How Women Entrepreneurs Pivot Business Goals In Summer

From retreats to workshops, summer is filled with opportunities to explore and revisit business goals.

As it’s the midpoint of the year, the start of Q3 is a perfect time to carry out a business review, review your goals, and redefine your execution for the next half of the year. 

Drawing from the advice of five business women, Her Agenda has compiled a guide on how to make summer a pivotal time for the rest of your business year.

Goals tend to drift as the year progresses. January starts with resolutions and determination, but by June, they might have drifted. Vanessa Ann Miller, a business and mindset coach, highlights the reasons for this in her article on recalibrating business goals mid-year.

Internal Factors: This mainly consists of mental concepts. One issue is the loss of motivation; initial excitement fades once the honeymoon phase ends. This often goes hand-in-hand with feelings of overwhelm and burnout, especially when overly ambitious goals are set without accounting for practical limitations. 

External Factors: Several external factors can also interfere with consistency and goal achievement. Changing priorities due to life events such as career shifts, new business ventures, family responsibilities, or health concerns can naturally redirect focus and energy. Moreover, resource constraints, including limited time, finances, or necessary skills, can also stall progress, especially when unexpected challenges arise and drain valuable energy.

A summer pivot will include highlighting which one of these factors is distracting you from executing your goals and realigning you and your business.

Sheryl Kline, an author and the founder of The Zone Lab, explained in her article why summer is the perfect time for a reset.

“With the slower pace and longer days, it’s an ideal opportunity to step back, reflect, and make meaningful changes,” she wrote 

Reflecting on the past six months helps assess whether the pace you have been running at is sustainable, productive, and whether it is still going in the right direction.

A good way to assess your journey and business trajectory so far is to do some inventory and answer some reflective questions as they pertain to your business. 

Shanna Skidmore, the CEO of an accounting and fractional CFO agency, outlines in an article likes to reflect on the different facets of her business by examining the following things:

“Professionally, I reflect by asking myself a series of key questions: What is going well? What isn’t going well? What lessons have I learned? I then rate how I’m feeling on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning I’m just surviving and 10 meaning I’m thriving. I follow this by asking, Why am I feeling this way? And finally, what would a “10” look like?” she wrote.

Concerning sales, Shanna reflected on how she is tracking toward her sales goal for the year.

“Using my profit and loss statement, I compare our current revenue to our sales goal for the year, then determine how many more products or services I need to sell to hit our goal,” she wrote.

Shanna also assessed conversions. She likes to study their “client tracking document.” This shows where all their referrals are coming from, how many inquiries came in versus how many were booked. 

Similarly, Michelle Knight, a brand strategist, explains in this video how she uses summer to dive deeply into analytics across Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Pinterest, YouTube, and email to understand content and business performance better. She also spends time updating old blog posts and content for SEO improvements, adding freebies, optimizing keywords, and improving sales opportunities.

Summer holds the perfect environment to refresh your business vision. With the air of refreshing and renewing, it is a good time to realign and clarify your vision and maybe find a new sense of purpose. Dawn Andrews, a business strategist and leadership coach, aligns a few ways to do this in an opinion article:

1. Get Out of Your Head: A huge part of developing a vision is creativity. Activities like journaling, meditating, and creating vision boards can help you tap into that.
2. Ask Unusual Questions: “Instead of focusing on metrics, ask questions like, ‘What is my business passionate about?’ and ‘What role do I want my company to play in the world?”, Dawn said.
3. Find Your Words: Once you have a grasp of this vision, put a pen to paper, add words to define what this vision looks like.

Your mindset ties everything together; you don’t want to once again list off a bunch of goals and not take action, and you also don’t want to feel guilty about the first half of the year. You want to focus on the next steps. 

Adopt a growth mindset, challenges are growth opportunities and lessons in disguise. They are best used as learning experiences. Reframing your mindset helps you stay positive and focused enough to authentically recalibrate your business goals.