Catherine: In this episode, we are going to delve into how you recap the
first half of the year to make sure that you hit your goals in the second half.
Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan.
I'm Catherine Erdly, and this podcast is here to share retail industry
trends, insights, and best practises.
For you, the retailer who's serious about building something that lasts.
We are coming up fast on the end of the first half of the year, but if that
fills you with dread, then don't panic.
In this episode, we're gonna be talking through why midyear beats the
1st of January, because we have real data now, not just a theory about how
the year's gonna go, and then we're also gonna be looking at how you get
clarity on what happened in the first half of the year, as well as put
together a plan for the second half.
Stay tuned.
And also a reminder that this episode comes with a free downloadable resource.
Head to resilientretailclub.com/recap and get your free download with an outline
for how you can recap your first half of the year and make a plan for the second.
So in this episode, we are going to dive deep into how you actually take
some time to step back, take a look at the first half of the year, and
use that information to springboard into a successful second half.
And what I love to do with this process, and this is a process that
I've used in my membership group in courses and with clients over and
over again, is I like to start by looking back and then look forward.
So by looking back, let's go all the way back to the beginning of the year.
Now, I hope based on everything that I've talked about on the podcast or any
of my programmes that you've been in, that you took the time at the beginning
of the year to set yourself some goals.
So at the end of the first half, this is the perfect time to go get those goals out
of wherever you've stashed them, whatever dark digital corner you've put them
in, or which desk drawer you've put your notebook, pull them out and take a look.
Do you remember what those goals were?
Did you set a sales goal, a revenue target?
Did you have personal income goals or did you have maybe some non-financial goals?
So things like wanting to launch a new product, a new stockist,
or learn even a new skill.
And this is the perfect opportunity for you to think without blame or without
self-recrimination and to figure out how much of this you've actually achieved.
Be honest.
But to be fair, some goals shift because circumstances
shift not because you failed.
I certainly talk to a lot of people who had big goals for the year
and then because of something that happened to them in their personal
life or personal circumstances or maybe just some big change that
happened in the business, they've just had to start again from scratch.
Or they'll really take this point in the year as a great point for
them to look at moving forward.
Once you've pulled out those goals, now is the perfect opportunity for you without
any self recrimination or self blame to actually take a look and see how much of
your goals you have actually achieved.
You need to be honest, but do be fair to yourself as well.
If you've had major circumstances that have changed in the business or perhaps
even in your personal life, then this is not the time to beat yourself up about it.
But it's a good opportunity for you to take a look at those goals that you
set and decide how much you've actually done and also what goals still matter.
I do this myself in my own business and sometimes something that seemed like it
was a high priority in the first half has actually I've moved on, or I've come
up with different ideas for what I wanna do, and it no longer feels like this is
a goal that's aligned with my business.
And that's absolutely fine.
So let's talk about the numbers for a little bit.
What are the numbers that you really want to look into at the end of the first half?
Well, I would suggest that you quite simply look at your total sales, so
all of the sales that you've taken up till now to the end of June, from the
beginning of January, and have a look at where they're versus your plan.
Now, you may not have set yourself a plan.
If you didn't, that's fine.
Although I do strongly recommend setting plans for lots of reasons, but you
could also look for example, at last year or even just get a general sense
of how you feel about that number.
Is that number ahead of where you thought it would be?
Is it behind or is it on track, and why do you think that is?
I think the most important thing when we are looking at numbers and we're
looking at recapping your business, we really want to make sure that we
are taking the opportunity to not just think about what the numbers
are, but why you think they happened.
So for example, let's say you've had a brilliant first half.
You have taken twice as much money as you thought you were going to take.
Why not?
Who knows that may have happened.
If that's the case, do take the time just to get really
clear on why you think that is.
Is it because actually you launched a new product and it's done brilliantly well?
Is it, for example, that you've made a major investment into your email
marketing and that's really paid off?
Is it that you've had a really fruitful collaboration with an
influencer or somebody like that?
What is it do you think that has really helped you?
Or on the other hand, is it a number of different things?
Knowing why you've been successful is as useful as, or more useful
than just looking at the numbers.
And equally, if you feel like it hasn't really worked out the way that
you wanted it to, or maybe you're under where you'd like to be versus plan or
for last year, this is your opportunity to think about the why there too.
Now this, it's even more important than when you're looking at when sales are up.
It's even more important than ever for you to not be overly harsh on yourself.
This is not about making you feel terrible, but it's about
you understanding what happened.
Is it, for example, you went on holiday during a busy time of the
year and you had to shut the shop.
So that's had a really big impact.
Is it that you've struggled with personal situations, something that's
happened in your life that you know means that you haven't been as focused?
Or maybe it's you've had a really difficult team member
or footfall's been down, or customers have been spending less.
There are so many different things that it could be, but the key thing
here is to be curious and inquisitive, but not to make yourself feel worse.
You can also delve into what's actually been selling or not selling.
In an ideal world, you would have a look over the last six months
and find out what are the top five items that you've sold by value?
Because sales value, that's money in, which is always really important.
But also you might look at units.
So how many units have you sold?
Unit best sellers are useful to attract as well as value best sellers because
they're an indication of what your customer is choosing on a regular basis.
So it's really important for you to understand what the units are as well.
If you've been tracking your cost prices correctly, you'll also be able
to pull out the best sellers in terms of your profit, which is another
thing that is interesting to look at.
But if all you can get is your top best sellers by value, then
that's still really useful too.
And if they're not the same, if your best sellers by sales volume are not
the same as your best sellers by profit.
That's also another interesting thing to know because that suggests that
you can make a real difference to your profit margin by actually improving
the prices on some of the things.
Sell the best.
So this is a really great opportunity for you to step back.
And again, what I would really strongly recommend is that you don't
just look at which were the best sellers, but you ask yourself why?
Why do you think they were best sellers?
Is it because they were a certain price point that your customer liked?
Was your customer really into a certain type of product?
Did you just get lucky because it was on trend?
Did you find that all of the items that were certain colour
or a certain fragrance, were they the ones that really performed?
What is it that you can pull from that data?
And if you've got a wide product range, you may well want to pull even your top
10 or maybe even 20 or 50, but really understand the best sellers, the ones
that were really driving the sales.
What does that actually tell you about your business and about your customer?
As well as looking at your best sellers.
You can also look at what I call the dead weight audit.
In other words, what did you not sell so much of?
Definitely have a look and see if there are any products that
sold zero in the last six months that you currently have stock of.
This is something that honestly, if you've sold zero of something in six
months, you definitely wanna consider definitely, definitely not buying
it again, but maybe even discounting it or something to get it moving.
You also wanna think about are there any items that you actually
bought and they may be sold.
Okay, but they were disappointing.
Worse.
Sellers are almost harder to calculate than your best sellers
because there's lots of different ways that you can look at something.
But typically I tend to look at the things with the lowest sales, with
the highest amount of stock value behind them so that you can really
understand where your money's tied up and where things aren't moving.
And just like for the best sellers, when it comes to your worst sellers, you really
wanna take some time to think about why.
Why do you think people didn't like it?
Is it something that they used to like that it's moved on?
Is there more competition in this particular area?
Does somebody else close to you start selling this and
you think it's impacted sales?
Or could it just be one of those things where you bought something
you thought was gonna be fantastic and frankly, it turned out not to be.
It happens to everybody.
So if that's happened to you, don't feel bad about it.
Don't decide that it means that you're terrible at what you do,
but just think about how you can take that learning and move on.
Other things that it's good to look at.
Conversion rate is something that I reckon should be looked at once a month,
but definitely at six month point, you wanna be seeing how is your conversion
rate doing and how is it shifting?
So your conversion rate is the number of purchases made compared
to the number of visitors.
You can track it very easily online.
It's one of the key figures you'll see on most dashboards for
e-commerce brands and in store.
You can actually also do a conversion calculation if you can count the
number of people coming in compared to the number of transactions.
If it's something that you don't track continuously in store, maybe
do a little test just to see how your conversion rate is doing, and
that can be very informative as well.
Average order value is something that, again, I think should
be looked at once a month.
But again, at the six month point, you can see how does your
average order value compare?
Is it going up?
Is it going down?
What's going on with that?
Has anything shifted since January?
Have a look at your sales channels.
If you sell in more than one sales channel, many people sell across
websites and their own stores.
They might also sell at wholesale, they might sell on
Etsy, not on the High Street.
Many, many other different channels that you could be selling on.
So do take a moment to have a look and actually analyse, which
is your best sales channel.
Is it still the same?
Has it shifted?
How are the different channels doing?
Did everything perform in the same way in the first half or did you
have some channels that were actually doing brilliantly and other ones
that aren't doing so well?
Are you still investing in the channel that's actually driving results,
or are you defaulting to habits?
So for example, you might have seen huge growth in one particular area,
but you realise actually you still think of it as a small channel.
You don't really give it as much time and attention as you should,
and therefore that's giving you good direction for what you should
be looking at for the second half.
Social media is something else that you can take a look at.
And if you haven't done a bit of a social media audit recently, then I do recommend
doing it at the halfway point, not as a vanity metric, but more as a signal.
What is working?
What are you seeing that works?
What types of posts are you getting any reaction to?
Do people respond when you show up and talk on your stories, but you don't
get much interaction on your feed?
Are you still posting for the audience you had in January
or the one that you have now?
You don't have to have all the answers, but it can be really
informative to go into, say, Instagram and look at some of your metrics.
Look at the last six months and see what posts had the most shares, what
posts had the most saves, what posts had the most interactions, and see if
you can track what posts were driving.
Traffic to your website.
When you look at any peaks of sales that you had online, for example,
or even when you had peaks in store, can you match any of that back to
social media content that you put out?
This is a great opportunity for you to just make sure that you are
leaning into the formats and the subjects and the type of content that
your customers are responding to.
A relationship audit is a great thing to do, especially at the halfway point,
and the relationship audit is really all about anybody who you work with.
It could be your suppliers, it could be people that you collaborate with.
It could be stockists if you're a wholesale brand who moved
the needle and who cost you more energy than they returned.
Many of us have a lot of issues with couriers, for example.
How are you doing with your courier relationship?
Are you happy with it?
Do you feel secure going in towards the second half?
And the same with your stockists, your collaborators, your suppliers.
These are all relationships that you want them to be firm before
you go into the second half.
So if you've got any questions about anybody or there's anything that
you'd like to change in terms of service providers or things that you
wanna invest in, then now's the time.
We've talked about the numbers.
I'd like to talk a little bit more about some of the kind of more subjective parts
of analysing your business performance.
The first thing is to make sure you celebrate your wins.
So I call this section what worked and what didn't.
So first of all, we want to make sure you take some time to
actually name your wins out loud.
Don't rush past them.
Small business owners we're absolutely terrible at having a huge achievement
and then brushing straight past it and onto the next thing, or
beating ourselves up that we haven't achieved something else as well.
So make sure that at this point in the review, you are actually taking
the time to really sit into what your strengths are, what you did well, what
you achieved, and did you even think this was possible a couple of years ago.
If you looked at the business, would you have believed everything
that you've achieved now?
Then I'd ask you to think about what genuinely added value, either
time, money, energy, or all three.
What were some things that you did either inside the business or even for
yourself that supported the business?
For example, look at healthy eating or exercising in a way that supported you
as a business owner that really helped.
That could be something that has worked really well.
Do you have a great new team member?
Did you start a new marketing tactic that's worked brilliantly
or take on a new supplier?
What has it been that actually worked well and made the business better?
Being able to identify those things and lean into them is really important.
And then what flat out didn't work?
Be really specific, not vague.
If there are things that you brought in that didn't sell, list it out.
If there are troublesome employees that really cost you a lot of time,
effort, and energy, then list those out.
Again, this is not about beating yourself up, it's about identifying what didn't
work and what you don't wanna repeat.
What I'd do differently, question.
This is your second half strategy.
Hiding in plain sight.
You can almost take what you would start, stop, or continue from the
first half, and think about what you therefore would do for the second half.
So what do you wanna start doing in the second half?
What you wanna stop doing and what you want to double down on?
That can be a really good way to just get some quick, clear direction as to
what you wanna do for the second half.
And then just have a think about how the business feels right now.
Now, it may seem like an odd thing to say, to talk about feelings in a episode that's
mostly about numbers, but I definitely think that we all need to be building
businesses that feel right for us.
So pay attention to where the energy is, what you've been
enjoying and where it isn't.
If something feels off, then get specific about what kind of off it feels like.
Is it circumstantial?
For example, you love what you do, but you wish you paid yourself
more, or you're just exhausted?
Or is it directional, which is a nagging feeling that you've drifted from
what you originally set out to build?
Or is it worry?
I call these the 3:00 AM thoughts that feel catastrophic in the dark,
but look different in the daytime.
I actually really like a SWOT analysis as an emotional clearing
exercise, not just a strategy tool.
SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.
It's the kind of thing that people set you as second round interview tasks to
do about a business, or it's the kind of thing that you do in business school
when you're looking at case studies.
But I also think that it's a perfect opportunity for you as a business
owner to really reflect where you're at right now and a 20-minute SWOT.
You know, set yourself a timer.
Get yourself a piece of A4 paper, fold it in half, fold it in half.
Again, get yourself four quadrants.
Write strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats on it,
and then just start brain dumping.
You can also, I often tell people to write areas of
improvement instead of weaknesses.
If you don't like really pondering your own weaknesses too much.
So under strengths, you're gonna list out everything that you're genuinely
good at and how you're using it.
So strengths typically refer to when you're using this in a business
context as internal strengths, internal advantages that a business has.
So think about what you do well, what your business does well, what your team
does well, what you are really happy with, what makes you really pleased.
When you think about the business weaknesses or areas of improvement,
do you already know needs fixing?
What are things that you internally when it comes to the business,
you think could be done better?
And again, really, really important to not let this be like something
that you do that makes you feel really bad about yourself.
Opportunities.
So these are the external things.
So what's sitting right in front of you that you haven't acted on yet?
What are some things that you could be doing in the business
that, or maybe interesting you?
Areas of direction, new product types, new channels that you could go for.
What are some things that you could do to help you grow and threats?
This is where the 3:00 AM thoughts go get them outta your head and onto paper.
This is a way for you to really just brainstorm everything that you have
in your head that is making you feel uncomfortable or you're worried about.
And sometimes just writing all down really helps.
And these are the external threats, external factors that
you think could have an impact on your business over the next year.
Another great exercise if we're talking about the emotional connection is what
I call the 20 year interview exercise.
If you were interviewed in 20 years about this business, what
would you want to be saying?
And are you on a path that leads there or have you gone off course?
So for example, some people might say, in 20 years time, I'll talk about how I
exited this business after successfully running it for several years and I
handed it off to somebody else and I really got a lot of value out of it,
the time that I was running it, but I was happy to say goodbye when I did.
Some people in their 20 year interview will say, I went on to build this to be
a household name and a high street brand that was recognised across the country.
All of those things are completely acceptable.
I mean, everyone has their own vision of what they want it to be,
and some people will say, I'm still running my business because I run
it around my life and my family.
And that's always the way I want it to be.
It's never the main thing I focus on, but it's always there and it's
always given me joy and satisfaction.
Who knows what your 20 year interview will be, but taking some time to think about
it, especially if you felt like there's something off, can help you identify if
you're moving in the right direction.
So now let's talk about refocusing for half two.
So we've really looked at the first half.
We've thought about how it made us feel and we've thought about ourselves and
where we're at as a business owner.
But now for the second half, we're gonna set an actual number.
You may have the sales goal from January.
You might have set yourself a goal for the full year.
If you haven't, then I definitely recommend that you set yourself an
actual number that you wanna achieve.
If you set yourself a goal in January and you're way off it either way over
or way under, you may wanna adjust it.
Set yourself a new goal for the second half that feels more realistic.
And then also, what are your two or three non-financial goals for the second half?
So for example, you might want to launch a new product or to
start a new selling channel.
It may be something like a project in the business, like you want
to have a new website, or who knows what else it might be.
But think about what your key opportunities are, or things that you'd
like to really work on in the second half.
And then key dates, planning, map out what's coming and
whether you're ready for it.
If Christmas is your biggest trading period, you need to start that plan.
Now, think about when you're ordering your product, when the stock's coming
in, if it's already ordered, your marketing plan, wholesale deadlines,
if you're selling at wholesale.
And then what other key trading dates launches or seasons apply to
your business in the second half?
Work backwards from those dates.
What needs to happen and by when.
Revisit any other goals you might have from January.
Are you keeping them, adjusting them or replacing them entirely?
And then write yourself a sentence.
By December 31st, I will have make it concrete.
So that could be, for example, by the 31st of January, I made it
through Christmas without getting the flu and without burning out.
And I'm really happy to have balanced things really well this year.
Or you might say, by the 31st of December, I have reached this financial goal.
Whatever it might be.
It gives you a really clear intention for the second half.
So think about what you wanna do next.
Make sure that you list out not everything that you wanna do, but what
needs to be done in the third quarter, and what can we move to the fourth.
So make yourself a list of what you wanna have ready to go for.
If you do, for example, a third quarter check in.
So that is your homework.
Don't forget, if you want to get all of this in a downloadable format,
you can go to resilientretailclub.com/recap and you'll have a PDF
which will let you do your own first half recap and your second half plan.
But make sure you at least write down your second half sales goal and
what's your main goal that you want to achieve by the end of the year?
Write that down today, not tomorrow.
And why not head over to Instagram at Resilient Retail Club?
Drop me a note or send me an email at catherine@resilientretailclub.com
and lemme know what your thoughts are, what you're aiming for in the second
half of the year, and set yourself your tasks, but don't overwhelm yourself.
Make sure that you have just a couple of things you're gonna work on in
the third quarter to make sure you're building towards your full year goal.
Thank you so much for listening.
Don't forget to like, follow, or subscribe to be the first
to know about each new episode.
And don't forget to head over to resilientretailclub.com/recap to get your own
version of this as a handy PDF that lets you do your own business check in.