How To Choose What Not To Do This Quarter

Every quarterly plan I have seen that failed had the same shape. Eleven initiatives, all of them sensible, none of them finished.

The businesses that move pick two or three and write down what they are not doing. The second list is the one that does the work.

Why the long list loses

Three reasons, and they compound.

Nothing gets to the point where it compounds. Most marketing channels do nothing for the first few months and then start returning. Spread across eight, you quit each one just before it would have started working. That is the whole of how long seo takes.

Switching costs are real. Every channel has a learning curve, a setup cost and a weekly attention cost. Eight channels is eight sets of each, paid out of the same week.

You cannot tell what worked. Eight things running at once and revenue goes up. Which one? Nobody knows, so next quarter you keep all eight.

The three questions

For every candidate on the list:

If this works, how big is it? Not whether it works. How much does it move. A tactic that could add five percent and a tactic that could double enquiries are not comparable, and they usually sit next to each other on the same list looking equally reasonable.

What does it cost in my hours, not in dollars? The constraint in almost every business under about twenty people is founder attention, not money. A cheap initiative that needs you for six hours a week is expensive.

Can we tell within the quarter whether it worked? If the answer is no, it is not a quarterly initiative. It is a long term bet, and it goes in a different column with a different review date.

Anything that is small, attention heavy, and unmeasurable within the quarter comes off the list. That is usually half of it.

Pick the one that unblocks the others

Not all initiatives are equal in sequence. Some are prerequisites.

Fixing tracking makes every paid decision after it real. Fixing the offer makes every channel perform better. Fixing the follow up means the leads you already generate convert. Each of those multiplies everything downstream, and doing them after the channel work means the channel work was measured wrong.

So the first slot in the quarter goes to the thing that makes the rest legible. In practice that is usually the offer, the tracking, or the follow up, which is the follow up sequence most businesses never build.

Write the not doing list down

This is the part people skip, and it is the part that holds.

An explicit list, in the plan, of the things that were considered and deliberately deferred, with a one line reason each. "Not starting a podcast this quarter, because it needs four hours a week of mine and we cannot read a result by March."

Two things happen. The team stops raising them every fortnight, because they have an answer. And when somebody new arrives with a good idea, it goes on the list for next quarter instead of into this quarter's slack.

Without it, the plan has three initiatives in the document and nine in reality, because the other six were never actually declined. They were just not written down.

Set the number that ends it

Each initiative gets one number and one date. Not a direction. A number.

"Twenty enquiries a month from organic by the end of the quarter." "Cost per enquiry under sixty across at least thirty enquiries." "Proposal to close rate from one in five to one in three."

Which forces the honest conversation at the review: did it hit the number, yes or no. That is the discipline in how to run a quarterly marketing review and it only works if the numbers were set at the start.

Then protect it for the whole quarter

The plan is not the hard part. Not changing it in week three is.

Something will come up: a competitor does something, a client asks for something, a channel looks interesting. The rule is that nothing enters the quarter without something leaving it. One in, one out, explicitly, in the weekly meeting described in the weekly marketing meeting that works.

Three things done properly in ninety days beats eleven things started. And it is the only way the slow month in what to do in a slow month turns into a decision rather than a scramble.