Annual Planning Sneak Peek

Annual Planning Sneak Peek

Each year in January we spend two days planning for the year ahead. We’re still learning & fine-tuning this process, but this is what it looked like for us this year….

Reflecting on 2022: We’ve learnt its important to ‘finish the year before it starts’. So, we asked ourselves some key questions about 20212- What lessons did we learn? What worked well? What didn’t work well? What do we want to do better next time?

Calendar audit of 2022: We quickly went through each activity that was written on our 2021 calendar & put it into one of three categories:

• Good use of time/effort/money
• Waste of time/effort/money
• Living the good life ie. fun things we enjoy

We then did a quick review of what ended up where & discussed what needs to change. We both agreed we needed more items in category 3 – Living the good life!

Revised our Mission & Vision: This year we gave our mission statement a lot more ‘thinking time’ because it needed a revamp. To us, our mission is important because it really sets the path of the business & reminds us why we’re doing it. We got some of the ideas for our mission statement from a farming book we read titled ‘The Turnaround’.

Goal setting: Once we knew what we want more of, what we wanted less of & refined what our long-term plan is, we then set our business goals for the year. We only set 3 key goals, as we wanted to keep it simple & have a clear focus. We then broke each goal down into what needs to be achieved each quarter. We also did a similar process for what each of us wants to achieve personally & as a family.

Schedule meetings: We then booked monthly planning meetings into our calendar, so we can assess our progress regularly. We will also have weekly planning meetings with our team to organise operational tasks.

By doing this basic planning it creates excitement & belief around what we can achieve this year. For us, it comes down to fertilising the activities that bring results, eliminating those that don’t & making time to do plenty of fun things we enjoy.

Bring on 2023.