462 | The 5-Day Exercise That Sets Your #1 Business Priority Every Quarter with Katie Hunt
Most product-based business owners do their strategic planning late at night or in the car with ten spare minutes. Or they make a big list of everything that needs fixing and try to work on all of it at once.
Either way, a few months go by and it's hard to tell whether the business is headed where you want it to go.
In this episode, I walk you through a five-day exercise, about 30 minutes a day, that ends with one clear priority for your quarter and a plan to get there.
In this episode, you'll learn:
The two patterns that keep owners from planning — the Firefighter, who's too busy reacting to look up, and the Juggler, who makes a little progress in five directions instead of real progress in one
Why looking back at the last 90 days, not the whole year, is the first step before you plan anything
How to take your business temperature by rating your product line, your sales and marketing, and your systems and operations from one to five, and why your lowest score usually points to your biggest opportunity
Why you pick one priority for the quarter, not three or five, and the question that helps you choose it
How to break that priority into three monthly milestones and a first step small enough to take in the next 48 hours
How LABS members are using the exercise to make real progress in their business
Today's episode is brought to you by Proof to Product LABS, our membership for product-based business owners who want to keep growing after the basics are in place.
Inside LABS, you get coaching, our full training library, and focused sprints throughout the year to help you make real progress on one thing at a time.
CEO Week, which is what I'm walking you through today, is one of those sprints.
We also have an upcoming Black Friday / Cyber Monday sprint so you go into the holidays with a plan.
We're opening enrollment to LABS this week, and our next CEO Week kicks off October 12th. Come do it with us!
your product brand right now?
Connect with Katie Hunt
Katie Hunt is a business strategist, podcaster, mentor and mama to four. She helps product based businesses build profitable, sustainable companies through her conferences, courses and coaching programs.
Website: prooftoproduct.com | Instagram: @prooftoproduct
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Katie Hunt [00:00:00]:
All right, friend, when is the last time you sat down and thought about where your business is headed next? And I'm talking like free-flowing thinking about it, not while you have a to-do list sitting next to you or an order that's waiting to go out or a customer email that's just kind of like sitting in the back of your brain that you know you need to answer. When have you dedicated time to thinking strategically and planning for your business? If you had to take a minute to think about that and you're not sure when the last time you did this, you are not alone, friend. You're not alone. Today, we're going to talk about carving out real time to be the CEO of your business. I'm going to walk you through a simple 5-day exercise that you can do on your own, and you can even start it this week. So I do want you to grab a notebook and get ready for this. This is the same exercise, although it's slightly abbreviated, to what we do inside of Labs during our CEO Week. And the next CEO Week is coming up in October.
Katie Hunt [00:00:58]:
Now today's episode is brought to you by our Proof to Product Labs program. It's our membership for product-based business owners who want to continue growing their business and building their profits. Inside of Labs, you're going to get coaching, our training library, our tools and templates, our focus sprints throughout the year to help you make progress on one thing at a time. Things like CEO Week, which I'll be walking you through today, is one of those sprints. We also have an upcoming Black Friday Cyber Monday sprint so that you can get into the holidays with a plan there. We are opening enrollment till Labs this week, and our next CEO Week kicks off on October 12th. So if you want to come do this with us with the support of the community and coaching, then head to proof2product.com/labs. That's proof2product.com/labs.
Katie Hunt [00:01:46]:
I'm Katie Hunt, wholesale expert, business strategist, and mom of 4. I'm also the host of the Proof to Product podcast. Since 2011, I've coached thousands of brands whose products can be found on the shelves of indie shops and big box stores all around the world. If you are a creative entrepreneur that makes and sells physical goods, you're in the right place. Here on Proof to Product, you'll learn new strategies for product development, sales, marketing, and more. It's like your weekly dose of business school, and we're going to help you confidently grow your revenue in your own way and at your own pace. So let's get started. Okay, when it comes to strategic planning in our businesses, I typically see business owners fall into one of two categories.
Katie Hunt [00:02:35]:
The first one is the firefighter. The firefighter's days are full of orders, emails, wholesale follow-up, maybe a team member with a question, a supplier that's running late with things. Like, your day is filled putting out fires. Fires. You're in reactive mode, handling everything as it comes in and trying to be strategic along the way. But if we think about the firefighter, it's really hard to be strategic on the fly. Your strategic planning for this kind of person happens late at night when you're tired, or when you're sitting in the car and you have a few spare minutes. It's not really usually a dedicated time to think deeply about your business.
Katie Hunt [00:03:17]:
And the danger zone for the firefighter is how fast time goes by. So you may look up after a few weeks or a few months or even a few quarters of reactively putting out these fires in the day-to-day operations of your business, and you start to wonder if your business is headed in the direction that you really want to go. You're wondering if you've had your head down for so long that you're not Heading towards the goals that you actually set for yourself. And I will also add here that that's when the confidence starts to dip and decisions start to stall. So the firefighter is head down, reactive. They're moving quickly and doing all the things, but they're not sure if they're being very strategic and they're not allocating time to be strategic. So that's one of them. The second one is the juggler.
Katie Hunt [00:04:06]:
And this one's sneaky because from the outside, The juggler looks super ambitious and productive. The juggler can sit down, get inspired, write a huge list of all the things that they plan to tackle in their business. They're going to end their big projects too. Redo the website, rewrite our wholesale pitch email sequence, fix our production workflows, more marketing, hire help. The list just kind of goes on and on. And when the juggler is trying to keep all 5 balls in the air at once, We know how this goes. None of those balls, each of those projects, gets only a tiny bit of your time and your energy, and none of them actually get your full attention because there's just too much there, right? So the juggler makes a small amount of progress in multiple directions instead of solid progress, like real progress, real traction on the one thing That would make the biggest difference in getting their business to the next level. So I'm curious, which one are you? If you're a firefighter, you need a reason to stop and look at your business strategically.
Katie Hunt [00:05:19]:
You need to carve out the time. If you're a juggler, you might need permission to set down a few of the balls that you're carrying. And some of you might be both. And if that's the case, hello, welcome. Me too. You are in good company here. I would say most recently, I am a recovering juggler. I've caught myself doing this as recently as last week, but it feels so productive while I'm in the moment doing it.
Katie Hunt [00:05:47]:
And then later you look back and you think, wait a minute, did I actually accomplish what I set out to do here? Was that just a random side quest or was that actually something that was pushing me closer to my goals? Now, usually if I miss the mark on something, The answer is because I wasn't all in on one thing. I was spreading myself too thin and trying to do too much. So maybe you guys are in that boat too, if you're listening and going, yes, yes. Some of you might feel like you're in firefighter mode right now too, just putting out all the fires and kind of keeping your head down and doing the work. And so if you're a firefighter, I see you too, because I'm totally there at different points in my business. But all that to say, this is why we created CEO Week inside of Labs. At the start of every quarter, we hit pause for 5 days, and Labs members step out of their firefighter or juggler roles. They kind of pause things for a few minutes every morning and they get very intentional by sitting in the CEO seat.
Katie Hunt [00:06:47]:
And by the end of that week, the end of the 5 days, and using only about 30 minutes a day, everyone has set one priority for the quarter and a plan for how they are going to get there, for how they're going to accomplish that goal. So I want to give you the bones of that today. I want you to grab a notebook. You can do this on your own. I'm going to give you one question a day, pace it over 5 days and follow along. Now we do go a little deeper inside of Labs. And we of course have like other levers to pull, like accountability and coaching and things like that. But you can do this on your own and I'm going to give you the framework here.
Katie Hunt [00:07:23]:
Okay. So day 1 is your look back day. Before we start planning anything, before we start picking our priorities or setting any goals, I want you to look at the last 90 days. Just last quarter, not the whole year. And I want you to ask yourself what worked really well. Maybe it was a product that flew off the shelves. Maybe you sent an email campaign that got people converting, or maybe there was an internal system that you built that saved you hours of time. Big, small, whatever it is, I want you to write it down.
Katie Hunt [00:07:56]:
Now, when you skip this step, you repeat mistakes and sometimes you miss things that are actually working. We overlook some things. So again, in Labs, we're going to go a little deeper with a couple more questions that show you what to keep, what to let go of. But if you only answer this one question, what worked really well for you in the last 90 days, then you're going to be off to a great start. Okay? So write that one down. On day 2, I want you to look at where are you stuck? I call this taking our business temperature. Now I give folks a heat map to rank the different areas of their business on a scale of 1 to 5, and 1 on the chart is the This is super messy. And 5 is this is running very smoothly and it's running really great.
Katie Hunt [00:08:41]:
So I want you to start by ranking these 3 areas of your business. So your product line is 1, sales and marketing is 1, and your systems and operation is the 3rd one. I want you to rank each of those things on the scale of 1 to 5. Again, 1 is okay, this is a mess. And 5 is this is running really smoothly. I want you to look at your lowest score. That one is usually, not always, but usually where we have the biggest opportunities for growth. So again, we're going to do this slightly differently in labs.
Katie Hunt [00:09:14]:
I will also ask our labs folks to rate their energy and confidence as a CEO. So if you want to rank that here, you can add that to that too. But the reason we add that to our heat map is because those qualities are energy and confidence as a CEO that affects everything else. It affects our product, our marketing and sales. It affects our operational stuff. So we do spend some time in CEO Week talking about the correlation between those things. So that's what I want you to do for day 2. Where are you stuck? Rank those things based on the scale of 1 to 5 and figure out which one has the lowest ranking.
Katie Hunt [00:09:46]:
That is probably where you have the biggest opportunity to set your priorities. Okay. So day 3 is where we set your priority and this day can feel uncomfortable for some people. And here's why. I ask everyone to pick one single priority for the quarter, and that's really hard for people to do. They want to pick 3 or 5 or 7 or more, right? And I am asking them to whittle it down to just one, and that's tough. So look back at what you wrote on days 1 and 2 and ask yourself, if I could make only one shift in my business this quarter, Which one would have the biggest impact on everything else? And then I want you to finish this sentence. So write this down in your notebook.
Katie Hunt [00:10:36]:
This quarter, my one singular priority is, and then you're going to fill in the blank. I will also add here that it's okay if this feels a little bit incomplete. I would rather have you pick a priority and have that be finalized and clear rather than perfect and kind of fuzzy or too many things to choose from, right? Pick one thing. One thing. Okay. So day 4, we're moving into building the plan, and this is where you're going to break down your priority into 3 milestones. So I like to break it down since we're doing this in quarters. I like to break down one specific target for each month of that quarter.
Katie Hunt [00:11:19]:
That feels good to me usually. If you want to do it differently, you can. But we pick 3 milestones and we try to do one each quarter. So I'm going to ask you to write in your notebook, what 3 things are you going to do to accomplish that priority or goal? Now think of them as a compass rather than a detailed project plan. We can get into the weeds later. We're trying to keep these daily tasks under 30 minutes a day. If we tried to do too much in, in the session, we would probably like bail out on it. So we want to keep this pretty tight.
Katie Hunt [00:11:55]:
You can build out the more detailed project plan later. So for today, on day 4, we are building the plan by identifying 3 milestones, one for each month of the quarter, ideally, that are going to help you complete or reach that priority and goal that you set on day 3. Those are 3 checkpoints that tell you whether you're on track to finalize that priority. Day 5. On the last day, I ask everyone in Labs to take action. And so I want you to ask yourself, what is the smallest step that I can take in the next 48 hours? And we want to make this tiny on purpose. It could be as simple as you are blocking off 2 hours on your calendar next week so that you can work on that first milestone. Right.
Katie Hunt [00:12:47]:
Just putting a block on your calendar. It might be that you are sending out one email just to get the ball rolling. Maybe you're opening up a blank Google Doc and you're giving the project a name or the priority a name. And that's it. That's the one tiny step you're doing, right? It seems so small that it doesn't seem worthy of noting, but it is. And it's important because once you've started. Your relationship with the project starts to change. The project becomes something that's like in progress and underway, not something that you're still waiting to start, right? So let me show you what this looks like in real life.
Katie Hunt [00:13:29]:
Kristen Necessari of Starfangled Press, she is one of our Labs members. She went through CEO Week. She took her business temperature. She decided that wholesale marketing and outreach would be her priority for the quarter. And her milestones included setting a rhythm of writing and sending 2 wholesale newsletters a month. And she also set a specific number of cold pitches every single week that she would send. And I love this for Kristen for a couple of reasons. First, she didn't try to fix things that were already working.
Katie Hunt [00:14:03]:
She was looking at the whole picture of her business and she saw that there was a gap and she went after that. Now I'm a fan of optimizing things that are already working and doing more of that. You guys have heard heard me talk about that. But for CEO Week, we're trying to identify the gaps, we're trying to identify the holes, we're trying to make progress on an isolated task that we've maybe neglected and left behind. And that's what Kristen was doing. She saw that she needed to focus more on the wholesale outreach, and she wanted to do it through the newsletter and the cold outreach. And then second, look at what she chose. It's not a one-time campaign.
Katie Hunt [00:14:35]:
What she's doing is building a rhythm that she can repeat Month after month, quarter after quarter. So once this quarter is done and she moves on to maybe a different, you know, CEO week goal or priority, she's already established these systems of sending newsletters twice a month and sending out a certain number of pitches every week. She was clear about the frequency. She was clear about the number and the cadence of emails and things that she wanted to send. And that specificity helps with the follow-through. It helps with the maintenance after you kind of establish the system. Also, this is how you build a wholesale sales system that brings in orders year-round instead of just during market seasons or during like a fair promo, right? Nurturing your audience, sending consistent emails out, sending cold pitches so that you're both attracting and acquiring new customers and retaining your existing customers. So Kristen is laying some really strong foundations here.
Katie Hunt [00:15:29]:
I will add here that everyone in Labs ends up focusing on something different and That is the beauty of CEO Week. Folks are choosing the priorities and the projects that are most important to their specific business. They're finding the holes or the gaps that they're experiencing, and they're working on patching those things. And frankly, that's what I want. If everyone was working on the same things, we have different businesses, so we're going to have different goals and priorities. So Michaela from Michaela Maidman Art, she's updating her fair shop and researching 50 stores to pitch. That was part of her CEO Week plans. Neda from Evil Llama and Friends is putting inventory and CRM systems in place.
Katie Hunt [00:16:09]:
Abby from Bonafide Bookworm is refining and documenting her SOPs. Again, different businesses at different stages need different priorities, and that's how it should be. So you can absolutely take these 5 questions and do this CEO Week exercise on your own, and I really hope that you do because this is An important exercise, and it's something that we need to be doing consistently. We do it, like I said, quarterly in Labs, but you can do it whenever you want. You can just replay this episode, right? Mm-hmm. But if you are a firefighter who knows that the week will get away from you, or if you know that you are a juggler who needs somebody to help you set a few of those balls down, then I wanna invite you to come do this with us. CEO Week starts inside of Labs on October 12th, and every morning a short lesson will unlock in the classroom. You'll get the full set of exercises.
Katie Hunt [00:17:01]:
The workbooks, the real examples of how other members are mapping out their quarter, and of course you'll get a whole group of product-based business owners who will see your priorities, hold you accountable, and cheer you on along the way. And I should add here that just for fun, everyone who completes CEO Week is entered to win a prize. I love to give away prizes when we do our sprints, so there's a little extra motivation to see it through to day five, and this one's going to be a mini mastermind with me and four other Labs members. It's. So much fun when we do these. So if you are already a Labs member, mark your calendar for CEO Week, October 12th, and I will see you inside the community. And if you are not yet a Labs member and this is resonating with you, we are opening enrollment for Labs this week. So now is your time to join us.
Katie Hunt [00:17:47]:
Head to proof2product.com/labs to join. proof2product.com/labs. I really hope today's episode was helpful for you, whether you are a firefighter or a juggler, or maybe you're both at different times like me. I wanna remind you that you are not alone. You are carrying a lot of weight as an entrepreneur, and it is tough to stay on top of everything. I see you and the work that you're putting in. I wanna encourage you to keep going, friend. I appreciate you sticking around till the end today.
Katie Hunt [00:18:18]:
I will be back with a new episode next week, but have a great week and I hope you enjoy your own CEO week.
In this episode, Katie Hunt walks you through a five-day exercise, about 30 minutes a day, that ends with one clear priority for your quarter and a plan to get there.