The second quarter is nearly finished. How did you do? Let’s do a little “check-up” on the past quarter and use it as a springboard to encourage your business’ success through the upcoming third quarter.
Check up:
This is a good opportunity to get out your business plan, dust it off, and take a look at it. Ask yourself these questions in order to leverage what you’ve learned this past quarter.
- What goals did you reach? Celebrate hitting those goals! If you have a staff, make it a big deal among them that you had goals and you reached them. Let them know what the goals were, and how well you did, whether you were on target or far above it. Use this opportunity to highlight the actions of one or two individuals who helped to achieve those goals (as a way to promote their actions amongst your staff).
- Identify what you did that helped you to reach those goals. Was there an incentive contest among your staff? If you are a lone entrepreneur, was it because of a specific job you did or a certain number of hours you spent marketing? Try to identify the specifics so that you can use them next month as strategies to reach larger goals.
- What did you miss? Invariably, we miss some of our goals. If we hit each and every goal, we’ve simply made our goals too easy. We should be hitting some goals and missing some. Identify the ones missed.
- Why did you miss it? This is a harder question to answer and sometimes it takes an honest look in the mirror to admit that our procrastination or sales avoidance resulted in a missed goal. Although this mirror-look is harsh, it will be helpful to us for next quarter.
- What could you do differently to ensure that you hit it? Knowing why we missed a goal is good. Identifying ways to reach it in the future is great. If it was procrastination or sales avoidance that kept you from reaching a past goal, perhaps some better incentives or motivation is required to help you reach the goal in the future.
Q3 is starting; are you ready?
Don’t put away your business plan just yet! Keep it out and look at where the plan tells you that you should be.
- Do you have quarterly goals? If not, you should take your plan and develop some goals from it.
- What areas of your business could be a challenge this quarter? Is your business sensitive to seasonal changes? What can you do now to prepare for these seasonal shifts?
- What are the areas you struggled in last quarter? What can you do differently this quarter to make sure you hit those goals? How can you use motivation or incentives to help you get there?
The next quarter is just a couple weeks from starting. Could this be your best quarter yet? Planning now could help you make it so!
