on rebuilding a business (inside my 2024 plans 👀)

Hey there!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve read, watched, and listened to dozens of posts, podcasts, and videos about peoples 2023 reflections and 2024 goals and plans.

(I’m SUCH a sucker for this “genre” of content lol. Do you eat them up as much as I do?)

And as I have, I’ve noticed a common theme:

People finally feeling “back” for 2024.

So many people I follow or subscribe to have said something about how this is the first year they feel like their work capacity is somewhat back to what it was before the pandemic started.

And I’m in the same situation myself.

It’s only been recently that the hours I’m able to work per week (without burning out or becoming completely ineffective) has gotten close to what it was back in 2019.

Before so many rounds of trauma, inaccessibility, and burnout took me down and out.

It took until last year for me to fully realize and accept how burnt out I really was, and how much rest I really needed. But once I did, I committed to it.

I realized that I’d spent 3 years unintentionally not working much. I was putting in the bare minimum in terms of output and time spent actually working on business stuff. But I spent TONS of time trying and failing to push myself through my exhaustion.

So I decided to take a year to more intentionally not work much, where instead of spending my time trying and failing to be productive, I would spend it actually getting the rest I needed.

Here’s what that looked like:

• Smaller and fewer marketing campaigns than usual
• No proactively pitching or going after client projects
• Turning down half of the inbound leads I got for client projects
• Letting my website, branding, evergreen sales systems, etc. go stale and outdated

Basically all I did was write the Work Brighter newsletter every week, email this business’s email list when I could, and remix those emails on social media here and there.

In terms of business, it sucked.

In a lot of ways, it feels like now I’m starting from scratch again. I’ve lost so much momentum and so many things need to be majorly updated, if not completely rebuilt.

But in terms of health, it was exactly what I needed.

So now that I am able to work a bit more again, there is a LOT of work to catch up on.

And if I want to avoid getting as burnt out as I was before, I need to be careful about how I catch up on it.

It’ll be a planning and productivity challenge, but that’s exactly the kind of challenge I like.

All of my 2024 business planning has focused on the question, “how can I rebuild my business foundations this year without compromising the health and self-care foundations I rebuilt last year?”

And since a lot of other people seem to be in the same place with their own businesses, I thought I’d share some more about how I’m breaking down and planning such a big undertaking.

So far, I’ve broken it up into 4 phases or objectives:

1. Refine my brand and messaging strategy: things like who my ideal customer is, what problems I can solve for them, and how I describe all of that.
2. Design a new offer suite: decide what products and services I want to offer moving forward, and how they all interact with each other.
3. Update my top-of-funnel marketing strategy: choose a social media channel to focus on, along with any supplemental channels I’ll be using to reach new people.
4. Launch new (or updated & improved) products & sales systems: one by one, update or create the offers chosen in step 2 and launch evergreen sales systems for them.

1. Refine my brand and messaging strategy

It’s been about 4 years since I launched my latest website and branding.

And while that’s fine for things like the visual elements, the overall messaging and copy for the main pages could really use a refresh.

The market/industry I operate in changes so quickly that I usually tried to do a small copy refresh around once a year in between larger “redos.” A week-long project or something where I did things like swapping out examples, references to trends, and descriptions my customer’s most timely and relevant problems.

But after skipping that refresh so many times, a much larger brand update is in order, even if I’m not changing the visual identity. Especially since I think I want to slightly shift who my work is for in the first place (I’ll let you know if that actually happens, of course).

2. Design a new offer suite

Right now, my evergreen/always available product suite is focused on having one product to help with each stage of the content marketing process:

• Content strategy/planning
• Content creation
• Content repurposing strategy
• Content repurposing implementation

And then I also have a few service offerings focused on repurposing.

I’m questioning whether this is the approach I want to take anymore, or whether I want to zoom in a bit more.

And if I zoom in and just focus on repurposing, I’d need to decide if I want to just sell the Content Remix Planner, or if I want to develop new products to go along with it (because omg do I have so many ideas for that already).

But I do know I want to focus less on services, so that I have more time to dedicate to Work Brighter.

3. Update my top-of-funnel marketing strategy

Like I mentioned earlier, I didn’t really do much top-of-funnel marketing last year: just one guest webinar and some sporadic spells of social media that were less strategic than I’d prefer.

My evergreen email systems are still working for nurturing and selling, but that doesn’t matter much with so few people joining my email list anymore.

So my ideas for list growth, in order of priority, are to:

• Update my main lead magnet
• Do a batch of new YouTube videos
• Book some guest blog posts and podcast interviews
• Pick a social media channel to focus on (likely between Instagram and LinkedIn, although we’ll see how Threads continues to evolve)

4. Launch new products and sales systems

My approach to launches is infused with my usual minimalist content marketing mindset: create as little as possible and reuse as much as possible.

So when I launch a new product, I try to avoid planning and creating a whole live launch, and then separately planning a whole evergreen sales funnel.

Instead, I plan them both at the same time and try to create as much content overlap as possible, or even just launch a new evergreen email sequence by sending it to my existing list.

(I’m actually going to write a series about this starting later this month, so stay tuned if you’re interested in the topic.)

Once I’ve gotten all the higher level ducks in the row, I’ll be ready to update the Content Remix Planner and the evergreen email sequence that sells it. And do the same with anything else I decide to offer going forward.

The sequence I think makes sense at the moment is:

• Update the product
• Create the new sales page
• Write the new sales emails
• Use them for a live relaunch
• Edit them for ongoing evergreen use

Now for the timeline

I mentioned earlier this is my 2024 business planning.

But I don’t actually expect to accomplish it all in one year, especially on part-time hours.

The reason I still wanted to map it all out as part of my 2024 plan was so that I had a clear vision of where I’m going, what I’m building.

I’ve learned that with neurodivergence and chronic illness, getting too attached to due dates, deadlines, and timelines is a recipe for disappointment and feeling like a failure.

So I’ll do my best, work as much and as well as I can without compromising my health, and the work will take as long as the work takes.

Bummer? Yes.

But less burnout inducing than pushing myself through pain, sickness, and burnout? Also yes.

Stick around to see how it goes. 🫠

How about you?

Can you relate to needing to rebuild a lot after recent burnout? What are your business plans for the year looking like in light of that?