Numbers Don’t Lie

A pure numbers pull activity is a great warm-up to get excited about year-end review and new year planning.  Approach this exercise as if you were an external consultant who was asked to prepare a full-year business findings report: numbers-first: no rationalisation, no marketing spin, just “what actually happened in the business.” Creating some emotional distance helps reduce any unconscious bias in the data pulled.

Get The Facts On The Year

The premise for this activity is simple: gather your core business performance metrics and write a clear, neutral summary of how the year went. You are not yet interpreting causes or judging performance or results; you are building a factual baseline you can use for all the thinking that follows to reviewing the year and planning for the next year.

Step 1: Decide what to measure

Besides your standard P&L, cash flow and balance sheet reports, pull other relevant business metrics such as:

• Number of new customers and repeat customers.

• Average order value and total number of transactions.

• Cost of goods sold per unit

• Key operational metrics (project completion rates, delivery times, utilisation, etc., depending on the business).

• Team metrics that matter (headcount, turnover, notable hiring or capacity changes).

You may want to pull these numbers by month or quarter, in addition to year-over-year comparisons, to identify any seasonal fluctuations in your business and to assess how specific marketing campaigns impacted it. The goal is to capture how the business performed, not why.

Step 2: Gather the data in one place

Enter the numbers into a simple one-page overview (spreadsheet or worksheet) with rows for each metric and columns for each month, quarter, and year.

Highlight any obvious peaks, dips, or trend lines—but without analysis yet, just “this went up / this went down.”  You can create line charts for a visual review or add percent change columns to establish meaningful change benchmarks for your business.

By the end of this step, you should have a tidy snapshot of the year’s numbers instead of scattered reports.

Step 3: Write a neutral performance summary

With a consolidated view of your business metrics, write a short, descriptive summary in plain language, for example, 3–5 bullet points per area:

• “Financially, this year was…” (e.g., higher / lower than last year, more stable / more volatile).

• “Customer activity this year looked like…” (e.g., more new customers, fewer repeat buyers, larger average orders, etc.).

• “Operationally, this year was…” (e.g., stretched, smooth, capacity-constrained).

• “Team and capacity shifts this year were…” (e.g., key hires, departures, role changes).

The key is to stay descriptive, not evaluative: “Revenue dipped in Q2 and recovered in Q4” rather than “Q2 was a disaster.”

Also, note any anomalies in the data, such as a single spike or a sudden dip, for further review.

Step 4: End with a one-paragraph “Year In Numbers”

Close this activity by asking them to condense everything into one short “Year in Numbers” paragraph. For example:

• One sentence on financial performance.

• One sentence on customers.

• One sentence on operations/delivery.

• One sentence on team/capacity.

This becomes the anchor they will return to when they start exploring causes, opportunities, and strategy later. This activity will give you clarity: a clean, honest picture of how the business performed over the year, before any marketing, storytelling, or problem-solving enters the frame.