Hey there, friend! You're in the right place if you're juggling the demands of running a small online business, taking care of your family, and trying to create consistent, organic content. A Strategic Planning Day isn't just a “nice-to-have” as small business owners. It's a non-negotiable if you're serious about scaling your business and reclaiming your time.
It may be me, but I think it's a good idea to go refill that coffee mug, and let's dive into the five steps for a successful strategic planning process.

If your business growth is unimportant to you, you’ll be stuck in your online business. Put on your CEO hat and be the person your future self will be proud of. (:

Why You Need a Strategic Planning Day Process

Your business growth depends on strategic thinking. Your calendar should include a Strategic Planning Day if you're serious about your business success. Done quarterly, this focused time allows you to step into your CEO shoes. I think you'll agree with me when I say that business leaders set time aside for strategic thinking. You will not miss any important steps when you have a set process for your strategic planning meeting.

The Struggle is Real, But So is the Solution
If you're anything like me, you're juggling a million things simultaneously, trying to keep the wheels on the bus. At the end of the day, you fall into bed exhausted from running an online business, taking care of your family, and creating consistent, organic content marketing. It's a lot. But here's the good news: You're not alone; the solution is dedicating time to your strategic direction.

A Planning Workbook

As an Online Business Manager (OBM), I’ve helped business owners set up strategic planning processes that drive real results. I set aside time with the owner every quarter for a business strategy meeting. I understand that your small company may not be ready for a dedicated OBM as one of your team members. With that in mind, I created my most popular free resource, a planning workbook. It's like a one-day strategy meeting in a box.

It is 50 pages chock-full of all the prompts you need for strategy planning in your business. With the workbook and email series accompanying it, you can create your repeatable strategy process.

Please feel free to download the workbook. We are going to walk through all the points, and you can use it for your personal strategy workshop. I hope and pray that this is helpful for you.

Are you ready to get into the five steps for a successful Strategic Planning Day Process that is truly transformative?

Grab your copy of the planning workbook here!

Create a Distraction-Free Zone

Do you want to know what you must do first? You should put time on your calendar for your successful strategic planning session. While you are at it, why not set aside time for the whole year of strategy sessions and, of course, time at the end of the year for your annual plan.

It’s a lot if you cannot get through it all in one day; no worries, friend, break it up into days, or maybe you want to stay at a hotel for a weekend. What is essential is that you focus on your business and where you're going in the next 12 weeks.

Before you start, ensure you're setting yourself up for success. Turn off notifications, close unnecessary browser tabs, and silence your phone. This is your time to focus solely on your business, so make it count.

Here is your strategic planning agenda:

1. 1. Reflection and Self-Assessment
   2. Your Vision
   3. Goals
   4. Project Planning
   5. Content Planning

1. Start with Reflection: Your Business Check-In

Step one to a successful quarterly planning meeting is reflection. The best way to know if you're headed in the right direction with your business goals is through reflection. It's amazing the insight you can gather by taking a step back so that you can look forward. You're going to spend 15 minutes journaling and reflecting.

Grab your journal and jot down.

• • What has worked well for you
  • Areas that need improvement
  • Lessons learned (the good, the bad, and the ugly)

Remember, you're amazing, and acknowledging your wins is a crucial part of the process.

While you have your journal, let’s also do a self-assessment.

How happy are you, really? Not put on a show fake happy, but like real, real happy.

How happy are you in these areas of your life?

Rank your happiness (1-10) in these areas:

1. 1. Money
   2. Personal Growth
   3. Self Care (Mind, Body, spirit)
   4. Family and Friends
   5. Love and Relationships
   6. You Time (Fun and Leisure)
   7. Home Environment
   8. Business

A previous client won a two-day strategic planning day with Cameron Herold in a silent auction. One of my key takeaways was the importance of conducting a SWOT Analysis—assessing your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. While larger companies use this often, small business owners rarely take the time for this kind of deep analysis. Yet, it’s crucial for identifying what’s working, where you need to improve, and what external factors could impact your business growth. I highly recommend incorporating a SWOT Analysis into your quarterly planning process. We used different color sticky notes for each of these areas. Remember that every idea is a good idea when you're having a brainstorming session until it's not.

3. Be SMART: Strategic Goals

What strategic goals did you set on your last strategy day? I'm curious: Were you able to reach the desired outcome you've set for yourself in the past quarter? 

Now, let's get down to the nitty-gritty—your goals. Break them down into three categories:

• • One-year goals (Think big, like financial milestones)
  • 90-day goals (Smaller objectives that contribute to your one-year goals)
  • 30-day focus (Immediate actions to propel your business forward)

Break your vision down into actionable goals. Think about:

• • Your top 3 business, personal, and financial goals
  • What you’re fully committed to achieving
  • How to turn those commitments into results

Have you read the book The 12-Week Year? This approach allows you to accomplish more in less time by focusing on 12-week cycles instead of traditional annual goals. The idea is to treat each 12 weeks as a full year, increasing urgency and execution. If you find that a year plan doesn't work for you and you lose steam, why not give this a try? Instead of setting goals for the entire year, break them down into shorter, more actionable time frames.

Goal Breakdown:

• • One-Year Goals (Big-picture milestones)
  • 90-Day Goals (Quarterly objectives that feed into your one-year goals)
  • 30-Day Focus (Immediate steps to move your business forward)
  • 12-Week Sprint (A focused plan to drive real momentum in a short time frame)

Always step back and ask yourself, what are you committed to achieving? Identify what you are committed to 100%. Without your true commitment, you may struggle to take the next steps and get it done. Do you want to know why I believe in this question of true commitment? It is because I've found myself chasing someone else's dream for my life. I'm sure you can guess how this turned out for me. Maybe, like me, you've doubted your vision for your life and somehow following someone else's dream felt a little less scary. 

Remember, God puts dreams on our hearts for us to follow. I think almost as a way to challenge us to release the outcome into his hands. 

4. Commit and Break Down the Plan

A plan is only as good as its execution. Break down your goals into action plans. Using the best practices of actionable steps, assigning responsibilities and deadlines. 

This is where your commitment comes into play; without it, even the best-laid plans can fall apart.

Have you ever broken down a goal into actionable steps, or are you more of a winger? Trust me, I wing with the best of them, but the things that truly matter are better off with a plan.

In step four of your strategy day, you will map it out. This is where your creative thinking meets strategy execution. It is where you make the strategic decisions, making sure that you achieve those goals. You sit down, and you map out your goal.

Start at the end and work back to the beginning. How will you know that you’ve accomplished your goal? What was the step right before that, then the step before that? Map out all the different steps that must happen. Please keep in mind small, actionable steps that you can do every single day to move forward toward your goal.

Sit down and do a whole mind sweep of every step you think you must do to achieve that goal. Once you have it, you want to map it out with who's responsible.

Suppose it's only you in your business. Well, you’ll be the only one doing the work. You also need to look at your time and the actual time bank to get everything done. 

We tend to underestimate the amount of work and time something will take to get done. Make sure to give yourself grace.

To create your plan, you must also figure out how much time you’ll be working. It's time to pull out that calendar and determine how many days out of the office you want in the next 12 weeks. 

What days will your kiddos be home because they are off on a random day? What are the must-attend kid events? What holidays are upcoming? All of those things. Then, you need to be able to reverse engineer from that end date to ensure that you have enough time to get all the items done. To make that goal a reality.

You will be assigned to all the action items if you're a Solopreneur. If you have an entire team working with you, who are the team members that will be doing the work? 

You need to know all the action items; no more flying by the seat of your pants. You need to have the who, the what, and the when documented, preferably in a project management tool like Asana, Trello, or Notion. All the action steps are assigned a date by knowing the end date and reverse engineering the time frame.

Depending on your goals, you may have a couple of goals in the quarter; however, if you have something big, like a launch. Then, you only want one goal for that entire quarter. One other point: you need to under the real time investment for your personal goals and business goals. Here are the ground rules that I set with my clients. During a set period of time, you get only one major project to focus on. Why? You have a finite amount of time and energy.  A great way to add stress, overwhelm, and anxiety is by thinking it is a good idea to, let's say, be remodeling your house while prepping and executing a new course launch.  

Here is an example of how to set up an Asana Board for Goals and Quarterly Planning:

Map Out Important Dates

As I mentioned, you must understand your time bank for the quarter. How many hours do you have to work on the goals and projects in your business? Do you have a realistic amount of time to get everything done in the timeframe your brain tells you?

It is essential to take the time to map out the dates and the actual chunks of time that you’ll work on your goals and project. When you do this, you’re not sitting at your desk wondering what you must do today. It is all planned out for you in advance, thoughtfully.

Be sure to start by marking all the out-of-office dates on your calendar.

• • Vacation Days
  • Important Kid Events
  • No School Days
  • Holidays
  • Add all the out-of-office dates to your Google Calendar.

Everything else is mapped around those dates on your calendar. I need to know the commitments and the time bank when working on my promotion calendar or a client's promotion calendar.

5. Your Content Calendar and Beyond

While not directly related to strategic planning, your content calendar is crucial for the long term organic marketing of your business.  Plan out your content for the next three months, week by week. This will help you stay consistent while keeping content-aligned with your revenue goals and strategic objectives.

Don’t Forget To Track Your Numbers

If you do not already have a stat/metric tracker in place, do that. What gets measured gets improved.

Here are a few ideas for your metric tracking:

• • Website Traffic
  • Email Subscribers
  • Social Media Engagement
  • Number of Clients
  • Number of Leads
  • Number of Sales

Here is a link to my other popular free resource, a Google Sheet to keep track of all your business metrics or key performance indicators (KPI).

Time To Wrap This Up:

Strategic planning isn’t just about setting goals—it’s about having a proactive approach to business growth. Whether you dream of leading an executive team, collaborating with board members, or keeping it simple as a solo entrepreneur mapping out your next move, sufficient time spent on planning can be the most important time you invest in your business.

By treating this as a strategy away-day, you’ll align your mission statement, address key issues, and generate new ideas that fuel new investments. With a clear vision and a collaborative effort, your strategic planning sessions will become a roadmap for continued success.

Now, take a moment to reflect on the main benefits of this approach.

• • Are you still in alignment with your vision?
  • What are you actually committed to doing?
  • Have you scheduled your strategy discussions?
  • Are you tracking your progress?

The right people and different teams thrive when there’s clarity and a plan in place. So go ahead, set your strategy, and make it happen!

[Book a 1-Hour Virtual Strategy Session Here!]

Thank you so much for your time, I appreciate you and I hope you make it a wonderful week.