I don't wait until September

September is one of my favorite times of year. I will take any excuse to buy some new notebooks (yes, I still use a paper notebook, mmmk!) and pens that I definitely do not need.

But I don’t wait for it to reset on my goals.

I run a reset at the start of H2 (that’s July 1 for my non-corporate girlies). It’s a chance to reset, refine, and set me and my team up to sprint heading into the back half of the year.

Summer makes that easy to forget. It’s the season everyone takes their foot off the gas: vacations, a real pause, time off. All good things!

But there’s no rule that momentum has to go on vacation with you.

Honestly, I love how slow July gets. New client projects cool off, the inbox calms down, and then in September, everything picks back up at once. So I use that quiet time on purpose. July is when I reset and get my head right, so that by the time September hits, I’m already locked in.

Now let’s dive into the how of it all.

A lot of people love a clear, concrete goal. SMART goals, a number on the wall, the whole system. Great if that’s you. Not so great for me.

What I keep instead is a North Star. One thing I measure everything against. I keep one for work and one for my personal life, and that’s it.

For work right now, it’s scaling the business to $1M/year with 30%+ profitability.

For my personal life, it’s balance and happiness.

Here’s why I love a North Star over a checklist. In my business, something unexpected always lands on my desk. A new opportunity, a left-field idea, a yes-or-no I didn’t plan for. With a North Star, I have one clean question to hold it up against: does this move me towards my North Star or away from it? That’s all I need to gut-check against to decide. It keeps me focused without boxing me in.

Let’s take a detour into my favorite topic (/s): sports.

Going into the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the British men’s eight rowing crew hadn’t won gold since 1912. They were starving for that win. And they got it.

The way they got there was almost boring. Every decision, big or small, ran through one question: will it make the boat go faster? A second helping at breakfast, an extra session, a night out, a new piece of kit. It didn’t matter what the choice was. It went up against the same question, every time. If it made the boat go faster, yes. If it didn’t, no.

One of the rowers, Ben Hunt-Davis, wrote a book about it years later, called Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?, and that one question is the thing that’s stuck with me ever since.

Is living like that sustainable forever? No. Nobody runs every breakfast through a gold-medal filter for years. But for the stretch that mattered, that single question ran everything. That’s a North Star. One clear thing that every small yes and no gets measured against.

I think about it a lot. Extreme goals require extreme discipline. If you don’t want an extreme goal, totally fine, most of life isn’t lived at that intensity. But if you’re after something genuinely extraordinary, the discipline and the planning aren’t optional. The North Star is what makes the discipline possible, because it tells you what every small yes and no is actually for.

Here’s the North Star doing its job.

At the start of 2026 I set a goal: sign one new client a month. On the numbers, we blew past it.

But signing clients was never really the goal. Building the right roster was. And “one a month” had me filling seats instead of choosing carefully, bringing on people who were fine instead of people who were ideal. So I changed it mid-year. For the rest of 2026, we’re pausing on new clients unless someone is an obvious, perfect fit.

We work on a revenue-share model, so when we go deep with a client and genuinely help them level up, we win when they win. Going deeper with the people we already have beats going wider with people I’m lukewarm on. Better business, and honestly a better way to spend my days.

Going deep over going wide. That’s what I’m focused on to make sure we’re properly tracking against that North Star.

That’s the work North Star. The other one is personal. I want to get back to actually taking care of myself. I’ve been on and off with it this year, and H2 is when it goes back to the top of the list. I want to feel exceptional all the time, not just on the calm weeks.

So that’s the reset. Summer goals now, end-of-year goals in September, and two North Stars to hold all of it up against.

If you’ve been saving your reset for the fall, this is your nudge to run a small one now.

Cheers,

Audrey