Post #9: 2023 Goal Planning

Goal planning and prioritizing is a skill that we are continually working on. If you read our 2022 Goal Planning blog post, you know that this was an area that we were determined we would improve in. We learned a lot when we set our goals last year and are happy to report that we had a much better line of sight to our goals and priorities throughout last year.

Over the Christmas break we made time to complete our 2022 Year in Review and focus on our 2023 Goals. The main resource we used for our Goal Planning Session was the Designed on Purpose goal planning workbook that we have used in previous years from Janine Deanna.  We selected the key areas we want to focus on and then created an agenda for our meeting. 

Our goal planning took us around three hours, and we continue to review our progress monthly.  Here are the highlights from our goal planning session:

Authentically You

We started by reviewing the foundations of our business:

• Mission: our mission is “To make wine that people love while sharing our journey to owning our own winery”

• Vision: our vision is “To build a winery that allows us to connect with people and inspire them to chase their dreams”

• Values: our company values are family, gratitude, determination, connection and integrity

• Unique connection factor: we are bringing people along on our journey to owning our own winery and are sharing the behind the scenes of our business

• Word of the year: our word for this year is Consistency (again)

Most areas remained the same as last year, but after some discussion we decided to update our Company Core Values. We felt that family and gratitude were still core values but we decided to replace three of our core values (hard work, accountability and humor) with three new core values - determination, connection and integrity.

Our journey this past year has shown us how important it is to continue to pursue our dream even though it’s difficult (determination), the importance of the bonds we’ve formed with the people who have supported us (connection) and that we want to model some of the people we’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with on our journey (integrity).

Define & Align

Next we identified what a successful year would looked like and reviewed the health of our company:

• Envision your success: we discussed what success would look like at the end of the year and established goals in four key areas. They are the same areas that we identified last year, those areas are:

1. Sales targets by vintage and varietal

2. Targets for the number of new stores, restaurants and cities

3. Consistent planning and review of our goals and our financials/inventory throughout the year

4. Detailed transition plan to purchase a property and for our move to BC

• Current health of your organization: we talked about two main areas we wanted to improve for things to run more smoothly:

1. Weekly, monthly and quarterly planning and reviews

2. Dedicated time to work on our business

Design Your Strategy

We started to identify the areas we wanted to work on by brainstorming a list of all of the opportunities we could think of that would support our goals. Through that work, we were able to group these opportunities into the four key strategic marketing areas we wanted to focus on in 2023:

1. Media/PR

2. Email marketing and our website

3. Direct sales

4. Events and tastings

For each of these four areas we identified the actions we would need to take and determined which quarter does the action belong in.

It was a lot of work but in the end, we have a clear direction on the actions we need to take.

Hello Someday annual goal planning session 2023

We also confirmed that there were two additional areas we wanted to focus on in 2023:

1. Operations - this includes financial and inventory tracking, regular operations (e.g. bottling wine)

2. Transition plan - this include creating our business plan and property search activities

Next Steps

We now meet weekly to look at our priorities and actions in Asana for the current month to determine what we should focus on in the coming week. We also meet monthly and quarterly to review our progress against our goals.

Last year we had great intentions to do this on a regular basis and started out strong, but somewhere along the way we stopped doing this consistently. We know from experience that this approach to goal planning and action setting has made a world of difference for us previously, so we are committed to making this a priority this year.

And that wraps up the summary of our 2023 Goal Planning! If you have a business, do you set goals for the year? Let us know below!