THE STEPS YOU NEED TO TAKE FOR A SUCCESSFUL QUARTER TWO

Your Dream Business

Today’s episode of the podcast is a solo episode where I am talking all about the practical steps you need to take to set yourself up for success in quarter two.

I am so excited to share with you the exact process I go through, and some of the key things you will want to think about when doing it for yourself - because trust me when I say that it is absolutely key to the growth and success of your business.

TUNE IN TO FIND OUT:

1. The practical steps I take to review quarter one
2. The questions I ask myself to move forward into quarter two
3. How I review my annual goals to ensure I am still on track

If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to iTunes and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE

Buy a Full Focus Planner Connect with Teresa on Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Your Dream Business podcast. How are you doing this week? I hope you are good. I just want to say a little thank you for tuning in and listening. I really do appreciate it. And just as a quick reminder, if you have not already subscribed to the podcast or reviewed the podcast, I would be so, so grateful if you would do those things. It really helps not only me by my podcast being heard more, but also helps other people because they get to discover the podcast. So I'd really appreciate that. Okay. So this week, I don't have an interview. I am doing a very quick solo on some practical steps to reviewing your quarter. So at the time you're listening to this, we've not long come into quarter two of the year, and my quarter one was the crazy. If you've been in my world, you will know that I have done a lot of stuff this year already. So I launched another podcast. I started a beta group program. I've relaunched that program. I have done a massive summit with thousands of people and 38 phenomenal speakers. So I have been like smashing out the work in the first quarter. So it's a great time for me to review what I've done and also maybe walk you through the steps that I do at the end of every quarter and I do with my executive club members and with my club members. So what I'm going to do is just walk you through the questions that I ask myself and If you've got a piece of paper and a pen, then maybe make a note of these questions and give yourself some time to go through it. I promised you anything like goal setting, anything like reviewing and looking at where you are is never ever wasted, ever. So the very first question I ask myself when I look at the previous quarter, so first of all, remind yourself what happened in quarter one. So January, February, March, what did you do in those months? Now, one of the things that I do, which really helps is I have a full focus planner, which we'll put a link to in the show notes. I'm a big fan. They were a sponsor of the summit. So basically Michael Hyatt and a team have put together this amazing planner that I've used for years. And one of the things it does is every week it asks you to celebrate your wins. So that really helps when it comes to review my quarter, because I can literally just go back to that planner because the planners are in quarters. So I'm starting a new one at the beginning of April and I can just scan through to see what happened in that quarter. Sometimes looking at photos, looking at your calendar, looking at like, you know, if you've got a wall calendar. Just trying to keep an eye on what happened in that quarter, because you'll be amazed how quickly we can forget things. So the very first question I ask myself is what went well in that quarter? And I list out all the things that went really well for me in quarter one. And this year it was lots of good stuff. Like I did lots of work, which felt really good. If you've not been a long time listener, then you'll, you might not know that last year, although I showed up every week and I still did everything I needed to do. I was not moving forward with my business as well as I would have liked for many good reasons. One of them being that I spent 2023 working on getting sober and now I'm working on staying sober. So for me, focusing on what went well is really, really important because we need to celebrate those wins and we need to take some time to realize some of the really cool things that happened and just pat ourselves on the back of them. So. What were they? What happened in this first quarter? Did you get some really good engagement on social media? Did you build your email list? Did you get asked to speak somewhere? Did you get some new clients? Did you do something phenomenally huge, like start a new product or service? Or did you redo your website, maybe have a rebrand? What was it that you did? So let's celebrate those wins first. The next question is, what didn't go so well or as I expected? So it's not that we're going what was awful in the first quarter, what didn't quite go as I expected? One of the tools that I have developed over time has been the ability to go, Hmm, that was interesting. Often when I want to scream, shout, cry, throw myself on the ground because something hasn't gone the way I wanted it to go. But this is the point. It's always trying to acknowledge that, okay, that was interesting, that, why was that the case? So doing the summit, and I'm actually going to do a podcast episode around the summit and how it went and my takeaways and what happened and what was good and what wasn't good and all that sort of thing. But doing that was such an eye opener in terms of, okay, what has, what is going like happened here. And rather than judging myself by going, well, I could have done that better, and that wasn't very good. And who did I think I was with this thing? I just spent the time going, okay, that's interesting. So now I know I've never done a summit before. So again, be really gentle with yourself. If this is something you've done for the first time, Your only goal is to learn, is to learn from it. So what did I learn from doing XYZ? What did I learn from being asked to speak at such and such? Where did they find me? How can I replicate that? So what didn't quite go to plan? And again, it doesn't mean that it was awful. It just maybe didn't go how you thought. Maybe you didn't hit the numbers you wanted. Maybe you didn't sell what you wanted. Maybe you got no's in places. So Just make a note of them. What can you learn from those things? What didn't go so well this quarter? So the next thing I look at, and the next question I sort of address is, I look at my annual goals. So what goals did I set at the beginning of the year? And were those goals, they should have been broken down into quarters. And therefore, did I achieve the things I wanted to achieve in the first quarter? Now, one thing I want to remind you of with all of this is none of this is a tool to beat yourself up. None of this is a thing to hit yourself around the head and go, you haven't done well enough. Not at all. The whole aim of doing anything like this is if we don't review things, we don't know where we are and we don't know what we're doing and we don't know how to improve it. So, Go in with that kind of, you know, scientist head, not the judge and review and think, okay, where am I at? And the thing with the goals could be, you might have started, or maybe you did your goals at the end of last year, with all good intention of something happening and something already has come and knocked you off your feet. And you've got to now decide, is that thing big enough to change the direction in which you're going and therefore you need to align your goals to match that, or is it something that you need to get back on track and you stick with your goals as they are? So again, this, none of this is set in stone. It's not like you have to go, Oh, well, these are the goals I set. I've got to do them. So I review my goals. I actually part of the full focus planner is I actually go in and so they make you rewrite your goals every quarter, which is really helpful because it makes you really kind of think about it. A couple of my goals for this year were. to put the podcast live, the new one, the losing part of me podcast about my getting sober and to do the summit. And both of those things have happened already in the first quarter of this year. So they are off, like they're done. Tick. Well done. Amazing. So now it's a case of, do I need to put something else else in to replace them or am I okay then working on the other goals? And some of the other goals were weren't worked on at all because I was too busy working on those others. And that's fine because I knew that before I went into that quarter, I knew that in quarter one, the focus was get out the new losing part of me podcast and do the summit. Everything else could wait till quarter two, quarter three, quarter four. So that's what I mean, like in terms of being flexible and tweaking and changing as need be. So I look at my goals and plan what do I want to achieve in this coming quarter? So we know what went well. We know what didn't go so well. So we've made any tweaks that we need to tweak. Now we need to make our plan. So we look at the quarter as a whole and we decide what do we want to achieve in that quarter. And one of the things that we do in that is I look at what you've got in your diary. So If you have got trips, if you've got speaking gigs, if you've got a launch, if you've got, you need to look at what's in your diary to see, okay, how much am I going to get done? Where does my focus need to be? So we kind of do it as a What do I want to happen against what actually might be happening in this next quarter? Again, if you know that quarter three is typically not a great one because there's school holidays and you like to take the school holidays off, I don't, I continue working through, then you might go, okay, I'm going to put a lot into quarter two. And again, that's the other thing to mention. One of the things we talked about in the summit with Michael Hyatt on his keynote was how do you know when you're hustling to get through or to achieve something. And how do you know when you need to stop? And actually that's just a way of working. And it's in these reviews. It's in the, you know, my quarter one was super, super busy. I know I can't maintain that level of work for every quarter. And quarter two is now going to focus on different things and is going to slow down a little bit. So again, it's like, okay, do I need to work super hard in quarter one and quarter two? Because my quarter three and quarter four are never as good, or I don't want to work as hard. For me, I do work throughout the summer. However, I love the summer because I go in my garden. So actually, Working really hard quarter one, quarter two works really, really well for me. It's fine. So the next thing I review is what do I want to keep and what do I want to remove or change? So what's working for me and what isn't working for me? Is there an area of focus that I was trying to work on that actually needs more focus, or I could probably drop it. This is where I go in. I'm especially doing it this quarter, this year. I'm actually doing a full review of my business. I'm actually reviewing pretty much everything, financial, products, services, lead magnets, emails, podcast. I'm reviewing everything. everything. And I'm looking at each area and questioning it because sometimes we just keep doing these things and going, well, you know, is it really doing the thing I want it to do? So what do I need to bring with me into this quarter? And what do I need to leave behind? So for instance, one of the things that I might do, and it's kind of on my list, so I probably am going to be focusing on it is how do I grow my podcast more? That's one of the areas where I need to start focusing. Actually, I might tweak and change what I'm doing and work it up a bit. There might be an area in my business that it's like, actually, I can pull back a little bit from that and I'm going to focus somewhere else. So two questions, really, what do I need to take with me into this quarter and keep doing? And what can I leave behind? What don't I need to do in this quarter? What can I forget about, leave off my list? Maybe push back until another quarter if need be. And like I said, I'm using this quarter. I wouldn't normally do it at this time of the year. I probably would do it, you know, at an end of a year, but I'm using this quarter to beginning of this quarter to really review my business, where I am, what I'm doing. what the services I have, what the pricing I have. And I booked out a couple of days in my diary to do this. You know, how am I showing up on social media? Like what are the show notes doing? Like all the various things who is in the team, what are they doing? What money am I paying out? Like everything. So for me, that feels like naturally a really good time to do that now, because I just did those huge things in quarter one and actually, in seeing all the speakers and hearing some of the stuff they were doing has really made me go, Oh, okay. Maybe I need to tweak and change things. And I probably didn't have the energy to do that while I was doing the summit and the other podcast. Whereas now I feel like I'm giving myself some energy. So. I think the most important thing is, although I've given you these questions and these things to look at, which I do do, and I do with my members and my one to one clients, I think the key thing here is the reviewness of it. The reviewness, I literally just made that word up. Like the fact that you're reviewing, the fact that you're stopping and slowing enough to review what you've done. That's the key thing of all. So just spending some time And if you need to do it every week or every month or every quarter, or it actually works every four months for you, whatever it might be, just slowing down and reviewing what you're doing to make sure that you're going in the right direction. Make sure you're looking at the right things. Make sure that you're investing your time in the right places, because it's really easy to start down a path and suddenly be six, 12 months down the line and not be any further on, even though you've been working hard. And this has where I found myself in years before, you know. Last year, like I said, was a completely different year for me and my business and it showed up on my income and it showed up in other places and on my growth. This year is completely different. And I want to make sure that every minute I'm putting into my business is going to the end goal is what I want is heading me and getting me closer to Antigua, as it were, and I'm not going to Antigua, but we had an amazing speaker in the membership a few years back now, who rode the ocean, basically from like Spain, I think, to Antigua, and was on the water for like, over a month. It was ridiculous. And one of the things that she talked about in her talk was, is every single action I'm taking getting me closer to Antigua. So, you know, if they had to stop and clean the barnacles off the boat, would that help them move faster in the water, which then would help them get closer to Antigua? Yes, it was worth doing, you know, doing something else, would that get them close to Antigua? No, it wouldn't make enough difference. Okay, we're not doing it. So that's where I'm trying to focus this year is everything I'm doing, getting me a step closer to where I want to be, and am I putting my time in the right things? And the only way that we can understand and do that is if we stop and review and look and think and decide and make changes based on that kind of analysis. So I hope this has helped. It's a bit of a short one. Like I said, I am reviewing what I do with the podcast. It's not going away. Don't you worry about that. But 2023, I just did solos. So far this year, I've done mostly interviews. And I think I'm going to go back to the Either or like, you know, one week, one, one week, another, because that did work for me. And I do think having the solo episodes where I can give you practical information and kind of steps to take is helpful, but obviously as always, tell me, you know, I am doing this for you for the lovely listener who is listening to my voice right now. I literally sit and talk to myself. In my office for you guys. So if you have thoughts, then I would love to hear them. Also, like I said, I would really appreciate it if you would go and hit subscribe and go and give me a review. Obviously five stars would be amazing. Thank you very much. And if there's someone that you think would find this helpful, another friend in business, please do share this with them or share it on social media and tag me in. Okay. Have a lovely rest of your week, wherever you are in the week. And I will see you next week. Take care.