two 2014 workbooks planners for your best ever year in business

Now is the time to start planning for 2014.

If you wait until December 31st, you’ll have lost out on a lot of opportunities to set things in place to ensure your best year yet.

This month, since we’re focussing on planning for 2014, we have a one-two punch – two fabulous biz planning guides! I have reviewed the first, and Jess has reviewed the second.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

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Your Best Year: 2014 – Productivity Workbook and Creative Business Planner

2014-Best-Year-Download-page-1-of-200-800x1024By: Lisa Jacobs {Review by Megan E}

Famous for: Marketing Creativity and her business, Energy Shop Jewelry

What It Includes:

  • 200 pages of prompts, goal-setting exercises, goal-prioritizing exercises, and hard questions
  • Printable planners and calendars

Why We Loved It:

This planner is longer than most, 15 months instead of 12, and it really breaks down each quarter and month in new ways.  You set your monetary and marketing goals each month and then devise your strategies for reaching them.

Before you get started though, Lisa has a lot of hard questions for you to answer to see which path you need to pursue to take in the money you want.   You’ll break down your revenue streams, identify what success means to you, and plan how you’re going to meet your goals.  Lisa also put in quarterly reviews to keep yourself accountable for your success.

The best part?  Monthly overview pages!  These allow you to see the bigger picture for your business as well as chart your growth and success month to month.  So often we focus only on the day to day stuff when really we need to keep the bigger goals in mind to make big leaps in our business.

Check out more about the workbook here.

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C&T Trees: 4 out of 5!

C&T Tree Rating - 4 out of 5

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BIZPLANTASTIC – biz planning for dreamers and doers (This site/resource is no longer available)

planning-workbook-promo-images2By: Karen Gunton {Review by Jess}

Famous for: Build a Little Biz (This site/resource is no longer available) and a wealth of e-books on marketing and branding

What It Includes:

  • Instruction, ideas, and examples of planning strategies that you can apply to your biz
  • Inspiration to help you stay focused and get excited about your plans
  • 11 printable planners that you can customize & use in multiple ways

Why We Loved It:

This is WAY more than just a planner. In fact, it compliment’s Lisa’s planner perfectly.

The printable planners in here are great (as are the sweet printable motivational posters sprinkled throughout) – but the REAL gold is in the instructional part of the book.

Karen takes you through a top-down planning process for your business:

vision > goals > strategies > plans > tasks

She guides you through ideas, strategies, and examples for each level of planning, and encourages you to really find your own path.

I love her perspective too – that what she’s written (while exhaustive in detail!) is just a guide and an example – she’s not telling you the ‘right way to do it’. Instead, she’s doing what all truly great teachers do – give you the knowledge you need and then encourages you to find your own path and way of using that knowledge.

I sat down with a glass of wine the other night and worked through this book, and I have a MUCH clearer overall vision for my own 2014, as well as some dug-down goals and strategies to make my vision a reality.

{Warning for fellow INTJ/Grammar Nazi’s – Karen writes without capitals. If non-traditional grammar usually makes you twitch, please trust me when I say it’s WORTH IT in this case! Also: if case you missed it, we reviewed another of Karen’s products – Build Your Visual Marketing Mojo – last month.}

Check out more about the workbook here (This site/resource is no longer available).

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C&T Trees: 4.5 out of 5!

C&T Tree Rating - 4.5 out of 5

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 BONUS TIP

Another great planner we came across this week is Jessica Swift’s 2014 Goal + Intention Kit (This site/resource is no longer available).

We haven’t had a chance to take a look at it, but check it out!

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Image source: Love from Ginger (This site/resource is no longer available)

{A note from Jess: There are a phenomenal amount of useful and informative books/ebooks/courses out there – so how do you choose which ones are right for you? Megan & I decided to start a monthly review series here on the blog where we share our favourites with you. If you know of a great book or info product out there that you think we should take a look at, make sure to contact us and let us know about it!  Disclaimer: C&T is an affiliate of some of these products. We give honest reviews and only recommend stuff we think is genuinely useful and practical.}

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