Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there, Catherine Langman here. Welcome back to the Productpreneur Success Podcast, and today on the show, we are going to be talking about how to get ready to plan your best year yet. Now if you haven’t already thought about your goals for this year or the things that you might do to achieve them, what are you going to put into place to try and grow your business and achieve whatever goals that you have for yourself? We’re going to be talking about that in today’s episode, it’s going to be like a little mini how to training episode. You’re probably going to want to pull out a notepad and a pen and just jot down some notes as we go.
Catherine Langman:
So here’s how to write a simple business plan and make the next 12 months your best year yet. And yes, I did just say that, even though it might feel maybe a tiny bit pointless planning ahead when COVID is still going a bit nuts around the world. Thanks, Omicron. But here’s the thing, if we don’t set the course for our business or ourselves personally, we’ll end up meandering all over the place and operating in a very reactive manner. And I believe it’s much better to be really intentional about what you want to do and achieve, but then to set about doing it with the mindset, if things change, I’ll pivot. Because when you operate with that more positive outlook, then you’re going to start to see all sorts of opportunities rather than brick walls.
Catherine Langman:
So here’s how you do it. And I guess to who begin with, what I want to say is how … Or what I want to ask you rather, is how would you describe success in your business? Is it a profitable lifestyle business? Is it an empire? Is it perhaps a fully automated passive income stream? Is there a really, really big impact goal that you’re working towards? That big, hairy audacious goal, BHAG, I’ve spoken about before? So What is the dream? You really need to be pretty clear about what that looks like for you, because I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I don’t want to say this is the only valid goal to aim for. That’s not how it is.
Catherine Langman:
Whatever success looks like for you, you want to be able to define that and describe that really clearly for yourself, otherwise you’ll end up on a journey that just never seems to end. And that really makes it harder to feel like you’ve achieved anything and it certainly makes it harder a push through the tough times that we will all inevitably face along the way. Let’s face it. We have to develop a little bit of resilience in business just as we do in life, because there are certainly many things, many challenges that are kind of thrown in our way and we just have to be able to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Catherine Langman:
And personally, I’ve found that having a really, really clear vision of what I am aiming for, and honestly, that’s got very little to do with money. Sometimes it does for some people, but for me, yes, I want to make some money, I need to be able to live, all of that kind of stuff, but that’s not quite enough to pull me through the harder times. So for me, I really need to be clear about what, what is that kind of really big vision that I’m aiming for?
Catherine Langman:
So anyway, in this episode, we’re going to sort of step it out for you and I will be kind of sharing with you the method that I use to describe my vision, to set my goals, and then to go about figuring out how I’m going to go achieving them, if this makes sense. And this is actually a method that I developed years ago when I started my first business selling modern cloth nappies here in Australia. Some of you probably know this story and some of you don’t, but like many good things in life, I became what I call a Productpreneur almost by accident.
Catherine Langman:
Back in 2005, I became a mum and my first son was a honeymoon baby, and he changed my life. I thought being a mum was awesome. I really loved first time motherhood, so good that I had another son a year later. I don’t recommend doing that that close, to be honest, and it was certainly a juggle after that. But anyway, two kids that close together, there really was way that I was going to be going back to my previous career after that. My background was in branding and advertising for Blue Chip Corporate and government clients in Sydney, so like the Coca-Colas and the Microsofts of the world, amongst others.
Catherine Langman:
For me though, the ethical dilemma of designing packaging for a tobacco company and the boredom of creating advertising for a bank on top of, of course, juggling two little kids under … Well, under two, they were a year apart. All of that drove me to seek a much more professionally satisfying as well as family friendly role, and so the answer for me at the time was that I started my business. For me though, I wasn’t just creating a job for myself, I felt like I was a little bit on a mission to change the world one nappy at a time.
Catherine Langman:
I guess I was inspired by my babies, but my business was designing and manufacturing and distributing and retailing eco-friendly nappies, and we went on to create a whole bunch of other products as well. But I just was kind of horrified at the time when I had my babies and discovered how disposable nappies were just … They just didn’t break down in landfill, and that these nappies would be there for hundreds of years, so that was the motivation for me. And I really wanted to create a business that was lucrative and successful, but also really flexible around the needs of my family whilst also aiming to achieve a really positive impact in the world and on the environment. And so that’s kind of what I did.
Catherine Langman:
I went on to create one of the very early eco-friendly nappy brands to really hit the big time in Australia, and I led that brand from a small eBay only presence to one that was stocked in retailers nationally and exporting globally all around the world. And it was really quite a thrill, I guess, to be able to grow my business from that micro operation, running from the dining room table into a highly profitable business. And I don’t say any of that to shortcut the journey. There were plenty of ups and downs and difficulties along the way, so if you are assuming that the way I tell it meant that it was just a straight line from start to success, it certainly was not like that. We can, of course, have another episode another day where we talk about some of the hard things.
Catherine Langman:
But anyhow, today’s episode is not about that. It is about planning, and so how do we do this? And step one really is about your vivid vision, and you need to be clear about this. And now I know I’ve told this story again, but I really love it because it’s a fantastic analogy. Imagine you are on a plane traveling to an overseas holiday destination. I think I love this story just because all we are doing is imagining that right now. I can’t wait to go overseas again. So anyway, imagine you’re doing that. Midway through the flight, the pilot addresses the passengers and the crew over the PA, “We’ve had some bad news and some good news. The bad news is we’ve lost all our instruments so we have no idea how high we are, how fast we’re traveling, or which direction we are going in. We also don’t know how much fuel we have left in the tank. But the good news is we are making fantastic progress.”
Catherine Langman:
Seriously, have you ever felt like you’re flying by the seat of your pants? You’re just doing whatever is in front of you or doing what you think you see other people doing to try and get wherever they’re going. I don’t know, it is pretty common, but clearly if you don’t know where you are going, you are seriously limiting your chances of succeeding and by succeeding, I mean achieving something that you love in your business. So your first task must be to describe in as much vivid detail as possible exactly what your business will look like in three years time.
Catherine Langman:
And yes, set yourself a revenue target, but don’t limit your vision to that. And when I say three years time, I’m picking three years just because 10 years, 20 years, 100 years, apparently Jeff Bezos of Amazon, he has a 100 year plan. That is really, really hard to think that far ahead, right? Three years is far enough away that you can achieve some pretty big things, but not so far away that we are going to rest on our laurels because there’s no impetus. We don’t feel like we are in any kind of rush to get things done. You don’t have to say three years, pick a timeframe that you feel like going to be long enough to achieve what you want, right? And I will say here that it’s very common for all of us to underestimate what we can achieve in 10 years and overestimate what we can do in 12 months, so aim big but don’t expect that you’re going to get it all done in the next year. Make sense?
Catherine Langman:
So with your vivid vision, aside from revenue, you really want to think about things like who your ideal customers are, who you’ll be working with, your team, your contractors, what kind of people they will be. Think about things like the environment that you’ll be working in. Do you own it? Do you rent it? Are you kind of a remote lifestyle business where you outsource everything? Or do you have everything in house with you, like owning your own warehouse? Whatever the case may be, really, really think intentionally about what you want that environment to look like and who you’re going to be working with. You can also think about things like what products that you’ll create, or brands that you’ll stock, or what media that you might be featured in, or what retailers you might be stocked in if you’re going to be wholesaling. You might want to think about what impact that you aim to have on your audience or the country or the world.
Catherine Langman:
So for me, with my first business, I had a goal for the proportion of new parents, babies being born every year, that I wanted to be converting into reusable nappies because it was so clear to me and to everyone in the modern cloth nappy industry how damaging to the environment that the disposable nappies were. And so it was quite … It actually wasn’t that hard to figure out the positive impact that every single baby moving to reusable nappies would have on the environment. We could calculate that. So that was kind of the impact goal that I was aiming for.
Catherine Langman:
So have a think about all of those things and write them down in as much detail as you can, and I actually … When it comes to who you will want to work with, your team and what that kind of people they’ll be like, you also really want to think about the values that you want you and your team to all have and hold dear and work to because it is very … If I’ll say anything about building a business, I will say probably one of the hardest things, if not the hardest thing, is to build and manage a really great team.
Catherine Langman:
Team management is one of the hardest things to do well, and the difficulty I think is that oftentimes we make the mistake of thinking that other people think like we do and that’s never the case. And people can’t read your mind and not everybody has the same values as you do, so you got to work out what is important to you and be very intentional about these things. And then the last thing that I want you to do when it comes to your vivid vision is you want to be able to describe your brand or your online store as the go to store for … And then really think about the kind of people who are going to buy from you and what they’re coming to you for. What do you want to be known as the go to place for? And write that down. All right, so that is step one.
Catherine Langman:
And step two, the next step is really where a lot of people start. So step two is setting the right goals, and this is where you want to break down what you need to have in place in three years to achieve that vision, or five years, if you make it a five year vision, and then break it down, what do I need to have in place? What do I need to have achieved in the next 12 months to be on track to achieving that? All right? And again, like I said earlier, many of us overestimate what we can do in 12 months, but underestimate what we can do in 10 years. So don’t feel like you have to get it all done now is the point that I’m making, okay? Really, you just need to really think about what you need to have in place in the next 12 months to be on track, okay?
Catherine Langman:
And then, and this is going to be partly revenue, okay? But then you also need to think about all of the other kind of performance metrics, key performance indicators, KPIs, whatever you want to call them that you need to measuring because they are influence measures towards that outcome of revenue, okay? And some of it will be kind of big ticket things that you’ll need to check off with. If you’re very early stage in your business, you might need to be getting branding design or packaging design, or you might be manufacturing a new product that you need to launch, or that sort of thing, right?
Catherine Langman:
But then you’ll have other metrics that you’re going to need to be tracking and monitoring and keeping an eye on because they’re the lead measures towards achieving that revenue outcome. So you want to really dive into all of your analytics reports and accounts and things like that to figure out initially where you are right now with things like revenue per month. And I like to look at this month on month, rather than just an overarching 12 month revenue amount because there’ll always be fluctuations to an extent from month on month, and it’s useful to start to identify if there are patterns you should expect.
Catherine Langman:
So for instance, in my first business, whenever it was school holidays, sales would dip, and I didn’t … I mean, yes, obviously you want to do what you can to lift it each year, but I needed to expect that that was going to be a pattern that would repeat because it did every single year. And so I guess the point being is you don’t panic and think that you’re a failure just because you’re not continually increasing month on month, if that makes sense. So you want to dive in and have a look at your revenue month on month over the last 12 months, maybe even go two years. How much did you grow from the previous year?
Catherine Langman:
And then look at things like your average order value, look at how many website visitors that you get each month, and even dive into your Google analytics and figure out where those visitors are coming from. Are they coming from organic search? Are they coming from your email list? Are they coming from paid Google ads? Are they coming from Facebook ads? Or whatever the other case may be. So work out where the traffic and sales are coming from. Make sure you know what your current website conversion rate is. Make sure you know how many email subscribers that you have, and how well your customers are converting from your email list. And so really get that lay of the land, all right?
Catherine Langman:
At this point, you can even do things like really dive into … Say your email list, for instance, do you have automated email flows? Can you analyze the performance of those and see how well they are actually converting subscribers into customers? And same with your broadcast email campaigns as well. What insights could you draw from what you’ve done in there that could give you some opportunities to improve and get better results? Same with your website.
Catherine Langman:
Once you’ve noted down all of those metrics from your website, where are the opportunities to improve? Is the conversion rate under 2%? Do you need to really figure out how to improve the conversion rate to your website? Is your average order value really low and you really need to lift that up? I mean, you really want to have an average order value of over $50 at a minimum. And really just try and draw out some insights from the information that you’re gathering about your past 12 month performance.
Catherine Langman:
And then from there what outcomes do you want to achieve in the next 12 months? So this is, again, we’re not necessarily thinking about how we’re going to achieve it just yet, but if we have an overarching 12 month revenue goal, how are we going to get that month on month? We’ve done the historic analysis part, we’ve identified what the sort of pattern is over the year, and we can see how much we maybe grew from the year before, and then we can estimate what the growth might be. Now obviously, if you’re a brand new business, you don’t have historical data to look at, it doesn’t mean you can’t plan, okay?
Catherine Langman:
Now just to give you a few kind of baseline metrics that you want to aim for, I would be trying my best to aim for 40% of your traffic and sales coming from organic search, about 20% from email. If you are starting from the beginning, it’s not going to be that yet because you don’t have an email list, this is just what you want to aim for ultimately. And then split the rest between your different kind of paid traffic channels and any referrers, like if you have any big referrers that you work with. So that’s what you can aim for.
Catherine Langman:
And as a brand new business, you might set yourself a goal to make six figures in 12 months and that’s a great goal to set and then you have to try and figure out how you’re going to get there. So what does that mean in terms of could you estimate an average order value based on maybe a bundle that you want to push as the hero product that people buy first up? Or you’re just going to have to try and use your intuition and take a really smart guess if you don’t have that historic data to work from.
Catherine Langman:
But if you do have that historic data, this gets a lot easier. So then you can start working out okay, based on the percentage of traffic and sales that I get from each channel, what channels do I need to focus on? Can I scale up my ad spend? Do I need to really work on organic search to really try and get a little bit more free traffic? Do I need to improve my website conversion rate? So do I need to set a goal to increase that from X to Y in a certain period of time? Things like that. So really start jotting out what those goals are for the next 12 months and make sure that these goals that you ate writing out are specific and measurable and time limited.
Catherine Langman:
So don’t set a goal to increase brand awareness, for instance. It’s going to be really hard for you to measure that and to identify whether you have achieved that or not, okay? Of course, we all need to increase brand awareness. If we don’t have people who know we exist, they’re not going to buy from us, but that’s a bit of an amorphous goal to be able to measure. So really try and set goals that you can actually check to see if you’ve achieved them, okay?
Catherine Langman:
All right, so the next thing that we need to do is to identify any sort of problems or opportunities that exist. So here is where I like to do a SWOT analysis. Am I talking Greek or do you understand what I’m saying there? So this is probably one of the few academic exercises I learned at university that I actually still use. Not much from a marketing degree that ended in 1999 is particularly useful in 2022, but there you go. A SWOT analysis is a good one. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. And basically you want to get real with yourself here. There’s no point … No benefit to you if you’re kidding yourself about how things really are.
Catherine Langman:
So when we’re doing a SWOT analysis, I just like to get a big piece of paper out, draw it in, a line up the middle and across the horizontal middle, so you’ve got four quadrants, and name them strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And strengths and weaknesses relate to the internal side of the business, so it relates to your own personal abilities and the abilities of your team so you need to work out what are you really good at? What is your team really good at? And what are you weak at? And what is your team really weak at?
Catherine Langman:
For example, are you fantastic at social media marketing but suck at writing emails? Are you really brilliant at, for instance, great customer service but maybe you don’t really understand how to … Maybe you don’t understand whether your website is working or understand how to read metrics or track and monitor that kind of number side of things? You really just need to get very clear on what you and your team are good at and what you’re bad at and just write it all down.
Catherine Langman:
Then you need to look at external to the business. Opportunities and threats relates to what’s going on out in the marketplace, out in your industry, and are there new competitors coming to the market? Have you identified a fantastic new product opportunity that you reckon would be an absolute killer? Don’t think any of us could ever predict a pandemic coming, but whatever you can perceive out on the marketplace that might present an opportunity or present a threat to your growth and viability as a business.
Catherine Langman:
I’ll just kind of add as a side note, don’t ever be worried too much about competitors launching in the marketplace because that’s a pretty good signal that there’s a demand for what you sell, so that’s not a bad thing. But what is a bad thing is if you are 100% copying what somebody else is doing, that’s going to be a weakness for you. You want to be a leader in the marketplace. You want to be the one who’s coming up with the ideas and not the one who’s following, if that makes sense. All right, so identifying those problems and opportunities is really important to do at this step.
Catherine Langman:
Next we need to move on to choose your growth strategies and also choose any kind of strategies or activities that you know that you need to do to overcome any weaknesses or mitigate any clear threats that might cause damage to your business. So at the end of the day, once you’ve got that vivid vision, you’ve set your 12 month goals, and you worked out where your problem areas in the opportunities are, then we need to figure out how we are going to make it all happen.
Catherine Langman:
And so when it comes to choosing your growth strategies, you really want to consider always having some marketing in place to attract new potential customers. So this involves building the size of your audience and increasing brand awareness, so we’ll talk about particular activities that fall under that umbrella in a tick. And you always need to have activities that are going to entice new customers to buy from you and existing customers to buy more from you, okay?
Catherine Langman:
So you want to think about things in terms of a growth strategy quadrant, so there’s strategies that will sell new products to new people, then you can have strategies that will sell the same products to new people, so that’s finding new customers. New products to new people, we all start there. That’s where we start with a new business. It’s the hardest place to operate so once you’ve got some traction, I don’t advise spending too much time there, but we all start there. But then once we’ve got some traction, then we go into needing to find ways to sell the same products to new customers. So we need to always have things in place that are going to win us new customers.
Catherine Langman:
And then the third quadrant is selling the same products to the same customers. I should have had this written out in front of me because it’s a bit of a tongue twister. Same products to the same customers, so this is getting repeat sales. This is the first method of getting repeat sales. And then the fourth quadrant is new products to the same customers. So again, we’re getting repeat sales but we’re selling them something different. So we’re either upselling them or we are cross selling them, okay?
Catherine Langman:
So those are the quadrants that we want to operate in. We don’t want to stay in the first one for too long because it’s the hardest and the most expensive place to be. And then once we’ve got some traction, we need to start moving into those other things. So when it comes to trying to get new customers to buy from us, we have to be doing things that are going to build our brand awareness. So that means we need to be focusing on brand ambassadors, influencers, traditional PR, collaborations with other brands that are complementary and have the same audience, but aren’t in competition. We could be doing paid advertising, for sure.
Catherine Langman:
There’s other ways as well, like getting out at markets or expos or trade shows, all of that kind of stuff. Even search engine optimization, and that’s obviously a long game, but if there are people Googling to solve particular problems or looking for specific types of products, when people are Googling, they’re usually pretty keen, right? And so if you can teach yourself a little bit about search engine optimization and how to create content on your website that is going to appeal to people who are searching for that stuff, then you’re going to start to appear in Google search rankings and you’ll start to gain traffic and customers that way as well.
Catherine Langman:
But even things like initially if you’re just getting going, getting some customer testimonials is really hard when you haven’t made purchases, so you really want to consider starting out by finding some people that you can gift some product to in return for legitimate reviews and get that content on your website, start using it in your social media marketing, and other marketing as well, emails, advertising, and all of that kind of stuff.
Catherine Langman:
So attracting potential new customers requires building your audience and becoming a little bit more well known. And so that’s all of that kind of real conversational style marketing because you’re working with people and getting that … Really, recommendations, referrals, word of mouth, all of that kind of stuff. And you’re getting a little bit of credibility and a bit of the reputation rubs off on you because you’re getting the recommendations from whoever it is, whether it’s a brand ambassador or an influencer or a collaboration with another brand, or whatever the case may be, so that’s where you start there.
Catherine Langman:
But then when we are trying to sell products to our existing customers or to new customers, we need to be putting in place … Sorry, same products or new products to our customers, we need to be putting in place the sorts of marketing that’s going to help you achieve that. And again, SEO is going to work in this mix. You also need to be doing other things, such as setting up your email marketing, making sure you’ve got some automated flows, but you also have some … A promotional calendar that you’re going to roll out, and use email marketing and advertising and other sorts of communication channels to share regular promotions, new product launches, and things like that.
Catherine Langman:
So really making sure that you are making it as easy and desirable as possible, and just giving people a really good reason to want to come and buy from you, whether it is for the first time or it is a repeat purchase. It is essential that you find ways to encourage customers as much as possible to come back and do a repeat purchase because this is how you become a profitable eCommerce brand over time. Trying to just get the first sale and stopping there, you are not going to become a particularly profitable business long term.
Catherine Langman:
You really need to find ways to enable that kind of repeat purchase rate to happen over time. Of course, some products that makes it easier than others. If it’s skincare or makeup or something like that, that people use it up and they need to replenish it. Others maybe a little harder, but it’s always possible. So try and think about that as you think about the sorts of marketing promotions and the products that you might roll out over the next year.
Catherine Langman:
So the next step, once you’ve decided what kinds of activities that you’re going to work on and roll out in order to try and achieve those 12 month goals, then I recommend documenting it. And quite honestly, you don’t need to get super duper sophisticated here, by all means you are most welcome to dive into my … And grab a copy of my planner book. It is designed for e-commerce businesses and it has a whole lot more detail on planning as well as staying on top of that plan and executing it and being accountable for it throughout a year, so that’s well designed for an eCommerce brand. But of course, you can start super simple.
Catherine Langman:
So for me initially, I just used an Excel spreadsheet to kind of map out what was going to do and when throughout a year, and I found that really easy. Some people like to use project management tools like Asana, and that can also be a useful one. Or you can just write it out. I guess the point that I’m trying to make is you’ve got to document it, you can’t stay in your head. That’s going to be completely useless. And I will say though that the kinds of plans that get done that are implemented and help keep the business owner on track are the ones that are not only written out, but also have a method for you to stay on track, and this means documenting your progress over time.
Catherine Langman:
So in our business over the years, we’ve gotten into the habit of talking about metrics Monday, not talking about. We would do metrics Monday every week and some people loved it, some people not so much, but basically the idea is that every Monday, and it doesn’t have to be a Monday, it can be whichever day of the week that you can stick to consistently, but literally once a week, on the same day every week, going through and looking again at all of your performance metrics. So going into your analytics and having a look at how much traffic did you get? How many website visits did you get? How many orders did you get? What was your average order value? Where did that traffic come from? What have been the most successful traffic channels for you over the last week? And what are the opportunities to try and improve?
Catherine Langman:
Even doing things like noting down how many new emails have joined your list in the week, and how many orders came from that email list, and open rates, click through rates, things like that, so that you can actually see very clearly as you keep going what marketing efforts are working for you and where you need to be improving your game. Also, things like what promotions have worked for you? What promotions didn’t work so well? What product launches went really well? What offers or incentives work really well? And vice versa, what one’s really, really tanked? Because if we write this down, then we’re going to actually learn from our own experience.
Catherine Langman:
I’ll tell you what, just as one final story to kind of round us out here, when I was at high school and early days university, so I actually was a violinist. Some of you probably know this story too. And I got into the music at university when I was 15, and I thought that I was going to be a professional musician. I actually initially did go into a music degree after high school and hated it. So music has just remained more of a passion hobby than anything further. However, I had this fabulous, fabulous, fabulous teacher when I was finishing high school and he was one of the four in the Australian string quartet at the time, and he’s well and truly retired now, but he was just this amazing musician.
Catherine Langman:
And for those of you who don’t know, a string quartet or any quartet, they are not like an orchestra that has a conductor. A string quartet is just the four musicians playing together, it’s an ensemble and it is a collaboration. You don’t have a leader really because you’re all playing together. So how do you know if you are playing good music? Because when you’re playing an instrument, yes, you can hear yourself, but you’re not listening constructively.
Catherine Langman:
So he gave me this tip that they used to use. They’re professional musicians, so what they used to do is they would record themselves in their rehearsals and then listen back constructively and work out where it sucked and they needed to produce a more practice and improve and where it sounded really good and what they wanted to keep. So it’s this idea of looking at what you’re doing, or in that case listening, and figuring out what do you keep? What do you do better? Or what do you discard?
Catherine Langman:
And that why recording your performance metrics every week, this is your opportunity in business to do that as well. You do it in sport. My sons who are swimmers, this is what they do in sport as well. So I used to record myself doing my practice sessions and then I would listen back and literally I would essentially be teaching myself, coaching myself, to perform better and to play a more beautiful piece of music.
Catherine Langman:
So that’s what you want to be able to do and having the right kind of planning tool, whether you set yourself up in an Excel spreadsheet like I did originally, or whether you want to get a copy of my planner book, they’re both two great tools. It’s going to depend on your style of working, what’s going to suit you best, and that sort of ongoing weekly checkpoint is what’s going to keep you on track. It’s no point creating the best plan in the world at the start of the year and then not looking at it ever again because you’re never going to get to where you want to go if you operate like that.
Catherine Langman:
So there you go. And of course, we do have the special offer on the planner book. There’s some free trainings that come with it and free shipping as well, and so grab that deal if you do wish to have a paper book planner versus a digital one. So that’s it, what I have for you to day. Of course, you’re going to get lots of help in our rockstar Productpreneur community. If you also wish to do some networking with other like-minded productpreneurs, as well as me and my team, you can get into that free group by heading to CatherineLangman.com/rockstar.