#51 Stop Planning Your Future in the Margins of Your Life

Show Notes

In this episode of Rooted & Relentless, Steph challenges the hustle mentality that keeps entrepreneurs stuck in reactive mode and explains why creating intentional space to think is one of the highest-level responsibilities of any CEO.

If every decision is made while you're distracted, overwhelmed, or chasing urgency, you're not leading—you're reacting.

Steph shares why strategic planning isn't about predicting the future. It's about making better decisions with the information you already have, creating planning rhythms that support long-term growth, and finally leading your business instead of letting it lead you.

If you're tired of feeling like everything is urgent, this episode will completely change the way you think about planning.

💛 Connect with Steph on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/virtually_stephrubio

In this episode, we cover:

1. Why the quality of your business depends on the quality of your decisions.
2. The hidden cost of never creating space to think strategically.
3. How reactive leadership creates unnecessary chaos.
4. Why not making a decision is still making a decision.
5. The difference between urgency and importance.
6. How to build planning rhythms that actually support growth.
7. The four planning rhythms every CEO should have:
8. How to create a decision filter so you're no longer chasing every opportunity.

Memorable Moments

"The quality of your business is determined by the quality of the decisions you make."

"The quality of your decisions is determined by how much space you have to think."

"Not making a decision is still making a decision."

"We keep solving today's problems instead of preventing tomorrow's."

"Information without processing becomes noise."

"Space is where pattern recognition happens."

"Distance creates perspective."

"If thinking is part of your job, that time belongs on your calendar."

What is Rooted & Relentless?

Rooted & Relentless is the business strategy podcast for entrepreneurs building service-based businesses designed to grow, adapt, and last. Business strategist Steph Rubio shares practical guidance on a range of topics meant to help you sell, scale, and stabilize.
Think sustainable business growth, revenue strategy, systems, capacity, client experience, and the founder leadership required to turn your skills into a successful, sustainable company.

Steph Rubio: Welcome back to another episode of your favorite podcast for growing your business, for loving your freaking life while you do so, leading them instead of them leading you, where we talk about life, leadership, family, growth, all the things it takes to sell, scale, and stabilize your business. But we make it fun. I'm a little weird and a little quirky. Steph Rubio, rooted in relentless. Grab your notebooks, hold on to your tits. This one is most definitely for you. We are getting into why the hell we are even talking about planning for the future of your business. You have to stop planning for the future of your business and your life in the margins of your life when you barely get to it in between client calls. We don't create space. We don't create space to think. strategically. And when I talking about strategy and strategically, since the online space has kind of murdered that word, I want to tell you what I'm talking about. Think about battle strategy. Terrible example. I know. I don't want to talk about war and all of that, but that's kind of where most people can go to and relate to it as easy as possible. So when I talk about this, think about like a battle strategy. It's who needs to be where, on what front, how to infiltrate and all of the hat. That's what we're talking about here. It's how to make the best decisions about where to spend your time, energy, and money, your resources, right? For your small business to get the results you want. And when we don't create space to think strategically, we react. We lead reactively. We're reacting to noise. We're reacting to what felt good or didn't this month. We're reacting to what everyone says online. And that creates chaos. And the truth is that the quality of your business is determined by the quality of the decisions you make. So this is really an episode about making quality decisions more than strategy, though it's part of your strategic plan, right? Deciding where to spend your time, energy, and money. And you should do this on an annual basis. You should be planning on an annual basis. And we'll talk about why people typically avoid this, what they're running from, why they don't. And then you have reflection. Build in. On the last episode, I talked about reflection points, but we have to pull that up a bit too. Before we can reflect, we have to plan. And we have to make good decisions, right? So the quality of your business is determined by the quality of the decisions you make. And the quality of your decisions is determined by how much space you have to think. Every business is built one decision at a time. Hiring, pricing, offers, marketing, partnerships, where you spend your time and money, they're all decisions that you make. The question is, are you making them intentionally or reactionary? Because you're making them, whether you're planning to or not, whether you're intentional about it or not. We obsess over making these decisions, sometimes spiraling because we're not sure and spending weeks and months or even years and putting those decisions off. Not making a decision is still making a decision. You're just avoiding it and you're not doing it intentional and it's costing you as a result. So we often think about that, but we rarely evaluate how we're making decisions, how we filter those through. And the sharper and quicker you get at that, at filtering decisions on what you say yes to and no to, what gets your time, energy, and money and what doesn't, the better off you and your business will be. The quicker you can grow, more aligned in reaching the goals that you set out to achieve, whatever priorities you're after right now. If every important you make in your decision is made while you're distracted, while or squeezed between client calls, what kind of leadership are we actually practicing? Strategic thinking like this is not a luxury. It's actually one of the highest level responsibilities of the CEO of a business. And that's what you're acting as, leading your business. The cost of never creating this space to think, to look at what's happening so that we have this kind of decision tree for our business is that we keep solving today's problems instead of preventing tomorrow's. Think about that one. Every decision becomes reactive instead of intentional. We confuse urgency with importance. I used to work with a CEO of an ed tech company that created chatbots for universities and colleges and stuff like that for admissions. And it was like a 45 person startup company. And he would sometimes say to me, when he was like, we were talking about tasks, I was an executive assistant and project manager. And he would talk about something to do. He was like, this is important but not urgent. Or this is urgent but not important. So that I knew, like urgent is now, right? But a lot of us create if we don't have this decision, if we haven't paused a plan where we're going, if we haven't reflected on that, what's working, what isn't, if we don't have this like built-in decision tree, then everything feels urgent. And then we're trying to do everything. And then we're stressed the hell out because we can't do everything. Spoiler alert, you're never going to be able to do everything in your business. There is a never-ending list of things that need to be done. People even let this stop them from taking off time or stress while they're taking time. And I'm like, no, you can't stress while you're taking time away. That list is always going to grow. But what is urgent, what is important, you have to know the difference. And you have to know where to spend your time, energy, and money based on where you're trying to go, right? I've done this long enough too that I think it's important to talk about why people struggle to create these long-term plans. I've seen this a love. And there's a couple different reasons why people struggle to sit down and plan annually. And trust me, I have a podcast episode unless in the end of last year where I used to hate setting goals. I didn't. I didn't like them. They felt boxed in. I didn't have the luxury of thinking about where I wanted to go and what I wanted it to look like. So I avoided it. Why bother, right? Why do that? Why miss it? I don't know what I want. So a lot of us think that planning means having the future figured out. That's not what it means. A lot of us think that if we do this plan and we decide where we're gonna spend our time, energy, money, what gets our focus, what our goals are next year, that if something changes, the plan failed. Or what if something changes? That's not the case. So we default to just dealing with whatever shows up. We tell ourselves that we'll plan and we'll reflect after this lunch, after this business season, after next month, at the start of the year. But business never stops asking for your attention. And if we don't intentionally choose, it becomes the default. If we don't intentionally create space, then we start leading from whatever is screaming the loudest. And that is not necessarily where you want to spend your time. If you never create the space to stop executing, to get out of the day-to-day and lift it up a bit and think strategically about what's working, what isn't, where you're trying to go, the best actions to take, where you'll spend your resources, right? Your business becomes a series of reactions instead of intentional decisions. Marketing becomes what should I post today instead of what message supports this quarter's goals? You hire because you're overwhelmed instead of because your numbers say it's time. You launch another offer because sales dipped instead of fixing the real issue. You invest in software, coaching, or strategies because everyone else is, not because you identified a gap. One of the things I'm most proud of is teaching my people discernment, is teaching them. I do this through a quarterly business review in the mastermind. When they sit down and they review, I basically teach them, they review everything, they decide their priorities for the up. Coming quarter. And then I tell them their leftover homework is to look at those priorities and see any gaps they have. Is it a knowledge gap? Do they need to learn something? Is it a skills gap they need to learn? Is it something they cannot do? Do they need a connection? If there's any, right? And now they know the only places they should be spending time and energy and money are on those things to pull them off, right? I teach them discernment. And then I ended up launching something in it and I told people, I had people telling me no to what I was selling to them, which most people would think I'm crazy, right? I want to sell it everybody. that they didn't need it because they had just done this reflection. You need to identify what your gaps are, not just because someone's marketing worked really well on you. Every quarter, every month, every year starts to feel disconnected because you never sat down and intentionally decided where to spend your time, energy, and money. You're constantly pivoting because you never decided where you're optimizing in the first place. Decisions become emotional because there's no strategic plan to measure them against. Think through these questions. How would you handle these? Could you handle them? How would you make the decision? A referral comes in. Do you take the client? Revenue dips. Do you create a new offer? A collaborator reaches out. Do you say yes? Someone tells you to get on LinkedIn. Do you pivot your marketing? A VA says they're available. Do you hire them? None of these have a universally right answer. And what you're consuming online is making you think that there's one right way. There is not one right way to run your business. Without strategy, every decision gets made in the moment. With strategy, every decision gets filtered through where you're trying to go. With strategy, every decision gets filtered through where you're trying to go. And what's the best place to spend your resources? Most of us already have enough information to make a decision. The question is, are we monitoring that? Are we collecting that? Are we reflecting on that? Are we making the space to do so? We have months of sales data. We have client feedback. We have wins. We have mistakes. We have patterns. We have to stop and look at those. None of it matters if we don't stop long enough to connect those dots. Information without processing that becomes just noise. Space is where pattern recognition happens and distance creates perspective. So it is a literal power move to pause, to step out of your client meetings, to put time on your calendar where you do nothing but plan and be the CEO of your business. So let's think through now that we know, right? We know that we need the time. What are we going to do? How do we create that? Okay, we've established that we need to create space to think. It is a power move, but how do we create that space? There's a couple of different things. It doesn't have to be like three day retreat every single month. You can do this in a way that fits into your calendar. And what you have to remember when you want to skip these is that it's costing you to do so without pulling it up and planning. Even if you don't feel like you're executing, even if that task list is breathing down your neck, even if there's emails that need a reply, even if that client needs something, your business and your life still demand that you put those off and you pause to plan. This can be an hour every Friday, a CEO, right? Monthly CEO day on your calendar. It can be a quarterly reflection point. In fact, I suggest that it's all of those. But if you can't start with all of those, start with one. It is an annual planning rhythm. Whether you go somewhere to do this, actually know someone who checks out of her home office, goes and checks into a hotel and spends two days between a spa and a hotel or into just plan for the year ahead, right? These are your different planning rhythms. I honestly don't care whether you take to a beach, you take to your favorite coffee shop, you take a notebook, whatever you have to do that works for you. And in fact, I suggest all of this. If you look at my offers, they're all created around strategic planning rhythms for businesses. The rooted reset, we plan. Annually. That is a new strategic planning retreat I have where we plan annually. Then in my mastermind, I have quarterly reflection points, quarterly business reviews where we look at what we did that quarter and we pull out what's going really well and what isn't, what we want to repeat, what we want to trash, what we want to keep, where we need to pivot. So then we're not doing this year to year and we're not reactionary. We're doing it based on what the data is actually telling us. And monthly number checks. You're executing, is it working? Is there anywhere to pivot messaging to lean in to repeat month to month? And weekly is your CEO time like looking at your numbers? It's like talking to your leads. It's really focusing on those sales conversations and the priorities that you set. If thinking is a part of your job and growing and leading a business means that thinking and planning strategically is part of your job, then that time belongs on your calendar.