The end-of-season debrief: five numbers to pull before you forget
In January you’ll remember that October was hard. Right now you can still remember why. Five numbers — minutes per piece, weather days, revenue by lake, what got skipped, who canceled — pulled in one afternoon while the season is warm.
· 6 min read
The last boat comes off the water and every instinct says: done, lock the shop, think about it in January. Resist that for one afternoon. The season you just finished is the most accurate information you will ever have about your own business, and it has a half-life. In January you’ll remember that October was hard. Right now, you can still remember why.
So before the trailer’s parked for good: pull five numbers. Each one takes minutes, each one changes a real decision — a price, a start date, a hire, a customer conversation — and every one of them is worth less in January than it is today.
1. Minutes per piece
If crews ran the clock at their stops, you have the number this trade almost never has: what each kind of work actually takes. Real on-site minutes, per piece, per crew, per lake — not “we were busy”, but “a dock section costs us eleven minutes in May and sixteen in October.”
This is the number every winter pricing decision leans on. One season of real minutes will change at least one of your prices — usually the fall one, usually upward — and it turns the January price review from an argument about nerve into arithmetic.
The per-crew cut of the same number is a quieter tool. Two crews, same work, same lake, and a steady gap in minutes usually isn’t effort — it’s technique, and it names exactly what to teach in April.
2. The days the weather took
Every day a crew went in early is marked with why — weather, breakdown, daylight — so “how often did the wind stop us” has an actual answer, by lake and by month. That number is next year’s margin: a shop that knows it lost nine afternoons to weather last October sets next fall’s start date differently than one that just remembers the wind being bad. It’s also the honest input for how much work you can promise in a fall week, which is a number you quote every August whether you know it or not. Quoting it from a measured season is the difference between a promise and a hope.
3. Revenue by lake
Run the season’s completed work filtered one lake at a time and look at what each water actually paid. Then put it next to the minutes it consumed. Most operators find a surprise in this pair — the prestige lake that underpays for its drive time, or the modest one that quietly carries the fall. That’s the “which lake do we grow next year” decision, made with numbers instead of affection.
While you’re on that screen, flip the same report to unpaid-only for the season. That’s the collection sweep’s worklist, and pulling it in the debrief means the money conversation happens in November — while there’s still a ladder to climb — instead of surfacing as a bad surprise at tax time.
4. What got skipped, and why
Every piece a crew couldn’t do is on the season’s report with its written reason and no money against it. Read them all at once and they stop being exceptions and start being patterns — the same seized wheels, the same too-low water at the same properties, the same “needs the crane” on a lake the crane rarely visits.
Each pattern is either winter work to sell (fix the seized wheels in the shop, this winter), a gear decision (the crane needs a day on that lake next year), or a conversation with a customer whose expectations have drifted from what their equipment allows.
5. Who canceled, and why
Pull the arrangements canceled this year, with the reasons written when they were canceled. Sold the cabin, moved away, doing it themselves, unhappy — these are different problems with different responses, and only one of them should worry you. A cabin sale is a lead: somebody new owns that shoreline, the equipment is still in it, and you’re the shop that knows where every piece winters. An “unhappy” deserves a call while the season’s still warm — in November it’s a conversation; in April it’s a competitor’s customer.
Make it an afternoon, not a project
Every one of these comes off a report that takes a date range and exports to CSV, so the whole debrief is one afternoon with coffee: the season’s date range, five screens, one page of notes. Write the conclusions somewhere you’ll find them in January — next to this fall’s ice dates, which you also wrote down, because winter-you will trust nothing autumn-you didn’t record.
Then lock the shop.