How To Plan Your Year In Less Than An Hour.

Thanks for watching!

Belinda

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TRANSCRIPTION:

How to plan your year in under an hour

Belinda Kerr

Hi there, Belinda here from recruitment garage. I speak to lots of recruitment agency owners who find it hard to plan they used to being recruiters and looking at the next month when it comes to setting goals and really laying out what they’re going to do week by week across the year to build their business it things become a bit fuzzy, and there are various tools that you can use, and most of them are pretty good. What I have found is I have one of those brains, I’ve got an entrepreneurial block or an entrepreneurial brain. So I tend to go in two directions and create lots of lists of lists and having to have too much happening and then you end up in a world of chaos. So there’s lots of great tools out there but what I find with a lot of them is there’s a lot of cool functionality on them. They look good they can link to this and link to that and sometimes that just creates more confusion. I guess what I cover off two birds with one stone with this video one is showing you how to plan out your year.

Very quickly with a tool I discovered the other day it was recommended by somebody I was watching. I wish I could remember who but anyway, it’s a product called workflowy calm. It’s, free I’m sure there’s an upgraded version but the version I use is free. And so court so workflowy.com work flowy.com. And what it helps you do is really plan out your year in a very linear very easy clean way. And I love it. So I’m going to run through an example here we you very light, but if you’d like it, check it out, sign up and give it a go.

You’ll see over here I’ve got the shortcuts they don’t automatically come up I had to Youtuber did a bit of debate of how-to on YouTube by itself to get this to come up and all you need to do is press your on a PC, the Windows button and the question mark if you’re on a Mac, a Mac, that ctrl key and the question mark and this will come up for you. So all you need to do I’m going to make this a really simple example. But I think you’ll get the point of how easy it is and if you are somebody who’s coming to work every day and you don’t really have a plan. Just follow this simple process. And it will give you something to make sure that you’re maximizing every day.

All you have to do is first up, is put your first heading in. So we’re going to put right at the top of the tree, we’re going to call it yearly goals. All right. Now when you’re setting yearly goals, two to three is absolutely enough. Don’t go giving yourself 10 or 15 goals, you’ll never achieve them. Give yourself a few goals that if you reach them, you would be absolutely over the moon about so we’re going to say that we’re going to this year, we’re going to start a new division in our agency for project managers. And we’ve decided that we’re wasting too much of our effort on fulfilling roles that aren’t exclusive. We’ve been doing too much contingent work. So we’re going to move from being a contingent business with only a few exclusive roles to having at least 80% of our roles. Now we’re going to go 90 Gotta go 90% of our roles are exclusive. So in 12 months, we went and won 90% of exclusive. So if you were going from 20% of exclusive roles to 90%, you’d be pretty happy. Right? So that’s our second goal. The third goal might be to double your pool of engaged freelancers. And when I say engaged people that know you and want to hear from you. So those are three goals. With each of those goals what we then want to do is look at the first 90 day milestone, what’s it going to what do we need to do in the first 90 days to move us forward to that goal down here? Oh, yeah, hang on. There we go. Move that back out, we can then start to look, you could do this one of two ways. You could go into each one of those goals and do 90 days for each of them or you could just put it all in together. For the case of this example, I’ll just put it all in together. So we want 90 days milestones.

So how are we going to know that we’re on track in 90 days to hit our yearly goals? All right, we are going to if we look at our first one, setting up the project management division, well, what do we want to know? What do we want to have known in 90 days, we’re going to have to have our market fully mapped. Ideally, we would also like it within 90 days, we’re going to have to have started to engage with that market. So what will we be doing to do that? It might be that we do a webinar for that market, for example. So we have all right, and then project managers want the market fully mapped. We want to have completed a value webinar with the project management market there to obviously build our awareness and relationship with them. Then we look at 90% of roles exclusive what is it that we need to be doing to shift that if you’ve got consultants working for you today know what conversations to have

One of the things that may need to have happened within that first 90 days that is perhaps completed training. Now actually, we’re going to change that. All consultants fully competent, competent at selling exclusive roles.  And then for the doubling the pool of engaged freelancers, maybe what we’ve decided to do there is to implement a loyalty program with a.

Alright, so looking for ways to use your current talent to bring in more and maybe another action that you might do there is to might decide to complete a personality quiz for one of your divisions might already be that you place UX people, so a computer personality, quiz, UX talent, and these are all just very rough examples. But then so We go all right, so yearly goals, going to start a project management division 90% of our roles are going to be exclusive. We’re going to double our pool of engaged freelancers what needs to happen in the next 90 days to move us towards that goal. Well, by then we should have our market fully mapped for project managers.

We’ve completed our first value webinar with the project management market, you may decide that a way to engage with your market or you, and then when it comes to the exclusive roles, or your consultants are fully competent at selling exclusive roles. And when it comes to doubling your pool of engaged freelancers, you’re going to implement a loyalty program with a referral incentive. Or you’re going to have to run a personality quiz for UX talent. And we’ll go into the details here. There are just ideas for you. But then, what you want to do from there is bring so we don’t have to think about the 90 days after that right now. Just your first 90 days, and then we bring it back to your monthly actions right. So monthly action put them here. So for the first one project managers, we want our market fully map. How are we going to do that? Well, we’re going to get an outsourced VA to map the market so that we know who they are. Tibet addresses our first point there of the market fully mapped. And we’re going to again, speaking of these project managers, we’re going to have completed a webinar with the project management market.

So in the first month, what do we need to do to have that webinar have happened we need to get a topic decided for the webinar confirmed as Speaker and a date. And then we may also need to have all tech requirements. All right, that’ll do for that one, and then all consultants fully competent at selling exclusive roles, monthly actions to complete training for consultants on short-selling In my typing day to complete training for all consultants on how to sell exclusivity, we might create a buddy system for consultants to Alright, so we might have created a buddy system for consultants to practice selling exclusivity to each other. That could be another idea. And then for our doubling our pool of engaged candidates, freelancers, rather, we want to add our milestones. We’ve implemented what we want to have implemented a loyalty program with a referral incentive.

So the first thing is we need to really understand how to do that. So we perhaps need to speak to some people about how to do that. Speak to loyalty program specialists on how to implement a loyalty program and then completed a personality quiz. We may need to so invest in gait, how to do this. So with something like quizzes you can, there’s software for everything. Now you can research on, you know, do online quizzes, and you’ll find software that you can actually use to run this. And quizzes are cool people like quizzes, and quite often they’ll engage with them. So you can use that as a tool to get more people in. It’s just a bit of a fun bit of a gamification thing. To investigate how to embed a quiz into your website. For example, we might send it out by email or whatever you want to do put it on social media, but can you dig through some investigating around that? Alright, so there’s our monthly reactions. And then what we want to do is the final step in this is to create weekly.

So get it in your diary, get it happening, so we want to schedule it, schedule it weekly. So what’s going to happen every week, in order for this to move forward. Now you can write out the whole month’s activity if you want to if that works better for you, or you can do it a week at a time and review at the end of each week, whichever way your mind works best, if we go back up to the monthly actions, then what do we need to schedule every week to make it happen? Get an outsourced VA to map the market.

So what do we need to do in week one, first of all, we need to create a brief for them a brief for the VA. And then you might want to reach out to five VA’s and choose the right person, give them a test and review that test and make sure they come back with the information you want. That’s the first month of action ticked off. So that’s all we need to do in that first week. In fact, what we might find is that I’m going to put I should do this way. This is week one. And then we want to move this one over and a common how to do it.

So how do I do it here, indent Oh, yeah, just hit tab. Right. That’s better. Alright, so schedule it weekly. Week One, create a brief for the VA. Reach out to five VAs and choose the right person. Give them a chance. And review. And then week two, I would actually move that test, maybe down week one might be a bit soon. So let’s move that down. I worked there we go move that down there instead. So the first week you creating the brief the brief and you’re finding them choosing the right person, give them a test to review and then you would want to review their test and choose the best VA there we go. That might be week two, and then the topic decided for the webinar. So you might decide in week one, you want to reach out to the reach out to specifics a good reach out to five people in your market to discuss webinar topics. Right that might be enough for week one, then you collect those and then in week two, once you’ve got those, choose the topic and make a list of potential speakers. So there you go. We might do that in week two. Then we come back up here we are actions confirmed by a speaker on a date so that you might do these actions to find a speaker. And you might then it might be the third or the fourth week that you actually confirm that speaker might not all happen in the first week, then to complete the training for all consultants on how to sell exclusivity.

Now, maybe that’s something that you can do internally, or maybe it’s not. So if you don’t feel you feel like you want to get an external trainer. So in that week one or you might go, you know what, I’ve got enough week one, let’s just look at week two here. And we’re going to speak to three potential recruitment, trainers on training routine on exclusivity. Boom got that. And then you might go, yep, so that’s week two. That’s enough for that right. Now, once we’ve done that, well, we’ll go from there, if I want to do after that. So that gets us underway with that. These are monthly actions, so you don’t have to address them all in week one. But in week one you’re looking at what are the things that are going to start to move this project forward for you, and if you want to stick it out week to week wait three weeks for and that makes you feel a bit more comfortable, then do that.

What else have we got here? Have all tech requirements sorted. So you might kind of go or we don’t need to do that and wait to let’s look, let’s look at week three, review five, maybe not that many of you three platforms and select one, right and play training Hamilton I’ve jumped ahead he doesn’t matter and create a buddy system for consultants to practice selling exclusivity where you might kind of think at this point, haven’t even got the trainer in yet. I’ll come back to that at about week four, and worry about that then. So you might not select any actions yet on that one. Speak to a loyalty program specialist on how to implement a loyalty program. You might decide you’re going to maybe do that week four, so you could put in week four here. Identify loyalty specialists to speak to and investigating a quiz, you might think you know what got enough on my plate for these first four weeks, I’m gonna leave that.

So that’s, that’s how you do it. And what I like about this, look how simple and easy that is. I mean, you can use different cases and stuff if you want to, but everything just follows really easily. And if you want to, if you decided, you know what, I’m actually going to do this in week one not wait too, it’s just a matter of drag it up there, whack it up there. So you can see it becomes a little bit of a fluid document for you. There’s nothing in there to get in the way. If you want to delete things, add new ones, you can do that you can collapse and expand things. So if you wanted to go and just look here, you can collapse all that down. And it just makes it really easy to focus on what you want to focus on at any one time. You might just think you know what, I just really want to think about my monthly actions right now. So collapse all that down. Expand that one out. Collapse that down.

All I want to focus on today is my monthly actions, I want to review that and make sure that I feel like that’s the right plan for this month, and nothing else is in your way, nothing screaming at you, it’s not my link, don’t link to me, don’t send me somewhere else or format me in some different way, just at least to the stuff that you need to get done to move your business forward. You’ve all heard it, massive action will move your business forward. This is a really easy way to set out a plan. And look, this is a made-up plan. I’m not suggesting this is one that you use or, you know, that’s necessarily the right time frames or anything like that. But the the process, understand the process, setting up goals, get your 90 day milestones in place, what’s the next month actions that are going to move you towards that. And then the I guess the most critical piece here is look at what it is you can do this week to move that forward next week to move that forward and then keep on.

This is a live document so tweak it and change it as things happen. And if you need to speed things up or slow things down In terms of getting you to where you want to be at the right time, this framework will allow you to do that. So I hope that helps you out. It’s a really simple tool. I’m using it at the moment in my business and I’m finding it really, really easy to use. So hopefully that’s a value to look I’m not pretending to be an expert in it. I only came across this about a week ago but I’m really loving it and wanted to share it with you. Because I thought there could be some value in that for some of you. There you go. Enjoy it. If you’ve got any comments on it or different ways to use it. You want to share, I’d love to hear from you.