2025 Planning for Small Teams: A Smarter Approach to Setting Goals

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by 2025 goal setting. There are endless priorities pulling you in every direction, but you’ve only got a small team and limited resources to work with. It’s tempting to skip the planning process entirely and just wing it. Sound familiar? 

But as the saying goes: failing to plan is planning to fail.

The problem isn’t that planning is inherently hard—it’s that most small business founders approach it the wrong way. The result? A muddled to-do list, unrealistic expectations, and a team spread too thin.

What I want to share with you in this blog is a planning framework designed specifically for small businesses. This approach is about aligning your goals with the reality of your resources. 

Let’s dive in.

The Mistakes Founders Make When Planning

1. Trying to Do Too Much

One of the most common traps small business founders fall into is attempting to tackle too many projects at once. Marketing campaigns, product launches, rebrands, process improvements—the list goes on. With limited resources, taking on too much leads to scattered efforts and burnout.

Instead, you need to narrow your focus to a few key projects where you can make the biggest impact. Success doesn’t come from doing everything—it comes from doing the right things well.

2. Confusing Targets with Plans

A target is an outcome you want to achieve, like growing revenue by 20%. A plan is a roadmap that outlines exactly how you’ll get there. For example, a plan might look like:

• Assigning Richard to a three-month conversion rate optimization project to achieve a 2.8% conversion rate.
• Hiring an SEO agency for $5,000/month to grow organic traffic by 50%.
• Having Susan run retention marketing campaigns to increase lifetime value from $90 to $100.

Without a clear plan, even the best targets are little more than dreams.

A Framework for Small Business Planning

To simplify your planning process and align it with the realities of your business, use this three-step framework. It’s designed to help you focus on what matters most and avoid being pulled in too many directions.

Step 1: Brain Dump Your 2025 Priorities

Start by listing all the projects and goals you’d like to tackle in 2025. Taking my own Fractional CFO consulting business as an example, these might include things like: 

• Grow my YouTube channel to 5,000 subscribers, which will be a platform for sharing free content with eComm founders who want to learn more about finance
• Launching 2 mini-courses for founders who want to go a little deeper, and
• Adding 4 more retainer clients ($3,000 - 5,000/mo ea)

Capture everything you’d like to achieve, no matter how big or small.

Step 2: Map Skills and Resources

The next step is to think through this skills, competencies and inputs that would be required to achieve each goal. Taking the YouTube example above, we could list these as:

• SEO keyword research
• Scripting and writing
• Video editing
• Graphic design

Link all of these inputs to your projects, like I've done above.

Step 3: Prioritize Using a Two-Axis Framework

Next, evaluate each skill along two axes: your skill level (low to high) and your enjoyment (low to high). Arrange the skills into four quadrants:

1. Zone of Genius: Tasks you enjoy and excel at.
2. Hobby Zone: Tasks you enjoy but aren’t yet highly skilled at. The interesting thing about these tasks is that they can drift 'right' over time (more practice = skill improvement)
3. Danger Zone: Tasks you’re good at but don’t enjoy (ideal for delegating or training others).
4. Doomed Zone: Tasks you dislike and lack skill in (avoid these entirely).

The final step involves re-arranging the various inputs into the four quadrants.

It should now become clear which projects allow you to operate in your Zone of Genius, and which ones you need help with. 

Building a Focused Plan

Here's how you might interpret the above diagram:

• Servicing 4 more clients as a fractional CFO allows me to spend time in my 'Zone of Genius', but I need to either a) work on my sales skills, or ideally b) delegate this task in order to achieve it. 
• By hiring a YouTube strategist and Video Editor for $2,500/mth I can offload key inputs for both the YouTube project and Mini-courses to someone else. 

By clearly defining the scope, resources, and costs involved, I’ve built a realistic, actionable plan that aligns with my strengths.

Back in 2018 when we were just getting started with Urban Leaf, we encountered an example of this. We could see all around us these cool gardening lifestyle brands starting to take off. Their playbook was simple; run a cool Instagram account with inspiring and motivational content, and drive traffic to Shopify. The problem was that my founder and I were both engineers, and truthfully we didn't have a branding or marketing bone in our collective bodies. We knew that if we attempted to play that game we were going to have rings run around us. Being engineers however, meant that we were both good with math and data. So we decided to focus on Amazon as a sales channel. Those of you who have sold on this platform will be aware the mountains of data that sellers get access to. By picking a 'game' where we had a competitive advantage we were able to quickly grow our Amazon business to over a million dollars in sales. 

The Takeaway: Planning for Success in 2025

Effective planning isn’t about doing everything—it’s about choosing the right things to focus on and having the discipline to ignore (or outsource) the rest. By using this framework, you can align your goals with your team’s strengths, resources, and capacity.

The hardest part is deciding what not to do, but mastering this skill will set you up for success. Remember: the more focused your efforts, the greater your results. For 2025, let’s trade overwhelm for clarity and aim for fewer, smarter, and more impactful goals.