Today I want to just jump right in and talk about the mid year review process. It’s the middle of June which makes it an excellent time to hit the pause button on your business activity to take a look at what’s going on inside your business.
I want to talk about why that’s important and give a few tips and actions you can take and try out in your business.
Let’s start not in the middle but at the beginning of the year.
At the end of every year you hear all kinds of stuff about setting resolutions, getting your annual plans, budgets and setting your business strategy for the year. It’s all rally cries and 4 hour strategic planning retreat or exercises.
That’s all good stuff because for a short time you are forcing yourself to get crystal clear about what you want and how you’re going to get it. At least in an idea generating-optimal resource allocation-best case scenario planning kind of way.
But, unfortunately, like well intentioned weight loss resolutions, after a few weeks, most businesses fall off the resolution wagon. Falling off your over idealized business resolution bandwagon doesn’t have to be a bad thing though.
See, strategy and plans need to be more fluid. The trap is that as soon as you get in the flow of doing your business there are lots of pressures that a business owner has to deal with, that maybe weren’t accounted for or aren’t included in any of that early planning. If you built a rigid plan with maybe a few unreasonable or unrealistic expectations, there’s a chance that you get a little discouraged and throw the strategic planning baby out with the bath water.
That’s when most businesses chalk up that whole process as not being worth it and validate how they feel by claiming that quote, this stuff doesn’t work or all that advice sounds great for everyone else but not for MY business end quote.
That makes my heart sad.
All that resolution and early year planning work is important for a lot reasons. They are the same reasons why they are important in the middle of year as well.
Reasons like:
Taking stock of what you’ve accomplished to date and look for constructive feedback on areas where performance is lacking.
Discovering and eliminating possible roadblocks that are keeping you from achieving your goals.
Adjusting goals because people's tastes and expectations can change over time.
Getting information from you clients or customers about their satisfaction.
Making sure in the course of doing business you’re honoring what’s important to you - those would be your mission and values.
And, last on my abbreviated list here is making sure that you’re getting the most out of your time, money, emotional energy, patience and the list can literally go on in terms of the resources your business needs to thrive.
I think you get the point. What happens is during the year we get busy. Get busy trying to do all the important things that help keep the people that we serve happy and returning as customers. But that leaves room for unclear strategy to creep in. Unclear strategy and conflicting priorities reduce your business’ performance and profits.
That’s no bueno.
So here is a list of 3 actions you can take during your mid year review process to help get your business back on the tracks you laid back in January.
Gather your data. Every business has data. It might be a little different but start gathering. Start putting together things like client/customer sales, how many times you engage with customers, how many times do you have to engage with a prospect before they make a decision, how are you measuring success with things like social media or other marketing channels, what are all the steps in your process from customer interest to close, how much time are you spending doing admin stuff, or networking?
I’m hoping you get the idea. Then once you have all that in front of you and in some kind of way that makes sense you can make your way through some of the bigger questions about your business.
Start with the big questions like:
Where are we?
What do we have to work with?
Where do we want to be?
How do we get there?
What you’re trying to suss out are the mechanics of your business. If this were that weight loss new years resolution review what you want is to see how your body is doing now compared to the beginning of the year and have you been doing what you said you were. Then whether you were or not take a look at what’s happening right now and try to work out how you can still get to success if you’re a little short or if you are blowing your fitness out of the water what’s the next set of goals you can work to.
After the mechanics I want to get into the experiences.
A very important part of the review process is getting clear on what you want the people who interact with you to experience. They can be the same or different for all the different kinds of people your business interacts with. Everyone you meet is not necessarily someone that will listen to your pitch and you have to be comfortable with that. At the same time though you want to make sure that whoever your audience happens to be at the moment when they walk away, you did your best to be authentic in terms of your mission and values. This is getting at the heart of what’s important to you.
In terms of our weight loss goal again, it’s like if you were using one of the many MLM weight lossy kind of products and all you did was spam social media asking people to buy or plan some kind of party. If taking your fitness more seriously has transformed what you want to do to reflect helping other people embrace their fitness is spamming <insert mass marketing weight loss gimmick> really the best way to get that conversation going. Probably not and if you’re like me you’ve already muted a few friends that have done that. Sorry friends muted friends if you’re listening.
This last piece is about digging deeper on the “How” question from the first part. What you need to wipe from vocabulary from this point are vague business success generalities like: Make more sales, get more customers, have more engagement, set more meetings, coach more clients, make more stuff.
Get the idea?
Move away from the generalities and start quantifying what success looks like. How many more sales do you want? How many more customers? What kind of engagement? How many more meetings? How many more coaching clients? How much more stuff are you making?
Once you get specific you can start to break out your schedule and allocate the time or other resources you need to allocate to hit those goals. You should have an idea because you already did the work of pulling the data. It might be more than finding the groove in your schedule. WHen you are looking at your business, you need to get clear and incremental on the actions you need to take.
I mean, if you were a client of mine and said ok my goal is to get 30 new customers this year I’d say great so what are the steps you think you need to take to get the next client? That’s how you start. If you make your way through enough next’s you’ll be able to make your process a little more streamlined every time and figure out the tricky little things that work and tease out the things that aren't working so well.
That’s it! That’s your review process for the month of June. You didn’t have to start from scratch and hopefully you're just building on the momentum you’ve been growing from the start of the year. I hope that the reasons I’ve listed are compelling enough to help you work through the three steps of getting your data and answering the big q’s, then working on the experiences you want to create, and lastly getting granular on the work that needs to be done to finish the year successfully, however you define success.
I’ve just finished this process for myself and realized that success for me has changed a bit and that’s not a bad thing. My personal review process has shown me how I can take what I’m working with and authentically use my strengths and resources to finish the year strong.