352 - Halftime Check-In: Are You Winning 2025?

0:00It's almost July. Next week is in fact July. And half of 2025 is almost behind us. So I would highly suggest that all of us sit down and ask ourselves a question. Am I where I plan to be at the halfway point of 2025? Hopefully, back in January, you ended up coming up with a series of goals for 2025 and wrote them down and put them in a management plan or a timeline or something like that to hold yourself accountable. So ask yourself three really critical questions about where you are at the halfway point. What have I achieved so far in acquisitions and prospecting that can include building your board, getting your professionals, talking to financial institutions, talking to prospects, and ultimately closing acquisitions?

0:57Number two, what strategies worked well and what didn't work? And then three, where have fear, distractions, or procrastination limited all of us? And if you go through those questions, you will have a pretty good feel for, is your program working or does it need to be improved? And almost always it can be improved. So how do you identify the changes needed? So there's a few things that I would suggest there. Clarify exactly what's holding you back, whether that's the quality of your board, whether or not you're leveraging the board, whether you are committed to this, and what your why is. Look at that why again.

1:46You know, I frequently tell people who have a job, if you have two phones, and one is the phone from work, your day job, and one is this business acquisition process, and they both ring at the same time, which phone would you answer? And almost always, people would answer the work day job phone. Understandable, they're paying you to work, but it also shows you where your priority is. So if you realize, for instance, if you have a day job, that that's top priority, they're going to expect me to do some things, understand and block out that time where you're going to have to work, but also block out the time where you're going to, without distraction, work on this business acquisition process.

2:42Second thing I would suggest is look at your pipeline. It's been said by mentees more than once that my pipeline is my lifeline. And boy, is that true. So is that working? Are you working it? And then what are you doing on a daily basis? And how are you doing on the execution of those daily tasks? We've talked about things like the Ivy Lee method, where the night before you talk about the three things that'll move the business acquisition process up the field the most towards hopefully a goal line. And identify at least one major action that must change to reach your goals, whether that's the discipline of doing Ivy Lee and the actions that are required as a result of it, looking at the results of what you're getting and changing.

3:39You come up with those one things, and all of us can do that. And then ultimately, implement your halftime adjustments. What are you going to change? And urgency is absolutely a key. Set deadlines for immediate changes. It's not enough to say, I want to do better at prospecting. What you need to do is, if you want to be successful, and I hope you do, is set a task, but set a day, and even better yet, a day and a time. It's one thing to say, I want to work out tomorrow. It's another thing to say, I'm going to work out at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning. And then share your adjusted goals and action plans with those people that can help you become accountable and hold you accountable.

4:29Perhaps that's me. Perhaps it's your board. Perhaps it's some other accountability partner. Just be careful with accountability partners that it doesn't become a pity party. So I typically don't spend a lot of time with that. your mentors can act as an accountability partner but that will help you stay on task and then commit publicly within the group if you're in group coaching or the vip mastermind what you're doing and how you're going to do things differently than what you've done before and again that's an accountability when you say you're going to do something i would suggest you get in the habit of under-promising and over-delivering.

5:18So in summary, remember progress demands honesty with yourself. And I did recently a piece on what separates those that are most successful from those that aren't. We all know the things like taking action, staying focused, all of those things. But one of the biggest things is there's no excuses. My most successful mentees don't spend any time saying, well, this happened and the reason it happened was X. They just say, okay, here's the situation. What are we going to do to fix or change it? And don't waste the second half of 2025 repeating the same mistakes. If you're honest with yourself, if you can identify what needs to be improved, work on those in 2025.

6:04There's still six months to get across the goal line. And so finish strong, evaluate, adjust, execute, and do that starting today. Not, I want to do it next week, start today. So if you know the steps, good, take action on them. If you don't know the steps, get over to brucewhipple.com, take a look at the Acquisition Advantage Bootcamp 2025 edition. that's going to lay out the steps with templates suggested approaches it gives you access to a monthly Q &A where you can ask questions if you're having problems and then additionally next week we're going to open up group coaching for the month during that first week so all of those things can help you if you need help but take action evaluate what's happened so far and make the second half of 2025 better than the first and more successful than the first half.