Plan next year in one afternoon

What should actually change next season? Not everything — five things. Prices, crew count, which lake to grow, what to stop doing, and what gear to buy. Everything else about next year is a consequence of those five, and all five can be decided in one quiet afternoon this week.

The trick is to treat it as five decisions, not as “planning.” Planning expands to fill the winter. A decision takes an hour when the number that informs it is in front of you, and by late December the numbers from the season you just finished are all in.

1. Prices

The question isn’t “do we raise prices” — most years the answer is yes somewhere. The question is which prices were wrong. If your crews ran clocks this season, your minutes per piece will point at the one or two services priced on an old memory of how long they take. Decide the numbers now; announce them in January, anchored to the renewal, which is a subject of its own — raising prices for spring covers the letter and the timing.

2. Crew count

Count the days this year a boat sat because there was nobody to run it, and the days a crew stood around because the work was thinner than the payroll. Those two numbers argue with each other, and the argument settles the question better than optimism does. If you’re adding a boat, the crew decision is due now anyway: the hiring window for people who’ll stand on a barge in April opens in January, not in March.

3. Which lake to grow

Density is the whole economics of this trade. Ten properties in one bay share a launch, a travel run and a weather window; ten properties on ten lakes are ten separate mornings. Look at revenue and minutes by lake and pick the water where you already have a foothold and the drive is short. Growth there costs a yard sign and a finished job the neighbors watched. Growth on a new lake an hour north costs a season of thin margins — sometimes worth it, but make it a decision this week, not something that happens to you customer by customer in May.

4. What to stop doing

Somewhere in the season just ended is a kind of work you shouldn’t take again: the service that eats a day and prices at half of one, the property whose access risks the trailer every visit, the one-off type of job that always turns into three trips. The report that shows work with hours against it and thin money against it is where the candidate list comes from — and the items your crews skipped, with the reasons they wrote at the stop, are worth rereading too. “Needs the crane” written eleven times is not eleven small notes. It’s a decision waiting.

5. What gear to buy

Which brings up the last one. Gear earns its keep by unlocking work you currently skip, turn down, or do slowly. The skipped-item reasons and the minutes tell you which machine that is — a second fork barge that halves the travel math on your biggest lake, the crane that turns “we don’t do those lifts” into a service line, or nothing at all this year, which is also a real decision when it gets made instead of defaulted. Whatever you buy, order it against the season: a machine that arrives in May missed the point of the year.

Write five sentences and go back to the holiday

The output of the afternoon is five sentences, each with a number and a date in it. “Dock sections go to $95 in the January letter.” “We hire one crew member, posting goes up January 15.” “We grow the south lake and take nothing new past the narrows.” That’s the plan. It fits on an index card, everyone in the shop can repeat it, and in August you can hold the season against it and see which sentences were right.

All five decisions lean on the same season of records, which is the quiet argument for keeping good ones: the completed-work report for where the money was, and the minutes for where the time went. An afternoon is enough when the evidence is already written down.