End of Season Reviews: The importance of looking back for forward planning

If you’ve ever been part of a team sport, you will have memories of your coach standing in front of the team at a training session going over what worked and didn’t work at your last game. Which plays were successful, where your teamwork was off, what weaknesses in the opposition should have been identified earlier, even how the weather conditions affected your team performance. This is all done with the aim of making improvements, learning from mistakes and setting the strategy for the next game. And it’s no different in business.

A lot of SMEs are so busy trying to keep up with the pace of their growing business that many are constantly looking forward: designing new products or services, chasing new sales accounts, developing new marketing campaigns and so on. Seldom do they take the time to look back. But reviewing what has been can be an extremely worthwhile exercise, giving SMEs insights into what to add/change/scrap from what’s already been done to support their future goals. The two questions every entrepreneur or small-business owner should ask themselves at the end of every season are:

1.     How did we do?

2.     What do we want to do better next time?

 These questions should be applied to all areas of the business, especially those where data are available to ensure results are quantifiable and comparable.

Marketing and Sales are areas to look at, and, if you are selling a product, then add Merchandising to that list too. The key is really to combine the insights gleaned from each area to get a true, 360-degree picture of what happened, and most crucially, why.

All too often small business owners will see that a product sold out and immediately think “that did well, we need to make more”. But once a full review is completed, the data might tell a different story. Perhaps it’s true, you didn’t produce enough, but it could also be true that there was an event or activity that occurred that boosted sales, such as a promotion of some kind, a marketing campaign, a new account, or a macro-economic event that is unlikely to be replicated in the next year (COVID, for example). The same applies when the opposite occurs – low sales numbers don’t always indicate that there was no consumer appetite for a product but may point to something else. Maybe the pricing was too high, maybe a few key accounts were lost or reduced their buys due to their own business factors, perhaps the timing of the product release was incorrect, or sales were cannibalised by another, similar product.

Conducting an End-Of-Season review can help a business plan for the next season, taking the wins and the mistakes and translating them into a strong future strategy. You never know what the next season might hold but arming your team with as much knowledge as possible can give them the confidence to take the calculated risks to ensure future commercial success.