the information I have today, like this is where I think that we're going and it would be amazing.
I think this is representative of the growth that I'd love to see. And then I actually. Release those entirely from a goals perspective, because these are all outcomes. These are all like, if you're trying to set KPIs for this key performance indicators. If you think about it, all of these things, aside from what you decide to offer, but like a lot of these things outside of your control, how much money you make at the end of the day can be intentional and you can absolutely play for it and go for it and show up as if to get there.
But something I've learned is that also you can have really positive surprises. You might have You know, a couple of content pieces that land so well that you weren't planning on, or an incredible opportunity or collaboration come your way, or a massive visibility driver that you weren't expecting. And you can actually make a lot more than that.
It's it's one of those things that at the end of the day, you can play for something, but you actually cannot control how much revenue ends up coming in. Or social media followers. You might have a couple of content pieces that go absolutely gangbusters that get into the media or are just shared incredibly well and you could be aiming to grow to 10k this year and you end up on 87k.
You just don't really know what's going to happen, right? And then on the flip side, you could exceed your revenue goals and have half of the social media footprint that you've noted down here. So would that actually matter? Are you really going to be sad about it? And so all of these things which are more outcomes, I can absolutely plot them out and say that I want those and get excited by them and imagine how supportive that would feel and how amazing that would feel and Release them to then start looking at it from the level of goals But I'm very much focused on the process goals.
That's what's interesting to me because that is much more inside of my control. What I mean by that is that you can say that you want to grow 10, 000 followers on Instagram. But again, that's not really inside of your control. And you could still achieve every single business goal that you had hoped for without doing that.
Like you might be pleasantly surprised that you didn't need that many followers and or you have far more followers than this or like whatever. So instead of the goal being get 10, 000 followers on Instagram. I reverse engineer. What would it take within my control to the best of my knowledge and ability?
What would it take to significantly increase the likelihood of that happening for me? How am I going to get there? And so out of that, I start identifying behaviors, actions. I'm going to show up on stories three times per week. I'm going to post every day. Or if it's about revenue, am I going to raise my prices?
Am I going to launch more often? Am I going to implement an affiliate program? Am I the things that you can actually do and take action on. The things that you can commit to that are within your control. If it's okay, I know that I want to increase my social footprint. So I'm going to implement an email newsletter and get email subscribers that way, et cetera, like whatever it is, but you may not be able to control, okay.
By the end of the year, I'm going to have. 7, 800 email subscribers. But, you can control implementing and launching that email newsletter, regularly speaking about it, regularly offering a call to action for people to sign up to it, making the email newsletter amazing so that people come back and binge it and recommend it to friends.
There's a lot that you can do. Even if you can't control the exact number, the exact outcome of that. So I break down the behaviors and actions, the pro and I make process goals. So the goals in playing for that, the goals and how are we going to get there? And so I start mapping out and by the way, this is just for we've done the three year vision so I can have the big picture and see how it all works.
Now we're just speaking about what's it going to take to get that 2025 level, right? So even though I've got 2025, 2026, 2027 sort of mapped out in terms of my revenue, my team, my office, my socials. Now we're just doing this. We're reverse engineering. What will it take? The process goals dropping out of 2025.
Yeah.
Mapping Out the Year
And then what I'll do is I stress test out of all of the ideas. I have so many ideas, right? We could try this. We could do this. We could try that. We could launch that. We could, there's always more you could do. You could try. In entrepreneurship. If anyone ever told me that they had tried it all, that they had done it all, I would laugh in their face.
There is always something that we can try, that we can do, that we can change. Never ever are you finished. For example, if like someone's saying to me I've done everything I can on YouTube. I have done everything I can in terms of my scripts, my filming, my watch time strategies, my community engagement strategies, my SEO strategies I've done it all and it's not working full I would just laugh.
No way have you mastered every single possible thing. No way have you tried Or at least enough times every single thing that you possibly could try and collect enough data, like there are endless things that you can do to keep improving, to keep growing, to try things out, to see what happens. And so often what happens is that when I ideate on how am I going to get there, I have a lot of ideas and a lot of things that I would like to test and a lot of things that I think could help.
Therefore, I stress test this against sort of project planning and capacity. Of all of my ideas, and when I think I'm going to do things and what order, what priority order, what comes first, and what comes next, and, I map it out, across the year. Literally, at the top of the page. January, February, March, April, May, etc.
When do I actually intend on getting this done? And first, what I'll do, is I'll sort of, usually, I'm doing this physically with my team. We have post it notes, and we have sheets of paper where we're like, okay, quarter one, which of all of these ideas and actions and things that we're going to implement and things that we're going to take which are happening in court, which need to happen in quarter one, which need to happen in quarter two, quarter three, quarter four.
Firstly, that's really confronting because you'll often say that you want everything to happen in quarter one and there's nothing in quarter four and you're like, okay, so let's get realistic, but it's about mapping out. Okay. So when is it going to happen? And in what order ish, and already at this point, you might be like, okay, This is a lot.
We're gonna have to already trim. Then, you break it down month by month, and to the level where you're like, realistically, this month, we have five public holidays. This month we literally have 17 working days. And we view it from that lens. So these eight projects that we're thinking about, or whatever, these overhauls or these whatever we're gonna do, On top of just day to day jobs and workload.
Is that feeling realistic? Is that feeling like a lot? Like, how is it actually feeling? And in that process, we'll often identify things that we can strip back, cut. You just have to prioritize because simplicity is everything. Simplicity sells and making business as simple and streamlined as possible.
And not moving on to the new until things are feeling easy and you've mastered entire systems. It's really important because it's fun and it's shiny and it's creative and it's cool to do new things all the time. But it can also break your entire business if you don't stay intentional, streamlined, focused.
And so through this, you might have a bit of a wake up call around, okay, you'll If things are to feel focused and we're implementing properly and thoroughly, and we've got enough time to see how things go and to test that and to get the data on that and review that, and you start saying, okay, cool. At the end of the day, we're going to try these core actions and prioritize these key things.
Now of what remains, essentially, That becomes the KPIs. The key performance indicators then broken down, and you want to make sure that they are very specific, that they are measurable, and so on and so forth. If one of the levers is, for example we will always be running six weeks ahead on content.
Let's get specific. What does six weeks of content mean? So are you posting every day? So six times seven or six times five, if it's five times a week, like how many posts is that and how are you going to measure that? So every week in the team meeting, we're going to check in on this and this. And we're going to make sure that we're still.
Six weeks ahead, six weeks ahead. What needs to happen for this to be real, and how do you stay accountable, and what's the deadline? So how often are we going to check in on this? So that might be every week, because it's a rolling kind of KPI. Other KPIs might just have very specific deadlines, like this project needs to be finished by the end of May, according to our planning and so on and so forth.
So we start setting the KPIs and we make them specific, measurable deadlines and think about what support needs to be in place so that we're checking in on this, we're measuring this, we're keeping up to date with this, it doesn't get forgotten and so on and so forth. And typically what will happen is that myself and each team member, therefore, as a result of this end up having KPIs for each of the areas that we spoke to.
So typically, there will be revenue sales, KPIs, there will be. Offer KPIs. And what I mean by that is that usually offer it's okay, we're going to keep the offer, but we're going to streamline the client experience. We're going to streamline the client onboarding. We're going to add this module.
We're going to, whatever those become projects that need to happen by a certain time. So there will be KPIs pertaining to that socials, the whole like content machine, the whole content production side, there will be KPIs pertaining to that and. So we have these kinds of KPIs that ultimately feed back to the things that we're measuring and the things that we're working on and the things that we're prioritizing are moving the needle on what we've identified we want to achieve.
The, how are we going to achieve those things. And then on top of that, each team member and myself would have a signature contribution to the year. And so that's typically around personal growth and development. So you might have your KPIs pertaining to revenue creation, social media growth, and projects pertaining to making your offer amazing.
And then someone might be really wanting to get into SEO, for example. And so because of that, it's almost like a bonus KPI. It's like their unique contribution to the business that year might be like, cool, you take the lead on learning more about SEO and updating our website to be more SEO friendly.
Because that's something that's of interest to you and the business, it could help enhance the business. So finding that beautiful win. Or like my kick this year is going to be graphic design and I'm going to, instead of you Rosie needing to hire a web designer to develop these pages, I'm going to give them a go myself.
So when we create a landing page for that and that, which we, falling out of the projects we've already identified. Okay. I'm going to do those, like whatever it is. And so that also helps to, build team members, help them play to their strengths, help them to grow in new ways, and also feel like they're contributing and becoming a, an expert or go to expert in an area of the business, which is really empowering for people.
But if you're just doing this with yourself as a solopreneur, think about a signature, like it's a KPI that grows you and yeah, it does well for your business, but it's not necessarily, it's like more of a nice to have in terms of, it's not necessarily like one of the mission critical ones, but it's important for you and your expansion and your growth.
So it's like a bonus or a bonus project that you wanted to do for example, I've been on Instagram for two years and now I'm going to launch a podcast. And so the podcast could be like your signature pop up KPI for the year kind of thing. And so you'd create the process goals around that.
Now, once we've identified the KPIs, the process goals, what's happening and when, what actions need to happen by when, and what behaviors need to happen by when, I'll always go back and stress test the original vision and look at what I had identified for the year in terms of the revenue, the team, the people around me.
And just be like, given the projects we have on, and therefore contractors or freelancers we might need to hire, and therefore business expenses, does the team structure make sense, or the people around me, the support, does that make sense? Does my revenue desire make sense if my expenses are going to be doing this?
Does, just that sense test of is this actually going to get us where we want to go? And do I need to tweak anything here? And then as you go, obviously you've got your, that vision that we created at the beginning around what, how do we want life to feel and the pie and the proportions. And so if you have intentionally made your business or work a lower proportion because you want to spend less time and energy there.
Again, just having that sort of reality check of Hey, so like big picture vision, then does it make sense? Does it make sense that I'm going to have my working hours this year, but double my revenue. So if there feels like a little bit of a gap, you might want to be like, look, like having my hours is so important for me this year.
Cause health is a big priority. And my daughter is a big priority, for example. So That revenue, honestly, it can go down by 400k because that would be worth it for me. So it's just always checking it just to make just go back to that big picture vision and try to make it a little bit more anchored into cool.
So now that we've seen the detail, are things making sense? Are things feeling good? Goals should feel like a stretch. They shouldn't feel like, oh, easy piece of piss. They should feel like a stretch. They should feel exciting, but also not impossible or not full of sacrifice you just said that you didn't want.
So it's about just sense checking all of that. And so from this point, if everything's feeling good and making sense and feeling aligned, I'll then break business KPIs down by quarter. So every three months of the year, and that really helps as well because, for revenue, for example, if you know that you're building your course in the first quarter, your revenue goal can be like a disproportionately small amount of the overall goal.
But if you know that you are hyping up and launching it and going hard in quarter two, that quarter might carry quite a big proportion of the revenue goal. And so it's mapping out. With those big picture, like that big picture again, I'm looking at that big picture just so you're gunning for the, 1 to 1.
4 million ish. What would your, therefore, good, better, best be per quarter based on activity? Because it's never going to be copy paste every quarter of the year, exactly the same money coming in, is it? Based on what's going on, what are you measuring? Because if you've been building your offer and not doing much marketing in quarter one, but you've given yourself a goal of 250 K per quarter you're going to be incredibly disappointed in quarter one.
And that will affect your mood. And that could affect, it shouldn't, but it might, it might be like, Oh, it's not going to work. And it might get you down versus being like, cool, quarter one. If I could make 50k ish, that'd be awesome. 50 to 70, but quarter two is going to carry, it's going to be like a 400k quarter, whatever.
So just mapping out, making sure that your KPIs are mapped out. Not just for the year when you've gone back to that big vision when it comes to team, like when it comes to team, for example, if you need more support, when are you launching the hiring process? When are you making the decision?
When are they being onboarded? Like it just allows you to map that out rather than say, okay, cool. So for 2025, I'm going to hire five people. It's just so much more tangible and measurable if you can be like, cool. So like this higher happening in quarter one, two hires in quarter two, and so on and so forth.
So just mapping out those big high level KPIs for the year by quarter that gives you, your year pretty much mapped out. And then. I also like to do a process on top of this, which is asking myself, who will I need to become and how will I need to show up and behave to pull these off, like looking at these KPIs in front of me, am I going to have to preserve my energy in quarter one to be able to be a little, bulldozer in quarter two and so on and so forth.
So also just having a I don't say KPIs, but I. I look at that and I think about how am I going to have to show up and who am I going to have to become and how am I going to have to grow to also pull this off. So that pretty much wraps up the vision and the reverse engineering of the vision.
Tracking Progress and Tools
And then we go to the tools level of putting things in place to make sure that we are measuring the right thing.
So for example, we have a. Business dashboard that tracks and measures certain things in each tab. And we've got a big dashboard on the front that we check in to and like monthly team meetings or like even weekly meetings. I might have a weekly meeting with my ops manager and say, cool, let's talk about the funnel performance. And for example, if one of the big objectives or KPIs for the year was around improving the conversion rate of our evergreen funnel from 3 percent to 5%, for example, and we're going to do these things to make that happen. Therefore we need to look at our dashboard and be like, are we measuring this?
So do we have the tool in place to step by step break down every component of our funnel. And track the action we took, the impact, the performance, et cetera, et cetera. And then be tracking that average conversion rate across the year. Do we have that? If not, we've got to build that out. If we're going to do this every Friday, do we have a ClickUp card that has a recurring, element on it so that every Friday it pops up so that we absolutely all remember to do this.
It's do we have the tools and structures and systems in place? And what we often do as well is we'll create like KPI trackers for the team and It's like just in a spreadsheet with like little squares representing the weeks. And if we've hit or exceeded the KPI, it might be like green or dark green.
If we haven't quite got there it changes a different color and it just allows us to give us like a heat map on, because again, life and business aren't linear. And sometimes, things are exceeded and some things, sometimes they don't go as planned or. You have an intentional break.
So for example, for the KPI, the process KPI about always running six weeks ahead for content. If you're running 12 weeks ahead, cause you've gone hard. Actually you can afford for your KPI tracker to be like gray week by week for six weeks and not focus on that and focus on one of your other projects because you're good.
And so you can pick that up. Like that KPI back up. So it's about being able to visually see that heat map are we like better than okay? Or do we have some catching up we need to do, et cetera. Okay. So it's just are there tools in place where we can measure, we can visualize, we can see if it's getting done, we can see if we're on track.
And then I have a business KPI tracker, which is very visual and just based on the key components. For example, it's do I have the right roles in my team? What's my revenue? How far through the offer upgrades are we? If there were six major things we were going to do to Upgrade our offer one to six the thermometers are physically like built out as thermometers and as major milestones happen like for example 100k chunks of revenue or That project and that project done just against the revenue Against the team against the offer and against the social footprint We'll fill it in and color them in to see the thermometers being filled up all the way throughout the year.
So this is essential. It's. They're not forgotten, these goals. They are getting tracked and measured. And if you're a solopreneur, have a date with yourself, a non negotiable date with yourself, it could be weekly, it could be monthly, to check in and track your progress. Because it's very hard to do something about not reaching a goal all the way at the end of the year.
Whereas if you can see that it's tracking to be more difficult than expected, you can tweak behavior, tweak action, and or tweak the goal if priorities have shifted. yourself, It's important to keep this very active in life. And then as a bonus, if you have a team, so I talked about, checking in, who do I need to become?
How do I need to grow? How am I going to be able to show up and pull this off? Like from an individual standpoint, if you have a team is always good once we've all clear on the vision and the goals and everyone's co created the KPIs and it's feeling really exciting. It's always good to have a conversation around ways of working.
So is there anything we need to stop, start, continue when it comes to how we communicate, when it comes to how we behave, when it comes to how we work together to pull this off, to make this happen? And then we usually build that into updating our team manifesto, which are our internal like codes and like a shared language around how we work with each other around here, our values our expectations from one another.
And. The minimum operating standards when it comes to how we treat each other, how we communicate with each other, and just, so we can very clearly and quickly call out any behavior that's not aligned to, hey, that's not how we do things here. This is how we treat our team and. That wasn't enough notice.
So it's, it allows us to be very clear on how we're going to carry ourselves also to pull it off and how we commit to each other to make sure that everyone has their full potential to be able to reach their KPIs as well, especially when they're depending on other people.
I hope that was interesting.
I would love to hear about your business vision. Send me a voice note, DM me over on Instagram at @badassempires_. I'd love to hear from you. And otherwise, cheers to a year that is going to change your life. Let's go hard, let's play big, let's build these empires, and let's make sure that this year was a massive turning point in terms of things just feeling incredible. You got this.
