Getting swept into the current of a busy Fall season is easy. So how can you go into the rest of the year and be intentional with what you’re doing in your business? This week’s episode is the second in a 3-part series called Fall Focus, and we’ll be going into how you can stay on track with your plan, week to week. 

An important thing to remember is: planning isn’t something you do once, it is an ongoing, dynamic process. Like how you care for the plants in your garden, the plans that you make for your business are the same – they both need tending to. Staying on track with our plans and goals requires structure, and this is where the practice of doing a weekly review comes in.

A weekly review is a time you set aside so you can review what’s on your plate and plan for the week ahead of you. Specifically, going through the 3-step workflow will help you stay organized and on track with everything that’s going on in your life and business. Before anything else, you should be able to answer the question of when you’re doing your weekly review. After you’ve sorted it out, it’s time to:

1. Get clear – process your incoming tasks and projects
2. Get current – review and update the tasks and projects that are on your plate
3. Get focused – make your to-do list for the week

Links

Getting Things Done, David Allen

Download your free copy of the 90-day planning template here. 

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

No matter what industry, family status, or even if your business does a lot of year-end stuff – everyone in the universe is busy during the Fall. Coming back from vacation during the summer, we immediately start to get busy in our lives and businesses. However, we’re not necessarily getting busy with the right things, so we’re left at the end of the year confused and exhausted.

A lot of us operate from a list instead of a plan. This leads us to be overworked and discouraged. Having a plan helps us decide what will go on our list. It’s hard to do, it takes practice, but you have to learn how to do it. Having a plan helps you focus on the main things, have tangible outcomes, and lets us recognize and celebrate our progress.

Today’s episode is the first in a three-part series called Fall Focus where I aim to help you go into the last part of 2021 with focus so you can get amazing business results without burning yourself out. We’re starting by talking about what it looks like to have a plan instead of just a bunch of lists. Using my 90-day template as a guideline, I’m breaking down the specifics of creating a plan, which are:

• Setting the time frame
• Figuring out your top priority
• Focusing on your goal
• Having your sales goal align with your business and priority, and
• Listing which projects and tasks to commit to in order to achieve your goal

Links

Episode 52 - Mindset Shifts You Need to Make Before You Can Set Goals for Your Business

Episode 69 - 3 Ways to Set a Sales Goal for Your Business

The One Thing, Gary Keller

Download your free copy of the 90-day planning template here. 

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

A really big part of our businesses is talking to other people and articulating how you can help them. Talking to clients, taking sales calls, showing up on social media, developing content, attending a networking event, and meeting new people – improving our ability to speak has the potential to make a massive impact. And to help us entrepreneurs with the practical side of improving the skill of speaking is Heather Sager. 

Heather helps online entrepreneurs become the go-to authority in their industry by confidently nailing their message on live and virtual stages. In this week’s episode, she’s going to give us insight into how we can strategically leverage speaking opportunities to grow our businesses.

In this interview, she is breaking down:

• Overcoming your fear of being visible as the face of your own business.
• A 5-minute daily habit that can help you intentionally practice and improve your speaking skills.
• A simple hack for practicing Instagram stories without anyone seeing them.
• How to get strategic about pitching signature talks and podcast interviews so that visibility leads to profitability.

We are surrounded by stages in our businesses. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a speaker, if you talk to other people about your business, it’s important to lean into this conversation. 

Links

Find Heather Sager and her work online on her website, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Facebook Community.

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

This week’s episode is the second in a 2-part series all about time blocking. Last week, I covered the basics of how to use time blocking as a creative entrepreneurs. Today we are going to touch on (and resolve) the obstacles that are preventing you from using time blocking. We are going to cover all of the "what ifs" that are holding you back from taking control of your time. 

For instance, you might want to use time blocking, but...

• you don't have consistent childcare 
• your schedule changes from week to week.
• your business is just a side-hustle.
• things are always coming up!

In this episode, we de-bunk these common obstacles to time-blocking and break down practical solutions to address them.

Links

My scheduling tool, Calendly.

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

A lot of us get into entrepreneurship because we want freedom and flexibility. We want to live lives of balance, freedom, and flexibility.  

When we’re talking about work-life balance, we mistakenly believe that if things aren’t going well, it’s us at fault. But I will make the argument that the problem isn’t our ability, but a structural problem. Most creative entrepreneurs are trying to juggle their work and personal lives without making any intentional choices about how their time is going to be spent. 

Solving this problem means having a structure for how you spend your time so that you can show up for all the different responsibilities you have in your life. For this week’s episode, I’ll be talking about a time-blocked schedule. Time blocking is a tool that helps you decide in advance how you are going to spend your time so that you can balance the different priorities you have in your life and business. We’ll be going through the basics of time blocking, specifically, 4 things you need to have in place to have a basic time-blocked schedule, which are:

1. Office hours
2. Client work vs. admin/internal work 
3. Meetings vs. No meetings
4. Monthly and quarterly planning days, content batching

Links

Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

Event planner and former TBB client Rebecca Waldrop joins us for this week’s episode, ending The Power of a Plan series. This summer series features current and former clients who share their stories of developing a real plan for their businesses and how this has impacted their growth in both their businesses and also their lives.

Becca is an event planner who started her business back in 2019. She had a lot of confidence in her skill set but she was struggling to put together a real plan for her business to be successful. After her time in Thrive Business Bootcamp, Becca was able to discover that she was missing two major components to help make her business thrive – a clearly defined ideal client and a signature service.

Today, Becca breaks down how she made the transition from being an event planning generalist to being very specialized in her industry. She talks about:

• Choosing a niche 
• Why having a signature service is more helpful for clients
• How to plan for maternity leave as a business owner 
• How to streamline your offers 

Links

Learn more about Rebecca Waldrop on her website, or follow her on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

Jessie Barnes has been involved in the body confidence movement and built her personal following online around body-positive content until she decided to turn it into a business in order to make more of an impact in the space. However, she was stuck – no website, no knowledge on how to run a business, no credentials.

For the fourth episode in The Power of a Plan series, Jessie shares her journey in building her business. This summer series showcases my current and former clients and their experience operating from a real plan and how it has impacted their businesses and their lives. 

Jessie walks us through what she went through building her body image coaching business that she started in February 2020, just right before the pandemic. She talks about:

• How she overcame an “all or nothing” mentality and decided to finally start the business with the resources and time she already had;
• A simple framework that she uses to articulate the value of body image coaching;
• The pros and cons of starting your business with a preexisting audience; and,
• The key to staying on track and focused with limited time to dedicate to your business.

Links

Discover Jessie’s body-positive content on Instagram or visit her (new) website to learn more about her work.

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

Wedding planner, stylist, and studio owner Elizabeth Carberry joins us this week for The Power of a Plan. This summer series showcases my current and former clients and their experience operating from a real plan and how it has impacted their businesses and their lives.

Elizabeth is a very busy woman. She owns multiple businesses, takes care of two small kids, and is pregnant with a third. In this episode, we’re diving into her story about learning to slow down and focus her energy as a business owner on the most important things. She talks about the value and benefit of slowing down and refocusing, and how this has helped her navigate her businesses and her family through the pandemic. 

She goes into:

• How to make time blocking work for you when your schedule looks different from week to week
• The benefit of slowing down and staying focused even when business is booming.
• Learning to deal with the fear of failure and give yourself grace in goal setting.
• The importance of consistency in building your business and not trying to tackle too much at once

Links

Learn more about Elizabeth Carberry and her work by visiting her website or following her on Instagram.

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

For the second episode in our summer series, The Power of a Plan, I’m interviewing Jordan Wilde, a current Thrive Business Bootcamp Client, who is a professional organizer. Her company, Wildely Organized, was started this year, in 2021, after just getting her first client on a whim.

Today, Jordan shares her journey from deciding to take the leap into entrepreneurship while having little kids at home. While feeling confident in her skills as an organizer, Jordan needed some help on the business side which she has been able to accomplish this year. She gets into detail about this, as well as:

• Two things that helped her get consistent about social media
• Overcoming the fear of rejection in networking
• Learning how to make time to work on your business even when you’re busy with client work.

The Power of a Plan series aims to share how creative entrepreneurs just like you are learning to operate from a plan in their business. I hope that this episode challenges you to think about how you can adopt some of the simple strategies and approaches in your business.

Links

Check out Wildely Organized on their website or follow their Instagram to learn more.

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.

This is the first episode in a new series called Power of a Plan. I’ve invited my current and former clients to share their journey – from winging it in their business to operating from a real plan. We’ll talk about simple concepts and strategies that they’ve embraced to transform their businesses and lives.

My first guest in this series is Juli Smith, founder of The Garter Girl. She started her business in 2008, but fast forward to 2020 when Juli wasn’t enjoying her business anymore. She felt like a ping pong ball every day – bouncing between work and personal tasks, barely spending any time doing what she loved. 

The way that she’s been able to drastically change her daily experience in her business is by embracing two simple, but not easy, strategies: time blocking and having clear priorities and goals. By doing this, she was able to:

• Operate from real work hours for the first time in 13 years of business
• Ditch her workaholic tendencies and start committing to just 3 tasks on the to-do list every day
• Learn to match the right projects to the right season of life so she can stop beating herself up for the things that aren’t getting done

Links

Check out The Garter Girl’s website or follow their Instagram.

Follow Katie on Instagram or visit the website to learn more about her work.