Business planning for the new financial year

Want to know how to plan for the new financial year? Business planning can happen at any time of year, but it is common to do annual business planning for the financial year or calendar year. Business planning isn’t something you should just do at the beginning of your business and never again. It is something that you should be doing on an ongoing basis. Business planning comes in all shapes and sizes. This blog post is created specifically for small businesses that provide services or digital products. Keep on reading to learn about business planning for the new financial year.

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BUSINESS PLANNING FOR THE NEW FINANCIAL YEAR

Step 1: Review, and reflect, on the past financial year

Before putting your plan together for the new financial year you should look back over the past financial year. You want to get an accurate understanding of where your business is right now and what over the last year has resulted in the business being in the position.

When I work with clients I take them through a two-stage process where they review the data and then reflect on their personal experience. Looking at all of the data in your business is important, but data alone might not show the full picture.

Review the data

Some of the data you can analyse during the review stage is;

Revenue
Profit
The amount of money you personally took home
Sales per service or product
Revenue breakdown per service or product
New buyers versus repeat buyers
Average lifetime customer, or client, value
Volume of leads
Percentage of leads from each marketing channel
Conversion rate
Website traffic
Email open-rate and click-through rate

Reflect on the last year

Then once you’ve got gathered, and analysed, all of your data you can reflect on how you’ve felt in the business over the last financial year.

You can ask yourself questions such as:

What did you love the most about running your business?
What did you dislike the most about running your business?
Did anything happen that you want to ensure doesn’t happen again?
How do you currently feel about your business?

Step 2: Set your goals for the new financial year

Once you’ve finished reviewing and reflecting on the past financial year you’ll have an accurate understanding of your business’ current position. You’ve now got a clear Point A (where your business is right now) and it is time to move on to getting clear about your Point B (where you want your business to be at the end of the new financial year).

To start don’t hold yourself back and write down all of the things you’d love to achieve in your business. In the beginning you’ll want to write down anything that pops into your mind. You don’t need to think about whether something is realistic and how you can make it happen. At this stage the point is to dream big, allow your imagination to run wild and be super honest about what you would love to happen.

Then once you’ve got all of your ideas down it is time to go back through the list and now you can consider the feasibility. All of your ideas will resources – this could be time, money, skills, knowledge etc. Do you have everything, or can you get everything, required to make this idea happen?

Also, as a small business you can’t do everything at once. So you’ll also need to think about the opportunity costs. Saying yes to one thing will mean saying no to something else. For example, it might be that it is only physically possible to bring 3 of your ideas to life in the upcoming financial year. You’ll need to think what is the most important both for the business and you. And just because you can’t do something this year doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the future.

I love the idea of having a Now, Future and Maybe Goals list. This enables you to be able list ideas that aren’t important to focus on right now in your future or maybe goals list. That way you are gaving them a place to live so they don’t have to keep on fighting for your attention, but it is clear they aren’t the current priority.

When setting goals the phrase ‘less is more’ is something to keep in mind. The fewer goals you have the easier your life will be, but if you are like most business owners with lots of ideas then I appreciate that trying to set just a few goals is hard.

Once you’ve decided on your goals for the new financial year you’ll want to go through them all and make sure they are SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. By using this framework you should end up with goals that are clearly defined and someone outside of your business would be able to confirm whether you have or haven’t achieved that goal.

TAKE YOUR BUSINESS PLANNING FOR THE NEW FINANCIAL YEAR TO THE NEXT LEVEL BY WORKING WITH ME – BOOK A STRATEGY DAY

I’ve been running annual planning strategy days with small business owners since 2019. Doing your annual business planning with someone external from your business and with tons of business and marketing experience and expertise makes a massive difference. I’ll support you to face the facts about your current position, dream big about the future and get really strategic about what you need to do in order to achieve those big business goals.

So if you are planning on preparing for the 2024/25 financial year and you want to get your annual planning done in the most effective and efficient way, book a 2024/25 Strategy Day.

For more information and to book click here.

Step 3: Offer suite, pricing and financial forecasting

One of your business goals for the new financial year should be a financial goals and it isn’t wasn’t then stop right now and add that your list. As someone who helps people build their dream business there is one financial goals in particular I’ll focus on – the amount of money they are personally taking home. If you’ve set an annual revenue goal that is absolutely fine, but just make sure that you’ve probably thought about your annual revenue goal, the expenditure that will need to happen for that goal to be hit, and that it will enable you to hit your take home pay goal.

Once you’ve got a clear revenue goals for the new financial year you’ll need to make ensure that financial goal is possible. The first thing to look at is your offer suite, which is all of the services and products your business has available to sell. Review what you currently offer and decide whether you want to continue with everything in the new financial year or you’d like to drop something. Then think about whether there is anything you want to add.

Getting your offer suite is so important. What you offer in your business, and the prices you charge, play the biggest role in determining whether your business will enable you to live your dream life. You want to ensure your offer suite allows you to work with the level of flexibility or freedom you desire. I go into more detail about how to create an offer suite here.

Then once you are happy with what you are selling, you’ll want to review the pricing. Do the prices of each service or product make sense in relation to each other? Are you happy with the prices you have set?

Once you’ve got an offer suite and pricing you are happy with it’s time to move onto financial forecasting. You want to make sure that your financial goal is possible and financial forecasting will help you to understand what is and isn’t possible, and help you to think about what sales you need to be generating in your business.

In an ideal world, you want to do financial forecasting for each service or product your business sells. For each service or product estimate the number of sales you could make (and successfully deliver) on a monthly or quarterly basis. Then taking your pricing information you should be able to forecast monthly or quarterly revenue, and then annual revenue.

If once you’ve done those calculations your revenue goal is higher than the figure in your financial forecasting you’ll need to review everything and decide whether there is scope for an increase in sales with your current offer suite, whether you need to make changes such as adding a new offer or raising your prices, or you need to lower your revenue goals. Do not skip this step! Do not set yourself a revenue goal that you don’t physically know how you’ll achieve.

Then once you are happy with the income forecasting, it’s time to move onto the other side – the expenditure forecasting. If you are already running your business you’ll have a good understanding of what it takes for your business to run on a monthly or annual basis. Start with those figures, but then don’t forget to think about the new costs for changes you are making this year.

Earlier I mentioned how to bring your ideas to life you’ll need resources – and often they have associated costs. For example, it might be your plan is to scale your one-to-one service business this year and therefore you need to invest in software, like Kartra, that will enable you to sell digital products or have a membership area.

Step 4: Create your marketing and sales strategy

One of the reasons why it is worth getting into detail about the number of sales you need to make per month or quarter, per service or product is that you have clear sales goals. You’ll have a great understanding about how many sales you need to make and this will enable you to create a suitable marketing and sales strategy.

When business planning for the new financial year you won’t be able to get super detailed and create a marketing plan, but you can create the overarching marketing and sales strategy Your marketing and sales strategy will cover things such as:

The marketing channels and platforms (social media, email, long-form content, affiliates, paid advertising, partnerships) you’ll use
Whether you’ll be selling on evergreen (all the time) or whether some services or products will be available for a limited amount of time (and therefore you might do launches)
How sales are created: directly on your website, on a sales call, conversation in the DMs
The resources you’ll need (personnel, software)
What your marketing budget is for the year
A buyer journey per service or product
Your key messages for your business as a whole and each service or product

DON’T LEAVE YOUR SALES TO CHANCE. I’LL CREATE A MARKETING AND SALES STRATEGY FOR YOUR TO SMASH YOUR SALES TARGETS.

Does the thought of putting together your marketing and sales strategy feel like too much? Let me do it for you!

You can have the provide the best service in the world, but if you aren’t able to successfully market your business it is pointless.

I’m an award-winning Chartered Marketer, with over a decade of professional marketing experience and I personally create ALL of my own marketing.

As part of a 2024/25 Strategy Day I’ll create a marketing and sales specifically to achieve your sales goals AND that can be delivered by one person (whether that is you, your VA or a marketing assistant).

Stop trying to guess how to market your business and let me create your marketing and sales strategy.

For more information and to book a 2024/245 Strategy Day click here.

Step 5: Create an annual timeline

Your business planning for the new financial year is nearly over. The last thing you need to create is an annual timeline. This is a working timeline, which means when first created you want to put in as much information as you can, but you’ll add to it.

It is easy when you concentrate on one area of your business or goal to think everything is possible. By bringing everything together you’ll be able to highlight in advance if you are trying to take on too much and that means you need to change the timings, get additional support or make your goal smaller.

Another reason why creating an annual timeline is so important is because most businesses are impacted by seasonality in some way and therefore it is important to think across the whole financial year and not expect every month to be exactly the same. I go into further detail about preparing for seasonality in this blog post – How to prepare for seasonality in your business.

That’s it. You now know how to approach business planning for the new financial year.

As new financial year is a great time to work on your business and really think about the future of your business. A lot can happen over 12 months – your business could be unrecognisable! But if you want that to happen you’ve got to be intentional. And that is why business planning for the new financial year is so powerful.

The steps you’ve just read about are the exact steps I’ve used for years to help small business owners plan for a new financial year.

I’ve written this blog post in great detail so you can go through the process by yourself, but having a business and marketing expert to help you makes a massive difference. So if you want to ensure you are as ready as possible for the new financial year book a 2024/25 Strategy Day with me.

BOOK A 2024/25 STRATEGY DAY

Running an annual business planning day by yourself can be tricky. You might not have the analytical mind to properly review your finances and marketing data. You might have a money mindset that impacts your approach to pricing. You might not have the knowledge for creating an effective marketing and sales strategy. And you struggle to take your big goals and create a plan to achieve them.

If you think any of those things might hold you back then I can help you. You can book a 2024/25 Strategy Day with me and I’ll guide you through the process, ensure that you don’t skim over the bits that aren’t your strengths and be the external support to ensure you have strategically thought through everything and have the best plan possible for the year ahead.

To find out more, and to book a 2024/25 Strategy Day click here.