The 3 steps to prepare for an abundant and flowy new Financial Year!
We are kicking off the second part of the year, but if you are in Australia, that means a new Financial Year! When preparing for the new financial goals and milestones, there is a blend of strategy and spiritual practices that this article is here to share.
When you blend the masculine and the feminine energy into your business, there is a magic that comes to life. Rather than relying purely on strategy or purely on trust and spirituality, you rely on both to bring a blend. To bring harmony into your business and finances.
Let’s explore the 3 steps to prepare you for an abundant and flowy Financial Year!
Step 1: Pause for a retrospective on the last Financial Year
There are a lot of business owners who bypass this step, yet it is essential to make space and allocate time for reflection.
Here some prompts to guide you and don’t hesitate to connect with me on Instagram or email if you want to access my Retrospective worksheet that I share with my masterminders and private clients.
First things first: Celebration!
Write down everything you accomplished this year
What are you proud of this year?
What do you appreciate?
What do you want to acknowledge yourself for?
And then schedule a time and date in your calendar to celebrate: Take yourself out for dinner with your friends, your family, your team, your clients or take yourself to the spa, or on holiday, or on a weekend getaway, a retreat.
Personally, I did all of the above to celebrate a multiple 6-figures first FY in my business. I went for a month & a half in France, took myself to a 2 day spa retreat and went to restaurants - just to name a few.
Then Go back and reflect on your intention for the last Financial Year.
What did you set out to do? What was the intention?
Finally, audit in more detail, what’s working, what’s not, what to start/stop/continue.
What worked
What worked WHY, How to maximise it
What didn’t work?
What didn’t work WHY, How to minimise it
What do you need to start/stop/continue doing?
For instance, looking in detail at your offerings (products or services) from your business:
Which offerings are you most connected with?
What offerings were the most joyful for you?
Which offerings performed best?
Which offerings did your clients like the most ?
Which offerings provide the majority of your revenue?
From there:
What offerings are you keeping?
What are you getting rid of?
What are you changing?
What are you adding?
You can do that for your Ideal Customer, for your brand messaging, for your socials, for your email marketing, for your processes, for your team etc. All of the elements in your business.
Step 2: {Re}-Connect with your Vision to set an intention
If you have done my “Bring your Vision to Life” course, you know I'm an advocate of knowing your vision and setting an intention yearly aligned with our highest self and 10 year vision.
If you are unclear about your vision, check out my Bring your Vision to Life, a self-paced course with clear steps on defining your vision and making it happen.
First: Pause to remember:
What’s your big picture vision?
What’s your mission? The impact you want to have in your community?
What are you MEANT to do with your business?
What matters the most to you?
What sparks joy in your heart when you connect with your business vision?
From this vision, let’s break it down to the next Financial Year,
What is your intention for your business?
What do you want to have as the central theme of your business for the next Financial Year?
What’s your overarching focus?
What’s a word/words, a sentence, that can describe how you want to feel, what you want to experience?
Have you re-connected with the vision yet?
Step 3: Be clear about your objectives and the results you want to achieve
FIRST: OBJECTIVES
What are your 5 objectives for the next Financial Year?
To write those objectives it needs to be significant, concrete, action-oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking and ineffective execution.
Then you can spread out across the next Financial Year by quarter, by month when you are going to focus on each objective. Maybe your business is seasonal and you need to take that in consideration when planning your objectives.
NEXT: KEY RESULTS
And then for each objective, you put the key results and spread it across each quarter. It is something I help my clients do at the beginning of each engagement with me privately or within my mastermind.
Indeed, for over 15 years, in my role in strategy consulting or running the large teams with agile methodology or incubating startups, we were using the OKR approach which stands for Objectives and Key Results.
It is an effective goal-setting and leadership tool for communicating what you want to accomplish and what milestones you’ll need to meet in order to accomplish it. OKRs are used by some of the world’s leading organisations to set and enact their strategies.
OKRs are typically written with an Objective at the top and 3 to 5 supporting Key Results below it. They can also be written as a statement:
I will (Objective) as measured by (Key Results).
For example, “I exponentially grow my business as measured by increasing my revenue by 200%, by serving over 1,000 clients & by developing 2 new revenue streams”.
Objectives
An Objective is simply what is to be achieved, no more and no less.
Key Results
Key Results benchmark and monitor how we get to the Objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound and aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no grey area, no room for doubt. At the end of the designated period, typically a quarter, we do a regular check and grade the key results as fulfilled or not.
Where an Objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, Key Results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the Objective is achieved.
Of course, don’t forget to plan for holiday in your yearly planning, to plan for your revenue (planning by offerings), to plan your internal projects (hiring, process, website design, etc.).
Synthesis on how to complete your next financial year planning
A lot goes into planning but as I always say: planning is ESSENTIAL for you to know where to focus your energy in your business.
STEP 1: Pause for a retrospective on the last FY
Celebration
Audit: front facing (offerings, ICA, brand messaging etc.) internal (team, processes, finances, etc.)
Adjustment: change in offerings, update ICA, review brand messaging
STEP 2: {Re}-Connect with your Vision to set an intention
What do you want to be the central theme of your business for the next Financial Year?
STEP 3: Be clear about your objectives and the results you want to achieve
OKR (objectives and key results)
Calendar quarters, months
Holiday
Projected revenue
Internal projects
Timeline etc.
I provide my clients an annual planning spreadsheet with all the details when they work with me via my intensive, my mastermind or private coaching. So if you need help, let me support you. It is something I love doing: blending strategy and spirituality to plan the most abundant year for your business.