Day 1 - Plan Your Sales Challenge

The Resilient Retail Club Members Podcast

Catherine Erdly [00:00:00]:

Hello, and welcome to the five day plan your sales 2024 challenge. Hi, it's Catherine. I'm so excited that you've joined me. I can't wait to get started, and I promise you we're going to have a fabulous week. Before I jump into today's task, I just want to tell you a little bit about how this week is going to work. If you've done one of these five day challenges before, this is my fifth year running the Plan Your Sales Challenge, then this year is very slightly different. So I just want to talk you through that. First things first, your tasks are going to be arriving every single morning into the private members podcast.

Catherine Erdly [00:00:36]:

You'll get a new audio each morning, 06:00 A.m. With the details of today's task. You will also receive an email that has got a link to the task for you to share about the task for that particular day, as well as a link to an Ask Me Anything post, which will have a place for you to ask any questions you like. It doesn't have to be about the challenge. It can be anything to do with running your business or getting ready for 2024. Whatever you want, you can ask it. Happy to take your questions that will also be in the group. Thirdly, every day at 12:00 p.m..

Catherine Erdly [00:01:10]:

I will be going live to go through the questions, to talk about the task, and to just generally give you some insight input. The idea is that we're working together throughout the week to go through the tasks, and by the end of the week, you have got a solid sales plan for 2024, which is so exciting and so empowering. And every year when we do this, people have real light bulb moments and it really helps them get ready for the year, which is what I'm so excited about this year too. But that's not everything. Next week then, in the membership, we will be having a Plan Your Years detailed session, where we're going to be going through how to put together a full blown plan for your year, breaking down the elements of your sales goal and looking in more detail at how we're going to achieve them. So that's all still yet to come. Don't worry about the actual how we're going to do it in terms of beating your sales goals. This week it's all about just getting that goal set.

Catherine Erdly [00:02:08]:

So let's jump into task one. Today's task is pretty simple. How much money did you take last year in your business? So what I'd love for you to do today is to add up how much money you took in terms of value across either the last twelve months, if that's easier for you. If you just want to say, look at, say, the end of January 2023 to the end of January 2024, or if you prefer to look at the last twelve months as calendar months, January to December 2023, then that's fine too. Or if you have a tax year or a business year that runs differently, then that's absolutely fine. Just pick the twelve months that make the most sense to you as a business owner, but just make sure that you know how much money you took. I often get asked what should I include? Should I include VAT? Should I include postage? I think whatever you can get your hands on, whichever one you think is the most relevant to you, then that's the number that you should use. So if you want to look at total revenue, including all of those things, that's fine.

Catherine Erdly [00:03:10]:

If you prefer to [e-mail] sales, so taking off tax, postage and things like that, then that's fine too. Again, this is really your challenge. So do whatever makes the most sense for you now. And for some of you, that's going to be super simple. You're just going to log on to Shopify, for example, pull that number off and that's it that's you done for the day. Or if you've already done this and you're like, oh, that's super simple, then what am I going to do? Then don't worry, I'm going to be going live later at twelve with some bonus tasks of other things that you can think about and have a look at. But for some of you, today might be a bit trickier. You may not have actually done this yet.

Catherine Erdly [00:03:44]:

You may not have sat down and pull together information from different places. So for example, if you did events, if you sold on Etsy, not on the high street, your own website, if you had wholesale sales, it may take you a little longer to collect together all of that data. But what I'm really looking for here is the amount of money by sales channel and then the total for the entire year. That is what you want to know. How much money did I take last year? Then once you've done that, come back into the group. Comment on today's post. You absolutely do not have to share your figures. This is completely confidential for you.

Catherine Erdly [00:04:19]:

But what I'd love for you to share is how you felt about the task. Had you already done it? Do you already have a spreadsheet that you can just pull it from? Was it super simple for you if you just sat down to do it for the first time today? Were you surprised? Were you pleasantly surprised? What was it about those numbers that maybe you weren't expecting? And what were you expecting? Is it in line with exactly what you thought? And how did that make you feel? So that's it. That's today's task. How much money did you take last year? Come back into the group. Comment on today's post that you'll get linked to in the email once you've done that task and let us know how you found it.