We are halfway through the year, and holy bananas, where the heck did it go?
If your stomach just dropped because you are nowhere near the goal you scribbled down back in December, I need you to stay with me. You do not toss out the plan you made. You check it.
This is the exact mid-year reset 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 going to walk through actionable steps you can take right now to make the second half of the year your most successful yet.
I’m Brandi Mowles, and I help one-on-one service providers build a business that pays you big girl money and still fits in 25 hours or less a week. No hustle culture, no rainbows and butterfly promises. I’ve worked with over 3,000 service providers and made every mistake so you don’t have to.
Here’s why this matters. Every year around this time, I watch incredible business owners get in their heads over a made-up number they pulled out of the air in December. They decide they’re failing, they start spiraling, and some of them blow up the stuff that’s actually working.
We’re not doing that today. We’re going to reflect on what actually happened, reset where you’re off, and replan the next six months based on real data instead of panic and feelings.
Why Service Providers Need a Mid-Year Reset, Not a 12-Month Plan
Here’s the first thing you need to understand. As service providers, we do not run our businesses like coaches, course creators, or traditional businesses. We run in 90-day increments.
That’s literally how your client contracts work. Three months, six months, nine months, twelve months. 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 for a check-in. We pull over, look at the dashboard, decide what’s happening, and move forward.
This is cheesy, but it’s so true. There’s a reason your windshield is huge and your rearview mirror is tiny. We don’t need to obsess over what’s already behind us. We need to focus on where we’re going. That’s where 80% of your focus belongs. This checkpoint is the other 20%.
Your Feelings Are Not Data
Here’s where most people get it wrong. They plan their whole business on emotion.
“I feel like I’m behind. I feel like this isn’t working. I feel like everyone else is crushing it and I’m the only one stuck.”
Friend, your feelings are not numbers. Your feelings are not data. Your numbers are data, and numbers tell the true story. So before you decide how you feel or what you’re going to do next, write down the numbers. The scoreboard is the true indicator of your business’s health, not your mood on a Tuesday.
Step One: Pull Your Numbers and Reset With Year-Over-Year Growth
Pull your revenue from January to June. And if you really want the full story, pull last year’s January to June too. Year-over-year growth tells you the truth way better than asking whether you’re 50% of the way to a December goal.
When I did this in my own business, we were 17% short of where I wanted to be. In that moment, I was like, dang, this sucks.
But then I looked at last year. This time last year, we were 20% short of our goal, and I know the majority of our revenue happens in the last four months. Suddenly, that 17% didn’t feel like a failure. It felt like a checkpoint. We were actually ahead of where we were last year.
The Growth Number Nobody Talks About
Now sit with this. The average business only grows 5 to 10% a year. Somehow, in the online space, we decided that if we’re not doubling, tripling, or quadrupling, we’re failing.
I had women in Strategist Society swearing, “I’m not on track, I’m not on track.” Then we did the year-over-year comparison. 36% growth. 62% growth. 94% growth from the same time last year.
That is freaking amazing. That tells a completely different story than comparing yourself to a made-up number from December. And even if you’re at 5% growth, growth is growth, and that’s real data you pulled.
Here’s your reset, step one:
- Write down your projected number (what you wanted by now)
- Write down your actual number (where you really are)
- Identify the gap between them
- Before you feel anything about it, look at your year-over-year growth and give yourself credit for it
There are a whole lot of people who would love to have the growth you might be taking for granted. Or use it as a gut check and ask yourself: “Huh, we’re down over last year. What did I do last year that I’m doing differently now?”
Step Two: Be Honest About Where You’re Sitting in the Car
Now that your numbers are on paper, let me ask you a gut-check question.
Picture a big black SUV, three rows, the whole thing. Where are you sitting in your business right now?
- Driver’s seat: You’re in control. You’re hitting your goals, holding your discovery calls, doing your gap analysis, driving your business forward.
- Passenger seat: You’re still running things and taking care of clients, but it’s not consistent. Stuff keeps coming up, and you’re letting your business happen to you instead of you happening to your business.
- Back seat: Client work is leading every decision. Your revenue is a rollercoaster, scope creep is winning, and your standards of excellence left months ago.
- The trunk: Hands fully off the wheel. You’re coasting on referrals, just hoping someone lets you out.
And listen, there’s no in-between seat. You have to pick one. Nobody else will see your answer, so be brutally honest about where you are.
I’ve been in every single one of these. When my son Bodhi was born, I was in the trunk for six months, just hoping something would work. At the start of this year, I was in the passenger seat, working my 25 hours, but not making data-driven decisions. I got back in the driver’s seat when I did my checkpoint. That’s why this matters so much.
You get to decide where you sit for the next six months. No matter how hard the season is, you have 100% control over where you sit in that car.
You don’t control whether someone pulls out their credit card and hires you. But you have complete control over doing your marketing minutes, your gap analysis, and getting back to your standards of excellence. If you’re in the back seat right now, you can decide to climb into the driver’s seat.
Step Three: Close the Gap (It’s Smaller Than You Think)
The gap is just the space between where you wanted to be at the halfway mark and where you actually are.
If your goal was $100K, you’d want to be around $50K by now. If you’re at $40K, you have a $10,000 gap. Here’s where people panic. They look at the gap and think they have to solve all of it right now.
No, you don’t. You have to add it over the next six months.
Spread it out. A $52,000 gap over six months is less than $10,000 a month. A $10,000 gap is one client at $3,000 for three months. That’s nothing. You can absolutely do that.
And here’s what you’re forgetting. Your revenue compounds. When you sign one retainer client, that locks you in for three, six, or twelve months. Then you sign another, and it stacks. You’re never closing the whole gap with one move. They compound.
Brain Dump Every Possible Option, Yes the Crazy Ones Too
This is my favorite part, and it’s the thing I actually want you to do after you finish reading.
When you don’t know how to fill the gap, brain dump every single option, and I mean all the crazy ones too. Don’t edit. Don’t talk yourself out of anything. We’re just dumping.
Because here’s the thing. There’s never just an option A or B. We get locked into “this is the only offer I have, this is the only way I can make money, this is the only marketing channel.” No. There’s always C, D, E, F, G.
Back in 2019, I was sitting in a co-working space in San Diego, wrapping up a $250,000 year with just my ad services. I told my coach I was going from $250,000 to $1 million. He literally laughed out loud. We planned it every which way, and the math would not math.
Then I went home and kept brainstorming, and I had an idea to launch a course that teaches ad managers. That’s when Conversions for Clients 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 never mathed. But because I was willing to look at B, C, D, E, F, and G, it all came together.
It’s the same energy as when we booked our trip to London last year and couldn’t check into our Airbnb until 3:00. I went through every option, including hiring a private driver to drive us around for hours. (Austin was looking at me like he didn’t even want to know the cost.) But because I dreamed up everything, we landed on the obvious answer: just book an Airbnb for the night before.
So when I looked at our 17% gap this year, I brain-dumped everything. A retreat. Workshops. All of it. Then I 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 already have.
Ask yourself:
- Could I reach out to every past client and offer a VIP day?
- Could I send one bigger offer to a client who worked with me before?
I was in a mastermind recently and someone said, “Why don’t you send out a $100,000 offer? Somebody on your list will buy it.” Instead of going “that’s so stinking ridiculous,” I went, you know what, I bet I could offer a previous done-with-you build client something for $20,000 or $30,000 and one person would say yes.
That’s the difference between being open to ideas and shunning the ones you can’t make logical sense of in the moment. Be the dreamer first. Do the logistics later.
Step Four: Decide What to Keep and What to Trash
Now we reset, and the way we do it is simple. Look at the first half and decide what to keep and what to trash.
Keep whatever served you. The retainer package that’s working. The marketing channel that brought real clients. The habit that moved the needle. Figure out which channel actually made you money, not which one you like being on, and double down on it.
Here’s where people blow up their business. They get bored, or they see someone doing something shiny, and they abandon what’s working. They’re landing clients from Facebook groups, so they think, “maybe I should do Instagram, maybe I should do 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 trash what drained you and didn’t pay off. The marketing that flopped. We’re not trashing clients, but it might be time to replace the one who exhausts you. And sometimes the thing you need to trash isn’t even in your business. It’s a mindset. The comparison scrolling. The self-doubt. The habit of buying another course to fix a problem that effort would probably fix.
Real Talk: Business Isn’t Supposed to Be Easy, and That’s Okay
Put your big girl undies on, because this is the tough love part.
Somewhere along the way, we got sold the idea that business is supposed to be easy. You did not hear that from me, because I’m not an easy-button person and I don’t sell the rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns.
Business can be life-changing. It can pay you incredibly well on part-time hours. But it’s not going to be rainbows and butterflies every single day. There are going to be parts you don’t want to do, and you have to do them anyway.
I had someone tell me she didn’t want to do social media outreach because she was getting ghosted, and she didn’t want to do cold email or cold calling because she doesn’t like when people do that to her. So I finally asked, “What are you willing to do to grow your business?”
Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Look at the proof:
- Hundreds of people in Conversions for Clients have landed their first through fifth clients with cold email and cold calling.
- Ashley Monk grew a half-million-dollar-a-year agency cold calling.
- Ashley Kruse lands premium clients on Upwork, and another Strategist Society member just landed a $2,500-a-month Upwork client.
- People are going to local networking events and landing $4,000 and $5,000 clients.
- We have a husband-wife duo in Strategist Society doing $15,000 a month, all from clients local to them.
So you can say all day that you don’t like something. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
I don’t want to do my marketing minutes every day either. I do them anyway because they move things forward. If you’re not doing your marketing minutes, you cannot expect clients. If you’re not looking at your finances every month, you cannot expect your money to grow.
And one more thing. Being comfortable is the silent business killer. I got comfortable, I got distracted, and 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.
Step Five: Reconnect to Your North Star and Recalibrate
Before you close this out, look at your North Star.
Back in December, if you came to our Champagne Year workshop, you wrote an “I will” statement. This year, I will blank. Here’s the problem with December goals. We write them, we get hyped, then they hide in a notebook forever. Mine lives on a sticky note on my computer. I see it every day. Last year mine was “I will travel the world with my kids,” and they have seven passport stamps in their first year of having a passport, directly tied to my business performing. The North Star drives the work. It’s what makes you do the things you don’t want to do.
So right now, even if you skipped December, write your “I will” statement for the next six months. If you already have one, recommit to it.
Then re-rate yourself across your whole life, not just business. Where are you with your health, your family, your finances, your fun, your personal growth? Pick two areas to focus on for the next six months. Just two, not all of them.
Then recalibrate your good, better, best goals:
- If you already blew past your goals, congratulations, you’re thinking too small. Move the goalpost up.
- If you have a gap, keep the good goal because you’re going to hit it, and push the better and best goals even higher.
And the only homework that matters: 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. Maybe it’s “I’ll post three times a week with 10 touch points Monday through Friday.” Those become your non-negotiables. Be specific so you actually do the dang thing.
One of our Strategist Society members, Mandy, has a Post-it note that says: “Consistency looks like nothing is happening until everything changes.” I love that so much. Sit with it.
You Have 100% Control Over the Next Six Months
Here’s what I need you to walk away with. You are not behind. You’re at a checkpoint. The scoreboard is just data, the gap is smaller than your panic is telling you, and you get to decide which seat you’re sitting in for the rest of the year.
So pull your numbers, brain dump your options, pick your two focus areas, and write your three steps. Then go do the dang thing.
If you’re sitting here thinking, “Brandi, this is exactly what I needed, but I don’t want to do it alone because I’ll talk myself out of it,” 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. It’s built for service providers ready to scale to consistent $10K, $15K, and $20K months while working less than 25 hours a week. If you’re already doing $3K to $7K months, head to thestrategistsociety.com.
And if you’re just getting started and don’t have clients yet, go to conversionsforclients.com, where we’ll show you exactly how to start your freelance business so you actually have numbers to track in the first place.
This post was inspired by an episode of the Serve Scale Soar podcast. Now go out, serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve.
** This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you if you use one of the links to purchase. This helps keep the podcast going and I only share products I have used, tested, and love.”
Listen on Your Favorite Podcast Platform
Follow & Review on Apple Podcasts
Are you following my podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today so you don’t miss any future episodes! I already have so many amazing guests and topics lined up, I would hate for you to miss a single one! Click here to follow on Apple Podcasts
Could I ask a big favor? If you are loving the podcast, I would LOVE it if you would leave me a review on Apple Podcasts. I read each and every review. Plus, you get to pay it forward because it will allow other service providers like you to find the podcast! Wondering how to leave a review? Click here to review, then select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”. So easy and so appreciated!
Meet Brandi
Brandi Mowles is the host of the Serve Scale Soar® podcast which is a podcast dedicated to helping service-based entrepreneurs scale their online business to five-figure months so they can soar into six-figure years. Brandi is a wife, mom and in less than one year, created a six-figure business. Now she is spilling all her secrets so you can too.
