Behind the Scenes Business Planning Updates for 2025 and Beyond

Join me for a cozy coffee chat about business updates, plans, adapting to change, and what's in the works. 

Links Mentioned:

• Sign up for the Cozy Creatives Newsletter
• Digital Product Shop Program (aff link)
  Daily Productivity & Brain Dump Book
• Shine Sticker Studio
• Sign up for the Get Started with Google Workspace Workshop

Find more resources over at SarahSteckler.com

Come say hi on Instagram @sarahsteckler

Transcript

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You are listening to episode 215 of the Mindful Productivity podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this week I'm actually going to be sharing something I recorded back in December of 2024. So in this cozy conversation that I actually recorded for my newsletter subscribers, I talked about a couple of different things, one being my shift away from social media, my upcoming plans for a digital product shop, how I'm rethinking course maintenance, including what I create, how I create it, what support I provide, live calls, all of that. And I also talked about how I'm shifting things behind the scenes in my business and what productivity tools I'm using. So let's go ahead and dive in. Welcome to the Mindful Productivity podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into Mindful Living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts now. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited to share this coffee chat style recording that I did back in December of 2024. So it's at the time of this recording, about seven months ago. I listened back to it to see if it was still relevant, and it absolutely is. Not only is business constantly changing and we're always adapting, but there's some key things in here that I'm still working on in my business that I thought would be helpful for you to listen to. There's also a video of this recording. So if you'd rather watch me talk about everything and mention some of the things I reference in the video, you can head on over to Sarahsteckler. Com/podcast and search for episode 2: 15 And that is where this will be. I'll also have a link to that wherever you're listening below this podcast episode as well. So I'm going to go ahead and drop the audio and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it and we'll get into it. Today, I want to talk about my goals for 2025. So here they are all written out on my little Hovenici Techo A6. They're super cute. These are all Shine Sticker Studio video stickers, by the way. I'm obsessed with everything they do. But what I wanted to do was do a different format because I am just craving a different version of the Internet, and I hate social media. I have officially crossed that bridge. I'm officially there. I don't like being on social media. There's very few accounts that still feel like golden accounts, like it's still 2016 and people are still sharing their coffee in the morning and this and that. And I miss that version of online entrepreneurs, where people were just themselves online. So anyway, I want to talk today about some of my different goals. We can go through them together. And maybe just maybe hearing about what's going through my mind as a business owner will resonate with you or give you some ideas to think about or even give you permission to do something differently? We'll see. I think this is still entirely too hot to drink. Yes, but that's good. Okay, so I wrote down what I do every month in my little hubanichi is I write down just business goals and then personal goals. So I have business goals and then personal and home focus. So I'll go through some of these. And then I also want to talk about some of the ways that I'm going to be thinking thinking differently about content marketing, using the Internet, and getting in front of people. So first of all, one of my biggest business goals, and I have literally been working on this for over two years, I am someone in my business where if I come up with an idea, I create a sprint, I break it down into a focus project and I get it done. But the last two years of my life have thrown some curveballs and that has not happened. But the number one thing I want to work on next is a digital product shop. So I've enrolled in a program that shows me how to do that. I'll have a link to an affiliate link to the course I use for that. Everything she does is great. I want to create a digital product shop And I want to move away from constantly feeling the need to create bigger programs that take up a lot of my mental energy, not just in creating them and doing big launches and then hosting calls but also the sheer maintenance of them. A few years back, I made a course called Pretty Productive Life. It was all built in Notion. It took me, I think it was over 200 hours to build the thing. It's great. I love it. I have, in true honesty, not been using Notion as much the past 6 to 8 months in my business. Something about it just hasn't been resonating with me as much. I still use it for data capturing and project planning, but I've actually been leaning more into Google Workspace and even surprisingly, using Google Docs for almost everything. It's just really simple. And I am going to have an upcoming workshop where I show you behind the scenes of how I'm using Google Workspace and how you can do a similar process to what I'm doing. But I created that course, I think I launched it back, originally back in 2020. And Notion, the amount of updates they have, it's amazing, right? But There was so much that was changing so fast that I quickly realized that if I was going to continue to run this program and continue to launch it, I was going to be... I was going to have to be updating things, if not every day, every single week or multiple times a week. And it was the development changes in the back end of notion where the tutorial videos I was making weren't going to make sense three months down the road. And so I had to ask myself, do I want to run a business and have one of my courses be something where I'm constantly chasing either another person or another company in terms of what they're doing? And that's a business model a lot of people follow. Marie Pullen, she runs her Notion Mastery program, which I'm a part of, and it's amazing. But her business model is based off of constantly being plugged in to Notion updates and what they're doing, and then having to report back. And There's nothing wrong with that. And I mean, that's the nature of a lot of programs I run, Publish with Purpose being one. We're using KDP and Amazon. And just the nature of the publishing, self-publishing industry, I'm going to have to update people. But I do find that the updates there are a lot more manageable in terms of maintaining the program. So I always update my courses once a year and students get access to that. And if I were to only do it once a year with that course, I don't feel like students would be behind in any way. I give updates throughout our programs, right? I'll email students, I'll post in our private Facebook groups or communities like, Hey, this is a change that's coming. So you know. That felt more manageable. But When I was looking at some of my business model, I was like, Man, do I want to continue building these programs that just I build them and I create them and I use them and I show people what I'm doing. But then it's actually going to be more work for me in the long term because I'm going to have to constantly update things, right? And I've seen that with a lot of people that run Squarespace courses or something like that. When they did their huge update to the new, I can't remember the name of it now, formatting tool that they have, which is really cool, all of their course content was obsolete suddenly. So that's a question to ask yourself when you're thinking about not only content you're going to create in the new year, but if you're going to create courses, how much maintenance is it going to take from you? So that was one thing I was thinking about. The other thing is the reason I want to lean more towards a digital product shop is there's only one of me. And a few years ago, I felt like I was in this really perfect zone where I felt like I was on fire. I could come up with an idea, get stuff done, stay on top of my content I was publishing a podcast every week. I was doing all the things for that. Also, social media was working more in our favor during that time. I could put something out, this was before reels. I could post something on Instagram in my stories. People would see it. And I also could launch courses that way. And I would have... In 2020, I launched Pretty Simple Podcasts, and I easily had 25 people enroll just through Instagram alone. And you just don't see You just don't see that reach. You just don't see those numbers, at least personally for me. And I'm a smaller online business, but those things changed. And so with all that being said, I'm also thinking about my energy capacity, and I've talked about this on the podcast at length. I've shared this with my students. I've shared this with my mastermind friends. I have a love-hate relationship with hosting calls. I once I'm doing them, I love them. I obviously love connecting with all of you. I love connecting with my students. I love that support. There's absolutely a rush when you get to hear, for example, other people's planner ideas and I get to help them bring those things to life and fine tune them. I love that. And once I'm on the call and doing the thing, it's great. But I just find that I don't have the capacity to do that at the amount I want. And I also know that it's basically just a road to burn out, Phil. I can see it. It's why now we're focusing on just doing one live round of Publish With Purpose every fall. And that's historically, since 2019, it's been eight weeks But I'm thinking about maybe changing the length of that live round and the call structure. And maybe we won't do a call every week, maybe it'll be every other week. I don't know yet. I always love experimenting and getting student feedback on that. But I just know that I can't, if I'm going to do this and I'm going to scale my business, I can't continue to create stuff that requires more of me, especially on calls. It's just not going to work. Could I hire somebody to do the calls? Sure. But I don't love that either. And not so much from a control standpoint, more so I know that a lot of people are buying these courses because of my brain, because of the feedback I can give people. And not that someone else couldn't be absolutely amazing. But at this juncture in my business, it's not something I want to do. So there's limited me and limited calls. Okay, cool. That's a deciding factor. And then also there's a part of me that really wants to have more creative fun in my business. And there's so many digital products that I am constantly thinking of, but they don't get to happen because there's barriers to entry there in terms of building a huge sales page or just all the other things, all the other ways you typically think of launching. And so a digital product shop takes away some of those things. And again, I'll drop an affiliate link to the course below because I've been loving it so far. It's just really opened my eyes to a different way of structuring your business. So I'm thinking about that. And it just it would be fun I like the idea of also offering things at lower price points so I can cast a wider net and support more people. With the uncertainty of the United States moving into 2025, I'll admit I'm terrified. I'm not excited about Trump. I am sick to my stomach. I also got sick after the election and have continued to be sick since. So I'm starting to finally feel better. But I'm like, oh, my goodness. So there's a lot of uncertainty. And with that, it's, is now the time to run giant programs that are a bigger investment? I still will, but I want a bigger range of products. And I also want to get back into creating more planners and journals and putting more of those on Amazon. So it's been a couple of years since I've published a planner, which is so weird. I feel like for a while I was publishing one almost every six to eight months. Those are things I want to get into. I'm also working on, I'm still updating my website. This is something that is just really fascinating to me because in the past, there was more of a perfectionist side of me that could have never updated my whole website, changed everything, and not had it perfect and ready to go when it was live. I'll be really honest, if you start digging in my website right now, you're going to find pages that just say general or like summaries that aren't updated yet. You're going to see that. But it got to a point where I was like, I have to update this site. We have to transfer it. We have to get it going. It's It's just going to be a little messy. So I'm still in the process of going back through hundreds, literally, of podcast episodes, getting all the transcripts up, getting blog posts done, updating graphics, updating branding, all of that. And that is an endeavor. And I also really love that work, though. But it's not like a direct moneymaker, right? So that's been something I'm doing when I have time, but I also need to make sure I'm still making sales so I can live, all those things. I am working on a new workshop that's going to be dropping soon, I'm hoping in the next week and a half, all about using Google Workspace. And that will lead to a new course that I'm creating. I'm so excited about it. It's really, really fun, super nerdy, super specific and what it helps you do. And so that'll be fun. So I'm working on getting all that done. And I'm glad my voice is back because I wanted to do some curriculum recording yesterday and I sounded like a frog. And I was like, well, I don't want this evergreen in the course forever. So let's wait till we get a little bit better. I have an idea for a book I want to write around my business theme. So that's on the back burner. But I've captured the idea here, so I don't feel like I'm missing out on not doing it. I'm working on more of a podcasting content master plan. I really... Podcasting has not been a priority the past two years. And while I used to produce an episode every single week, every single Monday without fail, that hasn't happened. And I want to get back to it. And it doesn't have to be perfect. But I really want to up level my content. I want to blow people away because I really do want to move, excuse me, away from social media and into more engaging content, adding more content videos here, like on YouTube, and connecting with more of you in that way. And I think that's going to involve me getting off of social media. As a side note to that, I decided to completely delete threads. The election was a bad place for me. I found myself going down rabbit holes on threads. I quickly found myself in a place of dis and misinformation. And I felt like I was contributing to that in some ways. Just I felt so upset about what was going on in the election. And I also noticed that on threads, I don't like my behavior on there. And I don't know how else to explain this, but it just makes me feel a lot of FOMO. I don't like how I feel on there. I also feel like it's easier to be, not necessarily a mean girl, but it's easier to have disagreements on threads in a lot of ways. This is just my experience, right? And you create your algorithm, sure. But I just found myself wanting to engage with a lot of different business theories that I didn't agree with. And it was hard to have those conversations. You can't really have a conversation with someone you disagree with on the Internet. I wish we could, but I just found that no matter how I would write things or approach things, I inevitably would end up making people upset with me. And then there'd be a retaliatory post like, So and so said this on my thing. They made a whole new thread about it. And I'm like, oh, man, that that's not what I meant and not what I was trying to say. But I get it. So I just found that space, even though there was a lot of positive stuff on there and I connected with a lot of people, I just found that it was wasting my time and not making me feel good. So I cut it off. I cut it off back in September, but then I popped back on the week of the election in November. Then I cut it off. And now I think it's since I deactivated it and it's been spent enough time where it should be gone. I also have not been using TikTok anymore. I cut that off in September. I think I popped back on there once or twice to look at a couple of videos I had saved for some recipe I wanted to try. But other than that, I'm deleting TikTok. I'm not on it. I used to be team TikTok all the way. Now I'm just over it. Don't want to see it. Same with Instagram. I love Instagram, but I never look at reels. I never go into the reels tab. The only thing I'm guilty of is every now and then I'll see one and I'll send it to... I have a couple of people that we send them back and forth. But even then it feels like that's homework or it's stressful or you can't possibly like and react to everything people send you. People send you And that's another thing, too, is everything has a reaction now. It's like every text message you can react to. Where in the past, you would just send someone a text and then they wouldn't do anything about it. And you just be like, cool, they probably read it. You weren't worrying about whether they liked it or heard it or exclamation marked it or even said anything back to it. It's just so the microcosm of how we're supposed to interact online and all the options we have for interacting. It's wonderful that there are all those options. But I think in the actual human psychological experience, it's devastating to our brains. So that's some of the things that I'm working towards is moving away from social media. I mean, podcasting, YouTube, technically still social, right? But I want to go deeper into longer form content and stay there. Which brings me to in this long video that I did not think would be this long, I am really excited about something new. I launched before the election, then the election happened and again, couldn't work for two weeks. And that is my Cozy Creatives newsletter. If I had editing skills, I would just throw that up here on the screen. But basically, it's an email series, and it has a four-part welcome series where I walk you through what it really means to be a cozy creative in your business, and some of the pillars of how I'm now going to run my business So one of them is being off of social media. It's really identifying your values, doing things differently. In there, I'm going to be talking about how I'm working to get my business expenses down to less than $1,000 a thousand dollars a year, which is insane. I'm almost there. I think I have another year or two of being able to get there. And that in full transparency, I've been in my business for eight years. And a lot of that's trial and error and figuring out. Software I want to use, business models I like. But because I'm now in a place where I'm figuring that out, I've been able to buy lifetime deals for a lot of products and pay them off. And that's a huge part of that What else? I guess I could just go on and on, but those are the main business goals I'm working on. And then mapping out all of my 2025 launch plans, where I'm doing live launches and when. And I think the struggle for me is going to be continuing to show up in my business and do things, even though the state of the world might be really nuts. And I think that dichotomy is new for a lot of our We've been very privileged in a lot of ways to not have to face that. But that's going to be a struggle, I think, for me coming up. And then I have some personal and home goals. We're going to be moving again in the new year. And I don't know when. Please don't ask me. I never know. The military is difficult enough. I never know. I never know what's happening. And people are always like, Why are you mopping? I'm like, I don't know. I wish I knew. But we're going to be moving again. I've successfully gotten rid of just about half of our stuff this past year. I've sold stuff on Mercari. I've donated the majority of it. And since we're in Southern California, I've been able to just put stuff on the curb and my neighbors come and take it and it's fantastic. So really excited about that. I actually do want to do a vision board this year, I think. Like actually print out stuff and and do that. So basically it's just going to be getting healthy again, getting my immune system back up and running, walking more and continuing to pay off debt, too. That's one of me and my husband's big things. We paid off nearly $20,000 worth of debt in the past year and a half and our snowball is growing and we hopefully should be debt free, I'm hoping in the next two years. Really, really excited about that. Those are my goals. I thought this would be a fun way to connect with you. So if you want to comment below this video and let me know if anything resonated with you, if you want to continue the conversation, please do. So thanks for being here in my messy office. And let me know what's going on for you. That's what's going on for me. Stay tuned for links for the upcoming workshop. You can sign up for the Cozy Creatives newsletter below. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Mindful Productivity podcast. I know I mentioned a ton of different links during this episode. Those will all be linked below where you're listening. They'll also be available on the show notes page over at Sarahsteckler. Com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you back here Monday on a brand new episode.