310. Kickstart 2025: Setting Your Strategic Vision for the Year Ahead

A new year means a clean slate, fresh goals, and the perfect opportunity to reflect on your business journey so far. But before you dive headfirst into setting big, audacious plans for your eCommerce store, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and where you want to go from here.

In this blog, I’ll walk you through the first steps of creating a strategic vision for your business, using lessons from 2024 to set goals that are intentional, achievable, and perfectly aligned with the life you want to live. Let’s do the damn thing—together!

Prefer to listen to the episode? Click here.

Reflecting on the Previous Year

Now of course, you can’t figure out where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been and that’s why the first thing you need to do is reflect on 2024. If you’ve been listening to this podcast or hanging out with me for awhile, I hope you’re actually doing this every quarter so it doesn’t feel like such a big undertaking, but if not that’s okay. Today is just as good a day to start and I would just make a quarterly reflection and even a monthly appointment on your calendar so you can keep up with it throughout the year. This will make your yearly reflection a whole lot easier. 

And when I say reflection I don’t just mean hey did I hit my revenue goal, do I have money in pocket, did I want to burn my entire business down, or am I feeling pretty confident? 

No, I want you to get into the nitty-gritty my friend. Look at your marketing channels, your product assortment, your sales channels, your systems, your team… ALL THE THINGS. 

Get a handle on what brought you ROI, what didn’t quite pay for itself, and use that as a guide to decide what you should and shouldn’t be doing in your business this year. 

Now, admittedly, this part can get a little tricky… because there is a lot of nuance based on how you implemented these strategies, where you’re at in your business, the product that you sell, etc. Something could look unsuccessful on the surface from a monetary ROI standpoint but that doesn’t mean it was a complete waste. 

It’s hard to cover every possible combination, but let me give you a few examples to keep in mind when you’re analyzing your own business. 

For example, maybe you dive into your numbers and you realize you did all those in-person markets but you didn’t make a ton of money at them. At first glance, it might seem like you should stop doing them altogether. But maybe you’re early in your business and those in-person markets bring you invaluable feedback from potential customers or you met some really great biz friends that you can collaborate with or potential wholesale partners. 

Sure, you only sold enough at the market to cover your booth fee, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t get a positive ROI from that event. 

Or maybe you did a whole bunch of collaborations and they didn’t all perform well. Does that mean you should stop doing collabs altogether? Not necessarily. Go deeper into each one and try to identify was it the partner, was it their marketing efforts, was it the product

How about your marketing channels? Maybe at first glance it looks like your email didn’t really bring in the revenue you were hoping for. But when you take a deeper dive you see that you didn’t have a ton of people flowing through your email automations, and your list size is the exact same size as it was this time last year. 

Well, that’s likely not an email problem—it’s a traffic problem. 

When you look at your product assortment, you might have a specific category that didn’t really sell last year. Does that mean you should get rid of that category altogether? Maybe. But I would also go one-step deeper to figure otu why that is. Did you give the product the attention it deserves, do people know it exists?

Now you might be saying, no I didn’t really talk about it because Jessica, you told me to focus on marketing my best seller. And I would say, yay, glad to hear it! But also… did you run any short-term mini-campaigns for this category, did you set it up as a cross-sell, did you do any search engine optimization for organic traffic?

If your answer to all of those is no, then maybe it’s something you want to tackle this year to make sure you’re giving that category a fair shot before you completely throw in the towel. 

But again, I don’t want you spending too much time on things that just aren’t working. Like I said, this part can be tough because there are so many variables what looks bad at first glance might not be when you dig a little deeper. 

The same is true for what’s good. Maybe you see one product that accounted for a huge portion or your revenue. At first you might think, oh okay maybe I have to push this even further this year. But, if you took a moment to dig a little deeper you’d see that something in the production process makes this particular product a nightmare. Maybe you struggle to get materials, the prices have gone way up, it takes you forever to produce, or the vendor is a pain to work with. 

When I work one-on-one with clients setting up their email automations, and it’s actually a question in the pre-work of Email Badassery, I ask, if you could only sell ONE product from here on out what would that be? And I encourage them to think about all the things that go into selling that product just as I outlined. 

It’s possible your answer to that question isn’t currently your best-selling product. Does that mean you cut off your best-seller right away? No. But does it mean you might want to build up the rest of your assortment so you can phase it out? Maybe. 

As I said, this part of the process can be tough. The easiest way to sum this process up is to act like a toddler and just keep asking why. When you think you’ve got an insight into why something did or didn’t work… ask why again and see what you can uncover. 

By the end of this reflection process, you should have a general idea of what did and didn’t work in your business last year in regard to your products, marketing, sales channels, systems and people. 

Setting Your Vision for the Year Ahead

Now that you’ve got a clear picture of what did and didn’t work, it’s time to start dreaming about the business you want to create this year and beyond. And this isn’t just about revenue and profit, though that matters too—we’ll talk more about this in a bit… but I want to talk about the real stuff. 

• What does success look like for you this year? Is it working fewer hours so you can spend more time with your family? Is it hitting consistent, predictable revenue so you can finally breathe easier?
• What impact do you want to make? Do you want to create a standout customer experience? Build a community around your brand?
• Do you want to sell your business? I’ve had a few clients and students who recently exited their business or are currently in the process of doing so because they’re ready to move onto another chapter. 

When you define success beyond revenue, you give yourself permission to build a business that supports the life you want to live—not the other way around.

And there is no right or wrong vision to have for your business. 

I’m all about dreaming big and setting goals that stretch you out of your comfort zone. Larissa Loden talked about this in episode 250, especially about the concept of moonshot goals. Essentially, you set your long-term goals so big that even if you don’t hit them you’ll likely make it further than 99% of other people on your way.  As the go-getter and overacheiver that Larissa is, I totally understand why she loves this method of goal setting so much. And I know she has a really big vision for what her business is going to look like in the future. 

But it’s also okay if your vision isn’t that big. There’s a difference between intentionally building a lifestyle business that gives you financial security, freedom, and a solid retirement plan and not aiming big because you think you can’t do it or because it scares you. 

My point is, that when it comes to outlining the vision for your business, look internally. What do you really want? What really drives you? Block out all the noise of what people tell you you SHOULD want, and just be honest about what you DO want.

And if you don’t know what you DO want… start with what you don’t want. That works too. 

Set Your Financial Goals

Once you understand the type of business you’re trying to build, then you can set your monetary goals for the year. Ideally, you’ll start with your profit goal and reverse engineer that to a revenue goal. 

Setting profit goals is important because that’s what you actually get to put in your pocket, and because as a product-based business with regular expenses and COGS, it’s really easy to piss away your profit without even realizing it. 

But before you set your sights on a specific profit goal, I want you to do some math and figure out how much money you really want to make. A lot of times we create these financial goals for our businesses just because a number sounds good. We don’t take the time to do the math and figure out what’s your enough number. 

That’s not to say you’ll only ever strive for your enough number, I do still want you to think big… but I also find that many of us are doing better than we think we are, or we realize the goals we set for ourselves aren’t grounded in any real reality. 

So take a moment to jot down some numbers. How much money do you need to be content. You’re paying your mortgage, you’ve got food on the table, a couple trips per year, sports gear for the kids, investments for retirement, a sizeable cushion in case shit hits the fan—for example 6 months of living expenses. I like to do the same in my business too.. Leaving a little cushion there just in case. 

If you’re not already hitting that goal, then that becomes your first profit goal. If you’re already hitting that goal, then awesome. You can start making adjustments based on where you’re at right now; for example a 10% increase. 

Once you’ve finalized your profit goal, then you need to calculate your revenue goal. And you do that by dividing your profit dollar goal by your net profit margin %. 

Your net profit margin % is the percentage of money you keep after your COGS and your operating expenses. If you have an accounting system you should see this at the bottom of your profit and loss statement. If you don’t have an accounting system, please get one. 

Now, what a good net profit margin is will depend on whether you’re paying yourself a set salary or if you’re just taking profit out of the business. As you scale, your net margin % will decrease because you need more employees, systems, larger warehouses, etc.

As a starting point, I say aim for 30% net profit margin, assuming you’re just paying yourself from the business profits and you’re generating up to about $300k in revenue. These are not hard and fast numbers, I just want you to have something to aim for. 

So, assuming you have a 30% profit margin, that means to profit $100k you need to generate $334k in revenue. 

When you first calculate your new revenue goal, you might be surprised… and not in a good way. You might think to yourself, oh shit—how am I gonna hit that. 

We’re gonna dive deeper into how to make that happen in upcoming episodes, so don’t get too stressed about it right now. I just want you to have a realistic view of where you’re trying to go. 

What’s Next

Alright, so for this week you’re gonna start by reflecting on last year and identify what you want to do more and less of. Act like a toddler and just keep asking WHY until you get to the root of the results so you can make an educated decision on whether or not it’s the right thing for your business. 

Next, start thinking about the vision you want for your business this year. What do you want your business to look like, how do you want to feel when working in your business, go beyond the numbers and get clear about what excites you. 

Then, you’re going to solidify your profit goal for the year. 

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to dive deeper into this process. We’ll talk about the CASH Method, my framework for growing your eCommerce business. How to leverage your data so you know what to focus on, and how to set goals that actually stick.