September is fast approaching and with it thoughts of ‘back to school’ and new starts. Just like the beginning of the year, I find this the perfect time to take stock and review the remaining months. There is something about the change of season from summer to autumn that makes me want to seek new opportunities and make the most of the last 4 months of the year. It’s also the perfect time to jump off the roller-coaster of working in our business and spend a little time working on our business.

So grab your coloured pencils and join me in a ‘back to school’ review of your business:

1. To start the process, find some quiet time and ask yourself 2 questions:

  • What went well this year so far?
  • What did not go so well?

This is the time to reflect on the successes of the last 8 months but also the challenges.

If you did an annual review or plan at the start of the year, now is the time to dust if off. Take a critical look at what goals you had set yourself for the year. Have you achieved some of them? Have your priorities changed? Are there some goals that you would still like to achieve but have not started on yet? Remember – there is 4 months left of the year, plenty of time to still put your plans into action.

2. Collect together those notebooks/scraps of paper/Evernote entries/starred Gmail emails/bookmarked websites where you wrote down/noted all those great ideas for your business during the year – new products or services, new partnerships, new clients. Pick out the ones that resonate with you and think about what can you put into place over the next 4 months?

3. Get out your calender or print off the ‘month at a time view’ in Google Calender or Outlook. Mark off any existing commitments on the calender such as holidays, training days etc. You should be left with some white space hopefully.

Now start to schedule in your goals for the remainder of the year. I like to do this on a weekly basis, so one week might be focussing on developing new training courses, another might be promoting my mentoring work or looking critically at my website and SEO.

Even if you can only spare an hour this rainy bank holiday weekend to reviewing and planning for the next 4 months, I promise you your business will be stronger for it.

Happy bank holiday!

[Image with thanks to D. Sharon Pruitt via Creative Commons]