Planning for 2025
Welcome to The Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your morning shot of what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host Victor Menasce. On today’s show, we’re looking forward to the upcoming year, 2025. Last month, our team took an entire week off site on a cruise ship for our annual goal-setting retreat. The process of goal setting starts with gaining clarity on your values and then bringing your goals into alignment with those values. If your goals are not in alignment with your values, you will experience a profound dissonance in your life.
One of the things I personally struggle with is finding a balance between planning versus doing. Some days, it feels like there is so much to do that there is no time left to plan. Some days, well no, in fact, many days, I experience what feels like a personal battle with the clock. It seems like there is never enough hours in the day to complete what I want to get done, so much so that it feels like at the end of the year, the entire month of December, in fact, was to sprint to the finish line to complete the goals for the year.
So here we are on New Years Eve, goals set for 2025, but there is a crucial missing element, a goal without a plan is merely a hope, and a hope without a plan is a recipe for failure. So after the champagne is on ice for tonight’s New Year celebration, I will be spending the bulk of the day translating those goals that are lacking in planning into something far more concrete.
The planning process can be incredibly intricate, detailed, complex, and at times overwhelming, or it can be simple and straightforward if you’re systematic in your approach. The Project Management Institute is the group that certifies professional project managers, and as an engineer, I am very familiar with this particular body of work. Underpinning the certification is the project management body of knowledge, which consists of 10 books and approximately 50 chapters, even the guidebook, which summarizes the project management body of knowledge is 370 pages long. So, it’s therefore not that surprising that many people experience the project management process as overwhelming, but it does not need to be that complicated.
Start with getting clear on your outcomes. I’m going to give you a simple example. In my case, I have a goal for 2025 to transition the podcast from an audio-only podcast to a video podcast. That is a significant undertaking. There are many more steps involved in producing video compared with audio. In fact, my experience says that video is nearly 10 times more effort to produce than audio only. The art form will be to produce the video, of a high quality, with an approximately the same investment of time as the audio podcast.
Our marketing team then wants to repurpose segments of the video into YouTube shorts, into Instagram Reels and LinkedIn Posts. The key is to ensure the new content creation and editing process does not multiply the production effort. This is where the use of various AI agents can automate several of the steps involved in the post-production process.
There is a gap between a goal and the result. In order to close that gap, we need a plan on how to create the specific deliverables. This year, we will be engaging a research assistant to help prepare some of the raw material for the show. That means planning the episode schedule a lot further in advance in order to take advantage of the skills being brought to the table. The design of the video studio incorporates a lot of natural light so recording time will need to be fairly consistent around the same time each day or the lighting is going to vary dramatically. The challenge will be in recording shows during periods of travel.
For example, if I’m on the beach in Mexico or on my sailboat or in a hotel room at a conference, listeners to the audio show have no idea whether I’m recording from my office or a remote location. With the video podcasts, planning the location for recording video is going to require a lot more thought, this too requires additional planning.
When qualifying guests to appear on the show, we’ll have to be much more mindful of the video aspects not only at our location but the guest’s location as well. That means my staff will need to ensure the guest has a proper setup for both audio and video recording.
If the show is to grow its audience organically, then the show needs to become more discoverable. The title of each episode matters a lot more. YouTube, for example, is the second largest search engine, designing the SEO for each episode becomes more important. The method for designing each episode title requires a process. The process of carving the podcast into a series of YouTube shorts also requires planning. What’s the purpose of the YouTube short? What’s the ideal length? Will people watch the shorts and then later subscribe to the show or will they simply consume the shorts in isolation?
Something as simple as transitioning the podcast from audio to video has a lot of moving parts to it. With over 2,500 episodes so far there is already a vast and growing body of work in the show. The podcast directories are not very good at helping listeners search the show history for specific content. We consider the roll-out of an AI tool that will make the entire podcast history searchable.
Planning is the key to mapping a goal into reality and if you have goals that you want to realize in 2025, a detailed plan for each goal might be the key to bringing it to fruition. I want to wish each and everyone of you a happy and prosperous new year in 2025. As you think about that, have an awesome rest of your day.
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