Know Your Numbers Before January

Thirty days ago I began with a house built from the roof down. Since then the floor has gone in, layer by layer, the product and the funnel have gone on top of it in the right order, and we have looked underneath the floor at the thing that decides whether anyone stands on it. Today I want to close with the question of timing, because everything in this run could be done in any month, and almost nobody does it in December, which is the month it matters most.

December is when the year gets drawn. Not in January, when the resolutions are made, but in December, when the owner is tired and the diary is full and it is easiest to let next year arrive on the default line. Every owner who walks into January without a model is walking into a year that has already been decided by the absence of one. The price stays where it is because nobody set a date to change it. The hire does not happen because nobody ran it through the numbers. The careful room and the repriced work arrive as surprises because nobody put them in the model. By March the year has a shape, and the shape is last year's.

The owner who spends a few hours in December doing what this run has described walks into January differently. She knows the number the business is measured to. She knows the month the cash gets tight and has done something about it. She knows which of her products carry the business and which are passengers. She has drawn the two lines and chosen the second, and the decision that has been in the drawer for a year has a date on it. She has looked at the nine fears and knows which two or three are hers, and she knows what to do in the ninety seconds after they show up. None of this took a finance background. It took attention, in December, when attention is hardest to find.

I said at the start that ninety-eight of a hundred owners have no model, and that not one of them is careless. That is still true. What separates the two who have one is not talent or training. It is that at some point they decided to stop and look, and December is as good a point as any and better than most.

The response is the one I have been making for thirty days, and I will make it one last time with the plainest arithmetic I know.

One decision made right in January is worth more than the whole of this exercise costs. A price rise of ten percent on a business turning over three hundred thousand pounds is thirty thousand pounds of margin, because the costs did not move. A hire made in March rather than September is six months of recovered owner hours, and those hours, pointed at the six conversations a month the funnel needs, are the growth the business has been missing. A step back from the proposal-writing is a week a month returned to the person whose judgement the business depends on. Any one of these pays for the floor many times over, and the floor is what makes any one of them possible to see.

So, before January. Write the business model on one page. Build the twelve columns. Fix the monthly review in the diary for the whole of next year. Draw the two lines, and put the decision you have been carrying into the second one with a date attached. Then, when the ninety seconds arrive, as they will, name the fear, let it run, move, and ask whether it is real or old. Then make the decision.

If you want to do this with me rather than alone, I build the twelve-month plan with owners over two calls in seven working days: the month-by-month financial model for 2027, an operating strategy report that says what gets measured and by whom, and a ten-point plan of the things that move the number, in order. The details are at the link below. If you would rather do it yourself, everything you need is in the last thirty essays, and I would be glad to hear how it goes.

Which line is your business on? December is when you get to choose.

Your 12-month plan: Built with me in seven working days →

Or start the diagnosis: Take the free 10-minute Entrepreneur Gap scan →

The book: The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It →