Two Lines

Draw two lines. Each is your business on the thirty-first of December next year, and they start from the same place, which is where you are this morning.

The first line is the business if nothing changes. Same clients, same price, same hours, same you. It is not a disaster. Nothing collapses. The work gets done, the clients are served, the invoices go out and most of them get paid. It is just the same number again. Revenue near where it is now, costs near where they are now, the owner paid last and paid roughly what she was paid this year, working roughly the hours she worked this year. The decision she has been carrying is still being carried. The reasonable sentences are still being said. It is a perfectly survivable year, and it is the year most businesses have, because it is the year that arrives when nobody draws a line.

The second line is the same business with the one decision made. The hire, the price rise, the step back from the day-to-day, the new offer. Same facts, same market, same owner. One thing different. The model you built in November shows what it does: the month the hire's cost lands and the month it pays back, the quarter the price rise reaches the account, the hours that come back when the owner stops doing the proposal herself. It is not a fantasy line. It is arithmetic from a decision that has been sitting in the drawer for a year.

Most owners never draw either line. They do not draw the first because it is uncomfortable to write down that nothing is going to change. They do not draw the second because drawing it would make the decision real. So the year draws the line for them, and it draws the first one, because the first one is what happens by default.

I draw these two lines with every owner I work with, usually in the first hour, and the reaction is always the same. Not surprise, because the owner has known both lines for a long time. Something closer to relief, because the thing she has been carrying is finally on paper, and a thing on paper can be decided.

The response is to draw them, today, on one page, with numbers.

The first line is easy, and that is the point. Take this year's revenue, costs, profit, cash and your own pay. Write them in a column headed 2027 and change nothing. That is the default. Look at it for a minute and notice how it feels, because the feeling is the information. If it feels fine, you may not need the second line. For most owners it does not feel fine. It feels like a year they have already had.

The second line takes the decision you have been carrying and puts it into the model. If it is a hire, add the salary from the month it starts and the revenue or the hours it frees from the month that follows. If it is a price rise, apply it to the customers it affects from the date it takes effect and remove the one or two who leave. If it is a step back, cost the person who takes over the work and count the hours that return to you, and decide what those hours earn. The model does the rest, and the second column appears beside the first.

Then compare the two. Not the totals only, but the months. The second line is usually worse than the first for a quarter and better for the rest of the year, and the quarter is the reason the decision has been postponed. Seen on paper, the quarter is a number with a date, and a number with a date can be planned for. Seen in the head, it is a cliff.

Fear only loses its grip when something specific is pulling harder the other way. The second line is that specific thing. Tomorrow I want to talk about why 2027 in particular is not a year to let the first line happen by default, because the assumptions it rests on are already out of date.

Continue reading: 2027 Will Not Run on 2026's Assumptions →

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