July rolls around and for a lot of businesses, it's just the start of a new financial year on paper. But if you ask me, it's one of the most valuable windows you'll get all year, if you use it properly.
Every July, I get the privilege of running strategic leadership retreats with clients I've worked with for years, and because it's the first month of the new financial year, it gives us a natural, complete chunk of time to look back on the previous twelve months.
We start with the numbers. Profit and loss, balance sheet, overall business performance, and we never look at it in isolation. We compare it to the previous two years so we can see the trends rather than just a single snapshot, and then we line that up against the goals we set and ask, honestly, did we hit them? This bit is non-negotiable for me, because we ground ourselves in the data first, before we go anywhere near opinions about how the year felt.
Once that's done, we move into the part that gets skipped far too often, which is asking what actually happened during the year on a more human level. What went well and flowed easily, giving a great return without much effort? What was harder than it needed to be, and took more energy to navigate than it was worth? And then there's the business-as-usual work, the steady stuff that just kept ticking along and kept the business running.
This is where it gets interesting, because it sets up everything for the year ahead. As we tie our next moves back to the bigger strategic plan, we want to actually learn from the year we just had, rather than simply repeating it with five or ten percent added on top. If that's the plan, I'd argue it's not really worth calling strategic planning at all.
Here's something that might surprise you though, and it's that how you reflect matters just as much as whether you do it. If people reflect alone beforehand, they tend to arrive a bit closed off, already landed on their view and waiting for their turn to speak, and what you end up with is six people around a table each presenting their own conclusions one after the other, missing everything that could have been discovered together.
There's absolutely a place for quiet, individual reflection, but group reflection stops it being one person's take on what was good, bad or needs to change. Instead, you get a genuine unpacking and repacking of the year together, and when that group is diverse in how they think, that's when the best strategic planning happens.
So as another July rolls around, I'm grateful for the organisations who invite me back to facilitate these conversations. The businesses that do this properly, grounding in data first, then honest reflection, then group insight, are the ones that grow with intention rather than drift into the next twelve months.
If you haven't built this into your business yet, July is a good time to start.
