Can you believe it? We’re already almost halfway through 2025. What has been going well for you and your business and what things would you like to improve?
Towards the beginning of the year we gave you a checklist for ways you could succeed in 2025. Now that we’re almost to the six month mark, let’s help you understand the areas that you succeeded in and what parts of your business, whether you are running a nonprofit or LLC, might need a little bit of help to get you where you want to be by the end of the year. So let’s break it down into these main areas: marketing, revenue, sales, products/services.
Marketing
Social & Email
How many followers did you start off with at the beginning of the year? How many followers do you have across all social media accounts for your business now? How many people were in your email database that you were sending regular emails to at the start of the year? How many people do you currently have in your email database?
Content, Audiences, and Sales
How many pieces of content were you getting out for your business January one versus today? What’s the difference between the total number of people in your website retargeting audiences now versus when you started the year? Have you seen a noticeable bump in sales or revenue? Is that correlated to any improvements that you’ve made on the marketing front?
Website
How have you seen people interacting with your website? Do you have a form that asks people where they heard about you after they purchase your product or service? If so, where are most people finding out about your business and what are you doing to go all in on those platforms?
Sales
Sales Team & Types of Sales
Depending on whether you’re a large organization, a midsize business or even a solo-preneur, your sales team may look very different compared to other companies in your industry. How has your sales team grown or shrunk this year so far? How many new deals is your sales team bringing in and has that number increased in the last several months? Are the kinds of deals your team is bringing in the same, less than, or more valuable than what you’re used to in the past?
Scaling & Traffic Sources
Are you doing most of the sales work yourself? Or have you been able to delegate most of the sales work to members of your team? If you’re currently handling most of the sales work yourself, what could adding a dedicated salesperson do to scale your business? Or if most of your sales are completed online through your website, what could you do to scale the traffic that is bringing you deals on your website with ad campaigns or email?
Product
When you have a great product, everything else in your business is easier. You don’t have to sell as hard, more referrals come into your business, and it’s easier to market because people more quickly see the value in what you’re doing.
Especially after you’ve been in business a couple of years, it can be easy to think that you’ve got it all figured out and that your products are the way they are for a reason. But here are a couple of questions that you can ask your customers after you’ve completed delivery of your product or service so you can improve on the already good work that you do.
Post-Purchase Customer Review Questions
- What did you like the most about our product or service?
- What parts of our process do you think could be improved?
- How is our communication?
- Did you feel like we had you “in the know” at all points in the process?
- Why did you choose us over our competitors?
- Did you look at other competitors before choosing us?
Revenue
And at last we have the granddaddy of them all, the life blood of your business. Here are a couple questions to help you understand the big picture on how your business revenue is performing and help you understand your bottom line so that you can keep scaling even if you’re dealing with a tough market.
Understanding Your Numbers
- What was your monthly revenue on January 1?
- Where is your monthly revenue now?
- What factors have contributed to the increase or decrease in your overall revenue?
- What have you done to resolve those issues or take advantage of those opportunities?
- What percentage of your revenue gets eaten up by staffing, operations, and monthly fixed costs?
- Are there ways that you could decrease your fixed costs so that you could keep more of your monthly revenue?
- What have been the products or services that have contributed positively to your revenue the most this year so far?
- What’s standing in the way of you selling even more of those products or services?
- Do you need an additional staff member to bear down on those opportunities?
- Or are there ways that your existing staff can be even more efficient to accomplish the same or greater numbers?
Summary
Running your business can be a difficult process, especially when you’re almost halfway through the year and you’ve got major projects you’re in the middle of. Sometimes it can be helpful to take a step back and evaluate what you have accomplished so far, what else you need to do, and where you can fill in the gaps so your business can be even more profitable and successful for the rest of 2025!
While this is certainly not an exhaustive list of the questions and topics you want to evaluate your business on, it should give you a great starting point to run through all of the major areas and ask follow up questions that should get your business heading in more of the right direction.
And it’s important during this process to celebrate what you’ve accomplished so far! It’s easy to focus on what we wish could be better, but make sure to pat yourself and your team on the back for the things they’ve done well this year.
For more useful insights on running your business see our business learning center articles, or reach out to us here to find out how MyCorporation can help.