Your Back-to-Business Game Plan (Summer Is Over!) | Ep.22

Summer’s winding down, maybe you’ve been juggling family, vacations, or just taking a much-needed break, and now it’s time to get back into the swing of things. In this episode, I’m all about helping you get back to business with confidence and clarity.

I’ll share practical tips on how to evaluate your availability, audit your business and your client management system (including how to reconnect with past clients!), and review your service offerings to make sure they truly align with your goals and how you want to show up in Q4.

If you’re ready to simplify your systems and serve your dream clients with ease as we head into the last quarter, this episode is made for you! 

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Transcript

Kenniqua (00:00)
Okay, so here is your back to business game plan. Okay, so you might be a service provider and you probably fall into one of two categories during the summertime, right? Either A, you were the service provider that this might have been your busiest time of the year. Maybe you had a lot of events, you had a lot of client work, you were in the weeds of it all during the summertime, Or B, you were

Maybe just taking a break. So maybe this might be technically like a slow season for you. Maybe a lot of leads and clients don't come to you during the summertime. Or maybe you just decided to go through and just take a break. Just chill out with your family and your friends. Go on vacation, do things, and that's perfectly fine. But as the summer is starting to end, I know for me, my kids are starting to go back to school in a couple of weeks.

And so there are some things that I had to go through and just reset so I can go ahead and get back to the regular schedule program. That's what we're covering in today's episode. Now, this episode isn't about giving you a long to do list of everything that you need to do in your business. I think at this point, we really want to just make sure that we have our goals realigned with our systems that we have in place.

go through and connect with the clients and leads that have been coming through our pipeline during the summertime that we may have kind of just fell off or just missed. And then also just making sure that we, if needed, go through and just refresh our system to make sure that we're prepping ourselves for most service providers the busiest season, which is quarter four, okay?

So I'm Kenniqua I am a system strategist. I'm a HoneyBook educator. I help service providers just like you organize and automate systems to help you to be able to streamline your business, simplify everything and organize everything. So you can just do more of what it is that you love. And so one of the things I really think during this time is to go through and just focus in reviewing your time and your schedule.

So like I mentioned, for me, at this point in time, our kids are about to go to school in a couple of weeks, And I had to go through and just reevaluate the availability that I have. So this is my availability for my discovery calls, client calls, my client work. And so I went through and I went through my whole calendar from here until the end of the year.

I inputted the availability that I had to work with clients. I also went through and mapped off days that I wanna go through and take off, vacation days. And then I also think this is a great time for you to go back and just look and see ahead what launches do you have.

Maybe you want to have some type of boot camp or something like that. Well, when is the best time for you to do that? So going through and just mapping all of that out on your calendar, Now that we're about to go into quarter four here soon and we're really trying to prep for this busy season, because how does that busy season really look for you? Like for me and my business.

is quarter four and quarter one are the busiest times for us because it's like that new year, new me type of vibe. And so everybody knows that systems is important, but during those times of the year is like, hey, I definitely need my systems together during this point because everyone wants to start off fresh. And so those are really busy times for us. But when it comes to the end of the year,

I typically like to go through and I want to save and reserve space for the holiday season where I take off a week or two.

And so how is that going to look and how are we going to line our projects based off of that? So that's definitely something to go through and just consider now just sitting down with your calendar. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. You can take your Google calendar and input it in. That's what I did. But you can use just a regular paper calendar or your phone and just go through and just map out what it looks like and what your hours and availability and your

your focus and space is going to be for the upcoming weeks and the upcoming months. The next thing is going to be going through and just auditing your business. So now that we're a little bit past the half of the year, it's great to kind of look back at what you've already done and what you've already accomplished.

and what you haven't accomplished, but was actually on your goal list. And so this is a great time to kind of do like that mental check to see how things are going in your business and see if at this point that is there something that you can do? Like if you're not meeting your goals, is there something you can do to from now until the end of a year to help you to be able to go through and maybe hit those goals?

So that can be any type of goals you have. I mean, that could be revenue goals. That can be the amount of clients that you get goals. You might have goals for like your social media. Like I wanna have a certain amount of Instagram followers or YouTube followers or podcast downloads. So whatever your goals are, now is the perfect time to kind of get like a little pulse on what is actually going on and what you can do better to keep you going along.

Going through and reviewing your pipeline. So what I mean by reviewing your pipeline during this time is going through and just touching base and seeing what leads and clients actually were coming through in the summer months. So this really is...

really effective for people that maybe you were on vacation during the summertime and you didn't do much client work, but you might have had still had people that were submitting inquiries to you is to kind of go back and review those inquiries, touch base with them, see if they are ready to work with you now, If you've worked with clients in the past,

This is perfect time to see if there is another offer that you can help them with. Because like I said, going into quarter four, this is like the big revenue driver for a lot of businesses. This is like where all hands are on deck, right? And so there are so many things even with our clients that they're working on to make sure that they actually hit their goals for quarter four. They're launching different products. They have different offers, promotions. And so...

you want to touch base with the people, especially if you've kind of been out of touch with them. This is the perfect time for you to go through and just audit and look and see who's there and start just making those connections and having those conversations to see where new business can come in and see how you can go through and support those clients. The other thing is kind of just going through and just looking at some of the gaps that you may have. So like how I was just saying, going through and reviewing your pipeline,

Do you even have a pipeline, right? So if you don't have a pipeline, this is where I would say would be like a system gap as a service provider is to not have a centralized place where your leads are coming to where you can easily see where everybody's coming to you and it's not just somewhere inside of your inbox, like your Gmail or whatever inbox and you're having to shuffle through to see who emailed me during this time.

So I would recommend getting some type of client management system. I love HoneyBook for doing this. I talk about HoneyBook all the time. I recommend using HoneyBook because you can have everything in one place. Like you can have your lease, your contacts, your contracts, your scheduling, your invoicing all in one place.

And so this would be something that would be perfect for you. So you can be able to keep tabs and be able to reach out to clients when you need to nurture them as well through sending different offers and correspondence with them too. So if you don't already have something like that into your business, like I said, I'm not trying to give you a whole bunch of additional work here, because

You're getting back into the groove of things, but this is something that I would highly recommend that you go through and set up because you will thank yourself later as you get into the upcoming months that you have this actually set up and you have it active in your business. So if you're not a HoneyBook user and it, let me just say, you don't have to use HoneyBook for this. There are different CRM systems that you can use. The important part is that you set up something that is going to work for you.

So definitely if you want to explore them, I have a 30 % off link for HoneyBook that would be in the description and the show notes of this video or podcast episode. But definitely go ahead and give those other, you know, CRM systems a try and see actually what works for you. And then if you do decide to use HoneyBook and you do need assistance, I actually do HoneyBook setups. So that is something I can help you with. So if you're interested in that.

Definitely head over to yoursystemspro.com and that is something that I can go through and help you with. But auditing your business during this time, take it slow, but definitely go through and audit your business. That is something that I have been working through during the summer months. I didn't, like I said, I didn't take off during the summer this much. Surprisingly, this summer has actually been busier than most summers.

So I didn't really take off. I have been working on my lead generation system. I'm still currently working on my lead generation system. I'll show, maybe tell you guys in another episode how that's actually going for me because I am still actively working on it.

The next thing that I recommend is that in this whole refresh is really just going through and revisit and redefine your offers if needed. Right. And so that's one thing too, that I've been working on. I have been going and just like kind of reevaluating the offers. Does this offer match how I want to show up in this season? And so I've talked about seasons before, like seasons of life.

seasons of business and literally seasons of the year. But does that offer actually match your energy, your focus? And does it actually match how you want to show up for your clients and how they want to be actually served? So before we start getting into quarter four, is just to really go through and just look at your offers. Just read them on your website and see if it's still.

aligns with the way that you want to go through and show up. And if it doesn't, this is the time to go through and just like make some little tweaks. Like, is it something that you should just ditch altogether? Or do they just need a little bit of update? Or even if you're thinking about, okay, this offer is a solid offer. And I know that Q4 is coming. This is where a lot of times people go through and they do promotional offers.

So would this be something that maybe I could consider for a promo offer for like Black Friday or should I bundle this maybe with something else that I have that maybe is not selling so well but it will compliment this other offer pretty good? That's something that now you can kind of start getting your wheels turning and start kind of going through and planning it out.

planning this out with even like your emails and everything for yourselves, how you're gonna sell this offer, et cetera. For me personally, even as when it comes to offer, like I have been going through and reviewing offers and just trying to make sure that the offers that I created, that they do help me to be able to show up and support the clients that I want to work with. And the more conversations that I've been having,

it allowed for me to be able to see, this is what I need to put in place because based off of the leads that I'm getting and the conversations that I'm having, I can see that this would be a very solid offer. So even with that said I saw an email from ⁓ one of my friends, Kristy, that's in business she was talking about the community.

Like she put in there, like, if you want to start a community, you you can start a community on school. They have like this promo, whatever. And I said, that's so crazy that this is like literally confirmation for me because I'm like, I was just thinking about this just a couple of days before. And I'm like, okay, this, this is it. I need to start a community. And that's something that

Hopefully I'm gearing towards in the fourth quarter range. It may be more first quarter possibly just depending on how this task is going as far as my Lead Gen but I'm thinking about adding a community. I just feel like having that community where I could help my.

my clients go through and get more accountability. So actually be in the weeds with them on a regular basis in a community type of setting I think would be very cool to have where we can do coworking. I can do coaching in the community. I can give feedback and I can do this on a consistent basis, right?

And so I think that would be something that would be really cool. Definitely let me know if you're listening, if this is something that you think that would be interesting that you would like to join. Just let me know. I'm just, I would love to hear your feedback on this, but even with that offer, just doing this offer just based off of the conversations, the discovery calls, the clarity calls that I have had. I think this is a pretty good offer to add on.

Okay, so I think these things are the perfect things at this moment in time to really help you to go into the fall season, Q4, with just a little bit more clarity and you're ready to kind of push down the gas just a little bit. I'm not saying you have to dive fully into like the hustle culture if you don't want to, right? You want to maintain the speed that you're at. That is 100 % okay. I know for me, like I mentioned, I didn't...

do so much on a personal level during the summertime. I kind of had my foot down to the pedal just a little bit. I've done my weekly lives. I've had a lot of conversations between clarity calls, discovery calls. And honestly, for me, I'm just getting started. Like I'm ready, I have the energy. I feel like I have the bandwidth, the capacity to just kind of push the gas down a little bit further. And that's the season that I'm going into.

Is this a season that is a forever season? No, but that's something that I'm going into and in order for me to be able to reach my goals and to create the impact that I want to create, that is the season that I want to take my business to. And so, yeah, that's what we're going to be doing. But just keep in mind that you don't have to do what you see other people doing. OK, so if I say press the gas and you want to continue to go through and chill, please.

Chill, okay? Go ahead and chill. It's a important that you focus in on your mental health that you focus in on which you want, right? Because that's what it's about. When we're building systems, it's not about building the systems that I want or someone else wants. It's about building what works best for you, okay? So I hope this little back to business refresh really just...

gave you some calm, gave you some tips that you can use in order to just push your business forward. Ultimately, that's all that I want you to have. So I am very interested what it is that you're gonna be working on coming up in Q3 or the end of Q3 and then quarter four. Let me know, send me a message on Instagram at Kenniqua.Lewter

Or you can also just put it in the comments if you're watching the video to let me know. And I will see you in the next episode.