The Monthly Honest Hour

Companies have boards to force honesty on schedule. A one-person venture has only you — which means honesty must be engineered, or optimism will quietly cook the books.

Last working day of the month, one hour, alone, three questions in writing. What do the numbers say? — revenue, pipeline, burn, runway; numbers first because feelings negotiate. What did I learn? — about customers, the offer, myself; one paragraph. What changes next month? — one thing to start, one to stop; more than one each and nothing changes.

Keep the twelve monthly pages in one file. That file becomes the most valuable document in the venture: patterns visible nowhere else — the client type that always pays late, the offer that always outsells, the month you predictably overpromise.

An hour a month is 0.6% of your working time. It governs the other 99.4%.