Episode 82: January Business Planning: 7 Habits of Successful Creative Entrepreneurs

Welcome to the Creative Minds Smart Money Podcast, where we turn financial confusion into creative confidence. I’m Samantha Eck, bookkeeper and fractional CFO for Creative Entrepreneurs. Each week, I’m sharing my financial expertise and actionable strategies to help you build a thriving creative business.

Plus, you’ll hear from industry experts who bring fresh perspectives on growing your business beyond the numbers. Because building a successful creative business starts with strong financial foundations. Your next chapter starts now.

We’ve been talking a lot about building a relationship with your business, about habits that will set you up for success this year, about why Q1 feels really slow. And now I want to talk to you about what the fastest growing creatives are doing in January. I spend a lot of time in my clients’ businesses and January is the month where their habits are the most revealing.

The creatives who grow super quickly aren’t frantic and they’re definitely not just trying to start the year strong. They’re doing something with a whole lot more intention. Today, I’m going to share what I see them do quietly and consistently that sets up the biggest revenue months for later in the year.

So let’s dive right in. We kind of already touched on this during the last episode where we talked about what we should be doing instead. So let’s dive deeper into each of these things that we’ve been discussing so that we can really bring to light the things that my clients are doing to grow their business even faster and even better.

The first thing they do is they review the past year before they make any sort of new plans. So the highest growth creatives don’t just set goals based on blind data. They start with the actual data and patterns that they see.

They look at their revenue and their profit trends over the past year. They look at their client mix. They look at the capacity usage that they had.

They look at their cost of service spend and their contractor spend and they look at their offer performance. So maybe they had 17 offers last year and only 10 of them performed well. They don’t just build the goals off of these numbers just because.

They build them from what they actually know. This is their clarity phase and I try to instill this in all of my clients that I work with. I have a goal setting course that is on my website.

I think it’s $99 on my website. Shameless plug. Shameless plug.

But it’s all about setting your goals and how to set your goals with more intention than just looking at just your numbers, right? Like, yes, we want to look at our numbers, but we also want to look at a number of different things and how it will support us individually. Because a lot of the businesses that I work with are solopreneurs that do have contractors or they’re entrepreneurs with small teams and they need to support themselves as much as they need to support their teams. So we need to be looking at all of that and kind of wrapping our heads around that entirely, right? So that’s the first step they do is they make sure that they are building those goals out with actual numbers in mind and actual things that they have in mind.

The next thing that they do is they tighten their offers. They’re not focusing on adding anything new. They’re not trying to build new things in the season of refinement.

They’re trying to just tighten what they already have. They simplify. I think it’s a negative connotation.

It’s simplification. But sometimes when you simplify your offers, it’s much more powerful than trying to do so many different things. They refine the offers that they know have already generated the most profit, but not just the most profit, the offers that have brought them the most joy over the past year.

They tend to remove or just stop anything that drains time or margins because they’re not interested in picking those up when they already know what’s actually driving the profit and what’s actually helping them. They are going to tweak the scope and pricing and delivery to protect the energy that they had where they enjoyed in those offers for the next few quarters so that they can make sure that they’re really ready to go. They aren’t necessarily expanding in January.

They’re trying to sharpen and make sure their business is just doing that much better. Again, we’ve talked about this in all of the episodes for this month. They set their capacity before they sell anything.

Capacity, capacity, capacity. I don’t know how much I can say capacity, but I’m going to say it one more time. Capacity.

They don’t try and scramble for clients. They plan for them. They say, okay, I know exactly how many retainer slots I have.

I know how many projects I can handle in a month. When I’m busy, I know exactly when that time is going to be when I’m busy. They make sure that they have the resource allocation and the operational readiness to handle all of that.

They have that in mind and they’re like, okay, I have the systems. I have the processes. This is how many retainer slots I can have.

I can only have up to 20 different retainer slots. I can take on two projects during that month and then this is when I’m going to get busy. You’ve probably seen me talk about it before on my threads where I say, okay, I have four out of five spots left from my retainer slots this month.

That’s because I know exactly how many people I can onboard and how many retainer slots I truly have in my business. I’ll also say, okay, well, I have this much capacity for cleanup projects because, again, I know how many people I can onboard and I know how much time I can spend on a cleanup. I’m saying, okay, this is all the cleanups I can handle this month.

I really can’t handle anymore. Knowing your capacity, again, is what makes your growth sustainable. They take this month to wrap it out.

They say, okay, I know I’m going to be taking a vacation in August, so I can only take on two clients that month instead of my regular four. They are planning out their entire year. I’m sure you’ve seen people have those giant calendars with the sticky notes on them and everything like that.

Those are what these types of creatives are doing. They’re planning ahead and making sure that they’re fully ready for the year because they want to make sure that they know what’s coming and that they aren’t going to be caught off guard. They aren’t going to be overcommitted.

They’re not going to be panicking when things start to get really crazy and really busy. They already know their capacity and they already know what’s going on in their business. They know their capacity, so then they clean up their systems so that when they know the growth is coming, it’s not going to break them.

January is their systems month. It’s their operational month. They’re refining their onboarding.

They’re updating their SOPs and making sure their SOPs are looking good. They’re refreshing their proposals. Maybe they got new brand photos and they want to make sure that those are updated.

They’re streamlining their workflows. They’re cleaning up their finances and their folders. They’re doing all of the operational stuff that’s going to eliminate any sort of friction before they have the really big months where the clients are going to come in.

They don’t wait for the chaos to show them what’s broken. They already have tested this. They know what’s going on in their business and they’re working on fixing it as soon as they possibly can.

The most successful creatives are building a forecast that they actually check. I know last month we did a whole episode on how to build an actual forecast that you’re going to use. That’s going to be helpful right now.

They build a simple 90-day or annual forecast and update it monthly. They’re going to track their cash flow, not just their revenue. Because again, like we mentioned in that episode, cash flow is very key.

They’re going to watch their margins, their contractor costs, and even their owner’s pay. Because the fastest growing creatives that I work with, they aren’t guessing anymore. It’s one of my philosophies with my business is that I help you make those confident decisions so that you never have to guess again.

They’re already planning ahead and they’re not guessing. This habit where you’re actually building a forecast and doing everything that you can to make sure that you are building up and knowing what’s going on with a plan is one of the biggest differentiators I see behind the scenes is because they have a plan. I’m not saying that you have to know everything.

You don’t have to know, you know, exactly how many things. But the idea is that you have some form or some idea, right? So you’re saying that you can take on four projects and four retainers in a month. What is your average retainer cost? Okay, so your average retainer cost is $2,000 and your average project cost is $5,000.

So if you’re saying, okay, I have $2,000, that’s $8,000, and I have $10,000 coming in on project slots, I can estimate that I’m going to bring in $18,000 in April. That’s not necessarily what you are going to make, but you’re planning for that, right? So you’re saying, okay, if I bring in $18,000 in April, who do I need to back me up for that for contractor costs? What do I need in terms of fulfillment and deliverables? What do I need in order to pay myself to make sure that I’m doing fine? They are not knowing everything, but they’re trying to think ahead and say, okay, what do I need to do to make sure that I am fully ready for when that time period does come? Okay, a lot of them are working on investing in visibility, not necessarily the volume. So instead of being aggressive or reacting in scarcity, they are showing up consistently.

They pick a strategy and stick with it, whether it is starting on LinkedIn and building their LinkedIn presence, whether it is just having consistency with their monthly email or building up a podcast momentum. So starting a podcast and making sure that they’re keeping up with that on a weekly basis. Maybe they’re working on a portfolio refresh and making sure that that portfolio is updated so that can attract new clients.

They are focusing on the clarity of their business, not necessarily on the quantity, because the presence that they have in January is going to create the pipeline for April. So again, they’re not just going quiet and fading into the background. They’re making sure that they’re fully prepped and ready to bring on new clients.

This is also a time when they’re protecting their energy because avoiding burnout is a type of growth strategy. They are resting, they are setting firm boundaries, they’re pacing themselves, and they don’t accept misaligned clients out of fear-based scarcity. The creatives who scale at this point aren’t the ones working the hardest, they’re the ones working the clearest.

That doesn’t mean that they aren’t also working hard, it’s just that they’re working hard while also having the clarity and knowing what they want because there is a time for rest and there is a time for pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. They also don’t panic when January is slow. I know we just talked about this last episode, but they understand that we have a natural seasonal dip.

They understand that it’s normal and it’s not something that they need to worry about. They’re seeing January as that reset quarter, not a revenue test, not as something that they need to build more revenue. They are trusting that the cycle is there and then they stay focused on the preparation for what’s coming.

That alone is what separates sustainable scaling from being really frantic and just trying to get clients whenever you can. January is the month the fastest growing creatives plant the seeds. Not necessarily harvest, they’re planting all the seeds for the coming year.

The growth that they see in the coming year is the result of the clarity that they have, the systems that they have prepared, and the capacity that they have as well as the consistency that they have created. So it’s really important just to look at that. I want you to choose one habit from the episode to adopt this week.

It’s because the smallest shift that you make now is just going to help you so much throughout the rest of the year. And of course, if you need to talk to me or you just need some support, feel free to reach out. I’m here even if you just want to have a conversation.

Even if you don’t need a bookkeeper and you just want to have a conversation, I’m more than happy to chat about it. As always, friends, if you enjoyed this episode, please like it, share it, subscribe. If you have a topic that you would like to hear specifically on the podcast, please fill out the form in the description box below and I will make sure that we touch on that topic in one of the coming months.

Otherwise, as always, I wish you the best week ever. We shall see you next week. Farewell fellow travelers.