Damien Soitout
Close the year on one page: what shipped, what stopped, and what is still open. Leave the mood off it.
One page is enough to close a year. The flowers are not the close. The writing is.
December invites a speech. People say the year was heavy, or blessed, or chaotic, and they treat the adjective as the record. An adjective is a mood. A firm cannot be run on a mood, and a person cannot steer January from one either. I am writing on 13 December 2022. Close the year on one page. The page has three piles: what shipped, what stopped, and what is still open. If a sentence does not fit one of those piles, it belongs in a letter to a friend, not in the close.
I have closed years with a glow and then met January as a stranger. The glow did not remember the order that was late, the offer I had quietly dropped, or the work that was half done and pretending to be a principle. The page remembers. It is deliberately dull. Dull is a compliment in December, when everyone else is performing a highlight reel. You are writing a handover to the person you will be in three weeks, who will have forgotten the feeling and will still have the work.
Any firm can do this, including a firm of one. You do not need a scoreboard, a percentage of a dream, or a comparison with a competitor's public year. Those documents exist for other meetings. This meeting is you and a sheet of paper. If you share the firm, the sheet should be readable by the person who has to live with it. Leave the victory lap in the dinner. The page will still be there when the dinner is over, which is the point.
What shipped is a thing that left your hands. A delivery a customer received. A text that is finished. A role that was filled and started. A payment you completed. A repair that holds. If you cannot point at the thing, it did not ship. Effort shipped nowhere. Effort can be honored in private. It does not go on this page unless it produced something another person could trip over. Write the shipped lines as nouns and dates. “Invoice 44 paid, 3 March.” “The guide finished, June.” “The hire started, 12 September.” Pride can come later, when you read the list and notice it is longer than the mood claimed.
What stopped needs a verb. Cancelled, closed, refused, sold, ended. “We felt it was not aligned” is a mood wearing a verb's coat. Alignment is not an action. If you stopped a project, say you stopped it, and say the date you told the people who were waiting. A stop that was never announced is still open, whatever you feel about it. I have watched owners carry dead offers into a new year because killing them would have required a sentence. The sentence is the close. Once it is written, January does not have to keep feeding the corpse.
What is still open is the pile that scares people, so they hide it inside resolutions. A resolution is a wish with a calendar. An open line is a piece of work that still has your name on it. Give it the next action, or give it an honest “no date yet” if you truly do not know. “No date yet” is allowed once. It is not allowed as a lifestyle. If a line has been open all year and still has no next action, it is trying to join the stopped pile. Let it. Open work that is real has a who and a when, even if the when is “first week of January, draft the reply.”
The close is a record. A direction is another document, and I do not want you to weld them together until the record is honest. On 9 March 2019 I published how to create a MAP. A MAP is a massive action plan. You write it when you know the result you want and why you want it. The questions on that page are how much, when, and for what purpose. On 23 December 2021 I compared that kind of page with a long business plan in business plan versus MAP. A traditional plan, as I described it there, runs twenty to thirty pages and leans on the how: the line of business, the money, the customer, the mechanics. A MAP leans on where you are going and on the milestones between you and that place. It does not try to script every sub-step in a world that moves.
Use those two pieces when you are ready to aim. Do not use them to avoid the three piles. A beautiful map written on top of a dishonest year is a story about next year that has already failed. The close comes first. Then, if you want a direction, take one open line or one new aim and put it through how much, when, and for what purpose. That is a MAP. It can live on the back of the same sheet. It should not replace the front.
The U.S. Small Business Administration describes a lean plan, on plan your business, as something that can be one page and can be drafted in about an hour. That spirit fits a year-end close. The same pages describe a traditional plan as the longer document that asks who runs what and how the firm is structured. Use the long form when you are actually rebuilding the firm. Use the hour, and the one page, when you are closing a year. A sample of how a firm talks about attracting and keeping customers sits among the SBA's support documents at this marketing plan example. Marketing is not the close. If the year changed who the customer is, the example is where you go next, after the piles are written.
Some years include a failure that is not a strategy. A power cut, an illness, a machine, a person who left. Ready.gov's page on business preparedness is about those hazards and about continuity. If your year included one, the close should say whether you answered, not whether you felt resilient. “The outage was in March. We shipped two days late. We now have a written way to reach customers when the phones fail.” That is a shipped repair of a stopped day. “It was a crazy time” is a mood. Crazy does not tell January what to repeat.
Before you launch anything new off the back of the close, sit with the questions I gathered in five questions before you launch. A year-end high is a famous bad reason to start a second firm. The open pile of the first firm is still looking at you. If you are wondering how this year ends in a sale, a shutdown, or a handoff, that question is what your exit is. An exit that appears only as a feeling in December is not a strategy. It can be one line under what is still open: “Decide by March whether the exit is real, and what the first paper would be.” Until that line exists, the exit is a daydream, and daydreams do not go in the shipped pile.
Write it by hand or in a file you will not lose inside a thread of messages. Title it with the year. Three headings. Short lines. No percentages you cannot reconstruct from the lines themselves. If you want a number, count the shipped lines. The count is a fact. A percentage of a hope is a mood with a decimal point. I have argued for replacing the ritual wish-list in replace New Year's resolutions with goals. The close is how you earn the right to a goal. You can see what you actually do. Then you aim.
If you share the page with a partner, read the piles and then stop talking about the feeling of the year. A shipped line is not a trophy. A stopped line is not a trial. An open line needs one owner and a next action. Two people can disagree about a mood for an hour and still agree on a date. Agree on the date. If a line has two names, it will wait for both of them, which means it will wait forever. Put one name on it before you leave the table. You lived the same year and you remember it differently. The lines are how you stop arguing about the memory and start the next week from the same sheet.
Read the page once aloud. An adjective that sneaks in gets a line through it. The piles stay. January can find them.
