How to Plan Ahead for 2023
It might be our personalities but all of us at LCC love planning. Planning out your year is a great way to ensure you can manage your workload, prevent burnout, and visually see the year ahead. It’s a great way to make sure that all of your launches are well executed, on time and on budget.
Here are some of our top tips for planning ahead:
1.Planning Out Your Year
You can plan out your year digitally or the old-school paper/pen way but taking time to sit down and note all deadlines, campaigns, and product launches helps you visualize what is coming down the pipeline so you can plan accordingly and manage your time more effectively. This also allows for better management of resources — if big projects are coming up, it can help prevent overworking yourself or others on your team by creating a realistic schedule and assigning tasks accordingly, and knowing when you can take on more work.
2.Create a Branding/Marketing Schedule
When you’re working on your yearly plan, jot down any ideas you have for social media content, new products, or rebranding. Did you know, we suggest clients start their packaging 6 months before a product launch? And our most successful branding projects were started a year before launching? Being ahead of the game guarantees your designer has designated space for you in their working calendar and allows ample time for revisions, printing, or processing delays. Starting your projects early ensures your designer can create all the assets required for launch without incurring any rush charges or additional fees and there is less of a chance of errors due to time constraints.
Preplanning social media content takes the stress out of deciding what to post and allows you to create more high-quality content that resonates with your audience. Additionally, having consistent content on your social media channels establishes you as an industry leader and showcases your expertise. Our team can design social media templates for your business that will make your posts appear more professional and polished.
3.Make Sure Everyone’s on the Same Page
Planning out what your business year looks like helps ensure that all team members are on the same page and are aware of what lies ahead. This also allows for better management of resources — if big projects are coming up, it can help prevent overworking yourself or others on your team by creating a realistic schedule and assigning tasks accordingly. At LCC we like to have team meetings to collaborate on content ideas, campaigns, and what we’d like to complete in the upcoming year. We love working collaboratively and find we’re most successful when we work together. If you have a team – include them in your planning sessions and see what you can come up with together.
Make sure to plan for personal goals as well! If there are certain goals that you want to achieve this year, start thinking about how they might be integrated into your schedule now, so they don’t become an afterthought later on in the year when things get busy again! Hopefully, we have convinced you to at least try planning your business year at least once. You may decide that it is beneficial to plan your next year (or years).
To help you get started this year we’ve created a free 2023 planner! This is our way of saying thank you and giving back to small businesses. You can download the PDF file and use it digitally on your tablet or print it out, hole-punch it, and place it in a binder. The planner contains monthly and weekly templates that can be duplicated and filled out. Dream big and we can’t wait to see what you have coming up in 2023!
