Filed Note 15: Skipping the Annual Review
Skip September's review and January's goals arrive already out of date, like a calendar bought in the sales.
Skip September's review and January's goals arrive already out of date, like a calendar bought in the sales.
Autumn arrives, the review doesn't You mean to sit down with the numbers in September and somehow it's Advent. The practice keeps running, the kettle keeps boiling, and the one conversation worth having gets rescheduled into a year gone by.
You tell yourself things will calm down. They don't. They get colder and darker, and by November everyone in the building has booked a facial and skipped the meeting.
A facial has an end time. A review, left long enough, doesn't feel like it has a start.
Here's the sunny way to look at it: the review only takes an afternoon, and the facial takes longer if you count the drive.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
Nobody has ever calmed down their way into an annual review. You have to book it in cold, like a dentist.
Some practices treat the annual review like a card sent late to an aunt they haven't seen since a wedding. Guilt-bought, guilt-sent, guilt-forgotten by February.
Skip it three years running and you lose something specific: you stop knowing what your own client book looks like.
You could describe your regulars from memory. You'd be wrong about a third of them, and not the third you'd guess.
The gap between the client book you imagine and the one you have is where the money leaks out. It's usually the quiet regular you'd forgotten booked monthly since 2019.
Here's the odd part, and it held up when we looked properly. Owners who take a smaller cut of their own revenue tend to run bigger practices, at a correlation of r=-0.61.
Paying yourself less, in relative terms, seems to buy a bigger machine. Not a poorer one, a bigger one.
Underpaying yourself on paper turns out to be a growth strategy, which nobody puts on a mug but somebody should.
You find this out by putting the numbers next to each other in September. Reading them properly, ideally sitting down, is the entire method.
Pull last September's client numbers. Put this September's beside them, on the kitchen table, not on your phone.
Now ask whether anyone read either set when they were current. Most owners go silent here, the way people go silent when asked when they last defrosted the freezer.
The comparison itself is the whole exercise. You don't need a consultant for this bit, you need twenty minutes and a chair with arms.
Twenty minutes, one September afternoon, and the whole book comes into focus. Longer than that and you've started tidying the kitchen instead.
A dentist we spoke to calls her annual review "the thing I put off exactly like a smear test." Both get booked eventually.
Both get avoided for the same reason. Nobody enjoys being looked at closely, least of all by their own spreadsheet.
She was right about the avoidance and wrong about the danger. The review doesn't hurt.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
It tells you things you'd rather have noticed yourself, in your own time, with a biscuit. That's the whole transaction: an afternoon, a biscuit, and the truth.
Some practices build their own review process: spreadsheets, quarterly check-ins, a senior colleague reading the figures over lunch like they're the racing pages.
That takes real hours and a person who likes spreadsheets in their bones. Few practices have either lying around the staffroom.
You don't need to become that person. You need a version of the process that fits in an afternoon and doesn't depend on one person's private hobby.
The client who stopped booking in March rarely gets a mention come October. Nobody flags a departure too soft to notice on its own.
It's the way nobody notices the immersion heater's been off till the bath runs cold. You lose clients one at a time, softly, and the softness is the problem.
A review is where the soft losses get counted.
By the time it's loud, it's a pattern. By the time it's a pattern, it's three Marches.
Somewhere in most practices sits a treatment, or a therapist, earning far more than anyone gives them credit for. Nobody's hiding it.
Nobody's looked, which is a different thing entirely.
An annual review is the one real chance to find out which one it is. The alternative is guessing over Christmas drinks with a glass of something warm and an opinion nobody asked for.
Guessing is free and useless. The review costs an afternoon and tells you where the money's coming from.
Every practice has a soft earner, underestimated on purpose or by accident. Most owners can name the loud ones and miss the one paying the rent.
Book your September review before the year gets away from you again. start your review
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