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It's a new month, which means it's a time ⌚️ for another Plan with Me video for every online business owner. In this video, I take you behind-the-scenes and share exactly what I'm working on in my business, and encourage you to plan your month with me as well. If you're new here. Hi, I'm Louis! 👋 Here on this channel, I share all my best tips, tricks and tutorials on building a successful online business. If that is something you would like to do, definitely hit Subscribe down below.

Lookin’ Back 👀

All right, let’s get into the planning. Grab your notebook and let's get into it. 📘 The first step is to actually reflect on the month that just passed: how was April for you? If you are using a project management tool like Asana, open it up and scroll through all of your tasks for the past month. Just have a look at everything that you accomplished. Guaranteed, it's way more than you think! If you're not a business owner using Asana, then just scroll through whatever planner that you're using to keep on top of everything in your life, and just see everything that you accomplished. Do a bit of reflection and think about what went well for you last month, and also what didn't go so well.

Let’s be Honest…

For me, April was difficult… It is not my favorite month in business of all time. It was really challenging. We were trying to get a particular strategy to work with Facebook ads and a workshop. And no matter what we tried, we just couldn't get it to work how we wanted. It was really discouraging, and it created a lot of extra work that I wasn't expecting. Generally, I'm pretty good at staying upbeat and still just moving forward, but it actually started to impact my mindset and how I felt about our ability to hit our goals moving forward.

Since then though, I've reset and reminded myself that there are so many possibilities to how we can hit our goals as a business owner. If you find the strategy doesn't work, or you have to tweak things more than you were expecting, you're just getting closer every single time. If you need to change something, there are so many possibilities out there. There are so many different ways that you can go about hitting your goals. Don't let it get you down too much at all!

Business Glow Up ✨

Here are some things that we've done that I'm really proud of: we've completed the course update of my signature program Uplevel with Asana, and we created and launched a brand new support area (which is going to improve the customer experience and make the support so much better).

We also designed a brand-new challenge. I'm so, so excited about this!! ❤️ It took us a while to come up with the perfect topic, but we totally landed on it. It's called Business Glow Up; and it's going to help you get organized, create money-making systems, and hit your next revenue goal faster. This is something that I'm going to be hosting next week, starting on May 9th. I'm so excited, I would love for you to come join us. Click the link in the description down below, and you can sign up. It's a totally free challenge! I show up every single day for a quick 30-minute lesson, and then I challenge you to take a particular action step to help move you forward towards your goals. It's going to be super fun, and I think you'll love it!

Time to Plan!

So that was the recap phase, but now let's go into planning. I'm going to open up my favorite project management system ever, which is called Asana ❤️. I have a big goals board in Asana, where I put all of my goals for the year and it really keeps me nice and organized. Let’s go through the list! Also, if you want to see a list of my other fave tools, click here. The first one is my email list-growth system, and I've just realized that this is something that we are always going to be optimizing and focusing on. So, I think we can just expect this to be on all of the project lists. It's that important for every business owner.

Failure to Launch

Next, we have the launch, which is going to be the challenge that I mentioned. We were intending to do this in April, but it got pushed back because we were doing all of the course updates and the systems updates. That took a bit longer than I thought it would. So now we are going to be doing that in May. I'm going to edit this in Asana. This is going to be top priority for this month, and the list growth, I'm actually pausing on that for a little (just to put our whole focus into the challenge).

Our other Q2 projects are all around visibility, because it is so important that we are getting out there. We are getting our businesses out to the world and in front of new people. So, I'm doing things that I feel are like the most efficient things that you can do. We have set up partner webinar system, and set up our link-building strategy that we've come up with. If you would like a deep dive on these topics, that's something that we do inside Uplevel with Asana. So if you are an online business owner, come and join us there. We do strategy hours every single month where I go more in depth on these topics and just give you my whole systems.

Then we have Facebook ads for the challenge. I am going to work on this in May, but I'm actually going to work on it at the end of the month, and just create all the ads for it the next time that we run the challenge. Those are my top two priorities for this month, and I'm really proud of this list. I love the fact that it's all really impactful things that are going to move the needle in the business, and I'm also really proud that we've managed to get a lot of things off of my plate.

Designated Days 📆

There are a few things that have helped me with moving these things off my plate.

First, designating particular days of the week for certain types of work. For example, every single Monday is my “Meetings” day, and I just put all of my meetings there. For the rest of the week, I can get into deep work. I can get into my flow and actually get these things done.
Second, we narrowed my business models. Now we just have one offer: my online course. Rather than having lots of calls with one-on-one coaching or a group program, I actually just have two client calls that I need to show up for every single month. That's cleared a lot of space in my calendar, as well. And because it's manageable, I love those calls. They are so fun. Our entire Uplevel with Asana community comes together, and we rotate between doing monthly planning sessions and then monthly deep-dive strategy hours. They are awesome for every kind of business owner.

High-Impact Activities

Finally, choosing high-impact activities is so critically important. Look at your list, then write down all of your projects that you're going to focus on for the quarter (and for may as well). Look at your list and make sure that high-impact activities are the things that make the cut. It's so easy to just fill our to-do list with all the things, but think about what's really going to help you achieve your final goal. 🏅

After I've determined my focus under my big goals board, then I'm actually going to create a specific project for each to-do. My main task has become the new up level challenge. If we click on it in Asana, you'll see that it has all the to-dos for running a challenge. Right now it might look overwhelming, but it's actually so helpful. There's obviously a lot of moving pieces when it comes to hosting a challenge.

Rather than me having to remember all of the to-dos and write this list again from scratch, I have a template that I created that I can use as a base. Then, I can just come in here and customize. That's something that we give to you inside Uplevel with Asana. We've created all these different templates for all these different launches and marketing promotions, and you get them inside Uplevel with Asana. Then, you can just import them into your account! It's so cool, and it saves you so much time.

Set Dates to Create Goals

We're literally just getting started planning this in Asana. I need to go in and set dates. I’ll break it all down and determine when we're going to get everything done. That's what I will be doing today. I'll just go in and assign it to the right team member and when it needs to be done by. This really makes running a challenge so much easier, and ensures that you don't miss anything.

Wrap Up

For all my business owner friends, think about how you can simplify. Then think about how you can just use systems that you have previously developed, and rinse and repeat in your business. That's something that we do really well, and it saves us a lot of time. With my goals, I am following the “good, better, best” formula. Good would be 1,000 people signing up, Better is 1,500, and best is 2,000. I would love for you to come and join us, and also share it with your business owner friends. If you think that they would enjoy this challenge topic, it's going to be super actionable and really valuable as well!

Next month, I'll let you know how we did on these numbers. 🤞 Hit subscribe if you haven't yet, and that's it for this video. I hope you are feeling energized and excited about the month ahead. I am sending you all the best vibes 🙃 and I hope to see you next week for the free challenge. Thank you so much for watching and I'll talk to you soon!