The most productive course creators don't just work hard — they step back regularly to review what's working, celebrate progress, and plan deliberately. An annual review is the single best practice for building a course business that grows sustainably year over year.
Step 1: Review How You Invested Your Time
Before planning forward, look backward. Pull up your calendar for the past year and examine how you actually spent your time — not how you intended to spend it. Ask yourself:
- What took up the most space on my calendar?
- Which activities didn't move my course business forward?
- What do I want more of next year? What do I want less of?
- What went better than expected? What surprised me?
Be honest. If you spent 60% of your time on client work and 5% on course creation, that tells you something important about where your priorities actually landed versus where you wanted them to be.
Step 2: Celebrate What You Accomplished
This step is easy to skip, but it matters. Course creators frequently sabotage their own momentum by failing to recognize progress. You launched a pilot course? That's worth celebrating. You wrote five lessons? Acknowledge that. You talked to ten potential students? That's real market research.
Make a list of every accomplishment, no matter how small. Then sit with it for a moment before rushing into next year's plans.
Step 3: Extract the Lessons
Now look at the year through a learning lens:
- What risks did you take? What did they teach you?
- What's still unfinished? Is it worth carrying forward, or should you let it go?
- If you could describe your year in one word, what would it be?
- What skills did you develop? What gaps remain?
The Intention Triangle: Balancing Three Forces
When planning your course year, balance three forces that often pull in different directions:
- Intention — Your overall priority or mantra for the year. What's the one thing you want to be true by December?
- Business Model — How you sustain yourself financially. Is your current model working, or does it need to evolve?
- Intuition — What feels right and is pulling you forward. What excites you when you think about your teaching?
The healthiest plans honor all three. An intention without a business model is a wish. A business model without intuition becomes a grind. Intuition without intention leads to scattered effort.
From Annual Vision to Quarterly Action
An annual goal is too distant to act on daily. Break it down:
- Annual: What's the big outcome? (e.g., "Launch my signature course and run it twice")
- Quarterly: What milestone gets you there? (e.g., Q1: outline and pilot, Q2: refine and launch, Q3: run cohort 2, Q4: build evergreen version)
- Weekly: What's this week's concrete task? (e.g., "Write lessons 1–3" or "Interview 5 potential students")
Consider a focused approach like Marie Forleo's: she opens her flagship program just once per year despite having a large team. That level of focus produces outsized results compared to solopreneurs running fifteen different offerings year-round.
Keep It Simple
Apply two lenses when reviewing your plans:
- Minimalism: "What's the simplest path to this result?"
- Essentialism (from Greg McKeown's book): "Is this essential, or just nice to have?"
If something doesn't survive both filters, it probably shouldn't be on your plan. For more on maintaining focus, see Your Course Business Needs Focus.
A Note on Revenue Planning
When projecting revenue for the year, be realistic. Your first course launch is primarily a learning exercise, not a revenue event. The real financial returns typically come from your second and third iterations, once you've refined your offer based on student feedback.
For a realistic revenue model, see Can You Build a Six-Figure Course Business? Factor in your platform costs when budgeting — tools like Ruzuku charge a flat monthly fee rather than taking a percentage of sales.
Your Next Step
Set aside 60–90 minutes for your annual review. Block it on your calendar. Pour a cup of coffee, open a blank document, and work through the three steps above: review, celebrate, extract lessons. Then draft your Intention Triangle for the coming year. Even an imperfect plan dramatically outperforms no plan at all.
Want to see how other course creators have built their businesses? Browse real creator stories →