Strategic Planning with Tanya Dalton

Kris Plachy: I am so happy you're here, Tanya. Thank you for being here. For everyone listening, Tanya Dalton is genius. She's amazing. She's very funny and fun and incredibly smart. In fact, I've been talking a lot about you. I don't know, I didn't tell you I've been talking about you.

Tanya Dalton: Oh, no,

Kris Plachy: no, no. It's good. I'm gonna have you introduce yourself in a second, but, you and I were having an text exchange a couple weeks ago when I was in bed sick with Covid. It was like 11 o'clock or something for you on the East Coast. It was like eight o'clock for me or maybe like 10: 30 for you, and I was complaining that it was already dark.

Tanya Dalton: Yes, I think I remember this.

Kris Plachy: And I, I think I texted you, who do we call about this situation? And you texted back and said, "I think we outsource that" and I've been using it with my clients cuz it's such the perfect CEO response. It's like, "Oh, I'm not gonna do that"

Tanya Dalton: "But I don't like it. I want it fixed. Yeah. I don't need to fix it."

Kris Plachy: "So let's outsource that." Yeah. And so I've been working on it in my own brain too, like, "Oh, who can I outsource that to?" And I think we should all start to practice that. Like if I'm not the answer, who is?

Tanya Dalton: We need to ask that question more. Right? Who do I outsource this to?

Kris Plachy: Yeah. It's not gonna be me. So, okay. So welcome, Tanya. Why don't you tell all of the amazing listeners tuning in this week who you are?

Tanya Dalton: Well, I'm not sure how to follow that intro with the genius and the amazing, I mean, I need my kids to listen to this, right? Like, I know what I'm talking about. So, yes, so I am a CEO. I started my first business in 2008, so I feel like I'm like old school with, I've been in the entrepreneurial game for a long time. I started my first business with $50 and zero business experience. Never even took a course in college on business.

But I scaled that business so it would absorb my husband's MBA income, which was really kind of my goal at the time. So he could come work alongside of me. And I moved to Asheville because if you can have your own business and you can live wherever you want, why not go ahead and do that? Now, moved to Asheville and about a year later I looked at my husband and I was like, "I don't love what we're doing. I love you, I love working with you, but I wasn't really happy with what we were creating", so I made the big decision to close down my first business.

So my husband works for me, which means it pays all the bills, the mortgage, the three meals a day that my children do like to eat and all that fun stuff. Even though it looked really good on paper, it looked really successful, and it really wasn't fulfilling to me. So I closed up that business. Opened up Inkwell Press Productivity Co. And I scaled that to seven figures in less than 18 months. And I did that with only three team members, me and my husband, and one part-timer.

And I really did that because I was very, very strategic with how I did everything. And so after that, I launched my podcast and I then started writing books because publishing houses started reaching out to me. So I've written two nooks, the Joy of Missing Out, which was named a Top 10 Business Book of the Year by Fortune Magazine, which is nuts for somebody who never took a course on business in college, right?

So the Joy of Missing Out, and then I, my second book is On Purpose, the Busy Woman's Guide to an Extraordinary Life of Meaning and Success. Both of those came out with Harper Collins. And here I am today getting lucky enough to, to chat with you, Kris Plachy.

Kris Plachy: Yay. I mean, right. That's how this works. Such good news. You write two books, you get to talk to me.

Tanya Dalton: That is the price of admission.

Kris Plachy: Let's tell Michelle Obama too, that that's how that works. Cuz she just published her second book and I

Tanya Dalton: Now she can talk to you.

Kris Plachy: Listen, she's, yes, she's invited. I went to her website and filled out a request for her to be on my podcast. I am actually not kidding.

Tanya Dalton: I love that. And I'm somehow not surprised at all by that .

Kris Plachy: No. She's on my vision board. I will have some sort of conversation with her that will be of substance. I just haven't figured out how that's gonna happen yet. But that's another day. I'm talking to you now and I'm so excited and I love, you know what I love is that the reason that I wanted Tanya on this podcast, everyone, is that Tanya really is a productivity expert and she's also a visionary. And so, you know, that's a unique combo because there's a lot of us out in the listener land, including myself, who are visionaries, but we're not necessarily as good at the strategic implementation, not changing our mind, not having 14 new ideas by tomorrow, part.

And so what I always love when I talk to Tanya is that she has this grounded way of thinking through a really good idea or a really good long-term idea and vetting it in a way that means that we can first ferret out, is this even worth it? And then if it is worth it, how do we make sure we do our best to guarantee that it goes into the world the way that we want and it hand it's handled well.

So in the fall when she, this is kind of a funny story, right? Tanya was putting together a program that she called the Strategic Circle, which was going to be a strategic planning circle, which was gonna be a four week, high-level, but also nitty gritty workshop on how to plan for 2023, build your 2023 plan. So she asked me if I would review her registration page , just so I could give her feedback, cuz that's what we do for each other.

Tanya Dalton: It is. Yes,

Kris Plachy: She reviewed my sage registration page. Right? So we do that for each other and I read it and I asked for a little extra information that I thought there should be on there, but mostly it was great and that she did that. And then I just signed up. She wasn't even ready to take money yet.

Tanya Dalton: I was like, "I'm not even taking signups yet", and I'm like, "How?" And John's like, "We have somebody signed up. Oh, it's Kris." Kris signed up . At that point I was already winning. I felt like, you know, my first signup is you, Kris, I'm great. I'm in good shape.

Kris Plachy: But you were stressing you were gonna keep it small. I'm like, well, I don't wanna miss the chance.

Tanya Dalton: It's true. It's true.

Kris Plachy: I signed up. And such brilliance. And for those of you who don't know, Tanya, haven't taken a class with her. She's an excellent teacher and facilitator and leader through a process. It's not just content. There's a real gem to working with her personally. And so I jumped at the chance and have all these incredible tools now that have helped me think through what I want 2023 to look like. And the good news is, is I actually also just recently hired a chief marketing officer. Who's fractional with this business and she's helping now actually land these ideas in a way that we're gonna be able to really execute. So I'm super, super excited.

Tanya, let's talk a little bit about how did you really crystallize this area of expertise for yourself in strategic planning and maximizing productivity, all those things.

Tanya Dalton: Yeah, so, okay. Well, I have to be honest cause I'm a visionary too. So I have 75 ideas and every idea has about 48 variations on it. I have that same issue. My brain is kind of funny because it's very left and right brain, very creative, but I can really distill it down and make it very logical. And I think how you said, I can take a concept and crystallize it. I think it's because I've written curriculum for education institutions before.

I'm used to be a teacher. So being able to teach things and making it really easy and simple and breaking it down is just kind of part of my DNA. So, to be honest with you, I had too many ideas and I was spreading myself thin, and I was wondering why I was exhausted and overwhelmed.

And then I was like, you know what? I need to be more strategic. I felt like I was making more guesses than real, truly strategic decisions. And I think that's what happens a lot in our businesses is we see what other people are doing. Maybe people in our industry or competitors or people in other industries, and we're like, "Oh, they're doing great. I should do more of what they're doing."

And all of a sudden we have a business that's no longer really fitting what we wanted out of the business. It's not aligned. We're setting goals kind of arbitrarily. We're not setting metrics because we don't know what we're doing, and we wonder why we feel like we're chasing our tail and we wonder why we feel like firing everybody when our team is not doing the right stuff, and we're like, "Well, maybe it's because I'm not really directing them."

And I think that's our job. When you're the CEO, our job is to get everybody on board. And a lot of people talk about getting people on the bus. You need everybody on the bus, and I think that's all wrong. Because if you're getting people on the bus, Who's driving the buss?

You are still doing all the work. They're just sitting in the back being passengers. It's getting them in the boat. It's everybody grabbing an or pulling the oars and rowing the same direction. And your job is not to have the oar, your job is to be at the back of the boat saying row.

Kris Plachy: Wait a minute. I don't have an oar.

Tanya Dalton: You don't have an oar. No.

Kris Plachy: Who writes copy.?

Tanya Dalton: Somebody holding an oar. They have to let go of the oar to actually work on their keyboard, but it works. But this is the thing, if you want to turn the business to the left, you have to direct your team. Okay? Rowers on the left, you're turning more. Rowers on the right, you're turning the other direction, right? So that way everybody's going the same direction, and that's what creates synergy. That's what creates alignment, and that's what makes it so that you actually accomplish the things that you want in your business.

But if you're not directing people, if you're not creating that vision where you are strategically telling your team where you're going and how you're gonna get there, it's no surprise, everybody's rowing against each other and you're spinning in circles in the middle of the lake. So for me, I had to figure out how to do that.

And so I started doing this for myself years ago, which is how I was able to scale Inkwell Press to seven figures in 18 months. Because I was very strategic about the decision that I was making. So when it was time for me to offer this strategic planning circle, it was like, how do I unpack my brain of how I've done it and teach other people how to do this? So that's how I came up with the three I's of being strategic: identify, invest, and implement. And so when we break it down and we make it really simple, it can actually be fun.

And I think that's the thing is, I think people find it really daunting or they feel like planning is going to constrain them. And take away all their creativity. And the truth is when you have that scaffolding and that framework, you can actually have more fun. It's actually more enjoyable.

There's this great example with boundaries that works here too. If you have a playground at a school and there's no boundary, there's no plan. There's no fence. The kids have to play close to the school. They can't run and do all the things they wanna do. They have to stay safe cuz they don't, you don't wanna run in the street.

But if you create the scaffolding, if you put a fence around that playground, the kids can play kickball over in this corner and tag over here and they can run around and do whatever they want. It gives you so much more freedom within those boundaries. And that's what good planning does. Is it allows us to be more creative in a way that moves us forward. And moves our business forward.

Kris Plachy: It's so great. I love, that's a point of resistance that I've had forever. I've probably shared on this podcast before when I was worked in corporate. I worked for a COO, who was a visionary, amazing woman, and she asked me to run all the women's leadership programs in our organization at the time, which was super fun.

She had a whole women's leadership conference, and so I created all this content. I created facilitator guides, and I had all these people trained to lead all these breakouts. It was such a great experience. But I was sitting at a table and I said to her, or I was sort of casually saying to the people at the table, like, "Yeah, I know. I create all this content. I run these breakout groups, I teach other people how to do it. And then I never even use my own guide that I wrote." And she looks at me. And she rolled her eyes and she's just one of those women, like that's all she had to do. And I was like, "Oh dear, I should not have said that."

Tanya Dalton: Turn your internal monologue back on.

Kris Plachy: Yeah. I'm like, oops. And she looked at me and she said, "Kris Plachy, you resist anything that constrains or restrains you". She said, "I'm surprised you even wear clothing."

Tanya Dalton: Oh my God, I love that.

Kris Plachy: But she was right. And so as a visionary, even in my own business, I have really, really grappled with anything that feels like if I say I'm gonna do something three months from now, I've had to practice trusting that my current self understands what my future self is doing, instead of just feeling like now, I'm boxed in and it feels tight.

Tanya Dalton: Right? Yeah, I totally understand that. And, and to be honest with you, it's not surprising to me, especially when powerful strong women, confident women, which is who we're speaking to today, when you feel that way, because we are breaking free of a lot of the constraints that have been there for thousands and thousands of years. And when you're pushing against that, the idea of adding your own type of constraints or your own framework or boundaries can feel worrying like, "Is this going to restrict me and am I gonna lose a lot of that freedom?" And the truth is, it's going to make you even stronger.

Think about a bridge or a building. They don't build them so that they're super rigid. They build them, so they flex and they bend with the wind and the hurricanes and the right. I mean, think about buildings, especially in California, are built to withstand earthquakes. They have that flexibility in there, and that's what really good planning is. Planning is not rigid. Planning has this flexibility, it has this gracefulness to it. It allows life to happen because life is messy at times. So it does give us that framework and it tells us where we want to go, but we ultimately are the ones who get to decide where we're going.

We get to choose that. No one else is choosing that for us. Unless you aren't stepping into that role. And then you are letting other people. So in fact, by not planning, you are giving away your power.

Kris Plachy: Ooh, y'all hear that?

Tanya Dalton: We'll just reframe that, didn't I? I'm just gonna drop the mic and walk away.

Kris Plachy: I think you should, I think that was pretty bad ass, if you know what I mean, when you said that. But that's really, really true.

So, here's the thing, your wisdom there is really critical because I know there's so many people who think of planning as either something too stuffy and corporatey, like, "I'm a creative", and also, or, too complicated. Like, "I don't know how, I'm not trained to be strategic. I don't understand it". And so then there's a lot of resistance even to that part, because it feels like if you talk to corporate people strategic planning takes three months. It's ridiculous.

Tanya Dalton: Ugh. No thank you.

Kris Plachy: So that's what I love, that you were like, we're gonna do this in November, four weeks, boom. Done. And it was just two hours a week. It's not like it was

Tanya Dalton: Yeah, it wasn't four weeks solid. No, it didn't lock you in a room. It was like, all told, eight hours. And, and they were a fun eight hours. We laughed a lot on those calls.

Kris Plachy: Yeah. And it's all people, all other women who are CEOs who are trying to put it together in the world. So I think it's so good. So you have a lot of really powerful ways to think about what you do.

And I know that I said to you before we started recording that one of the things that you talk about that was a total exciting turn on for me was your decision-making machine. Because we have so many ideas, it's hard sometimes to vet like, "Okay, is this a good idea or just a really good idea? Like, is this a good idea for my business? Is it a good idea for this year? Is it a good idea for what I'm up to right now? Or is this just a good idea that maybe doesn't belong here right now."

Tanya Dalton: Some ideas belong like a Pinterest board. You just need to say it out loud and that's enough. And other ones are like, "Yes, I need to take action on it."

Kris Plachy: Yes. Without, I mean, I know that you have areally cool system that you teach people, but I'm just kind of curious how that was born for you. What was the birth of the decision making machine?

Tanya Dalton: Well, because I was doing the same thing where it's like, Ooh. I walk into the office and my team's like, "Oh God, here she goes again. Another idea". "Hey, I know what we're gonna do." And then all of a sudden the whole team is like, "Wait a minute, are we doing? Okay. All right. We're doing this."

And this is why it's so important how you create a community. And this is too, with the strategic planning circle, was a community where you could bounce some of the ideas off of people too. Just say, what do you think? We need sounding boards like you and I are for each other. Oftentimes.

Kris Plachy: Yes.

Tanya Dalton: So, you know, the decision making machine really is taking some of the emotions out of it. We get really excited about an idea and then we need to step back and take some of the emotions out. I love emotions cause I think that they're so important. And they can drive us and guide us. It's one of the ways our intuition taps in. But then we have to step back and we need to look at it as an observer, just like in meditation, where we step back and we observe.

And that's what I love about creating a decision-making machine where you step back and you look at it from a logical standpoint. So the decision-making machine that I walk people through is, you come up with what are your parameters or what are your questions you wanna ask, and you give it ratings and it becomes super clear.

What I love is that you put in your 50 ideas and on the other side of it, you come out with, "Oh, this is the best idea, this is the second best idea", and it literally is based off of how you feel about it. So yeah, it's hard to get into like the ins and outs of how it works just really quickly on the podcast. But that's what it is. It's taking those things that are highly charged with our emotions and then stepping back and looking at it logically. Does this fit where I wanna go? And this is part of why, as part of the strategic planning circle, we step back and we decide too, where do I wanna be in five years?

This is that cathedral thinking that I love to talk about. Cathedral thinking is this concept born out of the idea that in the 1100s, 1200s, the 1300s, the city architects, the planners and the artisans got together and said, "we wanna build these beautiful cathedrals". Cathedrals like the Duomo in Florence or Notre Dame. Buildings that are still standing today. Those city architects, those planners, those designers, they knew the day they broke ground, that that building wasn't gonna be finished before they died. The Duomo in Florence took 500 years to build and it's still standing today.

So if we distill that down into, what does that mean? It's legacy work. And that's what a lot of us are looking for with our businesses to make that impact, create that legacy. So I like to do a five year vision. What's your cathedral? Or, what is it you wanna work towards in five years? Cuz five year plans, those don't work. Five year visions, that has flexibility built in. See the difference?

If you have a plan, then the pandemic happens and you're totally thrown off. If you have a vision, you can shift and reroute and detour. So we create that vision. And that vision is different for all of us in five years.

Do you want to grow your business? Maybe you want your business to stay the same size? That is not a fail. Sometimes it's like, I wanna get to this level, this revenue level, and that's good. Maybe you wanna position your business to sell. In five years maybe you wanna be involved, but you don't wanna be doing the day-today, right? So it depends.

Your actions of today get us to where we wanna go. So if your cathedral is one of those that vastly affects what your goal should be. So what we do is we look at that vision, that cathedral, this is my potential in five years. I wanna get my company ready to sell. Okay. If you want your company ready to sell in five years, what is possible in three to five years?

Well, in three to five years, I need to make sure that I have everything all set up, all the operations ready to go. I've set myself out of the business so it's ready to move on to somebody else.

Okay? If that's what's possible in three to five years, what's practical? What could I do in the next 12 to 18 months to get me closer? Maybe what you need to do there is you need to make sure you've brought in an operations person, or maybe you need to make sure that your team is doing their standard operating procedures and their SOPs.

Okay. If that's what's practical, what do we need to prioritize? And that's how we start backing into, we take this timeline,

Kris Plachy: I love all the alliteration. It's so fun.

Tanya Dalton: Oh, well I, that's like my love language. It's like alliteration. Practical. Yeah. Potential. Then you go, what is possible, what's practical, and then what do you prioritize?

Well, when it comes to our quarterly objectives, those priorities, those are our goals. Okay. If I know if I wanna sell, this is what I need to be doing in the next 3, 6, 9 months, to get me there. And that's when our goals, our quarterly objectives ,begin to have more meaning because they're actually tied with what we want in the future.

So there's a whole process of kind of backing that up to figure. This is what you need to focus in on for the next year. And that's really powerful. Cause then you're no longer making guesses. It's aligned and that's when it's like, "Oh, this makes sense."

Kris Plachy: Yeah, and I wanna emphasize too, I was leading a, I teach very irregularly, but every now and then I, I do a coaching call for self-coaching scholars, and I was leading one the other day. And so what's interesting about those calls is, I was doing a business entrepreneurship topic. A lot of the folks who come to those calls are relatively new, building their business. They're not at the seven figure mark yet, but they'ree doing good work in the world. They're just getting there.

And in the absence of a plan or, or a vision really, a real vision and a direction, a couple things I notice happen. First of all, we don't really have data, right? Like you said, we don't know how to evaluate results. And so in the absence of being clear about that, we take the feedback we get on the initiatives that we implement personally. And we don't evaluate the business as a CEO. We evaluate it as a human who thinks "Mm-hmm, they don't like me anymore, people are buying my planners or my services, or whatever you're selling in the world."

And so what I also really appreciate what, what Tanya's bringing to you all, and I hope you're hearing on this call or on this podcast is, when you think this way, you are stepping more and more and more into your CEO mind and your CEO mind is what's gonna build this business. It's not the personal relationship you have with the work that you do, the ideas that you have, the clients that you work with. It's how you plan this beautiful business that you've created so that it can stand and survive without you ultimately.

Tanya Dalton: Okay. It's funny because I was just talking to someone earlier today and I was talking about it like ,our business, so I have a kid in college. You have a kid in college and some more getting ready to go. It's the same thing with our business. When I raised my kids, because a lot of us think of our business as another child. It's like our brattiest, loudest, the one that needs the most feeding on a regular basis. But I didn't raise my kids so they can move back and live in my basement. Please, dear God, no. No, I didn't. I raised them to flourish and grow without me.

And it's the same thing with your business. We want your business to flourish and grow without you. Because if you are micromanaging everything, you're the bottleneck. And then you're so frustrated when it's like, "why can't anyone make a decision without me? Why is everybody knocking on my door asking me the questions?" Well, because you kind of set it up that way.

What we wanna do is we wanna take you out of the day today. We want you to do what I call getting the forest view. Your job is to go up and out. You're looking at what's happening. You're seeing the entire forest so you can navigate out of it. If you're down there in the forest, all you can see is the trees. Your job is to go up and out and to explain to all your foot soldiers, to your team, here's where we're going. And then let them take off. Let them go.

It's just like with our kids. I didn't move into my son's dorm room. My gosh. Thank God. Because that I wouldn't be able to do that.

Kris Plachy: I would be able to smell you from here if that was true.

Tanya Dalton: Right? I mean, do some laundry for God's sake. He goes to school and he is doing well. He still needs a little scaffolding. He needs a little bit of help from time to time. And now I'm a mentor for my son. And that's what we want you to do as a CEO. You're not in there flipping the burgers. You are the manager who's saying, "Okay, you gotta get the burgers out to the car."

So it is a difference in mindset cuz I think so often we get caught up in the doing and we feel like we have to do, or we have to work harder than our team. Because, oh, that wouldn't be okay if my team was working harder than me after noon on a Friday.

Kris Plachy: That's the guilt. Absolutely.

Tanya Dalton: So it is, it's really understanding that your role is not to be in there getting your hands dirty. Your role is to guide everybody. You're at the back of the boat. You don't have the oar in your hand. You're telling everyone where to go.

Kris Plachy: It's brilliant. It's very true, and I think the closer and closer you get to seeing what your true role is as the CEO, the easier and the more fun it gets to have a business.

Tanya Dalton: Oh my gosh. Right. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing, and this is one of the things we talked about in the strategic planning circle. When you were in there with us, the business is the vehicle for the life you want. The business is not your life. We don't want your business to be your life. The business is what supports the life that you want.

So one of the things that we actually do is we map out our personal life and what we wanna have happen. And then we fit the business around that. We fit the launches around when you're wanting to go on vacation, when you're needing downtime, we're making sure that we're implementing and putting in times that you are resting and rejuvenating and taking care of yourself, and then we're mapping the business and we're wrapping it around you and what you want.

And I think so often we say, "Oh, I don't have time to go on vacation. I don't have time to do this because the business is doing this stuff." You are driving the business. The business is there to support you and the life that you desire.

Think about where you wanna be in five years. Think about how old you're gonna be. How old are your children gonna be? What's the phase of life that your parents are gonna be at? What are the things that you wanna be doing? I can tell you as a CEO, I don't wanna be the one getting my hands dirty and doing all that stuff until I'm 80 years old. I'm quite content being a CEO till I'm 80 years old because I'm not doing all the doing.

Kris Plachy: Exactly.

Tanya Dalton: I'm letting others do it. I'm leading. And that's really, if you're an impact driven person, if you're out here to make a difference in the world, and I think, Kris, most of your listeners are this way, the message gets bigger and brighter and louder when you step into being the CEO.

Because if it's just you, you're one voice just shouting out against the crowd. And when you have the team behind you, your voice, This is how you amplify the message. This is how you make the difference in the world. It's by being strategic and really making sure that you're pouring yourself your energy, your time, your energy, your money, all of those things into the right things for where you want to go, and the message that's important for you and your business.

Kris Plachy: So good. So true. You know, that's been a huge part of why I was interested in doing Strategic Circle with you in the fall. Yeah, I guess we'd call that fall because

Tanya Dalton: Yeah, I call November fall.

Kris Plachy: Yeah, it's still fall.

Tanya Dalton: What would you call November? Well, I don't know.

Kris Plachy: It feels almost,

Tanya Dalton: You're in California. So winter's like, "I dunno, it's always spring, I dunno."

Kris Plachy: But we, you know, I knew this coming year would be very different for me because my kids are graduating high school. I have twins. For those of you who are new listeners and. My son's gonna live in San Diego and my daughter's gonna go to school pretty close, but she's a competitive soccer player and I'm a ridiculously loyal soccer mom.

So I will attend all games. And this is very, my team knows, everybody in my life knows, but the problem is I have no clue when that will be. I don't know what

Tanya Dalton: Cause you don't have the soccer schedule is

Kris Plachy: I don't know anything. Yeah. And so, rather than lose my mind, trying to plan things that I knew I wouldn't know if I could truly deliver that just was causing me so much stress.

I took the opportunity of the work that we did together and I really looked at, "Okay, I'm front loading the first six months of next year so that I can really, if I want to, I can take the latter part of the year and do what I'd like to do in my business, but not really do a lot else." So we had our second strategic call today as a team using the ideas and the planning that I did with you to start actually now, leveraging the team to deploy this plan.

I really am a firm advocate. I've actually done a few podcasts on exactly what you said, which is the business is not, we don't build a life around the business. We build a life and then we build a business that supports the life we wanna live.

And I appreciate there's a lot of people who are listening who feel like they're still sort of, you know, eyeballs deep in business operations without seeing that that's true. And I wanna emphasize as your coach, that that is a belief first before it absolutely ever be a plan. And the truth is, you have to believe first that yes, you were put on this planet for this beautiful vision and this beautiful gift of your business.

And yes, all of that's very important, but if it's at your expense, it is not okay, and I know no plan can be executed upon if you're exhausted. And so I really wanna highlight the work that Tanya does because it's so uplifting to hold space for the potential of the business, but also to relish in the life that you want to live.

I think that is the best gift of entrepreneurship, but we have to trust it and we have to protect it.

Tanya Dalton: Absolutely.

Kris Plachy: So that leads us to really, one of the reasons that we wanted to have this conversation today is because I want all of my clients to have an opportunity to work with Tanya.

I don't do strategic planning. I'm relatively good at it, but it is not my wheelhouse. Like I'll change your fricking life in other ways, but not strategic planning. And so I have always enjoyed working with other people who are experts as strategic planners because, I need that support also.

And so Tanya's running another strategic planning circle for 2023 in January, for the four weeks of January.

Tanya Dalton: Yep. On Tuesdays and Fridays in January.

Kris Plachy: Tuesdays and Fridays starting on the third. And so we were talking about this and about how could we do this so that my clients can know about what you do and we can share your work. And so here's how this is gonna work, if you are a How to CEO client or in the lab, so those of you who are listening and you're a current Kris Plachy client, we have agreed that y'all are gonna get a $500 discount, for lack of a better word. It's not very sexy.

Tanya Dalton: we'll call it the Kris Plachy gifts.

Kris Plachy: We'll call it my gift to you. Kris Plachy gift. $500 towards the tuition and registration for Tanya's strategic planning circle. But you have to be a client. So the way this works is if you're a current client, I'm gonna be sending a link to you. So wink wink, it's coming. So be on the lookout for that.

If you have not registered for How to CEO, that starts in February. Get yourself registered by the end of December. Actually by December 23rd, that's when everything's closing down and we will get you that link as well. But you have to be an active, How to CEO client or in the lab in order to get the benefit of the link and get the $500 gift. Did I say that well?

Tanya Dalton: I think you said that excellently yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think the thing is, cuz you and I were talking about it and you were like, "I just, I really want my people to be a part of this." And I was like, "I really want your people to be a part of it too." And I really intentionally curate it so it's not a giant group. This is not one of those programs full of 50 people. , I think we had like 15 in the group in the fall because I wanted to feel very intimate and small.

But I also priced it so it feels like a no-brainer. It's really a very low price point, for what all it offers. I mean, honestly, the response I got from the women who were in the program from the fall, one of them said that I'm like the Marie Condo of business. I taught her how to spark joy in her back in her business. Which is why I was like, "You know what? I just wanna do this again", because I really enjoyed it. I love pouring into women. And so Kris and I were talking and I was like, "We should totally do this together." I love giving a $500 gift from Kris to you guys because I love the work that Kris does. It works so beautifully with a lot of the work I do.

Kris Plachy: We have really similar philosophies. That's what's great about it, is that ideally a client of mine, going through your strategic planning circle at the beginning of the year is only gonna help us overall, do the best work we can as we're building the team and resolving some of the team challenges to get the results that you want.

It all works together. And it is, it's incredibly affordable. So for those of you who do decide to register, it's $2,500, but then the gift of $500 makes it $2000. Am I right about that?

Tanya Dalton: Yeah. Yes. I really did. I wanted, I was like, because here's the thing, I'm not in the business of selling. What I love is I love the teaching. I love getting people in, and I love the light bulb moments when you're getting it. And it's amazing for me. So I like to just price it so it's like, "Oh, $2000. Yeah, I can totally do that. Yep. I'm here for that." I just wanna take any of that hard decision making off of your brain. . So I made it really simple and easy.

Kris Plachy: I love it. Okay. So if someone's listening and they're like "Well, I'm not How to CEO client and I'm not ready to be a How to CEO client, the link that they need to go to for strategic circle is tanyadalton.com/2023. Super easy.

Tanya Dalton: Yeah, tanyadalton.com/2023.

So you can go there, you can get the information. And then, as we said for our little Kris Plachy gift, which not so little $500, I mean, that's, that sounds pretty good. $500, that's significant. Yeah. So you'll have a special link to get that discount? Yes.

Kris Plachy: Yeah, that's gonna, that will be something that I email out to our current clients and anyone who's starting in February. Or anyone who's current. So just be on the lookout for that in your email. And yeah, Tanya's gonna have all the information and all the details outlined the tanyadalton.com/2023, and we'll have that link in the show notes as well, so everybody can find that if they need to.

But be on the lookout for an email that will show up in your inbox with this episode very soon and probably even before this episode, to be honest, before it releases. I'll be sending a little notice out, so this should be the second time we've heard it. If you're a client.

Tanya Dalton: I love it.

Kris Plachy: I do too.

Okay. Any last parting words of wisdom from the productivity cathedral thinking expert?

Tanya Dalton: Well, here, here's the thing that I always like to remind people that it really is about taking action. The small actions count just as much as the big. So if you heard something today, that resonated with you, if you thought, "Oh gosh, yeah, I do feel like I'm making guesses, or I'm not setting metrics for my team. I need to think about that." Give to yourself 15 minutes today to take action on something. Maybe it's going to the site, tanyadalton.com/ 2023.

Maybe it's taking a look at what you've done in the past. Maybe it's just 15 minutes to really think about how have I been strategic in my business? Do I like it? What do I wanna change? 15 minutes is all I asked for you which is really easy to gift yourself.

Kris Plachy: Totally.

Tanya Dalton: So take action today on something that you feel like will be an investment in you and creating that business to be that support system for you, that vehicle, for that life you want.

Kris Plachy: Yeah. I love it. Well, thank you for the time today. I know that it's a Friday, we're just about done for the week, so I hope you have fun plans as we head off into the holidays here. You, are you closing down for a little bit for a few weeks?

Tanya Dalton: I am. So I am closing down after the 16th. I'm not working for the last couple weeks. My son Jack will be home from college and I just wanna pour into him and be there and hang out with him. And I think that's the thing too, like when you set your business in the way that you and I both talk about, you can do that. You can take that time off. So I'm really excited about it.

Kris Plachy: I am too for you, and I'm doing the same, so I'm thrilled. I love latter part of december is just a nice time to just kind of chillax with people that we love.

Tanya Dalton: Which is what we need to do. It's been quite a year for everybody.

Kris Plachy: Yes, it has. It just keeps being quite a year. I'd like to my like next year to be like, "Oh, what happened in 2023? I don't really remember.

Tanya Dalton: It's just easy.

Kris Plachy: It was just a vanilla year. Yeah, it was a good year.

Tanya Dalton: That'd be a nice change. I think we could all use a little more.

Kris Plachy: I think we could too. Let's go for that. All right, sunshine. Thank you for being here today.

Tanya Dalton: Thank you so much for having me. This is fabulous.

Outro: Hey, entrepreneur, you started that gorgeous business of yours to do some really good in the world. You probably didn't start your business to manage people. But here you are having to figure out how to manage people to get work done, and maybe it's not going so well.

So head on over to krisplachy.com/howtoceo, and let's talk about how we can help you learn how to lead, manage, hire, fire, and all the things so that you can build a team that expands on your amazing dream.