Today, I’m so excited to share the Plan Your Best Week Ever template. I developed this because I saw the need from my clients who loved planning big things for their business but struggled to follow through.
Can you relate to that?
I know I can – us entrepreneurs are IDEA people. Many of us are great at the BIG IDEAS and the START of new projects but struggle to follow through to completion.
As I mentioned before – I realized one of the reasons my clients were struggling with self-accountability and followthrough is because they didn’t have their BIG ROCKS aka their biggest priorities right in front of them each and every day? so they were constantly getting distracted.
So I designed this planning template that I call Plan Your Best Week Ever to help keep the most important tasks right in front of you and track your progress.
Let’s start with the marketing section on the top left corner. We start each week by mapping out our simple marketing system – ATTRACT, ENGAGE, NURTURE, INVITE, DELIGHT.
This little system is so important to focus on each and every week in your business – because if you drop the ball and STOP MARKETING, you’ll find yourself in the feast or famine cycle in your business.
But if you have a system that makes it easy to always attract new potential clients towards your business, you’ll always have a steady flow of clients and cashflow.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Planning your marketing each week helps you avoid the feast or famine cycle.” quote=”Planning your marketing each week helps you avoid the feast or famine cycle.” theme=”style2″]
Your 5 Part Marketing Strategy
What are you doing to market your business and to sell your products, programs, or services? Let’s go through those really quickly so you know exactly what each of those pieces are.
1: Attract
Attract is all about going out there and getting in front of new audiences full of people who do not know who you are. This is getting the word out about your business.
Now ideally you’re getting the word out about your business in front of potential audiences that are actually a good fit for you. Not just random audiences. You’re actually getting in front of the right types of people.
What could this look like for you?
This could look like being a guest poster. Somebody who contributes articles and blog posts to other websites and blogs.
This could look like being featured as a special guest teacher or an interviewee on a podcast. This could look like doing public speaking and going out to speak in front of new audiences.
It could also look like publicity so going out there and trying to get opportunities to be on the radio, be on TV, be featured in local newspapers and magazines. Maybe you run Facebook ads or Google ads, something along those lines.
The goal of attract marketing is that it’s getting eyeballs to see your business.
2: Engage
Once you get in front of those new people you want to engage them. It doesn’t make sense to spend all that energy attracting new people to come through the door of your business or to land on your website if you don’t actually collect their information and start building that database of potential clients.
This doesn’t mean you just need any information. It means you’re probably going to get access to something like their email address. Now, if you have walked into a store recently and bought something … I know any time I go to buy clothes for my kids they always ask, “Hey, are you on our email list?”
They want to know that because they want to continue sending me things so that I’ll come back in the store. Same concept applies in your business.
Once they walk through your doors or your virtual doors, what are you doing to capture their contact information? Are you offering something so that you can continue to nurture that relationship?
In my business, if you go to my website I have a ton of resources that are available. All you have to do is enter your name and email address and then you get access to all sorts of templates and checklists and guides.
I’ve created as well as things like the Break Free From the Feast or Famine Cycle Masterclass and the Fired Up and Focused challenge. That’s what I’m talking about when I say engage.
What are you doing to build that contact database so that then you can go on the next stage of the marketing process?
3: Nurture
Many people, in especially the heart-centered ones, marketing is what you think of first. Nurture marketing is putting your message and your information out there in front of people who already know who you are.
They know who you are. They know what your business is about. It’s just building that relationship so that when they are ready to take that next step they know I can trust you.
What does nurture content look like?
For a lot of us it’s going to be things like your newsletter, your social media, your blog, your podcast. Anything you’re doing where you’re getting in front of those people on a regular basis to bring them back into your business or to build the relationship to where they are ready to say yes to working with you.
Those first three parts of the simple marketing system are pretty straightforward. Attract, engage, nurture. Get in front of new people.
You want to engage them, get their contact information so you can nurture them and continue to share great content information.
4: Invite
Then you want to invite them to work with you. This could look like having a free consult. It could be hosting a webinar. It could be hosting a workshop. It could be offering a specific package or program that you have. The invitation is where the sale actually takes place.
5: Delight
This is taking care of the people who have already signed up to work with you. I think this is so important and so many people just forget this part completely. But every single week I make sure I’m doing something to delight the people who have paid me and who have helped me to build this business.
I want to make sure I’m giving back so that could mean dropping a thank you note in the mail. It could be sending birthday cards out. It could be just giving a quick surprise check-in call to some of your clients. It could be jumping on a quick Q & A call with people in your group program.
What are you doing to delight the people who have already signed up to work with you?
Once you sit down and think about this and every single week you write what you’re doing in these different five parts of your marketing strategy out you will see very quickly whether or not what you’re doing is impacting your bottom line.
You might notice as you start playing with the Plan Your Best Week Ever format that these are things that you don’t necessarily need to change every single week. You might have things that are very very consistent and maybe you focus on them for a month at a time.
For example, maybe your attract strategy you’re choosing for this month is going to be guest posting. Every week your goal is to submit one guest post to a new website. You’re engage strategy is a special irresistible free offer that you’ve created.
Maybe it’s a free guide to the topic you’ve been writing all these guest posts about and your goal is to send those guest post traffic people to this free guide you’ve created. Then in your nurture content, you’re also writing blog posts and newsletters about that big overall topic area.
Then your goal is to get those people, whether they’re coming to you from your guest post articles or from your existing community, you’ve been talking about the same topic everywhere, then you’re going to invite them into your product, program, or service that is focused on that topic.
These things should all flow together and I would say generally over a month everything should be working really cohesively together. I make sure that I write those things down because I want to make sure again that the ball doesn’t get dropped.
Even when things are going good in my business I want to make sure I’m doing the work to make sure that I’ve always got new potential clients coming in the door.
Your Top Three
This is the next key piece of the Plan Your Best Week Ever. If you’ve seen my video on the Big Rocks you know that I recommend choosing three big projects to focus on every 90 days.
Why just three? Because too many entrepreneurs have way too many unfinished projects. We are great at the ideas. We are great at starting the things. Not so great at finishing the things.
We are going to get good at finishing the projects. You choose your three core projects for your next 90 days and then you reverse engineer them.
You break them down into the core tasks that are going to help you achieve that project. Those become your top three. Your top three should align with your big projects you’re working on over the next 90 days.
There might be one or two things that pop up outside of that but you really want to make sure that everything you are doing in your business is moving you in the same direction directly towards your goals.
Your top three are the biggest tasks you are going to get accomplished this week. Come hell or high water, you’re going to get these things done.
I can tell you there is a big difference in my clients, between the people who get this concept and they really take off on their business and those who struggle with this concept and as a result the things in their top three kind of travel week to week to week with them or they change week to week to week.
They’re not focused and they’re not headed in a clear direction. You want to make sure that these things are getting done every single week. Your goal is to cross off every one of your top three and to not let it travel to the next week.
How do you do that?
Make sure the things you’re choosing for your top three are check-off-able tasks.
They need to be specific and clear. If they are a whole project it’s going to be pretty darn impossible to cross it off in the midst of all the other things you’re working on in your business. And you want to make sure that as you’re choosing your top three, these are things you actually have time for this week and you’re blocking time for them this week.
For example, this week when I’m recording this week’s podcast, one of my top three was to design and write all the information for the download that goes along with this episode. I have that as part of my top three. It was a big thing I needed to get accomplished and it had to happen this week. I’m not going to let it travel to next week.
Self-Care
This came into the Plan Your Best Week Ever because I am the type of person who if I don’t remind myself to drink a glass of water, I will not drink a glass of water. If I don’t remind myself to get up and take a walk, I will sit at my desk for eight hours straight.
I chose three simple things to fill in in the little self-care section of Plan Your Best Week Ever. For me it’s, the first thing is go to the gym or take a long walk, so an hour walk in my neighborhood. I have to do one of those things. To drink enough water and to go to bed by 10:00.
Every morning I sit down and I check off, I write a little tick mark if I accomplished that the day before. It’s so incredibly simple to do this. Just choose two or three things that you want to do to take care of yourself and check off each day that you do them. I just thought I was so important for myself personally so hopefully that will help you as well.
Your Entrepreneur Scorecard
This is about actually giving yourself a score and tracking what you’re doing to see if you are focused on high-value, high-impact work in your business.
Too often us entrepreneurs, we’re wearing all the hats and I get that. It can be so overwhelming. You have so much that you have to do on your own. Especially if you’re a sole entrepreneur you don’t have a team yet.
And what can often happen is you find yourself spending most of your days in the busy work, in the minutia of your business instead of doing the high-value work that will start moving your business forward.
What does that look like?
When you download the printable that goes along with this I’m going to include something called the Entrepreneur Scorecard. This is not something I came up with. This is something a lot of people have talked about all over the place, including Perry Marshall wrote about it in the book 80/20 Sales and Marketing.
Basically, the concept of the entrepreneur scorecard is you give everything a dollar amount. It’s not just that you track your time, you give each thing that you’re working on, each type of task, a specific value.
There are $10 tasks, $100 tasks, $1000 tasks, and $10,000 tasks. As you go through your week, you want to note in your Plan Your Best Week Ever what you are working on and then give it a value.
At the end of the day, you want to add it all up and figure out how much value did you add to your business. What does that look like?
I’m going to give you the entrepreneur scorecard and it includes examples of the types of tasks in each of these categories.
$10 an hour tasks include:
- managing your inbox
- doing social media
- invoicing
- billing
- scheduling
- tweaking your website
- website maintenance
- bookkeeping
These are tasks that ideally in hopefully the not too distant future, you’ll be able to pass off to an assistant or a team member or just outsource so that you’re not spending your time and energy in these busy work types of tasks.
$100 an hour tasks include:
- writing blog posts
- writing Facebook ads
- project management
- writing newsletters
- customer follow up
- copy writing
- designing graphics
- editing podcasts.
These are things that are skilled work. They do take you actually knowing how to do these things. But the truth is, you could probably also outsource these at some point.
Most of these types of tasks are things that thankfully I’ve been able to build a team to help me with but I’ll tell you, it took a long time to get there. There were many many many years where I was doing all of this, all on my own.
Then we get to $1000 and $10000 an hour tasks.
These are the thousand dollar and ten thousand dollar an hour tasks. Thousand dollar an hour tasks are going to be directly related to sales and marketing and new business development.
Ten thousand dollar an hour tasks, these are all about actually doing the sales. Getting something out there in front of a bigger audience that can start really scaling your business.
Now I will tell you most people start off with a lot of their time and energy being spent in the ten to a hundred dollar task areas. And that’s okay.
We all start there and it is not possible to just say, “You know what, I’m not going to invoice people this month.” These are things that have to happen. We don’t have a choice with that.
We can streamline how much time we’re spending there and quickly start to get support or buy tools and systems that will help us minimize those as much as possible.
The goal is to start paying attention to the value you add to your business each and every day so that at the end of the week you are adding enough value to start moving you towards your goals.
Which brings me to the final piece when it comes to planning your best week ever and that is figuring out the goal value you need to add to your business.
Give Yourself a Weekly Entrepreneur Score
This is about your sweat equity. It’s about giving yourself a way to measure what you’re doing. It’s about giving yourself a score. That’s why it’s called an entrepreneur scorecard.
If your goal score for the end of the week is set at let’s say five thousand dollars of value added to your business then at the end of the week you want to be able to fill in that you actually generated or you put in five thousand dollars worth of value into your business by focusing on the higher value tasks.
Often that will happen simply by focusing on your top three first because those types of tasks are going to be higher value.
How do you come up with that goal value you need to be adding to your business each and every week?
It doesn’t need to be just some arbitrary number you pull out of thin air. The simplest way to come up with this, and this is seriously the simplest way I know to come up with this weekly goal value, your weekly goal scorecard here, is to take your goal income and then divide it by 50.
50 is because I am assuming you’re going to work about 50 weeks this year. Now you might decide to work less than that. That’s fine. Just take your goal income and divide it by however many weeks you plan to work.
If you plan to take four weeks a year off of total vacation, fine. Then do your goal income divided by 48. Think through that and just make that work for you.
Let’s say that your goal income is to generate a hundred thousand dollars in revenue this year. Dividing that by 50 working weeks gives you a goal scorecard of two thousand dollars of value a week. Now if you are aiming at fifty thousand dollars a year of revenue and you’re working 50 weeks this year then your goal is a thousand dollars of value a week.
As you start to work towards these goals, this is about holding yourself accountable and doing the high value work.
[clickToTweet tweet=”You will never build a six-figure business if your time is spent on $10 tasks.” quote=”You will never build a six-figure business if your time is spent on $10 tasks.” theme=”style2″]
This is a real way to start really tracking your progress and really seeing for yourself if you are putting in the effort you need to be putting in your business.
If you’re investing your time and energy in the right areas in your business in order to achieve your goals. I encourage you to go download the Plan Your Best Week Ever template.
It’s going to help you to see exactly what I’ve been talking about first. You’re going to get examples of the entrepreneur scorecard and what types of tasks fall under what dollar amount and will help you to start implementing this into your business.
Download it, print it out, use it for the next week and let me know how it goes for you in your business. And if you do take this up, if you do play with this and see how it works for you, snap a picture of it and share it with me on social media.
Tag me on Instagram, tag me on Facebook. If you’re in my Fired Up and Focused group post the photo there. I want to see what you’re working on and how it’s working for you.
Plan Your Best Week Ever!
Ready to get the most important things DONE each week?
Download your weekly planning template - designed especially for entrepreneurs! Get your free workbook now!