#159 What I’m Doing in my 2025 Business Strategy to Ensure I Don’t Miss Out on Family Time (Again)

Lucy Gernon (00:06.148)
In this week’s episode of the 360 Leadership podcast, I am sharing five strategies that I’m implementing in my business in 2025 to ensure that I do not miss out on family time again. Like you, I juggle money balls. I can get shiny object syndrome, and sometimes that leads to us not delivering what we need to deliver on and then our family sacrifice as well. No, it’s caught start again.

Lucy Gernon (00:34.262)
Is this year the year? Nope.

Lucy Gernon (00:42.926)
There are things you can implement right now to ensure that you do not miss out on family time this year. If you are a woman in leadership, I understand that work can take over. Believe me, I am in exactly the same boat as you, which is why on this week’s episode of the 360 Leadership Podcast, I wanted to share five strategies that I’m implementing right now into my business to ensure that I achieve everything that I want to achieve while being more present with my family. These are super simple. They’re actionable. You can do them too.

Tune into today’s episode and I hope you enjoy.

Lucy Gernon (01:18.702)
Hi there and welcome back to the 360 Leadership podcast. I am your host, Lucy Gurnon, a mom of three, a managing director and an executive coach. And just like you, I juggle money, money, balls. Today’s episode is super exciting and practical for you because I have been taking a massive step back recently and there’s five strategies that I’m implementing into my business this year that I’d love to share with you in the hope that when I share what’s working for me, it can help you too.

They’re really practical. They’re aimed at the busy female leader who’s juggling personal life and career, which is not easy. So yeah, I hope these strategies help. But before that, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to a podcast reviewer, that is Dolly Pops, one nine six nine. And she’s a quality director. And she said that Lucy brings passion and practicality to the Leadership Podcast Forum, providing helpful tips, examples and support for women in leadership.

Make sure to give it a listen. Dolly Pops, thank you so, so much. I so appreciate when you guys take the time to rate and review the show because it helps push the podcast to new listeners, find new audiences. You tell me all the time how practical the advice is here. So if you haven’t already liked, rated, reviewed, subscribed, followed and shared the show, pick any of those things I just said. Just help me to spread the word because I love showing up here for you every week and

This enables me to continue to make free valuable content for you. So let’s jump into the five strategies. But before I do, I just want to kind of set the scene a little bit for you. I’ve been talking to my team recently when we were looking back at 2024. And I realized something that I wanted to share from my heart with you. And that is that sometimes I think.

I may come across as unrelatable because it looks like I have all my shit together and I can assure you that I really, really don’t. Just like you, I have so many challenges that happen in my personal life. I just choose not to talk about them all publicly, as I’m sure you don’t talk about all of your challenges publicly. So I just want you to be aware that.

Lucy Gernon (03:33.09)
While I’m a coach and while I’m highly strategic and highly practical, I have all of these tools which work for me and my clients. It does not mean that I don’t find this leadership and life and mom life a struggle. OK. And so just to kind of premise that I decided and I do this every year to take a big step back, to take a look at what worked well in 2024 in the business and in my life, and then also to look at what didn’t work so well.

And then that allows me to really, you know, realign with my values and my goals and then complete our set out strategy for the business for the year and also for my life. Because I think sometimes as leaders, we can forget that you are one person and there’s no point having a business strategy for your department, your business unit, your own company, your team, whatever it is, unless you ensure that it’s going to integrate into your life.

and your values. And so by applying these five steps, it’s going to help you to do that. So let’s just jump straight into it. The very first thing that I do, I did is that I mapped out my entire year back in November. Now, it helps me to get ahead. So what I do is I start with an Excel spreadsheet, good old Excel that I absolutely hate. It’s actually a Google Sheet, but it’s the same thing.

And I map out the entire year week by week. In row one, I’ll add week commencing. And in row two, I’ll add what’s happening in my life and in my business and even in the world. Now, we use the spreadsheet in my business to basically plan out all my marketing content, all my sales plan. It’s like a master document. But I put in my personal stuff into that too. So my team know what’s happening in my life because my life and my business are integrated. Now, I understand that for you, that might be a little bit

maybe impractical, but I do encourage you to literally plan out your year, get your team to do the same, encourage them to plan their annual leave in January, because this has been strategic. OK, now I’m under no illusion. I get that stuff happen. I get that there’s, you know, big initiatives that come out of left field. There’s problems. There’s all of this stuff. But let’s just at least put a strategy in place and let’s ourselves up for.

Lucy Gernon (05:58.338)
like manifesting what we want as opposed to being reactive. So once I have my overall plan where I pop in my the kids school holidays, any important events that are coming up, like in 2025, I’m hosting my first retreat in Europe. So keep your eyes peeled for a public pop and add on the podcast when we know it’s going to be an intimate thing, actually. And it might be invitation only. I haven’t decided yet. So keep in my DMS and we’ll have the chats.

And I’ll pop in birthdays and, you know, big business milestones. So for you, you might pop in if you know you’ve got key audits on certain dates, if you know you’ve got team birthdays, if you know you’ve got site visits, if you know you have like, you know, what I’m talking about, big initiatives, but like take the time to do this. I promise you it’s a game changer. And then it’s the only way really you can kind of see that there’s no conflicts or there’s no overwhelm points.

And we look at like projects and everything that kind of feed in by quarter. So once I have an idea of what’s happening in my life, then I turn to my leadership and life planner that I have just launched to support me to add structure. And you can grab that for only 47 euro if you go to lucy garden dot com forward slash planner. And in that you are getting like a mini course. I know it’s like you’re probably like, what? 47? Yeah, I just wanted to make it really accessible for you.

And I’m sharing my entire five step goal setting process and giving you a beautifully designed workbook so you can map out your goals for 2025. And then after that, there’s loads of other trackers like habit trackers, there’s quarterly goal trackers to help you put some structure in place. So side note, that’s there if you want to grab it. That’s what I did. So I essentially grabbed all of the tools that are in the Leadership and Life Planner in the mini course. I printed them out and I mapped

out my year by quarter by initiative. OK. And that brings me on to the second thing that I did, which is to get super intentional about the three to five big initiatives. Every year, I think about three to five big initiatives that I want to achieve in my business for the year, and I stick to them. Every year, I write an overarching strategy for my business. Now, this is not a really technical business plan. OK.

Lucy Gernon (08:20.908)
It is high level strategy of like what I want to achieve. They’re smart and I ensure that they only includes big impactful goals that are actually going to grow the revenue in my business. For example, in twenty twenty four, one of my big focuses was to grow 60 leaders club and we did just that. We tripled our membership from this time last year. One of the other goals was to launch a digital course.

which I did, which is the executive presence blueprint. And again, I will link that in the show notes. If you want to work in your executive presence, it’s amazing. And the other thing was we wanted to upgrade our membership experience for our 360 members. So we moved our courses and our membership to Kajabi. And then the other one was, again, as usual with me, I wanted to continue to develop professionally. And I added getting a positive psychology qualification as one of my big initiatives.

Now, I managed to achieve all of those things by keeping shiny object syndrome in check for the most part. Not going to lie. I have ADHD that is not diagnosed yet, and I’m sure it will be an episode coming after I have my consultation in April. And I tend to get shiny object syndrome. I want to like do so many different things. So if I don’t have this strategy to go back to, I will go off piste.

And so for 2025, I’m doing exactly the same. I’ve planned out the annual goals on my own personal goals, and I’d be using the Leadership and Life Planner and all the tools in there to support me. Well, I’ve already done that for the year and for quarter one. So it’s really about you aligning your actions with your big picture vision. Now, I just want to give a quick shout out as well to one of our 360Liters Club members who really got intentional about her goals. And I share this with you because

I want you to know that, you’re probably like Lucy, you’ve got your own business, you can do this. But there are so many of the girls in 360 who are getting highly intentional with their time. They’re being highly strategic and they are getting so clear on what they want. So one of our members, she is a director and her name is Donna. And she said before joining 360 Leaders Club, I was recovering from burnout and determined not to let myself slip back into that place.

Lucy Gernon (10:34.818)
My biggest goal was to find a way of balancing my professional life with my family life more effectively while learning how to communicate better, handle conflict with confidence and be more effective in my role. The training, coaching and support from 360 were exactly what I needed. The conflict management frameworks, communication strategies and mindset tools were particularly useful and helped me grow into a more confident, self-assured leader. One of the most impactful changes has been being able to close my laptop at the end of the day.

switch off while still doing my work to a high standard and delivering as I always did. I’m just doing it as more ease. She says the professional goals she’s experienced has not only improved her effectiveness at work, but it now allows her to enjoy her family life without the constant stress. I would highly recommend 360 for all women in leadership. Now, Donna didn’t get here by accident. She got here on purpose because she set goals. She got super intentional.

And when you work with me, that is the first thing I ask everybody. What are your top three goals in our time together? And I help you. I help you to get clear on what they are. All right. So the third thing that I am doing to ensure that I am more present with my family in 2025 is I’m going to delegate more. As I reflected on 2024, I realized that over the past year, I was taking on way too much myself.

Can you relate? And I realized that if I’m going to be a real leader myself and I practice what I preach, I have to focus on those big initiatives and make time to my family. I have to delegate more. And I’m honestly I’m not perfect, but what I did do, I was kind of going, thought I was going to delegation, but I realized my team were asking me a lot of questions around, is this OK? And this is OK. So I realized that actually I need to get better at giving direction.

So I came up with a framework that I’m going to be teaching the girls in 360 really soon called the five tiers of delegation authority framework. And this framework is helping me to delegate with so much more ease already. And it’s given me more confidence and more trust to my team. But with delegation, there’s a little bit of work in the framework. If you are in 360, please ask me about it. If you don’t know where it is, it tells you exactly what to do for each tier, because there’s different levels of delegation.

Lucy Gernon (13:01.976)
different levels of authority. So I’m surely leaning into that this year.

Number four, the next thing that I’m doing is I am reminding myself consistently that business success is a marathon and it’s not a sprint. It’s been a huge mindset shift for me is that this is like year four for me in my business. And let me tell you, those first three years in business are hard. I thought I just set up a business.

People would know how amazing it is because I’m sorry, but my offers are fantastic. So well thought out, so strategic, so useful, so practical. was like, everyone’s going to want to come and work with me. And I couldn’t believe how hard it was to like to market, to try to find the right messaging that lands with you guys, to really create a product and an offer that was truly transformational, that I could really stand over. And that involved a lot of testing, a lot of tweaking, lot of listening to customer feedback.

a lot of rejection of hearing those over the last three years. And I found that really, really hard. But what I realize now is that success doesn’t happen overnight. Yes, I’ve been highly successful. Like, you know, we’ve won loads of awards, generated multi six figures in the business super fast. have, you know, amazing clients. I just absolutely love my clients so much. You guys know that. I hope you’re smiling. It’s highly impactful work.

but I was trying to do it too fast. So 2025 for me is about reminding myself of that. And it’s the same for you. It’s about you reminding yourself that all this pressure that comes to you from above, they’re just like me. Like, or if you’re a business owner yourself, you know what I’m talking about. You want to grow your revenue. You want to make a huge impact. You want to support more people. You want to make…

Lucy Gernon (14:56.418)
You you want everyone to know about your product or service, and that’s how your C levels are thinking as well. They’re getting a buzz out of growing the business, but it’s so easy to get caught up in that pressure. Obviously, if you’re working for somebody else. my invitation for you is just to remind yourself that you never really get it done. And even if you kill yourself to do this particular to hit this particular target or to get this project over the line on time.

what’s coming right around the corner. It’s another one. Right. So it’s just to remind yourself of that and to take good care of yourself in the process. And that’s exactly why I’m using my leadership and life planner, the planning toolkit to ensure that I structure my goals like in a really strategic manner, like there’s spaces in there to do your milestones, your action steps, everything so that you have time. It’s laid out for you beautifully so that you can map it all out. So again, I link that in the show notes if you want to grab it.

Number five then, this is a final thing that I am doing in 2025 to ensure that I do not miss out on family time and that I don’t kill myself in the process. And that is empowering my team and giving up control. Ooh, that’s a hard one for me. And I know for so many of you, it’s the same. It’s something I’ve been actively working on for some time.

And it’s really not easy for me. I like to I do have perfectionist tendencies. I take when you invest in yourself to work with me because it’s a premium product like it’s four, nine, nine, five as I’m recording this episode for 360 leaders club, for example. Like I take that very seriously. I’m like I take it probably too seriously that I want to make sure that it’s perfect, that it’s a premium offer. And it is right. It really is. I’m really happy with the offer and.

You know, it’s a testament all our members are renewing. think we had like 10 of our 13 of our members were due to renew or to finish up their time back in November. And 10 of them decided to stay with us. So I know like it works. I know that the offer is amazing. And that’s because I pay attention to small details like care deeply. So it’s about balancing being able to still have that level of care and support and service for me and my heart, because that’s a part of my brand, you know.

Lucy Gernon (17:16.972)
I care deeply about your success and I care deeply about you making an impact because you’re being paid to make an impact. But at the same time, I’m learning to empower my team and just give up some decision making control. And I think that’s a big thing for you, too. So if you’re multitasking, come back to me. Is I think personally for me, sometimes it’s not the hours worked, it’s the numbers of decisions I have to make in a day that causes me serious fatigue.

And I know you’re not in your head along right now. Decision making fatigue is hard because you’re you’re carrying the weight of a potential outcome on your shoulders, whereas I’m struck. You know, I’ve started I did start last year. I’m going to continue to build on that to empower my team to make more decisions without having to constantly run everything by me as well. And it’s about creating that.

culture of trust and, you know, trying to step back in when, you know, if it’s necessary as well. So that is it for the five strategies that I am going to be implementing. I’d love to hear from you. I’d love you to reach out and DM me. I really love hearing from you. I’m like I’m on Instagram at Lucy Gurnan. I’m on LinkedIn. My team manage my social media alongside me, but if there’s ever personal messages and I don’t see them, like they will assign me a task to follow up. So

Please know that my team would be in my inbox, too. But I am always I love chatting with you guys, especially on Instagram and the DMs when I’m sitting down with a glass of wine, just having a few little chats. And so many times the girls who come and work with me in 360 leaders club, like they’ve been following me on Instagram for ages. They’ve been connected with me on LinkedIn. You are definitely in my podcast because I know that, you know, most of the girls in 360 would be listening to the podcast as well. So you’re in good company.

I’m like, why didn’t you reach out to me sooner? Like just have the chats with me. We don’t have to, there’s no pressure to work with me until you’re ready, but I still love just connecting and hearing what’s going on with you. So reach out to me let me know which of those five strategies you are going to be using. And just to recap, number one, plan your entire year. I did that in November. You can still do that too. And if you want to grab that leadership and life planning toolkit,

Lucy Gernon (19:35.566)
just go to lucygarland.com forward slash planner. You can grab that for just 47 euro. So, so good. Number two, get super intentional about your three to five big initiatives for the year and then stick to them. And side note, make sure that they are aligned with your organization’s strategic direction. Number three, to delegate more. So important, delegate more. Number four,

Remind yourself that business success is a marathon and it’s not a sprint. There’s always the next thing right around the corner. So take really, really good care of yourself in the process. And number five, empower your team a little bit more and just give up the need to control everything. So thank you for tuning in today. I hope you found it valuable. And here’s to a year filled with success, balance and happiness and precious moments for all of us with our families, as well as killer business success in 2025.

Until next time, take care and be kind to yourself. Bye for now.