Are you a solopreneur, service-based entrepreneur or small business owner looking to conduct your own mid-year business review? If so, you are in the right place as I’m going to walk you step-by-step through how to perform your own mid-year business review.

 

REVIEW YOUR ANNUAL GOALS

Firstly, I want to point out that I’m obsessed goal setting, planning and reviewing. Whether it is personally or professionally I believe to be successful you have to set goals and stay focused on taking the necessary actions to achieve those goals.

Now I hope that at the beginning of the year you set yourself annual goals and bonus points if you also created some sort of tracker. If you didn’t set goals at the beginning of the year then you should definitely check out my post How to prepare your business for a new year.

 

 

For each of your goals you want to ask yourself the following “Has the goal been achieved?”

If the goal hasn’t been achieved the next question to ask is “Am I track to achieve the goal by the deadline?”

If you answer no to that question then you need to ask “Is this still a goal I want to achieve?”

If you answer yes then you need to work out what you need to do to achieve the goal going forward.

 

ASPECTS OF YOUR BUSINESS THAT YOU SHOULD REVIEW

Once you have reviewed your specific business goals it is time to do a more general business review. There may be some overlap with reviewing your goals and it may be that you are reviewing some of the things more regularly which is brilliant. I have gone into lots of detail here because I know some people don’t!

FINANCIAL

The likelihood is that you aren’t in business just for the fun of it. Therefore, it is important to keep an eye on the figures. I know for some people this can be daunting, but ignoring the numbers isn’t going to change anything.

Depending on your business you may have certain financial metrics already decided. If you don’t here are my recommendations

Gross Sales – This is the value of the sales you have generated. This can also be called turnover. You can then break this down further depending on your business model to by month or by product/service.

Costs – Work out exactly how much has it cost you to run your business over the last 6 months.

What you have paid yourself – Maybe you give yourself a regular salary, or maybe you are still paying yourself ad-hoc. Use this review as a time to understand exactly how much you have taken out the business and decide if you are happy with that amount and how it works out in relation to overall sales.

 

 

MARKETING

WEBSITE

Whether you run your business solely online or not, the likelihood is that your website will play a key role in your marketing. You can use Google Analytics to review how your site is performing, as well as how people are discovering your website.

Referrals – Where is your traffic coming from? What percentage is from organic search, social media, email marketing, referral, paid search etc. Does the amount of traffic correlate with where you are putting energy and money into marketing your website?

Conversion – If your website contains pages where people can directly buy from you then you can work out your conversion.

If you don’t directly sell you still may be able to work out conversion rates. For example, if you have a page like me where people can schedule a call with you then you can work out what percentage of people who visit that page then books a call.

Or if you have landing pages with lead magnets/freebies you can look at how many people landed on that page and how many people filled in their details (this may be done via your landing page or email service provider).

Page Visits – What pages have received the most visits? This is especially informative if you have a blog/podcast/video show on your website. It will help reveal either content that interests people the most or the content that you marketed the best.

Referrals and conversions are just three of the many metrics you can review. To delve into Google Analytics more check out 7 Google Analytics Metrics Every Website Owner Should Review.

 

 

EMAIL MARKETING

The three most important things to review are:

• List growth – How many people join your list daily, weekly or monthly? How are they joining your list?
• Open rate – What is your current open rate? Has it dropped or increased in the 6 months? Have there been any emails with especially high or low open rate? If so, can you identify why that might have happened?
• Click through rate – How many people are clicking through to links you include in emails. You should be using email to drive people to consume more content or buy. Are people following your instructions?

 

SOCIAL MEDIA

If you are using social media to market your business then you should be analysing the impact. Here are some questions you can ask yourself for every social media profile that you have:

• What has happened to the size of your following/audience in the last 6 months?
• What has happened to your engagement in the last 6 months?
• What has been your best and worst performing content? Is there anything you can learn from your best performing content going forward? Look at the time you posted, the format of content, imagery, headline, hashtags etc

 

 

USE YOUR MID-YEAR REVIEW TO INFORM YOUR FUTURE GOALS AND ACTIONS

Once you have completed the review the important thing is to use the findings to inform your future goals and action planning. It may be that you adjust your annual goals or you set new ones.

If you didn’t already set some annual goals this will help you to set goals for the final 6 months.

 

Financial

As a minimum you should set|:

• Sales
• Amount you want to be taking home

 

Impact

• How many people do you want to work with?
• How many people would like to consume your content?

 

Product Mix

• Do you see the product/service mix that you currently have staying the same or do you want to add in something new?

 

Awareness

• How are you planning to raise your profile and the profile of your business?
• What PR/press would you like to receive?
• What size audience would you like across all of the marketing channels / platforms you use?

 

Once you have got clear on your goals it is time to write out your action plan and then start taking action!

 

DO YOU NOW FEEL CONFIDENT PERFORMING YOUR OWN MID-YEAR BUSINESS REVIEW?

I hope this blog has helped you feel more confident in doing your own mid-year business review. By following the steps I have no doubt you will put yourself and your business in a great place to have a productive and effective 6 months.

 

WORK WITH ME

Would you prefer to have someone to help you with your mid-year business review? If so, I can help you! I have a tried-and-tested review and reflect process that’s designed specifically for solopreneurs and small service-based business owners.

Depending on your needs you can either book a Strategy Day where we do the review and then creating a robust business and marketing strategy to help you grow your business over the upcoming 6 months. Or you can apply for my 6-month mentoring programme where not only will you get the robust business and marketing strategy but you’ll have me by your side for the rest of the year to give you the training, advice and accountability to successfully implement the strategy.

Not sure whether you need a Strategy Day or my 1:1 Business and Marketing Mentoring? You can book a free discovery call to discuss the programme in more detail and get signed up.