Q1 is over, now what?

If you've read this email for a while, you’ll know I'm a big fan of annual planning. At the same time, I always quote Eisenhower and say,

You likely walked into 2025 with BIG plans: A vision for how your business looks in a few years.

Beautiful spreadsheets and charts about how the business will scale. Service, hiring, product, marketing… They will all crush!!

Then, to quote another scholar,

So if you're like our companies at Gateway X (or any company), reality has set in, and you have gotten punched in the face.

So, what do I recommend?

The value of planning now becomes real.

If you planned well, you have a sense of the various inputs and investments you made, and how you HOPED those would impact your outputs and your revenue.

Most likely, it didn't go the way you expected it. E.g., as Andrew wrote last week, we spent roughly $33,600 on ads for this newsletter and didn't get nearly as many emails or new customers as we had hoped for.

Enter the concept of "accounting and response" — one of many lessons taught to me by my coach, Dave Kashen.

This past week and next, all Gateway X companies are entering into this phase. We will briefly look backwards at the quarter.

The accounting questions are pretty simple:

• What did we say we would do?

• What impact did we think it would have?

• Did it get done?

• Did it work?

This usually takes less than an hour to pull together.

It’s fast because we avoid all the reasons, narratives and, frankly, excuses that usually come along with these discussions.

The goal is just to get the information out on the table: to see reality clearly — to get the FACTS. (To be clear, it’s important to set up this structure thoughtfully and facilitate the conversation in a very structured way; otherwise, it will quickly go off the rails.)

There's no judgment in these questions, just a simple lay of the land to try and take stock of reality.

Then, we may want more color.

More whys, more of an opportunity to extract learnings from the quarter.

• What went well?

• What didn't go well?

• What did we learn?

• What will sink us next quarter?

Now, you have facts, you have learnings and you understand viewpoints. What do you want to do about it? At the highest level, there are 3 choices, made famous by Google.

The “3 choices”

1. Start

2. Stop

3. Continue

In my experience, it’s a bit more nuanced.

My list of choices

Double down on things that are working and do more of them. For example, we lit up paid media for GrowthAssistant in Q1, and it’s performing well. Let's go harder!!

Cut something that isn't working and you no longer believe in. End it!

Change what’s probably not working and what you need to adjust. Maybe you reassign the work. Maybe the approach shifts. For example, at Bootstrapped Giants, we are switching the person running ads and rethinking our funnel so that we can emphasize onboarding and nurturing subscribers when they join our newsletter.

Start something new. This is the most tempting, and the one I'd avoid the most. Often, when things aren't working, we are tempted to ADD. In my experience, subtracting is far more powerful.

Continue things that are not crushing, not bad, just cruising… In fact, the bigger a business gets, the more falls into this bucket.

This brings me to another observation of our portfolio. Depending on the size and stage of the company, this Q1 "Accounting and Response" looks TOTALLY different.

Let's look at GX’s portfolio:

(Yes, it's still around.)

The business is profitable, but shrinking, and still has a lot of debt. It DID NOT meet goals. Here, we completely changed leadership and even recapped it a bit. This is a BIG change. But the goal is to soft land it and have it not waste our time.

There's a mix of what's working and what’s not, but it’s a young business, and so we are pivoting the core product (from a cohort accelerator to something soon to be announced). It's a pretty major shift.

It’s in the middle of its S-curve. Tons of traction, and we are trying to keep up with demand. There's likely very little we'll really overhaul. We’ll just continue to do what's working and try to keep our heads above water.

It’s maturing and competition is heating up. Its growth slowed more than we wanted this quarter. So some important shifts and investments need to be made to adjust the trajectory.

Regardless, just like the first quarter of a basketball game, your team may be up or down. It's important to call a time-out, talk about what worked/what didn't, and then make your adjustments to win your year.

Let me know how it goes!!

-jesse

P.S. On a personal note, I had fun skiing with the family in Deer Valley, Utah, last week. It was the mental reset I needed after this quarter. What’s your go-to activity when you need to recharge? Hit reply and tell me what you’re into (and if you want to see some of my skiing photos).