Harvest has a way of settling arguments.
For months, you can estimate. Predict. Plan. Walk the vineyard. Watch the weather. Talk about what you think a particular block is going to produce.
You can test sugar levels, taste the grapes, compare this year to previous years, and make educated predictions about quality and yield.
But eventually, the grapes come in.
And now the estimates and predictions don’t matter. Because now, you know.
Maybe the vineyard produced exactly what everyone expected. Or maybe there’s less fruit than anticipated, but the quality is exceptional.
Maybe the block everybody had high hopes for is … fine. And maybe another one quietly overachieved and delivered fruit that makes everyone stop and pay attention.
Harvest replaces the estimating and predicting with evidence.
Except — and I think this is important — “now you know” doesn’t mean “now you know whether you succeeded or failed.”
It just means you have information you didn’t have before.
Now you know …
- What actually produced?
- What surprised you?
- Where were your assumptions right?
- Where were they wrong?
- What did this season require?
- What would you do differently next time?
The fruit doesn’t arrive at the winery carrying little scorecards that say:
A+ — Excellent vineyard management!
or
C- — You really should have tried harder.
The harvest simply tells you what happened. And then it’s up to you to learn from it.
That’s not so different from running a business.
Because eventually, our results come in, too.
And one of the most important skills we can develop as CEOs is learning how to look at those results without immediately turning them into a judgment about ourselves.
🌿 This Is YOU, Inc. Leadership
YOU, Inc. is the business you’re building — and the life that business needs to support.
As a solopreneur, you’re both CEO and your company’s most important resource. That means good leadership isn’t just about producing better results. It’s about learning from those results so you can make wiser decisions about what deserves your time, energy, attention, and creativity next.
That’s the work of being CEO of YOU, Inc.
This article is part of the YOU, Inc. series, exploring how to lead yourself and your business with greater clarity, confidence, and sustainability.
Your Results Are Information, Not Identity
There’s a funny thing that can happen when you’re both the CEO and the employee of your business.
Business results can feel awfully personal.
A launch underperforms, and instead of thinking, “Hmm. That didn’t perform the way I expected,” we think, “I failed.”
Revenue is lower than we wanted, and instead of, “What contributed to that?” we go straight to, “I should have worked harder.”
A project takes longer than planned: “I’m so bad at managing my time.”
You don’t finish everything on the list: “Why can’t I ever follow through?”
And we’re perfectly capable of doing it with positive results, too.
A client tells us how much our work helped her: “Well, she was already pretty motivated.”
Someone responds enthusiastically to something we created: “It wasn’t really that big a deal.”
We have a fantastic month: “Yeah, but can I do it again?”
Apparently, the CEO of YOU, Inc. can be a very creative data analyst when she wants the numbers to support a predetermined conclusion about herself.
But data can simply be information.
And feedback doesn’t have to be personal judgment.
Data can simply be information.
Feedback doesn’t have to be personal judgment.
There’s a distinct difference between evaluation and judgment.
Evaluation asks: What happened?
Judgment asks: What does this say about me?
One helps you lead. The other can send you into an emotional spiral that teaches you very little about what to do next.
We can’t remove ourselves entirely from the evaluation data. We’re solopreneurs. Of course our choices, habits, skills, boundaries, and decisions affect our results.
But there’s a big difference between saying, “I didn’t give this project the time it required” and “I’m terrible at follow-through.”
The first is information you can use. The second is a verdict.
And CEOs need information much more than they need verdicts.
So when you sit down to review a month, a project, a launch, a quarter, or an entire season in your business, I want you to try asking a different question:
What are my results trying to teach me?
That changes the conversation.
Harvest Is Feedback
Think again about the vineyard …
Harvest isn’t simply the moment when you collect the thing you’ve been growing. It’s feedback on the entire season.
The weather mattered. Timing mattered. The decisions made months earlier mattered. Even the conditions that nobody controlled mattered.
What happened in one vineyard may have been completely different from what happened somewhere else.
And the people evaluating the harvest aren’t simply interested in whether there are grapes. They’re paying attention to what those grapes can tell them.
Your business gives you feedback, too.
The client inquiry that came from a place you weren’t actively marketing? Information.
The offer you were sure people wanted that barely sold? Painful information, perhaps. But still information.
The project that took twice as long as you estimated? Information.
The boundary you worried a client would hate — and she barely seemed to notice? Very useful information.
The newsletter topic that generated three personal replies when the one you were sure would resonate got crickets? Information you really need to pay attention to.
The service people keep asking you for even though you’ve barely promoted it? Valuable information, indeed.
The work you can do beautifully but increasingly dread doing? Also information.
The thing is that not every piece of feedback or every informational data point tells you exactly what to do.
One disappointing result doesn’t automatically mean, Never do that again.
And just as important ─ one successful result doesn’t automatically mean, Do more of that forever.
Remember our conversation last week about the reserve blend?
The CEO’s job is to decide what deserves company resources.
Evaluation gives her better information for making that decision.
Harvest doesn’t just give you results. It gives you information.
And information becomes useful when we get curious about it.
Measure More Than What Has a Number Attached to It
Of course, some of the information we need is numerical.
Revenue numbers are important information. So are the numbers representing profit and sales.
Website traffic, email subscribers, inquiries, conversions, client retention, project hours, expenses — all of those numbers can tell us something useful about the health and direction of our businesses.
But they’re not the only evidence worth reviewing. Especially inside YOU, Inc.
Because you are not simply managing a collection of numbers.
You’re stewarding a business that has to function inside an actual human life.
So yes, ask:
How much revenue did this produce?
But also ask:
What did producing that revenue require from me?
That’s data, too.
Did you have to work three evenings every week to make the numbers happen?
Did you spend Sunday afternoon dreading Monday morning?
Did one client consume an amount of emotional energy wildly disproportionate to the revenue she generated?
Did the project that looked profitable on paper require so much additional time that the math changes when you look more closely?
Or perhaps the opposite happened …
Maybe you put a boundary in place and discovered that the work still got done.
Maybe you simplified an offer and clients loved it.
Maybe something you expected to be difficult became surprisingly easy once you stopped doing it the old way.
Maybe you earned slightly less during a month when you took a week off — and discovered the business did not collapse while you were gone.
Maybe you created something you’re genuinely proud of.
Maybe you did work that made you want to do more of it.
Maybe you finished most days with enough of yourself left for the rest of your life.
All of that counts. Even if there’s no number to count it with.
Because a result can look good on a spreadsheet and still be expensive for YOU, Inc.
And a result that looks modest on a spreadsheet can represent an enormous improvement in sustainability, confidence, capacity, or quality of life.
We need both sets of information.
Otherwise, we risk optimizing a business for numbers while ignoring the person responsible for producing them.
And we spent all of last week talking about why that’s not very good CEO stewardship.
Pay Attention to What Surprised You
There’s one question in the CEO Harvest Report (August’s Mini Power Tool for Tenacious WFH Entrepreneur Insiders and VIPs) that I think could be very easy to skim past: What surprised me?
Don’t skim past it.
In fact, it may be one of the most useful questions on the page.
Because surprises show us where our expectations and reality didn’t match. And that gap can teach us something.
Sometimes the surprise is delightful …
I thought nobody would care about this, and people loved it.
I expected that conversation to be difficult, and it wasn’t.
I thought this would take all week, and I finished it Tuesday.
I didn’t expect that client to refer someone.
I had no idea how much better I’d feel after changing that boundary.
Sometimes the surprise is less fun …
I thought this offer would sell better.
I expected this project to be profitable.
I didn’t realize how much energy this commitment would require.
I thought I could fit this into my schedule.
I expected myself to enjoy this more than I did.
And sometimes the surprise isn’t really good or bad.
It’s simply, Huh. I didn’t expect that.
That’s worth noticing.
Because expectations are built from assumptions.
Some of those assumptions are accurate. But some are outdated. Some came from our own experience. While some came from somebody else’s advice.
And some may have been hanging around our businesses so long that we’ve forgotten they were assumptions in the first place.
Surprise gives us an opportunity to examine them.
The gap between what you expected and what actually happened is often where the leadership lesson lives.
So don’t evaluate only whether you achieved what you predicted.
Pay attention to what happened that you didn’t predict.
Your business may be trying to tell you something.
Don’t Turn One Harvest Into a Whole Climate
There’s another reason we need to evaluate results carefully rather than emotionally.
One harvest is one harvest.
One month is one month.
One launch is one launch.
One difficult week is one difficult week.
One wildly successful article is one wildly successful article.
We human beings are very good at taking a single piece of evidence and immediately constructing an entire future from it.
A quiet sales week becomes: Nobody wants this anymore.
One new client becomes: This is obviously my new business model!
A disappointing response becomes: This isn’t working.
A successful promotion becomes: I should definitely do this every month.
Maybe. But maybe not.
Good evaluation requires context. We also need to ask:
- What else was happening?
- Was this typical or unusual?
- What did you change?
- What stayed the same?
- Is there a pattern?
- What would you need to observe next before drawing a bigger conclusion?
That doesn’t mean dismissing the single result. It means giving it the appropriate weight.
For example, a single harvest can teach you something without predicting every harvest that will follow.
The goal isn’t to avoid conclusions. It’s to make better ones.
The CEO Harvest Report Isn’t About Grading Yourself
I didn’t create The CEO Harvest Report to be a report card.
There are no gold stars. No letter grades. No box marked “Needs Improvement” that sends you straight back to middle-school parent-teacher conferences.
Instead, it’s a leadership tool.
It asks you to look at your business and notice:
- What produced results?
- What surprised me?
- What didn’t produce?
- Where did I invest well?
- What needs pruning?
- What gets replanted?
And then to pull those observations together into leadership lessons and recommendations for the next season.
Notice what those questions don’t ask …
They don’t ask, “Was I good enough?”
They don’t ask, “Did I work hard enough to deserve success?”
And they certainly don’t ask, “How do I compare to somebody else’s harvest?”
They ask you to observe.
Evaluate.
Learn.
And lead.
Because the purpose of reviewing a season isn’t to issue a verdict on the person who lived it.
It’s to make the CEO who enters the next season wiser than the one who entered this one.
Before You Ask What’s Next, Ask What You Learned
We entrepreneurs love the question, “What’s next?”
What’s the next goal? The next offer? The next project? The next thing to improve?
And there’s nothing wrong with looking forward.
In fact, that’s exactly where we’re headed next.
But there is an important leadership step between finishing one season and planning another.
Reflection.
Otherwise, we can carry old assumptions straight into new plans.
We repeat things simply because we did them before. We abandon things too quickly because one result disappointed us. Maybe we overlook something promising because it wasn’t part of the original plan. Or we set new goals without considering what the old goals actually taught us.
We plant the next season before we’ve bothered to study the harvest.
And that’s a missed opportunity.
Because you know more now than you did when this season began.
You’ve learned things about your business.
About your clients.
About your capacity.
About your priorities.
About what works.
About what costs too much.
About what surprised you.
And probably about yourself.
That knowledge is part of the harvest, too.
Don’t leave it sitting in the field.
🌱 Your Action Step This Week: Write Your Harvest Report
Before you start deciding what comes next, give yourself 20 minutes to look at what actually happened.
If you’re an Insider or VIP, pull out your CEO Harvest Report Mini Power Tool and complete it.
Don’t overthink it. Don’t try to write the definitive analysis of your business. And please don’t turn it into an opportunity to document every way you believe you should have done better.
Instead, put on your CEO hat and get curious.
Look for evidence.
Look for patterns.
Look for surprises.
Ask what your results are trying to teach you.
If you don’t have the CEO Harvest Report, start with these three questions:
1. What produced?
What created a result worth noticing — financially, strategically, creatively, relationally, or personally?
2. What surprised me?
Where did reality differ from what you expected, in either direction?
3. What did this season teach me?
What do you know now that you didn’t know — or didn’t fully understand — before?
That’s enough to begin.
Because good stewardship isn’t about demanding that every season produce exactly what you predicted.
It’s about paying attention to what it produced and letting that information make you wiser for the next one.
The grapes come in.
Now you know more than you did before.
And that may be one of the most valuable things you harvested.
FAQs
Separate what happened from what you believe the result says about you. Instead of “I failed,” ask what contributed to the result, what assumptions proved accurate or inaccurate, and what you would change next time. Treat the result as information you can use rather than a verdict on your ability.
Track useful numerical measures such as revenue, profit, sales, inquiries, conversions, client retention, project hours, and expenses. But also evaluate what those results required in time, energy, creativity, emotional bandwidth, and recovery. A sustainable business needs both kinds of information.
Surprises show you where expectations and reality didn’t match. That gap can reveal outdated assumptions, unexpected opportunities, hidden costs, or strategies that worked better than anticipated. Unexpected results often contain some of your most useful leadership lessons.
No. One launch, month, promotion, client experience, or sales result is one piece of evidence. Before making a major change, consider the context and look for patterns across multiple results.
A short monthly review can help you notice results and surprises while they’re still fresh. A more reflective quarterly or seasonal review can help identify larger patterns and guide decisions about where to invest your resources next.
Begin with: What produced? What surprised me? What didn’t produce? Where did I invest well? What needs pruning? What deserves another season? Most importantly, ask: What are my results trying to teach me?