Entrepreneur End-of-the-Year Super Review

Welcome to (most likely) the most thorough end of the year review you’re going to find. 

It requires some work, and some focused thinking along the way, but once completed you should have a brutally honest snapshot of your year, and be ready to accurately – and honestly – put together your list of goals for 2026.

Reviews like these allow you to spot patterns, revisit and refine lessons learned, understand what led to your wins and losses, etc. 

It’s kind of like being Bill Murray in Scrooge, a forced viewing of not just what you’ve done, but also who you are and how you’ve behaved.

So let’s jump into it…

The good, the bad and the ugly (be honest with the last two).

⚡️Categorizing Clients and Sales:

Categorize however fits your business. There’s about a thousand different businesses out there, so you’re going to have to use your best judgement on this.  Think along these lines..

✅ — Client Types (sort by key identifiers for your industry)

✅ — Purchase Type (online vs in-store, retail vs wholesale, etc)

✅ — Repeat vs One Off (was client a repeat client, project based vs recurring membership, etc)

There will be overlap, and that’s fine. The goal is to be able to sort clients/projects into groups so you can see your real mix and performance. You may already “know” this intuitively, but you don’t really know it until it’s written down.

Note: Once you hit a certain level in business, and your books are tight enough, you can probably get this sorted out easily, if you aren’t already doing that on a monthly or quarterly basis. Posts like these are for those who are not there yet.

⚡️Client Successes

Some clients turn out better than others. Make a list of your major successes, itemize and categorize according to multiple factors and learn from it.

Questions to answer:

✅ — Product Mix: Which product/service produced the best results for clients?

✅ — Profitability: How did that align with profitability?

✅ — Problem Areas: Which product/service is your ugly duckling?

Note: You see where I’m going with this review?  There is no perfect formula for doing it, it is the act of doing it and the ensuing thinking that is the actual benefit.

⚡️Company Successes:

Getting your clients what they need is always priority number one. But what did you achieve internally this year?  Maybe it was new equipment, software upgrades or systems build outs.  Maybe it was launching a new service line, or adding a new warranty plan? 

Maybe you started half a dozen things and didn’t finish any of them (lol).

List out and categorize accordingly.  Here are a few key areas to help you get started:

** Talent/Team Management

** SOPs/Process Written Down

** Recruitment/Hiring

** Product Mix/Procedure/Pricing

** Marketing

** Sales

** Accounting

** Inventory Management

⚡️Pet Projects:

If you are anything like me, you always have one or two pet projects going that allow you to continue your creativity (and not lose your damn mind).

How did they turn out?  What can be learned from them?  Is it worth continuing into the new year or should you scrap them? 

Categorize and itemize how you see fit.

And now… It’s time for the bad and the ugly.

Time to look into the past year with both disappointment and horror at what transpired the last 365 days.

⚠️ Client Disappointments

I don’t care who you are, you are going to have some projects/customers/clients who did not turn out as planned.  It’s part of the game.  And it happens to the best of us.

💥 — What Happened?

💥 — How Did It Happen

💥 — How Was It Handled?

💥 — What Did We Learn?

There’s usually more to learn from our mistakes than our successes, so take your time on this one.

⚠️ Company Disappointments

Working IN the business vs working ON the business.  Mismanagement of your team.  Poor attention to onboarding/offboarding.  Losing your cool, being too patient, etc, etc, etc.

Reviewing your disappointments is a potentially painful and endless exercise , but it’s mandatory review for those who are serious.

⚠️Personal Disappointments

This is the section where things might get ugly.  Personal issues bleed into business all the time, with all of us.  What doesn’t happen all the time is a forced, hard look at ourselves in relation to the business.

We all make mistakes.  And we all have room for improvement.

Take a hard look at yourself to figure out where you dropped the ball for those around you.

⭐️⭐️⭐️In Summary:

Do these up at the end of this year, and THEN move onto your goals for 2026.

If you don’t understand where you’ve been, it’s pretty pointless to try to understand where you’re going.

Keep these docs in a Google Drive folder.  As the years go by it’s nice to go back and see the growth and lessons learned, compare and actually build your review off of last year’s goals (where applicable). 

It’s also interesting to see how you – all of us, really – tend to make the same damn mistakes over and over again in our lives (lol).

Hope you enjoyed this review, and hope it got the wheels turning.

Happy New Year 👊