How I plan for Q4 as a business owner (my full Fall Reset)

Sep 9

A Fall Reset is a one-time planning session that for business owners or ambitious people to reflect on your last set of goals, set a new vision for the next three to six months, and make a plan to execute that vision using specific, trackable projects. Running it in September instead of January gives you a full quarter of momentum to execute, rather than kicking off after the hectic energy of the holidays, at the same moment everyone else does.

I’ve been making vision boards, setting goals and trying to achieve them for years. But I now have multiple years of vision boards I can reference to see that my systems really work. Before 2024, I made this vision board:

In that year, I spent 2 months traveling Europe and many months exploring new cities to potentially live in. You can check out the video version of this post to see the real life photos I took while on this adventure but it was pretty darn spot on.

Vision boards get a bad rap as more daydreaming than reality, but in my experience if you build them the right way and put structure in to supporting the work behind the vision board, they can be incredibly powerful.

If you're a service-based business owner who sets goals every year and rarely feels like you kept them by the time the next one rolls around, this is the exact process I used this month, mistakes included.

Prefer to watch? Here's the video!

A Q4 planning system for business owners that sticks past January‍ ‍

Step 1: Reflect on my previous vision board and goals‍ ‍

I don't set new goals until I've sat with the old ones. That means pulling up the vision board I'd been working from since January and being honest about what I did and didn't do, and paying attention to why.

My primary goals this year was to grow Exhale Operations to recurring revenue and to make more friends in Austin. Underneath those, I had secondary goals: keep building a healthy lifestyle, and pass the WSET Level 2 (a wine certification exam).

I'd broken each one into specific projects I could work on regularly. For Exhale, that meant finishing every launch-related task (website, LLC, clarifying the offer) and publishing a weekly ops-related blog post. For friendship, one meaningful investment in a relationship each week. For health, ten cardio classes.

When I sat down to review, there were some things to celebrate. I signed up for and passed the WSET 2, which was genuinely fun and one of the few goals I had that was finite enough to just finish. My fiancé and I already cook pretty healthily, and I was consistent with Pilates for most of the year. I did procrastinate on the cardio classes specifically, but a new spin studio opened near me, so even though it’s a bit behind schedule I’m working through it now.

But on the two bigger goals (business growth and new friendships), I hadn’t made as much obvious progress. Part of that is just that they're bigger and messier than "pass an exam."

To be fair, I’d successfully completed launch related tasks easily (identifying tools, setting up systems is the part I'm good at), and I'd been consistent posting on YouTube weekly, which meant I got that blog post published every week too (which is how you’re reading this right now).

But my underlying goal, recurring revenue, hadn't moved the way I wanted it to, so that needed to try something different.

The friendship goal was similar - I'd made some connections in Austin, but I wasn't close to where I wanted to be. When I sat with why, I realized the metric I'd set, "one meaningful investment," was too fluffy to hold myself accountable to. I couldn't tell you what it meant, so I couldn't tell you if I'd done it.

Step 2: Review personal and business financials and metrics ‍

Before I write a single new goal, I pull up my business stats and spreadsheets. It's easy to walk away from a reflection like Step 1 feeling generally good or generally behind, but that feeling isn't always accurate in either direction. The numbers are a good way to check in.

This isn't just a business exercise. The same principle applies to your personal finances: if you're setting goals for the next quarter without knowing where your money stands right now, you're planning against a guess instead of a baseline. I check both my business revenue and metrics and my personal financial picture at this stage, so the goals I set in the next step are grounded in what's true, not what I assume is true from memory.

Step 3: Journal on my vision for the next 3-6 months ‍

Most people jump to visuals first when they think about goal-setting. The problem here is that it can be tempting to put together a real “dream world” scenario - think yachts, fancy watches, a humongous house. But that’s not a useful vision board because it’s too far away for your brain to really be able to envision you living it right now.

From a neuroscience perspective, the power of vision boards is to help encourage neural pathways of what it would look like to have a new result in your life. The more you see it and actually can see it as something that could happen to you, the more your brain will work to find ways to make it possible. That’s why I always try to build vision boards with visuals I could realistically see through my own eyes in the next 3-6 months.

But this is why before I start pulling visuals, I try to journal to come to the vision without prompting from the algorithms or outside world. The first step here is sitting down and imagining the next few months if everything worked out. I ask myself:

What do I want the next three to six months to feel like?
What type of person do I want to be six months from now?
What needs to change from my life today to get there?‍ ‍

Once I've narrowed in on the shifts that matter most, the questions get more specific:

What daily or weekly habits would contribute to life feeling that way?
How does the person who's already done these things show up differently than I am today?
What skills or experience do I need to build to get there?

It's easy to talk about what you want, but…

Your results are always going to be tied to who you become along the way.

The person who built a million-dollar business became someone capable of running a million-dollar business. She's not scared to look at her numbers. She's dependable at doing the specific things that generate revenue, whether that's marketing, sales, or client delivery.

You don't need to be a business owner to do this exercise, but if you are one, I'd push it a step further with questions like these:

What are the metrics in your business telling you is missing?
What actions are most directly tied to those metrics?
How does the CEO of your ideal business spend her time, make decisions, and decide what isn't working? What does she never skip?

I put together a longer set of prompts for this exercise if you want more to work with. You can grab them here.

After I personally did this exercise I had a few useful takeaways:

Visibility is the biggest need in my business and it's easier to hit visibility goals when I stick to my content planning habits, which makes a real difference in how consistently I can create.

I want deeper friendships and connections, which means I need to challenge myself to be the one who reaches out first, and it would help to have a standing plan for meeting new people or deepening the relationships I already have.

And I want to maintain solid foundation in my mental health, which mostly means sticking to my exercise routine, but possibly layering in something like meditation.

Once I know the shape of the vision, I break down those larger goals/visions it into projects.

For the business goal, the new projects are 16 content prep or scripting sessions (roughly one a week) and posting one creative or fun piece of content each week, mostly to remind myself that content can still be fun.

For the friendship goal, it's 17 different plans to meet new people before the end of the year (also roughly weekly) and attending one recurring activity a week, like a mahjong class or a volunteer shift, somewhere I can consistently meet people.

I try to keep miscellaneous projects, the ones that don't ladder up to a bigger goal, to under three. Mine right now are: planning my wedding, learning to bake a decent loaf of sourdough , and five minutes of daily meditation.

A few tips to help make your goal setting more practical and achievable:

Keep projects sized so they're achievable in a three-to-six-month window
Frame them around your input, not the result (i.e. posting a video, not gaining a follower or going to the workout class vs. losing ten pounds)
Make them clearly trackable (1 hour of cardio per week, versus “do cardio”)
Integrate them into how you already manage your life, whether that's a task manager or a calendar.
Build in incentives. (I love a progress bar for this specifically)

Step 4-5: Collect inspiration images and design your vision board

Once the goals and projects are set, then I move into Pinterest and collect inspo images, keeping two things in mind: make it achievable (something that feels like the next three to six months, not ten years out), and make it a POV shot whenever possible, so I can picture myself in the image instead of looking at a stranger.

I pin things onto a board over the course of a few days, then download the images and drop them all into Canva, where design starts. I build one big design for my computer background first, then resize it for iPad and iPhone, which is usually a matter of adjusting a few things rather than building a whole new version.

Step 6: Update my devices and task management system

Once the designs are done, I update the actual backgrounds on my devices, and I go into Notion, where I run my entire life, to update the names of my goals and projects. Every day-to-day task in my system is tied to one project, so this is also where I rebuild the specific tasks that ladder up to these new goals, not just the goal names themselves. Skip this step and a good planning session turns into a vision board that just sits on your desktop doing nothing.

How to make vision boards and goal setting more effective ‍

Setting the vision, updating the goals, and structuring the projects isn't the hard part. It's not even close. The hard part is following through months from now, so here are the three things that have made a difference for me.

Accountability.

I used to do this exact exercise with my best friends, and we still try to. Having someone else know what you said you'd do is a different kind of motivation than a private list. We've even used a shared note to log our progress so we could celebrate each other, even while working on completely different things. As a business owner, investing in your own business can work the same way: if you're paying a consultant to rebuild your CRM, you're going to feel more invested in using it. Business coaches can help here too, though candidly that's been hit or miss for me.

Accepting that it's going to feel hard.

There's a version of this dream where one day life just feels like floating on clouds, and that's not true. The woman in your vision board still has to go to the dentist. She still gets spam texts. She still has to grit her teeth to get through a workout sometimes. Life is a series of todays, and it will always be lived as your current experience, not some future, resolved version of it. The point isn't to wait until you feel confident to start. It's to start anyway.

Automation.

I'm biased here, since it's what I do for my clients, but it's also one of the things that's gotten momentum going for me more than once. Sometimes that means automating something you hate doing, like the bookkeeping system I built to make tracking my numbers less painful. Sometimes it's a system that helps you plan content. Sometimes it's automation that holds you accountable, like my morning brief routine, which surfaces my goals every day so they can't slip out of view. And sometimes it just gives you back the time you need to hit your goals in the first place, like automating my meal planning and grocery list, which frees up hours I now spend on the goals that matter to me. If system-building isn't how your brain works, this is exactly the kind of thing we build inside Bottleneck Breakthrough.

The power and challenge of vision boards

None of this works if you stop at the pretty pictures. The board, the journaling, the questions, none of it does anything on its own. The projects and the follow-through are what turn this exercise into something you actually feel proud of when you look back.

But there's something true on the other side of that too. You have to believe you can have the thing before it's real. I made a vision board with photos referencing finding my long term partner and at the time had to believe it was possible, at a point when I had no evidence he was coming. I wasn't lying to myself by putting him on the board. I was willing to hold a picture of something before I had proof of it, and then I did the work that made room for it to happen. That's the whole exercise: hold the vision like it's already true, then go build the projects that make it true.

Frequently asked questions

Why is September a better time to reset your goals than January 1st? ‍

September gives you a full quarter to course-correct before the year ends, instead of starting the clock at the exact same moment as everyone else. If you wait until January, you've already lost the last few months of the current year to drift, and you're setting new goals at the most crowded, least reflective time of year. Resetting in the fall means you can close out the current year deliberately and walk into the new one already in motion, instead of starting from zero.

How do I turn a vision board into goals I'll accomplish? ‍

The gap between a vision board and real progress is specificity. A vision board tells you what you want to feel or experience; it doesn't tell you what to do on a Tuesday. Take each broad goal and break it into a project with a clear, numerical way to track it (a count, a frequency, a deadline), then integrate that project into whatever system you already use to manage your day, whether that's a task manager, a calendar, or something simpler. If you can't tell, three months from now, whether you did the thing, the goal isn't specific enough yet.

What makes a business goal trackable? ‍

A trackable goal is framed around your input, not the outcome, and it's numerical. "Grow my business" isn't trackable. "16 content sessions this quarter" is. The reason input-based framing works better is that you control your inputs directly, you can't force an outcome like follower growth or revenue on a fixed timeline, but you can control whether you show up to do the work that tends to produce it. Track the thing you're doing, and let the outcome be the thing you check on separately.

How do personal and business goals fit together when you're a solo founder?

When you're the only person running the business, your personal life and your business aren't separate systems, they're competing for the same hours and the same headspace. Setting them side by side, in the same planning session, is more honest than pretending you can plan one without accounting for the other. This round, my business goal and my friendship goal were the two I struggled most to make progress on, and it wasn't a coincidence that they were also the two with the fuzziest metrics. Treating your business goals and your personal goals with the same rigor (specific, trackable, tied to your actual calendar) tends to surface the same blind spots in both.

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