You will be able to review whether past actions worked and decide what to keep, change or stop.
In early December, Jun opened his draft of the November report and stopped. One of his three proposed actions was "refresh the Meta ad images", and he had a nagging feeling he had written that before. He searched his old reports and found it in August and again in October. In August the refresh had been done and Meta sales had not moved. In October nobody had done it. Nobody had noticed either time, because each report looked forward and none looked back.
A monthly routine that only sets new actions turns into a list of good intentions. This lesson closes the loop: start each review by checking what happened to last month's actions, and keep a record of decisions so the business remembers why it did what it did.
Make the first item of every monthly review the actions from the previous report. For each one, answer two questions: was it done, and what happened?
"Done" is a yes or no, with a date. If it was not done, say so plainly and note why: no time, waiting on someone else, deprioritised. An action that keeps slipping is information too. Either it matters and needs a different owner or more time, or it does not matter and should be dropped.
"What happened" compares the result with what you expected when you set the action. Jun's October actions included adding the sofa range pages to the Google Ads campaign. Done on 6 November. Expected: more sofa enquiries from paid search. Result after three weeks: sofa enquiries from paid search rose from 4 to 11 (example figures). Clear enough to keep.
Doing this first, before looking at the new month's numbers, keeps the review honest. It is much harder to set three ambitious new actions when the page above shows that two of last month's were never started.
Not every action shows its effect within a month. Judging too early is how good changes get abandoned.
Some channels respond quickly. A change to an ad, a landing page or an offer usually shows something within days or weeks, if you have enough traffic. Others are slow. Search rankings can take months to respond to new or improved pages, as SEO and AI search explains. Email changes need several sends before a pattern is clear, especially with a small list. Anything that builds reputation, like reviews or referral habits, works slower still.
So when you set an action, write down when you will judge it, not just when it will be done. "Rewrite the three sofa range pages, done by 15 November, judge organic enquiries to those pages at the end of February." Then, in December and January, the review notes the action as done and still waiting, rather than calling it a failure because nothing moved in two weeks.
The same applies in the other direction. A quick win in the first week may fade. Check again a month later before treating it as settled.
A decision log is a simple running record of the marketing decisions the business makes, with the reasoning behind each. It answers the question every business eventually asks: why did we do that?
It needs five columns: the date, the decision, the reason, the result you expected, and the result you actually got. The last column stays empty until you know.
Jun's log has rows like these. "1 September. Cut Meta budget from S$1,500 to S$1,000 a month. Reason: Meta payback was 11 months against 4 for Google search, from the unit economics sheet. Expected: fewer Meta sales, roughly the same total sales. Actual: total sales flat, Meta sales down from 18 to 14; confirmed." And: "15 August. Refreshed Meta ad images. Reason: click rate falling for six weeks. Expected: click rate and sales recover. Actual: click rate recovered briefly, sales unchanged."
The log takes a minute per decision. Its value shows up months later, when a new team member suggests raising the Meta budget, or when the owner wonders why the newsletter went from weekly to fortnightly. The answer is in the log, with the evidence that supported it at the time. It also stops the same debate from being re-run every quarter from memory.
Jun's ad refresh is a familiar pattern. An action fails, someone suggests trying it again with small changes, it fails again, and it reappears on the list a few months later because it feels like the obvious thing to do.
A simple rule breaks the cycle. If the same action has been done properly twice and failed both times, stop doing it, and write down why in the decision log. "Stopped refreshing Meta images as a fix for falling sales: done twice, no effect on sales either time. Next step is to test a different offer instead." Stopping is a decision like any other, and recording it means nobody has to rediscover the lesson.
This does not mean never revisiting an idea. Markets change, and something that failed last year may work next year. But revisiting should be a deliberate choice, made with the log open, not an accident of forgetting.
Jun's November report now opens with a short table of October's actions, done or not, with results. Getting your own log started with the last few decisions you can remember is the quickest way to make that table possible next month.
Set up a decision log with columns for date, decision, reason, expected result and actual result, and enter your last three decisions.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).