Maycember and Why You Need a Mid-Year Review
Hey there, CEOs. Racheal Cook here, host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast and founder of The CEO Collective. It's about the middle of May, and usually I do this episode more in June, but over the last few years I've noticed this effect that's been termed on the internets "Maycember."

If you are a parent right now with kids in school, then you are probably super familiar with Maycember, where there is so much happening in the month of May. Your kids are headed toward the end of the school year, and that means there is so much going on, so much on your plate, that you feel like you're scrambling to get it all done.

You're trying to have your kids prepared for whatever special day they have deemed it, whatever outfit they need, whatever party they're gonna have in class. Or if your kids are a little older, like mine are, maybe you have kids who are stressing out about final exams, final papers due, final projects they have to finish up.

So May can be a tricky month, and if you're in that boat with me, then you probably are like, okay, I need to start looking ahead for the rest of the year because once these kids are home again, things are going to change, especially if you are a working parent.

Now, maybe you're not a working parent. Maybe those examples don't particularly relate to you. And if that's the case, I know a lot of people right now have just felt like this year has been so up and down. There has been so much going on that has been completely out of our control.

The plan we had at the beginning of the year simply isn't still the plan. Things have changed and we need to adapt and adjust.

If having these time periods, these milestones throughout the year where you're sitting down and really reviewing your plan so that you can adapt and adjust, if you don't have that built into your operating system, then what tends to happen is we just abandon the plan altogether. But we don't really replace it with a strategic plan. We just keep going through the motions and then wonder why things aren't going as we thought they would.

So this is a huge part of the way that we run things here at The CEO Collective. It's also a huge part of our entire 90-Day CEO Operating System framework: having these points throughout the year where you're checking in against your plan and you're giving yourself time to adapt and adjust as needed.

You're giving yourself opportunity to make those changes really intentionally and thoughtfully before you're just running on default instead of intentionally taking your business where you want it to go over the coming months.

So with that, today I want to go through our mid-year review process, and there is a workbook that will go along with this episode. Make sure you head over to the show notes. The link in the show notes will give you access to download the Mid-Year Review Workbook.

I promise this is one of those things that seems really simple but can be so helpful in making sure that you're staying on track for the rest of the year, or you're making the adjustments you need to make right now, before the kids are home from school, before you are facing summer vacations or sometimes a summer slowdown in a lot of different industries.
Pull Up Your Goals and Strategy
So the first thing we want to do during a mid-year review is pull up your goals and your strategy that you created for this year. If you have gone through our Plan Your Best Year Ever challenge, which by the way is still available for free on the website, then you have a plan that you put in place.

You know what you're selling, when you're selling it, what you're marketing, when you're marketing it. You have a game plan of what this year was going to look like.

So the first thing we need to do is pull that up. We need to look at that and we need to pull up our goals.

This is so important, and this is such a crucial first step, because I often find a lot of entrepreneurs are walking around with their plan in their head, and they don't actually have a document that they're checking in with and that they're using every single week to help them make decisions, to help them figure out what they need to tackle next.

That is a recipe for a lot of frustration when your business starts to feel even more out of control. So go ahead and find those things.

If you didn't have them, if you didn't go through Plan Your Best Year Ever with me, it's okay. You can still go through it, or you can just sit down and write down for yourself, okay, what were my top goals going into this year? What were the goals I had set for myself?
Action-Oriented Goals and What I Track in My Own Business
I always have approximately five goals for the year in my plan, and I keep these in a Google document that I go back to every single quarter, every single week, every single CEO date. I'm looking back at my goals for the year.

This is really helpful for me because I can track if I am on track or off track with these particular goals.

Now, a lot of goals that you might have are gonna be things like revenue goals. Totally okay. Some goals you have might be action-oriented goals, things that you have more control over. That's what we really encourage our clients to do here at The CEO Collective.

Focus on the goals that are about what activities you are doing, what actions you are taking that will lead to the revenue that you're looking for. So for example, one of my goals is to publish 52 episodes of Promote Yourself to CEO.

That means every quarter I need to have about 13 episodes go out. Every week, an episode should be going out.

This is a goal that I can really own because whether or not it happens is a hundred percent up to me. If I'm going to have a weekly podcast and I set a goal for myself to have that podcast weekly, and then every single week I'm making sure I'm following my systems so that that episode goes out, I can very quickly tell whether I am on track or off track.
Giving Yourself Grace and the 80% Rule
Now I'm gonna share with you some of my own reflections as I'm going through my own mid-year review, because of course, this has been a challenging year. There have been a lot of ups and downs, a lot of uncertainties, and that's both in the world.

But a lot of us in our businesses, our business is going to be responding to what is happening in the world, what's happening in our economy, what's happening generally with how people are feeling about consumer confidence overall, how it changes buyer behavior. All of those things are intertwined.

And then I've had a lot happening on the personal front in the last few months, which means I've actually realized that some of the goals I had set for myself, well, in prior years I had the capacity to do those without much issue. Like putting out an episode every single week. Things change here sometimes.

My goal is always to be able to do at least 80% of what I set my mind to. That gives me permission to take the pressure off when I need to take the pressure off.

I want to share that with you, because maybe you're looking over your goals and thinking, okay, did I achieve this goal? I was gonna publish this many podcast episodes, or I was gonna write this many newsletters, or I was gonna promote this many offers over the last few months.

If you got 80% or above, I really want you to be okay with that. Give yourself grace. We don't have to be perfect in order to have a successful business. Perfection is not required.

So I want you to take the pressure off, because the reality is, life is gonna life. Maybe some of the initial goals you set for the year took a little longer to get up and running.

Another example out of my goals: one of my goals with my attract marketing strategy was to get ads in place for our Fired Up and Focused challenge, which is a free five-day challenge we run to help with productivity and teach some of the habits that we teach our clients here in The CEO Collective.

I have been working on getting these ads up since February. In past years where maybe things weren't so crazy in the world, maybe I wasn't feeling so stretched thin in general, I would've had all of those ads ready to go, all the creative ready to go, all of the videos ready to go, all the copy ready to go. I would've had it up within a month.

Things just slowed me down this year. It took longer to get the creative done. It took longer to get everything up and loaded. We like to do some testing before, so it took a while to get all the testing done.

Then Facebook disabled my ad account because of a payment issue, and it was stuck for about a month before I guess I finally wore them down with all the support requests, and they sent somebody to talk to me, or they let me talk to an actual human, and we finally got them up just now in May.

So it went from a goal I had that I thought would be done within a month or two, to now taking nearly three and a half months to get up and running. I'm okay with that, because I recognize that there were things happening that some of those things were a little out of my control.

I also really believe in giving myself grace as a business owner. I think this is so important, especially this year, to say it's okay if things took a little longer. It's okay if you had to reduce your frequency because you simply didn't have the capacity to do everything. It's okay if you did a more simplified version of something because that was what was available to you. That was what felt like the path of least resistance in this particular season of your business.
Reviewing Goals Across the Client Growth Engine
So I want you to go through all of your top goals for the year. Again, not just your revenue goal.

Revenue's important, but if you're only looking at the revenue goal and you're not looking at things like what were your goals with your marketing, what were your goals with your sales activity, what were your goals with delivery or your operations inside of your business, how you actually deliver your product, program, or service.

If you don't have goals for those things, you just have a massive list of to-dos, but you haven't really sat down to make it check-off-able, to make it make sense for what your business needs to really start building what we call our Client Growth Engine. Then you'll find yourself feeling really, really overwhelmed when it comes to making decisions about the future.

So for me, as I look at my goals, like I said, I like to set my goals so that they are action-oriented. I just shared two of my marketing goals, my attract marketing goal with getting Facebook ads up. That one was a huge one. They're up and running, so that goal is now in process.

It feels like we've made a lot more progress in the last couple weeks because it was kind of stalled on us.

My engage goal, so all of the content that I have available for people to join our community and to learn more about working with us. I actually spent a lot of time in the first few months of the year going through and auditing them and refining them, rerecording all of the Fired Up and Focused challenge. So I feel pretty good about overall engage goal for the year.

Nurture goal: like I said, I didn't produce as much content as I had wanted. Last week I just got derailed and didn't have it in me to sit down and record a podcast. I haven't been publishing as much on social media. I've just been giving myself permission to not put the pressure on myself.

I know that I publish enough content, I have enough going out every single week, that if I need to scale back in one area, scaling back how much I'm on social media, just because I don't have the capacity for it right this moment.

I'm still doing the basics of my strategy, which for me always comes down to podcast and newsletter. Those are always going to happen. So even when I didn't get the podcast out, I still got a newsletter out. I still got an email out to stay connected to people.

The next goals that I set for myself are always gonna be around what am I selling. What are the things that I'm selling? I have a game plan every month to be selling something.

This was a fun one for me because I have a pretty locked-in, rinse-and-repeat strategy for this. We are very, very consistent. You will see we will promote the CEO Retreat. We're actively promoting the next CEO Retreat right now. Then we will promote The CEO Collective, and then I will sometimes drop something else in there.

So I feel good about maybe dropping in some smaller bite-sized workshops. I feel on track with that goal.

And my fifth goal for the year is around delivery and our internal systems for delivering the CEO Retreat, The CEO Collective, really evaluating every piece of that puzzle. I feel like the first half of this year has really been me jumping back in and reviewing every single system we have to deliver the programs and the services that we deliver the way that I want to deliver them.
Restructuring the CEO Retreat for Where We Are Now
I would say right now the CEO Retreat: I updated all of our SOPs. I reviewed all the contracts for where we had been hosting the CEO Retreat. I made some changes, because we found this year that fewer people are wanting to travel right now.

In our March retreat, we definitely saw a major swing. We used to have a lot more people show up for our in-person retreat. We ended up with about 50 on our virtual and just a handful registered for our in-person retreat.

So I was like, you know what, I'm not going to put myself in a situation where I have signed up for a location to host this retreat and all of the extra bells and whistles. How can I make this more cozy and feel more aligned with where we are right now? That's why these little check-ins are so important.

I'm looking at the goal, I'm looking at what happened and able to make better decisions moving forward.

When it comes to all the internal systems for The CEO Collective, we have really gone in and started looking at a lot of these, because there were things that when you run a program like this, when you really run any offer, you will have a system in place and it'll work for a while. But sometimes parts of that system are no longer necessary or they're more complicated than they need to be.

So having this time to review and audit those things so that we can improve it was a huge win. I'm still not done with that. I would say I'm still probably around 60 to 70% through what I'm trying to review and go through and upgrade and update.

But I have no doubt that by the time I hit the end of June, I will have done a lot of these big things that I wanted to make happen.
The Month-by-Month Review
So I'm looking at my top goals. I'm asking myself, where am I, how close am I to getting those things done, what's going on? Then I like to go month by month in my mid-year review.

I like to go month by month, one, because this is important data that over time, especially the longer you're in business, you'll start to see trends in your business. When you go month by month, you can also not only see trends like the seasonality your business faces, but you can also see trends of what's happening in your specific market right now.

What's happening in your industry, what's happening in your space. You're able to identify if something is changing that's abnormal or different from what it was the year before.
What Worked, What Flopped, What Got in the Way
Once you do those steps, you ask yourself those questions for each month. Now we're gonna analyze things a little bit more. So this is where we really dig into the review part of the Year in Review.

Now we have some data, now we have some information, we have some context to look at. Now we can ask ourselves some important questions that will help us to make better decisions moving forward. It might help us adapt and adjust the plan as needed.

So the first question is, what worked so far this year? What offers were the most profitable? What marketing strategies worked the best? What experiment did you run that paid off? What worked for you so far this year?

The next question is, what flopped, what didn't work? What offerings didn't work, what marketing strategies didn't sell anything? What just did not work for you this year?

For me right now, I would say the biggest things that didn't work weren't the sales and marketing related activities, or delivery. Really, I think what hasn't worked for me is more on my leadership.

My own personal leadership is that I am usually really, really good about estimating my capacity, because I've done so much work here of understanding my capacity, understanding how much time, energy, attention I have, understanding my emotional capacity, my mental capacity.

I've really had to dial in on this over, I don't know, how many years now? 17, 16, 17, 18 years. I can't even remember. Since having a business since 2008, I've had to be really purposeful and intentional with managing my capacity.

But this year, just so much was happening all at the same time. Even though I was still doing the things to maintain my capacity, things like taking care of myself, making sure I'm prioritizing my own self-care, making sure I'm pouring back into myself, making sure I'm resourced and have the support system I need, I was finding that I was slowing down and needing to take more time than I had in previous periods of running this business.

So right now you might be feeling the same. When we are going through so much uncertainty, it's very easy to not adjust our capacity. We think we can operate the way we did prior to these things happening.

In addition to all these things happening, I've been going through just a lot of grief processing. I've lost some people. If you've ever gone through grief, you never know when you're gonna have a moment where it just takes you out.

I've had to really, really give myself a lot of grace and permission to slow down, and permission to be okay with things taking longer than I think they should take, and that I can't compare how I could do things a year ago to how I can do things right in this moment today.

So for me, that was what has flopped. Trying to operate as if I still have the capacity I did a year ago. Right now, I've had to slow things down, be very intentional, work on resourcing myself, supporting myself, et cetera.

What got in your way the first half of this year? This is important just to give yourself context, because I think it's really easy when we are reviewing things, we don't think about the context in which we are living and operating and running our businesses.

So you want to think about the context. What is happening in your context that holds you back from getting the results you wanted, that slowed you down? This is really important to consider. Any time sucks, any energy sucks, any attention sucks.

Are there things that are happening right now, whether it's in the macro, what's happening in the world, or in your micro, what's happening in your own life, that have taken something away where you just didn't have the capacity or energy or ability to do what it is you wanted to do?

There could be other things that get in your way. Maybe you were getting ready to do a big promotion for something and it just didn't go the way you wanted. Maybe something happened, you had a big snafu.

Goodness knows, like I said, having Facebook shut down my ads account for a month and a half got in my way, that slowed me down. That was completely out of my control.

But when I put this down on my review and I have context, I find it really helps me again to be more intentional and not be as harsh on myself, because that was out of my control. There was not as much that I could do when it comes to that.

That's something I really want more of us to be talking about. How can we give ourselves more self-compassion and not beat ourselves up when there are so many other factors at play beyond your ability to just sit down and lock in and get work done?

There are other factors at play that are going to impact you, your life, and your business. We want to make sure we're being really honest about that so that we can figure out a way to work with it instead of fighting it.
Leading Metrics and the Math Behind Predictable Revenue
The next questions I want you to think about: what is your leading metric that drives revenue and results for your business? This is an important question.

Again, like I said at the very beginning, if all we're tracking is revenue, if the only goal you really have in mind is your revenue goal, but you aren't clear on what leads to the revenue, if you don't have a Client Growth Engine in place where you can tell pretty predictably, if I want X number of clients to hire me for this particular product, program, or service, and spend this much money with me, that is the outcome that we're looking for. That is the lagging metric.

But what leads to those clients getting to you? What is the leading predictor of the revenue? That leading predictor could be the number of requests for consult that you get a month. It could be the number of requests for proposals. It could be you putting in proposals. It could be referrals coming into you. It could be people requesting content.

Usually these are the leading indicators I am tracking, because that is the first indication of a potential client who's essentially raising their hand and saying, I want to learn more.

Then they're able to get into that nurture stage of marketing where you're able to educate them more about what it is you do. You're able to let them get to know you and your team and your business a little more, and then they can make a decision on whether or not they want to work with you.

So I'm always looking at, what was my requests for consult, what were my requests for content? Are people actively indicating that they're interested in working with us? That is the leading indicator I want to track.
The Consult Math and How Many Conversations You Need
You want to take a look at that, because if you're not tracking that, then how can you predict the outcome if you're not tracking how many requests for consult? This is a big one with a lot of my clients, so I'm gonna specifically talk about this.

If you don't know how many consults you need in order to get the number of clients you need, you need to figure that information out. Here's how I would approach that.

For a lot of people, a lot of small businesses, let's say you want to get four clients a month, and you sell to them through a consultation process, a sales consultation process, and out of every conversation you have, let's say 50% of them say yes and hire you.

I would say this is an important thing to track. How many people say yes versus how many people say no. That way we know how effective you are on that sales consultation call.

But let's say if 50% are saying yes, and you want four clients a month to say yes, that means the leading indicator is I need to have eight consults on my calendar a month. I need to get eight consults on my calendar.

That way you can actually track and see, okay, we're already halfway through the month, have I had at least three to four consults? Or do I have up to eight already on my calendar? Or do I need to proactively do some things to get those consults coming in?

So you want to be tracking your leading and lagging metrics. If you do not know what they are, if you can't predictably tell where the clients are gonna come from, then you need a Client Growth Engine, and you need a system in place to make sure that you have that data, you have that information.
Closing the Gap and Adjusting Your Plan
Final big question here in the review section: what will help you close the gap between where you are right now at the time that you're doing your mid-year review and the end of the year?

I will say this is a year where you might need to adjust a little bit. I'm hearing from a lot of people that what they thought this year was gonna look like is already just drastically different. So they're having to do a little bit more adapting, adjusting. They might be doing a little pivot in their business.

They might be making some very intentional decisions in their business, and that might mean making those moves will actually reduce revenue in the short term or change up how revenue is coming into them.

So I want you to be thinking, not just how do I need to close the gap, but also what needs to change in order to get to where I want to go?

Maybe you adjust your revenue goal. Maybe you decide to keep the same revenue goal. Whatever works for you. Whatever you really want to do here doesn't hurt my feelings, what you choose.

But decide what do you want to be aiming for the second half of the year and what needs to change. What do you need to adapt and adjust in order to do that?
Mapping What You're Selling Each Month
Now, the final part of the Year in Review, especially if you go download the workbook, is to just map out the second half of the year. When we're mapping this out, I'm not talking about nitty gritty detail yet. I'm talking about let's have a nice big-picture look month by month on what the priorities are gonna be through the end of the year.

There's a few things I'm looking at as we're looking at each month. One is, what are you selling this month? What product, program, or service are you actively selling this month?

I know some people are gonna say, well, I have lots of things available for sale. I understand that, but even businesses that have a lot of things for sale will focus in on specific offers.

For example, think of right now, we're going into the summer months. You cannot walk into a store without them focusing and highlighting on things related to summer. If I go to the grocery store right now, there is a seasonal aisle and they are talking all things related to summer.

I can get beach chairs, I can get plastic cups that can go outside, I can get umbrellas, I can get all sorts of outdoor games and sports things. If I go down the aisles of the grocery store, I'm starting to see things for cookouts. I'm starting to see things for summer food that people like to have on the weekends.

So think like that. Think like a store. What are they focused on right now? Yes, they might have a lot of those things available all the time, but throughout the year, if you're selling the same things all the time, you want to highlight individual things and make them super, super relevant to that particular time of the year.

So what are you selling each month? If it's the same offer that you always sell, what is the reason that it's relevant right this moment?

Each month, then we want to reverse engineer here. What are you gonna focus on selling? How are you marketing that thing? What is your marketing game plan there?

How are you going to nurture those people so that they are excited about your particular offer? If you just drop a hey, this is available right now, but they haven't heard from you, they haven't gotten any information from you, maybe they need some more education. Maybe they need to have some questions answered.

If you haven't been doing any marketing leading up to that, then it probably will just slip through the cracks. We need to warm people up before we promote a lot of things, especially higher ticket products, programs, and services.

How many sales do you want to get from this particular offer? Do you have a goal there of how many people you want to invite in? This is really important, because again, capacity, especially those of you who are service providers.

You can't just say, hey, I have availability for websites if you're a website designer and just leave it open-ended. You want to be really clear about how many websites can you actually take on that month. When will they start? How much capacity do you need to onboard each client and to get them going?

You might realize you have to say, oh, I can realistically only onboard two clients a month, so I need to be very clear. I have availability for two clients this month, two clients the next month, two clients after that, and I'm going to sell those people. That's my goal, is to have two sales per month, and if it's more than that, I'm gonna start scheduling them out. I'm gonna start giving them start dates for the following months.
Setting Revenue Goals That Tie to Sales Goals
Finally, what's the goal revenue gonna look like? This is also really important. We need to make sure we're clear about what that goal revenue is and tie it to the sales goals that we have.

Make sure we're really clear about what revenue we want, how many people we need to bring into our business.

You also might be looking at how much revenue you already have on the way. Maybe you have people who have payment plans with you. Maybe you have clients who already are paying you on an ongoing basis.

That is great. You want to know what is the revenue coming in this month already, what new revenue do I need to get in order to achieve my revenue goals.
The June CEO Retreats Are Open
So I hope this was helpful for you. As you can tell, I've been looking down at my workbook here for your mid-year review. I find that this is an easy practice, and it just takes a little bit of time to get grounded in what's happening right now in your business. Then you can make better decisions.

As we're wrapping up today's episode, I want to let you know that the next CEO Retreat is coming up, and this is really the cornerstone of our 90-Day CEO Operating System.

Our way of planning is a little different than how most people plan, because it is built around making sure your Client Growth Engine is in place and running very smoothly, rinse and repeat, where you know exactly what things need to look like each step of the way so that you can more predictably grow your business.

Then we start firing up that team growth engine and make sure that your team is able to start taking over elements of your client growth engine and operations of your business so that you can stay focused on the bigger picture.

So the next retreats are coming up very soon. If you are interested in attending one of the June retreats, make sure you head over to theceocollective.com/retreat so you can sign up. We would love to see you there.

If you like this episode, please head over to social, chat with me, let me know your ahas and your insights. I love when you all connect with me and let me know how these things are landing for you.

Let me know also, what else do you want to hear from me on Promote Yourself to CEO? I want to know, what do you want me to be talking about? Because I'm hearing a lot of different conversations inside of the Collective, which is why I'm doing these episodes more timely, more in the moment, instead of batching them well in advance.

I do know there's a lot happening, and what worked even a year ago doesn't always land right now. I want to make sure I'm making this as useful and as relevant as possible for you. I hope you have a great one, and I'll see you in the next episode.