I don’t mean to raise any sort of alarm but do you know what month it is? That’s right, it’s June and we’re basically half-way into 2018. Cliché alert, boy is the year going by quickly!
But of course, we always seem to say that. The months roll by with increasing speed until we are smack at midyear or even a little bit past and we find ourselves:
- Ahead of the projections we made at the very beginning of the year
- Behind the projections we made but confident that we will be able to close the gap
- So far behind our projections that we don’t know which way to turn
Where are you?
There is a saying that ignorance is bliss but most business owners know that this is not a sustainable strategy. For a business to grow and thrive, in fact for it to even survive, a company owner must know where they stand. Data-driven management is the name of the game.
Here are three suggestions for a midyear reboot:
Get more knowledgeable about your financial situation.
Meet with your accountant to determine what you should do right now to better ensure a happy outcome to the year. There’s still time to make adjustments for a happier ending to 2018. If you find that your accountant is not providing you with sound financial advice that can help you to make educated business decisions, it may be time to find another resource. Meeting with your advisor in December is simply too late for any strategy to have much of an impact.
Get in more control of your sales
Clients come and go and it is critical to have a clear understanding of how many new clients you “need” and how many you can realistically expect to win over the rest of the year. Even more important, you must have a good grasp of your sales pipeline and what you must do to get and keep it filled with prospects in various stages of “readiness.” If you find that you are insecure about the quantity and quality of your prospects and leads you must create a proactive prospecting program to help you fill your funnel and uncover new business. And don’t forget about your existing clients. While it is always important to have a robust sales pipeline filled with new prospects it is also imperative to retain and grow your existing clients.
Evaluate your Human Resources
Your employees play an enormous role in the success of your company and at midyear it is helpful to determine the following:
- Are your staffing levels (or outsource resources) appropriate for the amount of work that you are currently doing or planning to do as the year moves forward? (In other words, are you under or overstaffed?)
- Are you experiencing employee attrition and if so, can you pinpoint the reasons that this attrition is occurring? Can you change the situation and stop the attrition from taking place?
- Are your employees adequately trained to perform the responsibilities of their jobs and are they cross-trained so that you have a fallback position should anyone leave or be absent from work for a lengthy period of time??
Doing this type of midyear assessment and a potential reboot is a good tactic, however, taking a look at these three elements of your business on a more frequent basis is even better. The key is to not be caught off guard and to be able to run your business in a prudent and strategic manner and without surprises.
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