A Guide to Your Mid-Year Check-In
Believe it or not, we’re at a midway point for 2024. While you may be feeling like you JUST set your annual goals, we’re somehow entering the second half of the year which is a critical time to pause, track, and evaluate the progress you’ve made on these goals over the last six months – and I don’t mean just glancing over the metrics and seeing how things are going. A mid-year check-in is a great opportunity to take a thorough look at your business’s progress and reflect on where you’re excelling, identify areas where you can improve, and create an updated strategy to tackle the second half of the year so you can meet all of your goals and objectives.
With so much digital data available at our fingertips, it can be difficult to know exactly what’s important and which numbers to pay attention to during your evaluation process. In this blog, we’ll go over important metrics to include in your analysis, including profit margins, customer acquisition, conversions, and engagement rates. I’ll also cover the next steps after your mid-year check-in and how you can create a revised action plan to still make 2024 your best year yet. Let’s dive in.
Financial Progress
While it can be scary to take an honest look at how your business is doing from a fiscal perspective, evaluating financial performance is a key part of making sure your company is on track to reach any revenue and profit goals for the year.
While tempting, it can be overwhelming to look at all of the numbers all at once. Start with your overall revenue and profit margins for the year. Is your business on track to meet 2024 goals? Are you moving at the right pace? You may be surprised to find that you’re ahead of where you thought you’d be, which is a great sign for you and your company. If, on the other hand, things aren’t quite where they should be at the halfway point of the year, hone in on the areas where you see discrepancies and focus on how you can change your strategy to boost those numbers.
It’s critical to be honest with yourself as a business owner when evaluating where you can make changes or cut costs. Looking at your expense reports and cash flow can help you get a better idea of where money can be saved and how you can proactively adjust spending for the latter half of the year.
Customer Progress
Your consumers are at the heart of your business, so it’s important to stay aware of how people are finding your business, engaging with your content, and ultimately converting into repeat users of your product or service. A great place to start when doing this analysis is with customer acquisition. Often referred to as CAC (customer acquisition cost) in the marketing world, this metric helps you identify exactly how much your business is spending on every new customer. If your CAC is trending upwards or increasing from the first half of the year, consider revamping your consumer strategy to reduce that metric.
Another good analysis to conduct for your mid-year progress report is how your consumers are engaging with your content and brand as a whole. Using social media metrics, site visits, and customer satisfaction surveys, you can use numbers to see how customers feel about your brand. Finding areas for improvement in customer relations can boost revenue for the latter half of the year and increase consumer retention and loyalty.
Team Progress
Although more of an internal analysis of your business’s culture and teamwork, it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of how your employees are feeling. Many times, negative feelings about the workplace directly impact professional goals and can lead to decreased productivity, motivation, and overall effectiveness.
As part of your mid-year check-in, consider meeting with your team members or sending out a survey to see what’s working, what can be improved, and how people are feeling about the trajectory of the company. This can also be a great time to get folks together for an informal brainstorming session on how to boost numbers, strategize on updated goals, or give kudos to those who deserve it.
Revising Your Goals and Strategy
If you’ve conducted your mid-year check-in and find that you need to make some serious updates to your 2024 goals, don’t panic! Part of being a business owner is being flexible and adapting to changing strategies. If you find yourself in a situation where you’re behind on many of your annual goals, you might want to start by creating smaller, more achievable micro-goals. While this may seem silly, setting the path with smaller wins can make achieving what seems unattainable today easier in the future.
If you’re feeling stumped on how to shift your strategy, get creative. Sometimes the best ideas occur to you when you least expect them. Go for a walk, get some fresh air, and give yourself the grace you deserve for making it through the first six months of what’s already been a very unpredictable year.
Conclusion
With half of the year behind us, now is a great time for a mid-year check-in on how your business is performing from a financial, consumer, operational, and team culture perspective. More than just a brief preview of your 2024 numbers so far, your mid-year progress report should give you a clear picture of what’s working, what’s not, and where you need to go back to the drawing board. You still have time to make the second half of the year even better than the first. Together, let’s still make 2024 one to remember.
