Plan Your Online Education Business for 2026

Chris Badgett offers a comprehensive guide on how to strategically plan your online education business for 2026 in this LMScast episode. He emphasizes that planning is about developing clarity, focus, and adaptability to maximize the probability of success rather than forecasting the future. He starts out by emphasizing how crucial it is to determine your main audience, or the “who,” and comprehend their requirements, goals, and frustrations. Chris clarifies that many business owners erroneously concentrate on their product or method rather than the results that their clients need, and he advocates delving deeply into details like quickness, assurance, understanding, or preventing unfavorable outcomes.

Chris presents a multi-layered strategy for planning.In order to create ambitious long-term goals, he suggests beginning with a 10-year vision, reducing it to a 3-year vision for more achievable milestones, and finally creating a comprehensive 1-year plan. From there, weekly and daily execution guarantees momentum and advancement, while quarterly themes aid in prioritizing focal areas, important projects, and initiatives.

He highlights the significance of “anti-goals,” or things you consciously choose not to pursue in order to stay focused and avoid distractions. He also emphasizes how important it is to link your company with its goal, vision, and values. Values influence your decision-making and corporate culture, vision reflects the long-term effect you wish to generate for your audience, and mission outlines how you will do it. Chris demonstrates how these components influence hiring, team duties, and leadership choices using examples from LifterLMS.

Chris delves into operational planning, outlining how to view your company as a “product” made up of people, procedures, and technology. Even for solopreneurs, he advises creating a basic organizational chart to clearly define roles and duties and to choose where to assign or employ staff.

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Episode Transcript

You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today I’m doing a solo episode about how to plan for an entire year as I’m recording this. It’s the tail end of 2025, and we have a resource on the Lifter LMS website in the lifter LMS Academy called the Annual Planning System.

I’m gonna go over some of the highest level. Concepts in that, but I would encourage you to go check out the annual planning system. I happen to actually be a very big planner and believer in plans and there’s so much going on in our space in terms of. Change and disruption and the economy and geopolitics and everything that having a plan, an intentional plan, but more importantly than a plan, is the system you use to create the plan can really increase your odds of success as a course creator, a coach, a membership site owner as a WordPress professional who builds learning management system websites for clients.

I’m gonna give you all the secret sauce on planning. And, we’re in this interesting stage where the education market is maturing. We have artificial intelligence accelerating in the world, in the economy, in tech. But keep in mind that planning doesn’t equal prediction, but what a plan gives you is a much higher odd of success.

So there’s a famous quote that Mike Tyson says that everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. But what I wanna say is the act of planning and coming up with a strong plan is super important and makes you far more robust and capable and clear. A better leader and just an easier way of being in the world in terms of business and even life.

So this is for the course creators, coaches, membership site owners and agencies out there. And we’re gonna go over, the planning stack because it all cascades down from the plan. And the problem with entrepreneurship is a lot of us. I have to constantly zoom in and zoom out. We may zoom out and work on a strategic thing, and then we have to get in the weeds and work on a very small technical issue or work with a specific customer or work with a team member.

But what I encourage you to do is to create the space to actually stay zoomed out and create a really high level plan, but then also start taking step functions down. From a big vision to a annual plan, to a quarterly plan and, down to a monthly plan, down to a weekly plan, down to your daily action and project management and things like that.

The annual plan basically, which is what we’re primarily focused on today, is gonna set the direction the quarterly plan creates focus. The weekly execution creates the momentum of executing on the plan. But the common failure points are that plans are too vague or not committed to, or there literally is no plan.

I’m often shocked when I see. Entrepreneurs of all kinds, not just education entrepreneurs, literally with zero plan in 100% reactive mode. And it’s sad because life and business could be so much better with some planning. That doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get setbacks or some kind of macro shift from the global economy or whatever, and things are just gonna change in your plan.

Kind of gets outdated, but it’s the active planning that is super important. And it’s important to mention that even if your plan gets hit hit off track by some event, it doesn’t mean you can’t pivot the plan, edit the plan, change the plan, re or reprioritize what’s in the plan. The first thing we’re gonna talk about is really your core focus when it comes to a plan.

You’ve heard me mention if you’ve listened to this podcast, I think Dane Maxwell, who we interviewed on this podcast a while ago, said it best that a business is really only three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. So the customers who you serve, the result is the outcome that they want, usually pleasure, pain, or transformation based, and the mechanism is how you facilitate.

The result for the core customer. That’s literally all businesses. And we have a challenge in our industry where a lot of folks are super focused on their mechanism, like what we do, how we do it. I sell to people who want what I know how to do. It’s very vague, but the first part of creating an annual plan.

Is to really drill in on that core focus and find the signal and the noise. The first part I just wanna say, and I, the, I’ve been in this industry for almost two decades and I realize that the number one thing missing from most businesses that hold them back from successes online education companies is the who you should always start with.

The who. Who are we helping? Who is it? Who is the customer? Some people call that the customer avatar, the ideal customer persona. But what in reality happens is a lot of people are not very clear on the who, and they’re just saying I help anybody who wants what I do. So that’s not a WHO statement, that’s a mechanism first thinking statement.

So we gotta get clear on who we serve. As you create your plan, the number one thing I would recommend you do is to figure out and even challenge yourself if you think you’re clear on who it is that you help. So you gotta develop that. You gotta question even if you think you’re already doing it and you’ve got a clear.

Target market and customer avatar and stuff. I want to challenge you to keep drilling in on the who do you help? What are their pains, what are their frustrations? What do they want? What results do they want? I heard I think it was Dev Basu who said that customers only want four things to save time.

What was the other one? Sorry. Save time. Oh, here we go. Sorry. Lemme back that up. What he said is, customers are looking for four things, speed, certainty, and insight. And the fourth one, which is funny, but not really, is to stay outta jail. So when you are creating an offer for a specific person.

They’re either looking for speed, certainty or insight or to stay outta jail. So when you’re really clear on your who is, and you figure out which one of those like primaries are between speed, certainty, and sight stay outta jail, you’re starting to get much more crystallized around who it is you help, how you help them, and the benefit that they see in you, which now are tied into the result or the transformation.

So let’s assume that you have figured out who you help. ’cause your plan, if you make it about you and what you want oh, I wanna make more money. I want, I don’t want as many obligations on my time. I want to create passive income and automation and all these things. That’s not really a plan, that’s just what you want personally.

A great plan is built around. The people that you serve, the people that you help. So I’m a big believer in that you should put your customer at the center of your business, not your product. So let’s, when it comes to annual planning, let’s put our customer at the center, not our product. So we’ve got the who in the center of our business.

We know what they want we know we have the unique mechanism to help them get what they want. Now we need to come up with a plan to actually make this happen. So in order to make that plan happen, what we also need to do is work on ourselves and our company culture, and we need to do the mission, vision, values work.

So to go over it briefly, there’s a lot we could do on mission, vision, and values. We have a whole training on this and the perfect offer playbook in the lifter LMS Academy. But just to, put the basic ideas out there. A vision is the world that you want to create for your who, for your avatar, for the customer that’s literally at the center of your business.

One way to think about vision if you’re a little stuck when it comes to your subject matter expertise. Is to think about what wrong do you wanna right in the world? So that’s, you can back into your vision by doing an anti vision of the world you don’t wanna live in or you don’t wanna see.

Keep persisting and fix that for a specific type of person because you have the skills, experience, and knowledge to do that. This is the territory of vision. Mission is how you do it, what success looks like, or what the opposite of failure looks like. Lifter, LMS is an example. Our vision is to, in the broadest sense, lift up others through online education.

I believe that education entrepreneurs are some of the most powerful, impactful. Positive outcome generating people in the world. So I throw out a stone with my software lifter, LMS, an education entrepreneur, picks that up and then throws out a stone to help their ideal learner get the results that they’re looking for, that which then helps more people.

So it’s like a stone in the water that has multiple. Outward ripples of positive impact in the world while also creating financial impact and creative freedom. So this is the vision territory where I live, but the mission is to help, a million education entrepreneurs change the world through online education by launching successful courses, coaching programs, education companies.

Internal training resources for inside companies and so on. That’s the mission. The values are how you do what you do. So Lifter, LMS has seven core values and when the first time I heard about values, I think of it as being cheesy. So for example there are cheesy values like.

Integrity, honesty synergy collaboration. Now, those aren’t bad, if you, if those align with you. But to really create strong values, I think you have to get way more specific and not just come up with a name, but actually explain what it means for you. For example, the lifter, LMS company values are community focused.

Reduce friction, continuous improvement. Learner results First, extreme ownership, clear communication, and fulfill potential. Now, I’m not gonna go into a big thing about what each of these mean, but these are values that I embody as a leader in the company and I hire and fire against those values.

Whenever I have a difficult decision as a company, I go to those values. They’re super important and a lot of what we do is about reducing friction. That’s, if I had to pick one, that was our primary, that’s what we do. We reduce friction through software and also content like you’re watching right now, like this content is a, I’m trying to reduce friction in your life by sharing with you.

An annual planning system that I’ve used for a very long time. That really works. So that’s mission, vision, and values. So the next thing you wanna do is comes from the personal development world in terms of developing a a vision that’s more. Like a vision board, something that you can see and basically, even if you have a hard time thinking about that, like I know as a parent, when I ask my kids, where do you see yourself in five years or 10 years?

They have no idea. And you might be listening to this and be like I’m an adult. I don’t have any idea where I’m gonna be in 10 years, but I’ll encourage you to slow down, press pause. And Dan Martel says, dream a little bit. Think about, what do, where do I want to be in 10 years? I wanna see, a lot of people creating online training platforms.

’cause I personally believe that there’s a course inside all of us learning and teaching is part of the human experience. And I see all I’ve always seen this, I see all this value trapped in. People where they’re not sharing it, they’re not helping other people. I call it hoarding all the value. So in 10 years, I want to see a million people using lifter LMS, making money, changing the world and creating like ideal, extremely creative lives that they’re super happy with and proud of.

But we can get specific. In constructing a 10 year vision, so what do you want your annual revenue to be? As an example lifter as an example, we’ve already achieved this where we have customers in every country. I don’t think we have a customer in Antarctica, but we have a customer in almost probably 99% of every single country.

And that was on division on the plan a long time ago, and we’ve achieved that. What do you wanna be recognized as a leader of how many employees do you want? Do you want a big company? Do you want a small company? Do you want to be a solopreneur? Do you want to be a micro business, a big business?

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Do you want to go out on the stock market and have an IPO? What do you want? What kind of like sales motion do you want? What kind of conversion rate do you want? What do you, if you saw yourself on a stage 10 years from now, not from an egocentric way, but just from a celebration of success, what award would you be receiving an award for?

Is it a, like some kind of YouTube award? Is it a humanitarian award? Is it a Nobel Prize? What is it? Dream a little bit. So come up with your 10 year target. And the other thing to create a plan around is like, what’s your main marketing strategy? Marketing is attracting customers. So what does that look like?

How do you close sales after you’ve got the lead? Where what is your, go to market marketing strategy? Are you growing through partnerships? Are you growing through content? Are you growing through ads? So basically condense your marketing strategy down to your ideal customer competitive advantage, proven process and results g guarantee.

For example, at LifterLMS, our ideal customer. Is a a WordPress website freelancer or agency, or do it yourself site builder with at least two years of WordPress experience. Ideally they have four plus years of WordPress experience. They’re polite, they’re successful with their courses or their clients are very successful.

Then what’s your competitive advantage? What makes you unique? We’re entering a world of AI disruption, and I can’t impress upon you enough how important it is to know what your competitive advantage is as a human and not just the information. Because artificial intelligence is making information more of a commodity, in that light, for example, coaching, like going beyond the content and helping people when they’re stuck in their unique personal situation. Having that human connection even through the internet is an extreme competitive example. And then what’s your proven process? Do you like how do you get customers, how well, how do you get leads?

How do you get customers? After they become a customer, how do you make them successful so that they love what you do and refer their friends? And then what’s your guarantee? See, this is part of the benefit of planning. Some people get nervous about a guarantee when they have an offer because it feels I can’t really offer a really strong guarantee because it’s up to the student or the customer to do the work and get the results.

If you’re really good at what you do and you’re really good at qualifying the people that come in that you allow to purchase from you, you can put out a really strong guarantee, like I’m talking about a hundred percent of your money back after X amount of time, like Dr. Dream a little bit. A guarantee can be a very strong sales tool, but more importantly than helping with conversions, when you think about a guarantee and construct it.

What you’re doing is really putting your money where your mouth is in terms of what your online education is all about, and your confidence in the offer that you’re offering. And then, you’ve done the 10 year vision, you’re exploring your unique mechanism, which is where we’ve been about how you do, what you do, how it works, what’s the process, but dial it back to three years.

What’s your three year vision? 10 years feels really hard. But in three years that should be easier. Do you wanna be making a million dollars, $10 million? Do you wanna have a thousand customers? 10,000, a hundred thousand customers or clients? What is your vision for three years?

What do you want to have ac have accomplished in three years? Do you wanna have a signature course that just sells like hotcakes that you make better and better year after year. Do you wanna have a huge membership library of training? Do you wanna have this really strong coaching model with other coaches working inside your education company, helping people get results?

What do you want? What are dream a little bit, think about those three year desired outcomes and accomplishments. Then dial it back again to your one year plan. So now this should feel more approachable. One of the reasons we do the 10 year and the three year is we wanna dial it back to think.

All right, cool. I have these big goals. ’cause what you don’t want to do is you don’t wanna put a 10 year goal and a one year plan. Everything is just, all of it is unreasonable and unlikely. Unlikely to be accomplished, but it’s important to dream big at the multi-year, 10 year, three year level, so that you can come up with a reasonable and strategic one year vision.

So think about that. What are the revenue targets in one year? What are the key projects? Now we’re getting more into tactics. What constraints do you wanna remove? What friction do you wanna remove? And more importantly than anything is what are you not gonna do, even if it’s considered good advice?

What are you just not gonna focus on the first year? Like your anti goal list, even if you want to get to it to achieve your 10 year vision, but not this year? Think about that. So once we get past, 10 year, three year, one year, we start getting into quarterly planning, and this is where this should feel relaxing.

The more tighter the focus gets because you get more control, the closer in time you are to what’s coming up. So when you do an annual plan, in this case for 2026. We’re ultimately gonna end up looking really hard at quarter one of 2026. So I like to do themes per quarter. So what theme do you want to focus on to achieve your one year goal in quarter one?

So in your accomplishments from your one year plan, let’s say you wanted to, you had four goals like. Get over a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube, launch five courses develop like a coaching system. And the other one was to come up with a template library. So it’s not just about content, it’s also about this awesome value packed resource library you have that’s part of your membership.

I’m just making these up as an example. The cool thing about quarterly planning is you don’t have to do all those all at once and multitask and simul simultaneously work on them. So let’s prioritize like what is the theme for the quarter? Maybe you have a theme of we’re going all in on YouTube, or we’re gonna go all in on AI to accelerate our business, or we’re gonna focus on our website.

Conversions in quarter one. So you can, you don’t have to do ’em all at once. In fact, it’s super dangerous to try to do too much all at once. So like within the theme, like what are the key projects? So if we choose the YouTube theme as an example for quarter one, that can mean a lot of things. That can mean.

We’re gonna start a weekly live stream to attract new clients. We’re gonna hire a designer to improve our YouTube thumbnails. We’re going to upgrade our video and audio and editing equipment. We’re going to do brand collaborations with other YouTubers. So you start figuring out your key projects.

Which is super important. And then once you’re in your key projects it’s important to think of not always just doing brand new things. What do we want to amplify that’s already working? Let’s say we already have a YouTube channel and we see that, content about this.

Subtopic within our niche does really well. Let’s do more of that and get more exposure on YouTube as a, and then, like if we haven’t done live streaming before, that’s like a new project. So I recommend actually amplifying what you’re already doing well at a greater percentage to adding new projects.

So if I had to pick three things for YouTube as an example, I might remake. Some of our oldest top performing content for modern times, that would be a project. Another one would be doing collaborations with other YouTubers, which we’ve been doing, but do more of that. So those are amplifications, whereas like doing YouTube ads, that’s a new thing.

So I might do that as like a new project. The other thing that is part of planning is removing problems or constraints. So what’s constraining you in your business and how can you remove that bottleneck? So sometimes projects are not about necessarily brand new things. It’s about removing things that aren’t serving you anymore.

So if we keep going with this YouTube example, let’s say you don’t have a strong home office set up for creating videos and audios and things like that. So you wanna remove the constraint of always having to do all this setup to make a decent video so that you can just step into your office.

I can turn everything on and I’m ready to roll to make a high quality video. So you’re removing a constraint of. Time to create a high quality video, which then furthers furthers your goal. And then what do you wanna stop doing or not do? So maybe you’ve been, let’s say, blogging every day and doing a ton of social media every day.

But in order to do more YouTube. You might need to reduce those things. So let’s say you move your blogging to once a week or once every two weeks. And in terms of social media, maybe you just take a temporary break from one of your social media channels or find somebody to help so that you don’t have to do it as much, or, just choose to discontinue a social media channel that you’ve been working for a long time that is not yielding any results. So turning things off is just as important as turning things on. So another part of annual planning is developing the business. So I like to say we’re really making two products.

There’s like our education company offer, whether that’s a course, a coaching program, a membership site, or whatever it is. But the other product we’re making is our business and our business product is comprised of people and processes and technology. So that whole like business product. What do we want to do there?

And particularly what I want to focus on is the people aspect. So maybe you’re listening to this and you’re a solopreneur, but maybe you have, you occasionally work with freelancers or maybe you have a team or even have a giant team. So even if you’re a solopreneur. Creating your organizational chart is a very important part of the annual planning system.

And this doesn’t need to be fancy. You don’t need like a org chart software or have to even create something fancy and Google Sheets or Excel or whatever. But put down like the key functions of the business. The way I divide up an organizational chart is. It comes with seven areas. So those seven areas are product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations, and admin customer success.

And then we have the CEO or the leadership role under those, each of those. So if you’re doing it low tech, you can literally do it on a Google document with each of those, and then you put bullet points under those. And the bullet points are like breaking out the functions. So as an example, like under engineering or tech as an example, we might have who’s in charge of the website?

Who’s in charge of customizing lifter LMS to meet the needs. Who’s in charge of the hosting, who’s in charge of the marketing automation as an example, and if, and then you put people’s names by it. You really, you just build out your org charts so that each key function and functions within that function has one name next to it.

If you’re a solopreneur. Your name will be everywhere. But the reason it’s an important exercise to do this even as a solopreneur, is that you can start seeing where you want to get help first. Like perhaps it’s under the CEO role. Perhaps you wanna hire a virtual assistant to help you first. That could be, but when you do that, you’ll start to see I like being a CEO. I like being a leader. I’m spending a lot of time here, but I also need to spend time over here in marketing or in sales, or on product, or on engineering or customer success, all these things. And you can start to see where there’s a gap.

So part of your annual quarterly planning or 10 year vision, it’s about people. It’s about the business product. What kind of organization do you want to have? What seats need to be filled? What are, what is the personality of those people that you want in those places? So that’s a accountability chart.

The next thing is to develop a conscious artificial intelligence plan. We’re being. Disrupted as a society, just like when the internet became a thing by artificial intelligence. So think about that. When you’re doing your 10 year vision or your three year vision, or setting your annually plan, annual plan, or working on a quarter, start thinking about how will AI be involved?

How do we wanna leverage ai? Even if you don’t know like the tool you want or whatever. If we go back to our YouTube example. We might wanna figure out how to do better video editing using ai. I’ll tell you the answer right now. Get the script. Script is an awesome AI powered video editing tool. It can make shorts for you.

If you’re watching a clip of this on YouTube. It was made with the script very quickly. It can remove filler words and gaps and all kinds of stuff, what’s your plan for ai, for content creation, for coaching, for marketing, for developing ads, for making your videos better for doing research?

What’s your plan like or what do you need? And even if you don’t know the answer, that’s fine but come up with the question, how can I use artificial intelligence to help me? Be a better YouTuber. Bring that question to ai. Dream a little bit, talk to AI a little bit and think about that one. And the final thing I’ll mention, and by the way, I’ll say it again, I mentioned it earlier, the annual planning system that I use is free on the Lifter LMS Academy.

If you go to academy dot lifter lms.com and look for the annual planning system course. Enroll in that you can get the template I use that I use every year to work on my annual plan. And the cool thing is once you’ve done it once and you come back to do it again the next year, you might have a few updates to your 10 year vision.

Maybe you’re moving faster or slower in certain areas, so this gets easier the more you use an annual planning system. The last most important part is that you are a human in business. So what personal development goals do you wanna set for yourself? Maybe it has to do around your productivity or when you wake up, or how stressed you are, or your work life balance or your ability to communicate public speaking your personal relationships outside of work, whatever it is.

Doing an annual plan, I highly encourage you to incorporate personal development so that you become a better person in the process, not just have a better, more profitable, impactful business. ’cause those things work really well together. So planning is a practice, it’s not an event. It’s all about progress over perfection.

And. When you really commit to annual planning and give yourself permission to not be perfect, and sometimes you won’t hit your targets. Sometimes you will overshoot your targets and that’s great, but it’s a work in progress. It’s a way of being in the world of operating with a plan. It’s like the military.

If you think about an elite operating unit, the Navy Seals or the Army Rangers they have plans all the time. They’re really good at planning, but then when they hit the ground and the stuff goes off, they have to adapt on the fly. And you have to do that in business and in life as well. But planning is really important.

And the process of planning, the act planning even if the world doesn’t go exactly according to plan. Your odds of success are gonna be so much higher. You’re gonna be so much more clear, less stressed, adaptable. So I would encourage you to develop your annual plan. Head on over to the lifter LMS Academy, find the free annual planning system course.

Fill out the document. You copy it, you put it into your. If Google Drive or download it and upload it to whatever WordPress processor you use and work on your annual plan, it will change your life.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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