Brotherhood Beyond Business (00:17)
Welcome back to another episode of the Brotherhood Beyond Business podcast. Today, me and Joe are going to go over annual planning, why we find it important, a little bit of the systems we use, maybe even cover some of the goals that we're going to attack this year and just have a conversation because this is one of my favorite times of the year. I absolutely love goal setting. I've actually talked to my wife the other day. was like, man, I've got to find a way to get the energy that I have at the end of the year.

for the quarterly goal setting as well. So when I go back and adjust my quarterly goals, it's kind of like, man, I'll dedicate like an hour to that each quarter, but it's like, I don't have the same like energy I do, you know, at this time you were super excited about the goals and I want to even though, you know, the quarterly goal setting throughout the year is meant to like, just play off those annual goals, but I still like, just want that renewed energy going into that next quarter and thinking like, man, now we get to attack this quarter. Whereas the year at the beginning of year for me, it's like, I'm excited to attack the year. I want to get that feeling about the quarter too.

Joe Rouse (01:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, man, dude, I love annual planning. I'm exactly the same way. I probably get, I can get just as excited for quarterly. guess it depends on what quarter's coming up because at this point, you know, I think we know what quarters are tougher than others in our business and where you got to push harder and things. But the annual is so much more fun and fuels effective, fuels more optimistic because we can look back at that past stuff and plan for it this year. So the plan never goes 100%. But yeah, it's,

For me, just like you, it's the most optimistic time of the year for sure.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (01:36)
Yeah, agreed. It is. And every year, I'll be honest, every year over the last, I mean, I've probably done like legit annual planning for 12 years now. I've been doing goal setting, like personal goal setting since I was like 16 years old. So I always kind of had like the personal side figured out, that the business side for the last 12 years, I've kind of been focused on that. And I don't know if I've ever really been consistent personally on the process.

Joe Rouse (01:46)
Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (02:02)
until probably three years ago, I sat down and I wrote out like all the different processes I've learned from Darren Hardy, from fitness revolution, from all the different research I've done over the years of all of the annual goal setting kind of things. and I finally was like, okay, I'm going to sit down and like, here's the things that I enjoy about all the different processes I've done over the years and put it into one template. So the last three years I've been following like a pattern. but it's, it's been changed every year. only in this year changed.

even though I've been consistent last week this year, it changed because now every, all my annual planning I I'm putting into chat GPT. So like the questions and the prompts I usually do, I will, I'm give those all, I give all those to chat GPT and I said, Hey, I'm going to answer all these questions and then give me feedback on where I'm at with those. Um, and I've only, haven't done that for the business side yet. Today's technically the day that I do my business side. I'll be taking a four hour clarity break at the library focused on this.

I did it for my personal goals last night and I love the like initial feedback that has given me like, I love this part. Hey, really need to think through these goals. So I think the new addition I'm adding this year to my annual planning is putting it through AI and having AI give me feedback on how to like challenge those goals.

Joe Rouse (03:09)
Man, my annual planning has changed so much over the years. I we both came from the same spot with fitness revolution overall, like when we first started and that was kind of all we knew. then I, you know, I've gone through other processes, reading books, learning from other people, other mentors. And like the biggest change I've made over the years for my, for my one, for my first business specifically is, setting metric goals, but

I learned that when I set metric goals that are so detailed that it's down to how many leads I need, how many of those leads I can convert into trials or into new sales and then use that to extrapolate how much growth we should expect and all that stuff, that when I go that deep with it, I always end up disappointed because I'm too lofty, I'm too aggressive. Even looking at past data, I'll still set it the same way.

The big thing that's changed for me is when I set these metric goals now, I know about how many leads I can get every month because we've been open for 12 years. I know about how many people we can convert because I've got data on that, all that good stuff. So I don't have to increase that for the next year to get growth. I can keep it relatively the same and improve one aspect of that process and still get some growth. But we can still do different things or change the way we're doing things to grow revenue.

But like can set a revenue goal and realize, you know, I learned this from, I believe it was digitalmarketer.com, like with their dashboard and you know, you might set a goal and if you're regularly not hitting that goal in a business like mine, then we can update the goal. Like we can be more fluid with our goals. Like as long as expenses are covered, we've got profit and everybody's getting paid. Well, we can work on that, you know? And that's been the biggest thing for me is...

adjusting, probably adjusting numbers or metric goals every almost every quarter. Like looking at previous years using that data, but then looking at what we've done and adjusting our goals accordingly. I probably won't have to do it as much this year because last year was my first year really doing that. I think I've got it even more, you know, slightly more dialed in this year where I can set those goals more effectively, mostly revenue. But ⁓ that's been a big change for me. And I've settled into a process that I really enjoy.

And that was effective for us to where we like we beat revenue wise, we beat nine out of 12 months last year. Significant, you know, a good amount, a solid amount of revenue. and that was, that was a good annual plan year. I am also using AI, like right now I'm using AI to help me. I like to document, you know, like SOPs and AI does a great job of spitting that all out for me. So getting feedback and talking to it, but I think it's important with AI as we use that.

to make sure we tell it how blunt we need it to be with us and not just to be like, right along coach Joe, now you're thinking like a top level marketer. Here's what we're gonna do. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, Like it, cause it'll do that for every single thing I ask it. It's like, that's what you're doing that other gym owners aren't doing. Good job. Boom, boom. And then it starts listing everything. So I've had to make sure I update the tone with which it speaks to me. Or you could use, guess you could use somebody else's personality, but it was pretty interesting. Cause it actually prompted me with that the other day.

It asked me, said, would you rather me answer you in this way, this way, this way, or this way? Most of them, like some were slightly more direct than others, but it would be like direct and friendly, direct and nice, direct. So it was always still like a friendly thing to try to get you to love chat GPT.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (06:17)
Yeah, I actually.

Joe Rouse (06:17)
But I'm excited to see

how that added some sort of intelligence helps with annual planning. Because it could feed it previous data too.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (06:22)
Yeah, I've actually had

I have my voice set up as Alex Hormozi because I really respect him as a business guy. So I have it set up at that point. It does in a sense, I obviously know Hormozi's voice pretty well. like it does a pretty good job, but challenging me, obviously it'll never be Alex Hormozi. I think one thing that Alex does great job of is really thinking big picture, know, AI, I don't know if it can always think, you know, you have to, I have to get better.

Joe Rouse (06:30)
Does it work pretty well?

Yeah, that's a point.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (06:49)
prompting what I'm looking for for those things. But I mean, I think Alex has a better job, a big picture than AI does, but it does, it does try to do its best. It does pull out some things from a hundred million dollar leads or a hundred million dollar offers and stuff like that. But most of my business stuff goes through that. And then all my personal stuff is actually mama mentality. So it's Kobe. Like it's like all my, all my personal goals are like, you know, that's not, that's not mama mentality. You're not chasing that with all you got kind of stuff. I do love that like twist that, that you can put an AI.

Joe Rouse (07:15)
Yeah, it's been cool, man. It's like, I think some people could look at it and they could say, well, every time I use it, it's always just reinforcing everything that I want to do. Or they could say, you know, I tell it to be Alex Horomose and it just keeps pulling me back to $100 million leads or $100 million offers and it won't give me any other insight. So I don't use it. And I think that's, I think that would be stupid. I think that would be foolish. think that would be, I think that would be short-sighted because it's still massively helpful in such a time saver.

especially creating spreadsheets and things too as you're doing metrics.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (07:41)
yeah.

Well, for me, it's like, it's, it's my in-between. So I have a business coach, you have a business coach. It's like, it's my in-between between business coaching is like my annual plan. When I'm done with it, I'll send it off to my business coach, Nick Berry, and Nick will like pick it apart and give me feedback. Like, cause like that's the human perspective AI. I, in many ways, like the more, the longer, obviously AI is always changing. So who knows what it'll look like in five years from now, but the current version AI is just not human yet.

Joe Rouse (07:48)
Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (08:09)
Meaning like, that's good. Like is that the people that are like, Oh my God, AI is going to take over. was like, no, it's still completely feedback on whoever's feeding it the right prompts. Um, I was like, it's really not there yet. So like Nick can give me 10 times more advice in two minutes than AI can ever give me now. AI can streamline that advice and help me put it into practice pretty quickly, but they couldn't ever give me that advice that I get from them.

Joe Rouse (08:23)
Mm-hmm.

So let's go through this process. I think this is a good place to take the conversation. And you can ask me this after if you want to too. Specifically, if you can think of this in a procedural manner or almost like a policy, how exactly do you use, what are the steps with which you use AI to work on annual planning?

Brotherhood Beyond Business (08:48)
So let's, let's take that even. Yeah. Let's go broader picture where it's like, let's just talk annual planning with AI involved, but like, don't want to just be on AI because I want to start like, okay, let's start off with where does my annual planning begin? So my annual planning begins on the personal side, first business second. And that's a huge switch in probably the last five years for me, maybe the real last three years. ⁓ and it's like, I need to design my life before I designed my business. My business should fit my life. And that's been a,

Joe Rouse (08:49)
Like from beginning to...

Brotherhood Beyond Business (09:16)
mission switch for me, a passion based business model where it's like, okay, I built a business for, to make my lifestyle better realistically. Or that's why I always wanted to originally when we first start build businesses, you build them to be as big as you can be. And then once you start to realize that as a man, you want to just be the best man you can be and you want your business to support you and that's switched. So first I started off with the personal side of things. And so I go through, kind of have five main categories I look at on the

on the personal side of things. So my physical health, so fitness, right? Then there's family. And right now it's just me and my wife, but like my family goals for us, the things that we want to focus on, faith, like how to continue to work on my faith and develop my faith. Relationships, those would be technically outside of my wife. So I'm always trying to build like strong relationships with friends. And so that's an important component to me. And the last one for me as adventure driven life. And so like

having travel fun, having those kinds things. Those are currently the major buckets in my life for those five categories. There's other ones, every like we have our brotherhood, like, ⁓ wheel that has all, you know, 10 different domains you can focus on. Those are the main ones that I kind of focus on at this current point in my life. so I go through that on a personal perspective and I have prompts based on those personal perspectives, that I've gotten from annual planners over the years. And so those prompts will be like, okay, at the end of 2026,

Yeah. 2026 at the end of 2026. Um, what, what would be a disappointment if you got to the end of 2026 and this didn't happen. Right. So like for a fitness goal, it be like, um, my goal is I want to lose another 30 pounds this year. And so it's like, if I get to December 31st and I haven't lost that 30 pounds, that would be a huge disappointment. Right. So it's like, that's kind of like that, that's a big rock for me. Um, and so the different goals that you have set up through there. So I use those prompts to kind of help me focus on what the personal side of things are.

Joe Rouse (10:45)
Mhm.

Yeah, that's something.

don't think I started doing that. I I've always been really focused on the family because I had kids pretty young. So it's always been important to me, but I didn't add it into my annual planning until a few years ago when I got, have a big marker board on the wall right here with all 12 months. What I used to put up there is like BFP, family, Joe and Mel for me and my wife. Now I try to think of it, let me make sure I say this right. I've tried to just simplify this and make it easy to remember. It's like faith, family, fitness, future.

So they all start with F to simplify it. And basically all of the 10 domains that we work with with the Brotherhood pretty much would fit into one of those. And they help me plan stuff. Like faith is going to be focused on like we need to choose a church or I need to choose a church for my family this year because I didn't do it last year. We study our, we have biblical teachings in our homeschooling. And we have, that's part of what we have to consider with faith as well. But, and then family would be probably, that's what we're going to break down like

My son is about to be 18. I'm helping him plan his immediate future so that he does way better than I did when I was 18. And we talk about how long are you going to live here? When are we going to move out? What's your, you know, where are we going with school? Then what kind of job are we looking at? And he's been very good at thinking that way. Talk about cashflow, talk about budgeting. That would be under family. And then we also do family trips under that. And then there's also a section for just Melody and I to take trips and make sure we're doing specific things together.

and we'll have goals together and ⁓ her and I will talk about that briefly. I'll probably get much more detailed with it.

Fitness is gonna be mostly my competitive events to train for. And if I can rope my life into doing some, I will. And then ⁓ future is where we look at mostly is, most partially it's usually investing, because we're saving up to buy some real estate. And look at if we can increase those investments. Look at if we can increase investments in our retirement programs, like our IRAs, our, look at our joint brokerage account that we're saving in.

And now part of it has become with the way health insurance has increased, part of it has become putting money away for insurance or for health related emergencies rather than pushing all of our money into an insurance company where we're not using it because we're young and healthy. We've been looking in self-pay options at doctor's offices and all that good stuff. But then also like, do we want to consider buying a house in the near future because if our family is growing or if we've got to bring in a family member to live with us.

Those four categories tend to encompass everything for me. And takes a lot of brainstorming, but those are my categories. And then the first thing I do with annual planning is the, perfect day exercise. And it's not my perfect day 20 years from now. It's meant to be about a year from now. Like how often do I want to show up to BFP? How much work do I want to be doing with the brotherhood beyond business? You know, how much time am I spending with my kids each day? I've got some prompts that I go through.

And then I have put that into chat GPT this year to try to get feedback on it and help improve it. And it was cool because I gave it the prompt of, here's my prompt. I would also like to have other options in this as well. And I need ideas in it. It gave me some great ideas.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (13:56)
Yeah, that's where I find AI to be the strength is like, you give it the initial prompt and then you ask it to add to that idea or help you think through that idea more. And then you just respond to its prompts. I find that to be very valuable. know yesterday I put a bunch into my personal one that I'm working on and it gave me three prompts to think about, okay, that's great step one. Here's three things to think about.

Give yourself a whole day. Don't answer right now. Give yourself a whole day and answer these three prompts tomorrow. So I that was kind of cool that it was like, Hey, don't just like answer me right now. Give me some think through these ideas. One thing that I'm doing this year personally different than I have done in the past is I got my wife on board. I was telling you about this. I got my wife on board for annual planning this year. And so me and her, we ordered things called unsung hero, which is just like a yearly planner.

And then we also got the big ass calendar, which is a calendar you put on a wall and you can mark out like all your trips throughout the year. just kind of show like, here's our, here's our year in a snapshot, right? And here's where we have highs and lows, things going on and kind of plan out your year. so every single, our goal is the books come in this Wednesday, so tomorrow, and then this Saturday, we're going to, we're going to spend three hours just diving into our personal goals and planning it out as a, as a couple.

Joe Rouse (14:50)
I love that.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (15:09)
Obviously we have separate personal goals on certain things, but we have a lot of similar goals too. And so it's just, I'm very excited about that for annual planning this year is the annual plan, also then that weekly accountability that we'll have when we check in with each other with the goals once a week. But that's our new addition to our annual plan. I'll see how it goes. My wife has never been a goal setter. ⁓ she's not really motivated in that way. My wife's very like, not that she's not motivated, but she's very motivated by the one thing that she wants to work on, like her fitness or like that one thing. And she's all in on that thing. so.

Joe Rouse (15:27)
Yeah.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (15:37)
my goal is to kind of broaden her horizons a little bit. Cause right now I do kind of all the goal setting for our family. And like, here's the trips we're to do. I do kind of like, you know, I set it all up. And so it's like at the end of the year is like my best version of the year probably happened, but I don't know if it was her best version. She just kind of goes to call. Yeah, I'm very happy with what we did. So this year I'm really excited to have her involved in that process.

Joe Rouse (15:56)
Yeah, I would say my wife is almost exactly the same. It's something I'm going, I've always involved her, but it's with three kids, her working as a nurse and being a nutrition coach, we have to really carve out specific time for it. And it might come up on this, this little trip we're about to take for her birthday.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (15:58)
I mean, she do-

Yeah, it's, um, there's a business coach that used to have, uh, his name is Scott Carpenter and him and his wife did a weekly huddle. Um, and I thought it was really cool that they dedicated time and how consistent they were. have no idea, but the idea is, like, I know me and my wife don't have kids, so I don't really have an excuse right now. And so I want to get these things ingrained in our lifestyle before we do have kids. So it's like, here's like, you know, that huddle helped us out so much. So when we do have kids, this huddles about our planning, but also our family stuff, what's going on in our family. So our chance to like,

beyond the same page together every single week. So that way we have all these things going on this week. have these obstacles that our son or daughter are running into this week. So let's go ahead and work these out together first before those obstacles come up down the road. obviously that's me dreaming in a perfect world, but at the same time it's like, we are adopting, so we have about five years before we plan to adopt. And so because of that, it's like, okay, I've got time to practice and put these skills in place.

Joe Rouse (16:44)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Brotherhood Beyond Business (17:08)
put a little repetition and I'm obviously I'm being a high dreamer here. I know you, you probably as a father, probably it's not going to be that easy. And I also have 15 nephews and nieces. So I'm definitely familiar with that world too, but it just trying like, Hey, let's pull a little practice in play and see if we can at least put some good rhythms in so that when we do have kids, our rhythms are at least solid.

Joe Rouse (17:25)
I think that's perfect, dude. think if I was gonna go back and do something, that would be one of the first things I would do before we had kids. Because if you can have habit in place, then once, let's say you have several kids like we did, even doing that once a month is very, very beneficial to your marriage. Not just to goal setting and planning, but it's just beneficial to your marriage. It helps you grow closer together.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (17:46)
Agreed. Okay, cool. the first step for most people, guys, if you're doing annual planning is, especially as an entrepreneur, plan the best life that you want to have, the best personal life you want to have first every year. Because as we all know, as entrepreneurs, we're going to fall into the trap that the business isn't growing as fast or is growing fast. And now you're super excited and you want to put more gas on the fire and you're going to start sacrificing those personal goals for those.

but you need to set those up. These are the most biggest priorities and those go in my calendar first every single week. Then we put the business stuff in there second. And that's as entrepreneurs, we always find, I think it's because we get to be the hero all the time as an entrepreneur. And so it's like, Hey, this is something I can control a hundred percent. I don't have to have anybody else's feedback from this. I'm like in control here. I don't have to have my wife's schedule for this. I don't have any of these things, but it has been a transformation for me in the last three years to go personal first.

because I've hit a lot of personal goals over the last three years that I, so feedback for anybody is I punted on my personal life until I got married realistically. I just gave up on the personal life because I just, I didn't get married until I was 35, 36 maybe.

Joe Rouse (18:53)
What do you

feel like that led to? Like what big change took place in your life over the last few years outside of getting married?

Brotherhood Beyond Business (19:00)
Well, moving here. So moving to Arizona. Yeah, exactly. Getting more sun is like, was huge. Having adventure outside of, of, ⁓ so living in Chicago, ⁓ you can either work or you can pay to do activity, but there's like no, nothing you can do outside of that, right? Because it's like, there's just no free things to do in Chicago. It's just expensive. And there's just like concrete everywhere. Whereas here we live in the mountains. I can go hiking.

Joe Rouse (19:02)
Yeah, you move from Chicago to Arizona, right? You're like, I need more sun in my life.

Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (19:28)
within 10 minutes from our house are five amazing one hour hikes that take you like to a whole nother world. And they're 10 minutes from my house. And so for us, it is, it's incredible. And so it's like, when we don't do a hike on a weekend, it's kind of like, dude, we, do we waste a weekend? Because like, this is something we could, it's only a one hour hike and you can't make time for one hour hike. So we hike almost every single weekend. Um, if we don't have specific plans for the weekend and then it's like, you know, it's not like I'm picking these like four hour, 10 hour hikes. I'm just like, it's a one hour, like cardio hike.

Joe Rouse (19:36)
Amazing.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (19:56)
But it's gorgeous. And that has helped that personal side grow too. There's a lot more to life than just this. And then also getting in the mindset that we do want to have kids because forever we weren't going to have kids. And now we are going to go down that route. And it's super excited. Both of us are. But I think also setting our lifestyle up to like, when we do have kids, this is the kind of life we want to bring them into. This is the kind of people we want to be for our kids. And so for me, for Everest is like, how did I want... I want to be the greatest entrepreneur in history because my dad's an awesome entrepreneur.

Joe Rouse (20:08)
Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (20:25)
And so I had those standards and I want to be the greatest entrepreneur in history. kids weren't part of that equation and I wasn't married. So when I got married and kids still weren't part of that equation, I could still put a heck of a lot of effort into business that most people couldn't. Now that we're like, Hey, kids are part of the equation. It's like, cool. Now I need to adjust, become the man I want to be at home so that when I have kids that they can see, you know, as sons, they can see this is what my father, the standard he lives up to. Cause I love the standard my dad set for me. However, it's not the standard. wasn't a perfect standard. He set an entrepreneur standard and he's a great dad.

but his time with me was very limited versus like what other dads do. And so I want to be the father, like when my kid gets to this stage, I built a business that's awesome. He can be like, dude, dad, dad, done this awesome entrepreneur things, but also you're just a really good dad that invests time in me. And that's, want to make sure I build a lifestyle.

Joe Rouse (21:10)
Yeah, dude, those are the most important things. I'd argue, and I heard a stat somewhere that said one commonality among very successful couples or couples that last the longest is that they go for, they had different names for it, but it was a weekly walk. during the summer, my wife and I communicate much more than we tend to in the winter because of the weather. And you know, here we don't have a very long winter. This has actually been a colder winter than normal because it's been 30 the last few days in cold. But we just go for a walk with no agenda, with no plan.

and everything organically comes out. And because you're walking and exercising and breathing harder, tone is for me is softened because I tend to speak in the tone I'm talking in right now, which isn't an effective way to communicate with my wife. It's more of a business. You know what I mean? It's how I talk to other staff and business owners. And on that walk, everything changes. It just gets more relaxed. Like that's where we have the best. mean, I would, I'm sure those hikes, that's probably half the reason you feel that way about like, did we have a productive weekend or a good weekend?

There's probably some significant connection happening there on those hikes.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (22:06)
And we all, me and my wife do a nightly walk, a 30 minute nightly walk because our dog needs it. So like he, he has, he's just so rambunctious. He has to have that walk. And so that does help a lot. It devents her day because she's a teacher and teachers have a stressful day. And so it devents her day. And then we just, you know, connect a lot. So I do find the nightly walk and we, we've been unusually warm here where we've been 69 for like two straight weeks now in December. So it's been pretty awesome. Yeah.

Joe Rouse (22:10)
Mm-mm. Yeah.

Beautiful.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (22:31)
And so for us walking has been easy recently, but weather does affect it. But yeah, I agree that it's great connection time. Okay. So let's go ahead and dive into the business side of things. So personal's first get that dialed in, spend time on it. Don't, don't just push it to the side where it's like 10 minutes. I'm going to lose 10 pounds this year. Really like put as much effort into it as you put into your business side. It maybe won't take as long as your business side, but like as much effort should go into it. Like I'm going to work on the same prompts. My personal goal prompts are

probably more like the prompts themselves. I probably have more prompts for them than I have for my business side because the personal side I need, I have found I need to be, have things pulled out of me more than on the, on the business side. It's just ideas and generations always going. I need some more prompts to pull more thoughts out of me. So on the personal side, I just have more prompts than I do on the business side because the business side is naturally just exciting.

Joe Rouse (23:21)
And for me at this point, at 12 years of owning my business, the family side is where I get more creative. Because at this point in my career, I have a routine for the business annual review. And I follow it now. I've done it the last three years straight. And it's worked out well. We're not blowing up super fast, but there's significant growth financially or revenue-wise every year. Our staff stronger than it's ever been. You learn lots of things over the years. And so I have a pretty steady

like repeatable process for the business side of it. For me, it's that personal side where I get, now, nowadays I get way more ideas. like, I want to invest in property. want, should we do a, a HELOC on our home so that we can invest in property sooner? Should we get this land from a family member and see what we can develop there? Do I need to bring this family member into this piece of land so that they don't have to go into a nursing home? Like there's all these things going on in our lives right now. And that stuff kind of gets me excited. And then

I don't know if anything gets me more excited than vacations. And I don't mean vacations to like get away from work. We just love to travel together. It's probably outside of going on those walks, it's probably the only time that my wife and I can really connect these days with the ages of our kids. Cause now we have two that are two years apart and they're at an age where they're both playing sports, multiple sports sometimes at once. So, and then we have a kid who's getting ready to be a legal adult.

So there's all these things when we're here that take up our time, but these vacations, even if the kids are with us, those are what I get just jacked up for. I'm very optimistic about the business and excited for where the business is headed, but I've got such a good routine in for that. That faith, family, fitness, and future is probably where the ideas flow for me at this point. So essentially, we can feed off each other in that way, for sure.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (25:02)
Yeah, definitely. And I think that's one of the benefits of the brotherhood in the sense that like sometimes, ⁓ actually just talk to my business coach about this and he's like, you need more feedback on your annual goals, meaning like you need more than just your input to look at it. You need more than just your, like his input. You need almost more than just your business partner's input. He's like, you need a lot of input on your, on your intervals because he's like a year is a long time. Like it seems short, but it's like, it's a long time. You can do a lot of things in a year.

Joe Rouse (25:15)
Yeah.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (25:28)
And the more eyes and the more opinions you can get on that, just, it's not meant to change your inner goals. It's meant to like challenge you. Are these strong enough? Do they fit what you're trying to do? Um, and I thought that was kind of unique. Cause I never really thought about it that way. Cause I've kind of annual goals have kind of kept to myself for the most part. She's kind of like, here's the things I want to do versus like being challenged on like, is this enough? And so I think with the brotherhood, I know we talked about

Joe Rouse (25:28)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (25:49)
doing an annual planning in the future with the brotherhood as a, a, as a, as a brotherhood, I think it's a good thing to be challenged on that side. Like I said, we, you and me have different lifestyles, but you can still, challenge me on what my semi personal goals are and things I don't always share. And I think, ⁓ as we grow as entrepreneurs, getting more feedback from people on the personal and the business side is a good thing.

Joe Rouse (26:10)
Yeah, it's been impactful in my life to get that feedback from people, especially when it's in a structured manner or coming from another entrepreneur that can kind of speak the same language as you and understands that lonely at the top feeling. That's huge for me. And I've been getting so much more of that locally lately as we continue to build these local groups. I mean, I've got a guy interested in joining the Brotherhood who's a PT and they own a practice and we happen to, we've been talking back and forth and I ran into him at Lowe's like two days ago.

And he was having to buy like a washing machine because they have to wash towels at the business. And we got to talking about annual goals, buying health insurance. Should he, we literally got right into it in Lowe's for like a half an hour. Should he implement a facility fee on every patient that comes in of like 15 bucks to cover resistance bands, to cover wear and tear on machines and all that because he's beholden to insurance companies. So they need to be bringing in more revenue immediately this way.

It was just really, a really, really interesting discussion. And then that's leading to us having more discussion. Now he's reaching out to me and we're going to be scheduling some things to meet. But, ⁓ it's funny how formal conversations can be great. And when you got the right person in formal conversations for stuff like this are really great too.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (27:17)
Agree. Yeah. Um, so on the business side of things, we've spent most of the in a personal one. Let's dive into business quick. Um, so for me, this year has been unique and it's going to be unique today when I really dive into it. um, my business coach really challenged me this year on, sometimes I, I, I set too realistic of annual goals, meaning like, here's what I think we can hit versus like challenged myself to be like, this, this, this is what you think you can hit. How far do you think if you, if, if you took everything off your plate,

Joe Rouse (27:34)
Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (27:44)
If you just like went all in on something, how far could that reach? How, how, what's, what's that edge? What's that real stretch that you're at? And I've never been a person to be really into that stress thing. I think part of it, what we talked about earlier was like, when you miss a year or two on those things, like, man, like I missed so much. missed on those goals so much. Like I want to set more realistic goals. And I was challenged to be, that's not really the goal of annual goal planning. The annual goal planning is to help you like, ⁓ you know, the idea is like you can achieve

Joe Rouse (28:02)
That was me.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (28:12)
you can't achieve as much in a month as you think you can, but in a year you can achieve a crazy amount, right? And so it's like, what can you do to make that possible? So this year, especially on the brotherhood, my focus on annual planning this year is almost strictly on brotherhood because that's our major goal. And so it's like, if I want to grow the brotherhood, what's the maximum capacity I could get to by the end of this year? How many total people could I add? And what do I need to do in my everyday schedule to achieve that? Meaning like, okay,

So I have, ⁓ for everybody's perspective is I have the brotherhood. have level up, which is a, an SEO company and then game change performance, game change performance. So our fitness facility, have very little, I have to do with that. Not a lot of responsibility. So that's like maybe four hours a month. So I don't really think of that too much in there level up though, does dominate most of my time. And then there's the brotherhood. And so this year though, the brotherhood is our main vehicle. That's the thing that is my passion project. That's what I think has the greatest potential. And by far.

Like just wakes me up excited to do things. SEO is cool. can do, we are amazing at SEO, but it does not move the needle in excitement by any means in my life. It's just a good profit tool that we are good at. And so the brotherhood is the thing. And so this year I'm really challenging myself in annual planning to be like, what does this look like? How far, if I, if I was to dream, if I was a dream, could I get to a hundred members by the end of the year? Now I'm just throwing out random numbers. I haven't thought about them at all, but like the idea is like a hundred with my original goal is like, I'm going to add 20 people this year.

Joe Rouse (29:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (29:32)
And it's like, why only 20? Cause I knew 20, 20 members is like, if, if everything works out perfect, I have like maybe 10 hours a week for the brotherhood. And so that's true. Then I could only probably get, you know, two members a month or something of that nature. And it's like, well, he kind of the script script. If brotherhood is really what you want to do, what if you could do everything in your power to make level up to be like only two hours a week of your time, you're just checking in with virtual assistants that can do this stuff for you. What if that happened? And so now you have.

How big could the brother be now? Could what if you could take Joe and me and have them have an, you know, a few hours a week that they spend on the brotherhood so then they can grow chambers. So what if Trevor, you could, you could get to 50 members in your group and joke, we get to 10 and, and, and Nick get to 10 let's instead of 20 overall goal. Maybe your goal now is 70 total people. He's like, what does 70 total people in the brotherhood? What does that change the trajectory of the brotherhood?

Joe Rouse (30:20)
Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (30:24)
And that was in one year because you actually focused on that thing versus having it as a side little thing you're doing. That was like, that's really been a, you know, this is why input on annual planning is important is because that changed my perspective where I'm going to chase after this year because I'm going to be chasing those big, a big hairy audacious goal with forcing myself to focus.

Joe Rouse (30:43)
Dude, I'm so pumped about it. can't wait because I'm excited to grow the brotherhood too. And to see you go more all in on it is only going to raise me up and get me doing it more too. ⁓ And we'll talk about that as we get in our annual planning for that. But I'm super pumped about it. I can't wait. I think for me, go ahead.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (30:57)
mean, I was just talking to Nate

yesterday, my other business partner in this, and he was like, you know, it's just some, we're just, God's done that mission for us, right? And he's like, in this moment, in the last two weeks, he's felt like the brotherhood's finally becoming this real thing. And I know you and me both talked about that too. like, this is something that is a real mission and God just keeps pouring on my heart every single time I turn my head away from it to work on something else.

hold it back like, dude, there's this other stuff going on really good. Stop getting distracted by this other like little, um, these little rocks over here, these little pebbles, quit playing with those pebbles and go after these big, you know, the big rocks that are filling in the canister. Right. Um, so I just like, with that in mind is like, is when you know, and you're, especially when you're, you're getting ready for annual planning and these things are on your heart a lot. It's like, man, this is my time to really set myself up for what I, at the end of 2026, if this happened, I would be extremely happy.

Joe Rouse (31:43)
Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (31:49)
And it's like, if if level up grew by like, let's say $15,000 a month, a month over this next year, that'd be great financially for us. And I wouldn't probably be any happier. It might be a little bit more stress because there'd be a lot more like everyday stuff on my plate. Yeah. Whereas with the brotherhood grew by that much this next year, I would be ecstatic and I'd be the happiest entrepreneur on earth.

Joe Rouse (32:01)
people to take care of.

I'd be right there with you. It's a talk about it being on your heart. And this was the first, the last few months was the first time that I felt called like something pulling at me to start reaching out to other men in the area that are business owners just to go have coffee. And it all started from me considering buying some land for BFP that I was going to build on that ended up getting sold before I took action.

But that led to me starting to network. And then I realized as I'm talking to these individuals that they could use something like this. Like this is a need in our area. And the more I talk to them, the more I realize it. And as I let them know what it is that we do and how we do it and how we've been doing this for, how we've been refining this process for over 10 years.

and how we've had multiple business coaches. We've worked, mean, between us, we've probably worked with six different business coaching companies over the last several years. And we have insight from other people who've worked with other business coaching companies. And we know what people like us need and what can be fulfilling for them from something like this. And I've learned how locally it's a big need. And I just continue to feel pulled. Like there's no, there's no imposter syndrome anymore.

There's nothing. It's this urge, this pulling, like something like God is telling me to start networking and talking to other men locally who are business owners because we have something that we've been doing for years that they could benefit from. And we can benefit from it on our side too, the way that we run these groups. So I'm more excited about it. I think 2026 is going be a big, big year for the Brotherhood.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (33:45)
Agreed. I'm going have you dive into your annual planning process because I feel like you, yours is a little bit more metric folk focused and mine's not metric folks focused, which is not good either. have some, I'm trying to get better at my metric goals. think partially is because like with the brotherhood and stuff, my metric goals are erroneous right now. I don't have data, right? I don't have data. They've got nowhere to go. And so I'd love to start off with yours. I think that'd be very valuable to help listeners.

Joe Rouse (34:05)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so for me with my goals specifically on my fitness business, we start with something called a perfect day exercise. And I don't want to do a perfect day like 20 years from now. I just want to do about a year, maybe two years out from now. It doesn't mean I don't spend time thinking about five years or 10 years, but for the business, it's one year because I'm going to be setting goals for the next year. That's what works really well for me. It's what works really well for a lot of other business owners.

With the perfect day, have questions that are asked, like how much time would you spend with your kids? Would you be able to pick them up from school? How many hours per week would you physically be in your business? How many hours per week would you physically work on your business? As well as some other things that kind of dial into more the personal side of things as well. It also includes like, do you want to renovate a room in your house this year? Do you need to buy a new vehicle?

Do you need to update the bathrooms at your business? you, so those things, and then we start with how much money do I need to make to achieve my personal life? What is the net benefit that I need to pull from my business for tax purposes, partially, but also so that we can accomplish the trips that we want to take as a couple, the trips that we want to take as a family, the potential to continue investing in real estate and life insurance, things like that. How much money do I need to make?

So we start there with net owner benefit. Then we look at, okay, in order to hit that, how much revenue, gross, does the business need to bring in? And then from there, I go real heavy into metrics from a budgeting standpoint because I was not taught cashflow habits growing up. So I've had to learn from you and from other people over the last few years to improve my cashflow.

and it's become something that's a priority to me. And this past year, I was very diligent in tracking every single expense, every single month on a spreadsheet and knowing where pretty much every dollar went. And I was very close to being 100 % accurate with it. So that's my next step. Once I know how much money I need to make, how much money the business needs to make, then I want to look at percentages. This is kind of from profit first, but it's not exactly profit first. I'm to look at

How much should payroll, should staff pay take up? How much, what percentage of the revenue should net owner benefit be or will it be? Then I'm going to look at operating expenses and I might have a couple categories under that. And then taxes. Those are my four. Some people like to have more than that. Some people like to have less, but most everything else is going to fall under fixed or variable expenses within operating expenses. And I set percentage goals to try to hit. So that's a big change to my spreadsheet this year is just

It's going to be green when I'm in the right percentage each month. It's going to be red when it's not. I was originally going to do daily. It's probably going to be every Friday. I'm going to be inputting expenses throughout the month rather than just looking at what I spent at the end of the month. So I've been very diligent over the last few years about watching revenue proactively.

rather than reactively so I know what we need, what we need to do to accomplish that revenue goal each month before we even get close to it. This year it's more about expenses and the budget. So I'm gonna be more proactive rather than reactive with the expenses and the budget. Like I could set a budget and then I could put numbers in at the end of the month and that teaches me things and spending habits. But this year I'm getting ahead of that and I'll be every Friday entering the expenses that have already come out.

and I'll know where we're at. I've also got it budgeted. So that way I can plan better for like, need new rubber flooring in the whole facility at Breakaway. That stuff's old now. So that's a four to $5,000 expense. So things like that I got to plan for. And then it allows me to plan over the year for increasing investment opportunities as well. So that's my, probably the most time consuming part of my business planning is the budgeting, creating, if I have to create a new spreadsheet,

tend to get lost in that sometimes. But the budgeting and those numbers. Some other numbers that I'll set goals for outside of net owner benefit and gross revenue, look at increasing our average revenue per member, making sure that we have a ceiling or goal set for leg or the length of engagement for a member. And then total members is in there, but I'm more worried about average revenue per member and gross revenue than I am anything.

Those are the main ones. I'll get deeper into that with staff and stuff, but my general manager will end up having to own most of that. that's where I spend most of my time, is those financial metrics. I don't dive as deep anymore into like, okay, last year I had this many leads, we closed this many, that means I need this many this year. Because I just haven't found that to be consistent with the way Facebook ads change, with the way Google ads change. So I'll set goals based on what I know I can get.

and then work on dialing in my sales process, you know, maybe adding another poll to the water, but making sure my foundational habits are in place. And then from there, the next step is looking at last year's marketing calendar and looking at the wins and losses. So wins might be that for the first time last year in January, we ran ads targeted at the youth population for our youth performance training. And that was the first time we'd ever done that. And they rocked. Like we absolutely crushed our highest revenue of the year was January.

which cause there's not a lot of outdoor sports going on in January. So I'll go through my marketing counter, look at wins and losses from last year. I'll take all the wins, put them in this year and I'll simplify it down as much as possible. And that's most of my business planning. Outside of that, once that's done, then my general manager and I have a day where we get away, whether we rent a space or we go to a coffee shop, like we have a space in a coffee shop this year and we'll

We'll plan out some of the things that he can be more involved in that fit within the annual plan that I created. you know, programming, what's he going to do for our staff? When are we going to have outings? When are we going to audit our staff? When are we going to do reviews this year? Stuff like that. And then he gets involved in it he can take ownership in it. And it gets him away. I'll tell you, we'll go out to lunch, depending on the day, might have a drink, something like that. that's, that's the business part and the metrics part for me. Also.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (39:48)
Yeah, I love it.

Joe Rouse (39:49)
I have,

I probably need to go here in just a minute because I got an appointment at like 9.30. I meant to tell you.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (39:54)
Totally fine.

Yeah. So I'm, I'm for the most part, most of the I want to talk about was on a personal side. The last thing I kind of leave us with was something that you said there was one, if you have other staff members or other business partners, it's important to make sure that you set up time to do some planning. might do a lot of planning on your own, but then bring them together to reflect on the planning, to challenge the planning. And then for me, the big thing is I, so I,

Joe Rouse (40:17)
yeah.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (40:21)
I work from home, so it's pretty quiet here in general, but I can't do my annual planning here because I'll get distracted on things. I've got like, I'm today, I rented the library for four hours and so four hours shutting everything off. Only thing I have is my laptop for chat, GBT pretty much. And then outside of that, it's just going to be a notebook. And it's just like me with my thoughts and my dreams and stuff of that nature. ⁓ because you need that dedicated time that this is a legit thing. It's not something I'm kind of doing on the side. This is really, really, really important to our business right now.

So if you're somebody that's getting ready for annual planning or you've never done annual planning, like try, just doing it in general is important. But like if you can get some private time would be awesome. Find a way to get away from everything you're doing out of your comfort zone. And then also making sure that you reflect that off of somebody when you're done with it to challenge you to see if that's a reasonable goal. Maybe if you didn't push yourself hard enough, that kind of stuff.

Joe Rouse (40:55)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And then, I mean, depending on the business you have, it's always worthwhile presenting that to your staff too. It doesn't mean the staff's necessarily allowed to change it because their perspective is so different. That probably depends on the business, but you can get them involved and without getting overly complicated, they could potentially add to it or they can take ownership over part of it. And then in my business, it'll be about presenting them with opportunities to make more money too. That's where we get them involved is what they're going to own to grow, to make

to make the pie bigger so that they can get a bigger piece of that pie.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (41:43)
Yeah. Sharing revenue goals are only valuable if you have a way to help whoever you're sharing revenue goals with to make more money. Cause you're just saying, we're going to grow by like 10 million this year, but I'm not going to pay you guys anything more. They don't want to know about that. So you need to make sure that like when you, but I do agree that having them, especially like using fitness as example, having your coaches involved in like, how do I become either part from part-time to full-time? Like, is there a possibility? How would I do this? Or how do I get my

get more hours or how do I make my hours worth more money? I think that's super valuable because they do have a way they can affect that. so it's some, mean, if your business allows it, they have a way they can affect it. And that's just encouraging and motivating them doing a little annual planning in a sense for them to be like, this is what we need to do to accomplish that. And then you can set up a process with them throughout the year to like check in on how they're doing for it. I do, I just, the more I've gotten in it, annual planning forever was really just me and my thoughts.

Joe Rouse (42:22)
Mm-hmm.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (42:39)
And now I'm working really hard on not making it just about me, about everybody else that's involved. Cause I thought as an entrepreneur, as a leader, I should be the person that guides all of this. And I think I've gotten more to the point that like, Hey, like I can only give so much input. I've got to get feedback and stuff to make sure that I'm touching all these other components that need to be touched.

Joe Rouse (42:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And the pro tip is use AI to help you create a process for it so that you can duplicate it the next year or tweak it how you need to.

Brotherhood Beyond Business (43:03)
Agreed.

All right guys, ⁓ moving through a lot over the last 50 minutes roughly. So I am gonna add our annual planner download to the link below so you can go ahead and download it for free. That's just what I've used over the last couple years. I'll put it in there. I'm actually gonna make a new Canva version of it where I can change that link in the future. What's on that so that way we can continue as me and Joe continue to tweak our processes. I can continue to update that and make that like an ongoing guide but for now it's just a PDF download.

But in the future, I do want to make it so we can continue like this goal setting and changing does change over time. These little tweaks make it more valuable as you learn things. And I want to make sure you guys get the updates in the future, too. Thanks for jumping in our podcast. Have a great day.

Joe Rouse (43:36)
Mm-hmm.