Happy Monday.

We’re sitting in that weird pocket between Christmas and New Year’s where nobody knows what day it is, half your clients are on vacation, and you’re probably staring at a cold cup of coffee wondering if you should just close the laptop and catch up on sleep.

Don’t.

This is actually the perfect time to do something most business owners skip entirely: a proper audit of what actually happened this year.

Not some feel-good reflection session. Not a vision board. A cold, honest look at the numbers, the systems, and the decisions that either made you money or cost you time.

Because here’s the thing. Most entrepreneurs are about to stumble into 2026 carrying the exact same baggage they dragged through 2025. Same broken systems. Same time-wasting activities. Same revenue leaks they’ve been meaning to fix since March.

Today, I’m going to walk you through the exact audit framework I use at the end of every year. It takes about two hours, and it will probably save you twenty hours a week next year if you actually do something with the insights.

Let’s get into it.

Part One: The Revenue Autopsy

Pull up your accounting software. I don’t care if it’s QuickBooks, Wave, or a Google Sheet you’ve been meaning to organize. We’re going to break down every dollar that came in this year.

First question: Where did your money actually come from?

Not where you thought it would come from. Not where you hoped it would come from. Where did it actually land?

I worked with a client last year who was convinced their high-ticket consulting packages were their bread and butter. Turns out, 68% of their revenue came from a mid-tier retainer service they’d been treating as an afterthought. They’d been spending 80% of their marketing energy on something that generated less than a third of their income.

That’s the kind of blind spot an audit exposes.

Make a simple list. Every revenue stream, every product, every service. Put the actual dollar amount next to each one, then calculate the percentage of total revenue.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Next to each revenue stream, estimate the hours you spent on it. Be honest. Include the sales calls, the delivery, the customer support, the backend headaches. All of it.

Divide revenue by hours. That’s your effective hourly rate for each offering.

I’ve seen business owners realize they were making $47 an hour on their “premium” service and $380 an hour on something they’d priced as entry-level. When you see numbers like that staring back at you, decisions get a lot easier.

Part Two: The Lead Source Truth Bomb

Where did your actual paying customers come from this year?

Not your leads. Not your email subscribers. Not the people who liked your posts. The humans who actually handed you money.

This is where most business owners start squirming, because they’ve been telling themselves a story all year that’s about to get demolished by data.

Track backwards. Every single client or customer you closed in 2025, how did they find you? Referral? Cold outreach? Social media? Your website? Podcast appearance? Conference?

Put them in buckets. Count them up.

Now compare that to where you spent your time and money on marketing.

I’ll share what I found in my own business last year. I spent roughly 15 hours a week creating content for LinkedIn. You know how many paying clients came directly from LinkedIn? Three. Over the entire year.

Meanwhile, 40% of my revenue came from referrals, and I had exactly zero systems in place to encourage them. No referral program. No follow-up sequence. Nothing.

That’s the kind of misalignment that quietly costs you six figures while you’re busy making graphics for the ‘gram.

Part Three: The Time Vampire Hunt

Now we get to the uncomfortable part.

Look back at your calendar from 2025. Actually open it. Scroll through the months.

What recurring meetings or tasks made you groan every time they popped up?

What did you consistently push to the next day, the next week, the next month?

What activities ate up hours without producing any measurable result?

I call these Time Vampires. They drain your energy and your productivity while providing the illusion of work.

Common culprits I see with clients:

Weekly “strategy” meetings that produce zero action items. Discovery calls with unqualified leads. Manual data entry that should have been automated six months ago. Email threads that could be a two-minute Loom video. Client revisions because the scope was never clearly defined. Social media scrolling disguised as “market research.”

Make a list. Be ruthless.

For each Time Vampire, ask yourself three questions:

Can I eliminate this entirely? Can I automate this with a tool or system? Can I delegate this to someone whose time costs less than mine?

If the answer to all three is no, then at minimum, can I batch it to reduce the context-switching overhead?

Part Four: The System Scorecard

Here’s where we separate businesses that scale from businesses that stay stuck.

Every business has core systems, whether you’ve documented them or not. The question is whether those systems are actually working for you or against you.

I want you to rate each of these on a scale of 1 to 5:

Lead Capture: When someone finds you, is there a clear path to collecting their information? Or are you letting potential clients slip through because your website has no lead magnet and your social profiles point nowhere?

Follow-Up: After someone enters your world, what happens? Is there an automated sequence that nurtures them? Or do leads go cold because you “meant to reach out” but got busy?

Sales Process: Is there a repeatable process from inquiry to close? Can you predict your conversion rate? Do you know your average sales cycle length?

Onboarding: When a new client signs, is the experience smooth? Or is it a scramble of “where did I put that template” and “let me figure out their login info”?

Delivery: Can your service be delivered consistently regardless of your mood, energy, or how many other things are on your plate?

Retention/Referrals: Are you proactively asking for referrals? Is there a system to identify upsell opportunities? Or do clients quietly leave and you have no idea why?

Any system scoring below a 3 is a priority fix for Q1.

I built an automation pack specifically for the most common system failures I see: no-show prevention, lead capture, and weekly reporting. If any of those scored low on your scorecard, that’s exactly what the pack was designed to solve.

Part Five: The Honest Question

After all this data, here’s what I want you to sit with:

If you changed nothing about how you operate and just repeated 2025, would you be satisfied with the outcome?

Not “would it be fine” or “could you survive.” Would you be satisfied?

Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you don’t actively make changes. Businesses don’t drift upward. They drift sideways at best, downward at worst.

The point of this audit isn’t to make you feel bad about what didn’t work. It’s to give you clarity so the decisions you make in January are based on reality instead of hope.

Hope is not a strategy. Data is.

Your Assignment for This Week

Block two hours before New Year’s Eve. Run through each section of this audit. Write down what you find.

On Wednesday, I’m going to show you exactly what to do with those insights. We’ll turn your audit findings into a simple operating plan that doesn’t require a 47-page business plan template or a motivational poster.

Talk soon,

Dan

______________________________

P.S. If the System Scorecard made you wince, the Automation Pack might be worth a look. Three core automations that handle the stuff most business owners let slip through the cracks. No-show prevention, lead capture, and weekly reporting. It’s $97 and includes setup guides for both Make.com and Zapier. Grab it here.

P.P.S. Know someone who’s been running their business like it’s 2015? Forward this to them. Sometimes a good audit is the wake-up call that changes everything.