How To Create A 2024 Plan For Your Business (That You'll ACTUALLY Use)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 289

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, hi, hey, hello, welcome. This podcast is for you if you are a freelancer who offers creative services and you want to earn more money from your creative skills without selling your soul, you're in the right place.

For my returning listeners, happy new year. Hey, it's awesome, it's 2024 Who freaking knew we'd make it this far? I thought the world would end by now or I'd be gone. I don't know, something tragic would happen. I don't know, my brain goes into catastrophic thinking sometimes.

But if I would have thought through, I would have had like the party hat, I would have had like a little popper, who knows? But that would have been fun to celebrate the new years with you. For the first podcast of 2024, and many more to come. We are now nearing our 300th episode.

And man, things have looked a lot different from episode one to 100 to 200 to 300 now. And I don't see myself stopping anytime soon. Today we're gonna talk about, if you can't tell by the title, we're gonna talk about the topic of planning.

So boring, so stupid. Creatives, why would you ever do this? Like, why would we want to plan anything? Well, you're either a planner or you're not. I am not naturally a planner. I am the person that like, I will just aimlessly drift through life if you let me. My wife's the person she wants to know what we're doing next Thursday in 2025 for like January 12th. She wants everything planned out, meticulously detailed. When we're leaving, when we're gonna get there, what we're gonna eat, what we're gonna order, what we're gonna do, like who's gonna be there? Like she wants every little detail of all things.

And so she's the planner. I am not. So in order for me to actually force myself to plan, I have to have a plan for the plan. And this episode is for you. If you're the aimless freelancer, who needs a plan for your plan so that you can go plan?

Because without me maybe kicking your ass a little bit, you're not gonna go plan for the new year. So as of the time this episode airs, I will have just gotten back from my year-end planning retreat. I'm actually doing it in that little gap between Christmas and New Year's.

Getting a little hotel down in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and I do like a little two or three day kind of thing down there. So this is like a simplified version of that to keep it simple because a stupid, simple plan that you actually utilize, actually create and actually fulfill on is way better than a overcomplicated, ridiculous plan. And I simplified my own planning over the years because I started super complicated because I overcomplicate things. So when I do plan, I go way too far.

And so again, I'm finding the happy balance for our listeners right now. There's a quote, I think Yogi Berra said it. It says, if you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else. It's kind of a stupid phrase, but I love that. So as freelancers, if we're just aiming to drift into life, we're gonna be pulled in the direction of what other people's plans have created. So when we don't have a plan, we're kind of in this vacuum and we're pulled or magnetized towards people who are intentional, who have plans. And if you ever see this in real life, like if you are in a group of people, the person who's not the planner, the person who had no plan is going to naturally drift towards whoever has the plan. If you're at a party and somebody has planned for some sort of game or united activity for everybody, everyone else gets pulled into that. It's no different in your business. If you don't have a plan, you'll be pulled into someone else's plan and as freelancers, we can't afford to do that. Someone else's plan usually means that we're working for an agency and they're gonna charge us a small day rate and they're charging many, many multiples to whatever big companies hired them for the project. And so now we're the outsourced work because they had the plan, they execute on the plan, and we got pulled into it. That's not what I want for any of our listeners or viewers on YouTube for 2024 We're gonna create our annual plan that points you in some sort of direction, which is infinitely better than just aimlessly drifting around to whatever you get pulled into. We want to be intentional versus aimless, and that's the goal for this episode. So let's talk about how to actually do this.