A Mid Year Review

As you approach the end of the first six months of the year, it is a good time to conduct a general review of your business. While actual numbers for sales, expenses, and profits for the first six months will not be available until July, now is a good time to access your results in terms of the critical issues you identified in your business plan. This analysis is vital to ensure you are on track with your goals and objectives

Some of the most important areas you should cover are customer relations, business development, internal and external processes, and employee performance. There may be other aspects of the business you may want to include, but these four areas will provide a good picture of how well you are doing.
Your business begins and ends with customers. If they are happy, you are happy. In a tough economy they will not think twice about going to your competition if they are not satisfied with your performance. Your review should consist of gathering some direct feedback from your customers to help ensure that you are indeed meeting, if not exceeding their expectations. It is far better to address any concerns now than wait and hope things get better.

When reviewing business development you can break this down into two simple areas; gaining business from new customers and gaining additional business from existing customers. You should strive for an equal balance between the two, as this will provide the steadiest and most solid growth over the long term.

Cost control is vital to protecting the expense side of your business. Reviewing all the processes that are involved in your day- to- day operations may uncover some wasteful practices or money saving ideas that can be applied to other aspects of your company. You must constantly work to eliminate bad practices and expand best practices to best utilize the limited resources that you have.

Finally, you need to review employee performance as this directly impacts all the areas mentioned above. You can have the greatest plan in the world, but if it is not being executed properly, all your effort will have been wasted.

You should think of this whole concept as a coach’s halftime speech to his team. Now is the time to praise and criticize, make adjustments and eliminate mistakes, capitalize on opportunities and form a better plan for the second half. If you are ahead in the game, this is not the time to ease up on your efforts and if you are behind you need to find a way to turn things around. A thorough review of the past will provide invaluable insight for the future.