Part 2 in our planning series. And it's another long one... feel free to bookmark for future reference.

Missed Part 1? Review the Reality of your Year.​

One of my clients is in Year 2 of building her business. She spent her first year heads down in fractional consulting. Now, in Year 2, she’s been planting major seeds—establishing her LinkedIn authority, doing serious networking—and is starting to see interesting prospects, both in areas she expected and in new directions she didn’t.

In our last meeting, she asked, “Jessica, what do you think will happen in Year 3 of my business?”

My response: “You’re still too early to know that. You’re at the stage where something is likely to happen. You’ve been doing the work for that. We just don’t know what.”

And for planners—people who want concrete goals—that can feel deeply frustrating.

What do you mean you can’t just set a revenue goal and work backwards?

That’s exactly why, before setting any goals, we need to understand our context:

1. Your stage of business
2. Your actual capacity
3. Your place (and desire) in the Zone of Enoughness

Your Stage of Business

As we covered last week, most “planning processes” come from corporate environments: set a revenue target, reverse-engineer the steps, execute the plan.

But that approach only works once you have data about what actually works in your business.

In the first few years, you don’t yet know where your business reliably comes from, which offers you enjoy delivering, or which parts of your point of view resonate most. So it’s hard to draw a straight line from “do these activities” to “get these results”.

You can absolutely make money in your first few years.

But building a business with consistent, repeatable patterns you can rely on for planning purposes? That typically takes a lot longer than you might expect.

If you’re in the Seed/Sprout stage (typically at least Years 1–3 of intentional building):

• You’re testing what resonates
• You’re building relationships and visibility
• You’re clarifying your point of view
• You’re gathering data about what leads to clients
• You’re learning how you like to market, sell, and deliver

Your job here isn’t to predict results—it’s to plant seeds, watch what sprouts, and begin learning your patterns.

I can tell you with certainty that if you plant consistently, something will happen.

I cannot tell you with certainty what will happen, because you don’t have enough patterns yet.

If you’re in the Strengthen/Scale stage (typically no earlier than Year 4):

• You have observable patterns
• You know which marketing approaches result in inquiries
• You do those marketing activities on a regular, measured basis
• You understand your conversion rates and sales cycle
• You know which offers are profitable and who they’re best for

Now you can make informed projections and know where to focus:

How to use this in planning:

Seed/Sprout: Focus plans and goals on the process of planting seeds and measuring early signals—not predicting the harvest.

Strengthen/Scale: Use your data to make deliberate commitments and improvements, based on what you’re observing.

Not sure which stage you’re in? Take the Stage of Business Quiz →​

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Your Capacity

Here’s what most business plans for growth look like: Add that weekly newsletter, and post on social media several times a week, and schedule coffee chats, and join communities, and do guest teaching, and start a podcast.

And if you’re not doing all of that? You’re not committed enough. You just need better planning and more systems.

What that advice rarely accounts for is capacity—especially in delivery-based businesses.

Even if you technically have 40 hours per week with your business, you can’t spend all of them on marketing. Time tends to break down across four buckets:

• 50% delivering with clients (once you’re fully utilized)
• 20% growing the business (marketing and sales)
• 15% building the business (systems and new capabilities)
• 15% running the business (admin, planning, margin)

So if you have 20 hours per week for your business, you realistically have about 4 hours per week for marketing.

Which means you cannot fit in a weekly newsletter, multiple coffee chats per week, participating in tons of communities, and consistent social media. That workload easily takes 10+ hours per week.

I do have a weekly newsletter, podcast, frequent guest teaching, and some LinkedIn. I also have 40 full working hours per week and a support system through my podcast co-host/editor and a part-time operations manager. That environment—not willpower—is what makes it possible.

If you have 10 or 20 hours per week and you’re trying to follow the same playbook as your favorite content creator who's been building for years, you’re planning for someone else’s capacity.

You can't compare a 20-hour-per-week, resource-constrained Year 2 to a 40-hour-per-week, fully resourced Year 5.

Before adding anything to your plate, ask honestly: What capacity do I actually have? And how much of it do I want to/can I actually devote to this business right now?

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Your Zone of Enoughness

Finally, you need to know what you’re planning for.

Not what you “should” want. Not what someone else told you to want. What you need to feel satisfied, sustainable, and aligned.

​Your Zone of Enoughness is the range between minimums and maximums across time, money, flexibility, and creative autonomy.

Most people skip this step. They chase more without defining enough.

When you don’t define your enough:

• You try to turn a creative passion into a $100K business and resent it (we should normalize having a bridge job and a creative side hustle)
• Or you chase the next revenue milestone and end up overworked and burned out

Your Zone of Enoughness and your place within it isn’t fixed. It evolves with your financial reality, your life season, and your creative endeavors.

I had to apply this recently myself. I’d planned to launch an operations cohort in January. Between that decision and the launch, my husband and I went under contract on a new house.

The night before the first launch email was supposed to go out (which I still hadn’t scheduled), I looked at my calendar, listened to my body (screaming at me to stop), and thought, “What the heck am I doing? I don’t have time for this!”

So I pulled the launch and will run something similar in February. That wasn’t a lack of desire—it was a decision grounded in my Zone of Enoughness for this season.

Your plans need to account for your Zone of Enoughness as it exists now, not as you wish it would be.

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Your Plans Need to Acknowledge Your Context

Your stage, your capacity, and your Zone of Enoughness form the context for your entire business.

Here’s what most planning gets wrong: it ignores your context entirely.

• You’re in Year 2 gathering data but set projections like someone in Year 5 optimizing proven patterns
• You have 20 hours per week but plan like you have 40
• You need $50K to complement a part-time job but chase $100K because you “should” be a six-figure business

And when plans ignore your context, the result isn’t growth—it’s overwhelm, frustration, and a constant sense of falling behind.

When you’re clear on your context, the planning becomes actionable.

• Your stage tells you what to measure (activities and early signals vs. targets and optimization)
• Your capacity determines your pace (different hours mean different choices—that’s math, not inadequacy)
• Your Zone of Enoughness defines success (maybe that’s $60K and 15 hours; maybe it’s $120K and 35 hours)

You stop comparing yourself to people in different circumstances.

You stop chasing goals that don’t fit your reality.

You stop feeling behind when you’re actually just working within real constraints.

In Part 3, we’ll identify which systems deserve attention to grow (and where you need to prune).

Then in Part 4, we’ll use all three elements—your reality, your context, and your business-building priorities—to build realistic projections for next year. Not aspirational fantasies, but grounded forecasts based on your stage, your capacity, and your enough.

P.S. Want to go deeper? “Leaving the Casino” includes full chapters on business stages, capacity, and the Zone of Enoughness—the foundation for everything in this series.

NEW EPISODES

Do you *need* more strategy? Strategy versus Implementation In this episode, the two of us talk honestly about something we see over and over again—in our clients, in our businesses, and sometimes in ourselves: the difference between having a strategy and having the support to actually do the work. We both love a good plan, but we’ve watched plenty of perfectly sound strategies fall apart the moment they hit a real calendar, a real workload, or a real human with limited energy. Our conversation explores what strategy really gives you (direction, priorities, a sense of sequence) and what implementation requires (the skills to actually execute, time, and accountability). Listen to the Pod