Right, you’ve got an idea of how you want 2025 to go.

Time to think about what you need to do (or do differently) in order for 2025 to go the way you want it to.

I’ll take you through 3 things, and we’ll look at your decisions and thoughts in the first week of January. If you miss that group session, book a 1:1, and we’ll look at your 2025 just the two of us.

(For a different perspective, consider booking a session with me if you normally do your fortnightly with David, and vice versa. Or one with each of us, or the group…)

The 3 things are your schedule for the year, coaching, you, and the Triangle (of course, the Triangle).

Let’s start with the schedule. On page 6 of the funsheet is a 2025 calendar on 1 page. I want you to use it to plan your year.

For most of you, this is probably quite a new thing. It was for me when I first did it (I nicked it off my coach). I would normally just head into a year without planning at this level at all and let things unfold.

This is a way of putting your rocks in the jar. Remember that story? I’ll tell it again briefly, and you can find a longer version in the Tradies Toolbox and probably on YouTube.

It’s not my analogy; it’s Steven Covey or someone like that.

The teacher puts a large jar on the counter at the front of the class and puts 5 or 6 large rocks in, filling it to the top. He asks, “Is the jar full?” and the silly students say, “Yes” (because of course they do), and he says, “But wait,” and gets a bag of little pebbles and pours them in, and they go down between the rocks until no more will fit, and he says, “What about now? Is it full now?” and they say “No” because they’re onto him, and he says, “Well done,” and pulls out a bag of sand, and in it goes. “What about now?”

“Yes.” “No,” he says and pulls out a large bottle of beer which, of course, goes in between all the rocks and pebbles and sand.

So what’s the lesson here?

There are two:

1. There’s always room for a beer.
2. You’ve got to get the rocks in first.

If the jar is full of pebbles and sand and beer, there’s no room for any rocks.

So, if you want the rocks in there, you need to get them in first—before the pebbles and sand fill it up.

And that analogy is good for how business works—your rocks (the things you need to do, the big jobs) are easily displaced by the daily hurly-burly, the emergencies, the fines you have to fight, the calls and emails and jobs and all the stuff. By the pebbles and sand and beer.

So, in our business coaching, we put a lot of effort into deciding what those rocks are and making sure you do them. They’re in your strategy, and they’re your Right Next Things that I ask about in our weekly coaching session and that we review and refresh in the Intensives.

So, you’ve done it for your business; let’s do it for 2025.

I’m going to be a bit corny and start with my Intensives—get them in there so you plan to attend them early and don’t let them get pushed aside by being busy.

• 31st March and 1st April is the first one.
• 23rd and 24th June is the second.

Those two are both on Zoom, and they are Monday and Tuesday.

The Byron Bay Intensive is on 9th and 10th October in Byron Bay. We’ve changed the days to Thursday and Friday so you can work the weekend rather than the other way around.

So, write those in.

The next thing is holidays.

How many do you want? Plan them now and write them in. Talk to your partner, of course.

Do you do a Christmas shutdown? Put that in there.

Now, I don’t want to get too preachy—these are your goals after all, not mine. But what tends to happen if you’re not careful is you don’t talk about a holiday, and then it’s Christmas again. And you’re disappointed. And most of you said you wanted more time away from your business, which I’m interpreting as holidays (at least partly).

The standard in Australia is 4 weeks of paid holidays, so I’m proposing you plan at least 5 over the year.

If you put them in there now and commit to them (buy tickets, book accommodation—that kind of commit), you’ll probably go, and because you’ve committed to them, you’ll plan for the business to be okay without you.

You only feel like you can’t be away because you don’t do this. So, schedule it and talk to me about that plan for when you’re away if you need help.

Next, mark the public holidays for where you live. There are 9 in NSW and 12 or 13 in Victoria and the ACT. Have a look at them and think about which ones you want to turn into a long weekend. Can you tack an extra day or two onto any of them and do something nice?

Do you take your birthday off? I’m going to start this year. Mark yours and your partner’s and plan for that, too.

Is there anything else you need to put in there?

I’ve put my Intensive and my business coach’s Intensives, including the one in August in Mexico, in mine. We’ll take a week or two in Mexico after that, I think.

And I’ll go to Spain to see Mum and Dad.

While I still can.

My team is keen on a company Global Conference in the Philippines, which I’m also pretty keen on, but I won’t put it in the schedule until I’m sure we can afford it.

Now let’s think about when you can spend time to work ON your business (rather than IN it, fiddling with pebbles and sand).

How much time can you plan to be away from your day-to-day and working on your rocks? Can you do a day a week? (Off the tools and off the phone.)

Half a day a week?

Mark it on your schedule. Make a plan for how you’ll manage it. Who will manage jobs, man the phone, etc.?

Okay, let’s talk about coaching and you.

I alluded to it a minute ago—if you want the results for your business, you need to do the jobs in your strategy, which means making the time to do them and using the coaching to help you.

So, how have you been at both of those things this year?

Have you been making time to work on your business? Have you been engaging with the coaching as well as you could?

Last year, I made a commitment (to myself) to go to my business coach’s Weekly Jam Session every week and really work on doing the stuff.

I need to do a lot of stuff, improve a lot of stuff. I spend Mondays on my business, and I’ve improved my content and ads, figured out why my marketing funnel isn’t flowing like I’d like it to, and I’m also trying to improve how I do my coaching so you get the results you want.

So, what are you going to do?

How can you spend more time on it?

How can you make more and better use of me and David and the group calls and the one-on-ones and the videos and the Intensives?

How can you do more of this work?

Rather than letting it get displaced by that other stuff (that doesn’t need you really as much as you think it does)?

How can you change for 2025?

The Triangle

What do you need right now—money, capacity, or systems?

Use that question to help you decide on your priorities as you go around the Triangle.

For Marketing—what do you need to do next?

What’s your Right Next Marketing Thing?

It could be one of the building blocks or making one of them work better. Watch the training on the building blocks from the November Intensive if you need help. What will get more leads?

For Sales—what do you need to do next? Increase your price? Work on follow-up?

Some questions: What’s your Right Next Sales Thing? What will win you more of those leads at decent margins?

Operations—How can you make your Operations Machine work better with less time from you? What’s your Right Next Thing there?

Same for the Back Office—what’s your next move there?

And for You? And your Team?

I’m hoping you have picked 6 things—a Right Next Thing for each of the 6 areas around the Triangle that will help you either make more money or give you more time or make things work better.

Can you prioritize them? Which one should you do first? And second, etc.?

Write them on your schedule and your funsheet, and get started when you get back to work.