A year ago, I wasn't thinking much about business growth.
I was thinking about whether I could think.
After a fall and concussion at the end of 2024, I spent the first months of 2025 measuring progress in small increments. Could I concentrate for an hour? Follow a task through to completion? Manage a meeting without exhausting myself?
When I finally wrote to you again in May, I wrote about small wins. One concentrated hour of writing was a win.
Recently, I looked back at what I've written since then. And I realized something I hadn't expected.
Those small wins didn't just bring me back. They brought me back with a clearer idea of what matters.
That idea has been running through almost everything I've written about business this past year:
We have less control than we'd like. But we have more influence than we sometimes think.
Some of the best proof of that doesn't come from me. At the end of every mastermind session and private conversation, I collect what my clients call BFOs — Blinding Flashes of the Obvious. Small, pithy lines that land in the room and change how someone sees their business. Here are three that shaped my thinking this year as much as anything I wrote myself.
By June, I was writing about the shift from running a business to owning one. We make decisions without having all the informationwe'd like. We figure out what we can control or influence, and act on that.
AI accelerated into nearly every part of business and life.
Costs stayed high. Some businesses were steady rather than growing dramatically. Some are struggling with conditions they cannot control.
Waiting for things to settle down is apparently not a business strategy.
This may be the clearest lesson I see looking back.
Again and again, I've written about doing less, better. Choose one or two priorities instead of five. Fix one recurring problem instead of overhauling everything.
One client put it this way: "My desire for the 'ideal' keeps me from doing what I need to do." She'd set impossibly high expectations for herself, and let them trickle down to her staff. When she finally let those expectations soften, her staff didn't do less. They started actually meeting them.
Another client, shifting from mortgage broker to franchise owner, felt the pressure to speed up as the transition intensified. What she landed on instead:
"Squeezing in one more thing is often a bad idea."
That isn't lack of ambition. It's discipline. Small businesses have limited time, money, people, and attention. Using those resources well matters more than simply using more of them.
I've used AI more this year — to research, organize, and get started. But one of my strongest conclusions remains stubbornly human: businesses grow through relationships.
My Farmers Market has taught me that for more than two decades. The same lesson shows up in choosing clients. Better clients don't just produce better revenue. They make the business easier to operate.
Technology can make us more efficient. It cannot decide which relationships are worth cultivating. We still have to do that.
By early 2026, I found myself writing more about clarity — and about asking better questions before rushing toward answers.
A hard-driving client aspired to be the named broker across multiple insurance offices. " I thought my strategic plan required me to be on the road between those locations five hours a day," he realized. One question derailed the whole tactic: Why would you want to do that?
That's what my Profitable Business Plan has always been about — not predicting the future. We can't. It's about having enough clarity to adjust when reality interferes.
Late last year, I wrote about sensible optimism — not pretending everything will work out, but believing that difficulties can be navigated. We make the call. We change the tactic. We stop something that isn't working. Then we take the next small step.
You don't need to know exactly what happens next. You need to know what deserves your attention now.
Sixteen months ago, my small win was concentrating long enough to write a newsletter. Today, I look back and see something I couldn't have seen while I was in the middle of it.
I did the work--the PT, the neuro evaluations, the brain games. I gardened all spring and summer, spending hours outside with the natural world. I wrote the articles and took on a few referred clients.
So as we head into the last quarter of 2026, here's the question I'm asking myself, and I'll leave it with you:
What have you learned about your business this year that should change what you do next?
Lorette Pruden has helped hundreds of small business owners, sales professionals, entrepreneurs, and community leaders grow their businesses and manage that growth since 2000. She specializes in the Formerly Corporate—so many small business owners who’ve worked with her come from a corporate background that she finally wrote the book on it.
