Issue #10 — Year in Review: The Ideas That Actually Moved the Needle

Issue #10  ·  December 16, 2025  ·  The Operations Weekly

Year in review issues are usually self-congratulatory. I’m going to try something different: an honest accounting of what worked, what didn’t, and what I got wrong.

What Worked: Systems Over Hustle

The businesses in our community that grew the most this year didn’t outwork their competition. They out-systematized them. The clearest pattern: businesses that documented their top 10 processes at the start of the year and held monthly system reviews grew revenue 31% faster on average than those that didn’t.

What Didn’t Work: Chasing Channels

I spent too much of the year writing about specific marketing channels — TikTok, Google Ads, LinkedIn. The businesses that struggled most were the ones that kept switching channels looking for the one that would work. Channel discipline — picking two and going deep — consistently outperformed channel diversification at this stage of business.

The Reader Insight That Changed My Thinking

A subscriber sent me a note in March that I’ve thought about almost every week since: “The bottleneck in my business was never the thing I was focused on fixing.” It’s a simple observation, but it’s the most accurate summary of why improvement efforts fail that I’ve encountered.