Bonus Episode! Ep. 185 - A Practical Q2 Review For Leaders Who Know that Tracking the Numbers Matters

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Ep. 174 - Q1 Is Done! Three Systems That Will Allow You To Review, Analyze & Plan With Certainty

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Show Notes:

Your numbers are talking. The question is whether you’re giving yourself enough space to hear them before the year gets away from you. We’re doing our Q2 wrap-up and walking through the simple quarterly review rhythm we use to reflect, reset, and make smarter calls as leaders.

We share how our week-in-reviews work to surface patterns like attendance issues, recurring obstacles, and the wins that are easy to forget once they become “normal.” Then we dig into business vitals and KPIs that actually move the needle: enrollment stats, payroll stats, and P&L review. We talk about comparing year over year, spotting what’s “out of range,” and asking the one question that keeps the whole process honest: what’s the reason behind any changes?

You’ll also hear a real-time story from the trenches: we noticed an enrollment drop, assumed it might be the economy, then pulled the data by location and program and found the truth. The dip was concentrated in beginner classes and traced back to stopping consistent Facebook advertising. That’s the payoff of quarterly planning: you can execute targeted action instead of guessing.

If you run a gym, a youth sports program, or any service business built on the school-year cycle, this mid-year check-in is critical. Subscribe for more practical leadership systems!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to Learning to Thrive. I'm Courtney and I'm Michaela.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

And we are here with your Q2 wrap-up, which also it's just crazy that it's the end of Q2. Yeah. Michaela had a baby in Q2.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

A whole human. Wild. So everyone else is taking second place in their accomplishments with Q2. But we're sure you've had some. And I'm sure there were some struggles in Q2. But I love the I love the end of a quarter because it is a natural time to sit and reflect. And I think in the busyness of an industry where you're serving so many people, there's so much energy output. There's so much that we do emotionally, you know, regulating and preparing and all of that kind of stuff, to have the reminder at the end of June that, hey, the first half of the year is over. You did it. Right? We did some things. And also, where are you in your goals for the entire year? Where are you compared to last year at this time? Like it's just a really nice uh time to pause, spend a couple of hours thinking through, going through, reflecting, planning, tweaking, making, you know, new decisions, like that kind of thing. Um, and I really love it. Yeah. Personal and professional, honestly. Yeah. Because it's a good time to check in on both the personal and the professional. Okay. So how so let's let's just do a recap, a refresher of when we do our reviews, our our quarter reviews, what are we looking at, right? We're looking at weekend reviews, right? Making sure that A, look, I guess the question is, have you been, have you been tracking your people? Are you doing weekend reviews? Are your people doing weekend reviews? If not, and it's been sporadic for us, the second Q Q1 was great with weekend reviews. Q2 has been more sporadic depending on the person. Some of some of our people are great. And our weekend review, just to recap, is the one pager that all of our leaders fill. Actually, everybody, everybody figured fills it out, I think, in the company. Everyone is supposed to. Is supposed to. It's probably it depends on, yeah, depends on the person. But um, and it basically just goes back through like how was your what was your attendance this week? You know, what was how many times were you, you know, were was there any you know lateness issues? Any were you on time? Did you do your time card? It's there's a couple things that are just check-in status things so that people like if you're chronically late, you hopefully will pick it up in those stats versus us having to say something, right? Like self-correction there. Um, what was the best thing you did this week? What was uh your biggest obstacle this week? Who did you meet with? Things like that. That we'll link it in the show notes. But all of our leaders definitely do that. And then our entire company is supposed to do it when when they and bring it for when they meet with their leader. I would need to do a check and see if that's happening or not, to be honest. We don't I don't track those ones.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

No, I don't think they're getting tracked the way you track the leader ones. Right. Um I think they are getting done, just not super consistent.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Yeah. Hopefully framing the framing the uh 10 tens and stuff. And then we have business vitals, which is your enrollment stats, your payroll stats, and then your PL. Where where do you stand in each of those places? And then looking at our calendar and auditing our calendars and just saying, okay, what did we love that we did this quarter? What where did we find ourselves bored or saying, why did I sign myself up for this? Or, you know, so that we can be spending our time both personally and professionally. And again, that it's not just that we're planning our work days, we're planning our lives, right? You spend a lot of time at work. So you want to make sure that you know our life is being planned well. So that's a recap on the Q4 check-in. We've done several of them. So if you wanted to go back to other episodes, uh, you would probably pick up little pieces here and there of what you know what's important and the different things that you can do in these, these Q, these quarter check-ins. But really, what you want to do is set aside a time to review. And so looking at the weekend reviews, what has your team struggled with this quarter? What have they really succeeded with? Make a list of the successes, share it with them, right? Because a lot of times we don't track our successes as closely, or so many weeks go by that you forget that eight weeks ago you had a big project that you were planning and that was your goal. And now it's you're doing it every day and you didn't even realize like that. It's just how you do business now. Um, business vitals, looking at your enrollment compared to last year, compared to last month. Uh, we have it broken down by program now. That that is new for us in the last year. Um, our program directors put in those stats, and so now we can see by program, by class, by location, or not by class, by location. Um PL, I like to export it over last year's numbers and then highlight on the PL where I see big changes, whether it's, oh, we didn't spend this much this year, why? What's the why? Um, or yeah, this expense went up. What's the why behind that? Right. And if you do that every quarter or every month, then you really have a good idea of where the money is going in your business and why. And then um for our payroll stats, compared to this month last year, how much are we are we in the ballpark based on our enrollment? So if our enrollment is about the same, the hours worked should be the same. And if they're not, why are they not? So asking yourself what's normal for us, anything that's out of the normal range, why? And getting answers on that.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Right. And that business vitals, that's probably where you're gonna do the majority of your goal setting for the next two quarters as well.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Yeah, you're gonna look at your annual goals, right? And you're gonna say, what where am I making progress where I'm not making progress? And then you're gonna say, okay, what based on because you know, based on your annual goals, hopefully we did annual goals. If you didn't do annual goals, you still got time. What do you want to accomplish by December 31st, 2026? Right? Write a couple out. And then to your point, how? What is gonna need to happen in this these next two quarters in order to get there? So if your goal was to increase revenue by 10%, and right now you're sitting at, you know, 8% increase in revenue, what do you need to do to bump that up a little bit? Right? What do you what programs can you add? What can you clear some wait lists? Can you add a new event? Can you, you know, we we added birthday parties. We doubled our birthday parties last year in September. Um and so, and that was a way, you know, like that was one of our goals was to expand our birthday parties because um we wanted to be able to reach more people and it was an increase in revenue. And so that has come to fruition. So we got to look at that category and say, are we doing well with that still? Do we need to cut back? Do we need, is there room to add? Um, you know, what do we want to do? So I want to share though a lot of this sounds like, okay, yeah, that's a lot, like that's a to-do list, right? It's it's very boring, it's very cut and dry, it's very factual. Here's how, though, it has helped us just recently, right? So um for our enrollment, we we track the enrollment month to month, and then at the quarter time, is it when I look back at what was the previous year and that kind of thing? Well, at the Q1 point, we were pretty much on par, right? So that's great. But in April, the end of April in May, I noticed we had a big drop for April to May, right? So it's like, okay, what's happening there? We looked at our reviews from our drop forms, it didn't have any more customer issues than normal. Okay. Well, looking at our stats, I was like, well, our Arnold location, that's our smaller location, is actually the enrollment actually there is down like probably about 50 kids over last year, and it had been down. I was looking mostly at total enrollment when I was looking back year to year. I was, and so there had been a gain in our second location and a loss, a consistent loss of 50 in our smaller location that had kind of been the gain. And that came to that came out in April when we had the bigger drop. And so I was like, oh no.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Yeah, I remember you were like, what do you think? What should we do? Like, what do you think's going on?

SPEAKER_00 8:35

What's happening? Well, you pulled the data. I pulled the data. And what was happening was our beginner classes, so our gal our intermediate gap numbers, our galaxies, our advanced classes, our ninja classes were all fairly consistent. But the beginner classes, that's where the numbers had dropped. And what correlated with that is we had stopped a Facebook ad. We had been, we had had a consistent Facebook ad running just kind of in the background the year before, right? So I think we stopped it in May, maybe June of last year. And the two years prior to that, we had had we had had it rolling. And so we were not any longer doing any consistent Facebook advertising. And what that told me when I looked at the numbers, because I looked, I went back to September, and it had been, you know, about 50 down since September, is that that Facebook advertising is critical to bringing in new athletes, right? Well, how does that help me? That tells me what needs to be done to correct the problem, right? So it's a small problem right now, easy, easy to easy to fix. Got on an online marketing class because I really didn't want to go back to using a company to do the advertising. Got a course on how to run your own Facebook ads, took the course, launched the first ad that they recommended, plus 50 by four weeks into running the ad. Wow. Boom. There you go. Right? Now, had I let that go, like if I did not know my numbers, if I didn't know that it was the beginner level, right? I only had a gross number, I didn't know it was the beginner level that was actually the one that would had dipped so significantly, I wouldn't know that it was new customers, right? And so my energy would have gone to all customers. And really where my energy needed to go was we just gotta get, we just we obviously need that brand awareness out there that Facebook provides. Thank you, Facebook meta. Whatever. There's a lot of things that I like about you, and there's some that I don't, but I do appreciate the ease of getting in front of people's faces. Um yeah, we just ran a little ad. And then the the course teaches you how to build out the full campaign, which is great. I'm gonna learn how to do that over the summer and continue so that when we go into our fall enrollment, there's plenty of Thrive showing up on people's Facebook feeds. And in theory, by the time we get to Q3, we will have course corrected and also then maybe added. I I would love to add 15%, right? That's the bit. Yeah, correct and surpass. So I share that story with you, and it's a real-time story, which you know it we don't know what the outcome's gonna be yet, but because it shows that that work of putting to of collecting all that data along the way made for a real impact in the business. And that is data that's collected by our program directors and put in. So our program directors are directly helping the health of the business because what they did, which might seem insignificant to them, I'm just putting numbers in here, or tedious even. No, you're helping the business to stay on track. And now I need to go back to them and give them the props for that small task, right? Just like we do our athletes when they do something, explain the why, right? And say, hey, because of the work that you did, and we had this data, we made a split second course correction. Four weeks later, we were able to make things happen. And we also have learned something about ourselves and our business and the our community. They like our us on Facebook. Um, so yeah, that's a little story from the trenches there.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Yeah. Well, I just I remember we sat down to I think podcast last month. Yeah. And it was before you had dove into the data, and you you were like, Yeah, we're our enrollment's down. This is so weird. I don't know why. I and then we were kind of brainstorming some ideas of what Oh, it my first thing was it's the economy. Right, right. I was like, You think it's the economy? Like you think it's finally like And then we were brainstorming things like, okay, what if we tried this or what if we tried that? But again, they were, like you said, kind of addressing the whole population, which wasn't actually where the issue was. Yeah. So yeah, you being able to go in, pull those numbers, look at it, and then also having, you know, the knowledge of, okay, well, we haven't been running the Facebook ad. Yeah. A little like cause and effect right there, uh, allows you to make that course correction super quickly.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Yeah. But not unless you have the data. And not unless you have the the points in built into your year to stop and reflect. So I think my my point in sharing that story is sometimes that stop and reflect literally feels like a waste of time. Or like, is this really the most important thing I'm doing? Because I'm actually reviewing old data that has already happened. So I can't influence that data. And I share that because it actually is probably one of the most important things you can do because it informs your future actions.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

And when there is an issue, you have something to go back for.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Yeah. Cause I think especially when things are going well.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Yeah, when things are going well, it's real easy to not do that. And and that's the thing. Things had been going well in our overall enrollment number. So that's how I missed that 50 down in Arnold over last year, right? Because we had just started keeping these um by program stats starting in September. So we didn't have by program stats for the year before. So there was no year-to-year comparison. So it was just the overall number. And yeah, it made all the difference. So there you go. Your business vitals, much like your health, right? We go to our yearly checkup. Nothing's wrong, nothing's wrong, nothing's wrong. And then the year that something's wrong, you know it's off your baseline. If you didn't have your baseline and you hadn't been going while you were healthy, you would never know, you know, what to isolate when you're when you're not healthy. So um similar to that. And then we want to just say at this half the half point of the year, you have enough data in what's been going on in your business to know how the year is going. And you still have enough time to change it, right? And that time's gonna get shorter and shorter and shorter. So at this point, you have plenty of time to work towards your annual goals, change your annual goals if you've decided you don't want them, you know, like you're like, that's actually not relevant to me at all anymore. Um, but go ahead and be looking at what your annual goals are, make yourself some monthly goals so that you can be working towards that annual goal. And what, you know, what do you need to see in the second half of the year in order to meet those goals? And who do you need to empower to help meet those goals? Do you need to do more for your coaches? Do you need to do more for your customers? Do you need like, where can you level up a little bit and make um a big impact so that you're going towards that, those goals and the goals of your team and being really mindful about your actions for the second half of the year and not running yourself in circles come September when you're like, oh gosh, there's only four months left, or November or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Yeah, or thinking you're on the right track and then you get to Q3 and you're like, oh shoot. Yeah. I wish back in Q2 we would have done X, Y, and Z.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Yeah. Do it now. Yeah. And I would say for at least for the gymnastics, any industry, any sports industry that runs on the school year, this is probably your most critical check-in. Right? Because you are setting in motion things for your the remainder of like for next year's school year, which means that the actions that you take now and the course corrections you make right now are actually gonna have an impact of about nine months from September to next June.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

And it doesn't feel like it because we're just getting into summer.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Yeah. Which should be a coasting time. And it can be, but it also needs to be some time. Planning time. Yeah, planning time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

So a lot of behind the scenes work goes on during the summer, I think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

With the planning, the goal setting, the adjustments and yeah, but I feel like as a I feel like as a leader, it is actually a pretty good time because it has that chill vibe, I feel like you can step away a little bit more. Right? You can you can take a weekend at the beach and spend your Friday as your goal setting day, right? So you get out of town, you get away from everything, you kind of use that, and you can still then have, you know, two days to vacation or whatever. But like you there, I think there there it lends itself to more, let me step away and think. Let me step away and plan. Let me pull these three people and step away for two hours, right? Because our schedules are different. The enrollment, you know, does dip in the summers, so it's you know, it can be a looser time of year so that you can take advantage of that and step away. And people are in a pretty good mood. So, like the dark days of December and and January like aren't here. It's everybody's a little more hopeful in July. So, can you capitalize on that hope and use it to get you through the winter? Make yourself some good decisions in planning for the winter so that you know you do have success there and don't fall into the slump. Yeah. All right, everybody. Well, we hope that was helpful. And if you have any questions, just shoot us a message. We would love to share more um with you about you know these things and clarify anything that maybe isn't quite making sense or you want more depth or detail on. So we hope you keep on thriving and we'll catch you in the next episode.