23. Making 2025 Your Best Year Yet

Creating a Roadmap for Success: Making 2025 Your Best Year Yet

In this final season opener of the KBB Unstoppable Business Owner podcast, host Kevin D Bannister discusses strategies to make 2025 your best year yet.

The episode introduces the MAP framework—a three-step process to measure your current standing, align your goals with your strategy, and prioritise actions for successful execution.

The discussion covers the importance of strategic planning to avoid reactive cycles and highlights the short and long-term consequences of failing to plan effectively.

With insights into overcoming common business challenges, setting SMART goals, and maintaining focus through 90-day action plans, Kevin provides actionable steps for business growth and success.

Listeners are encouraged to send in questions and join a December workshop for Making 2025 Your Best Year Yet.

Questions - Submit them here

Workshop - Attend the "Making 2025 Your Best Year Yet" workshop here
 

The KBB Unstoppable Business Owner podcast is sponsored by KBN - Kitchens & Bathrooms News THE business magazine for kitchen and bathroom professionals.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of The KBB Unstoppable Business Owner Podcast! If you found it valuable, please consider rating and reviewing our podcast on your favourite platform. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners like you. Don’t forget to share this episode with your friends and colleagues to spread the word!

How to Leave a Review:

• Apple Podcasts: Scroll to the bottom of the podcast page, tap "Write a Review," select your rating, and write your feedback.
• Spotify: Tap the star icon under the podcast title on the main show page.

When you are ready here are 3 ways you can get more help/support:

1. Join our workshop on How To Become An Unstoppable Business Owner.
2. Download "The KBB Unstoppable Guide" and put an end to being overworked, low fees, and finally be paid what you’re worth, starting today…
3. Connect with me on LinkedIn - send me a message and say hi, I would love to find out more about you and what kind of support you may need. Connect here
...

Transcript

Kevin D Bannister 0:15

We're back. It felt so odd not doing a podcast for last week, so we're back for a final season before the end of the year. We're diving into a topic that is on everybody's mind as we approach the end of the year, how to make 2025 your best year yet. Now, whether you're a business owner looking to grow, a professional aiming to hit new milestones, or someone Just striving for clarity in your goals. Today's episode is all around creating a road map for success. We're going to break it down step by step, giving you the tools and the strategies you need to hit the ground running. This whole season is going to be all around getting you ready for 2025, whether that's finance, marketing, people, your team, and everything in between. We're going to be looking at bringing in some guests to offer their expertise and making sure you're ready for 2025. We'll explore. The challenges many business owners face at this time of the year, the conquests of staying stuck in the same cycle. We're going to be going for a proven framework that will help you make meaningful progress in 2025. So grab a coffee, get comfortable and let's jump in. Let's start by talking about the problem. It's the end of the year and for so many business owners. This time is both exciting but also stressful. On one hand, you're looking forward to the fresh start. On the other, you might be feeling like you're carrying the weight of unresolved issues and challenges from the past year. Sound familiar? You're not alone. Studies show that 60 percent of small business owners struggle to create and stick to a structured plan for long term success. The result, they spend most of their time reacting to problems instead of. Actually proactively building their business. Maybe you're feeling this right now. Maybe 2024 didn't go as planned. Perhaps you didn't hit your financial targets or all your day to day operations kept pulling you away from the bigger picture. It's easy to fall into a cycle, firefighting, tackling one issue after another. And before you know it, another year has passed with little to show for it. This lack of strategic focus has real consequences, which brings us to the next segment. What happens when we don't address this problem? Well, Let's talk about this in the short term and the long term consequences. In the short term, you're going to stay stuck in a reactive cycle, meaning you're going to miss opportunities because without a clear goal or plan, you're likely to overlook chances to grow, innovate or build. And you're also going to end up in some sort of crisis management. Instead of building for the future, you're constantly putting out fires, which leaves you exhausted and unmotivated. Now, let's look at the long term impact. Failing to plan for the future leads to a few things. It's going to first lead to financial instability. You're going to have inconsistent cash flow and ineffective operations are just going to become the norm. You'll probably have. Own a burnout running on empty, meaning that effectively you're not leading anymore. And the more you try, the more you feel stressed and fatigued. Then you're probably going to stall in your growth. Businesses that don't evolve fall behind, especially in the competitive markets that we live in now. The good news is that there is a way out of this cycle. So as I said, How do we turn 2025 into your best year yet? The answer initially lies in the map framework. Now, this is just a three step process that I use with my clients to help them achieve the results that they truly want. And don't worry, I'm going to share it with you. So first, we want to be looking to measure where you stand. The first step in all of this is to understand where you actually are at the moment, don't just Make the assumption, you know, actually understand where you are. Take a deep dive into your business's performance. And I'm not just talking about from a financial point that is key, but also from the team dynamics, operational processes and your market positioning, who you marketing to think of this as setting the foundations. You can't build a skyscraper without knowing the strength of the ground that is built beneath it. Similarly. You can't plan for growth without knowing where you currently stand, which leads you into the second step, which is aligning your goals with your strategy. Once you've measured where you are, it's then time to look at setting that destination. This step is about creating clear, actionable goals and aligning them with longterm vision. Here's the key. All goals should be SMART goals. I'm sure you've heard of this, but I'll just quickly run through it being that they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound. For example, Instead of saying, I want to grow my business, set a goal more along the lines of I want to increase our net profit by 15 percent by the end of Q4 of 2025. Once you can do this, you will start aligning your goals with strategies. This is going to ensure you're not just wishing for success. You're actively planning for it. And the final step where the magic happens is breaking your strategy into those manageable chunks and prioritising the most impactful steps and executing them consistently. I always recommend using a 90 day action plan. This will help you keep your focus sharp and it allows you to measure progress in a tangible way. At the start of each quarter, identify your top three priorities, assign clear tasks and deadlines to each priority and make sure everyone On your team is aligned with this. You should be using your team in the same way so that they know what you're looking to achieve. To make this easier to remember, let me just explain this in a metaphor. Think about your business as the car, and the map framework is your GPS. When we're looking at measuring where you stand, your GPS pinpoints exactly where you are, so your current location. Without knowing where you are, you can't plan your route. When we look at aligning your goals with strategy, this is where we set the destination and map out the optimal route. Then when we're looking to prioritise and execute, what we're looking at is these are the turn by turn directions that you follow, avoiding any mistakes. adjusting for detours and keeping you moving forward. Just like a GPS guides you from your destination. The map framework ensures that you stay on course and avoid getting lost in the day to day chaos of running a business. Now, I want you to remember that success isn't luck. It's a plan in action by adopting the map framework, you can turn 2025 into the year you've always envisioned. Now. The map framework is just the stars. What you're looking at here is the bare bones of what you at least need to do at the bare minimum. We're going to be diving into areas that will assist you in pulling this all together, but also providing you with the kind of insights that you need to one, understand where you are and who you market to, but also where you actually want to go. When you've got clarity, it will take away the fear. So this season is all going to be around this. We're going to be looking at trends and everything else I've mentioned. But what I also want to ask is whether or not you have any specific questions. Do you have anything that you think we should be covering to help you, but also others?

Kevin D Bannister (2) 8:21

Send in your questions and we will give you a shout out when it comes to the episode. If you prefer not, don't worry, we won't.

Kevin D Bannister 8:28

I think it would be really helpful for everyone to help everyone make 2025. the best year yet. If you're looking to get really serious with regards to making 2025 your best year yet, I am going to be running a workshop on this, uh, in mid December. So I will leave a link in the show notes. If you want to grab that, you can have a look at it and look to register and come on. We will be working through all the detail. The idea being that we will have put a lot of content out to help you guys already, but the session will be the thing that we can use with you. And I can guide you in making sure you've got this all buttoned up for 2025. As always, thanks for tuning in. I'm Kevin D Bannister and you've been listening to the KBB Unstoppable Business Owner podcast.