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Omar Zenhom (0:56)

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. It's just that simple. Every November, Nicole and I disappear for one day and we plan out the next 12 months of our lives. We're talking business, health, travel, personal ambitions, everything in between. Anything we want to get done next year gets discussed and decided and planned out in this day. This is sort of our secret meeting and how we stay in control. Instead of letting your calendar control you, listen, if you don't have your year planned out, you're just letting the whims of everybody else plan your year. Whatever asks, whatever demands other people have of you, that's what you're going to do instead of what you actually plan to do. Today, I'm going to walk you through exactly how we plan our year, the exact questions we ask ourselves, the structure, how we design 2026. So it's a before it even starts. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week and more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. I want to start by sharing with you our five step framework that we use every single year when we do this Strategic Planning Day. It's simple, it's powerful, and it works. Every single year we do this. So let me share with you. Step one, get off the grid. Get away from where you normally work, whether that's home or the office. You want to get away from the noise, the emails, the things that you are normally attached to, and what you consider your work environment. Go to a hotel, go to a resort, do whatever you need to do. Just get away from your work environment. Why? Because you can't design a new life, an improved life in the same space that you live in, the same space that you're used to. Getting into a new environment gets you in a new headspace, allows you to think more creatively, and it allows you to think bigger. It's sort of a reset. It allows you to mentally and physically reset yourself and say, okay, the future could be whatever I want it to be. It's not what I'm used to. It's not what I'm experiencing right now. It could be something totally new, and it could be a little bit scary, but it could also be exciting. Step two, Come prepared. Nicole and I, we each come with our own ideas, our own notes, our own thoughts that are written down, documented before we actually meet on the day for our strategic plan. We work on this document maybe in the days and weeks leading up to this day so that we're able to kind of get our thoughts together and be able to communicate them to each other properly. Often what we do is we actually have a separate meeting before the strategic plan meeting, and we do sort of a recap of what we accomplished in the current year, like 2025. And the reason why we do this is that it gives us a snapshot of, you know, some of the things that we went after, some of the things that we achieved, some things that kind of surpassed our expectations, and we achieved even without realizing, some of the things we fell short, some of the things that we enjoyed, some of the things we didn't really enjoy. What were some of the things that we did in our life, even personal? What are some trips that we took that were, like, really rewarding? And some of them were kind of duds, you know, so it's good to kind of recap so that you can be mindful of what worked and what didn't when you come to plan the next year. So we have that kind of recap meeting. Then we spent a couple weeks individually writing down our own notes and our own kind of documentation so that we can come to the meeting and we can collaborate. We have two perspectives Two ideas, two visions. And we want to make it a shared vision. So it's important for us to be able to articulate these thoughts easily and quickly without us kind of rambling forever because we didn't think about it beforehand. So it's good to come prepared, but have your thoughts together, have your ideas together, don't be fully fleshed out, but you got to come with some starting point, with some thing to. To offer to the collaboration. Step three, when you're doing your strategic plan, you're doing this day, you want to start with the big picture, right? What we like to do is we map out the categories first, like business, health, relationships, travel, fun. Remember fun guys, Right? Fulfillment, how we feel good about our lives. These are kind of the buckets that we carve out. And then we ask, what do we want to feel by the end of 2026? What do we want to experience? What do we want to say to ourselves? This year was great because. Why? Why? Because we had adventure, because we grew personally, because we felt a sense of gratitude, because we had wonderment, right? We started to explore new things. This is a good starting point to have these categories and then ask yourself in each category, what do we want to feel by the end of 2026? What do we want to accomplish? What are the things that are going to make us proud? What is ultimately our goal when it comes to these areas? So, for example, in the category of health, maybe I say I want to put on more muscle. Maybe I want to put on 5 kgs of muscle. By the end of the year, I will feel that I've made improvement to my health. I feel that I'm fortifying myself for, you know, as I get older and as I'm. I'm not 20 anymore, in my 40s, I got to make sure that I'm more strength training. So you get the idea. Like we're looking at each category. What is a goal of feeling an overall thing? I want to be healthier, I want to be stronger, I want to be able to have more endurance. Maybe I want to run a marathon. Whatever it might be with relationships, what's the ultimate goal you want to fulfill in 2026? Now remember, you can't do everything possible when it comes to improving relationships, but it was one of the things you want to do. Maybe you want to go deeper with the relationships you already have. That's something you can really kind of have like a focal point. The reason why this is important is because we're going to reverse engineer it in step four. 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Thanks to Rosetta Stone, I found out that my mother in law was just talking about who's going to take home the leftovers at dinner behind and when I went to Rome, I was able to impress Nicole by ordering a meal in Italian at a really nice restaurant. Rosita Stone makes learning a language feel fun and really useful because you're actually able to use what you'll learn in the real world. Don't wait. Unlock your language learning potential now. The $100 BA show listeners can grab Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. That's unlimited access to 25 language courses for life. Visit RosettaStone.com MBA to get started and claim your 50% off today. Give a gift that keeps giving. Go to Rosetta Stone.com MBA and start learning today. You know how the holidays usually go. You promise yourself you're going to be thoughtful this year. Then suddenly it's last minute and you're panicking and you buy a gift card at the checkout line. This year, skip the panic and give an Aura Frame. Aura makes it unbelievably easy to share memories or which of course are priceless. You get unlimited free photo and video uploads and it's super simple to set up. Just download the Aura app, connect to Wi Fi and start adding photos in seconds. And I love this part. Every frame can be personalized with a custom message that appears the first time it's turned on. It's such a thoughtful touch and honestly, it's one of the reasons that these make incredible gifts. I personally always find it hard to get personal gifts for the people that are closest to me. So this year I'm giving an aura for Frame to my sister Mona. Mona lives far away and Nicole and I don't get to see her and her family as often as we'd like. We see each other about once every year. They're gonna love seeing shots from our trips together over the years. It's the perfect blend of thoughtful and genuinely useful for a limited time. Save on the perfect gift by visiting Oraframes.com to get $35 off. Or as best selling Carver mat frames named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code MBA at checkout. That's a U R A frames.com promo code MBA. This deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Step four is reverse engineering the year. So once you know the goals, and this is what we do, we know our goals for each category, we plug the them into the calendar with the actions we need to take to fulfill these goals. So say, for example, we have business goals, right? Certain revenue goals. What are the launches we have to do to be able to hit those goals? What are the events that we have to pull off? What are the travel or trips we need to do for business to be able to hit these business goals? What are the rest periods that we need to have in order for us to recharge and show up to our business with full energy so that we can give the best quality work to our audience? Everything gets a place in the calendar. So you gotta ask yourself and be honest, what do I need to do? What do I need to commit myself to doing in order to reach these goals? And then how am I gonna do that? When am I gonna do that? Put it into the calendar. We literally have a calendar that we plug it in for each month, each week of the year. This is something that is called a preloaded year. I learned this from my buddy Dale Beaumont from Business Blueprint. And basically, by the end of our strategic plan day, all of 2026, the whole calendar of 2026 is completed. It's filled out. We know exactly what we're doing. Generally, there's some flexibility and there's some room for spontaneity, but generally our calendar is booked because it's booked with the things we want to get done, the things that we want to do, the things are going to fulfill us like we just talked about in the previous step. That way we don't wake up in June wondering why we're not where we want to be or what's next or what do we have to do in next month. It's all planned out. Now. One of the things that I highly recommend is if you don't have time during your strategic plan day to do this. You need to make a time, literally put it in your calendar, maybe it's a week after, to actually implement the things you need to do to commit to these things. So if you're committing to going to a conference, book the conference tickets, buy the flights, book the hotels. You need to actually take action so that these things actually happen. Step 5 Cut what doesn't fit. Honestly, this is the hardest part of the five step framework. You gotta look at your plan and you have all these new things you're about to do, all these tasks, all these actions you're going to take so you can fulfill the goals you're looking for. You got to be honest with yourself. What needs to go from your daily life, from your schedule so you can make room for what matters, so you can make room for all these new tasks. Remember, you have a limited amount of time in each day. You only have 24 hours. We all only have 24 hours. You have a limited time of energy, you have a limited time of resources. So you got to ask yourself, if you're going after something new, if you're going to achieve new goals, if you're going to change your life, you need to change what you do to achieve those things. That means stopping something else so that you can do something new. Success, in my opinion, is about subtraction. It's saying no to the good so that you can say yes to the great. I know that sounds strange, but it's easy to say no to things you don't want to do. It's easy just to say no to things that you hate. It's hard, it's challenging. The tough part is saying no to the things you actually enjoy, things that you actually like to do, things that you kind of don't mind doing. Okay? But the reason why you have to say no to them is so that you can make room for the things that you have to do to achieve the new things you want to achieve, to expand your life. Let me tell you a quick story. About seven years ago, we started doing this strategic plan day where we just planned out our whole year. And you know, our business beforehand was growing, but our lives were a little bit chaotic, right? We had too many projects going. We had constant travel, we had no space to rest. We were really burning ourselves out. We were doing it to ourselves. And then one year, one November, we rented a little room and a little hotel on the coast and. And we decided to design our next year on purpose. We said, hey, I'm tired of being tired of trying to do everything. Let's get purposeful. Let's design our life rather than letting it design itself by all the demands that everybody around us has. So that single day that we committed to changed everything for us. Our focus, our happiness, even our health. So I got to say that this is one of the best investments. So don't tell yourself, I don't have time for this. I got things to do. I got to run a business. Yeah, you also have to be a leader and have some strategy to the next year. So spend one day. It's not going to kill your business if you just spend one day to do this so that your whole year, 365 days are beneficial, are going to lead you to where you want to go. Most people treat the new year like it's a surprise party, right? They show up in January and hope that everything is going to magically work out. But hope isn't a strategy, right? It's just not a strategy. If you don't plan your year, you will spend it reacting to everyone else. I know I said this a million times, but this is something I experienced year after year until I changed it. It's like driving to a destination without a map. You're still get somewhere, right? You're moving forward, but probably not where you want to go. You probably actually didn't choose the destination. You want to choose the destination first and say, I want to go here. All right, how do I get there? What are the steps to to that destination? What roads do I have to take, what things I have to go through? That is what you want to do. You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your calendar. That's what I found. If I wanted to know what's important to you, I will look at your calendar. I will know how you like to spend your time, your most valuable asset, time. Listen, planning isn't about having restriction and no spontaneity. No, planning is you putting you, yourself, your business, your health, your family first and saying, hey, this is what's important to me. This is what I want to get done, right? And there's always going to be space for you to be spontaneous and to have fun. And by the way, a lot of the stuff that we plan is all fun. So plan to have fun instead of you hoping fun will happen and it just doesn't happen because you get busy. So I want you to take action. I want you to set aside a full day this month. If you have not done this already. Do it before the end of the year. Go off site, design your 2026. Bring any business partners you have, a co founder or just you in a notebook. If you're the sole founder, ask yourself three questions. What do I want to accomplish next year? Second question. What do I need to do to make that happen? What are the actions I need to take? What are the milestones I need to hit number three? What do I need to cut out to make room for it? What do I need to remove from my life? What do I need to stop doing in order to make room for what I want to achieve? You're going to walk away with clarity, with confidence, and the year carved out for you. It's going to work for you, not against you. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Every year we finish that day, we feel a sense of excitement, a sense of joy, a sense of gratitude that we feel that 2026 is going to be even better than the current year. Because the next 12 months aren't a mystery, right? They're designed. We don't have to chase opportunities. We just have to follow the plan that we laid out. So you can't predict the future, but you can plan it out so that it can be as aligned as possible to what you want. So one day of planning gives you 365 days of clarity. So make it count. So if this episode gave you clarity, share with somebody who needs to reset for 2026, who needs a plan that maybe is a little chaotic, you know who that is in your life. Thanks so much for listening and go ahead and plan out your 2026. You'll feel empowered, you'll feel energized. You're going to feel like, hey, I got it together. I know where I'm heading, and I have a plan to get there. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. And it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode. Limu Emu and Doug Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat. Helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, limu.