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To keep you and your business on track, it is important to stop and review your progress regularly. Some people use a business coach to help monitor their progress on a weekly or monthly basis. However, with some discipline it is something that you can do yourself. The key is to have a system in place to ensure you are checking the right things at the right time.

In this article we will take you through what you should be monitoring and how often. You can use this information to review your own and your business’s progress and results; you can also share it with your team.

Yearly review

A yearly review is designed to give you an overall picture of your performance. It is often done either in December or January; however, it can be completed effectively at any time of the year. To complete this review you need to give yourself plenty of time, and you might like to include your key team members in the process. The yearly review is designed to look at the bigger picture and should focus on how well you performed in line with your overall vision and goals. Here are some tips for conducting the review:[wlm_ismember]

• If you follow our “SMART goals” guide, each goal will have a clear measurement tool attached to it, which will allow you to assess each of your goals one by one to see if you achieved your target. If you have successfully reached your goals, that is great. If not, you need to investigate a little further to determine what went wrong. This might involve asking the following questions:

1. Did you set the right goal? Did you find as the year went on that the goal was not relevant to what you were trying to achieve?
2. Did you set the target too high? Targets that are not achievable can work to demotivate rather than push you forward.
3. Did you just lose focus as the year went on? Often things can start off okay, but after a few months momentum can be lost.
4. Did the team get behind the goals? For a team to work effectively, team members need to have common goals.

• What went well during the year? It is important to review the year by looking for the positives. You may not have met all of your targets, but you still could have moved forward in a lot of key areas. Once you have your list you need to make an assessment on whether you can build further on these areas of strength or whether your focus for the next 12 months needs to be elsewhere.

Note:   One of the things to watch out for is that we usually prefer doing what we do well. It is easy to fall into the trap of spending more time on an area in which you are already doing well, when your time would be better spent on improving something that you do not do well.

• What did not go so well during the year? There are always things that do not go to plan. We recommend you make a list of them. These are usually the goals that you did not reach and any problems or issues that arose during the year that you did not foresee in your yearly planning.

• Where are the opportunities? Make a list of all of the things that you can do or improve on over the next 12 months. These will form the basis for your set of goals for the next year. The steps that follow should consist of the following:

• Look at your list of successes to see what strengths you can leverage off.

• Sort through your list of what did not go well to see what improvements you can make.

• Look for areas that you were making progress in, but lost focus as the year progressed.

Always keep a sharp eye out for any “quick wins”. These are the things that can have a high impact on your business and are easy to implement.

Once you have completed your review, you are able to start work on your business plan for the next 12 months. We discuss a comprehensive planning process in the “Business strategy” section of the website that provides you with a step-by-step guide.

Quarterly reviews

If you can get into the habit of conducting quarterly reviews, you will find that the chance of achieving your yearly goals and targets is significantly increased. By monitoring progress quarterly you will be able to make adjustments throughout the year if things are heading off the track. As in a yearly review, a quarterly review should consider your business’s big picture. You should look at every department and spend time reviewing the progress towards achieving each of your business goals. You need to repeat the process used in the yearly review and ask the following questions:

What is going well?

Work out the areas that are working well for you and simply keep doing what you are doing, do more of what you are doing, or decide that you have achieved your goal and move onto something else.

What is not going well?

This is where most of the work happens. You need to identify the areas that are not working as well. You should then look for ways to change what you are doing, work harder or smarter to get a better result or give up if the effort required is not worth the result.

One of the most important tasks in a quarterly review is determining which goals set at the beginning of the year are off target. Don’t be afraid to adjust or change some of your goals if you find that they cannot be met. It is better to do some fine-tuning or focus on a new goal than set yourself and the business up for failure. Here are some of the things to look out for:

Targets have been set at an unachievable level.

It is much better to review the target down a little to keep the motivation level high rather than witness a widening of the gap between your result and the target over the year. Ideally, a target should be set so it is within reach, but high enough that it would encourage strong performance.

You do not have the resources in place.

Goals and targets can often be set with the ideal world in mind. However, once the day-to-day reality of the business sets in, it can become clear that the goal cannot be achieved without an investment in additional people or equipment.

You set too many goals.

It is easier to focus on a just a few goals. So if you find that you have set more than three to five key goals, narrow the list down to the most important ones. Then you need to refocus – you can always go back to the other goals later in the year once you are on the way to achieving your key goals.

It is important to remember that very few business plans play out exactly to plan; however, this does not mean that they are not worthwhile or necessary. A plan will give you a focus and a direction to work towards, and if you carry out reviews regularly, any changes will be strategic rather than accidental.

Monthly reviews

Monthly reviews should focus on your planned actions and activities, and on results. At the start of each month you should set up a plan for the month. It might include such items as sales results and activities and actions that will help you progress towards achieving your goals. At the end of each month you should ask the following questions:

Were your results on target?

If not, you will need to assess what happened and what you can change in the following month. For example, you may need to focus on generating new business or conduct additional training in order to sell a new product more effectively. Once you can explain the downturn in the results, you can work on a solution.

Which tasks or activities were completed?

Once a task is finished, it can be taken off the list. Don’t forget to ensure that anyone responsible is recognised and rewarded accordingly and assess if any follow-up action is required.

What tasks or activities are still in progress?

Anything that is still in progress needs to be assessed. Is it on track or is there a blockage that needs to be cleared? Any in-progress task needs to be updated and then put on the action plan for the next 30 days.

What tasks or activities have not been started?

You need to find out what happened. Was the task or activity unnecessary? Was the person responsible not able to do it for some reason? Was it unclear who was responsible? A decision can then be made whether to keep the task on next month’s action plan or amend it.

Monthly reviews are an important part of the business management process. The sooner you can identify a downturn in your results or an obstacle to completing a task or activity, the more strategic your response will be. We suggest you conduct monthly reviews in the first few days of each month. You should ideally stick to the same day and time, for example the first Wednesday of the month at 10am, and ensure that all key members of your team attend and are prepared. If you are not confident about setting action plans, you will find an article explaining how to complete a plan in the “Business strategy” section of the website.

Weekly review

Weekly reviews focus on the day-to-day activities required to get a result. You may use these reviews as weekly team mentoring or coaching sessions. The review should focus on what has been achieved, what is not working so well and what can be done to get a better result the following week.

Summary

As you can see, the longer the time period between reviews, the more the review process focuses on the bigger picture. A weekly review might only take 10 minutes and might be as simple as setting a focus for the week and identifying any possible obstacles. At the other end of the scale, a full-year review is focused on the bigger picture issues and would be expected to take several hours or even longer. The key to a successful review process is to ensure that you conduct reviews regularly enough so you can react quickly when things are not going to plan. Use this article in conjunction with others in the “Business planning” and “Goal” sections of the website.[/wlm_ismember]

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