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What can you do NOW to set yourself for an amazing 2026?

In this episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of the audit I run at the end of every year, starting with vision forecasting and moving through offers, process, people, and profit.

This is about pausing and looking at your business with a clean slate – before planning what’s next.

Key Takeaways

• The end of the year doesn’t have to be chaotic or pressure-filled
• You should question everything in your business
• Leadership requires space

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Remember that problems and challenges are where the biggest opportunities are in the company. Challenges are where the profit and the money is. You solve those challenges and you uplevel that problem that you found and you’re going to make more money. Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within.

Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an incredible week, the last few weeks of the year, which is actually what I wanna talk about today. I thought it would be fun to give you guys a perspective of some things that I do and the end of the year for the company and with my leadership.

And just like conversations we have questions that we ask, things that we look at at the end of every year and where we put some focus. But the first thing I wanna say before I dive into that is I just created an audio for our obsessed membership every week. There is a little audio drop I give people with prompts, and I thought this was a good kind of piece that I could bring into this as well, which if, by the way, you wanna be in our obsessed membership, it’s only $7 a month and there’s so many amazing things in there from the audio that I drop every week to a monthly workshop, and it’s just an incredible community.

You can find that embodiedmarketing.com/obsessed. Anyways, one thing that I said to them this week is I want. To be the invitation for you to pause for a second. There is so much noise at the end of the year on. The need to finish the year strong, but also make sure you’re present for your family and don’t miss out on the holiday magic, but also you gotta plan all of the next year.

And there’s just so much more pressure. And then I think with that becomes the guilt of am I enjoying this enough? Especially if you’re a parent. Which I relate to so much. It’s am I enjoying, the holidays? Am I doing enough? Am I creating enough magic for them? And I love the holidays and I love watching it through my kids’ eyes.

But I think that with that comes this like constant pressure and let this be an invitation not to be like, let me pile on more things for you to do at the end of the year on top of the holidays. But let me. Give you the permission to pause for a second and come back to yourself, like pause and recenter, because I think in this time period at the end of the year, it’s really easy to get away from that and allow your day to dictate the way that everything is and become really reactive versus centered and intentional.

And the end of the year doesn’t actually have to be about. Oh, I don’t have enough time and let’s put myself in this grind and this pressure. But I feel like on the flip side of that, it also doesn’t have to mean that you don’t do anything. If that’s what you wanna do, great. I know people that like to take off the last few weeks of the year and just not work at all.

Cool. If that’s your vision, then that’s awesome if that’s what you do, but I know for me it’s how do I. Stay present in both sides of my life, the business and the things I do like to do at the end of the year, and also for my family during the holidays, and not create guilt on either side. What does that look like and what does that energy allocation look like and how can I bring intentionality to that?

So that’s my invitation to you guys as well is think about coming from the space of presence and intentionality versus chaos and let me pack all of this in and really feel guilt and like I’m not doing enough on either side. And then just wanna be like, screw it. I’m just gonna sit on the couch for the rest of the year.

So let me be that voice for you when there’s so many people out there telling you the things that you’re missing. And if you don’t have this, like everything’s gonna fall apart. And on the flip side of that, I’m also not saying Hey, do nothing for the last few weeks unless that’s what you wanna do.

It’s okay to work. Like it is okay to be working on your next year and to feel excited for that and still be a good parent and still show up for your family how you want. You can do both and you can have both of those things, but it takes a real conversation with yourself around energy and time allocation.

The other thing that I thought this weekend I had a great weekend with my kids and took them to do really fun holiday stuff and just soak it in. It was a rare weekend that we didn’t have sports, so that was fun. But my kids are obviously counting down the days until Christmas just like I did as a kid.

And it’s funny because their perspective as a kid is 10 days, 11 days is a really long time. They’re like, oh my God, still 10 more days until Christmas. That’s so long. And I’m like, are you kidding? I have to still shop. That’s not enough time. My go-to reaction is ah, it’s already December, whatever, and we don’t have a lot of time.

But it’s interesting for to to think about that because. On one hand, like kids think it’s a really long time. We think it’s a really short time and time is really just what we make it, right? Like I know that there is the logistics of kids don’t have to do anything, but wait for Christmas.

And we have to, we create the magic and there is a lot of things that we have to quote do. But what if you got yourself out of that narrative? What if you were like, this year doesn’t have to be about how little time there is. What would it look like if it was spacious? Like really sit with that. Okay. On that note.

Here are some things that I do at the end of the year for my company. I think it’s a great time for reflection and planning. I love doing that, and as I preface with all of this is not to give you more things to do. It’s hopefully to bring more clarity to maybe what you’re already doing or give you permission to create the space to just sit with some of these questions instead of be so on the grind of your company, like especially the last week of the year.

Unless you want to take it all the way off. I love, this reflection now because. Some of my team is off during that time, and these are a lot of like leadership team conversations. This is what we do. Which is really an audit and a future vision forecasting. And so for me, the end of the year is a great time to pause and take a few steps back and go where are the places that I haven’t looked at in the business all year?

Or questioned or said, if there was a clean slate, like what would that look like? Because a lot of times in your business you have areas of the business or people in the business or processes that become so regular that you don’t question them. But yet things have evolved and either things slipped away how they had been done, or there’s a better way to do them now.

So one of the first things that we do is clean slate of just dreaming. Like where do we see ourselves going in the next year? And this is the conversation that I have with my leadership team is, yes, like what’s our financial goal next year? But also, where do we see the industry going?

Where do we see the things in our company now that are working that we wanna do more of? Where do we see a need to lean in and where do we see a need to lean out and what does our dream year look like as a company in terms of yes, revenue, but also what we’re doing and, where we’re putting our time and energy and like what we’re building because when you are synced up on that from the leader, from the CEO down, whether your team is one or two people to my team of 20 people, like when you’re synced up on that, it is so powerful, but it can become fragmented throughout the year as.

Naturally things happen where you’re focused on this, but then this thing happens. You shift your focus and just, that’s just the way it goes. So we paused and we had a leadership conversation around where I see the industry going. Where I see our clients needing more and more support, like what is happening with ai, what’s happening with media?

The direction that we wanna go, what went really well for us this year? And not just what went well in terms of like numbers, yes, but also what didn’t feel like work, what felt like electric magic energy, that we want more of that in. This next year. And so we really sat down and what that does is it makes you pause and go, let me think about our offers.

Let me think about the way we serve clients. Let me think about how we position our company. Let’s look at all these things and overturn the stones that haven’t been looked at in a. And I think we all get into that place, right? Because a year is actually not that long of a time and it can go by so fast and all of a sudden it’s been a year and you haven’t looked at, Hey, is there a better way for me to deliver this in my offer?

Or is there a better way for me to position this? Or based on what people are saying right now in the market or where I see things going, we need to re-look at this. So that’s the first thing is we sit down and we have that vision forecasting both the specifics in terms of numbers. But then also the vision of me saying this is our mission.

I am the leader, I am the visionary of this company, and this is our bigger mission. We re-look at our values, our company values, and we go, do all of these still align? Is there something missing? Is there something we need to add or take away? And so we start with that, which is like the foundation of your company, right?

Your mission, your values. What you’re doing and especially why you’re doing it. So we start there and then we go to the next layer. After revisiting the vision, we can go, okay, what is working and what is not working? And it’s really important that you revisit the vision from a fresh slate. Not like not thinking about anything that’s working or not working.

But I say this because we had a conversation where we were like, okay, this is the vision, right? This is the vision of where we’re going, which we’ve got some really exciting things in that vision based on where I see the industry going. And that caused us to go, okay, if we were to say put our offers that exist right now into this box over here, and then ask ourselves the question, if this is the vision, what would be the perfect offers and the perfect structure to support that vision?

You wanna separate those two to start so that you are not forcing yourself into a corner that you don’t need to be forced into. If that makes sense. Like it’s okay to leverage, obviously, data from your company and what has worked this year and what hasn’t worked, but you don’t wanna go into the line of I have to fit in this box or I’m backed into this corner because I have this offer, because I’ve done this, or because I’ve put energy into this.

You wanna give yourself that freedom to be like, if we had the freedom to reimagine things, would we still do the same thing? And so what came up for us, the next thing is that we looked at what has worked this year, what has not worked, and not just in terms of marketing, but also client delivery.

We have conversations around who are our very best clients? Who are our most successful clients? Why? What worked there, what didn’t work? What worked in the positioning and the messaging of attracting those clients and looking at all of that and then going, okay, if we want more of this, then how do we call that in and not backing ourselves into that corner of.

It has to be this way. What usually happens is we find a lot of things stay the same, but then there’s a few things that we can adjust. So we have the conversation, what worked, what didn’t work, what do we wanna do more of? What do we wanna do less of? If we look at our company resources, our time. Our energy, the money, is there places that we’re putting it that maybe aren’t moving the needle as much as other places?

So it’s an audit, it’s a time, energy, money audit of my time and also the company’s time and resources and the team’s time and resources. The next layer after that is we dig more into the details. So these are the things that I start looking at and asking questions. And it’s at the end of the year when you wanna get rid of stuff in your house and clean it out and organize it and reset.

That’s what it feels like in the business. And looking at process. Looking at people like, who do we need more support with and do we have this structured in the best way possible to leverage the team to be leveraging people’s experience the best? What positions are we maybe missing and asking those questions and then profit in the finances.

And so what we do is we go through each department and we re-look at our process. So we re-look at yeah, the SOPs the step-by-step process. And number one, is it documented correctly? Number two, is it the best way? So I’ll give you an example. In our Ignite program, there was, there’s one constraint that we want to improve, which is the time it’s taking to get somebody from.

They sign up to, they have their strategy call, and what’s happening is people are taking longer than we want them to actually fill out the information that they need for their strategy call. They’re ta they’re sitting in the portion of answering questions to get their messaging strategy and their intake form too long.

So we looked at this and we have a conversation as a team, and we go, okay, what we’re gonna do is on their onboarding call, we’re gonna book their strategy call. And tell them, Hey, you need to set aside two hours in between now and this date to finish this and your strategy call is already booked. So just cleaning up those little things in our process of okay, instead of just going status quo in our process, in our delivery, in our company, onboarding or our, not our company onboarding, but our overall company operations, where can we question it?

And that is the biggest thing. I think that is also one of the biggest jobs of A CEO is questioning. It’s like you could reference Elon like walking the factory floor, asking the questions, digging, overturning the stones, picking things apart so that you can go, here’s a better way and. Let’s ideate this.

Let’s improve this because what will happen if you don’t do this is your team’s just gonna keep doing it the way it’s been. Y your team will never ask questions like the CEO will. ’cause they have a different vision. Like they have a different viewpoint. They are in the day to day they are. Boots on the ground executing day in and day out.

A lot of times very task oriented and step oriented. Where we are up here and we’re vision oriented and so we can question these things. So we go through all the components of our company from. Client delivery on our Done for you, on our done with you to the membership to marketing to like team process and team onboarding.

And it’s a lot like, we’re not gonna finish this in two weeks, but we go through and we go, where are the gaps? What needs to be reimagined? What can be improved? What can get more efficient? Right now we’re looking at like, where’s there room for automation? Where is there room for ai? The bigger the company you have, the harder it is to bring in that automation and bring in that efficiency.

We will do that, and then we will decide, okay, does this need to be a whole project or is it a small tweak? That tweak that we made on booking the strategy call on their onboarding call was one day change, like immediate change. It’s been implemented today and we just have to update the process.

But where. Are the areas of your company that you haven’t questioned from? Yes. Marketing, but also delivery and day-to-day operations. And do you need to redocument it and do you need to change it? Don’t just fall to status quo and kind of complacency of, oh, that’s just how it was. So that’s the first piece on process.

The next one is people. So as a leadership team, we look at the whole team and we go, okay, first of all, one of the most important things is everyone on this team in alignment with company values? Is everyone operating and we feel is the right fit for this team? And then we also look at where’s there’s gaps.

Like where are we not leveraging someone to their fullest? Skillset and their fullest strength. Where are we missing support that’s costing us more than the support would cost us? Like where do we have a gap? Where do we have a lack of efficiency? Like where are we not utilizing a role or a department or a process the way that we can?

People and team are one of the biggest. Drivers to accompany success for sure, so important to have incredible people surrounding your company. And so you wanna make sure you’re setting the people up for success with the right process, but also are you leveraging their expertise. So we will have conversations, the managers will talk with team members and say, what are you loving doing in your job?

What do you wanna do more of next year? Is there an area that you’re interested in that we’re not leveraging? Because where people are passionate and it doesn’t feel like work is a sweet spot of what you would like to leverage? I’m not saying make everyone’s job fun all the time, but people’s passion, I always wanna leverage.

So even when I hire people, I ask the question like, what do you love doing? What do you love doing that does not feel like work? ’cause I want that in people in their roles. We’ll have conversations with different team members going, what do you love about your job? What’s the hardest part about your job?

Like where’s the constraints? Where’s the struggles? What feels really forced? What feels like, you’re up against a wall or walking through mud, and where are those constraints? And then is there something you’re excited about or. Skillset or a passion or something new that we’re not currently leveraging.

And that just gives us intel to go, okay, like maybe we have this open role over here that we should move this person to, and then hire for their role. Or maybe we have the capacity to split their role, half doing this and half doing that, or whatever. So auditing people, not in the sense of they stay, they go, but auditing people also in the sense of leverage, are you leveraging.

The way you should be because again, over a period of time things shift and change. Like when we change our offers or we change how we deliver clients or we change priorities in a company, sometimes what we hired somebody for has changed. And so you gotta audit that. You gotta reset that going into the new year.

And then another thing with people is does everyone have very clear KPIs going into the new year? Do they know for sure? Even with anything that’s changed this year. This is success. This is not success in your role. People thrive off that, right? Everybody wants to know, am I being successful? Am I doing a good job?

So what are the metrics that they’re reporting on that you are looking at? It gives people a sense of security and safety. And then the last thing I look at is profit. So I go through with my. My financial support, my bookkeeper slash kind of finance strategist, look at all my softwares, all of our expenses.

I get advice on Hey, this is this expense went up this year in this department or this team these costs, are off or the margin doesn’t look good. Like I go through and I look at. Yeah, definitely subscriptions and softwares, but also here’s where there was a big difference from one year to the next.

’cause that’s really important for you to go, like why did that happen? And did that create more profit for us? More revenue? Or was it just us spending more? So I go through that and then we end up making financial projections for the next year. So we say, here’s our goal for the next year, and then we break it down by month.

And also what does that mean for sales? So we have a certain target going into January saying this is our revenue target and in order to hit that we need to sell this. Many of our program, this many of our done for you. And sometimes we have to make it up one way or we don’t hit it exact, but it gives us all a target of okay, now we back the marketing strategy up to hit these targets.

So definitely auditing finances and looking at, all the places where the money’s going out, the bigger the company, the more important this gets because it can be really easy to have expenses rise and not realize it, or not realize if the expenses are paying off or not. And what I can tell you is.

You as the CEO and then a financial support. Depending on the level of your company, what level of finance support you’ll need are going to care more about this than anybody else on the team. Like it’s really easy for team members to sign up for subscriptions and add expenses and add costs.

You’ve gotta audit it. So all in all, at the end of the year, my role with my team is to step out of the day to day, cast the vision and really make sure that is clear going into the new year. Then it’s to ask the questions and audit and overturn all the stones possible to make sure we have. Looked at all the areas that we maybe haven’t this last year, and then align the two, align the vision with the actions, clean up the process, clean up any, bloat financially or bloat within our process efficiency or our team, and make decisions from there.

And then that gives us such clarity on the projects we are working on where we’re allocating time and energy and that is the most valuable thing. That you do for a company is your time and energy and money allocation and how intentional and strategic that is. And it’s a constant question you should be looking at is have I.

Made the most leverage here, and that is the CEO’s job. Regardless if your team is like one or two people or you, or 20 plus people, you still have to continually ask these questions. So give yourself that space at the end of the year to reflect, to ask questions, to dig around a little bit in your company and not make it turn into an overwhelming, stressful thing.

But one thing to remember is like if you do this and you find problems, remember that problems and challenges are where the biggest opportunities are in the company. Challenges are where the profit and the money is, you solve those challenges and you uplevel that problem that you found and you’re going to make more money.

So it’s actually exciting when you do find those things. All right everybody. I hope this gave you the opportunity to take a breath, recenter yourself before you know the holidays continue. Holiday season continues and gives you some ideas of ways that you can really audit and strategize for next year without adding chaos and noise and overwhelm.

Thank you so much for tuning in. I’ll talk to you guys next time.