← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
921: How to Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Most Do All Year
00:47:54
Imagine accomplishing a year’s worth of goals in just 12 weeks. That’s what I’m doing here at Boss Project and today I’m going to share my game plan with you!
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Abigail Pumphrey
If I need people to see the sales page, obviously I need the right people to see the sales page or my conversion rate isn't going to be there. But if the right people see it and are presented with the offer and have some sense of like frequency in which they are seeing that offer, it should do well. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Business settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Looking for a way to make a difference with your morning coffee? Grab a bag of talitha coffee@bossproject.com Coffee Every purchase helps support survivors of human trafficking. Make every cup count@bossproject.com Coffee Imagine accomplishing a year's worth of goals in just 12 weeks. That's exactly what we're setting out to do here at Boss Project and today I'm sharing my game plan live on the show. If you've never heard of the 12 week year concept before, think of it as working in focused sprints rather than annual plans. This approach creates urgency and focus and allows you to really see what's coming in a very clear and tangible way. After hearing how it's transformed other businesses, I wanted to implement this framework and test it ourselves and then document my journey along the way right here on the podcast. I think it's only appropriate that I tell you why this even came to be. See, a couple of years ago, I stopped making goals. Like almost entirely. I wasn't writing goals for launches. I wasn't setting financial goals. I wasn't setting goals and objectives for my business. Now, while that may seem a little bit nuts, especially as a CEO of a small business, I just noticed that so much of what I was putting down and striving to do was ultimately completely out of my control. I couldn't make the sales happen. I couldn't have the leads appear. I couldn't necessarily grow my list. Not that I can't grow it. Not that I can't make strides for it, but I felt like the goal at the front end, the high end, was not something I ultimately could make happen. I could do all the work and it could still not happen. And then I would still feel this sense of failure. And so at that time, we kind of made this switch within the company to instead view things more as experiments. And so we spent more time kind of utilizing the scientific method where we would make some hypothesis about what ultimately would come to be. We would work towards the end game, but we would focus exclusively on the process in the same way that you would doing a science experiment. You just go through the process and you measure your results at the end to see if the hypothesis was true or not. And if it's not, then you make adjustments to simply do better next time or better hit the objective. Now, clearly there would be some opportunities to instead make the goals tangible. Things that you know, you can do, like have a goal to post X number of times per week for the entire year. That could be a goal. And you could obviously measure against it and you're in control of it. You could do it or you could not. But so often those kinds of conceptual goals, especially on an annualized basis, you tend to be really overzealous about your ability to stay consistent or you put it off so much so that you're like, well, I could technically do all this in the last quarter, so I'm just gonna wait. My last quarter is the biggest anyway, so it's gonna perform the best if I wait till then, yada yada. I just was kind of over it. Like, not necessarily over goals, but I wanted a new way to approach business in a way that felt fun, exciting, felt challenging again, but didn't feel so much like wins or failures. I needed something in the middle, you know. And so I'm not suggesting that adopting this methodology is going to completely change the game for you and it's going to be the perfect thing for your business. Honestly, I think you hitting objectives or goals or hypothesis or however you decide to approach it is about finding what works with your brain and how you show up in your business and figuring out a method that is going to continue to motivate you. Now, I think part of the reason I was unmotivated to set goals in the more traditional sense is that I wasn't trying to grow the business for multiple years. And I think often people get this sense that you're supposed to always be in upward trajectory and that's just not realistic one and it doesn't necessarily follow the seasonality of your life. You're going to need different things at different times. And you have to decide what is it that this time and space of my life needs and how can I accommodate that. And so as far as maintenance goes, I had been in business long enough that I knew what it took to maintain the business we had built. And it didn't require me to set goals or objectives to make that happen. Like, I knew this business like the back of my hand. That was simple. The thing that I ultimately came to, and the biggest reason I decided to add these back in, is I didn't want to feel like I was the only person driving forward in the business. I didn't want to be the only person striving for growth. And while no one else in my business is responsible for sales, that's only me. And that's fine. I did want to challenge them to grow their skill sets, to grow how they're showing up in the company, kind of give them renewed perspective. Because everyone who's in my business today has been here three, three and a half years plus. So now that you know why, let me talk about stumbling upon this. So this was months ago, maybe even last summer. At some point in the last six months, someone on TikTok mentioned the 12 week year and really was talking about it enthusiastically. So much so that I was like noted, when I'm ready to look at the year, I really should look at this again. And some of you may ask, why didn't you do it in July? If it's a 12 week year, you could start at any time. You're right, I totally could. But the business wasn't focused on growth last year and so I wasn't ready for that. I also had a lot going on. My dad was in the hospital. I've talked about this, yada yada. There was a ton going on. So I saw January as an opportunity for a fresh start. And I was like, you know, I remember thinking I wanted to look into this. So I downloaded the book on Audible over break and I started listening to it. I didn't necessarily get all the way through it just yet, but the concept is honestly very simple. I think it's easy to understand logically and much harder to execute on. So what do I mean by that? The concept is you set objectives that can be completely accomplished within a 12 week window. It gives you opportunity for planning, it gives you opportunity for momentum. But like enough sense of urgency, the follow through just is there. And every time I looked at annual Planning, I was like, you know, I could arbitrarily decide when various launches would happen or what sales goals should be for the year. And I did. Don't get me wrong, I know some of those basic things for the next 12 months. But anytime I looked at everything as a whole, I was like, well, if all of this is true, what am I really focused on in Q1? And in the same way, I think it would be really easy to say you should be focused on one quarter of what you said your annualized goal is. But the problem is there's a lot, like there's a lot going on. There's a lot that I said I wanted to do that I want the business to accomplish. And we even had a goal setting meeting in December with the whole staff, everyone set 12 month goals and objectives. But I walked away from that meeting feeling like it wasn't something we were going to stay on top of. It was something that would still be there and we would look at occasionally, but wouldn't be a focus. And so what I love about this idea is that you map out every week before the 12 weeks even start. You know exactly what you're supposed to accomplish that week. You did it or you didn't, and you know where you're going at the end of 12 weeks with the thought that at the end of those 12 weeks you reassess and you start over. It doesn't necessarily have to be on the same topic, the same plan, the same focus. You can pick different objectives, you can pick different goals, you can have different ways to measure success. All of that can change. 100% of it can change at the end of 12 weeks. But for 12 weeks you're fully, completely committed. The part that's easy to understand but hard to wrap your brain around, how to actually do that, is they talk about in the book the idea of removing annualized thinking. And what do I mean by that? I mean like not looking as 12 week goals as a piece of a puzzle. This is the whole puzzle. This is everything. And you're not supposed to look at an annualized basis like the way you do right now. Your focus is on fewer priorities with greater impact. You're probably gonna get less done, more completely, which is likely gonna take you much further. Like if you look at the statistics behind it, it's actually kind of insane. The amount of growth potential and the ways in which it has motivated employees. Like there's a ton of research out there about this being successful, much in the same way that there was a ton of research about a four day workweek before we implemented, which I waited years I might add, before I decided to actually do that. And now I can't imagine going back. We've been doing this for nine months maybe, but with a 12 week plan and a 12 week focus I have opportunities to drive weekly accountability. And I've tried KPIs in the past. Like I've read a bunch of books about team management and organizational management and a lot of it makes sense at a larger scale with much bigger teams. Like I have a friend who's an analytics and telephone company. You should hear how specific her job is. Like it is wild how specific her job is. And the analytics in which she covers is like insane to me. And not because it's insane, but because it's so wild to imagine having a job that is so focused on one thing. Like I'm running marketing and I'm writing and I'm creative and I'm doing product development, I'm doing sales. Like I am wearing a ton of hats and she's sitting over in corporate focused on analytics for one piece of the company, which I don't know enough about her position to know what her role is, but I think it's all reporting. Like I don't necessarily think she's like driving that measurement forward, but I could be wrong. I also have a serious I would making it an issue absolutely sounds like it's a bigger deal than it is. But I have always struggled with procrastination. Not because I don't want to do a good job, not because I don't care about the end result, not because I don't want to please other people, but often because I find the thing, whatever it is, to be so important that getting out of the gate feels like the challenge. But once I'm going, I have no problem. But the getting off the starting block when it feels like an important task can be something like I really struggle with it or I am juggling far too many priorities. I say I want to do this and that and this and that and there's way too much jumping around and not enough focus on any one thing. And so everything is okay, but nothing is stellar if you were to look at it on a bigger basis. Only 8% of people actually achieve their annualized goals. But when people talk about sprints, a short term focus absolutely increases the success rate like pretty dramatically. And I've done two week sprints in the past, which I love by the way for very specific projects like a two week sprint to build A product or to, you know, create an event or like whatever. I think that can work really conceptually well. But when we're trying to work the whole business forward, sometimes you don't have enough time to get any data. Like in a two week sprint you could finish the starting block, basically like you could start the thing, but there's no way you could track results and see how something's performing. Like you just don't have enough information. And so if you want to get a lot done, two week sprints, great. If you want to get a lot done and watch its growth over time, measure potential and then react. I think this concept of a 12 week year makes so much more sense. Now. The way I went about this, I don't know if this is the right way to go about this, but this is the way I decided to go about this is I did not dictate to my team at all what their 12 week focus should look like. I didn't say what their objectives should be or their like multiple objectives should be. I didn't define it. Instead they're all very clear on what their role is and the areas in which they impact inside of the business. And they had already set annualized goals in December, which for the record, I'm kind of like pretending don't exist anymore and rather just using that as a reference point of saying these are the things that we said were important to us. Are those things still true? A chunk of time at a time. But I went in and told them, you're going to each pick your own. I'm not going to dictate what it is. I'm confident you know enough about the business and what the overall goal is for the business that you can make educated decisions about what this looks like. And gave them a basic concept of overall what I was trying to accomplish. And tomorrow we're having a team meeting to discuss our individual goals, the thing that we're focused on for the next 12 weeks. Now it's not to say that that person can 100% own everything that needs to be done. Like there's enough crossover that we are all going to need stuff from other people in the group that that's going to be necessary. But enough of the project. I mean 80, 90% or more of the project will be individually owned. The other 10% is collaborative or you're getting feedback from, or you're looping someone into something but they're not necessarily owning it. You are. So I don't yet know what their focus is, but I know what mine is. And so I wanted to share mine, live with you a little bit about what my focus is, how I got there, how I decided what the traffic goals and various objectives would look like to make it measurable and kind of a basic overview of what my 12 week plan is. But what I love about this, instead of it being a goal, it's almost like a 12 week project that has some sort of measurable outcome and there's something about that in my brain that just clicks. So nonetheless, what am I focused on? What is the thing that is top of mind for me? So I suppose I should put an asterisk here to say that the business still has other things we have to get done, like we're still maintaining the business we have today. These are just the primary focuses week to week and everything else just kind of needs to fit around it. But if you were to look at a list of things you need to get done, this should be your priority one. So for the first 12 weeks of the year, my end game is I want to turn our most popular products completely evergreen on paid advertising and have those be profitable. So I want to see a return from paid ads on Evergreen for our most popular products and make them profitable. That sounds pretty general and it kind of is. But what I can tell you is that that means that our paid ad strategy is my primary focus. I'm maintaining a lot of things in the business. I'm maintaining our organic marketing, all of our emails, all of our social content, anything sales related, all of that. But if our paid ad strategy is the primary focus, to me that really dictates where I put the emphasis in time and energy. And if something, if a ball has to drop, this isn't it. It's going to be one of the other things. And that's okay because I've decided that this is the thing I'm working towards. Hiring with Indeed, your search is over. When it comes to hiring, don't go searching for the 1. Just meet your match with Indeed. Get unparalleled access to job seekers with over 350 million unique monthly visitors globally according to Indeed data and an extended reach through Glassdoor. I love that Indeed makes it easy to hire when we've hired. In the past, the process was full of unqualified applicants. With Indeed, we can target the right candidates for the right position, leveraging over 140 million qualifications and preferences every day. Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences. So the more you use Indeed, the better it gets. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com strategyour just go to indeed.com strategyour right now and support our show by seeing you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com strategy hour terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you need Indeed So I created some measurable objectives. I'm not necessarily going to get into the super specifics because I don't necessarily think that's important to you, but I did make specific things a part of it. So one thing we're doing, and I can't say Q1 in the next 12 weeks is is running a live challenge. The last time we did it at this scale it was incredibly successful and I have some pretty aggressive objectives for the number of signups I want to see this time around. There isn't a sales number attached to that. I just know that if we get this level of signups it's going to have a trickle effect and I have the most opportunity for impact to those sales goals by focusing on signups for the challenge itself. So that's numero uno. Beyond that, we're going to take just two of our primary product lineup and create evergreen ads to them. My goal is to create daily entry point product sales that upsell into my membership the Co Op. So I worked backwards to kind of see where we were at. I looked at exactly what our traffic has been like over the last 12 months. I've looked at our average conversions month to month. I compared live sales promotion conversion rates to evergreen conversion rates where things are just being driven by organic traffic or organic mentions in email copy. And I broke down what our monthly views to sales looked like and what that average conversion was. And then I looked at specifically because it all comes down to traffic. Like if you're going to hit those sales goals, you have to control the thing at the highest point. So in the same way I put the emphasis on signups on the challenge for the evergreen products, I need views, I need people to see the sales page. And so if I need people to see the sales page, obviously I need the right people to see the sales page or my conversion rate isn't going to be there. But if the right people see it and are presented with the offer and have some sense of like frequency in which they are seeing that offer, it should do well. And so I've reverse engineered exactly what we need on a daily basis. And the reason I did that is because so much of what you're looking at in the paid ad world is kind of in a little bubble. And so rather than trying to be like, well, I want this many sales over the month. That's not really what I want. What I want is daily evergreen sales from paid ads. I have daily evergreen sales from organic content. But I want to amplify what's already working with a paid ad strategy. And so I know what I need daily views wise to each sales page and then beyond that, the entire objective of all of this is to reach a 2 to 3x return on ad spend with a sales goal attached to that. You know, 2 to 3x for individualized ads is great, but I know exactly how many daily sales I want and how many daily people I want to see join the co op as a result. All of that is mapped out. I picked the products I did because I know they already convert well organically and are some of our most popular products anyways. I did, however, I was a little bit surprised by I had a strategy meeting with my ads manager and he suggested that I not do a couple of our products because the price point was low enough that he thought we would only break even or potentially it would cost money to run ads to them. So the products we picked are ones he believes there's enough room in the price point that we can, you know, at least break even on the front end with the goal of 2 to 3 extra turn. I have friends who are doing 10x return now that's kind of nuts on ads, but it's possible I'm shooting for average and if we surpass that, fantastic. The interesting thing about our ad strategy is we're going direct to sale, direct to entry point digital product sale. And what I love about it is you're getting paid to bring in qualified leads. The real money is made on the second and third sale and fourth sale and yada yada. And so the goal is for it to compound. I do anticipate that the initial sale will minimum break even. The opportunity for continued growth is going to be on order bumps and upsells. Now my upsell strategy is not the same as what I see the majority of people doing. A lot of people are going direct to a higher end offer and I am going to test that during the challenge. But I do have a plan to instead do an upsell to a trial and we've been doing an upsell to a trial for months organically and it's been converting quite well. Like converting at 25% which is nuts, which is obviously way higher. I mean you're going to see an average of 2 to 3% for something that's at that higher price point at scale. So seeing 25% is a really good metric for scale. So my goal in the next 12 weeks is to essentially test both strategies. We're going to test an upsell that is a higher end upsell and then we're also going to test the trial. We're going to do both. Now, with all this as the focus, you'd think that I'd spent a ton of time on ad spend and where we're going to put the deliverables and all of that. And that's not where I spent my time. I've already talked to my ads guy about where we can start and when we hit numbers, we will scale from there because I have no fear upscaling as long as the sales are there to justify it. Instead, my 12 week plan are essentially the deliverables I need to get done to really move the strategy forward. Which at the end of the day sounds so simple. You're literally saying, I want to make this bigger objective happen. Here's the work I need to do to support that happening. There's a ton out of my control, but my weekly plan is what I have to get done now. The thing that was really interesting about this is I already had a vague idea of the kinds of things I wanted to get done in the first three months of the year. But I thought I knew when some of those things would happen. And by just the sheer process of writing out these weekly objectives, I know on average what it takes to maintain what we're already doing. And I know how much space I have to work on this primary focus, which is about a day, a week, total of 8 hours, ish a week to focus on my focus. And when I started looking at the things I had to get done, I was like, ooh, I need to move this back. Like, this needs to be further into it than I realized. And it could be really frustrating to say, oh, I'm not going to even get there until the end of eight weeks. But seeing what's possible when you give it the proper space to actually do what you can realistically accomplish in the time and space that you have to dedicate to it. I feel confident that I'm setting myself up for success. Does it require things from other people on the team? Yeah. Does it mean I'm going to have to be in the weeds with it with my new ads manager? Yeah, this is my primary focus. So that's where I should be spending my time. If you're interested in applying this framework, I think there's a couple of things you could do. One, you can read the book. Whether you decide to read a physical copy or listen to it, that's up to you. P.S. i have it linked up for you. If you go to bossproject.com Amazon, it's in my books list. And then I actually listened to it on Audible. And if you haven't snagged an Audible subscription before, you can get your first book free. If you go to bossproject.com audible and that's a U, D, I, B, L, E what I spent 10 or 15 minutes on, he's going to spend six or seven hours on. If you listen on one speed, I'm pretty sure I can only listen to a book on like at least one and a half, usually two. First and foremost, you need to simplify your focus. You're trying to do too much. And by trying to do too much, you are not getting anything done that you want to get done. And so I want you to pick one big goal. What do you want to work on for 12 weeks? What are you excited about working on for 12 weeks? What do you think is going to move the needle most in your business? Maybe it's launching a specific product, building your email list, increasing visibility with social. There's so many things you could do, but you're going to need to break it down into weekly actions. What are you actually doing? This isn't the goal for the week. It's not like some metric you have to hit. It's what is on your to do list. In the beginning, it might be around defining that goal on a more specific basis or defining a strategy. Another week, you might be creating assets like ads or a sales page or writing something. At some point you're going to have to launch the thing, whatever it is, and start testing it. And throughout your time, you're going to refine. Now, I think it's really easy to get stuck. You might get four to six weeks in and be like, this all makes sense. I'm clear. I know what I'm doing. What the heck do I do about the second six weeks? I think this is where you have a really incredible opportunity to leverage AI. You can go in, you can describe exactly what you're trying to accomplish. You're going to communicate that you're using the 12 week year framework. So it's going to be able to reference that in anything on the Internet that describes it and share what you've mapped out and mention that you Want help coming up with potential options for the second half, but if you get stuck sooner than that, just include AI sooner than that. I think for me it was a good opportunity to see that I do need to add like inflection points for refining and monitoring progress because I think I can be pretty heads down and so going back and like really ensuring that I have opportunities to check performance. Not that I won't be checking performance on a regular basis, but like checking it in a way that's perhaps different than the way my ads manager might move something forward. Like my ads manager doesn't have access to my total traffic. He's not looking at a blend of organic and paid. I am. I'm the one who has access to my sales analytics. He's just going to look at what the pixel is telling him. And so really making sure that what we're seeing on the back end is reflective. In our actuals, our team already has a weekly meeting. It is the best. It is such a great opportunity to communicate what we're working on, what we're working towards, ask any questions that are not necessarily something that needs to get done right now. We can brainstorm together, we can work together. I plan to add this to our weekly meeting. We'll probably do it at the end essentially the way we used to do it, where each person like reported on their own stuff that was only kind of helpful. There's enough overlap in our different areas of the business that that's not always helpful. So instead we have kind of a flow of all the, I would call them departments, but kind of all the different departments, the different kinds of tasks that we would potentially have. And then anyone can add talking points to any of those categories. Obviously there's certain people that tend to add more things to certain categories and that is totally fine. But when we get to that specific talking point, whoever added it is the person that talks and it works really well. And then at the end of our meeting, we talk about our primary objectives in order. And so if there's any sort of misalignment on the things we're working on, that's where we bring it up. So my plan, at least as of today, we'll see how it actually gets rolled out, is that we will include this at the end of the meeting and say, what was our weekly objective based on our 12 week year and did we accomplish it? Yes or no. And theoretically, if people have written their goal out clearly, then saying they did it, yes or no should be a pretty obvious answer. I also have Monthly one on ones with each of my team members. So it'll definitely be something that I additionally check in with them they're on and will really make sure that they have everything they need to be successful. There's always things that come up in those meetings. You think after three and a half years that you've talked about absolutely everything. But the business keeps evolving. People's personal needs change. Like it's so great to continue to have that check in with people. And so I'm sure I'll learn a lot along the way there. And then we will just be tracking our progress religiously because data doesn't lie. If something's not working, I'm not worried about it not working. If you talked to me four or five years ago and we weren't hitting an objective, I'd be like, we're doing something wrong. No, we're not. If you're doing the work, you're doing the work. If it's not working, you need to tweak it and keep going. So that's the other thing. I have a 12 week plan, but I'm not married to my plan. If something needs to change, I'm going to change it. And because we're looking 12 weeks ahead, I have a pretty clear idea of what my life looks like. I know if I'm going to be traveling, if I'm going to be out of office, if we're closing for anything, those things are accounted for in the plan and it will be okay because I can accommodate that on the front end instead of over commit and be frustrated by outcomes. The thing I'm probably most excited about is while we're definitely not going to hit all of the financial goals we want to in 12 weeks for the year, like I get that conceptually, but. But I do think for our primary objectives, we're going to be a heck of a lot further on those than we anticipated. Because there's a ton of side projects I want to do and I am very good at making side projects a priority, not just for me, but for everyone on my team. And my hope is that by having these as the focus, those are the things that fit in between. And if it doesn't happen, it is very clear that it's because it's not the focus. And that's okay. Like I want to build another website, I want to continue to write more, I want to write a book, like all of those things. That's not my focus right now. Do I have more writing time baked into the plan? Yes. Do I Have the site built like on the docket for things I want to do in the next 12 weeks. Yes, but it's not on my weekly plan because it's not part of this strategy. If you're ready to try the 12 week year for yourself, it doesn't matter that we're into January. That's okay. You can pick 12 weeks of objectives and start now. Pick one goal, pick one thing you're focused on and let's do it together. I'd love if you would share on Instagram what you're thinking, what your plan is and tag me at Abigail says. I would love to see it and then I want to have you follow my journey. I have not necessarily shared, you know, a regular check in in the same way that I used to. We used to do like monthly income reports. But I'd love to check back in in four weeks to tell you how things are going. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out. And if you want some resources on how to implement yourself and your business, like I mentioned, you can grab a copy of the book by going to bossproject.comamazon. it's literally called 12 week year and I have it linked up for you in my book section. Super easy to find. And then if you want or prefer to listen to it on Audible, you can get your first book free by going to bossproject.com audible that's a U D I B L E. I look forward to seeing all that you accomplish and I can't wait to share what our team has done and also how the rest of my team is doing on their own goals when I report back. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me, Abigail says and ossproject so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from bossproject. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening until next time.