385 | Planning for the Year

There are some very specific steps I take in planning for the year. I want to share with you some of the steps I take in starting off the year on the right intention. Planning for the year is something that people want to do, but when they don’t hit their goals they get wrapped up in doubt and fear. In this special long version of me sharing with you my process of looking back and looking forward, you will learn how you can plan for the year.

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Planning for the Year: The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.

This is leaders in the trenches and your host today is Gene Hammett.

Hi, my name is Gene Hammett. I’m the host of leaders in the trenches. My question today is, how do you plan for the next year? As I record this, I’ve been thinking about what do I intend to do differently? What do I tend to accomplish, what needs to change, what do I need to let go of, and those are some serious questions that will help you really attack the gear in the way you want to or show up in a way that really fulfills you. I love doing what I do, like I can’t even wipe the smile off my face because I love serving my clients. I love helping them grow, helping them move to the next level. I also love speaking. I love to be able to share on the stage. I love the podcast.

I love writing. I love so much what I do. There’s going to be a few things I do because I have to. We’re talking about that today, but I want to share with you things that I do to plan for next year so that you can get your ducks in a row about planning for next year. I want to go through some series of questions and this is going to be a little bit longer than I normally do. It’s not an interview today, so I want to give you something from my heart. I want to share with you a piece of me, if you will, because I think that’s the best way. Last year was a big year. Last year was something that I was really proud of. So if you’re planning for next year, I want you to think about what you were proud of that you accomplished. You know, what are the two or three things that are most important to you?

Now, I don’t want to, you know, cloud this up. I create content for business growth and professional growth, so I’m going to assume that you’re proud of your family and proud of your kids, proud of your spiritual relationship and proud of all the things that drive you. But today we’re gonna talk about Your Business and talk about you as a leader. Talk about what you’re doing next. Hopefully you’re okay with that.

So the, the first step, I kind of jumped into it and then I’m having to come back to it is really talking about why you want to look back. I’ve done some videos on looking at the game tape and this is an example of something you should be doing if you want to planning for next year. You want to look back at what you’re proud of and you want to think about the two or three things and really go back into the moments.

Feel the feelings of those specific moments. I have two that really stand out for me, actually three. The first one is, you know, one of my clients recently told me how much he has grown in the past year, how much his company had grown, how much he grew as a leader, and I was just overwhelmed with just almost tears because he had such an incredible year that I was proud to be a part of it. Now he didn’t hit his revenue goals. Unfortunately, but he did hit a profit goal that had said and the profit goal allowed him to give back to his employees. He’s got quite a few employees and he’s able to give them a percentage of the profits and across the board to raise them up. They’re not expecting this and I just was so moved by that, that that moment led me to to really share with you what I’m most proud of is helping my clients.

The second moment that I was most proud of is I’ve spoken to stage earlier this year in February called the gathering and it was in February. It’s in banff, Canada. That stage was fantastic. The lighting, the. It was over a thousand people. Everything was just spectacular and I got to speak there on center stage sharing a message that really meant something to me, made a difference. A lot of people came up to me and said how amazing that was and how it changed them and get them to think of a new perspective. I love what I do and I love that moment. I ended up getting a, you know, a client or two out of that and that’s the reason I do what I do is to, to build a change in someone that they want to reach out to me and want to work with me. I don’t have to make a pitch, I don’t know, allow to, but I don’t need to.

I want to create such a moment unstaged that they want to work with me and they’re interested in that.

So the third moment was, you know, me looking at my own value that I bring and shifting my business in, changing the people I deliver my message to in my work too. And, and it really has made a huge difference in the type of clients that I’ve been doing. And I remember distinctly bringing on a client earlier this year that just, I was blown away at how good they were and how, you know, they had everything right there in front of them. And this, this group of people. It’s an accounting company just really was a pleasure to work with and still has been. We’ve got so much to do and right now within just a few weeks, the call I had yesterday with them was our pipeline is so big, we don’t know what we’re going to do if we get all this work now, it’s a good problem to have and I’m smiling just thinking about it, but working with this group of people and I won’t share who it is out of their confidentiality, but I just love what I do.

I love to be able to listen to them and be able to clarify what they are doing and who they are and how they move forward and see them grow as leaders. That’s pretty amazing. So what are you proud of? What are the things that are just driving you to the next level and thinking about do you want more of that? Well, and the rest of the questions we’re going to really dive into that. I’m going to, I’m going to look down at my notes to, to look at this. I want, you know, kind of mentioned. Another thing that I’m kind of proud of. You know, I started writing for INC magazine in March of this year at written from Entrepreneur magazine. I’ve written for other places as well, but I started writing for inc magazine and I’m going to tell you it’s been hard. You know, writing for them is fantastic.

It’s great to get the message out there. It’s great credibility. It opens a lot of doors. It is fantastic. Love it. It’s also hard. It’s also I had to shift my entire business to be able to do this. I had to. I’m writing six articles per month is my commitment and it is a lot of work, but I love it and I have had to grow as a leader and grow as a writer to be able to continue doing that. I kind of got put on probation because of some of the articles just weren’t performing the way we wanted them to and some of the edits were not as clean as they needed to be and I had to revamp my process and revamp my team around this and I had to change. I had to let go and I think you have to do to that too and so I share with you openly about some of the things I’m proud of.

I want to share with you three projects that I worked on this year. They’re very small projects but they mean the world to me and maybe you’ve worked on some projects that you can be proud of and so maybe it’s not, you know, an accomplishment or goal that you hit a but what projects did you work on that really caused you to grow and really has allowed you to reach a new level? I want to share with you my three projects and they’re, they’re very simple things to understand. One is my inbox. I used to just let everything flow in at three separate inboxes, a personal and two for, for business and I just let it flow and I just kinda caught up with it and every time I opened up my inbox for email I was stressed and so I didn’t want to do that anymore.

About four weeks ago I decided, okay, I’m going to change that. And I spent probably like eight hours. I know it’s a lot of time to spend. I think it was an all day Sunday and then an extra few hours during the week to really create filters, create rules, create a flow from my email and I have all three email boxes coming into one box. My main business email, which is [email protected] Sent me an email. We’ll see how this system works, but I cleaned it up. I don’t have inbox zero right this moment, but I have inbox like four, which is pretty good, right? I keep it very tight, very clean. There’s a few things. The reason it’s sitting in there is because I have to do something with it and I’m going to do handle it today and there’s a reason it’s sitting right there. I’m not scheduling it for another time, so otherwise I’d be putting it somewhere else and I’ve got all these filters and labels and it’s working like a champ.

I love it. The second project was my calendar. I have been spending a lot of time on various activities, you know, through the podcast who’s speaking to clients through my sales generation and all the conversation around that. A lot of people would just want my time and I’ve also got two members of my team and so I looked at that. I’m having on average 23 meetings per week now. Some of them are an hour, many of them are 15, 20 minutes, but that’s a lot of meetings and I color coded my calendar again in Gmail to really help me see where I’m spending my time and I’m not going to go through the details. Happy to share it with you if you wanted to, but I wanted to get it really organized too so that it really supported me and when I opened it up I could see what I needed to see and I know that this color coding is something I want to stick with because it really has helped me be who I want to be.

Before we jump into the content, let me just remind you that today’s podcast is brought to you by audible. If you like to listen to podcasts, you probably liked to listen to audible books and I want to give you a free 30 day trial and all you have to do is use this url, which is audibletrial.com/leadersinthetrenches. That’s the name of the podcast. Just go there. You can buy any book you want. I’d love for you to buy the trap of success. That’s my book that came out earlier this past year and if you want to get the 30 day trial, just go to audibletrial.com/leadersinthetrenches and back to the show.

Third Project I was working on this year and really this was more than just one little small thing, but it was just defining my systems for growth. That may sound interesting to you because I do work with systems and growth for my clients, but what was I doing inside my own business? It wasn’t that I wasn’t avoiding them. It’s just I wasn’t keeping them up to date, it wasn’t refining them now, it wasn’t giving enough to my team so that they can support me and so I had to go back and look at all of the systems in my book. I was reading clockwork by Mike Mcalary. It’s a great book. It really was something that I thought I had a handle of, but I realized that didn’t and I wanted to do that, so I’ve shifted a lot of my podcast recording too. One day I’ve shifted the way we do social media.

I’ve shifted the way I write, have shifted the way I work with my clients all to support the systems for growth and I’ve got a long way to go like I’m not done yet, but I just wanted to share that with you. What are your projects that you’re proud of? What are the things when you look back that you can know that you’ve accomplished this year and it probably not the goals. So I’m going to look down at my notes again because I want to make sure I’m staying on track here and this is again looking back and this will help you, but what are goals that you didn’t achieve? What goals did you not achieve this year that you really wanted, that you didn’t achieve? And here’s why that’s valuable because you’ve got to be honest with yourself. You got to be truly candid about who you were being that you didn’t receive those goals.

You can’t blame someone else. You cannot blame another person, a tool, a resource, money time because you made the priorities, you made the decisions, you’ve made the choices for not getting those goals. I’m going to share with you my goals that I didn’t hit this year and they hurt. They really hurt because I really wanted these goals and I, I share this with you because I really want you to understand who I am. I had a big revenue goal this year. I didn’t hit. It, didn’t even really come close. Now you may say, I shot for the moon and I did. I really wanted to grow fast. In my company, but there are a few things that kept me back. The main one me, I accept full responsibility. I kept myself back. Now to be clear, I had a better year than I did last year, probably at 25 percent growth, which is impressive but not, you know, monumental.

It’s normal for someone like my business size and I don’t want to be normal. I’m not mediocre. I, I know the work I do in the value I bring and that wasn’t acceptable to me. My standards are much higher so it didn’t hit my revenue goal and um, yeah, it hurts and I’m not letting it temporary for next year. My goal for next year is even bigger than what I had set it for this year, but I am going to be a different person. We’ll talk about that in a few minutes. Another goal that I didn’t hit was my speaking engagements, the number of them I normally average somewhere around 21, 22 speaking engagements a year and A. I’ve done that for the last six years and this year I really stepped out to be a professional speaker and to really work on my craft, work on the actual material, the presentation of it, the entertainment value inside there and actually getting those gigs and I got a lot of gigs I just didn’t get 40 and 40 is a lot.

Forty was almost double what I wanted to before I shot for the moon again and I knew it was a big goal but I wanted to rise up to that and I started out January strong, really strong, but I did make it so I learned from that. We were talking about that in a few minutes. The third one, and this is sort of personal, but it also relates to my overall business in and it’s my weight. I’ve been probably 15, 20 pounds if I’m being honest with you, overweight for years and I’ve just learned to tolerate it. I’ve learned to accept it and I set out this year to really move the needle and I had two goes at it. I started out the year is pretty strong and you know, it was motivated because it was going to be on this big stage in February and so I cleaned up my eating at, cleaned up, no caffeine and I cleaned up.

I was fasting, I was trying to do everything I knew to do and it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t losing enough weight. I lost. I went from about two, oh five down to about one 95 and that’s great. But I just, I felt like since I didn’t get to where I really wanted to, I didn’t lose the 20 pounds. I just let go and so gain it back. Yeah, it’s embarrassing to even say that, but I gained it back because I gave up on it momentarily and so through the summer I just coasted along, went on a nice vacation, eight, eight my face off in some ways and a back. It was back up at two. Oh, five very quickly, very easily so easily that I maintain that for a few months. And then I hired a nutritionist and I decided let’s do this for real. Let me get support and I lost another like eight pounds.

I got down to one 95 again. It’s Kinda like, that was night. That was the low point. I think I got to one 94 at one for one day, but I felt like I was gaining muscle. I was getting a little bit bigger and, and, and all the things I wanted to do, but I wasn’t losing the weight. I wasn’t losing the belly fat and it just broke me and I got to get back on it this year and I’m gonna Change my approach to it and I know that it all centers with me. It’s not about anything other than my commitment to myself and that’s where it comes from. And so what goals did you not make this year? Are you being honest with yourself about, you know, showing up and taking full ownership of reaching those goals. Now I say this because it’s, you. Maybe it’s easy for me to do do because you know, that, um, you know, putting out this content and I liked to be an involved person and I’m pushing myself, but I think we all could learn from the goals that we did not hit in who we are being in that we’re gonna.

Talk about that a little bit later. So now as you’re planning for next year, you want to think about what do you want? What do you really want? A lot of people struggle with this because they won’t let themselves want something. They won’t even voice it. They get caught up with it. One’s called the how virus the virus is really about. And that’s from my book. If you haven’t gotten it, plug it right now. The trap of success. I don’t know which chapters in here, but the how of ours is deeply inside here where you will limit what you actually want because you don’t know how to get it. You’ve never gotten it before. But here’s the thing, if you want something different, gotten before, you’re not expected to have the exact how. And even if you knew the how, it’s not enough, you’ve got to have that commitment to do it and you didn’t have the courage to follow through with it.

And I’ve seen that happen over and over and over with the clients I work with and my own business and watching others grow, my friends grow. It’s just an amazing place for me to be in and share with you about what’s going on. But you’ve got to learn to let go of the hell. You got to learn to let go of, you know, you don’t have to have those answers yet. How comes after you make the commitment in your heart and soul? I love this shirt, so I thought I’d wear it today and it says, always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting. I don’t know if you can see that. Maybe you can. Maybe you can’t always work hard on something uncomfortable. Exciting. This is my favorite tee shirt and someone took a picture of this today when I was in a coffee shop and instead you just love the shirt and I thought I’d share it with you because I’m always working hard on something uncomfortably exciting.

Now, when you think about what you want, it’s very common for you to think about what you don’t, but I want you to skip that process. I want you to really list out what you want. What money do you want? What kind of clients do you want? What projects do you have that really are important to you? Now, one thing that I do in planning for next year is I pick one goal, one goal for the first quarter that for the whole year, but one goal for the first quarter and I’m going to go after that one goal. That goal for me is around the revenue of my business because I’m ready to hire more people. I’m ready to take my teams. The next level I’m ready to commit to the big growth of my business. Much like my clients are. I’ve got a coach I’ve been working with and I’ve, I’m growing inside and my business is catching up with me.

I have grown in my confidence and courage and I am committed to that. Now I want you to think about what one goal you want for the first quarter. Now, can you have more than one goal? Absolutely. You can have as many as you want, but I know that having too many goals will only distract you. What’s the most important to you? Now? My family is most important to me. My relationship with God is most important to me, but I’m just looking at this from my my business perspective and I’m gonna. Take every resource and every project I have and centered around that one goal and move that forward. If you want an update, send me an email. We’ll have a conversation about goals anytime you want. All right? There are three changes that I’m making in the next year, but if you want to plan for next year, you got to think about how you’re changing and what needs to change because if you want something new, if you want something extraordinary, you’ve got to be willing to change.

So I am focusing more on sales. I have historically focused on marketing, creating content, creating videos like this. It’s all marketing. It’s all brand. It’s all about sharing the message, but sales is about actually targeting people that you want to work with. Having this conversations and enrolling them into whatever your offer is. And I have been lacking in that area because I get a steady stream of people wanting to work with me, but it’s not enough to grow to the level I want. So I’m going to be much more intentional about how I do that. And so you can watch that journey here on the podcast. So the second thing I’m changing is around more speaking. Like I told you, I didn’t hit the goal and I don’t think I have a number right yet, but I know it’s more than what I did last year. I did 18 and so I really want to take it probably into the 30 range, but in one of them to be the right stages. I want them to be quality stages and one of them be great experiences. If I’m going to go away from home, I want to know exactly that. It’s going to pay off. The third thing that I’m changing is I’m prepared

to take my confidence to a higher level than it’s ever been before. I’m prepared to let go of all the doubt and fear. Now. I’ve been working on this for months and months and months, but I am just dead set on the growth of me from the inside out. Nope. What are you dead set on? What changes are you making so that you can actually be the person that you want to be to receive the goals that are important to. You know, the reason I say this and I’m really wrapping this up, is who do you need to be to have the success you want? Who Do you need to be? Is very important because a lot of people think about the doing. They think about what projects and what things, and we’ve been talking about that today, but the most important is who do you need to be?

I talked about being more confident, being more courageous, being clear, being decisive. It doesn’t matter what the words are, as long as you have centered in and aligned yourself, the emotions, the body, the mind to actually achieving what you want, who do you need to be? Have the success you want. I’m going to leave you with that because I really want you to think about this heart. If you’re planning for next year, the biggest thing you can do is look back and be real with yourself and look at your being and the second thing you do in that step is look at what needs to change so that you can actually transform yourself to being the person to receive this new goal. This new thing that you want that will drive your success. My name is gene Hammett. I worked with hypergrowth leaders to help them create leadership and culture that’s competitive advantage.

I help them understand fast growth and how to handle that. How do reduce retention inside of there or increased retention? Exactly. Exactly. To increase retention employees, creating employee first work and all the things that I do. Hi, love. So this is my podcast for this year. This is the last message you’ll have from me, but next year, 2019 is going to be a hell of a year. Let’s rock this year. All right. Who Do you need to be? Have the level of success you want. My name is Gene as always, leading with courage and I’ll see you next time.

Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.

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