The Business Lounge Podcast with Kimberly Ann Jimenez
Welcome to The Business Lounge Podcast! Each week we'll share proven marketing strategies to help you build an audience of buyers, create impactful content, and grow a profitable business without compromising on your values with your host, Kimberly Ann Jimenez!
Kimberly is an Online Marketing Strategist, Educator, Founder and Thought Leader in the online marketing industry.
Having worked with 33K+ small business owners & entrepreneurs across an array of industries over the past decade, Kimberly and her business partner Chris Harris are obsessed with helping you level up your marketing game, and grow your bottom line.
They co-lead their flagship program, The Business Lounge, which teaches business owners & entrepreneurs like you how to navigate the confusing & often overwhelming world of online marketing and build an unapologetically profitable business on your own terms (and without compromising your faith, your family or your freedom).
Join us at kimberlyannjimenez.com/businesslounge!
The Business Lounge Podcast with Kimberly Ann Jimenez
S7 EP910: Explode Your Online Business with Quarterly Planning and Strategic Goal Setting for 2025!
Ready to level up your business game in 2025? Discover how switching from annual planning to quarterly goal-setting can transform your productivity, streamline your strategy, and drive massive growth. Inspired by thought leaders like Brian Moran and Gino Wickman, we’ll break down how to tackle your big goals in manageable, action-packed steps! Stay tuned!
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📝 The Prosper Plan: https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/the-prosper-plan/
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What is up? Tbl Podcast fam. I want to talk to you guys today about what we talked about on YouTube recently, which was how to do your annual planning utilizing a project management tool like Trello, but shifting your focus from what you would traditionally do in annual planning into quarterly planning, and so this theory has been really studied and tested thoroughly. There's experts in this space that I've had the privilege of talking to, some of which are actually personal mentors of mine. I worked with Brian Moran. He came on the podcast and we were talking about collaboration. He wrote the book, the 12 Week Year, and it really goes more in depth about the theory behind annualized versus quarterly planning, if you want to learn more about this subject. But then one of my mentors and personal friends, gino Wickman, really has made this popular as well. It's talked about it really substantially with doing what we call quarterly rocks. So super important, right? So let's break that down why it matters first.
Speaker 1:Imagine a year previously where you did planning and maybe you don't do this at all, and so you really this is the perfect time to start. But you sat down and you got to about May and you're like, what, like, what do I like? I don't, I don't know, and you start guessing. You just start putting stuff down. You just start writing down these abstract or these vague goals, and there's no specificity around them, or you really, even as you write them down, it's kind of like swinging at the pinata. You really don't know if you're going to be able to do those things or not. It'd be nice if you did. And so what if you gave yourself a little bit shorter runway, right? So I always give this metaphor and hopefully this helps. But imagine you're going from New York City to LA by car, right? Well, if you look at the whole list of directions on your GPS to start, it's kind of like wow, that's a lot. There's 75 different steps that I have to take to arrive there. You know the end goal, but what you're focused on is take a right on this street, take a left on this street, take a right, continue straight on this street, merge onto the highway here, and so you're following step by step. So you take something large and you make it into something small and thus actionable, and that's what we want to try to do here. So I'm not trying to deter you from doing some annual planning or having goals.
Speaker 1:The way we do it is we actually sit down, we go through our prosper plan which Kim actually just did a video on that as well on YouTube and we figure out what was working last year. What didn't work right Is should that be a priority going forward? If it didn't work, and how do we do more of what's working? Sometimes we complicate business and it's really what's working? Do more of that. What's working for my competitors? What are my coaches experiencing that's working? Does that align with what I'm approaching and did it work for me? Or have I tried that yet? Great, it worked. Do more of that.
Speaker 1:And sometimes I think we get lost in the things to do, the tasks we need to accomplish, and we don't think about the reason why we're actually doing it, unless we challenge ourselves to say but is this working? But is this making me money? All right, those qualifying questions will always keep you on the straight and narrow, and so what we do is take it from that. We build out what we call our issue solution map, which is all the problems we experienced in the business that we can fix, that we can run less. Clunky is how I tell our team right, we need to run smoothly so that we can achieve our initiatives and goals faster. If you're running clunky or there's bottlenecks in your operation or how you approach things, even as an individual, if you're a solopreneur, you got to smooth those things out, because then when you lay out those big goals right, you don't have these massive internal hurdles that you're overcoming, or the wrong tools or no tools at all, or you're spending too much time in a certain area. So those are things you really want to get out of your brain and down on a piece of paper. So I highly recommend doing that prosper plan. It'll help you a lot from there.
Speaker 1:Then what we do is we say, okay, here are our goals realistically, based on number, not speculation, not if the sky is blue 365 days, like realistically, this is what we can achieve, right, and we'll put in some stretch goals. That's fine as well. Then we're going to reverse engineer that further down. Okay, let's start saying what are the big priorities to reach these goals? Let's say you've got three to four major goals for the year. Okay, great, we got to build out some projects around that. So what we're going to do is we're going to say cool, these.
Speaker 1:Let's say there's four things for the year that are the most important to reach, the goals you set off for yourself. That could be revenue goals, that could be whatever your goals look like. It could be content goals, that could be whatever your goals look like. It could be you know content goals. It could be follower count goals, email list goals, whatever that looks like for you. That's what you're shooting for. Then you need to say here are the five to seven major things, and maybe there's more, maybe there's 10, just be careful not overloading your plate. That need to have happen so that we can achieve those goals Right. Then what you'll do is say, okay, some of these goals are going to be accomplished by these three big initiatives.
Speaker 1:Example let's say your revenue goal is $500,000 and you're currently at $350,000. And you know, based on your deep dive analysis you did into your business, where you just pour through your numbers from the previous year or previous years, if you have that available to you that when you grow your email list every 20 people you make a sale. Let's just say, for easy numbers, right, so you know, to bridge the gap between where you are and where you need to be, that email is, growth is the number one driver of new revenue for your business. We just did that and through our current customers, our email list and people that have our website, we are eight times more likely to get a sale from that than we are social media efforts. But we're not subjectively saying that our email list or our website or our current customers convert at a higher rate. We know that because we pulled those numbers, and they don't have to be. This is not a science lab. They don't have to be perfect numbers, but you need to have an idea, right within a general margin of error, of what those numbers look like. That's how you build really strong goals that are tangible, that are based on numbers, not speculation. So we know, then, that email list, if goal is to go from $350,000 to $500,000, and email list, we found, is the number one driver of doing that Well, what are we going to prioritize?
Speaker 1:We're going to prioritize traffic to our website. We're going to prioritize email list growth. We're going to say, okay, great, what are some traffic strategies that I need, then? Because I know traffic leads to people on my site, which leads to people on my email list, which leads to making money. You see how you're like going to prioritize those in order of importance to achieve said goal. So it's not abstract of try harder. Trying harder is not a plan, but it is linear. In a sense of it lines you up to achieve said goal right. So what I would do that is say, okay, cool. Number one is my traffic strategy. When I get traffic, I get new email subscribers. What does that look like? Then we can say I'm getting enough traffic, but I'm not converting enough of those people. Okay, let's address are using lead magnets.
Speaker 1:Do you have an opt-in on your website? How is your website laid out? Right? Usually it's one of those two, and I always use this metaphor. This will help you too.
Speaker 1:Traffic is like oxygen and your lungs are like your website conversions. Right, you need both, because without your lungs, it doesn't matter how much oxygen there is. You could have oxygen all around you, but you're not taking any of it in and converting it into stuff your body can use. If you have lungs in no air and you're in space, it doesn't matter how great your lungs are there's no oxygen, right? So the oxygen is the traffic. Your conversions on your website are the lungs. You nail those two things in any business, even if you're going direct to sale. In some cases you have a service-based business. You go direct to sale. If you're getting traffic and you're converting those people, you will have a business Again, keeping it simple and doing more of that. So we're going to identify and say, great, I'm only getting 500 people on my website every month. That's a problem.
Speaker 1:Okay, now from that research, we're going to say we're going to focus on traffic and quarter number one the theme which I always give themes to quarters the theme is going to be traffic and all the team is going to be focused on building out those core projects that tie into increasing our website traffic. That may be a blogging strategy, that may be a YouTube strategy, that may be including ads, that may be more being more deliberate on social media and not just putting out cool content but actually pushing those people to your website, giving them an incentive like a free resource or a download or a webinar where they're going to go from your social media to your website because now they're incentivized to do so. Right, that's intentionality. Then we're going to say, okay, cool, quarter two. Then, since we figured out that, then we're going to say, okay, cool, quarter two. Then, since we figured out that quarter one is going to be traffic, and then we're going to lay out those four things that I said.
Speaker 1:Whatever your strategy looks like, right? Whatever platforms you're on, how do I increase traffic to my website? Right, in this particular example, then quarter two might be conversions. Okay, great, we're going to increase our traffic. We want to go from 500 people Realistically, we're going to shoot for 2,500 people by the end of the quarter. That might be aggressive, but make it realistic. And really that's where your research is going to come into play. What needs to have happened for that to be the case? Right? We want to make sure that our conversions are X amount, right?
Speaker 1:So, like, if you've got a dedicated landing page for an opt-in, for a lead magnet, for example, you want to hit north of 50% and you can run ads to that. In fact, we have clients that have done so and they're adding thousands of people to their email list when they only had hundreds previously through a highly effective lead magnet, getting sub $1 or $2 leads that then they then put in front of an offer and maybe in some cases, in many cases actually, they're either breakeven or profitable on a low ticket offer. So if you've got something like a service, where it's multiple hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars. A sub $2 lead is incredibly valuable to you, right? That's incredibly cheap. So that would be a conversion quarter, right? And then you're going to say, cool, based off of that, I think, if we go, increase our traffic to 2,500 people per month and then we can increase our conversions to X amount, both from opt-ins but also in your sales conversions.
Speaker 1:Looking at your cart right, looking at your sales pages, how much traffic went from your sales page to your actual cart page? Right? Because if you see, hey, I'm getting a hundred people on the sales page every month, but only one of those people is going to the cart, well, that's a problem, right. If you increase that, if you got that sales page conversion up to 30 and cart conversions around 10, well, you just went from no sales to about three sales for every every month and if you have, you have a multi thousand dollar offer. You're in good shape, right? So I know I'm throwing a lot of numbers and statistics and data and stuff like that at you and make it your own. I'm just working through some examples to hopefully trigger some inspiration here, but oftentimes what we find is this and this is the real importance of this one we're taking something really big and abstract and we're making it small and actionable.
Speaker 1:The more I talk, the more specific I'm getting right, the more I'm saying, like, okay, specific strategies and specific numbers and data sets relating to said goal. Now you're reverse engineering success. Now you're reverse engineering the number you want. So you're not just saying I want to be a six-figure entrepreneur, okay, well, there's a path to achieving that. And in fact, sometimes and this happens often with our clients They've got a path to said Revenue milestone and it feels like a big, hairy number. And you know what they find out? That takes two sales a day at x amount per day. All right, I need two, four hundred dollar sales a day, or I need Three sales of 200 bucks a day to reach my revenue milestone, and maybe that's just leaving your job, maybe that's just subsidizing your income.
Speaker 1:But when you work in reverse order and you break it down from big to small, it feels more digestible. Making $100,000 feels like a lot, making a million dollars feels like a lot. But when you break it down to price of your product and unit of sales you need to make daily and then you turn that into traffic goals and conversion goals and then you build out a board that actually works in that direction and break it down by quarters and then break it down by weekly tasks. Not only is everybody on the same page, but you're clear about what needs to have happened for that goal to be achieved Right Now. Make it realistic and know your numbers and this is why I always say know your numbers, because some people will host a webinar and this has happened many times They'll get 65 people on a webinar and they'll make four sales that are like $500 to $700 sales each.
Speaker 1:So they made two grand from 65 people and they're boohooing. I'm not even joking, they're boohooing, crying, because they're like oh my gosh, it was such failure. Only four people. It's like do you realize your conversion rate on that? That is obscene conversion rate and they don't know Right. So you don't know. If you don't have proper, if you don't have a proper milestone to judge your success by, if you don't know what good conversion numbers actually look like, you're going to be disappointed, because the reality is we told that client no, no, no, no, you just need more people on that webinar. But if you're converting at that percentage, that is an obscene percentage rate for somebody that just started a webinar, for sure, right? So if you're getting anywhere north of 10% on a webinar, most people get one to 3% on a first go around, if they're lucky on a webinar. So, getting four sales of a above $500 offer at a 65 people that attended, meaning probably only, I think, 65 registered. Only 30 showed up, something, something to that effect. So even even even bigger number, right? And even bigger number in conversions, which is fantastic. But again, if we don't know those numbers, um, they feel big and hairy. Right. An even bigger number in conversions, which is fantastic. But again, if we don't know those numbers, they feel big and hairy, right.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's say you get to quarter three, so traffic is first. You need, again, you need more oxygen. There's no oxygen to breathe. We need more traffic. Quarter two we're going to break it into. We're going to do conversions, right, and our example we're using here. Quarter three could be we really want to run ads right, by quarter three. We want to be running ads. Why? Because, once we figure out our traffic strategy, we know what people are looking for, we know what people value, we know what content drives people at our website right Conversions. We want to convert the traffic we're getting. We need to be converting that oxygen into our body so we can run faster. And then quarter three, we're going to run ads. We're going to focus on scale Because once you know something's working, it's like putting gasoline on a campfire.
Speaker 1:You got to build the campfire first. Gasoline only works if there's a fire that exists. If there's no fire, well you're just wasting gasoline, you're just pouring on the ground. But once you've got that campfire going and it's a healthy, sustainable fire, what you can do, then and this should just excite you because a lot of people are doing this this is very undervalued in terms of a marketing approach or strategy.
Speaker 1:Not a lot of people are doing this. They're wasting time a lot on engagement marketing. They're not focused on direct response, conversion-based marketing. But if you start running ads, we're seeing some of the costs. We're seeing costs that we've never seen, at least in five years, in terms of affordability, like unbelievable.
Speaker 1:Because it's an auction block, right. So when you bid on, you're bidding on positioning in the newsfeed, or you're bidding on positioning in stories, and so when people aren't bidding on those positions, well, guess what happens If nobody shows up to the auction to buy a car. You show up and say 500 and you get a $5,000 car for 500 bucks. And that's what's happening with ads, because everybody's focused on the trends and the latest dances and the latest, this fad or whatever you know on on social media. And so there's nothing wrong with social media for building relationship and nurturing I would have you.
Speaker 1:But the big opportunity now, before and forever, is going to be the pros. The pros pay for ads. They just do pros buy ads, that's just do Pros buy ads. That's just what they do. But you can't just and you've probably heard that before, but guess what you didn't hear you need something working first before you run ads. You need a system of proven strategy working first before you just throw money at things. So maybe you've tried ads before you hired an agency or something, but they didn't know what was working and they don't know your business and they don't know the soul of your brand and they don't Know your customer. So they turn on ads and you just wasted 200 bucks and said I'm never doing that again, right?
Speaker 1:So in this particular example I would say Uh, analyze the traffic goals, okay, perfect. That's quarter one, quarter two. We're focused on conversions. Quarter three, we're going to run ads and then maybe quarter four. What we're going to do is we're going to say we're going to be, we're going to really prep and plan for the Black Friday promotional season. Right, we're going to go full promo mode. We're going to really figure out what that looks like, because we've now built our email list with our traffic. We're converting people like crazy. Our email has exploded. We're running ads, we're amplifying everything we're doing. We're growing our email list by thousands of people a month. Right, both from organic and paid. Now we're going to go big into promoting, and that could be Black Friday, that could be a launch, that could be whatever. Right, we're going to try to recuperate all of our efforts leading up to this and cash in, Because it's not impossible to have a six-figure Black Friday promotion.
Speaker 1:Our first Black Friday we made with very little email list, by the way, we made $20,000. First Black Friday we made with very little email list, by the way, we made $20,000. And that was huge for us at that time. It was huge, like we were just getting started and it basically paid our rent for, like basically almost the entire year. Our rent wasn't that much at that time, right? So, like you can bonus yourself. I mean, imagine what an extra 20 grand would do, right? It doesn't take that many people once you've been building that email list and you're sending out promotional type stuff. So that's what a year would look like for me. It could also say, okay, cool, all the efforts I'm putting in got me from $350,000. My goal was $500,000 for a year. I'm at $425,000.
Speaker 1:Great, well, let's try to slam dunk quarter four with a big promotional push and see if we can't get $75,000 in promo dollars, right. And then the next year, guess what? Now you're running into the next year where you say quarter one of the next year is going to be scaling our ads not just running ads, but scaling ads and then quarter two is going to be optimized conversions. And then quarter three is going to be heavy promo push. And then quarter four is going to be hiring and systems Right. See how we're like compounding efforts, working towards, like this overall big, big goal that we have, and we're not just saying aimlessly like stay consistent with content. Well, that doesn't mean anything. That's not specific, it's not actionable, it's not measurable, right. So set goals for yourself that are actually going to be things that you can achieve, because what happens is this and a lot of people get this wrong, and I really want to make sure people understand this Motivation doesn't spawn from nothingness.
Speaker 1:It spawns from momentum. When you, we flip this, we flip this, we think we're going to be motivated and thus we'll get momentum. We're waiting for that day when we're, when we're feeling motivated right, and maybe it comes once every 10 days and then boom, I'm getting momentum. That day I got a really productive day in, and then there's nine days in between where you weren't as productive or you didn't get as much momentum as you wanted to, because you haven't flipped that paradigm yet. That was the biggest mental game changer for me was realizing the most successful people on planet earth they focus on just showing up every day and realizing that you're not always gonna feel motivated. You're not always gonna wanna do that thing. You're not always going to feel motivated. You're not always going to want to do that thing. You're not always going to want to show up and create content. You're not always going to want to show up and focus on your numbers.
Speaker 1:No one likes doing this stuff, guys no one. No one likes to sit down and dig into a year's worth of data, looking over their website analytics, installing Hotjar, doing the arduous, tedious work. What we want to do is just create something fun on the internet. That's what we want to do. But ask yourself, is that leading to you achieving your goals? Is that leading to you hitting your revenue milestones that you know are possible? Is that leading to you achieving the goals and dreams you set out for the business when you started it? Because my guess is probably not, and that's not to be mean. This is truth and love, but this is how the big players and I know because I've spent a ton of money to work with these guys Kim and I both have invested a ton of money on coaching multiple six figures each. We've got PhD worth of expenses in learning this stuff, and that blew my mind when I realized these guys flip the paradigm momentum to motivation. The more they do, the more motivated they are. The more they win, the more they want to win. They trick themselves into becoming motivated and then what they do is they set themselves up to win, win. Win by setting achievable dopamine hit. Wins by breaking large abstract goals, big visions right, we've all those big visions and it feels like it's on the other side of the Grand Canyon. Okay, great.
Speaker 1:What does the next step look like? How do I get excited about going from 500 to a thousand people on my website? How do I get excited about going from 750 to a thousand people on my email list? How do I get excited about going from 750 to 1,000 people on my email list? How do I get excited about running a promotion and making $1,000? How do I get excited about running my first ad campaign that I'm getting sub $5 leads? Build things around that, but make sure and this is where the quarterly planning is so critical make sure that it's not about doing all the things. Sure that it's not about doing all the things.
Speaker 1:In fact, if you read the book the One Thing, gary Keller specifically says, being an entrepreneur means counterbalance and having to accept chaos in other areas of your life because you're prioritizing something else right now. You don't know what to prioritize until you actually have numbers. Otherwise, it's speculation. Speculation and I know because I've lived this one speculation will lead to you making the worst decisions you've ever made in your business life and will ever make in your business life. And the more you grow guess what? The more speculative decisions get costly.
Speaker 1:I was making speculative decisions, running multi-million dollar installation projects, only to turn and find out that out of our $200,000 contract we lost $35,000. Meaning I got paid 200, but realized at the end that we actually lost 35,000. Now imagine everybody else got paid and I have to absorb the loss there. Why? Because we didn't have a system track our numbers. So I was hoping and praying and speculating for the best and you get burned. So that day won't come. If right, you're not doing these things now and if you can, will it and pull the revenue lever to somehow will your way to millions of dollars, like we did in the first business, great, but you end up selling yourself to death, which is what basically we almost did by not knowing our numbers. So I know it sucks, but this is the time of year to do it right.
Speaker 1:Show up, get those numbers. What worked, what hasn't worked? Get those numbers what worked, what hasn't worked. Keep business simple. What worked, do more of that. Lay out those numbers so you know what worked and what didn't work. You're not just guessing about what worked and what didn't work. Focus in on how you increase, doing more of the things that worked. Prioritize those based off of what needs to have happened to reach the new goals that you set for yourself. Break that into quarters in order of importance. Set tasks and projects in that board relating to achieving that initiative right. Give the team a theme and then give them weekly tasks that everybody's now moving towards that quarterly theme, based off those initiatives. Now, based off those tasks. You do that and you will find, like our team found, that by May of last year the whole team's like it feels like we got more done in five months than we did all of last year.
Speaker 1:And you know what else happened? Everybody was more excited, everybody was pumped up, everybody was ready to rock and roll. Everybody was more invested in what we were doing than in any other time in the business. Why? Because we tricked them like we tricked ourselves. Because now their momentum was leading to motivation, because we were momentous as a company. Therefore, everybody was motivated. They were fired up because they were getting things done and everybody was on the same page. We were in cohesion. There wasn't. We're here, there and everywhere, everybody was working on the same thing. We were in cohesion. There wasn't. We're here, there and everywhere, everybody's working on the same thing Before you become a leader of many, you have to become a leader of one.
Speaker 1:Become a leader of yourself first. You might think I don't. I'm a soul producer, I don't need to do any of these things. Yes, you do. Yes, you do, because if you can do this for yourself, you're not just handing the parts to the car, somebody else to come put it together for you. You built the car and now you're just sharing the keys to have other people help you drive it right. So figure this out now and master this now.
Speaker 1:Don't look back when you have gotten to a certain point through pure energy, through pure willpower, where you're like oh my God, I'm sober and I need to hire somebody. And then you hire somebody like a VA, a virtual assistant, for those unfamiliar with that term and then guess what happens? That VA has no idea what to do. Why? Because you haven't built a system about what to do. They just have to know things intrinsically, with no experience. And then you say, oh well, hiring a VA doesn't work. I tried that already. You didn't set them up for success at all, and you didn't set yourself up for success either.
Speaker 1:And then so, a year from now, you end up right back where you are listening to a similar podcast like this one and saying this is gonna be the year, but there's no intentionality behind it. Again, hard to hear, I know, but it's truth in love and that's what we're here to give you guys, because this is legacy for us. Kim said this the other day this business is legacy for us. We know we can make our mark in the world by helping people like you succeed, because if you go, multiply, we're part of the genesis of multiplication in the world and that is a godly principle. So, you guys, winning is paramount to our legacy. So we're gonna tell you guys the truth in love, because this means something to us. You winning means something big to us, because we feel like we were called to do this type work. So lock in. This is the year.
Speaker 1:Don't wait for that dopamine hit of motivation in the morning. Create momentum that's going to lead you to be self-motivated right. Trick yourself into that, and that all starts with deriving these plans and going through the process of setting yourself up like the biggest players in entrepreneurship. Do so watch those two videos the one with the prosper plan that Kim just did, and then the one previously that on YouTube. I did. That actually gives you the template of everything I just talked about. It may be felt a little abstract or you've taken through a fire hose. I promise you know, when you get the structure in place and make it your own, it's going to feel a lot better. So we love and appreciate you guys and hope you got.
