Mid-Year Business Review: Using PESTLE Retro Analysis to Navigate Business Uncertainty and the Changing Landscape
External Forces are just as important as your internal company metrics. Business owners and Strategy practitioners should consider a PESTLE Retro analysis. This retrospective approach enables you to assess the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors influencing your business.
We are a little over halfway through 2025, making this an ideal time to assess your progress toward the goals you've set for your business. Beyond tracking performance metrics, now is the perfect opportunity to conduct a PESTLE retrospective ( We will call it a PESTLE RETRO) analysis of your company's operating environment. You can really run this analysis at any time of the year, but midyear is a good marker to reflect, reset, and move confidently in the direction of your decisions.
This PESTLE RETRO examines six key external factors that may influence your business: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental or PESTLE. We will walk through this PESTLE Retro by asking three fundamental questions for each category:
Which impacts in this area benefited your company over the past six months?
Which impacts created challenges or costs for your business?
Based on current forecasts, what changes will you implement today, tomorrow, or over the next several months?
Conducting this analysis with a retrospective lens enables you to identify which external forces have positively or negatively impacted your company's progress over the past six months and determine which business decisions to build upon or adjust. We will spend the next four weeks examining this framework while giving you time to assess your business through this lens.
Best,
Tyra