You will be able to set a 90-day cycle with weekly checks and a monthly review that leads to a decision.
Three weeks after writing her plan, Mei Ling has a slow week. Two enquiries instead of the usual eight. She panics, rewrites her Google listing, changes the broadcast message, posts a discount and asks her nephew to start a TikTok account. The next week enquiries are back to nine. She has no idea which of the four changes did it, or whether any of them did, or whether the slow week was just the school holidays starting.
A plan needs a rhythm for checking it, and the rhythm matters as much as the plan. Check too rarely and problems run for months. Check too often and you react to noise. This lesson sets out a 90-day cycle with a small weekly check and a monthly review that ends in one decision.
A quarter, about 90 days, is long enough for most channels to show a trend. A Google listing with new photos and fresh reviews takes weeks to change how often it appears. A monthly broadcast needs at least two or three sends before you can tell whether replies are rising. A single bad week tells you almost nothing, and even a single month can mislead.
It is also short enough to change course. If a channel is clearly not working, ninety days limits how much time and money it can waste. And it fits how many small businesses already think: school terms, seasonal peaks, quarterly GST filing for those registered.
So the plan runs in cycles of about 90 days. At the end of each one you make bigger decisions, which lesson 7.3 covers. In between, two kinds of check keep it on track.
Once a week, at the same time, spend fifteen minutes on two questions.
First, did the planned work happen? Check whether the broadcast went out, whether the Google photos were updated and whether every enquiry got a reply within a day. Plenty of plans that look like failures turn out to be plans where the work quietly stopped in week four. If the work didn't happen, the numbers that week tell you nothing about the channel.
Second, what did the leading numbers from lesson 6.2 do? Write them in the same place each week, whether that is a sheet, a notebook or a note on your phone, so that enquiries, calls from your listing and broadcast replies sit side by side. What you want to see is the direction they take over several weeks, and a single week's figure is too noisy to act on.
The weekly check is not the time to change the plan. Its job is to catch work that slipped and to record the numbers. If something looks badly wrong, note it for the monthly review, unless it's an actual fault, such as a broken link or wrong opening hours, which you fix straight away.
Once a month, take an hour. Bring the weekly numbers, the lagging numbers for the month (orders, new customers, revenue), and the one-page plan.
Compare results with the goal. Are you on pace? If you need 27 enquiries a month and got 19, where did the gap come from, which channel, which weeks?
Then decide on a single change. It could be a new message on the broadcast, a different offer on the Google listing, a shift of hours from one channel to the other. Write it on the plan with the date.
Making only one change a month feels slow, but it is the only way to learn what works. If you change the message, the offer and the posting time in the same month and enquiries rise, you don't know which change worked, so you can't repeat it. If they fall, you don't know which to undo.
This is the hardest habit. While you test a change, keep everything else as it was: the same channels, the same posting rhythm, the same offer, the same budget. Otherwise you are back where Mei Ling was in the opening example, with four changes and one result.
Steady does not mean blind. Outside events will move your numbers: school holidays, festive seasons, a competitor's opening sale, a rainy month for a weekend market stall. Note them in your weekly record so that at the review you can separate what you changed from what happened to you.
Here is what Mei Ling's next cycle looks like on her calendar, with example dates:
Every Friday at 4pm: weekly check, fifteen minutes. Enquiries via WhatsApp, calls and messages from Google, replies to the broadcast, and whether the planned work happened. First Monday of each month, three times in the quarter: monthly review, one hour. Confirmed orders against the goal, the weekly numbers, and one change to try. End of the quarter: a longer review with the continue, change or stop decisions from lesson 7.3.
In the activity below, you will put these dates into your own calendar. Choose times you will actually keep, even if they are less convenient than the ideal. A fifteen-minute check you do every Friday tells you far more than an hour-long review you keep postponing. Write the numbers you will look at in each calendar entry, so that when the reminder comes up you don't have to remember what to check.
Put your weekly check and three monthly reviews into your calendar for the next 90 days, with the numbers you will look at each time.
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