Why Adaptable Business Systems Beat Uncertainty

I am back today with another brand new episode. And I think this one is going to be incredibly timely for a lot of small business owners, because right now I'm hearing from so many small business owners that they had made their plans at the end of 2024. As we all do, we set our goals for the new year.

We have big, ambitious things that we want to do, but right now at the time that I'm recording this, at the end of February 2025, it just feels like a very unpredictable time. And when things are very unpredictable, when there are new headlines hitting our feed every single minute, it feels like it can be really hard to stick to the plan.

And it can be even harder if you're like some of my clients and community members who have reached out to me and shared, "What I had planned, I just don't have the bandwidth or the capacity to do right now. I don't have the energy. I'm feeling very drained. I'm very much feeling overwhelmed by what's happening in the world," or you're not getting the response that you had hoped.

I'm hearing from quite a few people that their pipeline is dried up a little bit, that they're feeling like things that they were promoting that previously sold very well are now not selling as well. And I want to remind everybody that all of us are going through this together. No one has a perfect answer, including myself.

I am not the only person here who's navigating this alongside of you. We are going through this time together, but because I have been in entrepreneurship for 18 years now, since 2008 to today, that's a long time. And I can tell you that I have navigated several ups and downs. I have navigated a lot of periods of uncertainty.

And the good news is they tend to pass. We get through it. We end up on the other side of it. And while we're in it, while there's a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot going on in the world that is completely out of our control, the good news is there is a lot that we do have control over as small business owners.

So that's why I want to talk about how do you plan when the world is unpredictable, when it feels uncertain, when new things are popping up every single day in the news. How do you navigate that? Well, you can see I'm looking down at my laptop here because I have a whole process for this. And if you've attended one of our CEO Retreats, then you have been introduced to a lot of this process.

And the reason I designed our 90 day CEO process in the way that I did is because there is one thing I know absolutely for sure that is true for every single entrepreneur. And that is the only constant is change. Things are always going to be changing. The world is always going to be changing. The economy is always going to be changing.

Technology is always going to be changing. The ways that we can grow and move our business through the world is always going to be changing. Our people, our community is going to be changing. And if we don't learn how to adapt to the change, then we're always going to find ourselves in these situations where we feel like we have no control over our business.

So today we're going to get grounded and I'm going to walk you through some of our 90 day CEO planning process, because really understanding this and learning how to bring it into your business is going to help you build that skill set that all CEOs need to have, which is the ability to adapt and adjust.

If we have a plan that only works if all of the circumstances are perfect, then we will not be in business for very long. Because there's never going to be a time when all the circumstances are perfect. Where the news cycle is quiet, where there's not a ton going on, where you don't have any competitors talking about things at the same time.

The reality is, every time we go out there to talk about our business, or to reach out to our communities, we are going to be facing uncertainty. And for you as the CEO, one of the most important skill sets is to learn how to navigate that, right? How to navigate the ups and downs. So let's talk about the first thing that I remind all of my clients.

## Stop Starting Over

The first thing that I remind all of my clients is to stop starting over. Stop starting over. This is one of the biggest planning mistakes I see entrepreneurs making. Every single time we host a CEO Retreat or every single time I sit down and talk with them about their goals. And that's because we have been taught goal setting from a completely different perspective than entrepreneurs and small business owners need.

Most of us were taught goal setting as a way to come up with new things we want to achieve, new things we want to do, new things we want to accomplish. And there's a key piece here. They're all new. So if you're sitting down and all of your goals are new things for your business, then that means you're always in that startup stage.

Even if your business is established, if every time you're coming up with new goals, you're coming up with new programs, entirely new marketing strategies, entirely new sales strategies, all of that is new, which means you're doing the hardest part of the work over and over and over again. And long term, not only is that not sustainable, but it means you're constantly testing and trying out new things to see what works and what doesn't work.

So hopefully this is starting to really resonate here and you're realizing, okay, I'm actually making my work harder. Because every time I come up with new goals, whether it's for the quarter or the year or the next five years, if it's all new things, then you're not building momentum off of the things that have worked and that have helped you grow your business so far.

## Double Down on What Works

So what do we need to do instead? We need to remember to double down on what works. Double down on what works. And here's the thing I want you to really keep in mind about this. Every entrepreneur you follow who has had really amazing success, they talk about the same things over and over and over again.

They aren't just launching something one time or talking about a topic one time, and that's it. I think about Brene Brown when I think about this concept. I think a lot of us get tired of hearing ourselves speak. We feel like we're saying the same things again and again, but we forget that people need to hear that over and over and over again for it to stick.

So if you watched Brene Brown really come to prominence in the 2010s, you know that she had her famous TED talk on vulnerability, but then she went around and talked about vulnerability over and over and over again, she stayed on message and she went around speaking at different conferences, speaking on different podcasts, talking to as many people as possible.

And when her book came out, it was all about this message that she had been on for years at that point. And so this is something that we often forget. We often feel like if the message doesn't take off right away, it's the wrong message. If the marketing strategy doesn't take off right away, it's the wrong marketing strategy or sales strategy or whatever.

I want to remind you that it takes usually about three to six months to even get in the data to tell you if something is working or not. So if you're putting in place a new marketing strategy or a new sales strategy or launching a new offer, and you're not really giving it a chance to work and in three or six months, if you haven't been collecting the data and looking at what's happening, if you just change what you're doing altogether, you're basically leaving right before you were about to start building momentum.

## Build Assets in Your Business

So we have to stop starting over, and we have to start doubling down on what works. Speaking of doubling down on what works, the second big thing here is to build assets in your business. So what do I mean by an asset? Well, an asset is something where you've done the hard work up front to create it. And I like to say, this is like you've done 80 percent of the hard work up front to create this thing.

And once it's created, then all you have to do is go out there and promote it over and over and over again. You want to be able to rinse and repeat that particular asset. So I have a ton of assets in my business and if you've been around long enough, you've heard me talk about several of them. So let me give you a couple of examples.

The first is the Fired Up and Focus Challenge. This was a free productivity challenge that I created in 2014. And I remember I created it right when I was about to do the biggest promotion for my signature offer at that point. And I really tapped in and listened to what my audience, my community was telling me.

They were like, "I don't have enough time or energy to do all the things that need to get done. How do I stay focused, stay productive, and stay doing the things that actually move the needle in my business." So the Fired Up In Focus Challenge was born. Well, once I launched that, the initial 28 day challenge, which by the way is insane and I wouldn't recommend a 28 day challenge to anyone.

But what had happened was I had created a ton of content that I continue to share over and over and over again to my community. So in over 10 years now, we have taken the Fired Up In Focus challenge. We took the original challenge, took all of the transcripts and had it edited into a book. You can go buy that book on Amazon and I actually just went and looked. We had like hundreds of reviews of that book. And it's something that I created once. I was able to repurpose and maximize again.

I also used the Fired Up in Focus Challenge, the original one, the full 28 day one, to launch this podcast in 2015, I think the year was. So I was able to take that asset and reuse it again and again.

And probably the most important part of it is I was able to take that asset and make it better over time. The first time I launched it, like I said, I did it 28 days. I really didn't know what I was getting into. At the time, no one was doing free challenges as a way to grow their audience and grow their community.

So I didn't really have any examples to look from. I was totally winging it when I came up with the first round. But over time, I realized things like, people weren't following through the whole 28 days. Maybe it was a little too long. And so I cut it back to 10 days. And I watched the open rates and the engagement rates.

And I listened to feedback. And I listened to the survey responses. And then we decided to really shorten it up even more to just five days. And so now you can still get the entire Fired Up In Focus challenge. In fact, I just rerecorded it for 2025. But because this is an asset that I built over 10 years ago, I now have leveraged that content into a podcast, into a book, into speaking opportunities.

I speak on all of the individual topics from that podcast, from the challenge all of the time. And this is something that I still use today. It's still one of the top performing ways that I can grow my audience. So I want you to think about that. What do you have that was popular that you created once and you saw some initial success with, but maybe you didn't double down on it.

Maybe you need to go back and you need to review your data, see where you can optimize it, see where you can improve the experience, see where you can do a better job connecting that into the next step to work with you. I did the same thing with the Plan Your Best Year Ever Challenge. I created that one.

Of course, challenges have tended to work pretty well for me, but I created that one originally in 2017. And when I look back on this challenge, we now have run that Plan Your Best Year Challenge every year since 2017 at the end of the year. I usually launch it at the end of October, beginning of November.

And this is something that people look forward to. It has become a big community builder for my audience, but it also tees people up perfectly to be ready to attend the CEO Retreat. So these are assets I have built in my business. These are marketing assets. They fit into that engage part of our client growth engine framework.

So there's attract, engage, nurture, invite, delight. If you've been around for a while, you've heard me talk about that, but these challenges are perfect for that engage piece. They are incredibly powerful. They share some of my best pieces of content and they help people accelerate that know, like, and trust relationship building.

So that they're excited to find out about the next step to work with me. And every next step to work with me is also an asset. If you have been around for a while, you know that I have been running the programs I've been running for years. The CEO Retreat I launched in 2018. And I actually was just looking through, because every year we do go through and we update things.

We do little refinements, we do little tweaks, we make the delivery even better. So this past year I went through and I was updating the workbook. I was zhuzhing up some of the slides because now I've also been training people how to deliver the CEO Retreat as part of our 90 day CEO certified professionals.

So I really had to make sure I had all of the thoughts that were in my head dialed in and documented for them. But this process of delivering and then refining and optimizing the CEO Retreat has led me to host. I do one every quarter. I do one that's both in person and virtually. And we have those so dialed in that it takes very little effort for me to sell the CEO Retreat.

It takes very little effort for me to run the CEO Retreat. I could literally show up and run the CEO Retreat at the drop of a hat because we are so dialed into it. And this offer has stood the test of time for my business. So what do I want you to take away from this? Don't just launch something once.

And then think, okay, that was great. Let me go find something new. Think about offers just like your marketing, just like your sales. Think about an asset that can be used again and again and again in your business. Now I happen to know because I work with a ton of service based clients who are offering some sort of transformation to their clients and those transformations all are a journey that require both some education and some coaching, some accountability.

And it also requires people to have that follow up to encourage them to really step into that next level that they're trying to go after, whether it's in their relationships or their parenting or their personal health or their mental health, whatever it is that you do. If you are helping people on a transformational journey, you might want to be thinking about how can I build my marketing.

How can I build my sales? How can I build the offers that I have so that they really help people through the life cycle of that transformational journey? Because that's where you're going to get people who come back to you again and again and again. And that is what we have seen for the CEO Retreat.

People are often surprised when I share, I have people who have attended dozens of CEO Retreats. They come to one and they start to understand this 90 day CEO planning process that's all about doubling down on what works and building assets building systems that you can rinse and repeat. And so the first time they come to this retreat it all starts to click into place and they start to see how what they have can fit into this framework and then the next one and the one after that things start locking into place. And that's where they start getting the momentum.

So I share this because each time you launch something that you've already created, you have an opportunity not to have to start from scratch, but to just do little adjustments.

So currently we are talking about the upcoming CEO Retreat. It's coming up in March and we have an early bird period to sign up and save 200 for the CEO Retreat. I also added a special bonus in where you can get our marketing without social media training that I did just earlier this month. And I'm adding that.

Because it's super relevant right now, because right now my community is wanting to back off of social media a bit. And I understand, I totally get it. So I wanted to be able to offer that as an additional bonus. Offering something I've already created as a bonus is such an easy way to really upgrade.

The offer in this time period, I also took a little bit of time to rewrite like our sales emails to make sure that they were relevant because the message might need to change sometimes right now is a perfect example right now, as you're getting messages from me about the CEO Retreat. I'm talking a lot about how to stay grounded in your leadership, how to make things easier, more streamlined in your business.

And that is an important message for right now at this particular time. Now, when we start promoting the next CEO Retreat, I might have to judge the message a little bit more because the world will have changed. The climate will have changed. Things will need to be as relevant as possible. But because I have these assets already built out, I already have.

Sales emails. I already have social media. I already have a sales page. I already have all of the big pieces of the puzzle in place because I built the asset first. And now each time it's time for me to go promote it again, I can just spend like a 20 percent of my time zhuzhing it, making it relevant, updating the message, and making sure that it's really going to land for the people in my audience.

So if you have something in place in your business already, that is working, that's getting results for your clients, but you're understanding right now, based on conversation with your community, that maybe the needs are changed. The conversation has changed. You need to add just a little bit, something to the messaging to get it out there.

Do that instead of trying to create a whole new solution.

## Embrace Rinse and Repeat Systems

The third thing I want you to think about is embracing rinse and repeat systems. Rinse and repeat is something you will hear me say all of the time. And it's because when you build these rinse and repeat systems, they became automatic. They become easier.

They just become kind of your default setting. The reason I love systems so much is they make it easier to do the things that help you show up and be your best and that help you to run your business to the best of your ability. One thing that I heard from James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, is that we do not default to the level of our habits.

We default to the level of our systems. And that really hit me because a lot of us had these aspirational habits that we put in place, but they're really hard to maintain unless we have a clear system in place. So we have to make sure we're putting the system in place that starts to automate some of this, or that frees up the mental load that goes into building those habits systems are incredibly powerful.

So if you can think about how can I create more rinse and repeat systems for myself and my business, then I can almost guarantee that things are going to go a lot easier, especially when there's times of uncertainty in your life or in your business. So I shared in a previous episode that 2024 was a really, really hard year for me on the personal front.

I broke my foot about a year ago. I had to go step in and help my parents some more. I, you know, I'm the oldest child and I'm the one that's responsible for their support, whether it's managing their nurses or helping navigate their finances. I had a loss, unexpected death of my dear cousin. And those things on their own can really knock you down and take you out.

And I've talked to so many women entrepreneurs who've had things like this happen. And they basically had to press pause on everything because they didn't have the systems or the infrastructure in place to keep their business going. Well, when you build systems in your business and in your life, then it becomes easier because you've taken away a lot of the mental load of running your business.

So here's a great example of this. One of the systems that we recommend to all of our clients is a system we call the client growth engine. It's really three systems. It's your marketing system, your sales system, and your delivery system. And if you think about it, if you don't have these in a system, meaning they are documented, they're in an SOP, somebody on your team could run this.

Ideally without too much of your help. If you don't have these things in place, then each time you have to go do more marketing for your business, you have a offer that you need to sell. You're coming up with all of those things from scratch and you're probably sitting there going, okay, what else do I need to do?

What else do I need to do? Do I need to create more content? Do I need to write more emails? Like you just are starting from scratch again, every single time. But when you have that system in place and you've run that system and you build those assets, it becomes easier and easier. So for example, coming back to talking about the CEO Retreat, where we talk about all of this by the way, at this point, because CEO Retreat for so many years, I actually have a different set of emails depending on the time of the year.

Because if I'm going to be promoting the CEO Retreat at the end of the year where we're going into a new year, I'm going to be talking about setting your goals for the new year, setting your new year up so that you can have a strong start. If I'm talking about the CEO Retreat going into the summer, you're going to hear me talk about the summer slowdown, how to set your business up if you are navigating vacations and your kids being home from school.

Like each season has a little bit different of a message. But because we've done this so much, we actually have a library of assets to run the marketing system, to run the sales system, and then to run the delivery of the CEO Retreat. This is so important because if we're depending on ourselves to remember all of this, if we're depending on ourselves in times of extreme stress to have the capacity to put it all together, then we are going to be setting ourselves up for a lot of frustration.

So I encourage you to start building out these systems. Again, you want to be putting 80 percent of the hard work up front. Good news is if you've already done marketing for this, if you've already sold it once, if you've already delivered it once you've done a lot of the hard work. Now you just have to take a little bit more and document it, put it into an SOP and start asking yourself, how can I adapt this?

How can I adjust this? How can I make this better? And if you make it better, even by like a little bit, like 10 percent better each time you do it. Over time, you're going to really reap the rewards and get the results from it. When I was in the boot and not able to go anywhere because I broke my foot last year, I definitely depended on a lot of the systems that I have in place in my life and in my business to keep things going because I needed to rest, right?

When I had to go and take care of my dad and take care of some things for my parents, I depended on my systems to go ahead and promote the Collective and the CEO Retreat and everything else that we have running. And because I already built the system, I wasn't there trying to do it all myself. I could pass things off to my team.

I could bring in support and I can make it a little easier on us. And when I lost my cousin and I was really going through the initial shock of the grief, I didn't have to improve anything. I could just run the system. And that's the other thing we have to remember. Like I know a lot of us have these really, really high expectations for ourselves.

We want everything to be perfect. We want everything to get better all the time. Sometimes it's okay to just let what you have be enough and just say, you know what, what is the simplest easiest way for me to run the system as it is right now? Maybe we don't get the absolute top layer result that we want, but we still are able to get out there and do what we need.

## Build in Buffer Time

The final thing I want to say about planning during times that are unpredictable and uncertain is give yourself and your plan a lot more buffer time than you might think that you need. It's really easy for us to plan for the best case scenario in our life and our business. But if our plans require that best case scenario in order to be fully implemented, then it's not a realistic plan because we're never going to have a best case scenario.

Like something is guaranteed to pop up at some point that is going to disrupt your schedule. That's going to disrupt your focus. It's going to take your time, energy, and attention away from your business or from the plan that you have. So the best thing you can do is to build in more buffer in your plan.

First, stop making your plan so complicated. It's better to do one or two things extremely well than to have like five to 10 different goals that you honestly do not have the bandwidth to implement. It's better to do just a few things extremely well. So think about if I don't have the time, energy, and attention to really give to all of these goals, what are the one or two things that I need to stay focused on right now and put a pin in anything else for the time being?

It's going to save you so much exhaustion and overwhelming anxiety compared to trying to do it all. Sometimes we can't do it all. Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to take some things off the plate. The second thing is embrace the messy first draft. If you are doing something for the first time.

So if you've never created your marketing system, if you've never created your sales system, you don't have your delivery system, you know, dialed in, then be okay with a messy first draft. It is really okay if it's not perfect and it's never going to be perfect. I tell my clients all the time, SOPs are always works in progress.

Systems are always works in progress. There's always things we could do to make them better. There's always things that we can do to make them more detailed. But sometimes we just have to get the first draft out, right? We have to run the marketing system once and see how it goes, and then use the information and data we gather to make it better.

Stop letting perfectionism really slow you down because right now no one has time for perfectionism. We just need to show up a hundred percent as we are in perfectly perfect, right? Like we are all imperfect humans. And when we put that kind of pressure on ourselves, it's just not realistic or sustainable.

I want you to also think about separating the must do's from the nice to do's. I think this really affects women especially a lot because we tend to, or at least in my experience, we tend to have this vision of how we want our business to look. We have this vision of how we want our marketing to look, how we want our brand to show up, how we want our copy, how we want our photos, how we want any content we create, whether it's video or audio or whatever.

And that really adds layers of complexity to our business. So start thinking about what is the difference between a must do and a nice to do. I know that when I get into, you know, a period where I'm getting ready to promote something, it's really easy for me to want to update every single graphic. Let's do a whole new photo shoot.

Let me hire a video team. Let me do all these things. Even right now with this podcast, it would be so easy for me to go, I need to get this whole team in place. I need to hire all these people. I need to have wardrobe. I need to have makeup. Y'all, I decided that I didn't want to let that hold me back. So I'm recording this podcast with, you can see my microphone here, my road mic, wireless mic that I've had for a while into my phone.

And then my husband will edit it. We kept it simple. I didn't go out and get my hair done or get my makeup done. I literally just used what I have because right now my message is more important than me being perfect. And I guarantee that is true for you right now.

There are people who need what you have and they don't need you to be perfect in order to go out and share it. They don't need you to have the perfectly branded website. They don't need you to go have a whole new photo shoot. Those things are nice-to-have's, but when it comes down to it, when it comes down to when you don't have full capacity, maybe you're more limited capacity because there's so much going on sit down and go what are the must-do's versus the nice-to-do's. Must-do's for me? Send emails. Do the podcast. Nice to do's? Have a whole team producing this podcast.

I'm not going to let the nice to do's get in the way or slow me down right now, because it's just not as big of a priority.

## Recap

Okay. So just to recap here, when things are uncertain, when things are not predictable, when we are being assaulted by the news and feeling like we have diminished capacity, we have limited time, energy, and attention.

I want you to build a plan that is actually resilient, that has room for you to adapt and adjust. Stop starting over, stop starting over, build assets in your business, build systems in your business and build buffer. If that means that you need to only focus on one or two things that are the must do's versus the nice to do's, then that's what you need to focus on.

And the next episode, we're going to talk about grounded leadership because when you really understand how to keep yourself grounded and how to manage your nervous system. You're going to be able to expand your capacity. So you will be able to accomplish more and do more without burning yourself out.

But if your plan only works, if the world is perfect, if the scenarios are perfect, then it is not realistic. And we all need to be embracing more adaptable, more resilient planning strategies as small business owners. So I hope you liked this episode. If you liked it, make sure you leave me a comment. Make sure you head over to my socials and get in the conversation with me.

And if you want to learn more about the CEO Retreat, make sure you head over to the CEO Collective.com/retreat. We have another one coming up very soon and I would love to see you there.