How I Planned a Whole Year of Launches (and Made Sure We Could Pay the Bills)

They say to just go for it and record your first video, and that it's gonna suck.

So I did. And it's probably a little rough (there's a gnat cameo, you'll see). But the stuff in it is the real process I used to plan an entire year of launches, so here it is:

If you'd rather read than watch, this post walks through the same thing. It's a little cleaner than me looking off-camera at my notes.

And if you want the spreadsheet I use in the video, you can grab it here. It's a random yoga business with fake numbers I put together with Claude... but the structure and the formulas are the real ones.

My name's Chen Lehner. I ran the marketing at Holden QiGong, and eventually took over general management too.

It took us a while to figure things out. Then we really figured things out. Over my time there, the business brought in around $34 million, and by the time I moved on we were doing about six to six and a half million a year.

A big part of how we got there was this planning process. Let me explain.

Honestly? I started doing this so people knew what the hell was coming up.

When the launch calendar lives in one person's head, everybody else is stuck waiting. The copywriter can't start their research. The social media people can't plan anything. Nobody knows if they can take a vacation in May without leaving in the middle of a launch.

This process fixed that. It's how I made sure the rest of the leadership team knew what we were doing and felt confident in the plan. Then I could go talk to the rest of the team, and they could go execute on everything.

They basically knew everything we were doing for an entire year (or more, if you want to take it further). So they could plan their work, and they could plan their lives.

If you want the launch playbook that sat inside this calendar, here's how I used to run two product launches a month.

This works really well if you've got a few years of data on the promotions you've run. We had a set group of promotions that we'd cycle through, and we knew the overall shape of how we liked to run them.

If you're brand new, you won't have this yet. Start tracking now and this gets useful next year.

Here's what you need:

The past isn't always the best predictor of the future. But it does help. A lot.

The whole thing runs on two documents:

You plan the calendar. You check it against the money. You go back and fix the calendar. That's the loop.

I'd sit down for maybe 45 minutes and just start plugging in dates. When do we want to do something for acquisition? When's the next certification? What goes in the spring?

I never really do it in any particular order. I just like to start throwing things at the wall, and then the next step tells me if it works.

What made this go fast for me is that I had a pretty good feel for what each type of promotion would make. Roughly:

That feel came from years of doing this. You may or may not have it yet. When I tried to train someone else on this, it took them a while to internalize all the numbers too. That's what your promotion history is for.

This is the part people get confused about.

The blocks on the calendar are not how long it takes to deliver the workshop or the course. They're the window where that promotion takes over every communication channel we have, and we really don't want to be talking about anything else.

I'm a really big believer in the rule of one. You want to have the one ring. One message, across all of your channels.

So in the example spreadsheet, there's a hip mobility workshop running February 4th to February 14th. For those ten days, the promotional emails are about hip mobility. So are the Facebook posts, the YouTube videos, the blog posts, Instagram and Pinterest. Anything going out anywhere has something to do with hip mobility.

And that's what frees up the whole content team. Once the calendar's set, the copywriter knows what's coming and can start researching. The social team can start designing campaigns and quizzes or whatever they want to do around it. Everybody can start their work.

Not every promotion has the same job. I'd try to work different types of campaigns into the year so they'd serve different masters:

This comes from Jay Abraham's ways to grow a business: get more customers, get those customers to spend more, and get them to buy more often.

For me, ascension meant helping students progress deeper into their practice and deeper into the lineage. The students who wanted to keep going got something that actually let them do that. And the business needs them to spend more money with us. It worked out for both.

So that's step one. How are we acquiring customers? Those events go on the calendar. How are we activating them? Those go on the calendar. How are we ascending them? Those go on the calendar too.

This is where most of the work actually happens. You can throw a bunch of stuff on a calendar. The spreadsheet is what tells you if it works.

For every single promotion, you build a low and a high estimate off the last time you ran it.

Let's look at the January Vinyasa Foundations cohort from the example:

For this one, Claude figured we'd hit 80% of last time on the low end and 95% on the high end. That gives you $110,000 for the cohort at the low point and $130,000 if you hit the high point.

And yes, you have to do that for every promotion on the calendar.

Once you have those numbers, you can look at the whole year month by month. For each month you've got four numbers:

Put those together and you can tell what kind of month it's going to be. Is it a good month? Is it at risk? Or are we going to be short? If it's short, you probably definitely want to change things around.

Say August comes up short, like it does in the example. You go, "Yeah, we can't deal with a short month in August."

So you go back to the calendar and look at what's happening in August. In the example, it's a free acquisition event and a workshop.

Maybe you swap that workshop for a course launch, or something else with a higher average order value. This is where knowing your numbers really helps. In the example, the average order value on a workshop is $119. On a course, it's $496. That swap would probably make up the $50,000 difference.

And you'd still get to run the free challenge, which brings in new leads. Then you go back to the money side and check it again.

You're always balancing two things. Where are we getting new leads? And how are we funding the periods where we're buying those leads?

New-lead events don't always make money right away. For us, we'd be losing money on a new lead for three to six months. I was willing to do that because I knew that if they were in the system and started practicing, they'd eventually become students and spend more with us. That only worked as long as we took good care of them and they had a good experience.

So it was never just "How much money can we make from someone right away?" It was "How do we keep them practicing?" If they keep engaging with the material over the long run, they stick around. They get a lot of results from the practice, and they end up with a high lifetime value.

The spreadsheet lets you make those calls consciously. Maybe some months are way over, and they can fund the short month (as long as you actually have the money in the bank). You can see where the risk points are for the whole year before you hit them.

Some of it. I tried to get AI to help with this back when it wasn't very smart yet, and it couldn't do much.

The math side is where it's really helpful now. Setting up the actual promotional schedule for the year was a little iffy. I think you could do it now, though. Point it at this whole approach and say something like, "I need you to find me a way to make enough every month to meet all of our company goals."

Then check its work. You know your business better than it does.

This was a very launch-heavy business. Most of what we did was email and launches, all run off a calendar. If your business is more about driving traffic to a store and letting people buy whenever, this is less useful for you.

It also doesn't include the stuff you'd be doing on top of this to actually grow the business. That means opening new acquisition channels, or running cold traffic funnels that bring people into a specific offer and then into your email and launch system.

This is really just the communication channels and the promotional schedule for the year. For us, that part was much more certain. I just knew I could predict it.

If you know your baseline, and you know roughly what each type of promotion makes, you can:

The example year plan from the video is free. Just a name and email address and it's yours. It has the mini calendar, the promotion history, and the money side, with the formulas already in place.

Get the example year plan →

Make a copy and swap in your own numbers. Or download it and point Claude at it and have AI do it for you. Whatever you want.

I'm trying to post something about once a week. So if this was helpful, subscribe on YouTube. And let me know in the comments on the video: how do you plan your launches and your year? I'm always curious about this stuff.

See ya.

Chen