Business Samurai™ Year End Review
Friends, we need to talk about something appraisers don’t want to admit. The biggest problem in this industry isn’t AMCs. It isn’t fees. It isn’t technology threatening to make you obsolete. It’s that most appraisers are operating like it’s still 2005, hoping the world stops changing just long enough for them to catch up. If you want next year to be different, you can’t keep hiding behind the same excuses; the same habits; the same patterns. This episode is the annual truth you’ve been avoiding.
I’m going to warn you now; this episode is not for the fragile or easily offended. If you’ve spent this year blaming clients, the Fed, the rates, the AMCs, the market, or your competitors, this episode may hurt your feelings. Not because I’m attacking you, but because the gauntlet we’re running through on this episode will remove every hiding place you built for yourself. The bottom line is that next year improves when YOU improve, and today we face that head-on.
In this episode, we’re going over what every single one of you should be doing at the end of every year. Whether you use the process I’ll be sharing with you today, or something similar, if you aren’t putting yourself in a recap, review, and remodel mindset around this time every year, you’re missing out on one of the most powerful and revealing practices available to you. The process I’m walking you through in this episode is what real businesses and real business owners do, it's also what people who are constantly chasing excellence and getting better every year do.
The reality is that we’re closing in on the end of the year. And this is where most people make the same mistake they made last year and the year before that: they tend to coast. They mentally check out for four to six weeks thinking there isn’t much left to be done at this point, and they promise themselves that next year is the year! Next year will be better…magically.
But that’s not how any of this works. You don’t get better professionally or personally on accident. If you want a better year ahead, the price of admission is simple: you face what actually happened this year regardless of how tiring or how painful that exercise may be. You don’t keep replaying the story you tell yourself each day and you certainly don’t grow based on the carefully curated and edited version you post online. You grow by facing the truth. You look in the mirror and say, “ok, here we are. This is what happened, this is why it happened, this is what I liked and what I didn’t like, and this is what I need to change going forward.”
Today I’m walking you through a brutal Year-End Deep Dive exercise that I have created for you called the Business Samurai Breakthrough Year-End Review. This is not journaling, and it’s not therapy. It’s better than therapy because this is an audit. An audit of your life, your decisions, your mistakes and missteps, your flaws as a leader and business owner, maybe your flaws as a person; but not to shame or blame but instead to grow. The goal of this exercise is to reveal the truth because the truth is a powerful antidote to the lies we tend to tell ourselves the other eleven months of the year.
So, let’s get into it.
If and when you download the Year End Deep Dive pdf that accompanies this exercise, you’ll see in the introduction of the workbook, something important: it says, “You’re not here to journal. You’re here to confront the truth about your year.” That’s your mindset for this exercise. This isn’t a “write down your hopes and dreams” exercise. This is Business Samurai mode. Strategist Mode. Martial-arts mindset. Warrior mode. Precision, honesty, and no drama.
The first two exercises are what I call ‘mirror exercises’ because they’re like holding up a mirror and revealing the brutal truth. And we start with the numbers because numbers don’t lie. They don’t care about your feelings, the market or about who wronged you. They simply reflect reality. As much as I don’t like ONLY talking about and working through the numbers, if we don’t do that, we’re not really running a business because the numbers are they scoreboard and the scoreboard tells us how we’re doing.
The exercise asks you to write down some key numbers and metrics:
Total reports completed
Gross revenue
Net income (meaning: what you kept)
Average hours per week
Days you didn’t work at all
Referral sources who sent you 5+ orders
Client/AMC mix
One metric that surprised you
One metric you avoided all year
That last one is the big one, by the way. The metric you avoided is usually your greatest source of power if you’ll stop running from it. If you have not been tracking any metrics at all up to this point, don’t fret, this is where we start doing just that. Just grab a note pad and start digging through your appraisal software, your management tools (ANOW, Quickbooks, etc.), and your bank accounts and start pulling some of these numbers together. The first time you do this will feel disorganized and chaotic, that’s ok. You’ll get better at it and more precise the more you do it.
The next mirror exercise is an energy audit. After dealing with the factual stuff, the numbers, we need to know where your attention was invested. I say often that time is our most valuable asset, resource, and currency because, at the end of everything, its really all we have. Everything we want to be, do, and have is rooted in time. We spend our time working so that we can have resources to enjoy other aspects of life.
One of the most vital aspects of time is attention. We have two primary states each day: asleep and awake. When you’re asleep, there is no conscious attention. When we’re awake, however, our attention is always on something. Every single moment we’re awake, we’re focusing our attention on something. In a sense, attention then is our most valuable currency and resource because what we give our attention to ends up determining what we ultimately become.
You’re asked to list your top five time commitments this year, and I’m strongly encouraging you be brutally honest. This is not a question of what you think was most important, the question is asking you what actually WAS most important. If scrolling social media beat out marketing, admit it. If worrying about things you can’t control beat out execution of the things you can, put it down. If procrastination beat out growth, write it down. This whole exercise is for you and nobody else to see. Lying here only limits you next year.
The next series of questions ask:
What task did you do that someone else should have done?
What’s the highest-dollar-per-hour thing only you can do?
What’s the lowest-dollar work you’re still doing for no good reason?
Who should you have hired?
What relationship did you avoid building?
What scared you this year that you didn’t act on?
You want a better year? Stop spending your life on low-dollar work. Stop avoiding the relationships that move the needle. Stop letting fear decide your actions.
After the two mirror exercises, we move to some deeper questions:
What actually happened this year?
What patterns defined the year?
Where did you show strength?
Where did you play small?
This is not about judgment. This is an observation exercise. Just like a professional athlete watching game footage, you watch the tape, you see what you did wrong, and you adjust. Here, patterns matter more than events. We’re looking to identify the patterns we all have. Some of those patterns are positive for us and the business and lead to positive results, but some of those patterns aren’t so positive and are likely limiting our results or negating them altogether.
Most people repeat the same four to five patterns year after year and think next year’s going to be different. It’s not going to be if you can’t identify the pattern, recognize the result of the pattern, and then either modify it or eliminate it.
The next audit is the dissatisfaction audit. This is where we start to uncover all of the silly things you’re tolerating that aren’t serving you, your people, your community, your family, or the business. You don’t grow until you stop tolerating the stuff that keeps you small, and way too many of you tolerate things either because it's what you’ve always done or because you’re afraid to confront them.
What did you tolerate this year that you refuse to tolerate next year?
Where did you waste time, energy, or attention?
What friction kept showing up over and over?
Every repeated irritation should be a signal for you. Every irritation that happens more than once is a signal you probably ignored. Find them, address them, and eliminate them.
Next, we move to auditing your identity. Identity drives execution. Identity can also keep you stuck in limiting patterns and behaviors or lift you out of fear or ego-based response patterns and help you achieve greater things next year than the prior year.
The year-end review asks three questions:
Who were you this year?
Who did you avoid becoming?
Who must you become next year?
Most people like to skip this part because identity work is uncomfortable. But here’s the truth: we don’t fail because we lack skill. We don’t fall short because of the market. We tend to fall short because our identity is out of alignment with the outcomes we say we want. It’s one of the reasons traditional goal setting often fails. SMART goals are great for the small stuff, but they tend to fail over a longer timeline because, unless you’re addressing the inconsistencies between what you say you want and who you need to become to achieve it, the answer isn’t to SMART goal harder.
Your identity is your operating system, and every new goal you have for your life and your business requires a firmware update or often a complete upgrade. You rarely make it to new levels of growth before becoming the kind of person that growth was meant for. Don’t blow this part of the process off as some woo-woo BS because it’s not. This is a series of questions I’ve developed over a couple decades of building and running businesses and also studying some of histories great behavioral psychologists like Erickson, Jung, Freud, B.F. Skinner, Maslow, and so on. People who have learned to ask very deep questions to get to the root of why we do what we do, why we did what we did, why we don’t do what we know we should do, and how to release the hidden blocks and patterns that keep us stuck.
You could say that this exercise is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars of trial and error on my part, coupled with tens of thousands in therapy sessions, making a baby with decades of coaching other people through their own issues. This is not your typical year-end business planning retreat type stuff, all of which can be useful, but rarely gets to the root of the who, what, where, when, and why of it all. All of which, I’m giving you for free, by the way. Just go to www.CoachBlaine.com/yearend and you can download the exercise along with an hour-long video of me walking you through the whole process.
The next part of this breakthrough process is the Business Samurai Inventory where you get to reflect on some of the year’s battles.
You’re asked to reflect on:
What battles were worth fighting?
What battles were distractions?
Where did you lose your center; emotionally or mentally? Where did you react? Where did you drift?
Where did you practice actual mastery? Where were you calm and disciplined?
This might not be a shocker to any of you, but appraisers waste a shocking amount of time fighting unwinnable battles. They’ll spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about AMCs, bitching about and arguing with agents, obsessing over fees instead of how to increase their own value, and trying to fix clients instead of fixing their own systems.
A Business Samurai™ chooses their battles carefully and wisely. Precision, discipline, patience, and then decisive action. Those are the hallmark traits of a Business Samurai™. If you find yourself fighting the same battles over and over, arguing with the same characters over and over, bitching about the same things over and over, its highly likely the problem is not ‘out there’. The problem is you and the battles you’ve judge as worthy of fighting.
I’m not saying that there aren’t some things worth fighting for, obviously there are. But if the battle comes at the cost of your own peace, your sanity, your precious time, and your profitability, while at the same time having no real benefit to you or anyone else, it’s probably not a battle you should be fighting. Choose your battles wisely.
Ok, friends, I can tell you that there are 5 more pages to this exercise and about 20 more very deep questions that I don’t want to bore you with on this episode. I’m giving all of it to you for free over at www.CoachBlaine.com/yearend for those who actually want to get better. For those who don’t really care, and this is all a waste of your time, hopefully you’ve gotten at least a few valuable questions to ask of yourself and your business that might help you overcome some roadblocks to growth, to gaining back some of your time, and to making more in less time and with less effort.
What I can tell you with 100% certainty, however, is that those who don’t do any form of recap, review, after action report, or strategic planning type activity at the end of year, or at least at the beginning of a new year, are resigning themselves to whatever the business gods decide to throw their way next year. I’m quite sue these will be the same people complaining about AI, the market, the AMCs, and everything else under the sun for why their business and profits are shrinking. If those folks end up having an amazing year; awesome! But it will be by pure happenstance and not duplicatable in any way.
Business is supposed to be about learning what works, what doesn’t, and then doubling down on the stuff that works while eliminating or refining the stuff that doesn’t. This exercise, while intense and not for everyone, helps do that. Download it at your own risk of, not only becoming a better human being, but also a titan of business.
Until next time, my friends, I’m out…
