Today is the last day of Q1. It’s a much different day than tomorrow, the start of Q2.

What do you do today vs. tomorrow as a wine sales rep, restaurant owner/manager, or retailer?

Today, you work super hard. You push for the final sprint ahead of the finish line. You make that extra sales call, send a great marketing email, post something good on social media. You give it your best effort to make one final impact that puts a cherry on Q1. What can you do or sell today to have an immediate impact?

Then tomorrow, you pull up your numbers. It will be time for a little analysis and reflection.

Tracking the metrics of business is incredibly important, and quarterly measurements are probably the best that there are, for with quarterly numbers you smooth out the ups and downs of weekends in a month, weather issues, and other factors that can throw off more granular statistics.

Quarterly numbers, especially Q1, also let you course correct and have a real impact on your final annual numbers.

(Caveat: there are obviously exceptions to these ideas, one of the exceptions being a global pandemic. You can’t compare Q1 2022 to Q1 2021 in reasonable ways. However, goals that you set three months ago — you did set goals, did you not? — are the control group for tomorrow’s analysis.)

Tomorrow Q1 is over … where are you at? Are you hitting your goals? Did you sell enough of what you aimed to sell to keep the engine running smooth and have a successful year?

Or don’t you know?

If you don’t know, that’s another whole discussion.

Tomorrow it starts over. Tomorrow is a fresh spreadsheet. What will be different at the start of Q2?

PS: side story – I once consulted for a restaurant group that drove themselves insane comparing date-to-date numbers over the course of years, not realizing that any particular date is a Friday or Saturday only 2 out of every 7 years … seems so logical but they were simply overthinking everything. Be careful about how you do your analysis.