608: Why You Shouldn’t Skip Your Mid-Year Review
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How is your year going—really? In this episode, we share why doing a mid-year review is essential for personal and business clarity. We explore common reasons pet business owners avoid this process, from fear and overwhelm to unclear goals, and offer a practical roadmap to reflect, adjust, and move forward with purpose. We also dive into what to track, how to celebrate your progress, and how to simplify or pivot your goals. Mid-year is not just about performance—it’s about direction, clarity, and peace of mind.
Main Topics
Mid-year business reviews
Setting and tracking goals
Common pitfalls and course correction
Simplifying services and processes
Emotional and personal business reflection
Main Takeaway: “Don’t let fear or busyness keep you from taking stock in what you have done.”
We get it—running a pet care business is non-stop. But pausing to reflect on your year so far is not just helpful, it’s necessary. You deserve to know what’s working, what’s draining you, and what’s truly worth continuing. A mid-year review isn’t about shame—it’s about clarity and intention. Celebrate your progress, make intentional adjustments, and move into the second half of the year with renewed purpose.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Mid-year check-in, goal setting, progress tracking, client conversion, business review, personal reflection, goal adjustment, team performance, administrative overhead, client satisfaction, business growth, time management, marketing strategy, business health, action items.
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:00
Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin. We are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you so much for listening today. We would also like to thank pet sitters, associates, dog co launch and our executive producers on Patreon for supporting today's show. We have been podcasting for almost six years, and whether this is your first episode or your 608th episode, thank you for coming along the ride. If you would like to help support us, you can go to pet sitter confession. Pet Sitter, confessional.com/support, to see that ways that you can help out. So we are halfway through the year, and this is a perfect time to pause, to adjust, to reflect on how the past six months have been, how your year is going so far, not only business wise, but personal as well. Most of us start the year with goals, but six months in, it often looks really different from what we had anticipated, from what we dreamed we'd hoped for. Hopefully it's good, but sometimes it's not. Maybe you didn't set any specific measurable goals, but you just had a feeling of where you wanted the year to go. So it doesn't matter whether you've said I want to grow by $100,000 this year, or I want to just take more time off. For me, when you do this assessment, it isn't about beating yourself up. It's about checking in, realigning, if you need to, and refocusing for the next half of the year. We do feel it's important to do a mid year check in. It provides an insight into, are you really far from your goals of where you wanted to be? Are you halfway there? Hopefully, if you've been keeping up with it, but you can also course correct. Maybe you don't want to do that anymore, but we often skip it, and we really shouldn't. We skip the mid year check in. We don't feel like it's necessary, or we kind of give a feel that we're on the right track. But if we don't actually look at the hard numbers, we may miss something entirely. Sometimes we skip it because we're too busy with clients in North America, this is summertime, so we are extremely busy. It's about to be Independence Day, and clients all over the country are traveling, so we're really busy. Oftentimes we don't have the luxury of sitting down for 1520, minutes or even an hour to scope out our goals and how we're doing on them.
Collin 01:56
And this is especially dangerous whenever we become too busy to do any sort of reviews, and we skip these aspects of it, because it's just the in the as important during the busy season, even more important when we're busy to making sure that we are doing these reviews to see how things are going. There's also the fear of seeing how far we've gone from our goals, right? So we we put this off because we don't want to actually look at those numbers. Maybe we started off the year with a big, audacious goal and even even a small goal, whatever that was for you, you set a goal. We set a goal and said, Okay, by the end of the year, we're going to have 200 new clients. It can be scary to then actually put pen to paper, break out the Excel spreadsheets and calculate how many clients you actually have, because that will be that that doesn't lie, right? There's no way of getting around whether you are or are not on track to reach that point. And so out of fear, out of this anxiety of feeling like we're not doing good enough, right, this, a lot of self doubt can come into this where we go, you're right. I didn't think that I'd hit this. I'm not hitting it. It's a self fulfilling prophecy, where all of a sudden, now we we don't want to look at this number, and so we continue to put and put it off. Another
Meghan 03:07
reason we skip it is because we don't know how to structure this check in point. Maybe we haven't been keeping an Excel sheet and keeping track, and now it feels too daunting of okay, I have to go back to January 1, and how many clients contacted me, and what process and what stage are they in, and did they convert to actual clients? Well, that seems like a lot of work, so I'm just not going to do
Collin 03:26
it at all well. And that starts with understanding exactly what we're tracking. How you structure it is related to the goal that you've set is related to what you want the outcome to be. So if it has been total number of new clients, well you track that very differently than if you were to track your total client conversion, because for that, you need a lot more data. You need total number of client contacts, potential client contacts, reaching out to you. So you had to have been tracking all of that information all along, and then whether they became an active client or not. So you could calculate that number of client conversion and so really sitting down and and making sure that you have a good grasp on exactly what information is necessary to understand whether you are meeting, meeting your goal or not. This is why having good parameters around that is so critical. Can you actually measure what you've set out to do? You know, client happiness gets a little tricky, right? You can look at reviews, you can look at feedback surveys, if your software allows that for you, or you can send those out on a quarterly basis or monthly basis to your clients. But trying to find good goals that are allow you to put hard numbers to it makes the step of actually calculating and getting connected with what that goal is, and the progress of the goal a lot easier.
Meghan 04:42
So basically, we're saying, Don't skip the mid year review. Do it because there is value in it. You can see clearly what is working and what's not okay. I've hit my goal or No, I am like, super far off from it. It gives you an opportunity to adjust your approach for the next six months. You. Know whether to keep full steam ahead or to pump the brakes a little bit if you feel burned out, it gives you a chance to celebrate those wins that you may have forgotten about. If you are halfway to your goal, awesome, or maybe you're almost there, it's okay to still throw yourself a little party. It builds that momentum heading into the fall and holiday season, when you see progress in yourself and what you're doing, it builds that momentum heading into the fall season and the holidays coming up,
Collin 05:26
this does take time right, sitting down to do a review and a check in. Takes time from your day, and so you do have to schedule this in. You need to look out a week, two, week, three weeks ahead of time, and block out several hours and really understand what do you need at that day to have on hand in order to do this kind of review again that relates back to what kind of goals that you've set and what progress you were looking to make, making sure that you've pulled the good reports from your software or the tracking Excel spreadsheet that you have on Google or Google Sheets, or whatever that is, it may take you doing some calculations, doing some figuring With a calculator before you even sit down to see how your goals are coming along. So having everything ready and prepped before that time really helps us go a lot smoother. And then blocking out that time, putting your phone on silent, giving you know going to a little quiet area, making sure that you have time to focus on what you're putting together
Meghan 06:19
here, the way you structure a check in is obviously going to depend on the goals that you have. If you had a goal for blogging every week, that's going to be a lot easier to check than if you're talking about number of visits for active clients who book dog walks on Wednesdays. This episode is brought to you by your friends at pet sitters associates, all pet care professionals should have specific pet business insurance. And as a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family members. But who's got your back for over 25 years, pet sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out. They make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at pets@llc.com and as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout. That's petsitllc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. So at this mid year, check in. There are some core questions that you need to ask. The most obvious one is, what goals did I set in January? Was it just one goal I had for the year, or many? Which have I made progress on? How far am I on that progress? Or how far off Am I from the goal that I set? You could also think of it like a percent. What percent are you done? So we're 50% of the way through the year. Are you close to that? And so this really comes down to have you been tracking your goals. You can't measure them. You can't say I am at 50% without having tracked them. So if you have not been tracking you need to start now so you can end the year strong.
Collin 07:40
When you look back at those goals that you set, maybe you've abandoned one. So you have to ask, What have I abandoned? What have I had to let go? And importantly, why? Maybe you had a goal of doing pup cups or meetups or community walks or whatever, one time a month or twice a month, and that disappeared. And you have to ask, okay, why am I no longer doing this? That was important to me at the end of last year, beginning of this year, what happened to it?
Meghan 08:03
Am I not as passionate about it? Did a personal event, life changing event in my life happen where I had to step back? Did I offload this to my team? But then my team left, so I was left scrambling, and I had to do the visit so I didn't have enough time to pick up this thing. Or
Collin 08:18
maybe you had an additional goal of increasing your business revenue and busyness, and so you wanted to be busier, and you got busier, and then you didn't have time to do the other ancillary things that you also wanted to do in your business. So also ask yourself, what is working well right now too often, whenever we start doing mid year reviews or check ins like this, we tend to focus on the negatives, because this, it's a much more powerful feeling to us of what's broken, what's working. Why is everything so terrible and all that stuff genuinely, you have to ask yourself, what is working? And then, why is it working? What have you been working really hard on this past month, this past quarter, this past six months, what results have you gotten from that? And then, why do you think that that has been impactful? Have you changed language in your marketing? Have you changed the structure of your business to have different leadership or different management styles or different SOPs and policies that you put into place? All of these things can and will have an impact on our business, but if we don't intentionally look at them and think about them and how they've changed our business, we will never understand why, and we'll just end up adding more goals that either do or don't get fulfilled, and we'll have no idea why that's actually taken place once you've started with the positive. Yeah, we do need to ask what's not working well, and where am I frustrated with this? It's one thing to know what's broken and what's not working, but are you frustrated by it? Is it causing pain points? Are you becoming burned out or overwhelmed with various aspects of your business? Importantly, a lot of this might not even be related to your goals, yet, you should look at and say, Okay, I wanted that five new dog walking clients a month. I'm not getting that, but I'm actually okay with the business levels in the right. Revenues that I'm still meeting and hitting. So I'm okay with that. What I'm actually frustrated on are the client intakes, and for some reason, they don't understand these questions that I'm asking, and so I'm having to spend a lot more work in defining and answering their questions when they reach out to me for this. And so this is a check in to understand we thought we had a direction at the beginning of the year or end of last year, we've been moving in a particular way. But where do we stand now? Maybe those goals that we set aren't relevant anymore. Maybe we have new things that we need to bring to light and set new goals for the rest of the year. Also
Meghan 10:34
think about what's taking more of your time and energy than it really should. Are you having a lot of questions from your team or from your clients. Maybe more education is needed to be done, or more training. Maybe it's time to hire a virtual assistant or elevate somebody within your team to do more responsibilities for admin work. It could be that you're over complicating things, or maybe multitasking when you shouldn't be. You should be solely focused on this one task, but instead, you're trying to do five things at once, and it's it's it's becoming too much. It's too chaotic. You need to simplify things.
Collin 11:03
This is especially relevant when you we talk about marketing and messaging to new clients to grow our business. It is, is often the case where we try and where we think we have to go for these big, complicated matters, or we find ourselves now doing 14 or 1516, different things to try and grow the business, when, if we were to actually be looking and tracking where things are going instead, if we were just to lean into the top two or three ones that are bringing the most clients, if we just did more of that, oftentimes, what we find is we get more time back in Our day and a less complicated life, because I'm not doing all of these different aspects and just kind of throwing away time and my energy and attention to things that aren't building the business. Check ins are a fantastic way and time to simplify what we're doing in our business. When we're looking at what's frustrating me, where am I spending too much of my time? What's too complicated in my business. Let's strip all that away. Let's boil it back down to basics. Let's reduce the number of things we're trying to do and have those metrics of well, if I can do a new marketing method, the only way that I'm going to actually do it for the long run is if it has a ROI of whatever that is for you, you set that number, whatever that ROI is that you think is beneficial is worth your time, energy and effort. That's what you need to stick to. And if it falls below that, now is the time to get rid of it, so you can refocus and redouble your efforts on places that are actually beneficial to
Meghan 12:34
you. If you have a team, ask how they are doing right now, what do they need from you? And then turn that question on yourself. What do you need from you right now? How are you doing personally? Are you depleted of energy, or you need more motivation or more balance? Whatever that looks like for you. Ask, what do I want my business to look like and feel like by the end of the year? Obviously, again, tracking that we want to feel good in the way that we can feel good is by tracking so that we know how much progress we've made.
Collin 13:01
Importantly here, the tracking is so powerful, because if you wait to do a check in every quarter or only at the mid year, okay, we've talked about this on the podcast about recency bias, you ask yourself, How am I feeling right now? What am I need more of right now? Well, your brain is immediately going to tell you basically how what you need based off of the previous month. Maybe right, maybe the previous day, and going well, this is how I feel right now. Instead keeping a log journaling, keeping data entry on Google Sheets or whatever that is for you, pulling reports from your software or looking at your calendar, all of those things, it gives you an outside perspective, a third party view of what your life is like and how things are going, and then asking yourself, do I want more of this? If I were to 10x this, would I still be happy? Or do I need to start changing things and bringing less complication into my life as well?
Meghan 13:55
When we do this mid year, pause and reflect. We may feel unsatisfied at some of the answers that we get, you may find that you are doing too much, either you need to offload and delegate to somebody else, or you need to step back and not do as much.
Collin 14:09
Or you may find that you initially start out with a narrow range of services, and now you look up and all of a sudden you're offering poop scooting and litter box cleaning out and cat taxi services. And you're also also, also, also, also, also, also doing and because, it's because the the good client asked you to do it one time, and you thought, oh, I'll just put it on my website and I'll be a good thing to have. And now you find you're kind of doing too much and keeping one thing that we've noticed is that each time we add a new service that's that's not just like, Okay, this is a 20 minute dog walk. This is a 30 minute dog walk. This is an hour long dog walk. When you offer something new and different entirely. It increases the administrative overhead and overload that's required to execute that service fully understanding the scope of what's needed, what the client's requests are different pain points that they have, the data and information and questions that you have to have, and how you prepare for that. All of that goes way up because it's completely new and different and out of what you were normally doing. And this burden can go up until it hits kind of this pain point for both you and your team members, if you have them. And so right now, you may find, oh, man, I'm so overstimulated. I'm so overwhelmed. That's because I'm offering 340 different services that if I were to pare these down, I could get a lot more breathing room back in my day.
Meghan 15:18
If you were offering that many services, that would definitely happen to you. Another pitfall could be that you are letting operations drift too far from your core values. Is part of your mission, to always be on time to your clients. But you've felt recently that because you're so busy or because of XYZ, you cannot commit to that promise anymore. You may need to look at that. A question to ask is, are you over committing to services or clients that don't fit well? Is your service area ever expanding? But I feel like the greatest common pitfall that most of us get into is neglecting our systems and processes. Well, I know my contract says this thing, but this client really doesn't want to abide by that. And okay, I'll just bend it for this one client, this one time, and oh, wait, another client three weeks later asked me that, and now I've why even have the policy in there if I'm not abiding by it myself,
Collin 16:08
these little things, they creep up over time. And so yes, the mid year check in, or the quarterly check in, is a time to see how you're doing on your goals. It's also just a time to check in and see how what is the health of your business? What is the health of you? What's the health of your team? And so if I were to ask right now, what are the five clients that you dread every time they sent in a request, could you fill those five? Would you say, actually, Collin, could you make it 15? Because there are 15 people that are 20 people really consider right now, what is a way or how could you if you didn't have them, if you didn't serve them anymore, what kind of peace would you have back in your life, above and beyond, more than just the money, the revenue that you're losing out? What would your piece be like, even if it's something like we ran into this one time where we took on a client, and I grew up with family members that smoked, and so when I walked into the client's home, it wasn't a big deal to me that it smelled like cigarette smoke, but it was a really big deal to all of our team members who did not like going into this home. It really impacted some of their health, but their asthma these things. And so we had to ask, is this client worth keeping on? If all of the team members dread this, and if we do keep them on, how do we adapt to this? How do we serve them so that it doesn't impact people and it's not a drudgery and it's not a pain point in their lives? And so whether it's your team, whether it's your admin, whether it's your life, look at your services. Look at your processes, look at your clients and ask, are they still a good fit? Does this still work for me. And you do have to put aside, I mentioned you do have to put aside the revenue for a minute because your sleep, your peace of mind, your health, your peace are so critical, you cannot put $1 amount on that you can whenever you end up in the hospital because of all of the stress and anxiety that you're putting under your on your life, and you have to go in and get help for the medical system that will certainly put $1 figure
Speaker 1 18:03
on this. But it is truly priceless
Collin 18:07
to be able to sleep and have peace and get a client request and not have your heart up in your throat or your stomach knotted with what you're going to do with it.
Meghan 18:15
Another aspect of systems and processes here is maybe you need to add some in if you feel overworked and burdened, maybe you need to add in some automation, or maybe
Collin 18:23
you have an intake process that you haven't been quite happy about for quite a long time, and you're able to finally sit down and go, I need to fix this. Is it? The order of questions, the information that I'm giving, the buttons that they click, the process that they come in, how they schedule the Meet greed, all of that stuff, if you've been unhappy, if you think it's been impacting the way the clients can understand your business and get in and start using your services. Don't stop neglecting that, right? That's a huge aspect and system and process of your business that changes and sets the tone for the relationship for new clients from before Day Zero. Basically, it's how they learn about you. So find those areas where you have go. Maybe you have that Inkling. You've been looking at some data, you've been getting some feedback from clients, really sit down, and now is the time to make those changes. It
Meghan 19:08
is important to adjust your goals, but make sure that you aren't feeling like you failed. If you say, okay, 50% of the year is done, but I'm only at 23% Ah, I feel bad. I feel guilty that I haven't progressed more. I know I should, but I just have it. Understand that goals evolve. This is part of life and business. Realities change. We have to adapt. Maybe you've had a really hard first half of the year in your personal life, and that's why you didn't meet your goals. It's okay to intentionally let go of some of the goals. Maybe you just want to scrap it all together and say I'm too far off the mark, or I'm not passionate about this anymore, or I just don't want to do this. I thought that this is a road I wanted to go down, but it turns out I don't want to anymore, and that it's okay sometimes
Collin 19:53
it feels good to burn it all down. This is there's actually a known effect that's called the IKEA effect. This. Yiddish furniture company, they studied this of people treasure and cherish things that they built or had to put effort into making and creating more than what they had to spend money on. So if you bought a desk from just a big box store versus you built a desk from Ikea, even though the IKEA desk is generally going to be a lot cheaper and not well made. You will more highly value and prize that desk than one that you spent maybe three times as much money on from another store. This is so powerful in the business of being an entrepreneur and running a small business, we build things from the ground up. We pour our heart, our soul, our mind, our passion, into everything that we do. And so when it comes time to letting things go, it can feel like we failed. It can feel like that we have let ourselves down or other people down. Instead, we have to recognize that this is part of the life cycle of a business and of our personal life of an entrepreneur. It's building things up, seeing where they go, and then letting them go and moving on.
Meghan 21:04
Now, a word from Michelle with dog co launch. Are
Speaker 2 21:07
you attending the dog co Business Summit located in Winston Salem, North Carolina, September 26 to the 28th This is a place for scaling pet care companies to come together, learn from industry leaders and level up your pet care business to the next level. Go to dogco summit.com to learn more and to purchase your ticket before they are all gone.
Meghan 21:31
But it's not all for naught. There are lessons that you can take from even what you're burning down. Focus on those intentional resets. What do you want the rest of the year to look like? Do you think that you're only going to get 75% of the way to your goal? Well, that's still fantastic. It's still 75% more than what you started with in January. It is important to adjust those goals, whether up or down, it doesn't matter. But use this as an opportunity to clarify and simplify again, asking what's working, what's not working. We tracked
Collin 21:59
several different points of data in our own business. We track of revenue, monthly revenue, we track total number of visits done. We track new clients, and client conversion from just, not just who reached out to us, but did they actually become an active client. And when we sit down to do these, we like to do these in small chunks. And I think this is to overcome our fear of just the overwhelm of all of the data that's there. But using the midway point of the year to really sit and look and it helps us go, Okay, we have averaged X number of revenue per month over the last six months. That's a huge stretch of data. Let's look and see what we can expect the rest of the year to look like, the client conversions. We break this down by not just per month, but per quarter as well as per pipeline. So how do they contact us? When did they learn about us? What services are they wanting? What kind of you know, if you put all three of those together, what percentage of them convert versus another arrangement of data for clients, we have to sit down with an open mind and really understand that the data is going to say what it's going to say, and we have to be okay with that.
Meghan 23:05
So we have blabbered on here about how to do a mid year check in, but here's some practical steps. The first one is blocking out one hour away from daily work. We are all busy, but this is important. If you don't block it out, it's probably never going to happen, because you're never just going to sit down at a computer and think, Oh, what do I need to do now? You have to be intentional with your time. Then print out your goals from January. What did you want to accomplish? You can see it in black and white, pen and paper, so you'll be able to know how far you've come. If you are a journaler, you can journal through your core reflection questions that we mentioned earlier in the episode, and then decide on one to three key focus areas for the next six months. Again, Don't over complicate this. Don't try to make 10 goals that you really have to pound the pavement and do. It's just like social media. You don't want to be on all the platforms. Pick one or two that you want to focus on,
Collin 23:51
and these can be collected from whether it's the hard business data and the new client acquisition and the revenue numbers all the way to maybe it's you want to start tracking the number of days off, or the hours off you have every week, and you have a goal of growing that slowly over time, so that by the end of the year, you're taking more time off than you were at the beginning of the year, whatever it is, whatever those pain points are, whatever the information and you are hearing, you need to follow that to make sure that you're making the business that you want.
Meghan 24:19
It's also good to have a buddy that you can communicate these adjusted goals to, so they can keep you accountable for the rest of the year schedule. Follow up, check ins with yourself or with your team, if you have them, or with your buddy. These can be either quarterly or a monthly mini check in so you can track your progress to see how you're doing and if you are on track for the rest of the year. This whole process doesn't have to be perfect. Again, it's the halfway point of the year. We're adjusting. We're being malleable to what we're finding, what the numbers are. It's about getting clarity and setting fresh intentions.
Collin 24:51
Yeah, make sure when you sit down, you you are an open flower. You are open to change. And you know that going into this the direction you're heading most likely will. Not be the same direction that you're heading by the end of it, and that that is okay if, when we if we come in thinking that, well, I'm just going to do this because I just have to do check boxes, and because I listen to a podcast and I'm just supposed to do a mid year check in, and this is just what I need to do to be a business owner. And then I'll just move on. You're we're missing the point of what the check in is supposed to do. It's supposed to change us. It's supposed to change the business in some way, shape or form, and so if we don't come in expecting change, no change will occur on the back end.
Meghan 25:29
Don't let fear or busyness keep you from taking stock in what you have done. You should also be celebrating all that you've accomplished in the past six months. This isn't just doom and gloom of I'm not going to hit my goal by the end of the year. This can also be a celebratory thing. The pet care industry is always evolving. Client expectations are always growing. Your Goals can evolve too. It's okay. You and your clients will benefit when you run your business with clarity and purpose and make sure it's aligned with your mission and vision. You don't have to wait for January 1, 2026 in order to make a positive change, you can start now. We would love to know what those changes are. You can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com, or look us up on Facebook and Instagram. At Pet Sitter confessional, thank you for listening today. We appreciate you taking your most valuable asset, your time, and listening to this. We would also like to thank our Patreon supporters, dog co launch and pet sitters associates, for sponsoring today's episode, we will talk with you next time bye. You.
