Start This NOW: Different Kind of Biz Mid-Year Review To Jumpstart Your Next 6 Months
Before we get to today’s episode, I want to let you know that today is part 1 of a 2-parter. You’ll hear more about the why and the what in the actual episode.
Also, you might have noticed that episode uploads have slowed down. That’s because of a couple of reasons.
Summer months are a great time to pull back a bit and do some behind-the-scenes catching up. It’s part of what I did last year with my July Sabbatical. Business still goes on but for me it’s a slower pace, front-facing.
Speaking of behind-the-scenes, the 2nd reason for the irregular upload schedule is that it’s allowed me to gear up for a later-in-the-year offer release.
Yup, you guessed it, something new is on the horizon. I’ve been hinting at this for a little while and here’s another one…it’s a gathering where we learn how to fill our own cups.
Okay, that’s it. Much more to come. I am excited to begin this new adventure.
But that’s not what this episode is about. Let’s get to it, shall we?
- - - - -
Do you regularly perform a mid-year review?
June and July is usually the time that most people in business start that process.
You know, examining what’s happened, what you got up to in your biz since the beginning of the year, evaluating your goals, seeing if your offers are still aligned with what you want to accomplish by year’s end.
In a nutshell, did you achieve what you set out to accomplish? What, if anything got in your way?
And if you answered yes, what’s the plan for the rest of your year in your business? All of these questions and more are part of a mid-year review.
It’s all about assessing where your business was, where you on now and are you on track to finish out the year as planned
The 6th month is a good marker month for that. You’ll have gotten enough data to get a fuller picture than, say, just 1 month in.
I still do a performance review like this, but in the last couple of years I’ve since added another component to my mid-way review and that’s what I want to talk about in today’s episode.
As I shared earlier, this episode will be part 1 of a 2-parter. And there’s a reason for that.
In this episode, I wanted to share what led to me adding this extra component.
And then, in the next episode go over what it looks like now and the reason why it could be a very necessary process for you to add in.
I want to also share how to implement it as part of your regular mid-year review + offer some ideas for how you can use this as a resource and catalyst for change in your own business. So let me share the back story on why I started it.
Looking back on what came up with what this year’s review contained, it felt different, more contextual.
This extra component that I added all started with something I’m calling…The Shake Up.
An event happened back in 2021 that really rattled my brain.
I lived with constant unease afterwards and it felt like I had been shaken up and spit out, leaving me clueless as to what to do going forward.
More specifically, I started to question my purpose. Events like these do that to us, don’t they?
Let me fill you in.
In August of 2021, my siblings and I lost our Mum to aggressive dementia.
Exactly one year earlier, in 2020, I had a straight-up 2-hour conversation with the woman, just like we normally did. Nothing was off-limits for our discussions.
Two weeks after that conversation I had a roughly 6 or 7-minute phone call with her where she repeatedly asked the same question over and over again.
My heart was devastated. In what seemed like 2 weeks her world, and subsequently, ours, had changed.
And because I live a whole day of plane rides away from where she lives, the place where I grew up in the Bahamas, I wasn’t able to see her on a daily.
So this shook me.
We worked with her doctors to figure out what was going on. Eventually, we landed on the dreaded news, dementia.
And, a full year later, she was gone.
It’d been the 6 of us, my sibs, me and mum for years. We were a force, a family strength and bond, and that was all down to her.
And now her physical presence was no longer with us. Needless to say, our world was rocked.
My brain did not know how to square things with this new reality I was being forced to live without her.
Okay, so I know this is a podcast about female entrepreneurs, about how to be more brave, bold and badass as women and business owners but for a full 6 months after she left us, I flailed. I could not find my footing.
It’s at that 6-month mark of this life-shattering event (see, another review), I was seriously toying with giving up, shutting everything down.
BUT, my biz besties (shout out to the PowerUp group, y’all rock!!!), helped me keep my head treading just above water. These women are the fricken best!
I came out of that period, questioning EVERY DANG thing about my business life, if it still existed, cause I was still grieving but no longer feeling like I was drowning.
That’s when the idea for a reshuffle, a pivot, a retracing of my steps to reassess #allthethings slid into my brain, but more on that in a minute.
Next came The Reassessment.
At that point, I truly had to reassess my impetus, my drive, my motivation to carry on in a business I no longer felt connected to.
I did not realize how my connecting to Mum, my connection with Mum, drove my reason for being in biz in the first place. That woman was a tower of strength, and how strongly she was connected to each of us.
I remember saying to one of my sisters that I felt so discombobulated from everything. I felt…..untethered. Grief does that.
So hey….at this point I want to just say, I want to stop for a minute and say…
If this is where you are as well, feeling disconnected in some way from an event that has happened to you, or even feeling disconnected from your biz, please reach out to your peeps to let them support you.
You don’t have to do it alone.
And journal, dang it! Get those chaotic mixed-up feelings out of your head. Release them suckers! They don’t belong there.
Okay, back to what I was saying.
At that time I was also pretty much fed up with social media. Who isn’t these days, right?
After Mum passed I rarely if ever went on it. I didn’t have the fortitude, the wherewithal, nor the patience to deal.
In fact, I felt it only added to the weariness I was constantly feeling.
So no social presence. No making connections. Even through email which was a hit-and-miss affair anyway, if I’m being honest.
In that 6 month after-the-fact reassessment the following year, I had to figure out a few things, so I came up with questions to ask myself.
Of course, I did! As a regular journaler, this is par for the course for me 🤣 Gotta get the prompts right to get to the answers that are needed.
The all-important 1st question that would define everything going forward…..did I still want to be in biz?
My answer was…Yes. Phew! Okay. Good.
So now that that answer is Yes, what does it look like? What can it look like for me that would make me feel purposeful and inspired?
What about the social media aspect? And who do I want to support now? Had that changed? How best can I do those 2 things in a combined way?
The ultimate question was what are my needs as a person, as a woman, as a business owner, combined? So many questions I had, and many more I was pursuing the answers to.
That whole process ended up with me instituting a July Sabbatical last year (you can listen to what that was about and how it went in episodes 21 & 22).
That self-imposed sabbatical was one of THE best decisions I’ve made for my business, to go dark, outward facing for a month, a glorious month of introspection and, what shall I call it…..re-suiting up.
I also made the decision to not allow social media to be in my brain, cause that’s where it was, taking up precious space.
I know some of you know this too.
My decision was to not let it hold me hostage anymore. Now truth be told, I know I did this to myself with the decisions I made and the bro-marketing mindset and actions I still was following.
In fact one of the members of my PowerUp Co-working crew said….so STOP, Grace. So I did.
The message we’ve always gotten is that we MUST have a social media presence and post X number of times and push ourselves way beyond our limit.
You know, allthethings, to have a successful biz and the only proof you’ll have is when you make 6-figures, cause that’s the ultimate prize.
Yada, yada, yada.
Rubbish. Complete rubbish I tell you. But that was always in the back of my mind.
I believed the gurus when they said that’s how things are done! And operated that way for such a long time. I believed the hype, so much so that I no longer recognized myself in it.
The work had to be, for me at least, more about being wholly me and making real connections with real people, not working to get the algorithms to like me.
Social media is a single tool in the whole scheme of things. I could let that need go.
What I figured out after that 4-week long sabbatical is that I wanted to have a business that was less about following the rules and conforming to standards that were not meant for me in the 1st place
HELLO! Not white! Not male!
These rules and standards were not ever about me, the person. My worth and way of being was never a consideration.
“Just follow along ma’am. Do what you’re supposed to do”.
I learned that it’s more about me being true and real and intentional in my way, and making those types of connections with other women in business doing the same.
It definitely took me a good bit to get here, to shed that old skin, but here I am.
Okay, let’s go into …The Result.
Today, the place I start from is with these 3 facts.
I am a woman, who happens to be black and is also confidently experiencing her mid-life years. There you go.
And I love it here!
So fast forward to today, this 6-month mark of 2023 and after having completed the 2 parts of my mid-year review…what are the results?
Business-wise? From the data I collected, I need to step things up a bit and have created a whole slew of tasks that were actually not on my list at the beginning of the year.
As for my internal assessment, there’s a new understanding I have about how I need to bring myself to my work in terms of life challenges that crop up.
I slacked off a bit in self-care which explains the blip I experienced in the 1st 6 months.
So, what was this pivot, the one that I’ve been steadily working on since that initial 6 month deep dive after Mum’s passing?
Here it is.
I was 42 when I had my 1st biz and I remember wanting someone to say they understood my perspective. They understood and knew, themselves, the lens through which I viewed being in business.
That did not exist in any real way at the time. Yet, I still craved it.
So today, this is also a part of my work. This was the pivot that fills me up, brings me JOY.
And a sense of satisfaction that what I needed back them I can provide for women today.
What is this work? What does it look like?
I am Thought Partner, an Integrator of Change, a Transition Guide.
My ZOG (Zone of Genius) is helping women who are craving a way to live in their truth more fully and unapologetically, figure out what the heck is going on so they can transform their lives and their lives in business.
I help women be more brave, bold and badass. I know. That’s the name of the podcast.
We work together to unlock and tap into possibility (just love that word!), to clear the way forward, to put a marker down in the sand as they figure out their next steps, navigating through big change.
I was listening to a podcast on my walk the other day and Rachel Rogers described it this way. These are women who are “in between being grateful but not yet satisfied”.
So what’s the next step then? What’s that extra component I suggest you add to your 6-month review?
An internal assessment, just like I did for my July Sabbatical back in 2022.
So yeh, it’s about your mindset.
Cause as solopreneurs we are the sole gatherer and keeper of all the information, both internally and externally, and it’s up to us to assess the true and full state of our business.
But we can forget to include an assessment of where WE are internally.
Life intersects business all the time.
What does that look like specifically? That’s what’s coming up in Part 2. Stay tuned for all the details in the next podcast episode.
Because this next part was so more robust and in-depth, I realize I needed to separate it into 2 instalments. We would have gone on for a whole while longer if I included it here.
When I began the podcast one of my promises was to make each podcast episode short and punchy, so you get the message I’m dropping but it doesn’t take up big parts of your day.
I love being with you and in your ears sharing good stuff about female entrepreneurship, but we always got work to do, y’all!
And by the way, if you haven’t yet subscribed, this will be a really good time to hit that sweet little button so it’ll pop up in your podcast feed automatically.
It does things like that.
Alrighty then, till next time.
Be Brave.
Be Bold.
Stay Badass.
- - - - - -
Break free from the doubt. Unlock your biz brain. Learn how to journal for your biz.
➢ Start with Biz Journaling 101: http://kgracehowes.com/biz-journaling-101
READY TO GET OUT OF YOUR WAY IN YOUR BIZ?
➢ Learn how 👉🏽 http://kgracehowes.com
➢ Purchase the Quarterly Biz Planner (the WTM)
➢ Download Master Your Work Week, Improve Your Energetic Capacity Workbook
➢ Book a FREE Biz Mindset Consult
GOT QUESTION?.
...about what you heard in this or other episodes?
➢ DM it to me on the Gram!
ALSO....👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
➢ Leave your 5-star review of the podcast