A buddy of mine hunts. Not the rifle-from-a-stand kind. The track-an-animal-through-the-woods kind. He told me once that the difference between a hunter who eats and a hunter who hikes is whether you can read what is behind you. The crushed leaves. The hair on the bark. The half-bitten branch. He said the markers behind you predict the path ahead better than any map.
I think about that a lot when I sit down with an owner trying to plan a new year.
Most of them open a fresh notebook. Blank page. New year, new me. They write a goal at the top. They write a strategy underneath it. They start chasing a future they have not yet earned the right to plan, because they haven't actually walked back through the trail.
Your past is the best predictor of your future. Not because the future is fixed. But because the trail behind you is the only honest data you have about what you are actually going to do.
What I learned at seventeen
I started Design Extensions, which became Business Builders, when I was seventeen. The same year my parents got divorced. Those two things are connected, even if I didn't see it at the time.
The divorce did two things. It made me want a place I controlled, because the place I had grown up in had stopped being predictable. And it gave me a reason to figure out money fast, because nobody was going to figure it out for me. Both of those things are still active in how I run my agency twenty-seven years later. The drive for control of my own environment. The fear of being financially unprepared. The instinct to over-prepare a meeting because I was once a kid who got handed too much.
I am not telling you that to be confessional. I am telling you because I did not understand any of it for the first fifteen years of running the company. I thought I was making decisions because of the market. I was making decisions because of the seventeen-year-old at the kitchen table.
If I had walked back through my past honestly, in year three of the agency, I would have built a different business. Not necessarily a better one. But a more self-aware one. That self-awareness is worth more than any growth strategy you can buy.
The two-column exercise
Here is what I do now, every January, before I write a single goal.
Get a piece of paper. Draw a vertical line down the middle. On the left side, write "Past as Fuel." On the right side, write "Past as Warning."
Now walk back through the last five years - or twenty, if you have them - and write everything you can remember. Every win. Every loss. Every deal that closed and every deal that died. Every team member who stayed and every one who walked. Every season that was easy and every season that was crushing.
Every entry goes on one side. Either it is fuel - it is something you want to keep doing, double down on, or remember when you are tired - or it is warning. Something you have done before, that did not work, that you are about to be tempted to do again under a new name.
Most owners I know cannot finish this exercise without help. Not because they cannot remember the years. Because they cannot tell which column an entry belongs in.
That is where outside perspective comes in.
The Tom Barrett story
Years ago I was sitting in my office, sure I knew exactly what was wrong with my company. I knew what we needed to fix, who we needed to hire, what service we needed to drop. I had it all mapped out.
A friend recommended I sit with a guy named Tom Barrett at StratOp. I went into that day mostly to be polite. I came out with a totally different read on my own business. Not because Tom told me anything I didn't already know. He asked me questions I had not let myself ask out loud. He pulled markers off the trail behind me that I had walked past for years.
action
1. Block one uninterrupted hour this week. Just one. 2. Draw a line down a page: Past as Fuel on the left, Past as Warning on the right. 3. Walk back five years and put every win, loss, hire, and bet in a column. 4. Ask one person outside your business to read it with you. 5. Let them tell you what they see that you don't.
This week, give yourself one hour. One. Two columns. Five years back.
Then ask one person who is outside your business to read it with you and tell you what they see that you don't.
If you do that this week, you will make better decisions in February than you would have made in March. That's the trade. One hour now for a quarter of clarity.
What is on the trail behind you that you have been walking past?
