How to Plan Your 2027 Business Goals in One Afternoon

If you can do something quickly, you probably didn’t spend enough time doing it to have done it properly, right? Nope. Cue the buzzer sound, totally wrong. If there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s efficiency. And to be clear, efficiency that still yields a great result. This comes up whenever I make bolognese for dinner, it’s a running joke in my household. So many recipes create this two-hour situation, but give me 60 minutes and I promise mine will be equally rich in flavour in half the time. 

Same with setting 2027 business goals. Business planning for women entrepreneurs doesn’t need to be a weekend retreat, especially for a company in its earlier stages with little complexity. This is a simple planning routine for how to set business goals for the new year. Goal setting for female founders is something you can do in as little as an afternoon, it’s just a matter of taking a few hours and giving each hour a specific task in order to reverse engineer your successful year. 

Marathon planning brainstorms can feel like productivity but are often an exercise in busywork. Thoughtfulness and strategy meet speed in an ambitious afternoon-long session where the real work is in avoiding decision fatigue. If you’re also someone who loves books on strategy, personal development and business, I hope you’ll enjoy the reading recommendations sprinkled throughout.

How long does it take to plan your business goals for the year?

Four hours. Set aside one afternoon for your 2027 business planning and you’re golden. When I’m doing my annual planning, my preferred way to strategize is beginning with my SMART goal in mind. Getting clear on that end goal that is:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Relevant

• Time-bound

I ask myself “What do I want my ultimate outcome for 2027 to be?” Once I’m clear on the definition of success, then it’s a matter of breaking it down into understanding what quarterly results need to be achieved, and clarity on the specific actions and metrics that will drive those results. Use your time effectively, and you’ll have your annual plan compiled in just four hours. 

This style of goal planning is centred around authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan’s book The ONE Thing. Keeping it simple removes the overwhelm and unlocks laser focus.

The four-hour plan

Here’s how you’re going to assign time in your four-hour planning process:

Grab a beverage, cue up a playlist, and let’s start planning!

0:00 to 0:45, look backwards

It’s only natural that the first thing you’re going to want to do is start planning for the year ahead, that’s the entire point of this post. But before you look ahead to 2027, begin by looking back and reflecting over 2026, similar to doing a Q4 reset.

As founders, we’re always thinking about what’s next, but it’s so important to take a beat to pause and acknowledge how far you’ve come so that you don’t evolve into the next version of yourself without noticing. One of my favourite books that delves into this is The Gap and The Gain by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. The co-authors liken our constant drive for forward motion to running after the horizon: no matter how far you run you’re not going to catch it. But when you stop, turn around, and notice how far you’ve come, you’ll likely be not only amazed, but truly proud of yourself. 

Go through each quarter of 2026 to review and reflect on your personal growth, relationships and focus. Some questions you’ll want to ask yourself include:

• What did you learn as a founder? Whether that’s crowdfunding, inventory management, or learning how to use AI.

• What’s something about your current self that the version of you a year ago would be surprised by?

• Review last January’s goals. Did you follow through on their execution? What worked and didn’t work? An honest look helps inform your strategy for 2027. 

Here’s a full list of 20 Year-End Questions Every Woman Entrepreneur Should Answer Before 2027 that will help you look back at how you grew as a founder, not only how well your business performed.

Too often, we skip past celebrations and set our sights on the next thing. But there is a real Importance of Celebrating Your Wins. It closes the loop in your nervous system, plus confidence comes from evidence. When you recognize and celebrate your wins, it helps your confidence grow.

1:00 to 2:00, choose the ONE thing

Now that you’ve taken time to acknowledge what you’re proud of yourself for in 2026 let’s turn our thoughts ahead to 2027. I appreciate author Jim Collins’ quote “If you have more than three priorities, you don't have any,” but I’ll take it a step further and lean into Keller and Papasan’s train of thought. They wrote The ONE Thing. It’s a productivity book about putting your focus on the single most important task, rather than splitting your focus. The overall theme is that success comes from doing fewer things with greater effect and notes that ‘going small is a simple approach to extraordinary results.’

I can’t believe I’m sharing this publicly, but after filling in my application last week for The Elleiance Network’s Capital Elle Business Impact Award, I got clear on my one thing for next year:

My 2027 goal is to help 10,000 women entrepreneurs feel confident building their business with the Female Founders Journal.

Ahhh now I’ve said it out loud, it’s real, and I’m accountable to that!

In case it’s your first time being introduced to it, the Female Founders Journal is a 90-day guided journal for women entrepreneurs with more than 180 prompts, reviewed by a licensed therapist. It’s designed to turn self-doubt into self-belief.

Photo Credit: Green Pearl Photography

Inside of the journal, the weekday pages begin with writing down your vision. In this case my vision is perfectly aligned with my 2027 goal. It serves as a guiding light and a decision-making compass and I lock that vision in every morning, writing it on repeat. 

Writing down your goals makes you 42% more likely to achieve them which is why the journal’s entries begin with ‘My vision is ___________.’

Once you’re clear on your one thing, the big picture question, Keller and Papasan introduce you to what they call the Focusing Question: 

What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

The Focusing Question is a small-focus question that helps you find the right, leveraged action(s) to achieve your one thing. I use this to plot my way through Q1 through Q4 for the upcoming year ahead. 

2:00 to 2:45, break the ONE thing into quarters

The Focusing Question guides my direction for each quarter. When setting quarter-by-quarter goals for your business get clear on:

• Quarterly, then monthly revenue goals & other milestones

• Required monthly activities and outcomes

• What needs to happen weekly

Reverse engineering your goals all but makes success inevitable, here’s How to Set Goals for Your Business. Two physical tools support my annual and quarterly planning: an annual wall calendar and monthly wall calendars. The annual wall calendar offers a bird’s eye view of the year (that one is up in the spare bedroom) and then the monthly wall calendars give me a week-by-week breakdown of what milestones I need to achieve. I keep three of them up in my office, representing a quarter, and I see them all day every day - no ‘out of sight, out of mind’ over here!

3:00 to 3:30, decide how you want the year to feel

Something I’ve realized is how important it is to let this present moment be enough and find the joy in it. Of course I’m ambitious and goal-oriented, but if I’m constantly chasing success, nothing will ever be enough. There will always be another milestone to hit. So I’m really committed to feeling happy, appreciative, and satisfied exactly where I am right now.

I’m an incredibly analytical person so I spend a ton of time in my head. It’s a challenge for me to get out of ‘doing’ mode and into ‘being’ mode. To be more in my body than in my head. A book that really helped me with creating soulful goals was The Desire Map by Danielle Laporte. This book is all about how we claim to chase goals, but what we’re really chasing are feelings. It offers a formula to help you do less proving and more living, and to make sure our desired feelings are a key part of how we plan our days, weeks, months, and years.

In the book, Laporte recommends choosing three to five core desired feelings, then checking your goals against them. Mine for 2027 are abundant, accomplished, momentum, magic and vibrant.

So in this half hour, write down three words for how you want 2027 to feel, then look at the quarterly plan you just built and ask honestly whether it produces those feelings or works against them. If the plan only gets you the number, you’ll hit the number and feel nothing.

3:30 to 4:00, keep the plan alive past January

We’ve likely all experienced the high highs of January with ambitious New Year’s Resolutions in full swing…and then remembered those resolutions in hindsight come March. So how does the plan stay consistent?

First, let’s acknowledge that our plans get to be fluid because life happens and things can shift. Staying focused and flexible is important, but at the same time it’s key to keep your eye on the prize without constantly adjusting the target.

When it comes to staying on top of goals, a book that made a huge impact on me (and millions of others) is James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. The concept in that one is that ‘you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.’

Goals set your direction, but your systems propel you forward daily. Stacking your habits atop one another for consistency, visualizing your progress with a habit tracker or another tool and creating cues that help you notice whether you’re actually moving forward will keep you motivated throughout the year.

Equally important is to give ourselves grace. Occasionally we’ll fall off track and having a plan to get back ON track is what’s important. I cover that in How to Journal When You’re Too Busy to Journal.

That’s the whole reason my plan lives in a journal rather than a document. Every weekday morning I write my vision, then a prompt from the BRAGS framework I built the journal around: 

• Build confidence

• Reframe thoughts

• Affirm strengths

• Grow mindset

• Self-reflect

Four minutes, and the goal I set in December is still in front of me in June.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many business goals should I set for the year?

Personally, I like having one focused business goal, with all my smaller objectives supporting the ultimate goal. It keeps me laser focused. 

Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, famously says “If you have more than three priorities, you don't have any,” so don’t go beyond three key goals for the year.

What is the difference between a business goal and a resolution?

A resolution is a commitment to change something, whereas a goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

When should I plan my business goals for next year?

As an ecommerce business, through November I’m typically pretty locked into Black Friday/Cyber Monday for most of the month, so once I come up for air in early-December, that’s when I start my goal planning. 

It allows me to mostly bring the year to a close, make decisions based on real-time information, and then have a plan in place before taking time off for the holidays.

Your plan needs somewhere to live

An afternoon of planning is worth exactly as much as what happens in February. The reason mine survives is that the goal doesn’t sit in a document I never reopen; I rewrite it every weekday morning in the Female Founders Journal, and 90 days later I can see on the page whether I actually moved.

If you want to try the format before you commit to it, start with five days of confidence prompts for female founders delivered to your inbox!