278. 2023 Planning for your Coworking Business

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278. 2023 Planning for your Coworking Business

00:00:02 Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast, where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how-tos in Coworking. I owned and operated Coworking spaces for eight years and then served as the executive director of the Global Workspace Association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought provoking operator case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the Coworking industry.

00:00:45 Hey there, I have to jump in at the beginning of this episode with a couple of important notes. So we're talking in this episode about planning for 2023 for your Coworking business. And I walk through a nine-step framework to do that planning and I mentioned that if you wanna do it with some Coworking friends, we are running a two-session workshop to get some planning done.

00:01:10 So live, lots of workshops, lots of worksheets, facilitated planning, and I mentioned the dates and those dates are going to change. So just wanted to give a heads-up that those dates are going to change. So if you're interested by the time you listen to this, we'll have the dates on the website. So you can go to Everything Coworking dot com slash 2023.

00:01:34 And the other announcement is that we have a, how I did this session coming up on November 17th that I am very excited about. I've been working on this for a while and I think I might have mentioned it on the podcast before. So we're ready to roll with it. We are doing how I did this session on warehousing, which is a really interesting kind of adjacent to Coworking model.

00:01:56 And a lot of folks are having success with this model, some have been doing this for a while. Two of the folks have been on the podcast before and they're gonna kinda share their experience and their insights into this model. So if you're interested, intrigued by warehousing and how that might play into your Coworking business or just wanna understand what's happening in the industry,

00:02:17 please join us. You can find all the details for that session at Everything Coworking dot com slash HIDT, how I did this, H I D T. So we hope to see you at both of those events. And now onto this week's episode. Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me today. Today we are gonna talk about planning for 2023 because my friends,

00:02:50 it is November already, so it's time to rock and roll. If you have not started planning for 2023, we are here to help you out. We're gonna talk about a framework today, a nine-step framework that you can use to start planning for 2023 on your own or with your team or with us. So I ran this episode in 2020, so two years ago.

00:03:18 And oh boy, things were different in 2020 and I'm so glad that we are two years behind that experience. So things are much different for the Coworking and flex industry things. We’re still so, so uncertain at the time. And of course some of you still have some uncertainty in your business, but many of you are trying to figure out how to capitalize on the growth of Coworking and flexible office demand and what's next for your business?

00:03:49 Do you grow? Do you expand? What do you focus on in 2023? Meeting rooms, events, second location, third location, adding to your team? What does it look like? And you know, but one of my favorite quotes, I don't know who the who it's by, I should Google it, but is if you don't know where you're going,

00:04:07 you're not going to get there. And I think that one of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs, people who start businesses is that we see lots of shiny objects, we wanna get a lot of things done, and we tend to line up all of the things that we wanna accomplish and sort of go at them sometimes a little haphazardly. And the metaphor I keep trying to keep in my head is that of kicking balls down a soccer field.

00:04:33 And if you listen to the podcast, you probably know I'm a soccer coach and a soccer referee and I'd like to play soccer. I haven't been playing soccer, but I am going to get to play in a volunteer game on Black Friday and I can't wait for that day. So anyway, I love the soccer ball metaphor. So imagine you line up soccer balls on an end line and then you kick,

00:04:56 say there's 10 soccer balls and you're trying to get them in the goal at the other end of the field. So you kick each of them a little bit and then you know, like 10 yards. And then you go back to the first one and you kick it out of their 10 yards. And then you kick the second one 10 yards, and then you kick the third one 10 yards and on and on.

00:05:16 So can you picture yourself kicking these 10 balls a little ways down the field? And it takes you a long time to get any one of those balls into the goal at the other end of the field, which is the end game, right? You're done, you're finished, you accomplished your goal. So imagine if you only had three balls and you started with one and you dribbled it all the way down the field into the goal and then you ran back and he got the other one and he dribbled that all the way down the field and into the goal.

00:05:43 And then you ran back and you got the third one and you dribbled it all the way down the field into the goal. And here you are, It's probably the end of first quarter and you've got three major things done that are moving and gro for you in your business. So that's what we wanna, I, I love that metaphor. I just interviewed William Edmondson who does a lot of work with eos,

00:06:03 which is, which is the entrepreneurial operating system. And it's detailed in a book called Traction by Gina Wickman. Although William had a couple of recommendations he prefers, if you've never read traction, he likes to start with, What the heck is eos? He's, that's an easier read. Traction gets maybe a little into the weeds. I would agree. I have I,

00:06:25 I like it. I have it though and feel like I have to reread it constantly in order to use it. So anyway, William will be on next week talking about implementing EOS and the value he has find in laser, focusing on a few core initiatives at a time and making sure everybody knows what those initiatives are and driving towards those initiatives and getting them done.

00:06:49 And then you stand up and you tell everybody, Hey, these things are done and you celebrate and you appreciate all the work of the team. And then you pick the next three things and you kick those things down the field into the goal. So anyway, the first step is to identify what are your soccer balls that you're gonna kick down the field.

00:07:09 So that is part of the process, the nine step process. So today I'm gonna go through those nine steps and you can use our show notes and we do a transcription of every episode. I actually went and found the transcription from 2020 to remind myself I didn't wanna listen to the whole thing, so I just scanned it to remind myself what I talked about last time.

00:07:32 So there we have an episode index on the, on our website, Everything Coworking dot com, and you can see the titles of all the episodes. I don't think you can do a search. We do have a search function that you can search by keyword though on the website. But anyway, every episode has show notes, but more helpful maybe is a transcription.

00:07:52 Oh yeah, it's right at the top of that. And every single episode has this big search, the podcast Barr, and if you put a keyword in it, it will search every podcast. And guess what number this is? 2 78. Isn't that crazy? We're moving towards 300. So if you're like, Hey, oh, somebody messaged our live chat today and said,

00:08:11 Hey, you know, have you ever done an episode on incubators? The answer is no. But he could type incubator into that search bar that is at the top of all of the podcast episode pages and it would search every single one of our podcast episodes and he would know, yeah, we don't really talk about incubators, but that is also not the topic of this episode.

00:08:33 So we're gonna dive in. Oh, so you can lost my train of thought. It's Friday. I'm recording this Friday at five o'clock. Don't tell anyone I know I had some things I had to get done today. Tomorrow's my daughter's birthday, so I had to take care of some repping and I had to go try to find some cupcakes. I didn't have the right cupcakes.

00:08:52 So I think we're gonna go for donuts. We have two soccer games tomorrow. It's tournament weekend, second week of tournament weekend. And we need to give treats to the team. We have two other birthdays this week on the team actually. So you can do this yourself using the transcription or just listening to the podcast audio. Or you can join our Design to Thrive in 2023 workshop,

00:09:18 which we are going to host on December 1st and December 8th online on Zoom. And that there's a small fee to join us unless you are an Everything Coworking Academy member. And then you are invited for free. So don't register, don't pay. If you are already in the academy, you will get your invite shortly. We'll get your calendar invites up, et cetera.

00:09:39 But if you're not in the academy and you wanna do the workshop with us, we're gonna go through step-by-step workshop style. We're talking worksheets, we'll have everything prepared for you. So it will be kind of dummy proof. You just need to show up with your brain and some coffee or tea or whatever. It's that you drink and be ready to do the work.

00:09:58 So we're gonna make it really easy cuz sometimes it's hard to carve out time to do planning. So we're gonna do it with you and sometimes it's better to do it with people and we'll do some breakout sessions and some brainstorming and you can get a sense of what other people are focus, not other people, other Coworking space operators are focusing on in 2023.

00:10:17 So we did this in 2020 and it was fantastic, I think we got great feedback from it. So we'd love to have you join us if you wanna register Everything Coworking dot com slash 2023 and register soon. Cuz December 1st is not that far away. So you were gonna focus on the next year. You are welcome to do broader range planning, but would you agree with me?

00:10:42 It's, it's hard to to look out for than a year. So the EOS system teaches you to do one year, three year, and five year. So you can do longer range planning with your team. But this is really to focus on the one year planning and you need to dedicate the time to do it, which is why we're doing the workshop.

00:11:01 If you don't do the workshop with us, then you'll want to create some time on your calendar. You might wanna go to somebody else's Coworking space in order to hide out and get some focus time. Take your team, reserve somebody else's meeting room and get some focus time so that you can do this. If you don't have a team then you might find a buddy to do this with.

00:11:21 Again, we'll be your buddy if you'd like to do it with us, but if you wanted to do it in person with someone, find a buddy and get that scheduled. So, okay, here we go. Ready? Step one, look back so that you are prepared to make big moves going forward. Hi, this is Josh Fried CEO of Proximity.

00:11:41 When we started Proximity, we did it for one reason. We didn't like how hard it was to run our co-working spaces. At first we tried testing different space management software on the market and look, we found that we had to use multiple, multiple software solutions. Then we spent way too much time trying to sync them all together. And then we spent even more time training our staff.

00:12:00 And worse yet, our members on how to use this overcomplicated solution. We ended up going circles, attempting to manage our software instead of letting software do what it's supposed to, which is help run our business. Our members were frustrated, we were frustrated, we just didn't think it should be so hard to operate a Coworking space. So we built our own solution to make Coworking spaces easier to manage all packaged up in one,

00:12:25 easy to use platform refined by feedback from hundreds of Coworking spaces over the last five years. Proximity software is simple for operators and best of all members and it is backed by our award-winning US based customer support team. It's time to stop settling for overcomplicate software, get software that was actually purpose built for Coworking by Coworking space operators. See for yourself. Our team is available to chat with Everything Coworking podcast listeners and you can schedule your call today at Proximity Face slash Jamie.

00:13:00 So the point here is to kind of evaluate the year that you just had and go through and make sure that you are taking stock of what went well and what didn't. So questions like what was your favorite business experience? What felt easy, what felt hard? I would share this insight that I had today, which is that if you are new to your business,

00:13:27 all of this feel might feel a little bit hard to do because you're still learning so much and everything is so new and you really haven't been through the cycles, right? Maybe you've been through the cycles once or twice. One of the cycles was covid and one of the cycles was 2021, which was a weird year. So the planning may just feel a little fuzzy,

00:13:46 but more important, it's still important to do it. It just might feel a little bit harder in my business, which is helping operators start and launch profitable Coworking spaces. I have now been doing this, so this is only the, this is year two that this has been my focus until then. I did a lot of things at the same time and 2023 planning feels a little bit easier because I can just really clearly see in my head what the year looks like and how I want that to look similar or different.

00:14:18 So, and the numbers all make sense to me and I kind of, you know, I'm still growing and experimenting with a lot of things, but it's feeling easier. So be patient with yourself, but it's always good to reflect. So what was your favorite business experience last year? What felt easy, what felt hard? And give yourself some time to marinate on these questions.

00:14:36 Like sometimes I'll, I'll like be listening to a podcast and then I'll, my brain will start to kind of kick in and think about some of these questions. I'll have to like turn off the podcast and give my brain time to process. So start thinking about these things, things now before you sit down to answer the questions. What did you love working on?

00:14:55 What would you never wanna do again in your business? You know, maybe you started hosting events and you hate them or what else do people really hate in their business? Maybe you try to do reals for your social media strategy this year and you hate them. It can be small or big. What do you want to change or fix in your business?

00:15:16 What are your biggest revenue drivers? What are your least revenue drivers? I think that's probably the most important question because it's easy for us to focus on what's our big money maker, but it's also really easy to spend a bunch of time on something that doesn't make us a lot of money. So be careful about that. Is there any area in your business where you're losing money or like on a product line or spending time on something and what channel brings in your most your greatest number of leads?

00:15:47 Is it paid ads? Is it organic? And if you're talking organic, we wanna know exactly what channel. Is it social media? Is it searches that come from Google? Is it word of mouth? Is it some other channel? And then we wanna make sure we know your numbers. So what was your gross revenue this year and what were your expenses and what was your profit and what was your profit margin?

00:16:16 And we wanna know that by month and we wanna look at the trend line. So if you don't have your numbers ready by the time we're doing our workshop on December 1st, that's okay, but if you don't have a bookkeeper, we might wanna put that on the list of things to do for 2023. When I first opened, I went for a few months.

00:16:38 This was back in 20 20, 20 12. I went for a few months, months with no bookkeeper cause I was like, I'll just do it myself. I have so many expenses, I'm gonna do the QuickBooks myself. And never did I do the QuickBooks myself. So I knew essentially what was happening in the business, but not in great detail. So you wanna really be able to dive into the numbers and look at your numbers on a regular basis.

00:17:02 Look at your profit margin. I want your profit margin to be 25% at a minimum. And if you're not there yet and you've been open for more than 18 months, then let's figure that out because there's something that's not working very well. Okay, step two, brainstorm your opportunities. What are the opportunities for 2023? What would you love to do if you couldn't fail?

00:17:29 What would be amazing to do in your business? Would you be the best event space in town? Would you be the place where everybody wants to hang out on Saturday night? I always wanted to put a disco ball in my Coworking space and host DJ parties. And I actually was just thinking about that again because I need a night out and I need some dancing.

00:17:48 And there's not a lot of that in San Francisco. That sounds weird, but not really in Chicago for sure. I could have found that kind of night out. So anyway, distractions, events. How about an amazing digital mail business that pays your rent? How about a second location on a management agreement that doesn't have capital investment by you? How about winning an award for hospitality?

00:18:14 How about, hmm, what else might you do? So brainstorm, what are your big opportunities? What have you not capitalized in your on your business yet? Is there an opportunity to add someone to your team to make your life easier? This topic comes up all the time. It was a very, very hot topic on our most recent academy call.

00:18:36 We do monthly calls with our operators and it's very hard to get the team equation right And if the team equation is not right, then our lives as owners are very challenging. So maybe that's your big opportunity is to figure out your hiring process and what your ideal team looks like and get that in place so that it frees up your time to work on the business instead of in the business.

00:18:59 So we will definitely do some breakouts and some sharing on big opportunities because sometimes we get good ideas when we hear what somebody else's opportunities are or we see what's even possible. I really like to share when people share numbers with me, I don't want to share people's secrets, but when I hear somebody say, Oh, we made 90 K in event revenue last month,

00:19:23 I like people to know that's possible. So that's one of the benefits of doing this in a group setting if you decide to do that with us. Step number three, get intentional and design your year. So identify where you are going to focus your efforts next year, likely to optimize your revenue. So what are, let's like literally now that step two was like,

00:19:49 think big, what's possible, What's sort of the big nugget that's out there or big few nuggets. And then step three is let's pick three to five of those things that we're gonna focus on in 2023. And just get really, really specific. So what lights you up the most? What do your members need the most? Or your potential members? Which of these options will best serve your members?

00:20:14 Which ones are the best opportunities to generate new revenue? Maybe it's something simple like adding more offices. I know this sounds boring and expensive, but that's usually the easiest fix to a model that's not working very well. So it might be, and maybe it's one thing, maybe that's the one thing that you can get done that requires a significant budget. And the other things might be things that your team's gonna work on and devote their time to,

00:20:41 but not budget. So you have to decide, you know, some of those things. Okay, step four, decide on your non-negotiables. So what are you committed to doing, but what are you not willing to do? So I'm not willing to start an event program if it means that I have to be in the space on the weekends or I'm not willing to kill it on my mail program if that means that I have to spend my Saturday sorting mail.

00:21:07 This is clearly not a problem because if you build a great mail program, then you hire someone, someone an expensive, like a high school student to come in and handle the mail after school. So lots of solutions there. But what's really important to you? I'm not willing to work on the weekends. Again, sometimes this is really self-imposed, usually self-imposed for me.

00:21:26 I pile too much on my plate and then I have too much to do and I can't get it all done during the week. So I do it on the weekends. So what are you not willing to do so that you can work around those non-negotiables or maybe as the owner you are non-negotiable is I'm gonna take Fridays off or I'm leaving the space at three o'clock to pick up my kids and I'm not gonna think about the space until the next morning.

00:21:50 Or this is a bigger trend. This seems super simple but you know, kind of a stretch for some people is closing the space between December 25th and January 1st. So that tends to be, even if you're not celebrating a religious holiday during that time, tends to be a time where people spend time with family and the space is slow and it's an opportunity for anyone to kind of refresh a little bit.

00:22:18 So we had that discussion on our call too and one of the owners said, You know, I just, if the space is open, I really can't relax. And so this is for me and this is for my team. We're taking the week off and we're gonna, they're you know, overcommunicating with members, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway,

00:22:32 I'm going down a rabbit hole, but her non-negotiable is we're closing between December 25th or December 22nd or whatever the date is that you choose. And January 1st or January 2nd or you know, whatever the other day is on the other side of that. So decide, you know, you're gonna take time away from the space. You're gonna take a two week vacation in the summer.

00:22:54 You're gonna take a month away from the space in the summer. You're not gonna check emails on the weekend, you're not gonna manage the live chat after five o'clock. You know, these again like small things, but it's good to put those on paper and decide what they are. And you know what, sometimes we fail at them and you can put them back on your list.

00:23:12 So if there's something that you thought you were gonna work on in 2022, I will confess that mine was, I'm not working after three o'clock in the summer. I'm gonna spend time with my kid when she gets home from camp. And that didn't go very well. And it's, I think it's because, you know, we didn't do this process last year and I didn't really write it down.

00:23:33 I probably need an accountability buddy. And it became, so I don't usually have meetings after three, which is why I thought this would be really easy because I'm on Pacific time so nobody wants to meet with me at that, that time. I can get other Pacific time people to meet with me after three, which is sometimes nice. I like to do meetings later in the day cuz my brain moves fastest in the morning.

00:23:54 So I don't wanna spend time in meetings in the morning. But it was like a spillover time. It was like, oh I didn't get this done today. Oh, I have to tell you, I'm gonna talk about this, sorry, this is an important tangent. There's a book that I'm reading called called something for, if you put it this in Amazon 4,000 weeks.

00:24:11 If you're looking for a book that's good mindset material for the end of the year, like I said, I need, I have to read it again and take some notes and really kind of synthesize it before I talk about it a lot more. But one of the sounds really basic, but I think it's really hard for a lot of people. So one of the things that the book talks about,

00:24:29 it's basically the idea that you have 4,000 weeks to live and that you should be really careful with your time. And that it's not really about time management, it's about, you know, making the most of what you wanna accomplish and kind of how you live your 4,000 weeks, which is sort of depressing. But he also makes the point, I really hate talking about mortality,

00:24:50 I should also say that. But the author makes the point that without a finite amount of time, then nothing would be nearly as meaningful as it is. We would just live every day and not be all that concerned about what happened in a day because we'd have infinite more days. So it's important that we feel a sense of time constraint. But the thing I wanted to say here is that he says we need to get out of the mindset of feeling like we need to clear the decks every day.

00:25:18 That's totally me. It's never possible, right? When have you ever gotten everything done? You cannot but you, your brain is like really disappointed in yourself if you don't clear the decks. So you have to just tell yourself, I can't clear the decks. The decks are never clearable because the decks are infinite and be okay with that. So the,

00:25:37 I'm gonna circle back to my miss on one of my, what I thought was a non-negotiable in 20 10, 22 about not working after three and you know, going to the beach and doing summary things with my 10 year old and feeling like, well I have to clear more of the deck before I'm done and then it'd be five o'clock and time to make dinner and all those things.

00:25:59 And the other thing is just not really committing to it and I think I, I need some way to really commit to it. So for next year I am planning that for July. July is gonna be, we'll still do our group programs and whatnot, but I'm gonna try to lighten up on July and I'm planning already for it. So I have my 2023 calendar printed out.

00:26:21 I like the, you know, I just print out a Canva version. I know you all use Canva. So Canva has like calendar templates, it's super easy and I print up them out and I don't need fancy ones cuz I just print them and redo them if I want to and not worry about it. And I mark everything out and I'm just really trying to think ahead.

00:26:40 So anyway, non-negotiable. This summer is gonna look different for me. Hold me accountable. Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion. If you're working on opening a Coworking space, I wanna invite you to join me for my free masterclass. Three behind the scene Secrets to opening a Coworking space. If you're working on opening a Coworking space,

00:27:05 I wanna share the three decisions that I've seen successful operators make when they're creating their Coworking business. The masterclass is totally free, it's about an hour and includes some q and a. If you'd like to join me, you can register at Everything Coworking dot com slash masterclass. If you already have a Coworking space, I wanna make sure you know about Community Manager University Community Manager University is a training and development platform for community managers and it can be for owner operators.

00:27:37 It has content training, resources, templates from day one to general manager. The platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the Community Manager role from community management operations, sales and marketing, finance and leadership. The content is laid out in a graduated learning path, so the Community Manager can identify what content is most relevant to them depending on their experience and kind of jump in from there.

00:28:06 We provide a live brand new training every single month for the Community Manager group. We also host a live q and a call every single month so that the community managers can work through any challenges that they're having or opportunities, get ideas from other community managers, build their own peer network. We also have a private Slack group for the group. So if you're interested in learning more,

00:28:30 you can go to Everything Coworking dot com slash Community Manager. Okay, so this, I kind of jumped ahead. Step six is decide how you're gonna get there. So let's make some decisions and we're gonna go back to step three and review the three to five goals that we put down that are probably focused on optimizing revenue or maybe optimizing team so that you're optimizing your time so that you can work on the business instead of in the business.

00:29:02 So it doesn't have to necessarily be revenue generating. So make sure that you are super committed to them and you don't need to know exactly how you're going to accomplish them right now, so we can come back to that. But review them and make sure that this is what you want to do and go back and finalize them and then get really specific now on what the outcomes look like for those three things.

00:29:31 So if it's a revenue number, pick a number. Like you know, my event business is gonna generate 5K a month in my me in my business by the end of 2023, or maybe it's 10 K a month. My virtual office or digital mail business is gonna generate 5K a month consistently in my business every month by the end of 2023. Or I'm gonna have a really great Community Manager team in place so that I only have to spend a few hours in the space every week and I can work on business development,

00:30:07 marketing, you know, bigger picture projects, whatever that is. Get really specific, write down the numbers or write down what the outcomes look like. And again, you don't have to know how you're gonna do it, like how am I gonna get to that revenue number in events? But you are going to get really specific about what the outcomes look like.

00:30:28 So you'll know what a win looks like. And I would say, you know, stretch a little bit, but make it like realistic. Don't sandbag it, but also just make it something like you know, you can get to, but big enough that requires your focus. If it doesn't really require your focus, don't put it on the list, you know,

00:30:46 if it's just gonna happen anyway. So make it meaningful and make it something that really, really, you know, requires your focus. Okay, so step number seven is making your plan. So if you're an EOS follower then you will know that EOS recommends you have a an annual plan and then everything's broken down into quarters. And in each quarter you would pursue three to five rocks,

00:31:16 rocks being like meaty projects that roll up to your annual goals. So if you were following us or you're gonna read the book, that would be, you'd have to do that fast before December 1st, but it's totally doable. You can do do whatever Thanksgiving break if you're in the US I think Canada has thanks, maybe Canada already had Thanksgiving, I'll have to double check that for my Canadians.

00:31:37 But think about, so we've decided specifically what you're gonna pursue and what your goals are or what your goals are and then specifically what those outcomes look like. So step seven is calendar plan, your sort of activities. So we're gonna really get into the detail of, again, you don't necessarily have to know all of the how steps at this point because that's a lot to to figure out.

00:32:02 But take the big chunks of what you need to do in order to get to your annual goal. So if your annual goal is to, you know, triple your digital mail revenue, what are some of the steps that you're gonna need to do? We could sort of brainstorm, dump those out, break them into quarters. And this is the really important work because it's one thing to set the goal and probably as a business owner you're good at thinking about goals,

00:32:30 but then doing, mapping it out and actually doing the work is very hard for some of the visionaries that are listening. The doing of the work can be challenging because it gets detailed and it's process oriented and it doesn't usually align with vision work. So if you aren't gonna sit down and do this work, map out the plan and then you need to delegate the work.

00:32:55 So figure out how it's gonna get done and how you're gonna, you know, budget it. If you have a Community Manager or an operations manager, get them on board with this process and add these goals to your weekly meeting, which you should be doing. Make, if you're not following eos, that's fine, but you should be following some sort of like,

00:33:17 you know, business planning process or KPI tracker so that you can follow through the projects and identify your progress against the goals. And so if you map out your year, then you're gonna know sort of the big buckets of what needs to be done in each quarter. So back to the digital mail example, if you want to triple your revenue, then what are the things that you might do to do that?

00:33:44 You might much more of a focus on digital mail on your website. So we're not gonna go into like lots of discussion about build your digital mail, that's for another topic, but that might be one. And so that project might be okay, we need a website update. We're gonna do that in q1. We're gonna focus on our own leads on our website.

00:34:05 We're gonna get some time with our developer. We're gonna map out the updates we need to make. We're gonna create a landing page, we're gonna do some, well, step two might be we need some SEO work done on you know, business address. We need to figure out what the keywords are and then we need to optimize our website and landing pages.

00:34:23 So that might be another mini project is get an SEO resource to help us do that. And then another step might be, okay, what lead generation providers are we not using that might add to our business and bring additional leads outside of our organic leads? And that's another project. Cause that takes some time to get that set up and get those operational procedures in place.

00:34:45 We might say, oh we're not really set up to take a high volume of mail. So once that starts to happen, say in q3, then we're gonna turn our focus to optimizing those processes. So just kind of map out everything that you need to be doing, assuming success and you'll iterate along the way of course, but you wanna do that for the three to five chunky goals that you laid out back in step.

00:35:12 What step were we in here? Hold on. Step three. Okay, so step eight, I'm kind of cruising you through these really quickly. Again, when you can grab these from the transcript or you can work alongside us and do the worksheets and we'll go through this in great detail. Okay, so step eight is really the planning process review. So this is super important and one that I also tend to fail at,

00:35:39 which is, is what I've laid out reasonable. So if you have three to five meaty projects that you wanna focus on this year, let's call it three, five is probably aggressive and you've kind of mapped out what the quarterly milestones are gonna be for each of those goals, does this look reasonable? You know, can your team achieve this along with all of the things that they need to continue to do to make the space run?

00:36:07 Or do you need to budget for external support and maybe even you know, a project manager that's my dream team member is a project manager who could just like kind of project manage and make sure that I don't take the eye off the ball and that we have the right resources in place to pursue our goals. Because again, that's where like the rubber hits the road is making sure that you actually follow through on this plan with your quarterly milestones.

00:36:36 And if it's too much, if you're kind of looking at the calendar and looking at all the things that need to get done and saying, wow, this is like, I'm not sure this is reasonable. You have to make sure you account for paid holidays that your team has off times that are just really busy in the space. Maybe you host a lot of events during a certain time of the year,

00:36:56 people getting sick or taking vacation time. There are a lot of things that we just completely forget about. I tend to forget about things like travel for, you know, my own time and not including some of those things. And you know, you can lose a whole week if you go to an industry conference, which I highly recommend, but you're not getting anything done that week,

00:37:13 right? So make sure you're being realistic time that you take off with your family, et cetera. So gut check your plan. Does this feel like a stretch but won't make anybody crazy? And do I have the right milestones and do I have the right goals? And am I really excited about this plan? You know, is this the plan that like gets me outta bed in the morning because it's the right thing to do for the business and it's what I wanna do and it's what my team's gonna get excited about?

00:37:39 And 2023 is gonna be awesome cuz these are all the right things to pursue. You wanna feel that way about your plan. And I think 2023 holds a lot of promise for our industry. And so if you're planning and doing the right things and doing the right things, guys can really be focusing on the basics. You know, I think sometimes I see this sometimes when we get on,

00:38:01 you know, the our operator phone calls. I think people are looking for sometimes like crazy ideas that someone has to fix something and they're, you know, all the things that we work on on our businesses are just, you know, the fundamentals, pricing and managing a team and generating leads and you know, there's no silver bullet to make any of the that happen.

00:38:24 It's just like really being consistent on the basics. Testing things, evaluating things, and pulling the levers that work for your business. So anyway, and so step nine is really about you and your mindset and maybe your team's mindset. And this might be where you take a little time to do a little introspection. I talk a lot about the Enneagram on the other podcast that I host with Giovanni.

00:38:51 He talks about the engram a lot and I think about it a lot in terms of like how you know, my brain works and what's important to me. And step number nine is thinking about who do I need to be to accomplish my 2023 goals and to lead myself and my team to do things that are necessary to get to those goals. What thoughts will keep me moving forward?

00:39:18 Who do I need to be to get this work done? When things get tough, what am I gonna tell myself to keep going? What's my why? So what do you need to do to work on your mindset and your energy and kinda showing up as the person who can accomplish these goals and has the confidence and yeah, I think the confidence and the mindset to do it.

00:39:42 So again, one of my favorite quotes, it's not really a quote, it's like a philosophy. I had a coach a long time ago, she's been on the podcast and I know lots of kind of coaches out there use this phrase, but b, do have. So you need to be the person that can accomplish the goals that you've laid out.

00:40:02 You need to have the mindset that you are that person. Then you need to do the things that need to get done to accomplish those goals. And then you will have those goals. So it's a little bit backwards sometimes we think we need to do the things and then we will feel like the person that has a successful Coworking business, but we need to believe that we are that person and act like that person and then do the things that create those outcomes.

00:40:32 So if you need, what you might need at the end of this year to get ready for that is a little break. So make sure as you're thinking about setting up for 2023, maybe you need to take that week at the end of the year off. Maybe you need to plan a retreat to set yourself up for success in 2023. Maybe you need some mindset coaching,

00:40:53 maybe you need some external support. I work with the coach and it's like my favorite time of the month when I get to talk to her and she keeps me accountable and moving and sometimes she calls me on, you know, some of the ways I think that might be limiting. So maybe you need to find that person for you. So again, you can grab these steps off of the transcript or you can join us and work through each of these steps one by one with other operators and get some ideas from what other folks are working on.

00:41:27 Meet some other operators. Again, anybody who's already in the academy, this is included in your membership. So we will send you the calendar invite shortly and anyone else that wants to participate, Everything Coworking dot com slash 23. We'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review.

00:41:55 It makes a huge difference in helping others like you find us. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to Everything Coworking dot com. We'll see you next week.

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