3 Key Figures For Your Mid-Year Business Review

If there are three things you should be doing in the middle of the year, it's reflecting, reviewing and remapping your next steps.

Here I will give you pointers on key numbers for your business, that you should know and track closely. In fact, these numbers are always included in the dashboard that I review regularly with my business consulting clients.

These are not only important for measuring your level of success, but they are also critical for helping you align your compass to point towards even greater growth for the rest of the year.

This is that time of the year when doing one thing can help you actually have the corrective measure in your business or build on the momentum that you already have.

That one thing that I am talking about is reflection. Reflecting on your business performance through the number lens.

There are three simple things that you can do to analyse your numbers and to see what needs to be done. I would specifically focus on your income statement, also called the P&L – your Profit and Loss.

So the first thing you need to look at is the actuals of the first six months compared to your budget. The first thing to focus on is the overheads – see what is the deviation, because that's easy to correct or easy to identify the areas of focus.

The second thing that you need to straight away look at is your GM – Gross Margin. How are your margins looking? They should be looking better, compared to your budgets or pretty much on track.

The final thing that you'd want to look at is the sales. You obviously want to be on the upside of sales to make sure you are doing well.

Let me just peel another layer of sales. When you're analysing your sales, look at two other things: break it down into your existing customers, or clients/sales. Because you want to make sure there is a good amount of retention, and ideally more build-up on that – that they are doing more business with you as far as your existing clients are concerned. That's an important distinction to make, rather than lumping all your sales in one thing, first segment out those existing customers.

The second level of analysis you need to do is new business sales. How many new clients did you acquire? What has been the average pound value? It should be healthy.

Once you look at these three fundamentals to start off with and then peeling the layers of sales further, to make sure you have some very clear input for moving forward, it will help you have more confidence that your first half of the year has gone well and you're in control of the next half of the year.

But make sure you do something about it before another year just passes by and you're left wondering, "Where did those twelve months just go?" Because I'm sure you would want to end this year with a high note, and with a good feeling.

If you would like to hear more about this and discuss how you can make your second next 6 months count, please feel free to get in touch below.