The Mid-Year Business Review: 12 Questions Every Nigerian CEO Should Answer Before July Ends

June has a way of arriving with an audit no one scheduled. The plan written in January's optimism has now met six months of Nigerian reality — rate movements, power costs, a hire that didn't work out, a client that pays late. Most leadership teams respond in one of two unhelpful ways: they ignore the gap and "push harder," or they quietly abandon the plan and go back to firefighting. The better response is a structured mid-year review — half a day, honest numbers, and twelve questions. Here they are.

The Numbers: Is the Gap Real, and Where Exactly Is It?

Start with four questions that force the fog out of the room:

• 1. Where are we against plan — by line, not in total? Total revenue can hide everything. Break it out: which products, locations, or client segments are ahead, and which are carrying dead weight?
• 2. What has happened to our gross margin since January? In an inflationary year, revenue growth with margin erosion is a treadmill. If input costs rose 20% and your prices rose 8%, you found your problem.
• 3. What is our cash position and collection reality? Profit is an opinion; cash is a fact. Days sales outstanding creeping from 30 to 55 days is how profitable Nigerian companies die.
• 4. Which assumptions from January are now simply wrong? Exchange rate, demand levels, that expansion timeline. Name them explicitly — plans fail silently when nobody says the assumption out loud.

The Business: What Should We Stop, Start, and Scale?

• 5. What is working better than expected — and have we fed it? The most common mid-year mistake is starving the surprise winner because the budget was written before you knew about it.
• 6. What should we stop doing entirely? Every business is running at least one project that exists only because stopping feels like admitting failure. Killing it releases the resources H2 needs.
• 7. Are the right people in the right seats? Six months is enough evidence. The role that has been "almost working" since February needs a decision, not more time.
• 8. Where are we exposed? Customer concentration, one supplier, one key person, FX. Which single failure would hurt most, and what has been done about it since January — usually nothing?

The Second Half: What Will We Actually Commit To?

• 9. What are the three priorities for H2? Not seven. Three — chosen with the discipline of knowing everything else will get less attention.
• 10. What does the revised full-year number look like? Re-forecast honestly at current run-rate plus committed initiatives. A target everyone privately knows is fiction corrodes accountability everywhere else.
• 11. Who owns each H2 priority, and when do we review? One name per priority, a monthly check-in on the calendar before the meeting ends.
• 12. What will we do in the downside scenario? Decide now what gets cut or delayed if H2 disappoints — decisions made calmly in June beat decisions made desperately in November.

"The plan you wrote in January was a hypothesis. June is when the data comes back — and pretending otherwise is the most expensive habit in business."

Make It a Session, Not a Mood

Put the review on the calendar as a half-day with your leadership team, circulate the numbers in advance, and walk the twelve questions in order — numbers first, business second, commitments last. The output fits on one page: the honest full-year forecast, three H2 priorities with owners, one thing you stopped, and your downside trigger. Businesses that run this discipline enter the second half lighter, more focused, and measurably more likely to finish the year they intended — while their competitors spend Q4 discovering problems that were visible in June.