Do you regularly review your business?
If you never review your business, you could be overlooking major money-leaking holes or income-generating opportunities, like...
- Social media platforms that take a lot of your time and are NOT converting many clients.
- Or marketing methods you barely put any time into that are KILLING it for your business and deserve more of your attention.
Without doing regular reviews, you end up potentially wasting time on things that aren't working and neglecting the things that are.
It's July at the time of writing this so we are halfway through the year - the perfect time to do a business review!
So grab a cup of coffee (decaf for me!), your favourite notebook and pen and set a timer for 25 minutes. Then read through these questions and answer them one by one...
1. What brought in the most sales and audience growth?
You can measure the success of your business in numerous ways:
Your enjoyment
Audience growth
Social media engagement
Brand awareness
A mixture!
It's up to you. I do believe, however, that income needs to be tracked and reviewed. Your income number doesn't have to mean you are or are not a success. But keeping a finger on the pulse of your income will help you understand if your business is financially stable or steadily declining, and help you see this sooner rather than later so you can take action and avoid financial discomfort.
I have a Growth Tracker Spreadsheet (available inside my course, Simple Sales School!) that my virtual assistant updates at the start of each month with the previous month's metrics. This includes how each of my new course students found my brand.
If you don't already, you can start collecting data on how your clients found you simply by adding a box to your contact form that asks "how did you find me?" Each time you book a client, look at their contact form and note how they found you. Over time, the data will reveal what your most effective marketing strategies are!
If you don't have this data, go and add that question to your contact form now.
If you already have the data, great! In your mid-year business review, write down your top 3 sources of clients or sales.
These are the 3 marketing strategies you should be investing time into. But if you don't have much time, just focus on the top two. (The reason I don't say "only focus on no.1" is because it's smart to diversify your marketing a little. If you focus on referrals and then all referrals dry up for instance, it's helpful to have another marketing method (like Instagram or email marketing) to keep bringing in clients for you. (That’s why I don’t just teach one marketing method in Simple Sales School, I teach you Instagram marketing, email marketing and video marketing!)
Now you know what brought in the most sales/clients, explore what brought you the most audience growth (if this metric is important to you.)
Log in your most effective social media platforms, head to the Insights, and sort your posts by Most Interactions or Most Follows. Then make some notes on what these posts had in common so you can replicate it with your upcoming posts. There's no point reinventing the wheel! If there's a certain type of content that performs best for you, make more of it! Just make sure to keep doing these reviews every six months or so because the types of content that perform well often changes over time. (Remember how flat lays used to be the rage on Insta? And now it’s reels? You get my drift.)
2. What have you enjoyed and not enjoyed doing?
Believe it or not, you should enjoy running your business! You didn't leave a soul-sucking day job to start a soul-sucking business. You are the boss now, which means you don't have to keep doing tasks or roles if you hate them.
List what you enjoyed the most. Then ask yourself, how can I make this a bigger part of my business?
List what you didn't enjoy doing. Then note down whether these things can be removed from your business, automated or outsourced to someone else.
If you really enjoy a certain method of marketing (e.g. making Youtube videos) but you only have a few subscribers, don't write it off. Don't choose to prioritize something else simply because it performs better. If you truly enjoy something, give it your time and effort while also continuing with the alternatives that you don't enjoy as much but are bringing in clients. I know this means you'll have to spend more time marketing, but hear me out. If you really enjoy doing something (like Youtube), it won't feel like a chore.
And because you enjoy doing it, your videos will radiate that and attract more and more subscribers.
Eventually you'll reach a point where you can give up the other marketing methods you don't enjoy and focus on the one/s you do, no matter WHAT that marketing method is. They all work. It's just a case of finding the one you enjoy the best.
If you don’t believe me, check out my new (vlogging) Youtube channel! I started it one week ago and it already has 200 subscribers and a video with 1.2k views - and 76% of those views and subscribers came organically from Youtube. I may have started this channel from zero but because I LOVE running it and making vlogs so much, I’m putting more effort into it than normal and it’s already paying off. If you love doing something, there’s almost no way you’ll fail at it.
3. What has been challenging?
Don't ignore your challenges. They are doorways to growth if you allow them to be.
When we go through something difficult in our businesses, our minds can view it as a threat. Threats to our income and security. But instead, get curious. This is an invitation to get creative.
If your income has decreased, think of fun new temporary offers you could do! Is there something you've always wanted to sell? Is there one service that is selling well that you could double down on?
If your social media engagement has dried up, turn it into a fun experiment and post different forms of content until you find what works best for your audience!
4. What do you want to achieve in your business by the end of the year?
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is neglecting to plan the bigger picture of your business:
What do you want to launch this year?
How much do you need to earn?
Almost every business owner I coach doesn't have an income goal, or if they do, it's pulled from thin air and not based on the lifestyle they want to live. With each of my clients, I get them to calculate all their current expenses AND the cost of things they'd like to be able to afford regularly. Then we work out their income goal from there. (And 9 times out of 10, it needs to be a lot higher than they realize.)
So when asking yourself what you want to achieve by the end of the year, make sure you get crystal clear on how much income you'd like by then, as well as the more fun things (like new offers, podcasts and Youtube Channels etc that you'd like to launch.)
5. What do you need to do to achieve this?
What do you need to do to achieve your income goal for the next 6 months?
What tasks do you need to do to achieve your goals?
Write all of them out in a bulleted list, starting with the tasks you need to do first.
Then schedule those first tasks over the next 30 days.
When those 30 days end, you can schedule some more of the tasks for the next 30 days.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in business is NOT having a plan made of incremental (manageable) steps, and not scheduling them into your day-to-day routine.
In the USA, every month about 543,000 new businesses start, but in the first two years only seven out of 10 is still in business, where as after five years 5 out of 10 are still around. Interestingly enough, of the businesses that manage to survive for 5 years, about 70% follow a strategic business plan. - Huubster
You may believe you're "not the planning type" but that's not true. You don't need to plan every minute of your day or go crazy colour coding your calendar - you just need to get clear on what you want to achieve and the tasks you need to implement to get there. Then break those tasks into tiny incremental steps and do some of them every day.
Personally, I don't have every hour of my day organized by task. That's too strict for me. I keep it simple…
I have a 90 day plan.
Each month, I take some of the tasks from that plan and add them to a 30 day plan.
Each week, I make a todo list that tackles some of the 30 day plan.
I keep my todo list in Evernote or Asana.
That's it!
Keep your business plan simple. The simpler it is, the more likely you'll be inclined to stick to it.
Summary
Here are the 5 questions you can answer to complete your mid-year review:
1. What brought in the most sales and audience growth?
2. What have you enjoyed and not enjoyed doing?
3. What has been challenging?
4. What do you want to achieve in your business by the end of the year?
5. What do you need to do to achieve this?
If you do a mid-year review of your business, I’d love to hear what you uncovered! DM me @neshawoolery on Instagram.
