Mid-Year Business Review: 25 Questions to Evaluate Progress towards Your Goals

The year is halfway over. Yet, we still have six months left. Perspective is everything!

Whether you feel like you’re crushing your goals or in the messy middle unsure if you’ll even come close to the goals you set this year… sitting down with your goals in a mid-year review is a great way to see how you’re actually doing— not just how it “feels” like you’re doing! 

How (and Why) to Conduct a Mid-Year Review in Business

You have some big goals for the year, but as Gretchen Rubin put it “the days are long, but the years are short”. It is amazing how quickly a year passes. Taking a day out of your business to work on your business is one of the BEST ways to get re-centered on your goals, course correct where needed, and regain momentum to achieve what matters most during the second half of the year. 

Here is what one of my students had to say after conducting her own mid-year review this year:

What You’ll need (Data Gathering): 

1. Your goals for the year! Remember those… *wink*
2. Calendar. To look back over the past six months (it’s helpful to jog your memory) and to plan the next six months (sales goals, product launches, vacations, etc).
3. Pull your stats! Ideally an up to date profit & loss statement for your business. And I’m currently obsessed with my business stats tracker. I track all of our financial numbers as well as marketing stats. 
4. A notebook, pen, and calculator! 

When should I conduct a Mid-Year Review?

Well, mid-year! Ideally end of June, early July. Again this is the perfect time to look at how far you’ve come, get re-centered on your goals, and gain focus and clarity for the next six months. I like to block a day to really look over everything, journal and plan (but even an hour is better than nothing!)

My Mid-Year Review Process (25 Questions): 

If you’re familiar with my goal setting process, My Blueprint Year, I set goals in three key areas: personal, professional, financial. I go through this same set of questions for each of those three categories: 

PERSONALLY:

1. What is going well?
2. What isn’t going well? 
3. Lessons Learned
4. From there: I like to give myself a rating: on a scale of 1-10 how am I feeling personally? 1— surviving. 10—thriving. 
5. Why am I feeling this way?
6. What would a “10” look like? 

PROFESSIONALLY:

1. What is going well?
2. What isn’t going well? 
3. Lessons Learned
4. From there: I like to give myself a rating: on a scale of 1-10 how am I feeling professionally? 1— surviving. 10—thriving. 
5. Why am I feeling this way?
6. What would a “10” look like? 

FINANCIALLY:

1. What is going well?
2. What isn’t going well? 
3. Lessons Learned
4. From there: I like to give myself a rating: on a scale of 1-10 how am I feeling financially? 1— surviving. 10—thriving. 
5. Why am I feeling this way?
6. What would a “10” look like? 

To dig a little deeper into the data I look at: 

19. SALES: How am I tracking toward my sales goal for the year. Using my profit and loss statement, I compare our current revenue to our sales goal for the year. I look at our end of year sales plan and determine how many more clients I need to book or (in our case) courses we need to sell to hit our gal.

20. SPENDING: Using our profit and loss report to compare how much we’ve spent on things like software or labor costs to our budgets for the year. Do we need to cut back in any areas? Is there room in the budget to invest more in education or advertising?

Related: Do you have a money plan for your business? If not, I’d love to help you make one! I do this with all my students inside my business course, The Blueprint Model.

21. MARKETING METRICS: Website Traffic, Newsletter Growth, Podcast downloads. One of the biggest reasons I created my business stats tracker spreadsheet is to identify key points of growth in our business and track those on a monthly basis. It’s quickly become on of my favorite tools in my business.

22. TIME: I also love pulling my Toggl report for the year to see how many hours I’ve worked. It’s really eye-opening (especially if you have limited work hours) to see where your time is going and the best use of time in your business.

23. CONVERSIONS: Conversions is such a fancy word but for our 1:1 work I like to pull a report we call our “client tracking document”. This shows us where all our referrals are coming from, how many inquiries came in versus how many booked. On the product side, I also look at how many people we offered the product to through either a webinar or email offer versus how many purchased.

Want me to guide you through a full mid-year review? Snag my goal-setting course and accompanying 1 year printable business journal, My Blueprint Year for just $197. Inside you’ll receive a full 1 hour GUIDED Mid-Year Review Workshop! 

24. Take time to celebrate by “Naming the Wins.” What has gone really well (think: features or being published, getting a podcast out every week or new blog content, hitting a sales goal, booking a dream client). What goals or milestones have you already accomplished?

25. Look forward: Refocus and Recommit to what Matters Most! What do you want to accomplish over the next six months? Are your goals the same from January 1? Have any changed, dropped completely? 

Even though this process seems simple, taking the time to think, review, journal, analyze and plan gives me so much focus and clarity going into the second half of the year.

I hope this quick summary of my own Mid-Year review process, helps as you sit down and evaluate your own progress towards your goals and get refocused on what you want to achieve in the second half of the year!

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