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Making 2015 a Success: 5 Tips for a Mid-Year Turnaround

We all know the tradition of New Year’s resolutions. They’re life-affirming in theory, but most of these vows are made too early in the year, are not sustainable, and get broken almost immediately.

Those of us in business are hopefully a bit more practical, and want to get a sense of how the year is unfolding before we commit to changing course. January, and even February, are often too early in the cycle, and November and December are way too late.

Think about a football coach headed off with his team to the locker room at half time. July is the midway point of the game, the perfect time to catch our breath. It’s our opportunity to go back to the white board, review the game plan, analyze the obstacles being thrown in our way, and figure out how to adjust so we can optimize our performance.

Rather than beating yourself up for not hitting your targets, or conversely engaging in self-congratulations for killing it, the best way to recalibrate is to ask yourself revealing questions about your team and yourself. While going on summer vacation is necessary and can clear your head, if you really want to hit refresh, you need to do a gut check and get real on points like these:

1. Are you and your team as productive as possible? After forming an allergic reaction to Oracle time sheets early in my career, the last thing I wanted to do was track my time as an entrepreneur. But after some encouragement by a trusted business mentor, I signed up for Harvest, an easy-to-use online time management platform. Now I know whether my team is getting as much done as possible.

The results: You’ll feel liberated by being more in control and more efficient.

2. Have you looked over the books lately? If not, it’s time to meet with your accountant or bookkeeper. It’s like getting an exam from a physician. If you’re trying to grow revenue at your company, you need to open the books to an outside pair of eyes. If you wait for tax season, you’ll often miss the bigger picture.

The results: You’ll see fat that needs to be trimmed, as well as new revenue streams that need to be tapped.

3. Have you reviewed the performance of your workers? A year-end review and bonus is fine and dandy, but a pat on the back for accomplishments they’ve made along the way, with a heads-up about areas where they could improve, is the kind of feedback that members of your team are hungry for. Plus, you’ll see the gaps, knowing when to bring new people onboard, and when to say goodbye to others who aren’t performing.

The results: Your staffers will welcome the praise, as well as the criticism. They’ll probably show you that they’re more aware of their strong and weak points than you realized.

4. Have you reached out to people who could send you business? It could be current or future customers, but it might also be longtime vendors, close friends and family members, or former colleagues and clients that recommend your company. It’s time to give them a call. And don’t forget to ask how you can help them out—a mistake made by all too many self-involved business owners.

The results: You’ll share real business intelligence and might even pick up some more referrals.

5. Are you making time for yourself? Make sure you’re seeking out purely pleasurable activities that have zero connection to work. During the middle of last week, I jumped into a lake on a hot and humid day, indulged in a relaxing yoga class, took a six-mile walk with my wife, and spent some time in a batting cage with my teenage son. Make a list of activities that you enjoy outside of work, and check them off one by one. For some, it’s a deep-tissue massage. For others, it’s reading a trashy novel or finally taking that ceramics class.

The results: You’ll realize that you can carve out time just for you.

This is the time of year when we can free ourselves from those clichéd year-end resolutions, like losing weight or getting to the gym. As Albert Ellis, founder of behavioral therapy, said in his classic How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything, you can finally stop “shoulding on yourself” and take time out to maximize your life at work and at play.

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    As February is about to try to convince us that it’s a real month again, New Year's resolutions have probably gone down the drain already. If yours is still on track, great!—I personally loathe you secretly, but good for you! Regardless, everybody knows that breaking a habit is a tough thing to do. However, we operate in a field where we always have to, breaking habits and norms is not something we feel obligated to do once a year. Breaking the new normal is something we do to survive. Clients, customers, and journalists are always all wrapped up in a convoluted spider web of attention. To spare arachnophobes, PR professionals are more like  the staircases at Hogwarts; we steer the attention to where we have to. And just like J.K Rowling did in her books, we need to find new ideas to inject into a world that often feels like its seen enough already. 

We are a small team, we work on the upper west side but all take the subway to get to work. We walk the same streets as everyone else and see the same ads on display and only rarely laugh or pay attention to them-- very much like everyone else. But what we create is not something you will forget so easily. As I write this we are all hard at work, making sure our clients are happy and making sure we pick up the phone with enough poise after swiftly gliding from one desk to another. 

We are not just an agency. We tend to reduce ourselves to single words like 'Team' or 'Agency' and while you will not find a better team or agency out there, we are much more than that. In the heat of the hardest days of work we rush past each other in the office to get that press release out, to send out that one pitch that will make a difference, to write down that perfect new line we just came up with and we never crash into each other because we're not just a team. What we are is best left described by those who have walked in on our few moments of respite when we all try to sit around our table to have lunch together-- but never too far removed from our screens--, or by those who have heard the occasional banter shooting across the room.

Over the course of February, everyone will try to find the time to write a short introductory post about themselves. We all spend a lot of time and energy working to get our clients recognized that we often cannot catch a break, let alone show who we are to everyone else. Getting each one of us to write a short blog post by the end of the coming month is probably impossible because of the time we hardly have already-- but this is Thunder11, and we come armed with coffee.

This blog will not simply be an open channel to our personal information; we have Facebook and Twitter for that, thank you very much. What you can also expect to find in this blog are PR and communications ideas, advice, and reflections from people who, just like you, get up in the morning, got to work, and do the best they can.