Here’s the problem with doing your community goal planning in January. By January, the year has already started.
I know that’s the most obvious sentence ever said out loud, but stay with me, because almost everybody gets this wrong and I got it wrong for years.
You come back from the holidays rested and full of ideas, you write a revenue number, and it feels like the most productive two hours you’ve had in weeks. Then you look up and it’s the eleventh, and the thing you decided to launch in March needed to be built in January. So March becomes April, April becomes after the summer, and somewhere around September you have the thought every founder has had: what happened to this year?
Nothing happened to it. You started planning it three weeks after it began.
Here’s the unglamorous version instead: when to actually do this, what you look at first, and the half of the plan almost nobody writes down.
When Should You Plan Next Year?
November. Not January, and not this exact second either, because most of you are heads down on Black Friday right now and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Once that’s handled, November is the window, and the reason is runway. Everything in a digital business has a lead time and we are all terrible at remembering it:
- A membership launch is not a launch. It’s about six weeks of warming people up before the launch.
- A new course is not a course. It’s a build, a beta, and a fix.
- A price change is not an announcement. It’s a grandfathering decision, an email sequence, and a solid month of your nerves.
- Hiring is the worst one. If you want real help by spring, you’re posting in December, because finding somebody good and getting to where they’re actually making your life easier is a three month round trip minimum.
So when you decide something in January, you’re not starting in January. You’re starting in February at the earliest, and that’s if nothing else is on fire.
Decide it in November and December becomes build time. Quiet build time, which is the best kind, because nobody expects anything from you in December and half your audience isn’t reading your email anyway. You come into January with the thing made instead of half imagined. You’re not planning earlier to be impressive, you’re planning earlier so January is for doing and not deciding.
My own version of getting this wrong was the summit. I’d decide in January that we were doing one, and a summit is not an event, it’s a four month project with approximately nine hundred emails. When I came up for air it was May and I hadn’t touched a single other thing I said I’d do that year. That’s not a summit problem, I love a summit. It’s a timing problem.
There’s a second reason, and it matters more than people think. Right now you remember this year. What flopped in March, which launch felt awful and which felt easy, the member who left and the reason she gave. By the middle of January that’s fuzzy and you’re planning off a vibe.
What Has to Happen Before You Set a Single Goal?
An honest look back at this year. Not the year in review post, not the carousel with the wins. The version where you put what you said you’d do in January next to what you actually did.
I do this every year and I don’t love it every year. The trick is doing it without turning it into a character assessment, because there’s a version of looking back that’s an hour of being mean to yourself, and you cannot plan from shame. You’ll set either timid goals or punishing ones, and both get abandoned by February.
Keep the questions flat and factual:
- What did I say I’d do, and what did I actually do?
- What did I spend time on that nobody asked for?
- What made me money, and what made almost none but I kept it because I like it? That’s allowed, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing.
- What happened this year that I didn’t plan at all?
That last one is my favorite, because something always does. A client finds you from somewhere weird. A strange thing takes off. That’s data, and it’s usually pointing at something.
Don’t do this alone if anyone helps you run this business. Your VA knows which part of your process is held together with tape and hope, and your community manager knows which members went quiet weeks before you noticed. Alone in a document you’re planning off your own memory, and mine remembers what was emotional and forgets what was merely expensive.
Then there’s a second look back, and almost nobody does it. The year inside your community, not your business:
- Who joined, who left, and where in their membership they left
- Which posts actually got replies, and which ones you’re still quietly a little hurt about
- Which event was the best one of the year, and be honest about why, because it usually isn’t the content
- What people asked for over and over that you never built
That’s a completely different document than your business review, and it produces completely different decisions. Most founders have never once done it, which is why the community plan for next year ends up being last year plus hope.
Why Is Your Revenue Number Really a Retention Number?
Because two completely different businesses can hit the same number, and only one of them is survivable.
Say you want to end next year at 100 paying members. One version brings in 120 people and keeps most of them. The other brings in 300 and leaks 200 out the back. Same number on the dashboard, wildly different year for you.
The second one will wreck you. You’ll spend the whole year selling, your onboarding will never get fixed because you’re always launching, and you’ll be tired in a way no amount of planning fixes. And you’ll probably hit the number, which is the crucial part. You’ll just arrive having run a treadmill for 12 months with a community full of people who don’t know each other, because you were never in the room. You were at the front door looking for new people to usher in.
The number on its own doesn’t tell you what kind of year you’re signing up for. The community goals do.
What Does a Real Community Goal Look Like?
It has a starting number, a target, a date, and a theory about why the number is what it is. “More engagement” is not a goal, it’s a wish.
Pick two or three of these, not all of them:
- Active members. Who actually showed up in a given month, not who was billed.
- RSVPs against attendance. Those two being far apart tells you something specific about what you’re scheduling.
- Space activity. Which rooms are alive, and which ones you’re maintaining out of guilt.
- Quiet members. How many haven’t posted or logged in, and what you’ll do about it. Reach out personally, have someone on your team do it, or leave them alone on purpose, which is legitimate for some communities. Pick one. Most people pick nothing and call it a problem.
- Churn by month in the membership. Somebody leaving in month two and somebody leaving in month 14 are entirely different problems.
- New member activation. What percentage of people who join complete whatever you consider the first step.
- Course completion, which is reliably the number people least want to look at.
For the longer version of which of these tell the truth, that’s the community metrics that actually matter.
Now make one concrete, because “pick two numbers” is easy to say and deeply annoying to do.
Say your live calls feel thin. The wish version is “I want better attendance next year.” The goal version: our monthly call averages nine people out of 62 members, about 15 percent, and by the end of March I want 25 percent, which I think I get by renaming it so people know what actually happens on it and moving it off Mondays.
Starting number, target, date, theory. At the end of March you’ll know whether the theory was right, which is the real reason to do any of this. You’re not just setting targets, you’re testing what you believe about your community, and most of us are walking around with beliefs we’ve never once checked.
Give every goal a number and a date, or it’s a thing you feel bad about in June.
What Are You Going to Stop?
Something, and you have to name it, because a plan that only adds is a wish list with dates on it.
First, productize everything. Most of us say we have one product and we don’t. There’s the membership, the one-on-one work, the course that sells quietly without you touching it, the audit, the template, the thing you run twice a year that has never had a name. Naming that one is usually worth money on its own.
Write them all down and give each its own goal, and here’s the part people don’t expect: those goals don’t all have to be numbers. The membership might get retention. The cohort might get “this is the year I stop running it live every time and record the teaching.” That’s a real goal with a deadline and an outcome that changes your life. It just doesn’t have a dollar sign next to it.
Then the stopping. Your capacity next year is roughly your capacity this year, so every new thing has to displace something. And the things that need to go are rarely the obvious failures, because those already fell off. It’s the stuff doing fine: the space nobody hates, the monthly call 11 people attend, the offer that sells just enough to justify keeping it. Those quietly eat the year, and they will survive another 12 months if you don’t decide about them on purpose.
I had one of those for two years. It made a little money, took a disproportionate amount of my attention, and I kept it because getting rid of it felt dramatic. Nobody was going to take it away from me. I had to decide out loud, on a specific day, that it was done.
Decide Sooner, Not Harder
One thing this week, before you plan anything. Open a document and write two lists: what am I carrying into next year, and what am I putting down. Don’t plan yet, just see what you’re holding. The surprise is almost always that the list is longer than you thought.
If you’d rather not do this alone in a document on a Tuesday night, that’s what Launchpad 2027 is. November 9 to 12, 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM ET each day, and three of the four days happen before anybody writes a goal. Monday is your business, reviewed. Tuesday is money with Geily Romero, a fractional CFO who works with founders generating real revenue who still aren’t paying themselves consistently. Wednesday is your community, reviewed, which is a completely different document than the business one. Thursday we set next year’s goals, product by product. Each day is an hour of teaching, a working lunch that’s really the most interactive hour of the day, then an hour in breakout rooms actually writing it down, in an app we built for it rather than a worksheet you’ll never open again. Included in a coCreator Society membership, or $297 on its own.
And if you’re not coming, do it anyway. Write the two lists, do both look backs, pick two community numbers and give them a target and a date.
The point was never the four days. It’s walking into January with your decisions already made, so the first week of the year is you building something instead of sitting with a blank document feeling behind.
That’s the whole difference. Not working harder next year. Deciding sooner.
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Listen: The Founder Bottleneck: What to Hand Off First. For the part of the plan where something has to come off your plate.
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coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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