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Ollie Aplin
3 x Founder | CMO & Creative Strategist
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Why You Need An End Of Year Review — Part 2
If you’ve not read Part 1 yet, I’d recommend giving that a read first. You can find it here.
Then, when you’re ready to do the work, I’ve got a practical guide on what to review, the questions to ask, and how to turn reflection into decisions for 2026.
Part 2: What to actually review (and why it matters beyond the numbers)
In Part 1, we talked about why end of year reviews matter.
This is the practical part. What to actually look at when you sit down to review the year, without it turning into a long, pointless exercise.
Every business is different. A subscription brand will care about different things than a high AOV one-off purchase business. A brand at £1m will have very different priorities to one at £20m.
The point of this review isn’t to capture everything. It’s to focus on the few areas that quietly shape performance all year long, and then tailor the questions to how your business actually operates.
Use the prompts below as a starting point.
Revenue and profitability
- Which products drove the most profit, not just revenue?
- Where did discounting meaningfully impact margin?
- What revenue looked good on paper but came with hidden costs or complexity?
This is where many founders realise one or two products did most of the heavy lifting, while the rest mostly kept everyone busy. The upside is clarity. Protect what works, simplify what doesn’t, and stop chasing revenue that makes the business harder to run.
Acquisition
- Which channels actually drove profitable growth
- Which creative messages or angles consistently worked across the year?
- Where did performance rely on constant intervention or rising spend?
This usually confirms what you already suspected. One or two channels carried the results, and everything else demanded far more attention than it was worth. The win here is focus. Fewer channels, better creative, and less time firefighting performance.
Retention
- How much revenue came from repeat customers?
- Where is retention doing more work than you realise, or being underinvested?
- What genuinely drove repeat purchases, beyond promotions?
This is often the most reassuring part of the review. You see how much revenue came from customers who already trust you. The impact is confidence. More attention on retention usually means less pressure on paid media to do all the work.
Operations
- Where did the business feel harder than it should have?
- Which earlier decisions directly contributed to that friction?
- What issues kept resurfacing throughout the year?
These answers tend to explain a lot of the stress. They show you which problems were structural, not personal. Fixing them doesn’t just improve margins. It gives you back time, energy, and headspace.
Focus
- What initiatives delivered real impact?
- What would improve if you did fewer things, but did them better?
- What absorbed time and attention without clear return?
This is often where the biggest relief comes from. Cutting noise creates momentum. Fewer priorities, clearer standards, and a business that feels lighter to run.
A quick note on reviewing yourself alongside the business
One final thing that’s worth acknowledging.
What’s good for the business is not always good for you.
Alongside the commercial review, it’s worth asking a simpler, more personal set of questions. Where the year felt energising. Where it felt draining. What parts of the business you enjoyed running, and which ones quietly took more than they gave back.
This was something I had to learn the hard way at MindJournal. Ignoring that signal doesn’t make it go away. It just delays the cost.
This isn’t about emotion over logic. It’s about sustainability. A business that looks good on paper but feels heavy to operate will eventually force a correction, one way or another.
Treat that information with the same seriousness you give the numbers.
A simple way to use this:
An end of year review doesn’t need to be perfect, detailed, or time-consuming.
It needs space.
A few hours away from your inbox and day-to-day decisions. Long enough to answer the questions honestly, short enough that it actually gets done.
The value isn’t in the document you produce. It’s in the decisions that follow.
Clarity on what to double down on. Confidence in what to deprioritise. And permission to stop doing things that looked like progress but weren’t.
Done properly, an end of year review doesn’t slow momentum. It gives it direction.
2026. Let’s go.
