Building an Annual Plan for Artists

1. Introduction: Hey, everybody. I'm Sarah. I'm an artist and an educator, and I am so glad you're here. I've been working as an artist my whole life, and I was teacher for 15 years in the traditional classroom teaching photography. It was awesome. But I always had a dream. I had a dream to start a business with my cyanotypes. And in 2017, I did just that. I hit publish on my website, and I started a cyanotype design studio, where I create originals, art prints, paper goods, textiles, wallpaper. I have a wholesale line. I license my work. I'm also an educator. It has been such a gift to do this work. But the first couple of years are really hard. What do I do? What do I want to spend my time doing? What was successful? What did my audience really love that I put out? Sometimes you don't even realize that it is gonna be successful. What did my audience not respond to? How do I move forward? Collecting all of that data is so helpful, and I'm a little bit of a nerd about that. I love spreadsheets and I love collecting information, and I like recording the feelings that I have in order to get the end result, which for me is a sustainable business. That is my ultimate goal. When I started annual planning, it really helped me turn that lack a mole feeling into something that I was in charge of. I feel like I am a little bit more in charge of my own business because of annual planning. It's the most effective, but also one of the most simple ways to get ahold of your business. In the next lesson, I'm going to talk to you about what is an annual plan. What is this thing that I keep talking about? And then we're going to dive in that will help you to dissect your year, build your annual plan, and then check in with it to make sure that you keep at it. Can't wait. Thanks for being here. 2. What is an Annual Plan?: So what is an annual plan, anyway? What is this thing that we keep talking about? An annual plan is not a schedule. A lot of people who think about an annual plan and don't like the idea think that an annual plan is a schedule. It's like scheduling out your entire year. But it's quite the opposite. It's actually taking information from your previous year and putting it into the year ahead so that you can understand where your energy is going and how to put your energy in more equal ways throughout the year. So you don't burn out. It's so helpful to see this on one sheet of paper. The critical piece of annual planning is one sheet of paper, right here. Print this out. There's an 11 by 17 sheet. There's 14 and 8.5 by 11. And honestly, you can just take a big sheet of paper and separate it into months with a big fat sharpie and write the months on top and start there if you don't have a printer. An annual plan is just a way to get all of the things in your year that are the big rocks on one sheet of paper so that you can see the whole thing at once. This method has changed everything for me, and I can't wait to see how it affects your business and your life. 3. Results of an Annual Plan: Results of an annual plan. What's the purpose of having an annual plan of creating one? Usually to get some kind of result and the results of an annual plan can vary from person to person, from business to business. But overall, you will be the business owner that you are that you set out to be or that you find yourself being now. Being a business owner means making a plan. Being a business owner is being in charge, having some strategy behind what you're doing every day. You'll understand the point on which you stand. It's really important to know where you are before you want to go somewhere else. You'll see navigable routes for your destination. I want to get to B and I'm over here at A. How am I going to get from A to B? Maybe that'll be easy, or maybe it's a little more complicated. You want to go to A to Z and you have to go through everything. But when you have it all laid out, it's so much easier to see the root. You'll perceive how the big picture fits together, how one thing leads to another thing, leaves time for this, and that's when you market that and it all starts to work together when we can really see it in one year. When we look at our life in bite size moments, it can be really difficult to understand the big picture. You'll see hurdles, especially in that exercise that we'll do about looking back. When we look back and we see and record the things that didn't work so well that didn't grow great in our business, we can start to see how that might happen in the future. You'll have confidence. What better than having confidence in your next steps, whatever it may be. If you're doing this for your personal life and your family, it is so great to have confidence in what you're doing. If you're a creative business owner and you're annual planning for the first time or really digging in for the second time or you're doing this for the tenth time, being able to have confidence in your next steps makes a huge difference in what you put out and how you put it out there. You'll have more space for creativity. What better than that? You actually plan and all of a sudden you have some space and you can put that into your plan as well. And you'll have a marketing calendar that writes itself. I'll get more into this later, but it's pretty much my favorite part of annual planning. See you in the next lesson. 4. Tools You'll Need: It's really important that you set yourself up for success. In order to do that, you're going to need some tools. You'll need your calendars. You'll need your Google calendar or your planner or whatever calendar you used last year that has the notes from what you did last year. You might need to combine this with lots of other things, but it's really important that you have your information from last year before we plan for this year. Then you're going to need your planner and your calendar and all the things for this year. One of the things that I started doing and it is so helpful is getting my photos. Taking my phone, Google photos, or wherever you store your photos so that you can look back where you're like, what did I do in June? You look back at your photos and you can see so many of the things that you did that maybe you didn't make the calendar or didn't make a more formal plan or schedule. Another thing that really helps to fill in the gaps is text messages. Keeping that phone is really helpful. A notebook, pen, pencil, just things to jot down ideas or to come back to. It's really good to have some pen and paper paper for life. Then optional is to purchase a much larger year at a glance calendar. There's a different there's 1 million different ones that you can use. If you go to Staples, Etsy, Amazon, of course, there's ones that are Plexi acrylic calendar that you can have everything up at once. It's so helpful. But also you can just get a desk calendar for 999 and tear out each month and then put that up on your wall. If you want to do that, then you might just do this exercise with this class for the weekend while you wait for that to come and then transfer that information over to the bigger calendar where you can see it every day. Then the last tool that you'll need is a special location. Now, people might think this is a little silly, but I have found that when I am doing something really intentional, the best thing I can do for this exercise or for whatever exercise is to get out of my normal routine. Remove yourself and treat yourself, if you have the resources to get a hotel room and go do this in a hotel room by yourself, do it. If you can just get an hour away by getting a babysitter for your kids, do it. If you can take yourself out to a coffee shop or have a drink, or even if you just are able to make yourself a lovely cup of tea and set the stage in your own home. Make sure that your location is really special and inviting and helps you to really dig into this work. Quiet is key. 5. Digging In!: Digging in. This is the heart of the course. You probably think that building an annual plan is the heart of the course, but you can't build anything without the proper materials. And this lesson is all about getting your materials together. In the next two lessons, I'm going to walk you through asking yourself all of the necessary questions to get answers of what was successful and what wasn't, what worked and what didn't? What challenges did you face? When did you feel out of control? What did you love, and what do you want to do again? The answers to all of these questions will actually help build the plan but we can't do that until you really dive in. So take your time, listen to the next two lessons, pause when necessary, print out the worksheets so that you can answer them, and then use that information while building your plan. 6. Identifying Successes: Identifying successes. In this lesson, I'm going to walk you through the first few questions that are available in the downloadable workbook. The downloadable workbook can be found in the project and resources tab when you scroll down to download resources. Print that out and then walk through these questions with me. Feel free to pause at each question and answer or just watch the whole thing through and then spend some quality time going through each one of these. What are the events that recur yearly around the same time? When is my audience most expecting me to show up? When am I most likely to need a break? What were the small daily victories? What were the bigger monthly or quarterly victories? What did I try or recently start doing that makes sense to continue? When are submissions due for new things to which I want to apply? What opportunities did I see from afar that I'd like to try in the coming year? Take some time now to work through each one of these questions and then get ready for the next lesson. 7. Identifying Challenges: Identifying challenges. In this lesson, you're going to use the same workbook that you had printed out for the last one. That workbook will be used throughout this entire class. Then we're going to walk through ten additional questions. These questions are a bit repetitive and so they're meant for you to truly dig into the things that didn't work or didn't feel quite right. Some answers might be similar and some might not be applicable. What events felt out of your control? When did you feel you ran right into a hurdle? What totally flopped what did you not mark it as well as you could have? This is one of my favorite ones because I think we as creatives, come up with lots and lots of ideas and sometimes we have to get the idea out of our head and our audiences don't have enough time to catch up to us. If you could do it again and you want to use that same momentum, how can you make sure that you mark it with enough time that your audience knows that it's coming? What wasn't profitable? What resulted in a negative ROI return on investment. If you need some help with some of these more business and money questions, I have some resources for you in the resources download, also available under the project and Resources tab in the download section. What shook your confidence? What led to tension in relationships? This is such a byproduct of when we are stressed or when things aren't working. We tend to take it out on those that we are around, friends, family, loved ones, children. What relationships struggled a little in times when you felt things weren't going so well? What made you feel lost? The final question here is what made you feel you had no room for creativity, reading, research, research, or other forms of self care? This is so important as creatives that we have time to dig into our own creativity and our own curiosity. If we don't have that time, it can just be so challenging. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Looking at the Past Year: You just really dove in to the meat of this course. You asked yourself all of these questions, and then you answered them. This might have taken a little longer than you thought, but well done. Way to go. Hopefully those worksheets were really helpful to you. You're going to use those worksheets to further ask some questions on another set of worksheets. This is like worksheet to worksheet to build the plan. These questions are so important to this process, so I hope that you dove in and that they help you to create a feeling of, Oh, yeah, that's working, and that's not working. This is worth my time, and this is not worth my time. So I'm going to ask you five additional questions about the year that just happened. The collection of data that you just worked on, the successes and the challenges. I'm going to give you a short story from my own business about each one, so hopefully you can identify what things are working and what isn't. What successes are worthy of my time again? For me, this came in the form of greeting cards. I was making greeting cards. I kind of wasn't even thinking about it. It was the first thing that I did when I started my business, but running the numbers, seeing how much of a reach I got by providing greeting cards, like across the country, the ability to go wholesale with them, all of that led to me understanding that that was, like, something I really needed to keep for my business. Two, which successes can I actually let go of? What's been successful, but you actually don't want to do it? You don't love it. It does not It's not super exciting to you. It's been successful, but you'd rather replace it with something that you like better. For me, this is markets, like in person events. Like, I really enjoy in person events, but I took on every in person event when I first started, and it was too much. They were successful. It was great. I loved meeting my audience. I would probably do it again the same way. But I needed to really pair down. And so even though these things were successful, I needed to choose which ones were really worth my time and which ones could I like, let go of. Which challenges are worth re engaging with in the coming year? So what did you see that was actually a challenge, but you actually kind of liked it? And you're like, wait a minute. If I can do this again, it's going to be better. Maybe it's profitable. Maybe you just love it, maybe you reached your audience. For whatever reason, it's a challenge, but you know that you want to re engage. For me, this is definitely my mastermind. My wonder mastermind was something I wanted to create for many years, and my teaching experience certainly made me feel confident. But the first year of anything is a lot. It was a lot of things to sort through and organize and get right. But I knew I wanted to do it again. I loved reaching the women that were in their businesses and needing some mentorship and walking through that with them was so exciting, and it continues to be. But the next year was definitely easier. So it was a challenge that I was re engaging with and I continue to reengage with. Which challenges don't deserve more of your time? Which challenges are like, Nope, that is definitely not worth my time. Sometimes this doesn't occur until the realization doesn't occur until you run your numbers, and running the numbers actually helps you to figure out, that's not worth my time. This happened to me one piece of my business I didn't realize I was spending a lot of time doing, but then not making the money that I needed to for how much time I was putting in. When I took that out of my schedule and took that out of my plan for the year, it opened up so many more opportunities for me. It was sad. It's sad to let go of something, especially that you put your heart and soul into, but it can often lead to even better things. After running your numbers, which activities are the highest and best use of your time? For me, this was commissions. A lot of artists don't love commissions, but I love commissions. I love commissions. I think that they are incredibly great opportunities for me to reach my customer, to work larger, to see and experience my work in a specific space. And I have loved doing them. And so I will continue I will continue to do them. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about what questions to ask yourself for the year ahead. So making sense of that data for building the year ahead, and then we're going to get into building a plan. 9. Looking at the Year Ahead: In this lesson, we are going to work on making sense of the data about the year ahead by asking five additional questions. These questions are more about what you know from your previous year that made up part of your schedule or your plan. Things that are recurring, things that you can use to your advantage in building out the next year. What international or domestic travel do you have coming up? Have you planned a big trip? Do you know that you're going to go on a work trip here or there? Make sure you write those down. It's so important. You don't want to put a big trip right before a big launch of some really cool art that you've just created. Like, doesn't that's not going to flow very well. So you have to make sure that those dates are in your annual plan. So we're going to make sure that they're in this worksheet so that you can use that data. The second question is what major life events will impact me in the coming here? Do you have a wedding, baby shower? Do you expect 100th birthday for your grandmother? Something like that or several events like that can be helpful to knowing where your priorities will lie when those events are happening. Number three, what budgetary constraints differ this year from last year? Are you on a tighter budget? Do you have a little bit more flexibility? That can come in really handy, knowing that information. What tools do you need to pursue the successes that are worthy of your time? What tools do you need to get your things accomplished? Do you need to hire help? Do you need to ask your spouse for extra support cooking dinner? You need some help with your children? Do you need actually specific tools to get things done? Do you want to record video, and you need a camera? Do you want to do a really special project and you need paint? Do you want to do a colab with a friend? Like, have you communicated with them? Like, what tools do you need to really accomplish the goals that you've listed out? What tools do you need to really get those successes to be successes again? And the last question is, what are my goals, and how can I incorporate them into my annual plan? Do you have a goal to make a little more money? Do you have a goal to show up at more family functions? Do you have a goal to release a launch of paintings? Do you have a goal to just be more calm in your life? Those goals are going to be really important when you list out your annual plan because it'll help you to organize what things you put in and what things you don't put in. Now that you have all of the answers to these questions, they're all filled out in the worksheets, you're going to bring those worksheets in with your actual calendar, the annual planning calendar that's provided in the downloads and we're going to work on building the plan. I can't wait. Let's get started. 10. Building the Plan: Building your plan, putting it all together. The first thing that you're going to need is the annual planning calendar. There's an 11 by 17 version and an 8.5 by 11 version. That is next to the workbook that you printed out and just wrote all over in order to get answers to fill in this very calendar. If you don't have one of these or you don't have a printer, you can honestly just write in Sharpie on a big piece of paper. For me, I think that the bigger the paper, the better for everybody. It's just easier for our brains, it's easier to look at. It's easier to see the whole year all at once. I just find it really helpful. If you only have 8.5 by 11 paper, don't worry, use that and then get a bigger one whenever you can. The first thing that you add to the calendar is your major priorities. For me, these are recurring events that are personal. In 2020, I left my full time job to go full time with Atwater Designs. Before that, I had a job where I really had to work around my job instead of my job working around the schedule. And it was so freeing and I know it's such a privilege to be in this place. But after 2020, I wanted to build a business that could fit around my life instead of the opposite. Now, in my annual plan, I like to put those things on the calendar that I know are going to happen over and over, but also that are important to me and my family. Oh, you can see here that New Year's Day is one of those for me because New Year's Day, John and I do our goal setting and that's so important. Then John's birthday, my husband, my brother, my mom, our anniversary, my birthday. These are ones that usually take up a chunk of the day or even a whole day or a weekend. Those feel like real priorities to me. You choose what are those priorities for you? Also notice where I put each event in the month, even though this is not a dated month to month week to week calendar. This is just getting the basic structure of our year down before we get into that nitty gritty. I put New Year's Day at the top of January. I don't put it at the bottom because it occurs at the beginning of the month. Then my mom's birthday is at the end of May, so I'm going to put that towards the bottom of the box in May. The next thing are holidays that are important to me and my family, things that maybe we celebrate together or that feel important. Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas come to mind. The third piece for my personal priorities are travel and any big events like baby showers, weddings, other kinds of events that you know are going to take up time and maybe even involve some travel. Then any travel that you have planned, are you going on a special trip? Are you going on travel for work? This is where work and personal start to blend together a little bit for me. Yours might blend together a little bit more earlier. The next piece I like to put in are the important holidays for my business. Now sometimes the holidays can overlap. You can see here Mother's Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas, I did two boxes because they overlap with my business. But then I also include Earth Day and national Cyanotype Day. I bet you didn't know there was one of those. Those pieces are really important for me to celebrate in my business. I make sure to put those as priorities in the year. Don't forget for your business to look up some of these holidays like different federal holidays, but also non federal holidays. There's holidays for everything and maybe you could even run with it with your business. Maybe National Dugut Day is really important to you in your business. Maybe you make doughnut illustrations or doughnut paintings and National doughnut Day would actually be a really perfect way to celebrate that work. Now I get into the section that is using your information that you filled out. This is really about your creative business. You're looking at those pages where you're where you've digested what worked and what didn't? Why did it work and why did it not? This is where you can cross off the things that didn't work and leave them to the side. This is where we put the things on the calendar that are recurring that you know that you want to do again. Those successes that you know you want to do again, or even some of those things that were a little bit hard, but you also know you want to do again. For me, January is always a studio sale. I've been doing it for I think this is my fifth year doing a studio sale in January and I love it. It's so fun. I'm pretty sure my audience knows that it's coming. It's the only time that I um reduce the cost of original work and I don't know, it's just something really fun to look forward to before the sun really starts shining again when I can start making my cyanoties again. Then commissions, as I said in the previous lessons are really important parts of my business, so I make sure to prioritize them. That happens mostly talking about commissions and signing up for them once the sun starts shining in April, May and June. But then commissions can go really until the end of the year. Then another thing that's recurring and that I love are workshops. I love teaching and I love showing people how to create cinatypes and I have all sorts of ideas for this year. Stay tuned, so excited. And then the holiday shop. You guys, not until I did my annual plan, did I realize where the holidays fell, how much time before them I had available to me, and really just how it all fit together. All of a sudden, seeing this all at once, it made me realize how much lead time you need to not only make the work that you want to sell, but also how you need to talk about it, which is where I feel like the writing of the marketing plan comes in to play full fledged. To me, I see this holiday shop and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I can't just decide what I want to sell on my holiday shop in October. It's got to come way before that. I'd never realized this until I did this exact exercise. It was a game ager. I know I say that all the time, but it really was. Then that's when you get to put in the things that you want to do or that you looked at last year and you thought, I want to do that, but I don't have time. Or the pieces that you're just let's experiment with or let's try that. I have been writing a course about holiday sales, how to harness the holidays for a little less than a year, and I'm so excited to build a schedule this year and build my annual calendar this year that makes that fit in to the work that I'm doing. Then the last piece is, I want to show you with these little red circles where you can start to see that you have some time where you're like, my January is pretty busy. My February is not so busy, but the end of January is busy, the beginning of February might be a cleanup and send orders out and figure out all getting everything together or maybe launching something for Valentine's Day. But then after that and into the next month, there's a lot of space there. What do I want in that space? Do I want more free time? Do I want to make more time for my family? Do I want to offer something new? Do I want to play? Do I want to do something just for my own creative excitement? This is where I feel like my expenditure of energy started to make more sense and the flow started to make sense. Because then you get over here to May and there's really not a lot of open space. I have a lot going on both personal and professional and holidays. May is a busy month. Maybe April is a month that I start to get everything ready for May. Then June is the calm after the storm of May or just continuing but at a slower pace. Then October, look at that beautiful thing right before the holidays, that's intentional. So this is really intentional for me that I try to create room in September and October to get ready for the holidays. I didn't use to do that. I used to cram everything in. I was doing things up until the last minute, and then I realized, Oh, no, I have too much going on. So this method has really helped me so so much, and I hope that it does you as well. So you've done it. You've built your annual plan. Or maybe you watched me do it, and now you know how to do it, and you're going to go and try it. It's so important to think about what worked and what didn't and how that gets incorporated into your plan. A couple of things to remember as you do build your plan. A plan is not a schedule. It's really important to know that just because you've written it in an annual plan doesn't mean that you can't erase it or you can't take it out, or you can't kind of put something in pencil and then put it in pen or cross it out or erase it completely. It definitely allows for flexibility. The point of the plan is simply to see how everything fits together in the whole year. That is what changed for me, and I think so many of my friends and businesses, they just don't look at the whole year, so then you don't see how it fits together and you just get caught into this everyday scramble and nothing really moves forward from that space. It's so difficult. Also, don't forget that you can rewrite this plan as much as you want throughout the year. I often actually write it out at the beginning and then as things shift and change or a new opportunity comes, if I haven't written in pencil, I'll crumple it up and rewrite another one. Sometimes it gets a little bit messy and I like to rewrite it again and again. I think last year I probably rewrote my annual plan three or four times and most of the things pretty much stayed the same, but I added in a few things and took out things that I just didn't end up doing. Again, it's not set in stone. This does actually allow for more flexibility. And the last thing I want to make sure that you know is that it's never too late to annual plan. There's all this hubbub, and I'm falling into that right now of annual plan in January, and when you haven't done it, you have to wait till next January. It's never too late to annual plan. You can get to June and say, What do I want for the rest of my year? I'm going to, like, really dive into this or I'm going to rewatch this whole video and then do it again or do it now because something has changed. Maybe there's a big life shift that happened, and your annual plan didn't really go the way you planned, that is okay. You can start anytime you want. Honestly, if your business doesn't run on a January to December schedule, if your year is a little bit more like June to May, then maybe your annual plan happens more in November or December. It's never too late to annual plan. Now that you've built this plan, it's time to implement the plan. So how to implement. I just go over just a very few steps in how to move it from this broad piece of paper into a little bit more of a day to day week week month to month planner or calendar in the next module. I'll see you there. 11. Implementing: You've just asked yourself so many questions, gotten answers to them, dissected the data about those questions and answers, and then you've built an annual plan. I am so proud of you. This is really hard work, but an annual plan is only as good as the implementing of and checking in with of the plan. You have to implement this plan now. What are you going to do? How are you going to do it? And then you have to check in with it. So the first thing to do in implementing the plan is turn this one large broad sheet of the year into a boiled down month to month version of it. So you're going to take this information and translate into your Google calendar or your planner. I've listed a ton of resources that you can try in the resource guide, but also if you have a method that works for you on a more day to day basis, please add it to the comments. I love learning the methods by which people plan. Then you're going to check in with your plan. In order to check in with your plan, you have to implement a date. Every single third to fifth day of the month, I check in with my previous month, run my numbers for the previous month, and I think about the month ahead. I often do this by asking myself several questions. What were the highs? What were the lows? What worked? What didn't? What did I like? What did I not like? Then what do I want to do for the month ahead? My planner is actually incredible in that it provides worksheets within the months that say these things. I've actually listed those on worksheets for you and you can print them out each and every month and fill them in. Or you can figure out some way that works for you to get that same information. A spreadsheet works fine, a Google Doc works fine, anything that keeps you accountable to this plan that you have created. 12. Until Next Time: So much for joining me for this course on building an annual plan. I hope that these strategies have helped you to create a plan that you're really excited about and a plan that reduces stress, increases your productivity, profit, and gets you more of the things that you are after in the year ahead. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below this lesson in the comment section. And don't be afraid to share your annual plan with us, as well. I'll see you next time.