It is the last week of March. The first quarter of 2026 is closing.
If you are like most owners I know, you have spent the last three months executing the plan you wrote in January. Some of it worked. Some of it did not. Some of it you have already quietly stopped doing. And next week you are going to crack open Q2 and start building again.
Here is the part most owners skip. The first ninety days of any year are a free intelligence report. You already paid for it. The question is whether you are going to read it, or whether you are going to throw it away and chase the next quarter without learning what the last one already taught you.
I run a quarterly audit at the agency that takes about an hour. Nothing fancy. A whiteboard, a marker, and the willingness to be honest. I want to walk you through the version I will be running this week, because the cost of not doing it is not theoretical. It is the same mistakes, three more times, by December 31.
The four columns
Here is the whiteboard. Four columns, evenly spaced.
Working. The things that are actually doing what you hoped they would do. The campaign that converted. The hire that landed. The new service line that pulled. The internal process that finally clicked. Be specific. "Marketing is working" is not a useful entry. "The Tuesday email to the segmented list is converting at three times the rate of the Friday email" is.
Broken. The things you set up that are visibly not working. The funnel that leaks. The process that nobody follows. The tool you bought that nobody opened. The hire that is not landing. Again, specific. Vague pain stays. Specific pain moves.
Missing. The things that are not even there yet. The role that should exist on your team but does not. The metric you keep meaning to track but have not built a dashboard for. The conversation with the client that is overdue. The system that you keep talking about and never building.
Confused. The things that you cannot tell whether they are working or not. This column matters more than people realize. Confused means you do not have visibility. You cannot improve what you cannot see. The point of the confused column is to turn it into the working or broken column by the end of next quarter.
Spend ten minutes per column. Do not edit yourself. Get it on the board.
When you step back, you will see something most quarterly reviews never surface. The size of your confused column tells you how much of your business is being run on instinct instead of evidence. The size of your missing column tells you what you have been avoiding building. The relationship between working and broken tells you whether you are accelerating or just churning.
The numbers I check at BB
For the agency, the numbers I run through every quarter are simple and stubborn.
Sales pipeline value, weighted by stage. Not "we have a lot of deals." A real number, on a sheet, that I would defend if a board asked me how I got there.
Receivables outstanding, by client and by age. Anyone past sixty days gets a name, not a row. I want to feel the weight of who has not paid us, because behind every number is a relationship that needs handling.
Cash on hand, plotted against three months of payroll. The number that tells me how long we could survive if every client paused tomorrow. That number should never quietly drift down without a deliberate reason.
Recurring revenue, plotted against the same number from twelve months ago. The single number I am most disciplined about because it is the difference between starting every January at zero and starting it with momentum.
Those four numbers, on one page, take about fifteen minutes a quarter to assemble if you have decent bookkeeping. The whole point is that you should not be discovering them. You should be confirming them. If anything in there is a surprise to you on the last week of March, that is the most important data on the page.
The honest pull
Here is the part most people skip.
Get a separate sheet. List the five biggest things you said you were going to do in January. Not the things you said in a meeting. The things you said in your own head, in your own notebook, to your own spouse, to your own leadership team.
Now next to each one, write what actually happened. Did it ship? Did it stall? Did you start it and quietly let it die? Did the priority change for a real reason or because something easier showed up?
I have done this exercise enough times to know that, on average, two of the five shipped, two stalled, and one was wrong from the start. That is normal. That is not a failure. The failure is doing the same five things again next quarter without knowing why three of them did not happen the first time.
The discipline of owning the outcome is not the same as the discipline of completing tasks. Owning the outcome means you take responsibility for what actually happened, not for what you tried to make happen. Tasks completed are nice. Outcomes achieved are the only thing your business actually feels. The Q1 audit is the place you reconcile the two.
action
1. Block one hour Friday. Whiteboard, marker, no phone. 2. Run the four columns: Working, Broken, Missing, Confused. Ten minutes each. 3. Pull the four numbers: pipeline, receivables, cash vs payroll, recurring revenue YoY. 4. List five January priorities. Mark each: shipped, stalled, or wrong from the start. 5. Write the Q2 reset in three sentences: one to double down, one to kill, one to start.
What did your first ninety days actually tell you? Read the report. Then go build Q2 on the truth instead of the wish.
