121 | Stop Planning Backwards! Why Female Founders Need a Champagne Moment Before Setting Goals

Are you planning goals that secretly exhaust you before you even begin?

Every January, you’re fired up and ready to plan the hell out of your year. By March? You’re resentful, off track, and wondering what went wrong. Spoiler: It’s not your strategy, it’s your starting point.

In this potent Founder’s Rant, Dawn Andrews reveals the one mindset shift that can prevent burnout, align your goals with actual joy, and help you build a business you still like by the end of the year.

And it all starts with a glass of champagne.

Write your Champagne Moment. Take 10 minutes this week and write the toast you'd give on December 31st, 2026. No edits, no pressure, just the slightly tipsy truth. That story is your truest roadmap.

What You’ll Take Away

• Why reverse-engineering your year from a Champagne Toast actually works—and isn't just fluffy founder journaling
• The unexpected clarity you gain when you plan based on who you want to become, not just what you want to build
• How skipping this ONE reflective exercise keeps you chasing goals that don’t actually matter
• What resentment in March reveals about the way you set goals in January

Resources & Links:

• Join the AI for Founders Community
• Grab the Feedback Fix Freebie

Related Episodes to Feature

• 114 | Female Founders Stop Planning Like You’re Corporate
  A deep dive into strategic planning that feels aligned and human, not corporate chaos — especially useful for listeners tired of goal‑setting that burns them out.
• 112 | The 4‑Stage AI Process Female Founders Use to Stop Losing 10 Hours Each Week
  A tactical episode that helps founders reclaim time — which pairs nicely with vision planning around what you want your year to feel like.
• 110 | 3 Custom GPTs That Save Female Founders 16 Hours a Week
  Shows how AI can support your team and free up space to live into that Champagne Moment vision.

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

She’s That Founder
121 | Stop Planning Backwards! Why Female Founders Need a Champagne Moment Before Setting Goals

Okay. Real talk. You know how we all come back from Christmas break completely fired up, like ready to plan the hell out of Q1. I do the same thing every single year. By March, I'm resentful and totally off track. Hang with me and I'll tell you why.

Hey, hey, hey.Welcome to She's That founder Thursday edition. These are the quick rants kick in the pants, velvet boot moments that represent me standing in the future, pulling you towards the even stronger, better, more powerful leader that you are with AI as your copilot. So here's what I want you to picture for a second.

It's December 31st. You're holding a beautiful glass of champagne. There's that warm, slightly buzzed end of year hum, where everyone's laughing a little louder because work is actually done and someone taps their glass and suddenly everyone's looking at you, not because you're supposed to pitch something, not because you planned some big moment.

Just, it's your turn to speak, to tell the truth about [00:01:00] what this year was for you. And here's the thing that's wild to me. Most of us never ask ourselves what toast we would like to give. We don't even think about celebrating necessarily at the end of the year other than just some big dance fest blowout.

We set revenue goals and hiring plans and launch timelines, but we skip the one question that actually matters. What do I want to be saying about this year when it's over? Because that moment, that honest, slightly tipsy truth telling moment reveals more about what you're actually building than your strategic plan ever will.

So there's this exercise that I run with myself and with my clients called the Champagne Moment. And I'm gonna be honest, when I first did it myself, I thought it would be easy. I work solo from my house in la. My team is remote

and I run this whole thing from a desk in our back, little casita. So when I sat down to write my end of year toast for 2025, I thought it would be quiet, just me, maybe the boys, a nice dinner.

But when I actually let myself picture it, I started typing names I hadn't even consciously thought about in some time. Clients who'd become real friends, a book publisher I hadn't even approached yet.

Collaborators I was looking forward to working with, but I'd never met in person, but who somehow became part of the architecture of my business. I was shocked by how full that imaginary Champagne Toast room was and what really got me. I wasn't talking about revenue.

I wasn't listing accomplishments like some LinkedIn humble brag. I was talking about what it felt like to run my business that year from 2024 to 2025, what I'd learned, what I'd let go of, who I'd become, and that's what I realized. This isn't like a written vision board moment. This is your roadmap. This is your intentional roadmap.

This is the story you wanna tell at the end of the year that will tell you everything about what to actually do during the year. So here's how it works. You imagine December 31st and you write the toast you'd give when the year is over, not that LinkedIn version, the real one, like the real vulnerable one.

The one where you've had a glass and a half and you're telling the truth, and I know you're probably thinking this sounds like nonsense. I thought the same the first time somebody had me do this exercise. But stay with me for a second. This story that you're writing is for you alone.

Nobody's grading it. You don't have to stand up and present it. You don't have to show it to anyone. Just write what you would actually say. As you're writing, ask yourself who's in the room with you who helped make this year work. And I don't just mean your team, I mean everyone.

Was there a client that referred someone? Was there a friend who talked you off the ledge somewhere in the middle of the year? Was there a competitor who gave you that one piece of advice that changed everything? And then what did you actually accomplish? What real numbers do you wanna claim? Real milestones, real decisions that changed everything, not what you hope to accomplish, what you did accomplish.

And yes, I get that this is an imaginary exercise, but I want you to stand fully in that future moment and claim it. What did you accomplish? What new skills did you build? And here's the important part. What did you let go of? What did you stop doing? Because sometimes the biggest wins are what you let go of.

Where did you struggle and what are you proud of? Because it was hard. A lot of us skip that part too. We plan like everything is gonna be smooth and go perfectly, but your toast at the end of the year, that's where you tell the truth about what it actually took. Okay, so you have the exercise, but let me tell you what happens to me every year when I don't do this exercise, I come back from my Christmas break.

I've had a few weeks to rest. My brain is buzzing with possibility. I have ideas for new offers, new workshops, new talks, a whole content series, maybe a book or two. Definitely some kind of community thing, like the potential and desire for world domination is off the charts. I see every opportunity. I wanna pursue everything with equal vigor, and then by March I am resentful or burned out.

Or so off track and so scattered in my focus, sometimes even frustrated, sometimes even so frustrated that I'm ready to kill something that was actually promising because I have layered so many things into my own expectations and dreams for the future, and then I can't see the real value anymore. I don't know if that sounds familiar to you, but if it does, welcome to the club.

Most founders do some version of this. We plan revenue without planning energy. We plan growth without planning support. We plan output without planning who we wanna be when we're doing it. And the champagne moment totally flips that. It starts with who you become, not just what you've built.

I ran a group of talent managers through this exercise a while back, and these are people who work alone a lot, or at least it feels that way, long days, high stakes, constant fires to put out. But when they wrote their toasts, almost every single one of them talked about collaboration.

One of the managers pulled me aside afterward and said, I'll never forget this. She said, I just wrote that I thanked my competitor by name and I meant it. She realized how much of her best wins that year came from cross collaboration, not just inside her own company, but with producers, directors, other managers, the talent themselves.

What felt like a lonely grind before she started the exercise was actually a deeply interconnected story that she told. For her, that shifted everything. It changed who she reached out to and how she did it, and who she was being When she did it, it changed what partnerships she prioritized and how she thought about business development moving forward, because she finally saw the real structure of her success, not the imaginary version where she did it all alone.

So why now? Why am I asking you to create your champagne moment now? Because truthfully, you could create it at any point during the year. But to me, this exercise feels especially urgent. As we start 2026, we're walking into the year with so much noise, political chaos, AI changing everything overnight, economic uncertainty, and everyone from your mom to your best friend, to your clients, to your business partners, to social media, to TikTok.

Everyone's got an opinion about what you should be doing. And it is so easy to get distracted and swept up by what everybody else is chasing or to reactively plan around fear. But when you take 10 quiet minutes and write the toast you wanna give, when this year is over, when you let yourself picture a joyful, satisfying celebration, everything shifts.

What you choose to do and not do, who you spend time with, where you put your creative, vibrant energy, how you show up, you create a positive force to live into, not a defensive one. So lovie, here's what I want you to do this week. 10 minutes. That's it. Write the toast you'd give on December 31st when the year you actually wanted to create is over, don't edit it. Don't make it pretty. Don't share it with anyone unless you want to just write what you'd say when you're a little buzzed and telling the truth, because that story, that's your roadmap. Everything else is just tactics. 

You don't need a louder plan, a complicated plan.You just need a truer one, driven by joy, and that starts with the toast. You haven't written yet. 

Have fun writing, lovey. I'll see you next time.