June is the month nobody books me for a strategy session, and I think I know why. We're tired. The first half of the year ate everyone's plans, the kids are about to be home for summer, and the idea of sitting down to "review the business" sounds like one more chore on a list that's already too long.
So most of us skip it. Or we do the soft version: open a fresh notebook, write some hopeful goals for the back half of the year, feel briefly virtuous, and close the laptop. By August nothing has changed because nothing concrete ever got decided. A real mid-year review is not journaling. It's a couple of hours with your actual numbers in front of you, ending with three or four decisions you can name out loud.
Here's the version I run on my own business and walk clients through. It takes a Saturday morning, a coffee, and the willingness to look at things you've been avoiding since March.
Pull five numbers before you think about anything
The mistake is starting with feelings. You'll "feel" like the year is going fine, or feel like you're drowning, and both feelings are usually wrong. Numbers first, opinions second.
Open your accounting software (or your spreadsheet, no judgment) and write down five things for January through May:
- Total revenue collected, not invoiced. Cash that actually landed.
- Your three biggest expenses, in order. For most solo founders it's some combination of contractors, software, and ad spend.
- Revenue by client or product line, ranked. You want to see who and what is carrying you.
- Average days from invoice sent to payment received. If you've never measured this, brace yourself.
- The number of hours you worked in a typical week, honestly counted.
That last one isn't a vanity metric. Divide your collected revenue by your worked hours and you get your real hourly rate, the one that includes all the unpaid admin and the calls that went nowhere. A coach I know charges $4,000 for a package and was thrilled with it until she ran this division and found she was netting about $26 an hour. The package wasn't the problem. The eleven follow-up emails and the "quick" Voxer access she'd thrown in for free were.
The 80/20 cut nobody wants to make
Now rank that client-or-product list and look at the bottom third. This is the uncomfortable part of the morning.
For service businesses, the pattern is almost embarrassingly consistent: a small set of clients generates most of your income, and a different small set generates most of your stress. They are rarely the same people. The client paying you the least is very often the one emailing at 9pm and asking for "one tiny tweak" that takes four hours.
You don't have to fire anyone this morning. But you do have to name them. Write down the two clients or two offers you'd quietly drop if you had a full pipeline. Then write down what it would take to have that full pipeline by September, because that's your actual H2 sales target, not some round number you picked because it sounds nice.
My honest recommendation: pick the single worst-fit client and give them a graceful 30-day exit before summer ends. Not because they're bad people. Because the calendar space they free up is the only raw material you have to grow into. You cannot add a better client to a week that's already full.
Look at what you said you'd do in January
Go find whatever you wrote down in January. The goals doc, the Notion page, the back of the envelope. Most founders haven't looked at theirs since week three.
Read it with a cold eye and sort every item into three buckets. Done. Quietly abandoned. Still relevant but stuck. The "abandoned" pile is the interesting one. Half of those goals you dropped on purpose because the business told you they were wrong, and that's good judgment, not failure. The other half you dropped because they were genuinely hard and you flinched. Only you know which is which.
This works cleanly for most goals. The exception is anything tied to a launch or a hire you were waiting on, where "stuck" might just mean "not time yet," and forcing it in June would be a mistake. Don't punish yourself for good timing.
Reset the second half without a 40-page plan
Here's where the journaling crowd and the spreadsheet crowd both go wrong. One group writes feelings, the other builds a 40-tab model. Neither ships.
What you want out of this morning is small and boring: three goals for July through December, each attached to one number and one weekly action. Not ten. Three.
- A revenue goal with a weekly number behind it. "$60k in H2" means roughly $2,300 a week collected, which tells you immediately whether your current pipeline is anywhere close.
- One offer or process to fix, with a date. Maybe it's finally writing the onboarding doc you redo from memory every single time.
- One thing to stop doing. The free Voxer access. The discovery calls with people who can't afford you. The newsletter you dread.
Write those on one page. A real index card works better than any app here, because you'll actually see it. The whole point of a mid-year review is that the second half of the year looks different from the first, and "different" only happens when a decision survives contact with your Tuesday morning.
The two questions to end on
Before you close the laptop, sit with two questions that the numbers can't answer for you.
First: what was true in January that isn't true now? Maybe a service you launched as a side experiment is quietly your best seller. Maybe a market you were chasing went cold. Businesses drift, and the founders who do well are the ones who notice the drift in June instead of next January.
Second, and this is the one people rush past: are you building the business you actually want, or the one you assumed you should? A six-figure agency you hate running is not a success, it's a well-paid trap. Mid-year is the cheapest possible moment to change course, far cheaper than December when you've already committed to next year's contracts and told everyone your plans.
You don't need a retreat or a $3,000 mastermind to do any of this. You need two hours, your real numbers, and the nerve to act on what they tell you. Block the time this weekend. Coffee helps.