oren meets world: rebranding yourself in 2025: future-proof your personal brand

We are going to rebrand ourselves for 2025 so that we're more locked in than ever. Creatively, personally, and in business. I built a massive personal brand last year and launched a new luxury business. But like all creatives, I have that feeling of being simultaneously at rock bottom, unsatisfied with the quality of the work that I'm doing, while also being at the absolute peak when I look back on everything that I've accomplished. If you felt this way or are feeling this way, then you're not alone. I've been here before. It happens really frequently around this time of year. And I'm going to share the complete blueprint for rebranding your life. To take everything that you are doing or want to do to the next level. In this video, we're going to go through rebranding the spaces that we work in, our aesthetics, and our lifestyle. We're going to build a personal operations plan and a personal marketing plan. Break down our habits and our commitments. Pick muses for how we want to create. And set up the action plan to do it. I've got a massive Notion doc linked in here. It's free. You can use to track everything. This is what I use to plan my year. And I firmly believe this is my most valuable video ever. You're going to take yourself as seriously as you would take a business. And it's going to change your life. Let's lock in. So some quick context. My upcoming rebrand is Massive Fruit. This is going to be the biggest year of my life. So I took my family off the coast of Africa to the Canary Islands to work through this exercise. I realized for a lot of y'all, it's going to be a big year as well. And so I wanted to do this together. So I'm going to share the template and talk through it all. I'm also going to talk through a lot of circumstances. What I'm doing to work on it. You have an example of someone at a specific stage going through this exact exercise. To kick off, we're going to hit briefly on perspective. That's like there's three levels to people that either have some kind of personal brand, some kind of creative or freelance work. There's level one where you're just you. You go to work, you do all the things that are expected of you. You spend your free time doing what people in society are expected to do. There's level two. It's when you begin to have that fire inside or you want something extra. It's you plus freelance work or plus content creation. Your time outside of work becomes something that is a focus element for you to take yourself to the next level. Then there's level three, which is you as a business. I did not understand this until maybe five years ago. I really didn't lock into it until about two years ago. When you begin to look at yourself this way, when you realize that you are intrinsically tied to your potential and you need to be able to treat your marketing, your operations, your choices as an extension of that and then understand the ups and downs of how much you want to engage, you begin to think about things a lot differently and invest with your money and your time a lot. For the first section of this, we are going to talk through all the things in our personal life, our spaces, our aesthetics, really our inspiration, and then we'll circle back around to operations and plans. So we're going to start with our spaces. As creative, your space is one of the most important things that you have because when you get into this zone where you come home from work or you're working from home and have to then shift gears, your space can put you into the flow state or to the state of inspiration with varying degrees. You're uninspired by your space or has negative connotations for you. It's going to inhibit your ability to get where you want to go. It may sound simple, but it's very true. We're going to do three things in this exercise. First is we're going to create a mood board of what our ideal space would look like. We're going to look at the dream state. It's something we're going to do in every segment of this. I love to look at where are we at now and acknowledge it, then look at the dream state of where we go ideally in our perfect world, and then we're going to zone in on exactly what's next. What can we do now? I like to work around space when I plan for a year around two things. One is inspiration maxing and the other is content maxing. Inspiration maxing is when I walk into my environment that I'm supposed to be able to be creative in. Am I inspired? One of the easiest ways to do this, by far the best investment I've ever made, is getting those four-foot by eight-foot whiteboards. I bought mine in a 10-pack from Uline. It was pretty expensive. You can pick them up at most art supply stores or ask them, and they will have those big quarter-inch or half-inch thick boards. It doesn't even have to be that thick. Just those big areas will just dominate a wall or an area of your household. You can pin things on and change up with your moods or your projects. And the act of printing things out, and I don't have a working printer in my life like many of y'all, I literally go down to a local CVS to print things or Walmart for like a couple cents every once in a while to then update all the things I have going on on these boards. And that means when you walk in, there's this big tribute to your projects, to your creativity, to what you have going on that is just a surefire way to turn your space into inspiration. But whatever it is, I want you to list out what would it be in a dream state to make your space inspired. And the second thing to think about and put photos and everything on the mood board for is what would turn your space into something content-friendly. You've seen in a bunch of my other videos, I have these big shelves behind me, which I got in an estate sale. Those shelves are inside a studio at a garage door. They transformed that space completely. It was a pickup I got thrifting and allowed me to feel great and look great on camera with just one investment. So I would map out, get on the mood board, put everything in your dream state of what your space could be like, and then go back to this next stage of what would make content look good, what would inspire. And then we're going to go into style and personal aesthetic. And there are two levels to this one. The first is your actual style, what you wear, what you want to be, how you want to be perceived. And the second is your actual personal brand kit. If you create content, even if it's as simple as you have a LinkedIn, etc., it's actually locking that down with a plan. So what you wear is about feeling good, about looking good on camera. It's about having confidence when you are working, when you're around people, or when you are in content, which is an important thing most people don't take for granted. But we're in this world where we buy things, we get over them, we have a bunch of things we purchase, but we don't actually use. You want to be intentional for the year about what you want to look like, who you want to be, how you want to be perceived. And for some people, if you have money to do this kind of thing, I would create a budget around it because I feel like it's very useful to not get carried away, because a lot of people do. Obviously, we are in a hyper-consumer culture. But create a realistic amount you're willing to spend on what you want things to look like. Now, let's make a couple of notes. So the first is, if you don't have a budget to put towards this, one of the best exercises I ever did in my life, I did about four years ago, is I didn't buy anything new for the entire year. My agreement was anything that I sold on Depop or Grailed or whatever, I could reinvest the money in things I sold into new things. And as a pack I made with myself, I think I made it from January to Black Friday, roughly. I didn't go through the whole year. I got caught by the Essence sale, as one does. But you basically trade intention of, hey, I'm actually going to take my time to list things out, to sell things, to trade things in if there's a local place to you that does that. And only use those funds and be intentional about what that spend looks like. So if you are low on funds, or even if you just want to be intentional about it, it's an exercise I would highly recommend. It really makes you think about it. And the second is, when you think about your style, think about pieces versus fast fashion. You can basically get any look and feel you want for relatively cheap. In our current world of Zara, even Abercrombie, you can find a, with some time and intention, basically anything you're going for. And if you need or feel the need to, the persona you're creating online, have those different looks and feels, and maybe something you choose to do. Versus, hey, I'm investing in things and brands you believe in, things that are going to last a long time, that are important to you, but may not give you as many looks or as many options. And that is a choice. And I would make one of the two, because people get caught up trying to do both, and it doesn't quite work. And I would just acknowledge, what type of person am I? Do I want to be? And don't feel bad either way, and go for it. And then I would create a chart of everything you have that is wearable. By charting, there's some software that does this, but honestly, I just have the Apple Note, where I've taken a picture of most clothes I have, and cut it out and pasted it in there, and most things on me. And you can go scroll through it, and think about being intentional about your wardrobe. And an exercise I would do for this, if you're trying to be intentional about your style, is I would document yourself every day. Challenge yourself to document you in the same place. One environment, one mirror, whatever it is. One Photoshop technique, or cut out, or thing. It doesn't have to be posted online, can be if you want to, but every single day, capture what your style looks like, and how it evolves. Again, it can just be for you, when you have that compendium, or that one folder, or that Apple Note, you begin to really look, and think about what looks good, what really matches you. Now we're gonna talk a bit about that brand kit that goes with it. So someone who I think has done a great job with this is my friend Bima. And he does it very simple. He has a color, purple, that is associated with him. He has it in a hat he wears in every single video. Every story you see from him has the purple, and the background is included in all the graphics that he does. And when he shot some videos recently, he actually had them paint the studio in that same Pantone color. He is becoming synonymous with a really particular color. And he also has just his brand kit, the same fonts and things he uses. I'm talking a bit about me, and what I'm doing this year. I am being more intentional about that, because I have done these more edited videos with kind of fonts and production. I have the fonts I like. They're the same fonts that are in my brand, meaning my brand is relatively changeable at this point. I want to keep it that way, but I don't want to use the same color schemes. I was going for color schemes that would be attractive on social media, that stand out on feed. Now I want to make that a little bit more subdued, and then bring in a signature color. Inspired a lot by what Bima does, and seeing how effective the color has been for him. Every time I see that color, I go, man, I need a signature color. And I would encourage you throughout this to go pick what that color or two is that represents you, and then document, how am I going to put that into practice? And then same thing, go into fonts. I'd recommend choosing fonts that are available in CapCut, that are simple or effective for you, or in Adobe Express, wherever you use, so you have an easy workflow for that. And then just take the time to actually put them inside the software you use. So they're loaded on your phone. Google it, figure this out. But they're in all the softwares you have access. But taking the time to just cement it, where you have that color code in the note, and you have those fonts available, and on every, all of a sudden, you begin to integrate your brand into this. And if you start searching fonts on Instagram, watching font videos, they're going to serve you a million of them. So if you're looking for inspiration for that, there's a grip out there. I know a couple people I mentioned before, designed by Brady. He put some fonts into his videos. Edgy Katrina, she put fonts into her videos. Good places to start if you're looking for inspo there. And if all else fails, how about a canoe, spaced accordingly, bold, hard to go wrong. All right, so next up, let's talk about the iM8 brand. I recently called out their packaging in one of my standout packaging videos, and I partnered with them on this YouTube. So the wellness industry in general is still rife with old school packaging. And I love seeing new approaches. This jar that you see here is what originally caught my eye. It's gorgeous. It makes you want to grab it, whether you're at a store or it's in your cabinet. And it stands out amongst brands that so often use green in this category. And then I enjoy little things too, like the excellent maroon metallic that they have on these statuette packets. So I've been using the product for a few weeks. As y'all know, I was on the road at ComplexCon. Then this week, I'm doing workshops all across the US. And my biggest priority is my health and feeling as peak as possible. At all times, despite the schedule intensity. So IM8 functions as a combination of immunity boosting, hydration, and general energy. And I feel great. If you want to give them a shot, you can check it out at im8health.com. And the last phase of this inspiration segment, before we get into operations, is muses. I want you to pick at least one person on every social media platform. And if you're not big on social media, or if you're a designer, or whoever it is, you were trying to get some skillset from, pick someone in your field that is going to be your muse for this next segment of your life. I think this is actually a really important exercise. So I picked someone on Instagram. I picked someone on TikTok. I picked someone on Twitter. And I picked someone on YouTube. Because these are the social networks I am most active on. And I'm thinking about strategy for it. So for each one of those people, you want to list out their content pillars. I look at pillars, what are the recurring things they do with their content that you are seeing them continue to use all the time that are helping grow their account. I would note those things down. Now I would list takeaways for each one. What are the things that I want to do? Why am I following this person? What is it I want to integrate in my workflow? The act of thinking about that, looking at their accounts and writing it out is a really powerful blueprint. So you'll see the people I chose when I walked through this briefly is I chose Grace Beverly on Instagram. If you're not familiar with her, she's a prolific female entrepreneur. You will see a frequent through line. And what I do is I look to female creators because they're just better than male creators. And at my size on short form, I'm one of the bigger male creators inside the fields I'm in in business that's not like completely gone down mainstream like Alex Ramosi, how much protein is in a Chick-fil-A type thing, which I'm never going to do. So I have to look to more female creators because they're the ones that we're innovating. What I like about Grace, one of the pillars she has I really like is she has put together carousels, something I'm not doing right now that I aspire to do, where it's a combination of her imagery and her titling. There's video clips included in them. She has diagrams in them. They are served as a documentation of her entrepreneurial journey. They bring in stuff from her other content sources and they're a great anchor format that I would like to attempt to do something like. I also like the way she uses her podcast as a vehicle inside her content and it's done not in a way that kind of fails, it's done in a way that is on-brand and interesting. And those are some things that I am trying to work on on Instagram. So I have taken those pillars and applied it to my work. And the second on TikTok, I'm looking at Girl Boss Town. You've probably seen me bring her up before because her entire TikTok is based on ideas. In fact, she's doing 31 days of prediction for December where she's just predicting things about all kinds of pop culture, about the Kardashians, about reality TV, about Selena Gomez, about pop music. She will put predictions out there and what's nice, she predicts all kinds of things. Occasionally they come right. Many times they don't. When they come right, she is out there being like, I called it. I think that's a great format that I wish I was doing more of because ideas are dominating right now. I share a lot of tactics. I share occasional ideas. I've done, how would I create a direct this format? I want to be sharing more of that and move away from, I feel like, information is commoditized. If you just say this thing happened, that's no longer interesting content. If you provide the tactics for how that thing happened, that's kind of going its way out. And it's purely idea-driven going forward. So I'm leaning into that. I want to take some of what she's done, how she format. I love things, even like this is the second year she's done her 31 days of predictions. Like I don't have any recurring themes like that. I need to be thinking like that. That's why she's a muse on my sheet. Then moving over to Twitter. I have Greg Eisenberg. I was on his podcast. I wasn't super familiar with him until he invited me on his podcast. But I love his Twitter account. It's just pure value. That's all it is. Ideas and value for businesses in text format. No images. I already do images well on there. I already have my own personality, but his is less focused on his personality and more on just like pure value in a really extensive, interesting, and different way. I want to model some of what I'm doing. So now that we've set our inspiration up, we're going to look at our life and our habits and the things that we do. We're going to think about ourselves before we go build our operations plan and our marketing plan. The first step in this exercise is what do I project now? I want you to think critically about what do people think of when they think of me? We're going to go write that out. And so I personally think that when people think of me, they often think of value, right? If they think of education, they think of design. Those are positive things. I'm happy with what I project. I want you to think about that. When people you know, people that see you on the internet, what do they think of? If they don't have an opinion, they don't think anything of you, that's worth marketing down as well to understand where you're at. This year, I'm looking at what will I project? My main thing I'm thinking about is I, because this is that next step here. It's more than what will I project? You want to write it out like that. I will project X. That statement of I am going to declare this is what I want people to think of me. This is what I want to be perceived as. And staring as a declarative is important. It's important to write it out, to acknowledge where you're at and then think about where you're going. So I want to project, I want people this year to be like, he's everywhere. I want to feel like not inescapable. People be like, wow, this is really transcended what I perceived him as. As someone who does educational short form videos, it's really gone to another level. It's kind of a hard concept, but it is the thing that I think gets me to a place I want to go to then go to the next stage. We're going to take that projection and we're going to go to this exercise. There's a database here. It's the first time we're getting into a database inside what we've mapped out. This is the database of the life I want. We're going to map out our dream life here. All the things we've ever wanted. This is a really important exercise. The first time I did this exercise, I realized that the dream life that I wanted is significantly cheaper than I thought it would be. My friend Zach has made some great videos about this concept as well. So go through and list everything out. I have a column for item. So a thing. Car payment, your house, studio. X, I'm investing in my clothing line, whatever. The cost next to it. Monthly or one off, whatever. List out the benefit it has to you. This is really important because oftentimes you'll find that you don't have an actual benefit to it. There's no reason you really want something. You may be able to just cross it off the list. I have some drop downs inside here for different types of benefits. Is it a health benefit? That's super important, right? I want to be at, you know, going to Equinox or whatever it is because it's a health benefit. Is it a happiness benefit? Does this make me actually happy? And that's why I'm doing it. Is there a wealth benefit? I'm doing this because it's going to make me money. An inspiration benefit. I'm doing it because it gives me the creative spark. A signaler. I'm doing this because of what it means to other people. And it's okay. Sometimes things are signalers, right? You only buy a watch because you want to impress other guys. There's no other reason. And that's all right because if impressing other guys gets you somewhere that you want to go, then that's a thing that is worth doing. Be honest with yourself about what those are and if they actually have value to you. And fulfillment is the last piece. By doing something that makes me feel right and in tune with the world. And it does not necessarily be a charitable thing, although it's great if it is. There are many things we do that make us feel like things are worth it. And so I have those categories in there and then you have to select one when you're doing this. Again, you can adjust this dashboard however you want, but it's really useful to go through this practice. List out the items. So it could be, hey, I want the G-Wag. It costs me $2,500 a month. I actually break down what the payment will look like. The benefit is it's a signaler. It's going to make me, get me a make. Or it's inspiration because when I get in the car every day, I feel a certain way. Or it's fulfillment because I always wanted one my entire life and now I have the resources for it. I want that fulfillment to say I did it. Whatever it is, think through that reason and put a timeline on there. Is this something that could happen in the near future or in the far future? And what are the actions need to happen to get towards it? I would list everything out, okay? Go through cars, lodges, trips, investments you want to make, equipment, whatever it is. Dream items. I would list every single thing out inside because you're going to get to a final, you're going to get to a thing that shows you what the roadmap is, what you kind of, you're going to reach. And it might be more achievable than if when I did this exercise or if there's some practicality behind it. Like, hey, I don't really need this. This doesn't really make me happy. Actually, I can't even do this because scenario with my family or whatever it is. I realized that everything that was on my current list one year ago, I could do. I made some adjustments, focused a little bit on income and achieved it. For many people, it may be a few stages away, right? I was at a different stage. I was already a part of the way through this journey I'm on now. Once you have your dream life mapped out, you need to look at the life that's going to get you. There are two ways at this point. One is sacrifices and the others are stepping stones. With a similar map here, we have the item, we have the cost, we have the benefit, we have the timeline, we have the action, it's the same framework. But to get to these other goals you have, what can you change? Does that mean, hey, I'm actually going to live below my means for a couple of years This is something I've worked on a lot for my whole life. I drove Hondas and Toyotas until I could have the G-Wagons because it did not matter to me. There was no benefit to me for being in the middle. I also recommend this to a lot of people. If you are either you're in thrifting or you're a designer, being in the middle doesn't benefit you. I would think about that a lot. Everyone's different, but it's a worthwhile mentality to have that I'd rather sacrifice for X time until you get to where you want to go than spend excess along the way. So think about what your life looks like this year. To get to that dream state, what would you have to do? Whether that's to save money, or to work up to a certain thing, or be able to have access, or be able to put yourself in the position to get into the working circumstances that allow you to achieve it. That's what we're going to map out. I'm going to take this time to have a little interlude about frugality and about thrifting and how far it can take. Secondhand is one of the cheat codes to life, especially if you are a creative, if you have taste or want to develop taste. Every single clothing purchase that you have could probably be gotten at a fraction of the cost, vintage or in thrift, and you will probably be cooler and more tasteful for it. And the same thing goes for furniture. If you've ever been on like LA Facebook marketplace, it is legendary. State sales, no matter where you are, there's something within traveling distance. If you become the kind of person that spends some of your time and finds other people online or some friends, whatever, and go do it with them. State sales, vintage, secondhand, and making that a part of your life and feeling great about it, which you can, is a absolute game changer to save cost and still flex in your way that I could not recommend enough. And you'll see me, look, I make a ton of money. I'm still out there at state sales because I'm looking for things that are different, that have taste, that perspective. And we're going to end this section with an exercise in two columns. Exercise is your action statement. You're going to put your name in there. Old Julie did these things. And you're going to list out all the things that you used to do that you want to abandon. New Julie does these things. So list out all the things that you want to do now. What are those things you're going to change in your life? And you're going to tie into these two lists. One is a list of don't do. What are the things I want to abandon and no longer have any part of in my life? Matched with the other column of what are my habits? What are the things I am introducing now that are going to stay with me and I want to make a consistent part of my life? My list here, inside my don't do, is the number one is sugar. That's the only thing in my life I have been unable to cut out. Unable to work around is I have not been able to kick it. And I am going to find a way to do that. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's when I identify the things that are ridiculous. And the second thing is continuing my anti-consumption diet where I've cut my content down. So you have to remember how much I log into Twitter. I use one sec, I use brick. I have lined up the apps and the circumstances to cut down the amount of time I am consuming to where it's only intentional, to where I have scheduled time to go watch YouTube videos and look at analytics or to go into Twitter and see what's happening. I'm only doing that on scheduled time. I'm getting into habits around my content creation or introducing carousels around my design process, around the communication I have with my team. I'm developing habits for that. Now that we have those sections, we are headed into the final portion of this, which is our actual plan. You'll see in the remainder of this, we have our marketing plan. We have our operations plan. And you'll see I have an action items list and a calendar so we can actually make this something that's doable. Let's talk about marketing and a marketing plan and treating yourself as a business. So if you are building something, whether you are a freelancer and one day you want to have agency or you're a content creator and one day you want to be a big content creator or you work at a job and you're starting a side business or you have an e-commerce brand, any of these things, you need to treat your personal life more like a business as well. If you are any part of it, people are choosing to do work with your business because of you or you are a face and a vocal part of this, which is going to be the vast majority of anyone inside a creative field or anyone with a brand nowadays. So like any business, you need to invest in marketing. I would look at basically making a budget as a percent of that income. Every brand invests, right? Sometimes it's 20%, but revenue goes into marketing. Sometimes it's 5%, but it's always something. That can be a team, that can be advertisements, that can be support for content creation, but there are things going into marketing. We're going to make a plan on it. As you'll see inside this chart, we have the program listed out. So what is it? So for instance, for me, I have a person who helps me shoot YouTube videos as part of my marketing. What are those things that are putting yourself out there when you want them to be? Look at the stage that they're in. I'd recommend you have one program at least. You can have multiple for each of these stages. Awareness, nurture, convert. Standard marketing funnel. Awareness is how am I getting attention for me or my business or what I do. Nurture is once I have that attention, how am I getting people educated on it so they can make a decision? And then conversion is how I actually get them to buy. What are you doing at each stage of that? And look at the budget, but what is it going to take to me to actually do this? Sometimes maybe running ads, sometimes maybe hiring somebody, whatever it is. Look at the needs. What do I need to do to be able to do that? Because in many cases, you're looking at a future test, right? And then you go get your notes. And so there are going to be a lot of things that are here, right? A lot of... I'm not going to walk through the entire scenario of it, but for instance, you can be going to physical events to show off your art. You can be promoting yourself on Upwork. You can be listing yourself on different job sites. You can be a featured vendor on X or Y. If you're running ads for your service on Facebook or Meadows or all marketing programs, you'll be sponsoring newsletters, whatever it is. Decide what those items are. And for me, it's a little different because I have all these businesses, but like some of the things I'm thinking about for perspective is like, so Cut30, we're starting to market more now. And that's my program for teaching people a short-form content. So we started to do newsletter sponsorship. That's a marketing program. We're spending money on it. It kind of covers multiple stages here, but really it's focused on conversion. Trying to reach new people to get them to purchase in the programs. We're testing newsletter sponsorship. That goes in my marketing bundle. I'm doing these content shoots that sometimes are great for my brand, but also I need more content. It's a marketing program for me. But you need to have at least one thing you can put in each of those three buckets and think really quickly about what that can be. Be as simple as creating content. You need something to push yourself out there or else you're not taking yourself seriously as a business. You're going to have a marketing issue. And then next we have operations. This is probably the most important piece of this. And one I did not dial in until this last year, even though I had run businesses forever, I'd owned businesses forever, I did not treat myself like a business until like mid last year where I was really thinking about quitting my job. And it was absolutely crucial. And so no matter what stage you're at, people always get caught up in the amount of time it takes to do anything entrepreneurial, to create content, to be freelance. And there's so many of the things that you do that other people could be doing for you. If you just built an operations plan, that's what we're going to do here. There's multiple parts to every operations plan, but the most important is identifying your operational need and where it's at. The second most important part is building a process for it. Documenting how someone does it well. And the third part is communication between you and the people that are doing it. We're going to dive through all this here. Inside this plan, you'll see these notes. I want you to go through and pick in the work you do. Say I'm being a freelance graphic designer, as an example. Inside the work you have, you're creating proposals for people, you're updating your portfolio with new work when it's completed. You're actually doing the work. You're communicating the work along the way. Maybe you're sourcing graphics, imagery and fonts, stay up on trends, a list of all your activities that you're actually doing. I put what program it is because I think for most people that are here, you're going to have like wherever your day job is, then you're going to have like a side project or a side business. And you're also going to have content. I would mark which these are because they're all going to take some operations. I'll list out all those items. Now look into the outsourcing segment of this. Is this something impossible to outsource? Is this something that only you can do? And this doesn't have to be about now, but there's very few things you'll find only you can do. So for instance, the only thing that I can really, I'm the only one that can do, is be on camera talking. Almost everything else I can probably do. Right now, I still write most of my content, all my content really. Some people will give me hook ideas or video ideas. I still do a ton of creative briefing because I'm better than anyone I've been able to find. But that is a training issue for me and that's not an impossible thing. So is it impossible? Can no one else do this? You will begin to find. Be critical about this. Almost nothing that you do would be impossible to outsource. And we'll get to when it's right to outsource in a minute. And then we have the stage of need provider. That means you've identified that someone else could do it. Someone else could be creating my proposals. Someone else could be sending my weekly updates. Someone else could be doing this part of the design process. But I don't have somebody for it. So I need to go hunt that down. Hiring, again, that's going to be a thing that actually takes some time and energy. And the third column is source for future. That means you found somebody or you found where you would hire for it. Like, you know what? I can get this on Upwork. Or I actually have a bunch of graphic designers. I bookmarked a thread someone posted where all the people were posting their portfolios. I could go through that and DM people. I could find something. You're going to, you know. If it's source for future, that means you've nowhere to get it. I would put that in the notes segment of like who would do it. And then outsource means you've actually done it. You said, hey, cool. This is, someone does this for me now. Like, for instance, I have YouTube editors. They do it, market it. You look at the budget. What would it cost? This is where it gets interesting, right? And it would cost me $75 each time I want to do a proposal. You need to look at your time and the bandwidth you have. You go, hey, it's actually not worth $75. I have plenty of time right now. I'm just going to do it. Or, hey, I'm swamped. $75 is a steal. I need to get this other person running proposals. And you're going to walk through everything on that list and literally go through these categories and start to figure out who could do it, what it could cost, and then is it the right time and benefit value for me right now? And then you begin to fill out an ops plan. So you'll see right now I have YouTube editors. I have short form editors. I have strategy support that I pay for, for my content. I have helpers inside of Cut30 that are running logistic. I have an assistant that handles a lot of support things I'm working on for my brand. I have accounting outsourced. I have legal outsourced. And then this year, I'm looking to do a number of things. I need to get clipping done. I need people clipping my YouTubes. If that's you, DM me. I need better newsletter setup. So I'm no longer doing as much as I am on the newsletter, even though Clayton does a good chunk of it. I'm not answering my DM. Someone needs to answer DM. My management's negotiating a bunch of things I have going on. That's perfect. They can do that. In my design workflow, I'm still designing too much. I have designers, but I don't have a process nailed down. Now I'm going to list out all the things, actions, what can I do to get towards these, to actually fill out everything this operation is planning to where I want to go. And now this is a blueprint for me to scale whenever I need to. This is the thing that most entrepreneurs just never build. I'm not going to get into how to build a process right here. But this gives you the blueprint for your year, all the things you'd want to do, all your ops, all the things that would allow you to do more. Now you have an organized structure. And that brings us to the action. End of this. Up here at the top of the notion, you're going to see two things. You're going to see a to-do list, and you're going to see a calendar. I put these here because most people just need a solution. They don't have something set up. I have a separate to-do list structure. I have an asana. I have a separate calendar inside my actual Google calendar. But you're going to go through and take all the actions that you saw. Look at the dream state of where you wanted to go. All the actions that get you there in the middle. You're going to list those out into a list. You're going to put your marketing tasks in a bucket. You're going to put your ops task in a bucket. You're going to put your to-do list in a bucket. And here's a huge pro tip, like a massive pro tip. Anything that's hairy, that's super complicated. You're like, okay, I need to hire a grappling center. Where do I even begin? Break it down. So it's more like, first, I need to write a job description. Then I need to Google sites that I can find. Then I need to post a description. Break any big item down into smaller items. And then we have the calendar section. So here I put a calendar on there for the year. I'm going to really spell what's around below it. Use whatever framework you have for it. This is what you need to do to take your life seriously. Because every month you need to review your finance. And I use the calendar because if you set a time for it, it's actually going to happen, right? So if you say, hey, every Monday at 10 a.m., first Monday of every month, I do a finance review. Then it's going to happen. And put that on your calendar. Every month, you need a finance review. You need an analytics review. And this is for anything, whether it's content on your website, your portfolio views, whatever. You need to be looking at your metrics. What defines success for you? And how do you measure it? Then a marketing review. Is my marketing effective? What am I doing? What am I not doing? How do I schedule going forward? Do at least one of those a month. And you just set the date. Again, just like anything else. Again, your work, whatever it is, 9 p.m., Thursday night. There is time. Setting those recurring things so you know, do it when it comes up. And treating it, again, like a business is a way to get yourself in the flow. The finance one in particular, where you're like, I brought in this amount. I have this amount coming out. I'm going to spend this much on marketing. Is this realistic? How do I adjust it? Do I do my billing? It stops you from thinking about it constantly and gives you a concentrated area to worry about. Analytics, the same thing. If you look at analytics every day, all day, you're wasting time. If you look at it every month and compare it month over month, start to look at what the trends are in a dedicated session, now you're getting something. Then we have weekly. If you have a team of any kind, whether it's editors, designers, support, EA, you need to have your weekly touch points with them. One, to talk through their expectations early in the week. Another, to review their work at some point. Maybe that's the end of the week. You need to be putting those scenarios into play. Then last on this calendar, list out your major events and your cultural events. What are your highlights? What are the things you want to do? What are the things that are happening in the world you should be prepared for? Hey, I should be doing a campaign or a drop for Valentine's Day, or I need to be thinking about back to school, or I messed up Black Friday. This is why I like to do this right at the end of the year because we're fresh on the mind of all the things that happened from the summer and all the things that just happened for holiday, which was a really ripe time for a lot of things, obviously. Then we're getting into this new Q1, Q2. I'll just map all this out so you begin to have a calendar of the things that are important to you. So only so much I can kind of get through in whatever this was, probably like a half hour of talking. There's obviously a lot more that comes to this, but the Notion doc is listed down here. Go through this. Mood board those things out. Look at your dream state for all these things. What is your dream marketing opportunity? What is your dream creative space? What is your dream lifestyle? What are the habits you want to have? Really look through that. Then go take that one step back. What kind of action towards that? List it out. Do some work on it. It will, taking this kind of thing seriously, even just doing this mapping session and then checking in on it, will change your life and change how you are pursuing your creative endeavor. And if I drop questions or other things you want to see or things I should add to this template down in the comments, I will go through them. And I appreciate y'all watching. Hope you lock in in the new year.