Entrepreneur Planning - How I Plan My Month for Success

As someone who considers herself incredibly organized, I thought it could be fun to geek out and do an ongoing series on how to plan your quarter / month / week / day for success as an entrepreneur.

(Well, how I do it anyway, plan my month as an entrepreneur!)

In this first post, I’ll share the two tools that I rely on as a Type-A, high achieving female founder planner to outline my month, specifically.

Then in the next post of the series, I’ll break it down into how I plan my week.

Having a plan makes me feel so secure. Knowing exactly what I’ll be working on when, how those actions fit into the bigger picture, and my week-by-week intentions helps me reverse engineer a winning month.

Wall Calendar

First up, there’s my wall calendar. The purpose of my wall calendar is to keep me focused on my goals for the quarter. My office always has three months up on the wall in front of me - representing the current quarter - so all day I’m seeing my quarterly priorities, upcoming events, and planned collaborations.

Photo Credit: Emily Ley

It helps me keep a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in the bigger picture, plus keep front-of-mind the things that have already been decided in advance.

Typically each quarter I might have three big things I’m focused on which means I can loosely theme my months. This quarter, I’m focused on:

• Selling our remaining inventory of our first production run of the Female Founders Journal, so we can order our next round

• Diving deeper into Canadian communities for women entrepreneurs so I can create and deepen relationships with other women building businesses

• Long-term SEO strategies (oh hi blog post 👋)

• Booking 10+ in-person workshops for the remainder of the year

For me, Q3 has been a lot of planting seeds for collaborations, and Q4 is where you’ll get to see them all come to life!

It’s so exciting that as of early-August I am literally booked out for the rest of the year with virtual workshops, in-person workshops (more on that soon!), online and IRL cross-promotions and collaborations, so I need to stay organized with what I’ll be promoting when.

Desk Calendar

Nope, one oversized calendar isn’t enough for me. And as you know, I am a paper girlie through and through so now add in my desk calendar, which is a bit smaller and can live on my desk.

The desk calendar helps me stay on top of my social content. And it absolutely also features colour-coded sticky notes so I can track which specific bucket my content falls into:

• Behind-the-scenes

• Promoting a lead magnet

• Promoting a podcast episode 

• Showcasing the journal, or

• Call-to-action to purchase

Photo Credit: Emily Ley

I could afford to be a bit more on top of this calendar because scheduling has been falling by the wayside for me lately and I’m seeing it!

Yep, I know there are social scheduling platforms and content organizers, but I gotta see it on paper and be able to move my sticky notes around as need be!

Since I’m looking at my quarterly wall calendars while doing my monthly content planning it takes some of the guesswork out of ‘What should I post?!’

In the next post, I’ll share the two tools that I use to help me run my week and stay aligned with my team!

Share your entrepreneur monthly planning tips over on Instagram!