Nine reasons you need a 12-month plan to succeed

As self-employed business owners we want freedom and flexibility, right? So why on earth would we restrict ourselves by creating a plan for the year, when we could just go with the flow?

That’s a natural thought process when you’re first starting out, isn’t it? And whilst you’re figuring stuff out, perhaps it doesn’t matter too much. After all, when you’re still working out your offers and the marketing activities that work for you, there’d be little point planning out your year. It’s far better to experiment and try things on for size.

But there comes a point when being too loosey-goosy starts to cause problems. When not having a plan leaves you floundering about, not quite sure where to focus your attention, spreading yourself too thin and ultimately not making the progress you know you’re capable of.

If you’re starting to feel the pain of winging it and wondering if having a plan would help, here are nine reasons why a 12-month plan can help you succeed.

1. You want to feel purposeful

Without a plan it’s easy to feel that you’re bouncing around all over the place, not fully in control of what’s going on and dealing with whatever’s in front of you in the moment.

That’s no way to run a successful business, is it?

When you have a plan that’s been carefully thought through and is designed with YOUR version of success in mind, you can see yourself moving forward with purpose. You’ll know what you’re doing when, and why, and will see yourself making purposeful progress towards your goals.

2. You have lots of different projects you want to make happen over the next year

Solo business owners rarely have just one thing they want to be working on during any 12-month period. Maybe you want to start a YouTube channel, run an in-person event, create a new free workshop, launch a new offer, set up an affiliate programme or join a new networking group.

When there’s lots you want to do, it’s tempting to want to do it all NOW. Creating a plan for the year helps you see you have plenty of time. Not everything needs to happen immediately. In fact, if you try and do everything now, you probably won’t finish any of it.

Mapping out your year allows you to focus on – and FINISH – one or two projects at a time, so you can make a bigger impact.

3. You’re offering different things at different times

Do you have more than one thing to offer your audience? Perhaps you work with people one-to-one, and you also run group programmes and free workshops from time to time?

Taking a moment to consider how those things fit together and when you want to promote and delivery them, means you’ll always know where to focus your energy and what to focus on when.

Which leads us nicely on to…

4. You want to be strategic about your content creation

As well as mapping out what you’re doing, you can use your 12-month plan to inform what you’re talking about in your emails and across your socials throughout the year. If you try talking about everything all at once, not only will you get in a muddle, you also risk confusing your audience. Knowing what you’re offering when allows you to be much more strategic about the content you’re creating. When you have a plan, you’ll be able to guide prospective clients towards working with you in a clear, organic way.

5. You want to make sure you have money coming in across the year

Another great thing about having a 12-month plan is that you can map out exactly when you’ll be bringing income into your business. This is particularly helpful if you have a launch model or run one-off paid online or in-person events. Having this mapped out in front of you for a whole year allows you to see when you can expect an injection of income into your business.

If you see a big gap where you’re not generating any new income for a while, you get to choose – is that ok, or do you want to offer something to tide you over?

6. You don’t want to create bottlenecks where everything is happening at once

It’s easily done, isn’t it? You’re creating and launching a new thing, but you’ve also said yes to speaking gigs that mean you’re away from your desk for three days. Or talking about a new offer whilst networking means lots of people booking discovery calls when your diary is already full. Not to mention the podcast interviews you booked when you thought things would be quiet, and the delivery needed for the clients you’re already working with.

It's a lot. And it’s all happening at once. If only you’d had a 12-month plan so you could see that this was going to be such a busy month… you’d never have said yes to all these extra things! 😉

7. You want to focus on the thing in front of you without fretting about everything else

When you have loads of projects you want to be working on and they’re dotted around in notebooks, on one long list, or rattling around in your head, it’s difficult to focus on what needs doing in that moment. You’re always wondering if you should be working on something else. What if you forget about that brilliant idea you had, and never get round to making it happen?

By taking time to decide when you’re going to work on the projects that are important to you, and then putting that in your plan for the year, it’s suddenly so much easier to focus on what’s in front of you. You can rest easy, knowing your plan will remind you of those other brilliant projects when the time is right.

8. You want to stop over-committing yourself

When you’re growing a business and a new opportunity crosses your path, saying yes feels like the right thing to do, doesn’t it? After all, you want more people to know about you. You need the money. You want to help. But hands up if you’ve ever said yes to something and then regretted it later on. Either because it wasn’t a good fit, or you already had too much on your plate.

The great thing about having a clear, visual plan for the year is that you can see where the gaps are. You know when things are busy, and when you might have a little more breathing room. The next time someone asks you to promote their thing to your audience, you’ll be able to see how that fits in with your own promotion schedule. And if someone invites you to a conference that’ll wipe out half your week, you can see the impact that might have on the other things you’d planned to do. You might still choose to say yes to those opportunities, but now you’ll be doing so with intention, and a willingness to let go of something else to make room.

9. You want to take time off (and actually enjoy it)

When you bounce from month to month without a plan, it becomes increasingly difficult to take time off. You might have a vague sense that you want to take a break in October, but clients book themselves into your diary, you say yes to doing an Instagram Live with a pal on the one day you had nothing else booked in, you promise a client you’ll get something over to them by the end of the month. Before you know it, you’re slogging your guts out all the way to Christmas.

When your plan includes time off, school holidays and the stuff you want to do for fun, you can make sure you’re not running a launch in the middle of half-term, or scheduling calls for your membership every single week of the year. You’ll also have more time to schedule emails to your list, let your clients know you’re going away, and brief your team. And lo and behold, you’re enjoying your time away, instead of stressing about all the things that didn’t get done.

Making sure your plan works for you

I hope it goes without saying that simply having a plan is not enough!

Your 12-month plan will only work for you if you work with it.

You need to look at your plan often, so it informs your actions month to month, week to week and day to day.

But remember - your plan is not fixed in stone. You should see it as a work in progress; created using your best thinking on the day you made it, and able to change as things change around you (which they will).

In my world, not following your plan perfectly doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It just means you get to learn, tweak and adjust. When you cultivate a kinder relationship with your plan – rather than using it as a stick to beat yourself with – that’s when the magic happens!

What next?

If you’re starting to realise that having a plan will help you succeed, but you’ve tried planning before and it hasn’t worked, head over to this blog where I explain what makes planning with me different (and why it works).