Is Mid-year Business Review Necessary?

Half a year has passed and it is time to conduct a mid-year business review – a status update and a plan for the rest of the year. As businesses often end up with the same troubled systems, processes, or employees, a mid-year business review is crucial for any business that wants to remain on track with its goals and prevent unexpected risks.

All businesses need mid-year reviews

A mid-year business review is an annual review that helps business leaders to reflect on the company’s performance in the first 6 months of the year and make possible adjustments to achieve year-end goals. 

Typically, there are 2 types of mid-year reviews, including employee assessment, an evaluation that managers conduct with employees to examine their progress and provide future-focused, actionable feedback for improvements. The other is business assessment, which will be focused on in this article.

While there are so many businesses that cannot survive over 12 months, many make efforts to improve the chance of achieving financial goals throughout the year. To ensure continued success and to plan for the best year possible, the process of evaluating a company’s performance is essential. In detail, the purpose of conducting a mid-year business review includes:

• Evaluate performance
• Reallocate resources to ensure everything remains on track and coordinated
• Provide guidance for leadership
• Discover and eliminate possible roadblocks

The mid-year business review helps business leaders to see how the company is doing and adjust to achieve their goals. (Source: swallowedeasy.com)

How businesses should conduct mid-year reviews

Preparation

To stay in the right direction, businesses leaders should ask themselves some critical questions for personal reviews:

• What goals are my company strive to achieve?
• Am I working hard enough to meet the goals?
• Do I have any uncertainty about my business future? Am I anxious and nervous about competitiveness and possible economic downturn?

According to the father of Financial Life Planning, George Kinder, emotions have a powerful effect to alert us that something needs to change and motivating us to make that change. Therefore, do not be afraid to encourage genuine emotions you have about the company and allow them to become a part of the decision-making. 

After having a general outlook of personal reviews, business leaders should collect data from all departments to have a broad picture of overall performance.

Performing reviews: What to focus on

Review business identity

One of the most feasible ways to ensure that the business is headed in the right direction is to make everyone aligned with the identity of the business. Specifically, business leaders and employees should answer some key questions: 

• Who are your customers? 
• What are their demands and needs? 
• How can your company satisfy their needs?
• What prevents your company from fulfilling these needs?

As everyone has the chance to share their point of view, business leaders can have insights into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and fundamentally analyze them to develop strategic planning. 

Review your financial position

Assessing the financial position is vital to identify the future stability and profitability of the company (Source: ballardbusinessrecovery.co.uk)

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any organization. Monitoring and managing cash flow is essential to take control of the cash and meet the target income. 

Some crucial points to consider include:

• Do you have any collection issues that need attention? 
• Are you heading in the right direction to achieve your target income?
• Are you managing your expenses properly?
• Do you think it is the right time to raise your rates?

Also, it is a good time to conduct an expense analysis. To do this, prepare 2 things:

• The total expenses for the last six months
• Any recurring expenses include rent, utilities, subscriptions, internet access, etc.

If you confront any problems, consider reducing unprofitable aspects of your business, cutting expenses, or revamping your offerings.

Decide the next steps

It is important to write down an outline agenda highlighting what you want to achieve and what needs to change. Then, develop action steps that need to help accomplish the new goals.

• Business review and goal-setting: A mid-year review is an ideal time to assess business goals and make adjustments if needed. Business leaders can consider some of the following questions:

1. Are your initial goals still compatible with your company’s direction?
2. What achievements have you reached so far?
3. Have you missed any milestones? Why?
4. Are you planning for any new goals? 

But the focus should also be on strategies and methods. What is performing effectively and what is not? For example, if your company is focusing on a campaign that is not attracting customers, or beginning a collaboration that does not bring any value, it is time to start rethinking the strategies and methods to deliver tangible results for the company.

• Resource allocation: After determining the goals, it is time to identify what resources or activities need to be reallocated to better support business objectives.

Some questions that business leaders and employees can discuss are:

1. What is necessary and what is out-of-scope?
2. How much should be allocated?
3. What business impact do you expect?

• Technology initiatives consideration: Intelligent Automation (IA) should be your next focus in the second half of 2023. It is considered the key to comprehensive digital transformation, strengthening business operations, and making the workplace more human. Intelligent Automation Network indicates that in 2021, only 30% of surveyed organizations were actively invested in IA and 64% had invested in IA. However, IA adoption has soared since 2023. Currently, more than 68% of large organizations have adopted IA, according to Technative. 

Intelligent Automation is the key to unlocking digital transformation and helping businesses thrive to reach 2023’s objectives. (Source: info.convedo.com)

In the digital era, IA gradually emerges as a game changer for businesses, allowing them to leverage levels of growth, efficiency, and quality. Specifically, IA helps businesses:

1. Boost accuracy: IA solutions can eliminate errors, providing greater efficiency and accuracy.
2. Reduce costs and improve performance and productivity: By optimizing workflow and reducing monotonous and complicated back-office processes, IA enables businesses to save costs while maximizing productivity and increasing processing speed.
3. Enhance customer experience: IA implementation provides higher quality, thereby delivering a richer, more positive experience for customers, and increasing competitive advantage for the company.
4. Increase scalability: IA adoption is flexible and can be easily scaled up or down as demand requires, without additional training.
5. Improve security, compliance, and confidentiality: IA algorithms can autonomously learn patterns, predict outcomes, identify risks in real-time, and notify vulnerabilities before they are exploited, thereby leveraging security levels and reducing fraud.

Read more: Building an Agile Future Enterprise Powered by Intelligent Automation

Last but not least, to complete the review, look at the big picture and identify the areas that need improvement, then define the action plan based on the evaluation. Also, as proceeding with the business review, collect positive insights and take some time to celebrate your achievements.

References

The Mid-Year Business Review: What Should It Cover?

A Guide To Your Mid-Year Business Review

Mid-Year Business Review: A Company’s Path To Success

How To Perform A Mid-Year Business Review For Your Sme

Mid-Year Reviews: The Ultimate Guide

Guide To Mid-Year Reviews

Top Intelligent Automation Trends To Watch In 2023

2023 Intelligent Automation and RPA Outlook

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