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Halfway Through the Year and Not Hitting Your Goals? Your Mid-Year Reset

• Brandi Mowles • Episode 290

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0:00 | 23:03

We are halfway through the year, and holy bananas, where did it go? If your stomach just dropped because you're nowhere near the goal you wrote down in December, stay with me.

You do not toss out the plan you made. You check it.

In this episode, Brandi walks you through the exact mid-year reset she just ran with her Strategist Society members, the one that stops the panic spiraling and replaces it with real data. You'll pull your numbers, find out where you're actually sitting in your business, do the gap math (it's smaller than you think), and walk away with three action steps for the next seven days.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • Why service providers should plan in 90-day increments instead of 12-month chunks
  • The year-over-year growth number that tells the truth about your business (and why the average business only grows 5 to 10% a year)
  • The car-seat gut check: are you in the driver's seat, passenger seat, back seat, or the trunk?
  • How to close your revenue gap by spreading it over six months instead of panicking over the whole number
  • The brain dump exercise that took Brandi from a $250K year to $1.2M
  • Why "I don't like it" is not a reason to skip what actually works (cold email, cold calling, Upwork, local networking)
  • How to reconnect to your North Star and pick the two life areas to focus on next

Mentioned in this episode:

Ready to scale past $10K months?

If you're sitting here thinking "this is exactly what I needed, but I'll talk myself out of doing it alone," that's exactly what Strategist Society is for. It's the room where we look at your real numbers with you, tell you where to raise your prices, help you brain dump your gap fill, and hold you to the three things you committed to. Built for service providers ready to scale to consistent $10K to $20K months on less than 25 hours a week. Head to https://thestrategistsociety.com.

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HALFWAY THROUGH THE YEAR AND NOT HITTING YOUR GOALS? YOUR MID-YEAR RESET

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Brandi: [00:00:00] We are halfway through the year, and holy bananas, where the heck has the year went? And you may be sitting there, and if you're feeling like your stomach drop a little because you're nowhere near the goal that you wrote down back in December or January for what you wanted this year to look like, I need you to listen.


You don't toss out the plan that you made, you check it. Today, I'm walking you through the exact mid-year reset that I just ran inside Strategist Society, the one where we stop making decisions off of emotions and start making them off of our numbers. So grab your numbers, grab a pen, grab a piece of paper.


We are gonna dive in and give you actionable steps that you can take right now to make the second part of the year the most successful yet. Hello, hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Serve Scale Soar podcast. My name is Brandi Mowles, and if this is your first time here, hello. I'm so excited that you found me, and I am so glad you are here.[00:01:00] 


This is a show where I help one-on-one service providers build a business that pays you big girl money and still fits in under 25 hours or less a week. No hustle culture, no rainbows and butterfly promises, just real, actionable steps, and it's like sitting down with your bestie over coffee. With someone who has worked with over 3,000 service providers and made every mistake so you don't have to.


So here's why I wanted to record this episode. We are at the six-month mark, and every single year around this time, I watch incredible women, incredible business owners, get in their heads be- because they look at a made-up number that they set a goal for back in December or January, and they just pulled it out of the air and decided that now because they're not on target for it, they're failing.


They start spiraling. Some of them blow up their entire business, the plan, and even stuff that's actually working. We are not [00:02:00] gonna do any of those things today. We're gonna reflect on what's actually happened. We're gonna reset where you're off and replan the next six months based on real data, real numbers, instead of panic and feelings.


This one is such a practical episode that our Strategist Society members were saying this is the training that they absolutely needed that they didn't even know was missing in their business, and you're getting it today on the podcast.


Okay, so the first thing I need you to understand, as service providers, we do not run our business like coaches, course creators, traditional businesses. We can't work in 12-month chunks. We run 90-day increments, and if you're not doing this, this is how I want you to look at your business moving forward, because that's literally how your client contracts work.


Three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, and if you're not doing that, that's a whole nother episode, which I'm sure we have, that you can go listen to [00:03:00] about contracts. Your revenue moves in cycles, and your planning should too, which means hitting the half year mark is not the time to panic. It's time to do a check-in. It's where we pull over, we look at our dashboard, we decide what's happening, and we move forward. There's no looking back. I was just telling someone, this is so cheesy, but it's so true.


There's a reason why your windshield is so big and your rear view mirror is so small. We don't need to worry about what's already happened, what's behind us. We do need to focus on where we're going. That's where we should be putting 80% of our focus, and this, this checkpoint, is to put the 20% figuring out what did we just do so we know where we need to go


But here's where most people get this wrong. They plan their whole business off of emotion and feelings. I feel like I'm behind. I feel like this isn't working. I feel like everyone else is crushing it, and [00:04:00] I'm only the one stuck. I feel like this just isn't for me. Friend, your feelings are not numbers.


Your feelings are not data. Your numbers are data, and numbers are what tell the true story. So before you decide how you feel or what decisions you're gonna make in your business based off emotion, I want you to write down the numbers. The scoreboard is what it is. It's not feelings. It is the true indicator of your business health.


So pull your revenue from January to June, and if you really want a story, pull last year's January to June too because year over year tells you the truth way better than figuring out, am I 50% of the way to my December goal, right? We wanna look at our growth year over year, and let me tell you why this matters.


, When I sat down and did this in my own business, we were 17% short of where I wanted to be at this point, 17%. [00:05:00] And in that moment, I was like, "Dang, this sucks." Like, I wish we were on target. But then I looked at last year, and this time last year we were 20% short of our goal.


And I know from those numbers that the majority of our revenue happens in the last four months of the year. So suddenly, that 17% doesn't feel like a failure. It doesn't feel like I'm off, like, where I'm supposed to be. It feels like a checkpoint. Like, oh man, actually we're ahead where we were last year at this point.


Now, here's the part I want you to really sit with. Do you know the average business only grows 5 to 10% a year? 5 to 10%. But somehow in the online space, we've decided that If we don't double it or triple it or quadruple it, then we're failing. I had women in Strategist Society, we were doing this training with them a few weeks ago, and they were like, "I'm not on track with my goals.


I'm not on track with my goals." But then we did the year to year [00:06:00] comparison. 36% growth, 62% growth, 94% growth from the same time of last year.


That is freaking amazing. That tells a different story than comparing your current numbers to some made-up number that you made in December. Growth like that, 36, 62, 94, that is incredible. And honestly, even if you're at 5% growth, growth is growth, and that is real numbers that you pulled. And you can see, looking at year after year, year to date from your previous year to date is such a fun measurement of how your business is actually doing So step one is we need to reset.


We write down your projected, your actual, so what you wanted by this time, where you are actually at, and then what's the gap? And before you let yourself feel anything about it, look at your year-over-year growth and give yourself credit for those, that growth. [00:07:00] Or take an opportunity to be like, "Huh, we are down over last year.


What did I do last year that I'm doing differently this year?" There are a whole lot of people who would love to have any s- type of growth that you have probably that you're taking for granted. So that's the first step. Okay, now that we have our numbers on paper, Let me ask you a question that is a little bit of a gut check, and this is where are you sitting in the car? I want you to picture a big old black Jeep Wagoneer SUV. Three rows, big old vehicle. Now you're picturing my vehicle. But when I did this, I want you to imagine where are you sitting in this big SUV.


You can be in the driver's seat of your business. That means you are in control. You're hitting your goals. You're doing your standards of excellence. You're holding your discovery calls. You're doing your gap analysis. You're driving your business forward. Then we have the passenger seat. You're still running things.


You're taking care of clients. You're doing your marketing minutes sometimes, [00:08:00] but it's not really consistent. Things keep coming up, and you're letting your business happen to you instead of you happening to your business. Then there's the back seat. Client work is leading every single decision. Your revenue's a complete rollercoaster, scope creep is winning, and your standards of excellence went out the window months ago.


Or you're in the trunk. You're in the way back back. Hands fully off the wheel. You're just hoping someone lets you out at this point. You're relying on referrals. You're coasting. You're not doing anything consistent. And listen, you're the only one that's gonna know this, so you might as well be honest with yourself, and there is no between seats.


You gotta pick one. Are you driving? Are you passenger? Are you in the back seat, or are you in the trunk? And I want you to be really honest with yourself where the heck you are. And listen, I'm in in every single one of these. And when Bodhi was born, for six months I was in the trunk. I was just hoping something would work, [00:09:00] right?


At the start of this year, I really found myself in the passenger seat. I was getting comfortable. I was working my 25 hours, but I wasn't working on decision, data-driven decisions, so I wasn't driving. I got back in the driver's seat when I did my checkpoint. That's why these are so important. That's why this whole episode was so important for me to record.


You get to decide where you sit. Now, you took inventory. You know where you are now. Now you get to decide where you sit the next six months. Nobody else. No matter what's happening in your life, no matter how hard the season is, you have 100% control over where you sit in the car. Now, you do not have control whether someone takes out their credit card and hires you.


You can't force that, but you have complete control over driving your business forward, doing your marketing minutes, doing your gap analysis, getting back to your standards of excellence. That's all you, friend, and that means if you're in the back seat right now, you [00:10:00] can decide to climb back into the driver's seat So let's talk about that gap.


The gap is just the space between where you wanted to be at the halfway and where you actually are. So if your goal was 100K, you'd wanna be around 50K by now, and if you're at 40, you've got a $10,000 gap. And here's when people panic. They look at the $50,000 gap and think, "I have to figure out the $50,000 gap right now."


No, you don't. You have to figure out how to add it over the next six months. Spread it out. That's $52,000 gap over six months, less than $10,000 a month. A $10,000 gap, that's one client at 3,000, three months. That's nothing. You can absolutely do that because here's what you're forgetting. Your revenue compounds.


When you sign one retainer client, that locks you in for three, six, 12 months, then you sign another one, and it [00:11:00] compounds because you have contracts in place. So you're never solving the whole gap with one move. They're stacking. They're compounding. Now, here's my favorite part, and this is the thing I actually want you to do after this episode.


When you don't know how to fill the gap, you brain dump every single option, and I mean all the crazy ones too. Don't edit it. Don't try to figure out, "But this won't work because of that." We're just brain dumping


Because the thing is, there's never just an option A or an option B. We get locked into this. This is the only offer I have. This is the only way I can make money. This is the only marketing channel. No. It's never A or B. It's never just A, it's never just B. There's always C, D, E, F, G, right? So years ago, I was sitting in a co-working space.


This would've been back in 2019. I was sitting in a co-working space in San Diego, and I was wrapping up a two $250,000 year with just my ad services. That's all I was offering, just my ad services. And I told my coach I was [00:12:00] gonna do two... go from 250,000 to $1 million. He literally laughed at me, out loud. And we sat there and we planned it out in every which way, and the math would not math.


Nothing added up. And then I went home, because I was brainstorming every possible way to bridge the gap. I had an idea to launch the course that teaches ad managers. That is when Conversions For Clients was started in January 2020, and that first year, it created over 800,000 in revenue. That was the entire reason we hit $1.2 million.


The logical math when I was sitting there never mathed, but because I was willing to look at B, C, D, E, F, G and figure out different things, it all came together. It's the same energy when we were flying to London. I'm always trying to figure out the craziest ideas, 'cause I always know there's one. We booked London, our trip to London last year, [00:13:00] and we were gonna get there super early, and we weren't gonna be able to check into our Airbnb until 3:00.


And I was sitting there, going through all the possible things that we could do, and one of the ideas was we could hire a private driver to pick us up and drive us around London for hours until the Airbnb was ready. And there's Austin looking at me like, "I don't even wanna know how much that costs." But because I was thinking of all these ideas, we landed on the obvious one, just book an Airbnb for the night before, and then we'd be able to check in that morning.


So when I'm looking at our 17% gap for the business this year, I brain dumped everything. A retreat, workshops, all of it. And then went, "Oh, duh, we'll run a boot camp," because I know exactly what puts big cash injections into our business. Sometimes the answer isn't something new. A lot of times it's something you're already doing or have.


So ask yourself, "Could I reach out to every [00:14:00] past client and offer a VIP day? Could I send one bigger offer to a client that had worked with me in the past?" I was in a room recently for a mastermind and someone said to me, "Why don't you just send out an offer for $100,000 offer?" Somebody on your list will buy it.


And instead of going, "That's so stinking ridiculous," I went, "You know what? I bet I could offer something to a previous done-with-you build client for 20 or 30,000, and one person would say yes." That's the difference between being open to ideas and receiving them, and shunning ideas that you can't make logical sense of in that moment.


That's the shift. Don't ask, "How do I fill this with what I'm already selling?" Ask, "What are all the ways I could possibly fill this gap?" Be the dreamer first, then do the logistics later. All right, now we reset, and the way we do this is simple. You look at the first half, and you decide what you wanna keep and what you need to trash.


So we need to keep is whatever served [00:15:00] you. The retainer package that's working, the marketing channel that brought the real clients, the habit that really moved the needle. you carry that forward. So go figure out which channel actually made you money, not which one you like being on, which one made you money, and then double down on it, because here's where people go off track and, like, totally blow up their business.


They get bored, or they see someone else doing something shiny, and they abandon what's working. They're getting clients from Facebook groups, so they go, "Maybe I should be doing Instagram. Maybe I should be doing this other thing." Friend, is the grass actually greener, or are you just bored? If it's working, do not stop because you're bored.


Do what works.


Whatever you focus on expands. So stop spreading yourself across six platforms doing all of them halfway. Then we're gonna figure out what we're gonna keep, then we're gonna figure out what we're gonna trash. What drained you and didn't pay off? The marketing that flopped, the client who's completely exhausting you.[00:16:00] 


No, we're not gonna trash clients, but it may be time to replace them and get them off your roster. And sometimes, honestly, the thing you need to trash isn't even in your business. It's a mindset. It's the comparison scrolling. It's the self-doubt. For me this year, it was getting in my head about working out until it spilled into all my other parts of my business.


And one of the biggest things to trash, buying another course to fix a problem that effort would probably fix. And


Now, this is gonna be the tough love part, so put your big girl undies on. Somewhere along the way, we got sold this idea that business is supposed to be easy, and you didn't hear it from me, 'cause I am not an easy button type of person, and I don't sell the rainbows and butterflies and unicorns, right? So listen, business can be life changing.


It can pay you incredibly well working part-time hours, but it is not going to be rainbows and butterflies every single day. There are gonna be parts you do not want to do, but you have to suck it up, [00:17:00] buttercup, and do it anyway. I had someone tell me she didn't wanna do social media, like she didn't wanna do the social media outreach because she was getting ghosted by too many people.


Then she didn't wanna do cold outreach, like cold email or cold calling, because she doesn't like when people do that to her, so she wasn't gonna do that. And I finally said, "What are you willing to do to grow your business?" Because just because you don't like something, doesn't mean it doesn't work. There are hundreds of people in Conversions for Clients who have landed their first, second, third, fourth, fifth client with cold emails, with cold calling.


We've had Ashley Monk on here who grew a half-million-dollar-a-year agency because she was cold calling, right? So don't tell me it doesn't work. Our Predictable Clients students took our Predictable Clients workshop, and they're landing clients faster now than they have been in the last six months.


We have Ashley Cruz who's been on the podcast, who lands premium [00:18:00] clients on Upwork. We had another Strategist Society member just land a $2,500 a month client on Upwork. We have people who are going to local networking events and landing four or $5,000 clients. Heck, in Strategist Society, we have a husband wife duo that are doing $15,000 a month, and all of their clients are local to them.


So you can say all day that you don't like something, but just because you don't like it doesn't mean it doesn't work


I don't wanna do my marketing minutes every day either. I don't wanna pay taxes. I don't wanna do laundry. But you know what? I do them anyway because they move things forward. They get me the results that I'm looking for. So if you're not doing your marketing minutes, you cannot expect to have clients. If you're not looking at your finances every month, you cannot expect your money to grow.


You have to put your big girl undies on and do big business activities. That is marketing and looking at your [00:19:00] numbers. And one last thing on this while I'm on it Being comfortable is the silent business killer. I got comfortable, I got distracted, I watched the dip happen.


You don't notice the momentum slipping until it's already gone. So if you're comfortable right now, that's your warning light. Watch when you get comfortable Okay, so before I close this out, I want you to look at your North Star. Back in December, if you came to our Champagne Year workshop, and if you didn't, that's okay, we'll do another one this December.


But if you were there, you wrote an I will statement. This year, I will blank And here's the problem with January, December, we write these things down, we get hyped, then they hide in a notebook and never to be looked at again. Mine lives on a sticky note on my computer. I see it every single day. Last year, mine was, "I'll travel the world with my kids."


And they have seven different passport stamps their first year of having a [00:20:00] passport, and it's directly tied to my business performing. the North Star drives the work. It's what makes you actually do the things you don't wanna do. So right now, even if you didn't do this in December, I want you to write, "I will..."


and write down what you're gonna accomplish the next six months. And if you already have yours, recommit to it now. And then re-rate yourself, not just on business, but across your life. Where are you at with your health, your family, your finances, your fun, your personal growth? Pick two areas that you need to focus on in the next six months.


Just two, not all of them, and try to move those forward


And then recalibrate. Look at your good, better, best sp- goals. If you've already blown past your goals, congratulations, you're thinking too small, so move the goalpost up. If you've got a gap, keep the good goal, you're gonna hit it, and push the good and better goal even higher. And then the only [00:21:00] homework that matters for you to do is write down three action steps you'll take in the next seven days.


Not a whole marketing plan, three steps. Maybe it's getting back to your standards of excellence. Maybe it's closing your laptop by 3:00 each day. Maybe it's, "I'll post three times a week and have 10 touch points Monday through Friday." Those become your non-negotiables. " Not, "I'm gonna post more."


Be specific so you actually do the dang thing And one of our Strategist Society members says that she has a Post-it Note to keep her reminded, and I just loved it. It said, "Consistency looks like nothing is happening until everything changes." Ah, thank you for sharing that, Mandy. I think it was Mandy. And I was like, that is so beautiful.


"Consistency looks like nothing is happening until everything changes." All right, my friends, if you're sitting here like, "Okay, Brandi, this is exactly what I needed, but I do not wanna do this alone. I know I'm gonna talk myself out of it, or I'm gonna get in my head," this is exactly what Strategist Society is [00:22:00] for. This midyear reset, this is our normal


. It's the room where we look at real numbers with you, tell you where to raise your prices, help you brain dump your gap fill, and we hold you to those three things that you committed to doing. It's built for service providers who are ready to scale to consistent 10, 15, $20,000 months with working less than 25 hours a week.


And so if you already have a business doing three, five, $7,000 per month, head to thestrategistsociety.com. And if you're just getting started and you're like, "Brandi, oh man, I wanna do what these people are doing. I wanna do a mid-year check-in," and but you don't have any clients yet, go to conversionsforclients.com where we'll show you exactly how to start your freelance business so you can track your numbers.


Y'all, I can't wait to hear what you do in the next six months, and I am always cheering you on. So until next week, go out, serve your clients, [00:23:00] scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve