Are you still on track to hit your goals this year? Haven’t looked yet? Forget what your goals even were?

It’s easy to get tied up in the day-to-day and forget what you’re working toward. Implementing a quarterly review and planning process will help you stay on track, pivot when you need to, and ultimately hit your goals. 

Further, breaking your annual goals down into 90-day goals will help you keep up the momentum. Large annual goals can seem daunting, so breaking them down into smaller quarterly goals will make them more achievable for you.

I love a simple three-step process and quarterly review and planning is no different.

Step one - check in on your goals and dreams. 

Go back to your annual goals and make sure they still resonate with you. If nothing has changed and the goals you’ve already set are still top of mind and really meaningful to you, then you simply move onto step two.

If your original goals have changed or you just chose an arbitrary revenue number as a goal, take time to re-think it. Remember, our goals have to be really meaningful to us in order for us to actually put time and effort into actually achieving them. 

So before you put numbers to anything, think about what you really want to do this year. How much do you want to pay yourself? What do you want to be able to do for your employees? Is there something you could do to better serve your customers? Think about what you want to be toasting to on New Year’s Eve next year. What would you like to be celebrating?

Once you’ve thought about what you really want for your business, then you can figure out the financial impact and how much revenue you need to make in order to make it happen, and how to break that down quarterly. Remember to factor in seasonal fluctuations. If summer is historically low for you, take that into account when you're setting your third-quarter goals and how much you need to make in other quarters to still hit your annual goals.

Also, remember that not every year has to be a growth year. Maybe you want to maintain the level of revenues that you made last year and take this year to implement systems and processes or improve employee culture. Sometimes you need a maintenance year to prepare for growth years in the future.

Step two - evaluate your progress. 

Now that you’ve revisited your goals, you can evaluate your current progress for the quarter.

Not only is it important to compare your actual revenues to your goal revenues, but you also want to review your full budget to actuals. It doesn’t do you much good if you’re hitting your revenue targets, but way overspending on operating costs. We want to make sure that you’re hitting your goal profits.

You’ll also want to review your non-financial drivers. If your goal was to improve employee culture, for example, you’re not going to be looking at revenue numbers. You might be looking at something like employee surveys. 

Step three - stay on track.

The third and final step is the part of the process that you’ll carry throughout the next quarter and the rest of the year. This not only involves staying on top of your monthly financial statements and comparing goals to actuals, but also tracking metrics on a weekly basis. Tracking your key metrics on a weekly basis will help keep your goals top of mind and allow you to pivot and act quickly if things aren’t going as planned.

It also helps to keep everyone accountable and on the same page. For example, if a wellness business has a goal to generate $20,000 of revenue a week, they would break that down into the number of appointments that each of their providers needs to have in order to hit the goal. Every staff member should have a scorecard with metrics that are applicable to their job. This will help keep everyone working toward the same goal and ultimately lead to achieving that goal.

If you’d like help with quarterly planning, book a discovery call here.

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