Episode 109: Planning Your Financial Year: What Are Your Goals, Strategies and Tactics?
In this quick tip episode, Fiona talks about the end of another financial year. Have you reviewed yours already? Listen now as she talks about setting new goals, strategies and tactics for the coming financial year.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
End of The Financial Year
Strategy vs. Tactics
Example
Conclusion
Links/Resources Mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 109 of the My Daily Business Coat Podcast, I'm Fiona Killackey. I'm your host and I just love putting out this podcast and more. So I love hearing from so many of you who listen to this, who kind of DM me on Instagram. I'm just at @mydailybusinesscoach or send an email. You can do that at hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com.
But yeah, I'm loving hearing from so many people all over the world who run just really interesting businesses from are just incredible stuff like furniture makers through to dietitians who work with children in different areas of the world, through to people who are creating amazing things from war torn countries to try and get some money back to those people. That it's it really warms my heart that, you know, so many people are finding this useful and it's helping you in your business kind of build things out that are really purposeful and you're passionate about, but also bringing in a profit. So thank you so, so much.
If you are somebody who has reached out and connected or likewise, if you've left a review, I read every single one. If you have hit the stars like so, so, so appreciate it. And if you haven't yet connected, come on over. Every time I say come on over and really I'm like, come on over, come on. I feel like it's that song. I don't even know where that's from. But anyway, come on over and let's connect. I can be found all the time. Well, not all time. 30 minutes a day on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach. And like I said before, you can email hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. All right. Let's get into today's Quick Tip episode.
All right, so I am based in Melbourne, Australia, and it is coming up to the end of financial year for us, so our financial year runs from the 1st of July to the 30th of June. And if you're listening to this in real time, we just got about maybe a week, just over a week until the end of financial year. And this is I'm sure this happens in other countries as well. It's very similar to kind of the end of the calendar year where you start seeing all these diaries and stationery and wall planners kind of pop up and everyone's sort of selling you something because you can pay for it before the end of financial year and get that deducted from your tax and other stuff. But yeah, it's really interesting because I'm all for planning, like I'm absolutely a planner addict, like #planneraddict. And I love that. You know, obviously, if you listen to this work with me, you know, I'm a big one for planning, but I do find that when I'm talking to small business owners or working with them sometimes and we dive into their plans, especially those related to business, there's like an abundance of tactics or ideas for tactics, but there's not so much strategy. And the strategy has to come first, like what are you trying to do? And this is kind of the most important thing to be clear on. Why are you doing it? And that's really what I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to talk about a tool that you can use to really understand what is your strategy. And it's a very simple one.
So I know that, you know, we might all know this like we do. We know it. Most small business owners like, “yeah, I need a strategy or I don't have a strategy, but putting it into practise can be difficult.” And I've heard, you know, some small business owners also claim that, like being strategic is somehow selling out or being inauthentic or somehow gaming the system or not being organic or not letting things flow. And I just don't believe that those statements are true. I totally believe that you can be strategic while also being super creative. You can be strategic while also letting things flow to some degree in your business. But being strategic, it's really about just making smarter decisions and reducing inefficiencies and having a clear roadmap. I say this all the time, but clarity equals confidence. Like if you know where you're going, you're more confident to try new things and experiment on the way because you know what you're supposed to end up. So you're like, oh, that didn't work. Let's try this. We know what the final destination is.
So as the financial year in Australia at least comes to a close and you start mapping out the next financial year, or if you're outside of Australia, you know, we're at the end of half of 2021 is coming to a close, which is crazy. But, you know, you might just be mapping out the next six months of the calendar year from July to December. And I know right now that we're still in a pandemic and it's not necessarily like everything can be concretely put into a plan. But you want to spend some time at this stage in the year, whether you're in Australia or outside, really getting clear on the overarching strategy for your next financial year or your next six months or your next 12 months, whatever it is. And only once that is clear, then figure out the tactics or the initiatives that are going to help you achieve that and strategy and tactics like the terms that are so frequently used together, just like systems and processes. And it's easy to get confused and think that they're the same thing, but they're not. And one way of just helping people understand it is, to put it simply, strategy is the why, like why are we doing this? And the tactics is the how. Or in other words, it might be that strategy is the destination and tactics are all the steps on the journey to that destination. So that is one way to kind of consider it.
You can also think of strategy as the plan and tactics as the action. Whatever way you think about it, you've just got to make sure that they're separate things that you're not thinking. I mean, they're aligned, of course, but you're not thinking that your tactics are the strategy. And again, I know I always say it like Instagram is not a marketing strategy. Instagram is one tactic or channel for your overall marketing strategy. So if you’re like many small business owners, you might be listening to this and you might be like, well, that's great, but I just want to, you know, make more money next financial year or have more time with my family. I don't have a specific strategy and that's worked for me and I don't need one, in which case I'd like you. Absolutely do. And sorry. And yes, it might have worked for you, but actually you may have a strategy and you're not even really conscious of it or you're not calling it your strategy. So do you just do you do need a strategy for business to be sustainable so you're not working 24/7, but also to be in a scalable as well in every business can map out this strategy by basically completing this super basic framework. And this is really the tactical tool and wanting to share with you in today's quick.
So if you think about it as kind of boxes on a page, now I'm a visual person and I'm always drawing things and making frameworks because that's how my brain works. So that's how I'm going to explain it. So think of it as three boxes sort of stacked on top of each other at the top. Are your goals then in the middle? The middle box is the strategy and the box at the bottom is the tactics.
So, for example, like let's say you have a goal and you can always make more money. Now, that's really vague. So fiercely, you'd need to put the goal into a kind of framework that works. And one that I like to use is from X to Y by when?
So your first box on that top might be goal. And the goal is move from $300,00 from this financial year or calendar year or whatever it is to making $500,00 by this time so that I can hire another staff member and take more time off. So again, just that goal framework is from X at certain date to Y by a certain date. So that what's the outcome, a result. So again, in that first box you've got the goal and this one was making more money, specifically. $500,000.
The second box is your strategy. So you might say I'm going to increase average transaction value. So the amount that people spend every time they transact with us of online and in-store customers, that's the strategy. The strategy is why are we doing we're trying to get the average transaction value up. That's the overarching strategy. Underneath that, you've got tactics. And so in this case, you might have tactics like incorporate low priced add-ons on product detail pages on the e-commerce store. It could be incorporate free shipping over a certain amount of money.
So, again, people are spending more to get that free shipping. It could be quality visual merchandising in-store for bundles. So instead of selling, you know, a single bath towel, you sell them as a bundle and it's going to be more expensive for people. I mean, maybe not if they bought every single item individually, but it's a bundle. They're spending more. You could add bundles online. And I know many of my clients have done that. And Shopify will have different apps and other places will have things where you can add a bundle.
Another tactic that you might try is introducing limited edition range. So the highest price point that you have and promoting these to your top X amount of buyers. So your top 100 buyers, your top thousand buyers first with a main promo coming 24 or 48 hours later. So again, average transaction spend is going up because this is perceived idea that, oh, my gosh, this is limited edition. I can't get it again. You could incorporate VIP shopping events once a quarter. You could incorporate VIP styling events. You could incorporate Zoom calls with the founder. I mean, anything's possible these days. And these are tactics that you can try and then you might have, you know, automating SKU specific email sequences for post purchase segments. So that might be people who buy these top ten of our products that are always the best sellers. Every time they buy that, they actually go into a email sequence that kind of guides them and nurtures them to buy other products. Or it's almost like that, you know, related products. Or you might like this as well. So as you can see, the strategy here is not adding bundles. That's a tactic. The strategy is long term and it's to increase average transaction value (ATV). So that's the strategy we are working on.
The strategy to increase ATV, increasing ATV is not a tactic. It is a bigger kind of thing to think about. Underneath that, we've got various ways to increase the ATV. But increasingly, ATV is a strategy here. That's what we're going to do in order to try and make more money. And you might have, you know, other strategies as well to make that more money. But increasing activity in this instance is the strategy. And some of the things I've just mentioned before are examples of tactics. And the tactics is really where you can get creative, you can experiment, you can test things. You can.
Let's try this. Let's try that. Let's try this channel. Let's advertise on Pinterest, because we haven't done that before. Let's do this. Let's do that. Those things are tactics. And I know I'm driving it home, but really, that's what I want to get through, if you can think of it. And if you even, you know, get your pen and paper out and just put those three boxes, what are our goals? What's the strategy, what are the tactics? And really, it's as simple as that.
It doesn't have to be a really scary word. I know every person in the dog calls themselves a strategist these days, and half the time they're actually just giving you tactics and that's fine. But you as a business owner need to be aware of what's your strategy and what's the tactics underneath that is helping that strategy help your goal to be achieved? I hope that makes sense.
That is it for today's Quick Tip episode. If you want to find the show notes and kind of read through that again and kind of test it out yourself, definitely check them out over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/109 as this is episode 109, if you found this episode useful, I would love it if you could take two seconds and leave a review or just hit the stars even more. So if you could share it with another small business owner, that just really helps them learn as well and hopefully get as much out of this as you did. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
