The quarterly business review is critical to keeping your business on track. How critical? Critical enough that I spent spent 25 HOURS last month discussing this subject with Black Dress Circle roundtable members. It’s so, so important that as business owners, we check-in at key points throughout the year to measure how we’re doing against goals. Waiting until the end of the year to review your results brings your ability to take corrective action at that point down to almost zero.

You may be thinking, “Yeah, yeah, Erin, we’ve heard this from you before.” And you’re absolutely right! I’m repeating this because it’s such a vital make-or-break differentiator for business success. Make the time to pause and reflect now so course-corrections can be made if needed. So do yourself a favor and take your foot off the gas pedal for a moment, review the goals you set for the year (and if you didn’t set any, set some now!), measure how you’re performing against those goals, and look critically at where you’re doing well (yay!) and where you need to adjust course or accelerate.  

In addition to reviewing against your annual goals, there are four specific questions you can ask yourself in your QBR…these are wonderful personal reflective questions, too.

Question 1. What is most significant thing that has happened so far this year?

Question 2. What’s bringing you 80% of your joy? 80% of your stress?

Question 3. In what areas are you stuck and not moving forward?

Question 4. What do you want to experience in the next quarter?

Make time to pause & reflect

After you’ve gotten insight from answering those questions, other key review areas to look at are:

  •    How you’re leveraging technology
  •    How well you’re harnessing the strengths of your team
  •    How you’re tracking with your networking expansion plans
  •    How you’re tracking with your sales goals
  •    How effective your marketing’s been

This is also an ideal time to review your self-care practices. Self-care lies at the foundation of sustainable success for entrepreneurs. It’s so easy to let it take a back seat when we’re busy building empires. Don’t let this happen!

When you have a clear picture of how you’re performing against your plan, you can see where course-correcting action is needed to meet your annual goals. Then, go the extra step and share your outcomes with a peer, mentor, coach, etc. (Shameless plug: Black Dress Circle (BDC) membership can also take your accountability and support to the next level.)

I hope you can see what can be gained from these exercises. No matter who you collaborate with to make sure your business is humming at max capacity, I challenge you to think: What do you need? Who do you need?

As I often remind my BDC roundtable members, it’s easy to get mired in the day-to-day minutiae of working in our businesses; it’s the planners who get ahead by working on their business.

Onward,

Erin Joy