Planning for the Mid Year Review
It’s May: Where do you stand against your goals?
Contributor: Andrew Amrhein, Sr. Business Coach & Director of Finance
Somehow, we’re already a week into May. If the busiest season of your business isn’t here already, it’s quickly approaching. You’re focused on the daily grind and dealing with a natural set of new problems that come along with another year. Business is messy, right? Recruiting and Hiring are a universal headache and you are just trying to stay afloat! But wait…have you taken a moment to come up for air? Have you done a company status check? Where do you stand against your goals that you created for the year?
Ahead? Behind? Don’t Know?
A lot of work went into creating those goals and priorities set for the year. We have to respect that work and make sure to remember the purpose! Are you on track, or pulled off-course from where you planned to be? Now is a great time to start checking and perhaps, redirecting. We call this behavior the Mid-Year review. We recommend this formal review to all of our clients, as part of our Cascading Planning Process (CPP) management system. The CPP is the working “On” your business system. The Mid-Year Review, typically held in June, is a critical item in this process and requires proper planning in advance.
It’s time to start that planning!
Some questions and items to consider prior to your Mid Year Review Meeting:
- What were our goals for this year? (Are they collecting dust somewhere?)
- Where do we stand against these goal(s)?
- Have we been able to report our results and data quickly and accurately?
- Are our results ahead or behind expectations? Why?
- What are our major successes? Our Challenges?
- Has anything unexpected happened?
I want to specifically address items #1-3 above. I see a lot of teams setting great goals through the CPP system. But when the adrenaline of planning wears off, many teams forget about tracking the data. In the beginning of the year, it’s easy to track in your head how you’re doing. But as activity picks up, tracking falls by the wayside.
The best teams set goals AND confirm they can pull results quickly for analysis with good tracking systems. If you haven’t been looking at results on a regular basis, start now. Confirm the results you’re seeing include the right information. If you’re not tracking the right information, this is the time to make adjustments in time for the Mid-Year review in June, and have good results ready.
If you are reviewing results on a regular basis already, awesome! Don’t wait for the Mid-Year review to begin thinking about how plans might need to change. Get yourself and your team prepared by sharing the results ahead of time so that everyone comes into the meeting prepared to discuss.
Looking at preliminary results ahead of time allows the team to:
- Get comfortable with the information and how it’s being displayed
- Stay focused on the key numbers that matter
- Set expectation for the meeting, preventing surprises
There’s nothing worse than going into a Mid-Year review, thinking you’re ahead or on track of the annual plan, only to realize you’re actually behind and in a messier situation. That’s not a good feeling! To avoid that, make the most of your meeting time by getting prepared now. You’ll be glad you did!
All the best,
