Mid-year is the classic moment when leaders face a tough choice:
Do you revise your forecasts and budgets to reflect new realities, or do you hold the line and double down on achieving your original goals
It’s been a roller coaster year so far.
The broader economy may steady in the second half—but every landscape business operates in its own regional market and has to make its own call.
Reforecasting has clear value.
If your plan is disconnected from reality, you risk ending the year way off budget.
Reforecasting helps you
- Recalibrate staffing, spending, and pricing strategies to better fit the environment,
- Protect margins and redouble focus on what’s achievable.
But the danger is that mid year revisions can breed excuse-making and goal erosion.
If you make it too easy to change targets, you teach the organization to lower expectations when hit by obstacles.
Ambitious goals are supposed to be hard—they force teams to find efficiencies, new ways to sell, negotiate better deals, and launch innovative solutions.
Dropping your goals too soon will kill that creative pressure.
The answer is not to pick one approach over the other. It’s to balance multiple moves with strategic stubbornness:
- Distinguish between external reality and internal execution. Reforecast when overwhelmed by uncontrollable external factors. But if under performance is due to sales-process gaps, marketing misalignment, or operational inefficiency, focus on fixing execution instead.
- Lean Overhead. As companies gear up over time, it’s possible that some people don’t operate at full potential or at last where you need them; and some positions may not be needed as your organization has evolved. Take a fresh look with a fresh set of eyes – can you do it differently with a leaner approach?
- Focus on leading indicators. Often, the mid-year temptation to reforecast comes from lagging results. But what matters most is whether your leading indicators (pipeline, bookings, lead flow, churn rates) suggest you can still get back on track. If they’re healthy, stay the course.
- Keep accountability high. Even if you adjust forecasts, keep the spotlight on delivery. Make sure your top people know the bar hasn’t dropped for them, and that breakthrough achievements will be rewarded.
- Communicate with clarity. Avoid the confusion of mixed messages. Stay focused on finding wins, and beating new goals and monthly “games”. Maintain your commitment to the mission and long-term goals.
Your Challenge: Know when to adapt, when to push, and when to do both.
Look for counter intuitive solutions as you head into the second half of the year.
Raise goals even if you reforecast. If you find you must lower revenue expectations in your forecast, consider raising activity-based goals (calls, demos, proposals) or innovation targets to compensate.
This keeps teams hustling rather than retreating—and often reveals new ways to close the gap.
Expand budgets in certain areas. Instead of cutting across the board when things get tough, identify growth areas that can benefit from increased investment.
Publicly recommit to the “impossible” goal. When reforecasting, leaders may become quiet and adjust targets in private.
Try the opposite: share the new forecast and loudly restate the original goal as an aspirational stretch. This keeps ambition alive, rallies creative problem-solving, and signals you won’t let short-term adjustments kill long-term vision.
Regardless of your situation remember that time is money, don’t wait to make changes later that could be made now and bring you a higher impact. (This is the most common sin I see.)
Challenge your team—and yourself—to get creative, make the tough calls, and finish stronger than you thought possible.
Go get em!
Regards, Jeffrey Scott
P.S. Hoping for a better year is not the same as intentional effort. Are you ready to break the cycle? If so, let’s talk.
