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Want to know the 5 things I check in my monthly review session for my business? As a business owner, it is vital to regularly review how your business is performing. I’m a big fan of monitoring your number and I sit down on a monthly basis to review how my business is performing. Keep on reading to find out the 5 things I check in my monthly review session.
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The importance of having a monthly review session for your business
Before sharing what I check in my monthly review session I want to quickly talk about the importance of having a monthly review session for your business. As a small business owner, it is easy to get stuck in the day-to-day and not make the time to really evaluate how the business is performing. No matter what size a business is there should be clear goals set and then KPIs (or metrics) set to enable the business owner to ensure that progress is being made towards those goals.
I hope by sharing a sneak peek into what I monitor in my business it will inspire you to have your own monthly review session. However, what you monitor will depend on what type of business you have and your current goals.
5 THINGS I CHECK IN MY MONTHLY REVIEW SESSION
1. Finances
The first thing I check is my business’ finances. I actually check my finances on a weekly basis, but since I set myself monthly goals I like to also sit down at the end of the month and review how the month has done.
I will review the following:
- Income
- Expenditure
- Gross profit for the month (value and percentage)
- Expected income
Income – I review income in terms of money the business has physically received in the month.
Expenditure – I review all outgoings for the month
Gross Profit for the month (Value and Percentage) – I review gross profit in a value form to ensure that on a monthly basis the company is making a profit. I also review gross profit as a percentage due to having targets on this metric as the business grows.
Expected income – Due to outstanding invoices and some clients paying on a monthly basis there is usually a level of expected income for the upcoming months. Taking a moment to review these figures helps me understand the cash flow of the business, but also realise how much new sales revenue needs to be generated to achieve upcoming monthly targets.
2. Conversion Rate
Next, I’ll look at my conversion rate. For my type of business, it is key to be signing new clients and knowing my conversion rate can help to identify problems sooner rather than later.
To calculate my conversion rate I use the following formula
Conversion Rate = (Total number of new clients that month / Total number of leads that month) * 100
With regards to leads, I track both the number of discovery calls I have, as well as the number of enquiries I get through email, the contact form on my website and specific enquiries via social media private messaging options.
Personally, I think it is important to monitor your conversion rate because just looking at the number of clients you’ve sign can be misleading.
For example, say it has been a quiet month and I’ve only signed 2 new clients. Checking my conversion rate will help me to see whether I have a sales or marketing problem. If I look and actually I only had 3 leads that month that would mean by conversion rate was 66% (a very healthy rate). Whereas, if I review my leads and see that I had 10 leads that month then my conversion rate would be 20%.
In the first example, a 66% conversion rate would suggest that I did a good job converting leads and the problem is that my marketing isn’t resulting in enough leads. Whereas in the second example a 20% conversion would suggest that I’m not able to convert enough leads and I need to improve my ability to close sales or I need to look at the messaging of my marketing to ensure people are coming to me for the right reasons.
3. Website
The next thing I check is how my website is performing. My website is the online home of my business. It houses all of my sales pages, as well as my blog content. It is also where people are directed to via press, partnerships and collaborations. As a result, I think it is ultra-important to monitor how people are getting to my website, as well as how behave across my website.
I am a massive fan of Google Analytics and could easily spend hours analysing what is happening on my site. However, for my monthly review I check a few key areas.
Acquisition > Channels – The first thing I check is how people are getting to my website. Understanding how people are getting to my website helps me to understand what marketing activity is working. For example, I’ll look to see how much traffic is coming from each social media platform, as well as checking all of the websites that are referring people to me. The latter is especially helpful if I’ve been guesting on podcasts or been featured in the media. It allows me to get a bit of an idea of whether that activity is leading to people wanting to head over to my site and find out more about me and what I offer.
Behaviour > Site Content – This is where I can check exactly what pages on my website are being viewed. I can check the views of recent blog posts, as well as see how many people are checking out a specific service I was promoting that month. Reviewing my site content can also help me to discover what pages are ranking well on Google and then I can consider if there are any ways to improve those pages.
As I mentioned earlier there is so much you can do in Google Analytics and these are just two areas I like to check. If you aren’t sure where to start with Google Analytics check out my blog post – 7 Google Analytics Metrics Evert Website Owner Should Review.
4. Email marketing
For email marketing I use Mailerlite. I send an email out to my mailing every Wednesday, as well as having a number of automated email sequences set up.
For reviewing purposes I concentrate on two things. Firstly, I review my overall subscriber numbers since this aligns with my goal to grow my mailing list. Then I’ll review the open rate and click-through rate of my weekly email. There is no point in having a large mailing list, but not having anyone opening them. Keeping a close eye on my open rate allows to me assess the success of my subject lines. Analysing the click-through rate can help me to understand what topics my subscribers are actually interested in. Knowing this information will help me with future content creation.
5. Social Media
The last thing I review is social media. The majority of the metrics I check on social media are vanity metrics. They aren’t really important for the business, which is why they are last on the list, but I do like to check them on a monthly basis. Across all of the social media platforms, I will record my follower/fan total so I can see my growth on each channel. Then for my main social media platforms (Instagram and LinkedIn) I will review engagement across the month and make a note of any post that performed really well or drastically underperformed. The performance of posts helps to inform future content planning.
There you have it! You now know 5 things I check in my monthly review session.
I complete this session on the 1st of the month (or the next working day) and find that setting the side aside to run a monthly review session helps me to really understand how my business is currently performing, as well as helping me to plan for the future.
I’ve shared the 5 areas I focus on to give you an idea of how a monthly review session could work, but this is just to give you an idea. Depending on your business and your goals you might need to monitor other things.
In the comments, I would love to know one thing that you are going to monitor going forward.
WANT HELP GROWING A THRIVING SERVICE-BASED BUSINESS?
The purpose of having a monthly review session is to ensure you are on track to achieving your business goals and that all of your key metrics are going up and up. But what if you are monitoring the numbers and you don’t like what you see? Well, I’m here to help.
I work with solopreneurs and (super) small service-based business owners to get clear on their business goals and then implement the right growth, marketing and sales strategies to achieve build a thriving business that supports the lifestyle they want.
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